The cold was unbearable. A human would have died from it long ago. Only the vampire blood in my veins had kept me going. But even the powerful blood of the vampires had its limits. I'd pushed to the very end of mine. I had no strength left, not even the tiniest morsel.

I was finished.

I wept pitifully as I lay there, tears turning to ice on my cheeks. Snowflakes drifted onto my eyelashes. I tried lifting a hand to brush them away, but couldn't. Even that small gesture was beyond me. "What an awful way to die," I moaned. Another hundred yards and I would have been safe. To collapse and die this close to the end was a shame. Maybe if I'd rested more in the cave in the mountain, I'd have had the energy to continue. Or if I'd—

A sharp, yapping sound jolted me out of my reverie. I'd closed my eyes and been drifting off to sleep/death. At the sound, I cracked them open. I couldn't move my head, and the flakes of snow clouded my vision, but I was staring in the general direction of the forest and could see a vague shape making its way toward me, tumbling through the snow. Oh, great, I thought. As if things weren't bad enough — now something's going to come along and eat me before I'm dead! Could things get any worse? Judging by what had happened to me recently — yes!

I shut my eyes as the creature came nearer and hoped I'd be too numb to feel its teeth and claws as it devoured me. Fighting back was out of the question — a squirrel could have knocked me out, in my condition.

Hot breath clouded my face. A long tongue licked around my nose. I shivered. It licked again, this time my cheeks and ears. Then it licked the snowflakes from my eyelashes.

I opened my eyes and blinked. What was going on? Was it cleaning me up before it killed me? That seemed unlikely. Yet what other explanation could there be? As I adjusted my vision, the animal nudged back a bit and came into focus. My jaw dropped. My lips quivered. And in a pained, shaky voice, I mumbled incredulously, "Rudi?"