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“You are such an asshole!” I hissed.

“I like you so much.” He sighed. “Where did your sister skip off to, the little minx?” John chuckled. “Never mind, we’ll track her down later. You two are going to be so much fun. But first, I want you to run. Anywhere you like, into the woods, into the house, to the road. Just scamper off. I’ll be along any minute.”

“No,” I spat, eyeing the shovel lying abandoned on the ground, at least twenty feet away.

“Now, Iris, our games will be so much more fun if you just give yourself over to them. I don’t want to waste our precious time together disciplining you for your petulance. Run,” he ordered. “I loved it when you struggled with me at Cal’s house. Come on, pretty thing. Give me a challenge.”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Iris,” he cooed, and that strange, detached cotton-headed feeling crept in at the edge of my brain. “Be a sport. I only want to play a little.”

I planted my feet, staring him in the eye—a big no-no when dealing with a predator. “You know what I think? I think you never learned to fight. I think your vocal talent meant you never had to learn. You just hum your little tunes, and people do whatever you want. I think I could probably kick your skinny, over-hair-gelled ass if I wanted to. And I think I mentioned earlier that I definitely want to.”

“Do you really want to fight me?” John asked, his musical tenor lilting sweetly. “You’re just a silly human. You don’t know anything about fighting. And I’m so much stronger than you.”

My arms felt like lead, like lifting them would take a crane. He chuckled as I struggled to move my feet toward him. I groaned.

“Why don’t you just sit down, Iris?” he asked. “Just sit down and wait for Marchand to kill your little boyfriend. And then you and I will make another game out of finding your sister.”

His cold, cruel laugh brought the memory of that day at Cal’s house hurtling to the surface of my brain, his icy-cold, slimy hands on me and the vicious bite at my throat. I thought of the time he’d spent with Gigi and how easily he could have hurt her and how hard it would be for her to trust boys after this. He could have killed her, arranged it so she never came home, and I would never have known what had happened to her.

Anger as hot and consuming as any blaze spread through my chest, loosening my arms. And what really pissed me off was his confidence. He was so sure of my inability to strike at him that he didn’t move when my arms flexed, not even when I did run, loping across the lawn like an overcaffeinated cheetah. I slid across the grass, diving for the kind of home base that meant more than “not it.” I snagged the shovel, turning to see that John had finally moved. He was sauntering toward me with the widest kid-in-a-candy-store grin I’d ever seen. He was enjoying this, the thrill of the chase, the taste of my fear. This was his game.

Well, olly-olly-oxen-free, asshole.

I stood, planting my feet wide. When John finally moved close enough, I swung the shovel handle like a bat toward his neck. Grunting with the effort, I landed it flat across his throat. He sank to his knees, clawing at his neck and making strange honking gasps.

I yanked his hair, stretching his neck back and making it even harder for him to speak. I whispered, “I don’t know anything about fighting. But I do know it’s hard to talk when you’ve been hit in the throat with a shovel.”

I swung again, splintering the wooden handle across his back. John fell to his hands and knees, honking all the way. I raised my arms over my head and plunged the jagged end through his back, pinning his heart in its descent into the dirt. John seemed to disintegrate in a wave. His skin turned gray and began to flake away to reveal his musculature, then a bare skeleton that exploded in a cloud of particles, leaving only a wavering wooden fragment sticking out of the ground.

With a triumphant cry, I looked up to see if anyone had seen me dispatch a vampire with a badass bon mot.

Of course not.

Having pushed himself back to his feet, Cal was too busy fighting off Mr. Marchand. The two of them were circling like feral dogs, searching for weaknesses, testing each other with random swings and swipes. They kept changing position, so that neither could get a grip on the other. Mr. Marchand was surprisingly agile for an older guy, ducking and sidestepping every blow with a toe dancer’s grace. Although I supposed the whole “vampire reflexes” thing was an unfair senior-citizen advantage.

Cal was less smooth. He took every shot he could, swinging wildly. He didn’t retreat; he only advanced. He was fighting angry, which was not good. Unfocused vampire fighting usually led to staking. I yanked at the shovel handle, but in my zeal to stake John, I’d apparently used that supernatural “mother lifts a car off her toddler” strength you only read about in tabloids, because I could not pull that sucker out of the ground. I leaned against it, changed my grip, tried kicking it at the base, but nothing worked.

“Damn it.”

What were my options? Think, Iris, I commanded myself. Think!

1. Running. Running as fast and far as my little feet could carry me.

Likely result: Escape to a dark country road, where, knowing my luck, I would be kidnapped and murdered by a drifter. Also, Cal would probably die because it looked like he was losing the fight.

2. Finding a pointy tree branch and jumping into the fight.

Likely result: A much faster and bloodier death than option 1.

3. Calling 911.

Likely result: Dead Cal and injured cops. Also, I would have to run inside to find a phone, and the possibility of getting trapped in Mr. Marchand’s house of horrors was not appealing.

Wait.

I patted my pockets for other potential weapons and found the syringes. The first needle I pulled out was marked “Calix, Batch 1.” Was this the poison that left Cal incapacitated? If John hadn’t shown up with the lovely Scanlon sisters bait package, had Marchand planned on giving Cal another dose to persuade him to give up the information he wanted? Was this the stuff that made him weak and ill and immobile?

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