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kicking me.
    The pain was immediate, intense, and unrelenting. I threw my arms over my face instinctively, taking the beating on my forearms, legs, and back.
    I think I was sure, during the first few blows, that they’d stop and hiss warnings and curses at me and leave. But I remember the exact moment I realized that they intended to kill me.
    I could lie there passively and take a beating, but I would not lie there and be killed.
    The next time a leg came close, I lunged and grabbed it and held on for my life. I was trying to bite, trying to at least mark one of them. I wasn’t even sure whose leg I had.
    Then, from behind me, I heard a growl. Oh, no, they’ve brought a dog, I thought. The growl was definitely hostile. If I’d had any leeway with my emotions, the hair would have stood up on my scalp.
    I took one more kick to the spine, and then the beating stopped.
    The last kick had done something dreadful to me. I could hear my own stertorous breathing and a strange bubbling sound that seemed to be coming from my own lungs.
    “What the hell is that?” Mack Rattray asked, and he sounded absolutely terrified.
    I heard the growl again, closer, right behind me. And from another direction, I heard a sort of snarl. Denise began wailing, Mack was cursing. Denise yanked her leg from my grasp, which had grown very weak. My arms flopped to the ground. They seemed to be beyond my control. Though my vision was cloudy, I could see that my right arm was broken. My face felt wet. I was scared to continue evaluating my injuries.
    Mack began screaming, and then Denise, and there seemed to be all kinds of activity going on around me, but I couldn’t move. My only view was my broken arm and my battered knees and the darkness under my car.
    Some time later there was silence. Behind me, the dog whined. A cold nose poked my ear, and a warm tongue licked it. I tried to raise my hand to pet the dog that had undoubtedly saved my life, but I couldn’t. I could hear myself sigh. It seemed to come from a long way away.
    Facing the fact, I said, “I’m dying.” It began to seem more and more real to me. The toads and crickets that had been making the most of the night had fallen silent at all the activity and noise in the parking lot, so my little voice came out clearly and fell into the darkness. Oddly enough, soon after that I heard two voices.
    Then a pair of knees covered in bloody blue jeans came into my view. The vampire Bill leaned over so I could look into his face. There was blood smeared on his mouth, and his fangs were out, glistening white against his lower lip. I tried to smile at him, but my face wasn’t working right.
    “I’m going to pick you up,” Bill said. He sounded calm.
    “I’ll die if you do,” I whispered.
    He looked me over carefully. “Not just yet,” he said, after this evaluation. Oddly enough, this made me feel better; no telling how many injuries he’d seen in his lifetime, I figured.
    “This will hurt,” he warned me.
    It was hard to imagine anything that wouldn’t.
    His arms slid under me before I had time to get afraid. I screamed, but it was a weak effort.
    “Quick,” said a voice urgently.
    “We’re going back in the woods out of sight,” Bill said, cradling my body to him as if it weighed nothing.
    Was he going to bury me back there, out of sight? After he’d just rescued me from the Rats? I almost didn’t care.
    It was only a small relief when he laid me down on a carpet of pine needles in the darkness of the woods. In the distance, I could see the glow of the light in the parking lot. I felt my hair trickling blood, and I felt the pain of my broken arm and the agony of deep bruises, but what was most frightening was what I didn’t feel.
    I didn’t feel my legs.
    My abdomen felt full, heavy. The phrase “internal bleeding” lodged in my thoughts, such as they were.
    “You will die unless you do as I say,” Bill told me.
    “Sorry, don’t want to be a vampire,” I said, and my