Allorah’s hand found the amulet, and she grabbed it and slashed up and across the throat of the female vampire. The vampire clutched for its neck, but its head was already rolling back and separating from the cut. She hadn’t fed yet because her body fell to the ground and seemed to shrivel up into itself without much of a mess.

Brandon walked forward, stunned, but there was a haughty anger about him that I found terrifying. “What have you done?” he hissed out. I knew how important family was to the now-reformed Brandon, but I doubted that much of anyone challenged his authority back then, and to have two of his companions (three if you counted the one burning upstairs still) struck down by a schoolteacher…

Allorah, scared as she was and on the verge of tears, laughed with bitter anger in it. “What have I done? Are you kidding me?”

Brandon’s face was almost skeletal as he pushed a wave of emotional anger out from himself. “How dare you speak…?”

Allorah was already swinging her staking post wildly at him. “These were children!” she screamed at him. “This is a school, for Christ’s sake!”

The town house was fully ablaze now, lighting up the once-dark courtyard.

Allorah dropped the post and started swinging the amulet again as she stepped forward through what remained of Brandon’s other vampires. The amulet whirred like it was an electric power saw, and Brandon’s face turned back to human. Flesh filled in the holes where muscle had barely covered bone. When his face finished forming, Brandon looked scared. Caught off guard, this other version of Brandon seemed afraid behind all the bluff and bluster of his powers. “Please,” he pleaded. “Don’t…”

Allorah wasn’t having it. All I could feel in her now was anger. She charged forward, brandishing the amulet like she was a knight carrying a Morningstar into battle.

Brandon had no choice but to shoot up into the sky, but so close to the fire of the building that his clothes were already aflame. Allorah watched as he flew away like some half-ignited human torch, hoping the flames would finish the job, but I knew that wasn’t the case.

Her mind had wanted to shut down just then, but there was still one last thing she had to do. Allorah cradled Campbell in her arms and brought him to the flames as well. She couldn’t leave him there, lying like that. She just couldn’t. As the flames laid claim to the boy, I found that I couldn’t take any more of it and pulled myself out of the vision and back into Allorah’s office lab.

My body was exhausted and my head hurt. First things first, though. I went into my coat pocket and started upping my waning blood sugar with Life Savers. I chewed them in between my erratic breathing.

Allorah was standing next to the chair I had sat in before triggering my power. She looked down at me, concerned and grim. “You okay, Canderous?”

“Yeah,” I said, catching my breath. “Thank you for that.”

She kneeled down next to me and looked me in the eyes. There was a sense of sadness and wonder to the look on her face. “You saw it all?” she asked. “The school? The kids? You felt everything I felt, right?”

I nodded, taking in huge gulps of air. “I understand now.” I handed back her apotropaic eye. Allorah stood and walked back to her microscope, laying the medallion next to it while she went back to work.

“When that night was over,” Allorah said, her voice flat, “I was still a teacher, just of a different subject…”

I understood her now, but the matter between the vamps and humans just got a whole lot more complex. Knowing what I knew now, I was even less inclined to let her get near the vampires. Parts of what I knew about them started to make sense to me. Even though Brandon had been a monster back then, these were not the vampires I knew now. Brandon and his people had changed. I had a pretty good idea that maybe that night at the private school had been the turning point for him. The loss of Damaris had touched something still human deep inside, changing him, making him go from an arrogant killing machine to a scholar interested in the preservation of his people.

Even the timing of it all seemed to make sense. The loss of Damaris was when he started giving a shit about the prophecies, deciphering them. It even fit with when Brandon had hired the gypsies to grab Aidan. It was hard to have seen him as that monster, but that wasn’t the vampire I knew. I trusted Brandon now, but if Allorah ever saw him again, there would simply be no reasoning with her.

And here we were prepping for the hunt. I had to find a more proactive way to keep her occupied. “Any luck with the sample?”

Allorah went back to her lab equipment and I stood on shaky legs to follow. When I got to her, Allorah was already bent over one of her microscopes again.

“The concentration level of viral activity is off the chart compared to the samples off your clothes,” she said.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

Allorah nodded.

She looked so serious. The change from who I had experienced just minutes ago had me seriously missing that version of her. I felt such deep sadness.

“It gives me a lot more to work with,” she said. “If I can find a weakness to these monsters, we can find a better way to destroy them.”

I could feel the tension rising in my shoulders at the thought of the bloodbath that would come on both sides of that effort. I had to try to change how this was going to be handled. All-out war didn’t seem like the healthiest of options for either side, but with the general black-or-white ideology of the Enchancellorship possibly making decisions on this, I was worried about Manhattan becoming a ghost town.

“What about other alternatives?” I asked.

Allorah looked at me like I was crazy. “Like what?”

“I mean, we could potentially try and make an antivirus, couldn’t we?”

Allorah stood up from the microscope and gave me her full attention. She crossed her arms. “Now, why would we want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, dodging the question. “I mean, wouldn’t a regular vampire be easier to contend with than these mutated things? If we were able to tone down this vampire variant, maybe we’d stand a better chance of eliminating them. Personally, I’d rather fight a guy in a dinner jacket, cummerbund, and cape than these clawed snaggletooths.”

I didn’t want anyone dead if I could help it, but taking this tack would at least help soften Allorah to the idea. I hoped. I stood there, maintaining my composure as she thought it over.

Thankfully, the stillness in the room was broken when she closed her eyes and nodded. “You have a point,” Allorah said. She put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “They’re vicious enough in normal form. I can’t imagine how powerful this new breed is. If they’re as savage as you described, you’re right. We need to do what we can to reverse the virus. I’ll get to work on it.”

Allorah went back to work with the same extreme intensity, but as I backed myself out of the room without her even noticing, I was at least happy that her preparation was now pointed toward more science and less slaying. Some days it was the small victories that got you by.