The moment he hung up the phone after talking to Dagwood, Irwin straightened up and sighed. “I can’t believe he expects me to believe that bullshit,” he muttered. “Good Samaritan? Bullshit.”

Dagwood might have believed that he was being discreet and clever, but he forgot that Irwin knew him. They had spent more than enough time together by now, so Irwin was wise to Dagwood’s ways of sounding calm even in the midst of chaos. It was an admirable thing, but it was also a damn stupid thing, especially when it resulted in lying to your mate.

Even though they weren’t officially bonded yet, Irwin considered himself Dagwood’s mate, and he didn’t appreciate being lied to. That left him with only one course of action, which was to head out and see what his heroic boyfriend had gotten himself into.

Placing one hand on either side of himself, Irwin pushed as hard as he could. People didn’t really appreciate just how much went into simple daily actions until those actions suddenly involved pain. For Irwin, this was the realization that he needed his core for everything. Bending over, stand up, sitting down, reaching out, all of it pulled at his chest muscles and made him ache in a terrible, throbbing sort of way that no amount of aspirin could cover. He’d been weaned off the stronger pain pills some time ago due to his rapid recovery, which he hadn’t minded at the time because they made him feel like a dipshit.

What he would have given to have one now…

Then again, he couldn’t very well go save Dagwood from whatever mess he’d gotten himself into if he was operating in dipshit mode.

After managing to make it to his feet, Irwin took hold of his trusty grabber and used it to fetch first his apartment keys and his shoes. Not those fucking stupid slippers Dagwood bought, but his actual sneakers. It took a bit of unbalanced wiggling to get them on, since there was no way he was going to be able to undo the laces and then tie them up again, but he managed to get close enough. The back of the right shoe was folded under, chafing at his ankle, but this seemed like an insignificant detail in the face of everything else.

Irwin placed his hands on his stomach and looked down at the small, round bump forming there. Before he met Dagwood, this bump would have seemed like a nightmare; now, he couldn’t imagine being without it. Even with all the discomfort it caused, the difficulties it placed on his body on top of all his other problems, he felt very protective of the child slumbering within. Sometimes, he thought he could feel the little life stirring around inside him, already developing its own identity and purpose.

This was the true magic. Not shifting, not wells that showed you people, but pregnancy. The miracle of life.

“Okay, baby,” Irwin said, patting his stomach. “Let’s go rescue your daddy.”

If he felt an answer, a sort of vague confirmation echoing from deep in the back of his thoughts, surely he imagined it.

Opening the door to the apartment and shuffling all the way outside was no easy task, though neither was it the most difficult thing he would face on his quest. Once he stepped outside, a wall of sweltering heat slapped him in the face. Grimacing, already starting to sweat, he started to walk in the direction of the grocery store. His pale skin already felt too warm, as if he was on the verge of burning. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t get any darker after burning and peeling. He just sprouted more freckles.

Before he had gone very far, he could feel his strength already waning. The heat sapped away his desire to keep going and the humidity made it difficult to breathe. Both of these things in combination with the fact that he had yet to be restored to a normal activity level, meant that he was soon breathing heavily, slouching forward. Slouching hurt his chest but there was little he could do about it.

Discomfort reigned supreme as he pushed his way onward. The crowd of people passing by parted around him, though he felt this was less out of politeness and more because he was a weird, limping, and sweaty man. His shirt stuck to his skin, and sweat stains formed beneath his arms and around his shirt collar. The roundness of his stomach became more and more apparent with every step he took.

After what surely must have been an hour, he finally caught sight of the grocery store. A sigh of relief escaped his lips, and he tried to pick up his pace, but he just didn’t have the strength for it. By the time he got there, he was practically crawling.

Someone held the door open for him as he entered and he murmured his thanks. Then, a gust of delicious, cold air blew into his face from the air conditioning, and he nearly swooned from the delight. Nothing in the entire world had ever been better than this, surely. No drink, no food, no emotion could hold a candle to this cold euphoria.

“Can you move?” said a voice from behind him, interrupting his quiet pleasure. “You’re in the way.”

Not even the slightest bit sorry, Irwin pushed deeper into the store and made his way over to the only open cash register. The cashier gave him a bored look. He stared right back at her, challenging her to give him a hard time.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was monotone, which was not a good sign.

