Free Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires by Rachel Caine

HER .
    He mouthed something that she didn’t understand, and covered his mouth in a gesture of real distress. Then he nodded decisively and turned to Harold. He made a series of fluid hand signs, and Harold brightened up and nodded.
    It was right about then that Claire realized what was so weird about Theo’s ears. There was something sticking out of them, sideways. Like …
    Like
needles.
Really long needles. Knitting needles.
    It was so shocking that she took a step back, eyes wide, and finally recovered enough to point to Theo and then gesture at his ears, urgently.
    He smiled, but there was something dark in it. He took the paper back and wrote, MUST KEEP MY EARDRUMS PIERCED. OTHERWISE CANNOT RESIST THE CALL.
    The vampire version of earplugs, she realized … literally disabling his ears. But it must have hurt horribly, keeping those needles in place to block healing. She felt faint imagining it.
    Harold fell in docilely enough behind Theo, heading for the door; Claire, at Shane’s hand wave, darted on ahead to make sure Harold didn’t do anything crazy when he saw Naomi.
    But Naomi was gone, and for a second Claire was terrified that something had happened to her. Then she heard the rumble of the truck’s engine and saw that Naomi had started it up. She might not have driving experience, but she’d learned how to turn an ignition key, at least.
    It all looked safe.
    Claire put the gun at a ready position and stepped outside … just as a sudden gush of liquid rushed out of a rusty drainpipe at the corner of the porch, sending a thick wave across her path. At the same time, rain started falling faster, and harder, pounding like ball bearings on the fabric of her jacket and stinging her exposed skin.
    She had just enough time to bring the shotgun up as the draug rose up out of the pool of water in front of her, clawed hands outstretched.
    Still, even now, she couldn’t say what it actually looked like … because the human brain tried and tried to fit it into some sense, some pattern, but failed utterly. There were eyes, horrible gelatinous eyes that somehow weren’t eyes at all; there was a body thatwas not a body. What she registered as
clawed hands
was probably something else again, something worse, but it was the biggest warning her uncomprehending brain could screech at her, and she reacted instantly.
    She pulled the trigger.
    The impact slammed the stock of the shotgun against her shoulder so hard that she felt something crack—bone, probably—and a white snap of pain sizzled through her from neck to heels. At the same time, the roar of the shot hit her like a physical slap.
    But that was nothing compared to what the silver did to the draug.
    The pellets didn’t have time to spread far, but tore a neat circular hole four inches across straight through the draug’s—well,
head
, she supposed, was the nearest equivalent. There was a shriek of high-pitched agony, and then the draug collapsed in a wet
slap
as it lost all consistency and shape. Claire yelped as she leaped out of the way of the wave of its … corpse? If it was dead, which she couldn’t assume. But it wasn’t coming for her, and that was what was important.
    There were more of them, rising out of hidden pools in the muddy yard, out of the drain in the street, condensing out of the rain itself.
    Oh God
. There were so
many
.
    The sound of Shane firing as he pushed forward shocked her into pumping her shotgun, raising it, and firing again. It hurt, but she kept it up, racking and firing again and again. Shane was clearing a path to the truck, so she concentrated on keeping the draug away from the sides. She fell back behind Theo and Harold, keeping them as safe as she could.
    The draug didn’t really care about humans; too little gain for them, so it was Theo she really had to worry about. They’d kill toget to him, of course, but unless Harold got in the way he’d be all right … for now. She killed, or at least discorporated, at least