“Get out of the way!” I shouted, and swung the sword to separate the fallen vamp’s head from its neck. It started flaking into dust immediately.
Nathaniel blasted a vamp with nightfire and it burst into flame.
There are three ways to kill a vampire—stake it, decapitate it or burn it. Anything else will slow the monster down but won’t kill it.
Jude attacked another vampire and I swung the sword at any creature that came near me. I dusted quite a few of them, but they kept coming, endlessly, relentlessly, unconcerned about the possibility of damage or death. They weren’t behaving like vampires at all, but zombies.
I don’t know how long we stood in front of those doors, hacking and burning, but there was suddenly a lull in the never-ending tide. My eyes were tearing from all the dust in the air, and it was hard to breathe without coughing. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and saw several of the vampires were bottlenecked in the door.
“Now’s our chance,” I shouted, backing down the hallway. Nathaniel threw one last ball of nightfire at the nearest vamp and joined me.
“Jude!” I shouted. The wolf had taken down another vamp and was in the process of ripping its throat out. “Come on!”
The vampires were stopped up in the doorway like a cork, but the pressure of the advancing horde behind would have them through in a moment. I wanted to get out before that happened.
The wolf ignored me, ravaging the struggling vampire.
“Jude!” I shouted again.
He turned toward me, blood on his muzzle, just as the mindless vampires broke through.
“Let’s get out of here!” I shouted, and ran toward the doorway at the end of the hall.
I glanced back to see if Jude followed and saw he was a few feet behind me. Nathaniel brought up the rear, which was strange, as he’d been right beside me a moment before. There were a lot of vampires following but they were moving slowly, so we were able to outrun them to the foyer.
I threw open the front door, Jude on my heels, and pounded out to the lawn. Nathaniel pulled the door closed behind him and joined us. We turned in unison to face the mansion, backing away slowly, our eyes on the door.
“They can’t possibly come outside,” I said. “They’d burn up as soon as they stepped into the sun.”
“They were not behaving like typical vampires,” Nathaniel pointed out.
I was so focused on the possibility that the door might burst open at any moment that I’d forgotten about the thing that had chased us into the house. So when the whisper of breath brushed across my ear I was too strung out with tension to think properly.
“Madeline,” it whispered.
I turned, and in turning acknowledged the monster at my shoulder. And I saw it in all of its terror and glory, and knew that if I survived this, every I time I closed my eyes from now until the end of my life I would see this horror in my sleep.
It wasn’t the biggest creature I’d ever seen—just about Nathaniel’s height—and it was vaguely humanoid in shape. Its hands and feet had elongated digits, twice as long as a normal person’s, and something about them put me in mind of tree branches.
The eyes were oversized for its face, protruding like a frog’s, and its few long and wispy hairs trailed greasily from the top of its head.
The worst of it, though, was that the skin looked like it had been turned inside out, and it oozed with reddish brown fluid that might have been blood.
Then the creature smiled at me, and every one of its teeth was a tiny, sharp triangle, like the gaping maw of a shark. It looked like a distorted goblin, a thing from a fairy tale with a bad ending.
Jude barked in warning, and I glanced back at the front door. The vampires were pouring forth into the day despite the fact that they began to smolder almost immediately.
“Madeline,” the goblin said again, and I turned in time to see its claws slashing at my throat.
I jumped backward, but the tips of its fingers grazed my cheek. I felt the skin tear open, the hot blood run down my face. I smelled the ozone of nightfire, the burning undead flesh of the vampires, heard Jude’s growls as he attacked once more.
But I couldn’t look, couldn’t help, for my death had come for me. I swung out blindly with the sword in my right hand, trying to keep the thing from me as I conjured nightfire with my left hand. The creature laughed, a horrible high-pitched cackle that chilled my blood, and then it disappeared just as I threw the spell at it.
I stared dumbly at the spot where the goblin had stood, and then I felt its finger slide down my spine for the second time that day.
Spinning around, I slashed with the sword. The monster laughed and disappeared again.
It was playing with me. It was playing with me, and I was in no freaking mood for games.
As seemed to happen to me so often, the rush of anger cleared my head, steadied my nerves. The blaze of Lucifer’s power lit in my blood, poured down my hand and into my sword. It didn’t burst mindlessly from the blade but lay charged and waiting for my call.
The creature reappeared on my right, just in the corner of my eyesight. It stabbed at me with its claws again, tearing through the shoulder of my coat and drawing blood. Instead of darting away or spinning around to face it, I allowed the creature to injure me and then disappear again. I wasn’t going to jump around for this monster’s amusement.
I felt the goblin’s fingers curl around the end of my braid and pull, hard enough to hurt but not enough to knock me from my feet. The goblin giggled, but its laugh sounded confused. I wasn’t reacting the way it thought I should.