“Was there a guy in here? A guy with long dark hair and…”

“That disgusting hippie?” The old cashier snorted with disgust. She looked as sour as if someone had just asked her about her personal life, which Irwin could imagine wasn’t going so great. “Yeah, he was in here. Filthy man. Nosy.”

I bet he asked how your day was, right? The nerve of him.

Somehow, Irwin managed to hold his tongue. Then he subsequently lost control of it and said, “Yeah, that’s my boyfriend. Did you see where he went?”

The look on her face was one of absolute loathing and abhorrence. A man with long hair and now a gay guy? Surely she’d never had such an awful day as this! And Irwin didn’t give a fuck. It wasn’t the Dark Ages anymore. People were allowed to be what they wanted to be, where they wanted to be. Just because this old hag hadn’t gotten the memo didn’t mean he was going to go easy on her. Even if he was inclined to tolerate someone’s prejudice, he was just too uncomfortable for it right now.

“You two are living in sin.”

“Yeah, well, I’m also carrying his demon baby so it’s kind of late to think about that. And he’s hot. So, that makes it okay in my book. Which, by the way, hasn’t been bent to the whim of the people who wrote it. So, where did he go?”

The old woman stared at him as if he was an insect or perhaps a snake. Her fingers were moving, and he didn’t understand at first what she was doing, until he figured out that she was making the sign of the cross at him.

I can’t believe there are still people in the world like this.

“Well?” he prompted.

“He ran across the street. Do you know what my book says, sinner? And God shall smite any man who lays with man…”

Irwin left her blathering to herself and shuffled his way outside. He was reluctant to leave the air conditioning, but there were more important things at stake.

The crosswalk was a bit away and he didn’t want to bother with it, so he just waited carefully until there were enough gaps in the traffic to allow him to shamble across. He couldn’t move as fast as he would have liked to however, which meant he greatly overestimated how much time he would have. Cars pulled up and stopped, idling, only inches away. They honked and shouted at him but he only tucked his head down and kept limping forward with his breath coming in ragged gasps.

“Get a job, you loser!” someone shouted at him as he finally managed to step up onto the sidewalk on the other end of the road. Bending over despite how it made his chest feel like it was on fire, Irwin put his hand out to steady himself against the nearby wall of a building.

“Yeah, okay,” Irwin muttered between gasps for breath. “I’ll just do that. And maybe when you get kicked in the face by a horse, I’ll tell you to be the president. Since that’s how we play this game.”

The other person was long gone, having driven away, and likely wouldn’t have been very offended by this nonsensical insult, but Irwin felt better anyway. Straightening up once he had regained his breath, he turned his nose up into the air and took a deep sniff.

The strongest scents were of course those that belonged to the city, but Dagwood had definitely gone this way. His powerful, musky alpha scent was in the air. It smelled like he’d been excited, or worked up about something. That fit with what Irwin knew about his boyfriend: the calmer he sounded, the tenser he was.

Dagwood’s trail led back through an alley nearby and followed a few twists and turns. Irwin grimaced at some of the obstacles in his way, shuddering while slogging on by. Doing things like this used to be so easy, but that was back when he was high on adrenaline, living like nothing mattered. A whole hell of a lot mattered right now, and walking through garbage was not making things any easier.

Irwin exited the last alley and found himself on the sidewalk with a number of other people, all of them clustered together and murmuring in low voices. His heartbeat quickened. This looked a whole hell of a lot like a place where something important had gone down. The question was what, exactly.

Pushing through the crowd, using his grabber stick to his advantage by swatting at people who got in his way, Irwin pressed closer to the street to see what was going on. Police cruisers had blocked off part of the road, which was unremarkable except for the fact that it had a covered opening to the sewer in the middle of it. As Irwin watched, two of the cops pulled the cover back and peered down into the darkness.

“What the hell is going on?” Irwin muttered.

He didn’t expect an answer, but a guy about his own age leaned over towards him with a conspiratorial look on his face. “It was the freakiest shit I’ve ever seen. This crazy dude just ran out in the middle of the street and went down in the sewer. It was super fucked up! Everyone thinks he was like this escaped mental patient. You know, like in the movies?”

