I smiled sweetly at her.

Reynold's frown deepened. I'd never been this happy to see her before. "Good to see you, too, Anita." Her greeting was cautious, but seemed sincere. Always willing to turn the other cheek. A good little Christian.

I was beginning to wonder if I was still a good Christian. I didn't doubt God. I doubted me. Having premarital sex with a vampire had shaken my faith in a lot of things.

She bent her five foot ten frame to peer in the window past me at Larry. "Hi, Larry." Her smile was genuine, too. Her eyes sparkled with it. I could feel the waves of lust, if not love, going from her to him like a warm, embarrassing current.

The blush had left Larry's face milk-pale with the sprinkling of freckles like brown ink spots. He turned large blue eyes to her, and I didn't like the way he looked at her. I wasn't sure it was just lust on Larry's part. Maybe it wasn't for Reynolds, either, but I didn't worry about her feelings the way I did Larry's.

"Detective Reynolds," he said. Was it my imagination or was his voice just a touch deeper? Nah.

"Larry." That one word was full of too much warmth.

"Where do you want us to park?" I asked.

She blinked hazel eyes at me, as if for a second she'd forgotten I was there. "Anywhere back here."

"Great."

She stepped back and let me park, but her eyes lingered on Larry. Maybe it was more than lust. Damn.

We parked. Larry undid his seat belt carefully, grimacing. I'd gotten the door for him at the gas station.

"You want me to get the door?"

He turned stiffly towards the door, trying to keep his upper body immobile. He stopped with his hand on the handle. His breath came in little gasps. "Yes, please."

Me, I'd have gotten the door myself, just from pure stubbornness. Larry really was the wiser of the two of us.

I held the door for him and offered him a hand. I pulled, he pushed with his legs, and we got him standing. He started to hunch from the pain, but that bent his back, which made the pain worse. He ended standing as straight as he could, leaning against the Jeep, trying to get his breath back. Pain will leave you breathless.

Reynolds was suddenly beside us. "What's wrong?"

"You tell her. I'll go talk to Dolph."

"Sure," Larry said, voice strained. He needed to be in bed, knocked out on painkillers. Maybe he wasn't that much smarter than me.

It wasn't hard to spot Dolph. Pete McKinnon was standing with them. It was like walking towards two small mountains.

Dolph's dark suit looked freshly pressed, white shirt crisp, tie knotted against the collar. He couldn't have been out in the heat long. Even Dolph sweats.

"Anita," he said.

"Dolph."

"Ms. Blake, nice to see you again," Pete McKinnon said.

I smiled. "Good to know someone's happy to see me."

If Dolph got the dig, he ignored it. "Everyone's waiting for you."

"Dolph always was a man of few words," Pete said.

I grinned at him. "Good to know it's nothing personal."

Dolph frowned at us. "If you two are through, we've got work to do."

Pete and I grinned at each other and followed Dolph across the wet street. I was happy to be back in my Nikes. I could walk as good as any of the men, in the right shoes.

A tall, thin fireman with a grey mustache watched me stride across the street. He was still wearing helmet and coat in the July heat. Four others had stripped down to T-shirts with just the rubbery-looking pants on. Someone had sprayed them down with a water. They looked like an ad for a beefcake wet T-shirt contest. They were drinking Gatorade and water like their lives depended on it.

"Did a Gatorade truck just roll by or is this some arcane post-fire ritual?" I asked.

Pete answered, "It's damned hot in a fire with full gear on. You dehydrate. Water to rehydrate and Gatorade for the electrolytes so you don't pass out from the heat."

"Ah," I said.

The fireman who'd been rolling up the hose came over to us. A delicate triangle of face peered out from under the helmet. Clear grey eyes met my gaze. There was a lift to the chin, a way that she held herself that was a challenge. I recognized the symptoms. I had my own mountain-sized chip on my shoulder. I felt like apologizing for assuming she was a man, but didn't. It would have been insulting.

Pete introduced me to the tall man. "This is Captain Fulton. He's Incident Commander on this site."

I offered my hand while he was still thinking about it. His hand was large, big-knuckled. He shook hands like he was afraid to squeeze too hard, and dropped contact as soon as he could. I bet that he was just pleased as punch to have a female fireperson on his unit.

He introduced the fireperson in question. "Corporal Tucker." She offered her hand.

She had a nice firm handshake and eye contact so sincere it was aggressive.

I smiled. "Nice not to be the only woman on the scene for a change."

That brought a very small smile to her face. She gave the barest of nods and stepped back, letting her captain take over.

"How much do you know about a fire scene, Miss Blake?"

"It's Ms. Blake, and not much."

He frowned at the correction. I felt Dolph shift beside me, unhappy with me. His face wouldn't show it, but I could almost feel him willing me not to be a pain in the butt. Who, me?

Corporal Tucker was staring at me, eyes wide, face very still as if she was trying not to laugh.

One of the other firemen joined us. His damp T-shirt clung to a stomach that had required far too many sit-ups, but I enjoyed the view anyway. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and looked like he should have been carrying a surfboard or visiting Barbie in her Malibu dream house. There was a smear of soot on his smiling face, and his eyes were red-rimmed.

He offered his hand without being introduced. "I'm Wren." No rank, just his name. Confident.

He held my hand just a little longer than necessary. It wasn't obnoxious, just interested.

I dropped my eyes. Not out of shyness, but because some men mistake direct eye contact as a come-on. I had about as much beefcake on my plate as I could handle without adding amorous firemen.

Captain Fulton frowned at Wren. "Do you have any questions, Ms. Blake?" He emphasized the Ms. so it sounded like three z's at the end.

"You've got a basement full of vampires that you need to rescue without exposing them to sunlight or getting any of your people eaten, right?"

He stared at me for a second or two. "That's the gist of it."

"Why can't you just leave them in the basement until full dark?" I asked.

"The floor could cave in at any minute," he said.

"Which would expose them to sunlight and kill them," I said.

He nodded.

"Dolph said one vamp was covered with blankets, and rushed to the hospital. Is that why you think the others may not be in their coffins?"

He blinked. "There's also a vampire on the stairs leading down. It's ... " His gaze fell, then came up suddenly to grab mine, angry. "I've seen burn victims but nothing quite like this."

"Are you sure it's a vampire?"

"Yes, why?"

"Because vamps exposed to sunlight or fire usually burn completely down to ash and a few bone fragments."

"We doused it with water," Wren said. "Thought it was a person at first."

"What changed your mind?"

It was his turn to look away. "It moved. It was like third-degree burns down to cartilage and muscle, bone, and it held out its hand to us." His face looked pale, haunted. "No person could have done that. We kept coating it with water, thinking maybe we could save it, but it stopped moving."

"So you assumed it was dead?" I asked.

All three of them exchanged glances. Captain Fulton said, "You mean it might not be dead?"

I shrugged. "Never underestimate a vamp's ability to survive, Captain."