Free Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror by Charlaine Harris, Tim Lebbon, David Wellington, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dan Chaon, Brian Keene, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Kelley Armstrong, Michael Koryta, Scott Smith, Joe McKinney, Laird Barron, Rio Youers, Dana Cameron, Leigh Perry, Gary A. Braunbeck, Lynda Barry, John Langan, Seanan McGuire, Robert Shearman, Lucy A. Snyder

the electric pressure of it pushing her down, making her skin feel too tight and her hair tingle at the edges.
    Please go around the back, baby girl , she thought, and turned the knob.
    T he blue-and-red flashing lights of the police cars parked outside filled the room even through the rain. Spenser choked on his beer before twisting to watch Mary talk to the police. The rain was pounding down; he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But he saw her go pale, until the only color in her face came from those dancing lights. He saw her clutch her chest, eyes wide and childlike and filled with a painful confusion.
    He saw her sink to her knees on the floor and start to sob as lightning split the sky in two and the world was reduced to the sound of thunder.
    That was when he realized that something was truly wrong, and rose from his chair to find out what that little brat had done now.
    I t had been the rain. It had fallen so hard and so suddenly that the ground hadn’t been prepared to absorb it all. There hadn’t been enough to shift the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, but there had been enough to wash her blood down the hillside in a crimson ribbon, one that held together despite all odds, until it swirled intothe gutter near a stopped police car. Even then, it might have been missed, had the junior of the two policemen not been returning to the vehicle after writing a speeding ticket for a woman who just wanted to get home, out of the storm.
    He had stopped when he saw the blood, looking at it speculatively. Odds were that it belonged to some animal, a cat-killed bird or a rabbit with its leg in a snare. But the storm had been a vicious one, and odds weren’t enough to justify potentially leaving someone out there when they were hurt and in need of assistance. He had knocked on the police car window. He had shown his partner the blood. Together, the two of them had gone up the hillside, flashlights in hand, hoping that they wouldn’t find anything worth getting wet over.
    They had found a little girl.
    The world transforms when a child dies. As the officers attempted to comfort Lou’s sobbing mother, the coroners were removing her body from the hillside, where the rain had already washed away any forensic evidence—not that they were really thinking of this as a murder. The story was too easy to see, written in broken bone and shattered glass. A terrible accident, a terrible fall, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, if they ran down the wrong hillside in the rain. She was very small. She would never get any bigger.
    As Spenser demanded proof that the little girl they had found was his stepdaughter, Lou was being bundled into the back of an ambulance, which drove through town with its flashers off, obeying all the traffic laws. There was no need to use the siren. There was nothing there in need of saving.
    As the officers handcuffed Spenser for taking a swing at them, Lou was being transferred into the freezer at the county morgue. She would be shown to her mother later, after one of the medical examiners had removed the larger pieces of glass from her chest. Just enough so that thesheet would lie flat, and Mary wouldn’t have to confront the story told by those planes and angles, that impossible geometry of loss.
    As Mary and Spenser were being loaded into separate police cars for the ride across town—one as grieving mother, the other as drunken assailant—Lou was alone.
    Lou opened her eyes, and they were filled with firefly lightning.
    Somewhere, thunder rolled.
    “W hat do you mean, you lost the body?” The officer tried to keep his voice low as he spoke with the medical examiner. He couldn’t keep himself from glancing back to where Mary sat on a hard plastic chair, folded nearly double in her grief. Spenser was elsewhere, being given a stern warning. They weren’t going to book the man. Not when his stepdaughter had just died; not when his wife needed him so badly.
    And besides, there were other