Irwin wasn’t even sure if Portsmouth had a live-in mental institution, but this didn’t seem like the sort of detail this other guy would consider. “What’d the crazy guy look like?”

“Dirty as fuck and he had this gnarly tangled hair that was so long!”

With this bit of information, Irwin concluded that the guy he was speaking to was either a little unhinged himself, or under the influence of something. He didn’t know what Dagwood had been doing to wind up looking disgusting but maybe it resulted from his run through the alleyway. Or, this guy was exaggerating.

“Fascinating,” Irwin said. He just stood there and watched the proceedings for a minute or two, letting his racing heart drop down to a more normal pace. Nothing much was really happening. The cops just milled around, occasionally warning the crowd to stand back. Every now and again, they spoke into the radios on their belts and then peered down inside the sewer, but no one tried to go inside. They all seemed to be waiting on something. Back-up, perhaps. Or maybe a map. A map seemed smart. No one in their right mind would want to go down into a sewer blind.

Irwin knew that was exactly what he was going to have to do. There was no way he was going to be able to get down this hole in particular with everyone watching so intently. Even if he was in better shape, he still didn’t think he could risk it. If he got down there and the cops followed him in, and he led them straight into something dangerous…

No, he couldn’t do that. So he was going to have to recall what it felt like to be the old Irwin, to take a risk that he should definitely not be taking.

He walked away from the crowd and back through the alleyway. He hoped that he might be able to find an entrance hidden from prying eyes, but there was nothing to be found until he saw an opening in the gutter a little ways down the next street. A storm drain. The old Irwin might have easily been able to wiggle his way down there, but the new and improved version had gained a considerable amount of weight. He didn’t dare think about what might happen if he moved the wrong way, or if he landed wrong.

But he didn’t think he could open a grate or a covering on his own. Not like this.

Which left him little choice, didn’t it?

Trying to act nonchalant, Irwin walked over to where the storm drain was and looked down at it. He scanned it, almost as if he was looking for something that he’d dropped. It might work. It just might be possible! But the last thing he wanted to do was to get halfway through and snag on something.

With this thought in mind, he grabbed his shirt with both hands and summoned his claws to rip it open. Getting dressed in the morning usually required Dagwood’s assistance. Being on his own now, he had to improvise.

After dropping the scraps of his shirt aside, he pulled his pants down and kicked them off. Sweatpants were the name of the game ever since he’d been injured—if he wore pants at all—and these were wide enough at the cuffs so that he didn’t have to worry about his shoes getting caught.

Once he was down to nothing but his boxers, Irwin discovered two things.

The first thing was that it was a lot nicer outside with no clothes on.

The second thing was that stripping down in public earned a guy a whole lot of attention. People were shouting at him and making comments on his behavior, his appearance. They called him fat. They called him crazy.

Damn right I am, Irwin thought. And none of you fucks better mess with me.

With this thought echoing in his mind, filling him with a sort of confidence that he hadn’t felt in months, the last time he’d stolen, Irwin sat down in the street in front of the storm drain. Everything in his body cried out and protested against this indignity. He ached so abominably that he locked up halfway through the squat and froze there, like a man about to defecate in the wilderness. It hurt so badly that all he could do from there was drop down onto his ass.

The impact didn’t really hurt but the shock sure as hell did. He could feel very acutely the way each and every healing wound on his body burned and throbbed with protest.

But there was no time to waste. He was gathering attention, losing precious seconds.

Irwin straightened out his legs, shoving them through the gap. They passed through and dangled out into empty space with some room to spare, which gave him hope.

Then he dropped back and lay down flat while at the same time pushing himself deeper into the opening with his hands. Nothing in the world had ever hurt so much. He couldn’t bear it. Spots flashed before his eyes. He saw the sky, concerned faces staring down at him, and then his back was tense with agony as a sharp edge rammed against it. His stomach scraped cement, terrifying him distantly through the pain, and then he was through.

And he was falling.

The back of his neck hit the same point that had terrorized his back. A soft whimper escaped his lips but he couldn’t make any other sounds because his teeth were clenched, grinding together.

