the trees….
She held her ground, dead still and waiting.
Shadows moved again.
She refused to be trapped. She wanted the creatures out in the open.
And so she stood. Dead still.
And waited.
And finally noticed the first of the shadows coming for her.
Young vampire. It approached as a shadow, slowly, but quickly turned. Her stomach became a knot. It was a young Rebel soldier. His uniform. His face. He barely had a beard. But he came at her, and she had no choice. She ducked and turned, grabbing him by the shoulders, and hitting his jugular—as he tried to do the same to her.
She had barely ripped at his throat before the next shadow fell upon her. She reached into her skirt pocket, then stabbed a stake into his heart. Before that one had even fallen, another was after her, this one in the uniform of a Union prison guard. She ripped the stake from the one body to strike into the heart of the other—
And saw more shadows and figures, bloody and gaunt, dressed well and in tatters, coming from the woods.
At least ten of them.
A chill at the back of her neck and she knew something was behind her. She spun to tend to the attack. Speed was everything; she had to be prepared to defend herself from those coming at her from the woods. She wanted to call for Cole, but with their speed and her breath seizing in rhythm with her movements, it was too much all at once.
The thing behind her was little but flesh and bone. He went down quickly, having used whatever fledgling strength it had to become shadow and slip behind her. She faced the trees again, with trepidation. There were so many of them. They had never imagined so many.
In a fleeting second, she saw that something more was in the copse of trees. A greater shadow, a darker shadow. Fear set a cold grip around her heart, and yet, even as she felt the terror, she realized that the shadow-thing, only noticeable because it was even darker than the rest of the blackening night sky—it was actually battling the creatures within the trees, preventing them from spilling out to assail her.
“Megan!”
She heard Cole’s cry as she met the Union sergeant running toward her.
Cole ran past her and into the fray precisely prepared. He held a stake in one hand, and a bottle of holy water in the other. When two of the beings fell upon her at once, she’d have to admit that only because one of them was stunned by the holy water did she survive. She struck out with her stake, and then struck again. Cole was moving expertly at her side. Despite the massive ebony wing of the giant shadow-thing in the trees, at least six more of the beings escaped the copse of trees and came at them.
But she wasn’t fighting alone anymore.
One by one, they went down.
She was fighting with Cole. And the black shadow had saved them from the full force of the mismatched army in the woods.
Suddenly, there was nothing.
She and Cole had set their backs to each other, and together, they had fended off every assault; they had actually been an awesome force.
They remained still, tense and waiting. She could hear the thunder of his heart, and the heave of his breath as they waited.
That, and nothing more.
When she looked to the trees, there was nothing.
“It’s over,” she whispered softly.
Around them lay a field of rotting dead. Blue uniforms, gray, butternut. They wore insignias that denoted them as militia, captains, privates, Army of the Potomac. The Southern boys were mostly in rags.
“Wait, keep an eye on the trees,” Cole warned.
“No. There is nothing more there.”
“How do you know that?”
She turned to look at him at last. “Because we weren’t alone, Cole. Someone was in among the creatures there, someone who helped us.”
He shook his head. His words sounded harsh. “No, Megan. Why do you think that Brendan Vincent went to find your brother in the first place? A staunch Federalist seeking the help of a Rebel doctor? You and Cody are anomalies. A vampire is a predator. A disease. A mass of infection. A parasite that must thieve blood to survive.”
“You’re wrong. Some can be…nearly human,” she said.
Cole paused, and she knew that she had struck a chord with him. She didn’t know what had really gone on in Victory, Texas, but she was pretty sure that Cole had seen infected people become decent vampires. He had to know it could happen.
“This thing could just have been some kind of a trick, or even a trick of your eyes,” he told her. “What exactly did you see?”
She wanted to explain, but when she opened her mouth, all she could think of to describe what she had seen was, “A shadow.”
“A shadow?”
She nodded.
“Megan, they come as shadows, they can move like the wind. You know that. You’ve done it, I’m sure.” She was surprised when he touched her arm, gently. “This is our battle,” he said. “It would be nice to think that others were helping, but it’s doubtful. And we’ve got to get moving here—we have a bit of a problem.”
She looked around at the fallen. The corpses were far too new to have dissolved to ash.
“Good point. How do we explain all these dead?”
“And how long do we dare stay here without…without reinforcements?” he asked. “The sun is falling. We have to make sure that we’ve completely dispatched all these men, and then we have to get out of here. I’ll find Lisette and have her see that the burial detail that cleaned up at the prison gets here, too. We’ve got to get back to Cody and Brendan and find out what they discovered today. Hopefully we got a fair number of the loose vampires here.”
She nodded. She didn’t know why, but she felt a sting of tears in her eyes. So many dead! It was war, and men were dying every day. But this…Her heart went out to the beings she had taken down. The Rebels that lay dead had endured battle and capture, but not this unnatural thing.
They shouldn’t have ended this way.
“Disease,” Cole said sadly, looking down at a soldier. “Ah, yes, Cody told me once that disease and infection killed far more men than bullets. I guess he’s right. The gangrene and the vampire diseases, both.”
Wincing, Megan silently agreed, and together they hurriedly made sure that the “diseased” could not come back to strike again.
The sun was almost completely down. They hurried from the cemetery, hitching a ride into the city on a medical supply wagon. They sat in the back, on a flatbed filled with crates, forced to nearly sit atop each other.
But it wasn’t a bad position,
