I smiled. "Nice not to be the only woman on the scene for a change."
That brought a very small smile to her face. She gave the barest of nods and stepped back, letting her captain take over.
"How much do you know about a fire scene, Miss Blake?"
"It's Ms. Blake, and not much."
He frowned at the correction. I felt Dolph shift beside me, unhappy with me. His face wouldn't show it, but I could almost feel him willing me not to be a pain in the butt. Who, me?
Corporal Tucker was staring at me, eyes wide, face very still as if she was trying not to laugh.
One of the other firemen joined us. His damp T-shirt clung to a stomach that had required far too many sit-ups, but I enjoyed the view anyway. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and looked like he should have been carrying a surfboard or visiting Barbie in her Malibu dream house. There was a smear of soot on his smiling face, and his eyes were red-rimmed.
He offered his hand without being introduced. "I'm Wren." No rank, just his name. Confident.
He held my hand just a little longer than necessary. It wasn't obnoxious, just interested.
I dropped my eyes. Not out of shyness, but because some men mistake direct eye contact as a come-on. I had about as much beefcake on my plate as I could handle without adding amorous firemen.
Captain Fulton frowned at Wren. "Do you have any questions, Ms. Blake?" He emphasized the Ms. so it sounded like three z's at the end.
"You've got a basement full of vampires that you need to rescue without exposing them to sunlight or getting any of your people eaten, right?"
He stared at me for a second or two. "That's the gist of it."
"Why can't you just leave them in the basement until full dark?" I asked.
"The floor could cave in at any minute," he said.
"Which would expose them to sunlight and kill them," I said.
He nodded.
"Dolph said one vamp was covered with blankets, and rushed to the hospital. Is that why you think the others may not be in their coffins?"
He blinked. "There's also a vampire on the stairs leading down. It's..." His gaze fell, then came up suddenly to grab mine, angry. "I've seen burn victims but nothing quite like this."
"Are you sure it's a vampire?"
"Yes, why?"
"Because vamps exposed to sunlight or fire usually burn completely down to ash and a few bone fragments."
"We doused it with water," Wren said. "Thought it was a person at first."
"What changed your mind?"
It was his turn to look away. "It moved. It was like third-degree burns down to cartilage and muscle, bone, and it held out its hand to us." His face looked pale, haunted. "No person could have done that. We kept coating it with water, thinking maybe we could save it, but it stopped moving."
"So you assumed it was dead?" I asked.
All three of them exchanged glances. Captain Fulton said, "You mean it might not be dead?"
I shrugged. "Never underestimate a vamp's ability to survive, Captain."
"We've got to go back in there and get it to a hospital," Wren said. He turned as if he'd walk back into the house. Fulton caught his arm.
"Can you tell if the vampire is alive or dead?" Fulton asked.