He hadn’t been aware of the fall itself but he was hunched over against the cold, damp wall with the opening right above him, retching from how badly it hurt. Never in all his life had he imagined a pain so great it could make him feel sick, but here it was now and he so wished for ignorance. His stomach was shivering, and he gripped at it with fear, wondering if he had hurt the baby, if he was about to lose it.

But no, it wasn’t only his stomach. It was the rest of him. He was shaking, very badly.

Some of the dim light filtering down from the storm drain was blocked out as some of the onlookers peered in.

“Hey! Hey, man! What are you doing?”

The rest of the onlookers all said similar things, taking their cue from the first speaker. Their voices echoed in the enclosed space, blurring together so that it was impossible to tell what was actually being said. Irwin didn’t care. He just wanted to stop hurting.

His rest was cut short when people started sticking their arms down the drain, as if they could catch him and pull him out again. Swearing softly under his breath, he straightened up and started walking away. The tunnel he faced was incredibly dark, bisected by a current of sludgy, foul water. The stench was choking and just downright terrible. If he wasn’t already having a hard time breathing, this would definitely do it.

As soon as he was out of sight of the onlookers, though their voices still reached him, Irwin shapeshifted. It was almost a relief to enter his animal form, though it did nothing to minimize his pain. However, his pain tolerance seemed to be better, and he was onboard with that.

The only unfortunate thing was that his red wolf form was so small, his pregnant stomach was more of a burden. The extra strain really wasn’t what he needed right now, but he had no choice. If he had any chance of finding Dagwood down here, it would be through his superior wolf senses and not by anything else.

Because he was lost.

Very, very lost.

He had hardly gone anywhere, and already he had no idea where to go. There were three different directions, not counting the fourth option that would take him back to where he started, and there was no telling which one was the right one to take. The one in front of him ran in the direction of the sewer entrance surrounded by the cops but just because it went that way initially didn’t mean it continued on like that. No telling how all these tunnels connected.

But he had to start somewhere. Bending his head, he grabbed up his stick and trotted forward with the water slopping around only inches away from his paws. The further he went, the harder it was for him to see until the world was reduced down to mere impressions and shadows. He heard only what he assumed to be normal sewer sounds. Water, dripping, rats.

But even if he heard something important, he didn’t know if he would be able to identify it as such. After all, Dagwood had come down here but what was he chasing?

Gripping his stick more firmly in his jaws, he just kept going. Even if he got lost, at least he was doing something.

He stopped abruptly as the sewer canal twisted, jerking around straight ahead of him instead of off to the side. No way in hell he was going to jump that. If he had to jump, he was going to save it for a situation that was absolutely desperate. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to go on afterward.

Following the new course of the water, he walked ever deeper into the darkness. Soon enough, not even sight was enough to keep guiding him. He had to rely on the feel of the world around him, letting the touch of concrete on his fur and whiskers tell him he wasn’t at risk of falling in the water. He felt claustrophobic, yet also as if the walls were spreading further and further apart. He might have been in a cave instead of a tunnel.

Then, he heard it. Shouting. Male voices. Coming from the left, where he couldn’t go because the canal was in the way.

Whining low in the back of his throat, Irwin pricked his ears up and swiveled them in the direction of the sound. Distorted by echoing, there was no way of telling if he recognized any of the speakers. Then, something wailed. A high, droning sort of sound.

Cop car siren.

Which meant that to his left was potentially the entrance Dagwood had used. So, he was more or less on the right path.

Encouraged by this, Irwin picked up his pace until he was trotting. His breathing was ragged around the stick clenched in his jaws, but he pushed himself to keep at the same speed. He lifted his nose into the air and sniffed deeply, whiskers quivering.

He hadn’t expected to pick up on anything, but mingled with the odors of the sewer that he had been growing used to, there was the musky aroma of wolf.

A soft bark pulled from his throat and his tail lifted up over his back. Dagwood!

Now that he had a trail to follow, he stuck to it like glue and was delighted to discover that he had been going in the right direction all along. Somehow. A few twists and turns, none of which were impossible to make. Hope rose up in his heart and his tail lifted even higher over his back.

There was light now, too, and Dagwood’s trail headed straight for it. Irwin followed right along, except that now his hope was turning into suspicion because that seemed like a whole hell of a lot of light to be in a place like this. Alarm bells were ringing in his mind.

