He had seen her at the last moment and had started to come erect; her bolt seemed to knock him backwards, limbs flailing as he collided with the door of the station-wagon and slid to a sitting position. Then his mouth spat a stream of bloodied froth, his eyes closed and his head slumped onto his chest.
And B.J. panted, 'Harry, your lighter ...' She was shaken, yes, but there was a snarl in her voice, too.
Harry collapsed the invisible door he had conjured a little way down the slope, into which he'd been about to hurl himself. He fumbled out a cheap cigarette lighter, flipped its top and struck fire. He knew what B.J. would do; as they scrambled away from the car and its occupants, he did it for her:
He tossed the lighter in a lazy arc into the pool of vaporizing fuel. It hadn't even hit the ground before blue flames licked up, enveloped the car, making a whoosh! and a roar that threw out a wall of heat. B.J. and Harry kept going; they were into the trees, covered by the mossy boles of a clump of birch trees when the tank blew. And when they looked out the car was an inferno. The explosion hadn't shaken it loose, but already the foliage around was on fire, burning furiously. Nothing was going to get out of that hell alive, but still they kept watching.
'Look and learn,' B.J. said, hoarsely. 'One of them must be a lieutenant. A job like this could never have been trusted entirely to mere thralls.' Harry knew she was right, and knew which one was the lieutenant.
The driver,' he said, remembering how his eyes were crimson in their cores.
She glanced at him, frowned and said, 'Oh?' She might have been about to say something else, but a sudden commotion in the blazing car stopped her. It was the driver. For while his passenger was content to sit there and melt, and drip, he wasn't.
Through the envelope of blue-shimmering heat, the lieutenant's red-robed, blazing figure was plainly visible. Twitching and jerking, with al his limbs spastically threshing, he lifted his head from the window sil and seemed to look out through the wall of fire.
But his eyes were peeled white things with no sight in them.
'Dead,' B.J. grated, 'but his metamorphic flesh won't accept it. It wants to go on, wants more.'
Even as she spoke, the chest and guts of the thing in the burning vehicle erupted, putting out corpse-white tentacles or feelers to lash in the super-heated confines of the car. Bunching together, they blossomed outwards through the stripped roof and upward into the fiery slipstream, and floated there in the furnace updraft like the arms of some crippled anemone.
Other tentacles uncoiled out of the door, opened at their tips, and pissed an orange fluid all around that steamed where it fell to earth. Then the thing gave in, withdrew its melting appendages, crumpled down into itself and began to slop out of the door around the shoulders of the blazing thral. Body fats were on fire now and the stink of roasting flesh was sickening.
It masked what was left of the CS smel, which B.J. had taken to be part of the natural stench of the accident.
That one had been a vampire ... oh, for quite some time,' she said. 'If he wasn't Wamphyri, it was close. Now we have to go. It's over, and we don't want to be found here.'
And Harry, who could still converse normally, said, This was just two of them. There are four more that we know of.'
'I know,' she said, taking the lead and heading back up the slope under the trees. 'Our trip is off. I have to talk to Auld John - but by telephone! They might have tracked us from his place! If they'd held back
just a minute or two, they might even have followed us to ...'
'... To Radu in his lair?' Harry said.
She heard the confusion in his voice, looked back and saw it in his face. And she believed that she understood. Right now he was
'switched on' to the reality of things; he knew that she was in thrall to Radu Lykan, Wamphyri! He knew that he was working for Radu's agent, Bonnie Jean, against those of other vampire Lords. The 'myth' of their mutual affection - the bond he and B.J. had established - might have been compromised; Harry might have begun to suspect that he was being used.
Therefore