6

The rain either sobered everyone up on the walk to their cars or inspired cautious driving. After the private clubs closed at two their parking lots cleared without incident. Garreth checked the Co-op, Gfeller Lumber, and other businesses along 282 on the east side of town, then made a sweep through the city park up by the river and around the sale barn and rodeo grounds, disturbing half a dozen parked couples.

The rain continued unabated but radio traffic faded to near zero. For five and ten minutes at a stretch, only the soft hiss of static came over the air. Garreth yawned. Now came the hard part of the shift . . . staying awake.

He turned around to head back south on 282.

Then in the distance, brakes and tires screeched.

Garreth held his breath, straining to hear through the drum of rain on the car. The sound stretched out for what seemed infinity before ending abruptly in a scream of crumpling metal and an animal shriek of agony.

Swearing, he flipped the light bar switch and stamped on the accelerator. The sound came from the north. Over the bridge was out of city jurisdiction but something cried out in pain-edged grunts and who else was there to check it out?

"407 Baumen. Investigating possible 10-47 on 282 north of the river. Advise S.O."

Half a mile past the bridge his stomach jolted floorward. Dark, square shapes loomed through the rain on the road, shapes the human eye would never see until on top of them. Angus cattle. Those Lou Pfeifer had reported earlier? One sprawled on its side groaning, rumen and intestines spilling onto the asphalt.

Garreth swung onto the shoulder, radioing for a wrecker and ambulance. The car that hit the Angus lay upside down in the ditch, a little Honda, or what remained of it after ploughing into a ton of beef at fifty-five or more miles an hour. And north beyond it, a human form hung across a barb wire fence . . . feminine in outline . . . motionless.

The stench of rumen contents and blood washed around him with the sound of the cow's agonized grunts as Garreth scrambled down into the muddy ditch to peer into the car. He ignored the thirst they triggered in him. The ditch carried two or three inches of water and another girl remained in the Honda. She did not move either. He smelled no more than the normal blood smell about her, though. By lying flat and reaching in through the slot left of the front window he could reach her wrist. A faint pulse fluttered under his fingers.

She was alive at least.

He splashed up out of the ditch to the girl on the fence, and cursed softly. This one must have gone out through the windshield. Her face had turned to bloody hamburger. With only pulp remaining of her nose, she gasped for breath open­mouthed . . . in liquid, bubbling sounds and a blast of blood smell on each expiration. Cold bit into Garreth's spine. The girl's throat was filling with blood draining down from her nose.

"I need that ambulance now!" he shouted into his portable radio.

"It's on its way," Doris Dreiling, the Morning dispatcher, came back.

But how long before it arrived? Baumen had no regular ambulance service, just one owned by the hospital with a couple of personnel assigned to it on each shift, and when a call came those individuals could be in the middle of other duties just as pressing.

Garreth gnawed his lower lip. Maybe if he laid the girl on her side the blood would drain out of her mouth and let her breathe.

All the warnings against moving accident victims echoed loudly in his head as he gingerly lifted the girl loose from the barbs impaling her and eased her to the ground. On her side she did seem to breathe more easily. He covered her with his slicker against the rain.

A shrill cry mixed with the groans of the injured cow. "Help! Someone help!"

He whirled. The girl in the car had regained consciousness. He slid back down beside the vehicle and stretched out in the muddy water where the girl could see him. "Take it easy, miss. I'm a police officer."

"Get me out, please!"

Not even vampire strength could move this car, the way it had wedged into the ditch. What might moving it do to the girl inside anyway? He had no way to assess her injuries.

"There's a wrecker on the way, miss. We'll have you out in a few minutes."

"No! Please, I want out now! My legs and back—this thing!" She began thrashing, pounding at the steering wheel pinning her.

"Don't move! It's important that you lie still and wait for—"

But panic left her deaf. She continued fighting, and screaming. And up near the fence, the bubbling of the other girl's breath grew worse.

"Miss. Miss!" God, if he could only catch this girl's eyes. Where the hell was Duncan? He needed help. Grabbing the girl's arm, he shook it. "Goddamn it listen to me!"

Miraculously, her screams softened to whimpers. But she continued pushing at the steering wheel and would not look in his direction.

He lowered his voice soothingly. "What's your name, honey?"

It seemed an eternity before she answered. "Kim." The nails of her other hand dug at the wheel. "Please, please help me."

"Kim, listen to me. I know you're scared but you'll be all right if you just lie still and wait for the wrecker. Will you do that while I go help your friend?"