Now he remembered the stories Dagwood had told him during his search for Kevin Leery, about going down into the sewer and fighting that viper lady.

Eyes widening, Irwin ducked his head down and pushed himself for a final burst of speed. He couldn’t even feel the pain now. Every fiber of his being was focused on one thing and one thing only, and that was getting to his dumb boyfriend before he was bitten by a snake again.

The lights were blinding as he made it to their source. Nothing made any further sense when he arrived there, taking everything in. Tons of tall lights on stands. Figures everywhere, just standing in a circle.

And Dagwood, turning to lunge at a sinewy shape surging at him from the darkness.

If this was ever the moment for an act of desperation, this was it. Irwin burst into the room, gathered his legs beneath him, and pushed himself into an enormous leap that carried him right between them.

“Irwin!” Dagwood cried out, sounding terrified and shocked.

Irwin landed hard on the ground and then collapsed, his exhausted legs incapable of holding him up. At any moment he expected to feel the burn of venom flowing through his blood.

I’m sorry, baby, he thought, wondering if the child in his stomach could hear him. I love you, but the world needs someone like your father in it.

But the pain never came and suddenly there were arms wrapped around him, picking him up.

“Irwin, you’re a fucking idiot!” Dagwood shrieked. His voice had gone high-pitched, nearly hysterical. “What are you doing? How did you even get here?”

Irwin turned back into a human so that he could wrap his arms and legs around Dagwood. All thoughts of that horrible snake were blown from his mind. He was just happy to be alive, happy that Dagwood was alive.

As he shifted, his grabber stick fell from his shrinking jaws and clattered on the ground. One end of it had been bent by a powerful bite force, and a viscous fluid dribbled from the plastic.

Seeing that, Irwin held his arms even tighter around Dagwood. That stupid stick had just saved both their lives. But what about the snake?

Dagwood was staring at something over his shoulder, so Irwin twisted around for a good look, too.

A very, very strange man stood only a few feet away, reeking powerfully of metal and cold, as if someone had embodied the scent of a skyscraper in winter. His skin was so pale as to be nearly transparent, but most of his body was hidden beneath a flowing black cloak. His eyes, where they peered out from beneath the hood of the cloak, were as red as blood.

In one hand, he held the attacking viper. The snake writhed furiously in his grasp but he had it right behind the head where it couldn’t twist around to attack him. Its struggles were useless. As Irwin watched, the snake tried to shift back into human form but the strange man’s grip was so unyielding that the snake would have decapitated itself had it continued. In the end, it had no choice but to stay as a snake, wriggling uselessly.

Irwin wriggled around too, trying to put his feet on the ground, but Dagwood wasn’t going to let him go anytime soon.

Great, Irwin thought, but he really wasn’t that upset about it. He probably wouldn’t be able to stand on his own anyway. He was as exhausted as a man could be.

Dagwood held him closer against his chest, as if sensing his thoughts. “Okay,” he said, using his commanding voice. “I’ve had about enough of this shit. Everyone needs to tell me what’s going on. Who are you?” he said, pointing at the strange man. “What part do you play in this? What part does anyone play in this? And for fuck’s sake, Irwin, why are you naked?”

“I’m wearing boxers,” Irwin said. He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The indignant expression on Dagwood’s face was just too much. As if his state of near-nudity was the most offensive thing going on here.

“My name isn’t important,” the strange man said. “But for the sake of brevity, you may call me Sebastian. I am a vampire.”

Dagwood nodded stiffly. “Right. I got that. And our friendly neighborhood snake here really wants to be a vampire herself, right? Is that why you’re involved?”

“I am the leader of this colony,” Sebastian said. “A vampire does not judge who a person was in the first part of their life. We have an eternity to change.”

That doesn’t give us any answers.

But, it seemed as if Sebastian wasn’t through. He spoke again. “This woman approached us many, many years ago with a request. She didn’t want to be an ‘ugly, pulseless undead’ as she put it, but she wished to know our secrets nonetheless.”

“And you agreed to teach her?” Dagwood sounded incredulous. Irwin privately agreed that the very idea was ludicrous and potentially wrong, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He’d risked enough for one day.

