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slowly as I feast upon you.”
    “And you thought me quoting
The Mummy
was bad?” murmured Dove.
    I wished we could call Ax, but cell phone service was nonexistent out here, and the walkie-talkies were over by Fang Boy. Shit. “Get Ax,” I told Dove.
    “The hell,” she said. “We have to find something that will cut through an undead neck.”
    “I’m not saying he’s
not
a vampire,” I said. Sweat dripped down my temple, but the gun, which I had re-trained on No Knees, didn’t waver. He was down, yes, but definitely not out. In fact, he was looking a little too perky for someone with shredded patellas. “Is decapitation really the way to go here?”
    “The only way to kill a vampire is to take his head off or expose him to intense light. It says so in
Vampires Are Real!
”
    “Oh, my God. That Theodora Monroe book? Really? That’s like taking advice from the Winchester brothers.”
    “And you know exactly what about supernatural creatures?”
    “Silence!” bellowed the vampire as he wobbled to his feet. His pants were torn and bloody, but his knees were nearly knitted back together. He eyed us with the kind of malevolence I usually witnessed only when it came time for me to approve departmental budgets. “You are both imbeciles. And you talk too much.”
    “Holy shit!” screamed Dove. “Holy fucking shit!”
    I shot at him again, but he swooped toward us, a blur of furious motion. I shoved Dove to the side and started shooting randomly. Yeah. That worked out well.
    Then
I
was shoved to the side, and I flew backward, landing next to an outraged Dove. We both watched, openmouthed, as a huge black wolf leapt into the air, howling in triumph.
    We looked at each other, and then we both scrambled forward. We stayed on our knees, crouching at the edge of my flimsy cot. The vampire (yes, I said “vampire,” all right?) was moving fast, very fast. Hell, I couldn’t really pinpoint his location, but it was obvious the wolf could. He howled, and then leapt—seemingly at random—landing on the bastard’s chest. The fanged Indiana Jones squirmed on the ground, unable to dislodge the big black-furred brute.
    The fight was short and violent, ending when the wolf clamped its jaws onto the vampire’s neck and tore out his throat.
    “Oh, crap,” whispered Dove.
    We huddled closer together, creating fearful solidarity against our so-called rescuer. Was he merely dealing with the biggest threat in the room before he turned his attention to the shivering girly girls? My philosophy was that the glass was always half foe. I sat up and leveled my gun at the wolf.
    Dove clutched the Tikka T3 rifle. She wouldn’t shoot it, even if she’d taken me up on my invitation for lessons. She had a thing about guns—as in, she hated them. But if push came to shove, she could use the rifle to whack the shit out of the wolf. For some reason she had no problem with bludgeoning.
    Both of us were on high alert. I couldn’t take my gaze off the dead vampire, and I noticed that Dove was also riveted to the spectacle. Black blood pooled in the sand around the ravaged neck.
    It was a gruesome scene that seemed right out of a horror movie. Except horror movies didn’t have smell-o-vision, and dead vampires smelled like feces wrapped in burnt cheese. As in, they smelled like deep-fried death. You know, like corn dogs at the state fair. A vampire showing up in my tent was fantastical enough—not to mention a supersized undead-killing wolf. (Weren’t vampires supposed to take wolf form, or something? I was rusty on preternatural mythology.) But oh, no, my night was about to get weirder. Our furry pal padded to a nearby space and morphed into a man.
    It wasn’t like a transformation you might see on a late-night werewolf flick, with snorting and snarling and breaking and sprouting. It was sorta . . . magical, I suppose. His fur rippled into skin, his limbs stretched and plumped into human arms and legs. And long, silky black hair