Free The President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth

he’d really hoped he’d killed them all.

Innsmouth, Massachusetts, 1928

    T he fires were mostly out, although they still smoldered along the wharf. Cade kept well clear of them as he searched for survivors in the ruined pilings sunk into the sand. Dawn was less than an hour away, but the tide would be in before then. He had to get to them before the water did.
    Above him, the men from the Treasury Department stomped in their asbestos-lined uniforms, carrying large tanks of fuel on their backs. Occasionally, he heard a shout, and then the squalling as something wet and fleshy burned beneath their torches.
    Cade hoped they’d be careful enough to avoid doing the same to him.
    But it wasn’t likely that any of the T-men would come down here. The three federal agents who’d tried to search the underside of the wharf had been found in pieces when the tide receded. This was why Cade was on this mission: he was much more comfortable in the dark.
    Still, it wasn’t as easy as he expected; his sensitivity to heat was no asset. The things he looked for were cold-blooded, and the nearby fires were only confusing. His enhanced sense of smell was clotted with stagnant water, the town’s sewage and rotting fish.
    He almost walked past the nest.
    Cade’s boot squished into something with a different texture than all the other dead things down here. Something springing with life, enough to burst and spew its contents all over.
    He looked down. A clutch of fish eggs, each the size of a man’s fist. The one he smashed held one of the creatures in its tadpole stage; its tail thrashed uselessly as it tried to breathe with unformed gills.
    There should be more, Cade thought. But there were only a half dozen or so, caught in their own slime.
    He looked up.
    In the shade of what was left of a plank, a huge sac of the eggs clung to the top of a piling, quivering like jelly as the things inside squirmed.
    Cade opened his mouth to summon one of the T-men.
    Then something whipped from around the piling and attacked.
    It moved almost as fast as Cade at his top speed, and he had been fighting and killing these things all night. It managed to get him down in the salty muck and slash at his face with its claws and long teeth.
    Cade fended it off and clouted it in the skull, hard. The skull dented, but the thing kept snapping with its piranha-like jaws. Its eyes bugged out, yellow and mad. Although it wore the dress of one of the townspeople, there was nothing human left in it. Its transformation was complete. It had probably been down here for months. That’s why they missed it when they firebombed the temple, and the old houses.
    Cade kicked the thing away, sending it flying. It bounced off one of the big logs like it was rubber and scrambled to attack again. Cade girded himself to deliver the killing blow.
    A tommy gun roared above him, and the thing went down, lead tearing through its gelatinous skin. It deflated more than bled, collapsing slowly to the dirty beach.
    Cade looked up. The man in charge of this assignment looked back through one of the holes in the wharf. He was already more serious than his age would have indicated—barely into his twenties. Cade saw gray hair at his temple. A mission like this one would only add to it.
    “Are you all right?” the T-man asked.
    “Fine,” Cade said.
    “You seemed to be having some trouble.”
    Cade pointed to the spot where the egg sac still held. “Mothers tend to be vicious when guarding their young.”
    The T-man pursed his lips in distaste and called to some nearby men. “Let’s get those flamethrowers over here. Nothing gets back into the sea. Nothing!”
    He looked back at Cade. “Anything else down there?”
    Cade shook his head. “I believe that’s the last of them. For this town, anyway. Someone will need to track down the remaining members of the Marsh family.”
    For a split second, the young treasury agent’s stone-faced veneer cracked, and Cade could see the fear and