"Sheela?" The arm in Garreth's grip jerked. "Oh, no! Where is she?"

"She was thrown out of the car." He let go of the girl's arm. "That's why—"

"No!" Her fingers clamped around his wrist.

"Kim, don't worry. I'm not going far, just up the bank. Your friend—"

"Don't leave me!" Her fingers dug in with fear-driven strength.

The gasps by the fence became gurgles.

His heart lurched. Tearing loose from the girl in the car, Garreth scrambled backward and clawed his way up the slippery ditch to the fence. Lying on her side no longer helped.

He groped for his radio. "Baumen, where's . . . that . . . ambulance!" The girl needed immediate suction to clear her airway.

"En route. It should be there any time."

The girl's breath gurgled.

Garreth stared down at her in anguish. His own breath rasped through a throat closed tight. Below, her friend in the car continued to scream in hysteria. "Any time" would be too late. "Any time" now she would be dead, drowned in her own blood.

She choked.

Unless he did something.

He bit his lip, and grimaced at the prick of his unextended fangs. No. Rain washed down his face and splashed on the slicker covering the girl.

The injured cow grunted, each cry punctuated with a thrash of its legs.

Garreth pushed sodden hair out of his eyes. No, he could not do that. He would not touch human blood. Must not.

Desperately he peered toward town, but no emergency-vehicle lights showed through the rain.

The girl choked again.

His gut knotted. He should not touch her, and yet . . . if he did not, she would die.

"All right!" he shouted, though at whom Garreth had no idea. Fate, perhaps, or Lane's ghost. "All right. Just this once."

He knelt at the girl's head, lifted her chin, and crouched over her. His mouth fastened over hers, sucking. He would spit out the blood, would—

Then it filled his mouth.

Every cell of him screamed in joy. The hot, salty-metallic liquid flowed over his tongue with a richness animal blood never had. A richness his instincts had been craving since the moment he woke in the San Francisco morgue. Garreth could not turn away and spit. Something else snatched control of him. He swallowed.

The blood burned like fire in his throat, but a fire that cooled, not seared, soothing the other fire of thirst. And from it warmth spread outward through the rest of him, warmth and a crackling surge of energy. All awareness of the rain, the mortally injured cow, and the screaming girl in the car faded to the distant edge of perception. Garreth sucked and swallowed again, and again, ravenously, greedily relishing every drop.

Then, also dimly, he became aware of a siren wailing, rising above the cries of the trapped girl.

The chest of the girl at his knees heaved, drawing in a convulsive breath.

A hand touched Garreth's shoulder. "We'll take over now."

Fury boiled up in him. No, not yet! He clung snarling to his prey.

The hand pulled at him. "Mikaelian!"

The sound of his name ripped through the thing controlling him. Garreth suddenly saw what he was doing. In horror he flung away, jumping up and backing until the fence stopped his retreat. Barbs pricked him but he barely felt them. Animal! Is this the way you serve and protect, feeding on a helpless girl?

One of the ambulance attendants glanced up from examining the girl. "You've got her airway clear. Good work."

Good work? Garreth grimaced bitterly. They had no idea how he had done it, or that he had taken such pleasure in the act. A pleasure that part of him still felt, savoring the taste lingering in his mouth. That part of him also pointed out with some smugness that for the first time since he entered vampire life all hunger had been satisfied.

Red lights flashing on the highway toward town caught his eye. The wrecker. That reminded him of the car in the ditch.

The girl in it was still screaming. He hurriedly slid into the ditch and lay down beside the car again to reach in and catch her hand. "Kim, honey, it's all right. I'm back."

To his ears the reassurances he murmured at her sounded inane, but perhaps all that mattered was the sound of his voice and being touched by someone. The girl calmed. He made no attempt to leave again, just lay holding her hand, the two of them alone in the rain and cold and mud. Thank god the wrecker was coming. The water in the ditch felt deeper, and the girl's hand had gone icy.

Then abruptly the solitude vanished. The ditch swarmed with people: the wrecker crew, one attendant from the ambulance, a deputy sheriff from Lebeau, the town north, and a tall, beefy man Garreth recognized as Dell Gehrt. Someone put the cow out of its agony.

Garreth continued holding the girl's hand through the jolts and bumps of winching the car up on the shoulder and while it was cut apart to free her.

Finally the ambulance screamed away with its two patients. Garreth collected his slicker from where it had been pulled off the girl and slipped back into it to protect the seat of his car from his messy uniform, then leaving the deputy to finish up at the accident scene, he headed back to town.