Sebastian nodded. The hood he wore bunched up with the movement, and an errant glance of light revealed strong, handsome features. “As I said, we do not judge. And it seemed a perfect arrangement. She would drain her victims of just enough to ensure her beauty, and the rest would be given to us.”

Now Irwin couldn’t help but to pipe up. “But wait. You don’t kill the person, do you? You don’t totally drain them, right?”

The vampire gave a single nod, as if in approval. “Correct. We take only enough to satisfy our hunger, and then we leave our prey exactly where they were found, if we know the location. It will all seem as just a bad dream. But this was eventually not enough for our friend, here. She wished to know other secrets. Entrapment. Enthrallment. All of these were taught to her.”

“But what did she want to use them for? What about Kevin?”

Sebastian glanced over at the man, prone in the corner of the room with a ton of lights piled on top of him. “Nightshade wished to eventually become a halfling. A creature vampiric in true, and yet living the full life of a human. Or as full of a life as she desired. Her appearance preferences seem to have limited some of those options.”

“Not by much,” Dagwood said. “I watched her out there on the street in broad daylight. Everyone was ignoring her.”

“That is entrapment. The ability to move others to her will as she so desires. She is a very powerful woman. But the reality of the situation is that halflings cannot be self-made.” Sebastian glanced at the writhing snake in his grasp. “More often than not, they are accidental creations. Caused by an interrupted fathering. They are to be pitied, walking in both worlds and never truly belonging to either. Yet, she did not listen to us. And so we have been watching, because we are curious. As of this very moment, Nightshade is as close to becoming a halfling as she will ever be.”

Those words had a strong finality to them, one that Irwin didn’t quite understand. Did Sebastian mean that Nightshade had peaked? That she would never be stronger than she was right in this moment?

Watching her writhe around in the iron grip of the vampire, that didn’t seem very powerful at all.

“The man you know as Kevin is a thrall. He is to be fed on, to do Nightshade’s bidding. Most of us are very kind to our thralls. Nearly all of them are with us out of choice. But she is abusive. And we have watched this with interest, because we are curious to know how much abuse a man can take before he will collapse and never rise.”

“You’re all monsters,” Dagwood said hoarsely. “How can you just sit back and watch all this happen?”

Sebastian didn’t answer that, but Irwin suspected he knew the reason. Vampires were creatures who basically lived in their own separate world. Different laws governed them. To them, this wasn’t sick or inhumane. They were like scientists watching how many times a rat could get shocked before it figured out that the cheese was behind a different door.

Or something like that. Irwin wasn’t very good with analogies.

Kevin stirred around under the lights. Sebastian glanced at him again, with what seemed like pity in his cold red eyes. “We did not teach her this talent, but Nightshade eventually figured it out on her own. It is the ability to absorb souls.” The vampire’s passive face suddenly went wretched, almost bitter. “We do not condone this for feeding. We take blood, not existence. But Nightshade figured out that she could use Kevin to kill and absorb souls through the link of their entrapment, which she could later take from him. This sort of feeding is…not substantial for our kind. It is more based in pleasure.”

So now they were dealing with a sadistic, vampiric snake. Great. Things only kept getting better.

But it made sense, as to why Kevin kept appearing places to randomly attack people, such as when he shot up the Macy’s store. He was being driven to it by a force outside his control, goaded onward by Nightshade’s greed or, even worse, her boredom. He was probably just a regular man before all this.

Dagwood shifted slightly, as if with realization. “I bet Kevin was involved in some underground fighting. And somehow, they were introduced to each other.”

“From what we know of this story, that is indeed the case,” Sebastian replied. “Nightshade is not a stupid woman. She is clever. She knows she must stay relatively hidden. And she is lucky, for the satisfaction from stealing souls lasts for a very long time. It would not be a thing which happened often.

“But here was this man, in the prime of his life. An unextraordinary man, who might be hard to identify. No outwardly defining characteristics. No outstanding features. He would do very fine for her experiments.”

So now they finally had all the answers. Except the last few. Irwin would have been satisfied just knowing as much as he did in this moment, but Dagwood clearly wouldn’t be. He pressed on.

“What the hell was her obsession with Irwin? Why did she keep making Kevin go after him?”

“Because of you,” Sebastian replied, nodding at Dagwood. “She was toying with you, trying to defeat you. I imagine you seemed like a worthwhile opponent.”

