Claimed by Shadow Page 0,133

creature would crumple like paper in my hands.

He finally went limp and I laid him down to check for a pulse. I found one and breathed a sigh of relief. "You seem to be doing well enough on your own," Pritkin commented.

"Against humans! It isn't humans hunting us.”

"No, but the principle is the same. When they looked at you, the two men saw only a weak woman, where they should have seen a predator." He gave me a brief, mirthless grin. "I often have that same advantage.”

"You can't take them all, predator or not!”

"The principle is the same," he repeated, wrenching the heavy lamppost I'd ruined out of the ground, then shoving it back into the hole, hard. The gas main underneath the street ruptured and caught fire with a whoosh, sending a bright plume skyward. I jumped back, Augusta 's instinctive terror running through me. But a vamp I hadn't even noticed caught fire and ran screaming into another. Pritkin grinned viciously. "Never be what they expect.”

He ran down the street after the fleeing vampires, whooping and generally making as much noise as possible, and the dark wells of power in my vision began to turn the same way. The vamps didn't know what was going on, but they'd been looking for a fight, and Pritkin seemed ready to give them one. And he called me insane.

I ran back into the theatre and found Billy cowering behind the ticket booth. I nodded approval. There was no safe place at the moment, but it beat having him with me or the maniac outside.

I turned my attention to finding Myra. There were three people in the building, and only one was human. I could hear the strong, steady heartbeat, could feel it at the back of my throat as something thick and sweet. The vamps weren't bothering with trivialities like having a pulse, but I could smell them. And even at this distance Augusta 's keen nose could pick out the crisp scent of pine.

I followed Augusta 's hunger through the backstage areas, trying to zero in on Myra 's exact location, but the place was a rabbit warren of tiny rooms and dead-end corridors, with props stuck here and there haphazardly. I fumbled out of a forest of painted trees to find myself in the wings of the stage. The theatre was dark, enough so that to a human's eyes little would have been visible. I could make out a few props-a chest, a couple of flags and some blunted lances- waiting for the next performance. There was no sign of activity, however, and the human's heartbeat was still a good way off.

I finally located my target in a room behind the stage, down a stairway filled with dust and old suits of armor. I kept a wary eye on the battered knights as I slipped by, but none so much as twitched. The first room I reached was set up like a dining room, with a large shiny wood table that practically reeked of beeswax. It was oak to match the paneling on the walls and the beams on the ceiling. There were a bunch of portraits scattered around and a big stone fireplace. It had a gothic feel to it that would have served as a good backdrop for a couple of vamps, only there weren't any.

The still-glowing embers in the fireplace and the decanter and two used glasses on the table told me that they hadn't been gone long. I peered into the next room, drawn by an odd smell, and found the human. It wasn't Myra.

A tall, portly guy with dark hair and, oddly enough, a red beard, stood by a counter with his shirt open over a pale, hairy belly. He had a candle in his hand and I identified the odor: cooked human flesh. He appeared to be trying to melt the skin on his chest and stomach, patches of which were already a flaming, lobster red. A few that had received extra attention were starting to bubble. He was crying silently, tears coursing down his cheeks to soak his beard, but he didn't stop.

I ran forward and knocked the candle away. It rolled across the floor and went out, and he looked after it blankly. Then he reached to the shelf behind him, got another one and was in the process of lighting it when I jerked it away, too. I looked into his eyes, but there was no one home. Somebody had