Mack wouldn’t have hesitated, badge or no badge. Who did she want to be like, her old friend Mack, or her jaded boss, Frank?

Kira spun around, heading back toward the warehouses and the source of that scream.

M encheres let out a long moan when the silver knife slashed into his sternum. When the ghouls first started cutting him, he hadn’t made a noise, and they’d drawn their blades even more slowly across his flesh, taking his silence as a challenge. So he grunted, moaned, and even shouted. It helped; they grew more excited, their cuts went deeper.

Soon, he’d have to choose between using his energy to cloak the fact that he was a Master vampire, or using his power to protect himself from the worst of the pain. He’d lost too much blood to keep doing both. But if his attackers had a grain of sense, revealing the extent of what he had coiling inside him might make them run away. No, he couldn’t chance that. Pain it was, then.

Mencheres dropped the mental barrier he’d erected between himself and those relentless, seeking knives. Immediately, his body felt like it was on fire, the silver causing an intense, agonizing reaction as it sliced through him.

With his barrier to the pain down, a new problem arose. Every new cut or stab wound roused the swirling energy in him that craved retribution. Mencheres forced it back, concentrating on keeping his aura tamped down, fighting his urge to kill the ghouls even though his power demanded to be released.

“Stakes,” Mencheres said, calling him by the name the others had used. “Are you inexperienced, or is this merely the best you can do?”

The ghoul snarled at the insult, hacking a deep line in Mencheres’s thigh as a response. Another ghoul took hold of Mencheres’s waist-length black hair and sawed a hunk of it off at the shoulder.

Mencheres’s anger rose again, dark and deadly, seeking to merge with his power to be given form. He forced it back, knowing if he released his control for even an instant, all of the ghouls would die. And they hadn’t served their purpose yet.