Stan opened his eyes and he found himself looking directly at a red-haired woman standing less than a meter in front of him.
Her red eyes had gone wide. Her expression was, for one perfect second, one of complete and total shock.
The two of them stared at each other across the tiny gap that separated them.
She had tracked him here. He had, without knowing it, willed himself back out at the exact coordinates where she had been standing.
Stan, bleeding from a hole in his abdomen and a torn chest and a scraped-off face, looked up at the beautiful vampire, because that was clearly what she was, the crimson eyes, the aura, everything about her made it unmistakable, and produced the only sound his oxygen-starved lungs could produce.
A wet, ragged exhale.
The vampire's expression cycled through three emotions in rapid succession: shock, disbelief, and, settling last, a kind of intense, focused, absolutely predatory fascination.
