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The vampire kept his grip on me, but started to scream in a high pitiful voice. The cross flared bright and brighter until I had to turn my head and shield my eyes. It was like having magnesium burning around your neck. So bright, it only got this bright when something very bad was near. I didn’t think the something bad was the thing still hanging onto me. I was betting the cross was glowing for her benefit, maybe others’ but mostly hers. A lot of things in the room could kill me, but nothing else in the room was worth this much of a light show.

“Let him go to his destiny,” she said.

I felt the arm that was still pulling so desperately go limp. I felt him kneeling, felt it through the barrel of the gun still pressed against him.

Edward said, “Anita?” It was a question, but I didn’t have an answer yet.

I blinked past the light, trying to see. The vampire put a hand on either side of my shoulders. His eyes were squeezed shut against the light. His face stretched wide with pain. The white white light glistened on fangs as he moved in to feed.

“Stop, or die,” I said.

I’m not sure he even heard me. His hand caressed the edge of my cheek, and it was like being touched by fleshy sticks. His hands didn’t even feel real. I yelled, “I’ll kill him.”

“Do so. It’s his choice.” Her voice was so matter of fact, so uncaring, that it made me not want to do it.

His hand grabbed my hair, tried to twist my face to one side. His head was drawn back for a strike, but he couldn’t push past the glare of the cross. But he might work up to it. As weak as he was, he should have run screaming from this much holy light.

“Anita.” Edward’s voice and it wasn’t a question now, more a preview.

The vampire let out a scream that made me gasp. His head threw back, then down, and his face moved in a white blur towards me. The gun went off before I realized I’d squeezed the trigger, just a reflex. A second gun echoed so close on my shot that it sounded like a single gunshot. The vamp jerked, and his head exploded. Blood and thicker things sprayed half my face.

I knelt in a sudden deafening silence. There was no sound, nothing but a fine, distant ringing in my ears, like tinny bells. I turned in a sort of slow motion to see the vamp’s body sprawled on its side. I got to my feet and still couldn’t hear anything. Sometimes that’s shock. Sometimes it’s just gunshots going off next to your ears.

I scraped at the blood and thicker pieces on the left side of my face. Edward handed me a white handkerchief, probably something Ted would carry, but I took it. I started trying to scrape the stuff off of me.

The cross was still glowing like a captive star. I was already deaf. If I didn’t stop having to squint around the light, I was going to be blind as well. I looked around the room. Most of the vamps had fled up the stairs away from the cross’s glow, but what was left huddled around their goddess, shielding her, I think, from us. I blinked through the glare, and I think I saw fear on one or two faces. You don’t see that often on several hundred years worth of vampire. It might have been the cross, but I didn’t think that was it. I slipped the cross back into my shirt. The cross was still cool silver. It never burned unless vampire flesh touched it. Then it would flare into actual flame and burn the vamp and any human flesh that happened to be touching it at the same time. Usually, the vamp would jerk away before you got past second degree burns so I’d never gotten a scar from one of my own crosses.

The vampires stayed in front of their mistress, and the fear was still there on at least one face. The cross could keep them at bay, but that wasn’t what they feared. I looked down at the body. The entrance hole was just a small red thing, with black scorch marks around it, but the exit hole was nearly a foot in diameter. There was no head on the body, only the lower jaw and a thin rim of back brain left. The rest had been blown in a wide spray across the floor and across me.

Edward