THE FORCE OF THE EXPLOSION BLOWS OUT EVERY window and covers me with shards of glass.
I lay on the ground a minute, taking mental and physical inventory. My skin burns, my ears ring. Don 't see any blood. I'm lying on my side, twenty feet from the building. I try to roll on my back, straighten out. My left arm aches and I realize it's twisted above the elbow in an unnatural angle. Probably broken, though no bone protrudes.
I sit up.
My back protests, but follows my mental command to move. That left arm is what's really protesting. I pass fingers gingerly up the arm until I find the point at which bone pushes against the skin. Grasping the arm with my right hand, I give it a sharp tug.
Pain causes my vision to go black. There's a popping sound and the bone shifts into place. It's all I need to do. Accelerated vampire healing will take care of the rest.
Except for the pain.
It hurts like a son of a bitch.
The ringing in my ears subsides to a dull roar, and I shake my head to clear it.
At first, I think what I hear next is a result of the blast. Some shift in decibel or tone that sounds less like percussion -induced noise and more like-
Screaming.
Screaming?
I'm on my feet and racing back toward the flames.
It's not my imagination. It's in my head.
In my head.
Vampires. Inside. Trapped.
The building is fully engulfed. Flames shoot out of the windows. Smoke and heat don't scare me. Flames do. Burning is one of the ways a vampire can be killed.
I race to the front. Maybe I can get in through the door. It hangs open on an explosion -warped frame. No flames here, not yet. But there's no one here, either. Not in the reception area, not in the office area in back.
I send out a mental probe. Where are you?
An answer comes back from a chorus of frantic voices. The basement. We're in the basement.
Basement?
The corridor at the end of where I'm standing leads only to the factory floor. I know. I traveled it last night.
I don't know where that is. Tell me.
An anguished cry, from a female voice: We don't know. We were drugged when we were brought here. Please. Help us.
Frustration and panic claw at my heart. I can't go back down those stairs into the factory. The flames are too intense. I feel the heat through the soles of my shoes.
Maybe there's another way.
Outside, I race around the building, circling, looking for anything that might be another entrance. I tell the female vamp to keep talking, hoping her voice can guide me.
She babbles, crying, begging me to find her.
I can't.
There is no other way in that I can find.
Nothing. I find nothing.
The vamp's voice becomes shrill with fear.
I beat my fists against the loading dock. Why can't you free yourselves? Exasperation fuels my feeling of helplessness and it comes out in an angry wail.
We can't. The collars.
There is such despair in her reply, it floods me with remorse and determination. I start again. At the front, circling, searching, running my fingers along the base of the bays in the loading dock, ignoring the white-hot metal that singes my fingers.
Until I find it.
A seam in the metal of the middle bay.
There is no latch, no hinge, no keyhole. I pound at the metal with my fist.
Yes! A chorus of frenzied voices. We hear you!
I beat at the metal until it caves. Then I tear a great rip in the metal and bend it back. It 's dark inside and smoke pours out like a genie released from a bottle. When I step inside, and my eyes have adjusted to the smoke and light, I follow the screaming voices filling my head.
Follow them to a scene straight from hell.