“I said I was sorry,” Aidan said. At the top of our flight arc, he grabbed onto one of the support beams among the rigging and lighting that helped create the false sense of night and day down below. He hoisted me up until I could grab onto one of the beams with my free arm. Aidan let go of me and I wrapped both arms against the cold steel, holding on for my life.

“Stay here,” he said, and before I could ask him just where the hell else he thought I might go, Aidan let go and dropped several hundred feet below.

I pulled myself up onto the crawl space among the crisscrossed bars up here, feeling a little better with something under my feet. I looked down, trying not to let the full sense of the height grab hold of me. Aidan was being charged by several of the creatures. Their feral ferocity made them dangerous, but quick thinking seemed to keep Aidan one step ahead of them as he dodged them and played one creature against another, leaving several of them in a snarling tangle of limbs as they fought among themselves.

The bars and pipes around me erupted into motion as if I were in an earthquake. I looked up thinking that maybe the supports were giving out with my added weight on it, but they looked fine to me, not that I knew a blessed thing about structural engineering. I turned my eye to the rest of the structure. One of the creatures stood along it about a hundred feet away.

And it was staring at me.

Screw this, I thought. I looked down. Aidan was swamped with the other creatures down below. Comparatively, one didn’t seem like too bad a contest for me, if I was standing on solid ground and not up here among the lights, that was.

The creature gripped on tight to the bars with its talons as it carefully made its way toward me. I pulled my eyes away from it long enough to use care unsheathing my retractable bat. The last thing I wanted to do was drop the damn thing and find myself totally unarmed up here. I locked both my legs into the beams beneath me and clicked the button on my bat.

Nothing happened. “Shit,” I said, shaking it. That vampire Gerard must have damaged it even more than I had thought back in Brandon’s chambers. Stupid vampires with their stupid preternatural strength.

I looked up and the creature was already much too close for comfort. I could already smell the stink of it from where it was.

I twisted and pulled at the bat. Deep inside it, several pieces of metal ground against one another, but as I spun it in my hands, it started to extend. A dull metal screech came from it, like pulling open an old rusty drawer. The sound seemed to incense the creature more and it roared even louder. The last chunk of the bat pulled out to its full extension and I gripped it hard with both hands.

The creature lurched forward, lowering its voice into a deep, throaty growl.

“Batter up,” I said, hiding my fear behind false bravado. As it charged, the teeth in its maw were a hideous parody of what I knew vampire fangs to look like. A rank blast of air came from it as it closed in on me.

As it leapt for me, I swung hard at its head. It connected with a meaty thunk and my bat stopped, lodged there, it seemed. The top of my bat was caught in the creature’s mouth, both keeping it from biting me and occupying its claws as it tried to pry free. The already battered metal began to tear in its mouth and I tried to pull it away. Desperate claws lashed out to knock it away, but I held it there, twisting it a little and hoping to hurt it when a new idea hatched in my brain.

“Chew your food, pretty,” I said. The backs of my legs felt on the verge of cramping, but I was damned if I was going to ease up.

With a final metallic wrenching sound, a chunk of the bat tip tore away, leaving a sharp, exposed, nasty point. I prayed that what Aidan had said was true: that the creature truly was one of his kind. I plunged the remains of the bat straight into its chest, aiming for the heart. I felt the sickening sensation of the metal piercing the soft, rotting flesh of the creature. It convulsed in pain as fresh blood shot from the wound, coating the bat and running down to my gloved hands. I pulled the bat out and swung like I was at home plate, pitching the creature off its perch. It slid off the jagged end of my bat and fell toward the ground far below.

I caught my breath as I heard it hit the ground a wet thud. The sensation of something else landing on the support beams shook through the structure and I flinched in reaction, choking my bat up into swinging position once again.

Beatriz crouched along the top of one of the beams, her hands free and making it look effortless.

“Having a little trouble?” Beatriz said, flashing me a sickly sweet smile.

“I’m holding my own,” I said, my bat still covered in a crimson web of ichor. As I decided just how I was supposed to resheath it in that state, Aidan flew up in front of me, grabbing onto the beams with ease. He looked to Beatriz.

“Everything okay up here?” he said.

Beatriz’s smile widened. “Just watching over your boy, Aide.”

“Don’t call me that, please,” he said. He checked the grounds of the castle below. “I want you to go tell Brandon we’re having a little internal-affairs problem.”

“Maybe I should stay with you,” Beatriz offered. “We don’t know how many more of those there are roaming around.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Aidan said, then looked at the bat as if seeing it for the first time. “Not that he looks like he needs protecting.”

“Oh, I do,” I said quite earnestly. I held up the bat.

“This? I got lucky. Bring Beatriz with us. There’s strength in numbers and frankly, I need as many of the good-guy vamps on me as possible.”

Aidan smiled.

“Connor told me you were funny,” Aidan said. “But I hadn’t noticed until now. As for defending yourself, you’re doing fine.”

I looked over Aidan’s shoulder at Beatriz. She was looking at Aidan for some kind of further direction, and he turned to her. “Go. Now.”

“Have it your way,” she said. “Good luck explaining this to His Worshipfulness.”

Beatriz pushed herself off of the rigging and launched herself out across the darkness, falling into a perfect dive as she went. She twirled like an Olympic diver and hit the ground standing up.

As she ran off, I said, “I guess things like that are pretty easy to learn when there’s no fear of snapping your neck or death, what with the whole being-immortal thing.”

Aidan shrugged. “It does have its advantages,” he said.

Another sharp clatter suddenly arose farther down the lighting work, followed by a snarling hiss that had me already raising the remains of my bat. As I did so, I noticed a soft popping hiss coming off of it. I looked closer at the gnarled bat, only to discover that the smears of ichor from impaling the creature were corroding through the remaining metal. “Hey!”

The clattering of talons on the rigging grew louder and I felt the vibrations as another one of the creatures started closing in on us. I stared with concentration off into the darkness until I saw the beady redness of its eyes as it moved forward.

“You see that, right?” I whispered. “You know, given your preternatural peepers.”

Aidan gave me a look of “duh” and turned back to our approaching foe as it clawed its way along the rigging.

“We need to go,” Aidan said.

“No argument from me.” I held up the dissolving stump of metal in my hands. “I’m almost out of bat.”

Aidan looked around as he assessed our situation. “Grab on,” Aidan said. “We’re leaving.”

I looked at the bat. There was no point in trying to sheathe it now, given what little there was left to sheathe. Plus I was going to need both my hands free to hold on to Aidan if I was going to survive the trip down. Below, a small crowd had gathered on the castle grounds in a small-scale battle royale with these creatures. I let go of the bat and let it fall. I was pretty sure that the crowd below had the reflexes to dodge it. And if it clonked onto one of the creatures, or better yet, impaled it, all the better.