The guy was on his back now, and Marid didn’t give him a chance to recover enough to sit up, much less stand. Moving next to him, he stepped a booted foot across his neck. Then Marid set the sharpened tip of the wooden cane on the other vampire’s chest and leaned.
“No, no, no—!” the prone vampire managed to gasp before the cane’s point broke through skin, then through ribs. The vampire arced, muscles contracting at once, and flailed like a bug on a pin before going limp, his skin turning gray and desiccated, leaving an aged corpse stuck to Marid’s cane.
Marid stepped on the dried-out chest and used the leverage to yank out the cane. A puff of ash rose up. Marid didn’t glance back.
“Ben?” I asked, looking.
He was picking himself up, brushing himself off, and his scowl hinted at a foul mood. “I hate vampires.”
“Present company excepted, I’m sure,” Marid said, donning a crooked smile.
Ben huffed, and asked, “You okay?”
I was frowning at the gash in my arm. “Nothing a little time won’t heal.”
“Jesus,” he muttered, coming at me and holding my arm up to study it. He pulled me close and dropped a kiss on my cheek. A big chunk of tension drained away at that, and I breathed in Ben’s scent.
Marid leaned on his cane, regarding us with amusement.
“Thanks,” I said, over Ben’s shoulder. Marid waved me away with a tip of h
is hand.
“How are we doing otherwise?” Ben said, keeping hold of my hand.
I listened and couldn’t hear anything that sounded like fighting. When I tipped my nose to the air, the only blood I smelled was my own.
“Almost finished,” Marid said. “We’re cleaning up now. We managed to drive them off.”
“How many did we lose?” I asked.
“Two of Caleb’s pack, and one of Ned’s Family,” the vampire answered. “Not bad, all in all.”
“But not good,” I said, and he shrugged. I hoped Caleb was okay. I wanted to find him, to see if I could do anything to help.
The three of us went back to the path, and from there to the hill where we’d started. We let Marid walk on ahead.
“I’m glad Cormac wasn’t here,” Ben said softly.
“He’d have been okay.” I wasn’t sure how convincing I sounded.
“I worry about the day he isn’t,” he said.
“Well, that’s what family does.” It wouldn’t matter if Cormac was a corporate drone or a firefighter. We’d still worry.
“If he ever gets bitten, if a werewolf ever infects him, he’ll kill himself. You know that, right? If it had been him instead of me who’d been bitten that night, he’d have just shot himself.” Many years of worry strained his voice. Cormac had been hunting werewolves a long time.
“That was before Amelia,” I said. “You think maybe she could change his mind?”
“Or drive him even more crazy.”
The others had gathered at the top of the hill. The meeting might have been going on, uninterrupted, if there hadn’t been so much blood and sour sweat on the air, smells of death and fear. Bodies—naked, human—lay on the sloping lawn. A wolf with a human companion—another werewolf—moved around the area in a patrol.
Ned watched the tableau. He was holding his left arm with his right, and I had to study him a moment to figure out why. His sleeve hung in tatters, and the arm inside was likewise shredded. A wound like that, there should have been more blood, but the shirt still shone white, and the flesh underneath was strangely clean. Vampires didn’t have much to bleed. Still, the skin and muscle hung in ribbons, pale and pink, torn away from the shoulder, rent in jagged tears by claws and teeth. An ivory gleam of bone, the round joint of the shoulder, shone through. A wolf hadn’t just attacked, it had hung on and gnawed. Ned seemed strangely unconcerned.
Antony and a pair of vampires from Ned’s Family also stood nearby, keeping watch.
“Are you all right?” I said to Ned.