If Dagwood was flattered, he didn’t show it.

“Once she discovered that you had a romantic interest, it only made her game more fun.”

“Fine,” Dagwood said. “But why this room? Why are all of you here?”

“The room is of Nightshade’s planning. It is extravagant and pointless.”

Well, I guess that’s true.

“She planned this meeting,” Sebastian said. “She lured you here, to this ring. She wished to show us how strong she had become, that she had defied all our laws. She wished to kill you with her thrall. She believed that she could push him past his own boundaries and overcome you with pure brute force.”

“But I had no problem beating him up.”

“And that is because she is a fool.” Sebastian’s calm, measured voice suddenly turned nasty. He bared his sharp fangs, snarling at the snake with malice in his gaze. “There are limits to the body. We know this. She knew this. She has learned nothing. And she has come to break our most sacred law today, the one by which all vampires abide. The one by which we live or die.”

On the word “die” he suddenly twisted his hand. There was a horrendous crunching sound as the bones in Nightshade’s viper neck all snapped at once. An agonized hiss burst from her serpentine throat, and then she went limp.

Irwin made a small, horrified sound in the back of his throat. Just like that, a life was ended. It didn’t seem fair.

“Good lord,” Dagwood croaked. “What the fuck did she do?”

Sebastian dropped the lifeless viper onto the ground and kicked it away. His lips curved with disgust. “She attacked someone who was pregnant.”

Oh.

“Whether it was intentional or not, we will never allow for this. Potential is sacred. Life is sacred. The unborn are filled with both in great measures, and we will never allow them to be robbed of it.”

Dagwood hugged Irwin tight to him. Irwin tucked his head against Dagwood’s shoulder, then dropped his hands down and felt his rounded stomach. This precious life inside him had saved them both. A miracle child, indeed.

Sebastian took a step back. “There are others approaching.”

Sure enough, distant footsteps echoed through the sewer tunnels, accompanied by the occasional shout.

“It’s the police,” Irwin said.

Sebastian nodded. “We who have gathered here must take our leave. We ask that you omit our presence from any story you wish to tell them.”

Sebastian turned away, raising his arm to give a signal to the other gathered vampires.

“Wait,” Dagwood commanded.

The vampire paused.

“Why should I let you go? You’re the cause of all this. You and your willingness to screw around with life. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t told this horrid woman how to do what she did.”

“We only provided the knowledge. Her actions were her own.” Sebastian looked back and smiled, revealing a gleam of his fangs again. “Besides, do you wish to fight against an entire colony of vampires?”

Dagwood hesitated, but there was clearly nothing he could do. He relented, though very reluctantly.

As the sounds of the approaching police grew ever louder, the vampires began to transform into bats.

They’re like shapeshifters, Irwin thought, awed by the way shapeless shadows became graceful, gliding creatures of various sizes. The bats took to the air, swirling around the room with easy grace, filling the atmosphere with dozens of echoing wingbeats. They flew towards an open vent along the top of the back wall that Irwin hadn’t noticed up until now, disappearing inside. Where that vent led was anyone’s guess.

Sebastian stood and watched as his colony all made their exit. He transformed into an incredibly large flying fox bat, with a busy golden crown of fur on top of his head. Picking up the body of the snake with one foot, he flapped his wings and lifted into the air.

“I will dispose of this,” Sebastian said, somehow projecting his voice into Irwin’s and Dagwood’s minds.

After completing a wide circle of the room, Sebastian folded his wings and disappeared into the vent. The dangling cover seemed to move of its own accord, tugged along by some powerful force of the mind, and replaced itself over the hole. And just like that, there were no vampires.

At exactly that moment, the police burst into the room.

Irwin tucked himself closer to Dagwood and sighed a little. It seemed terrible to let the vampires get away, but he realized that he agreed with what Sebastian had said. They had only provided the knowledge of things to Nightshade. Though they hadn’t stopped her from doing what she’d done, they were just onlookers. That didn’t excuse them of anything, but they also couldn’t be blamed. They lived by their own rules.

And now he and Dagwood would have to find some way to explain what they were doing here and what exactly was going on, to humans who would never understand.

Boy, are we in for a long night, he thought.