One yanked Dane’s door open before the lock engaged. Dane barely had time to shout before he was pulled from the passenger seat with a force that suggested his weight was irrelevant. He hit the pavement outside with an impact that knocked the air from his lungs.

Sofia’s door was ripped open simultaneously. She went for the knife at her belt with the reflexes of someone who’d been in this exact situation before, but the figure who grabbed her was faster. Her wrist was caught, twisted, and she was hauled from the back seat.

Martha’s door remained closed, locked. But the figure outside her window didn’t seem concerned. It pressed its face close to the glass.

And Martha saw its eyes.

They did not belong to human eyes. There were something else. Reflective like an animal’s, catching light that shouldn’t exist. The face around those eyes was wrong in subtle ways—skin too pale, features too sharp, mouth that opened wider than human jaws allowed.

The figure smiled, revealing teeth that were like daggers.

Then it reached for Martha’s door handle.

A hand closed around its wrist.

The figure’s head snapped around, its smile vanishing. It looked at Jaenor, who had moved across the back seat with speed that left no visible transition between positions. He was simply there, his hand locked around the figure’s wrist, his dark eyes meeting its inhuman gaze with absolute calm.

"Remove your hand," Jaenor said quietly.

The figure’s response was to bare its teeth further and yank backward, trying to pull free.

Jaenor’s grip didn’t move.

The figure pulled harder. Tried to twist its wrist free.

Then, when that failed, it brought its other hand around with claws extended, aiming for Jaenor’s face through the partially open window.

Jaenor caught that hand too.

Then he pulled the figure through the window.

Not carefully but with the kind of force that didn’t care about the window frame or the structural integrity of the door or what happened to the body being pulled.

There was a sickening crunch as the figure’s shoulders compressed to fit through the space, its clothing tearing, its body bending in ways bodies shouldn’t.

Then Jaenor was out of the car.

The other three figures converged immediately. They moved with coordinated pack tactics, coming from different angles, their hands extended to show claws that gleamed in the brake lights.

Jaenor stood in the space between Martha’s car and the commercial van ahead of them.

They all looked like humans, but Jaenor could tell that they were not.

The first figure came at him from the left, low and fast. Jaenor’s hand moved almost casually, caught him by the throat mid-lunge, and drove him into the pavement. The impact created a crater. The figure twitched once and went still.

The second and third ones attacked simultaneously from opposite sides. Classic pincer movement, designed to force their target to choose which threat to address while the other struck home.

Jaenor addressed both.

His right hand shot out, fingers straight, and punched through the second figure’s chest with the sound of tearing fabric and breaking bone. His left hand caught the third figure’s wrist as his claws reached for his throat, twisted, and used the figure’s own momentum to swing it into the side of the van.

The van’s metal exterior dented inward from the impact. The figure slid down and didn’t get back up.

Jaenor pulled his right hand free. It was holding something that pulsed weakly in his grip—a heart, still beating, torn from the chest cavity with cutting precision.

He dropped it. The second figure collapsed backward.

The entire exchange had taken perhaps four seconds.

Around them, other figures in black were moving through the stopped traffic, pulling people from vehicles, dragging them toward the darkness beyond the highway barrier. Men mostly, Martha noted with a sick feeling. They were targeting men specifically.

Dane was on the ground nearby, with two figures standing over him. Sofia was struggling against a third; her training let her last longer than most but not long enough against something that moved like this.

Jaenor moved.

He crossed the distance to Dane in a single effortless motion that looked more like teleportation than running. His hand closed around the nearest figure’s head from behind and twisted. The snap was audible even over the ambient screaming. The body dropped.

The second figure spun toward him with inhuman speed, its mouth opening to reveal rows of teeth that definitely weren’t human anymore.

Jaenor’s fist went into that open mouth and out the back of the skull. He pulled his hand free, and the figure fell.

He turned toward where Sofia was fighting.

She’d managed to get her knife free and had buried it in her attacker’s side, but the wound wasn’t slowing it down. That man had her by the shoulders now, lifting her off her feet, his mouth opening wide as he leaned toward her throat.

Jaenor’s hand closed around the back of the figure’s neck.

He yanked the man away from Sofia with enough force that she tumbled to the ground. The figure twisted in his grip, trying to bring his claws to bear, trying to bite, trying anything to break free.

Jaenor held it at arm’s length and looked at it with his dark eyes.

"Vampire," he said. Recognition dawning on his face as he stared at the figure.

The figure’s eyes widened in its too-pale face. Some fragment of intelligence behind the predatory instinct registered what he was seeing and registered the power in the grip that held it completely immobile despite his supernatural strength.

Then Jaenor’s hand punched through its chest. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

He pulled the heart free and dropped both the organ and the body simultaneously.

Around them, the other vampires had stopped their hunting. They stood among the stopped vehicles, their captured victims forgotten, all of them staring at Jaenor with expressions that mixed predatory assessment with something that might have been fear.

There were perhaps twenty of them. More kept appearing from the darkness beyond the highway barrier, drawn by some signal Martha couldn’t perceive.