and so awakened...

Normally I'm a light sleeper, especially if there are others anywhere near me, but I'd had a long day. I'd also had a lot of Thesulac blood on my bare skin. I think I'd heard somewhere that the blood has a sedative and hypnotic effect but I didn't know it affected my kind. The humans hadn't seemed very sleepy.

Anyway, I was far under, way down deep in the warm dark part of sleep - too warm. Then I realised I was out on the Zranth desert. There was a moment when I was thinking that they couldn't do this to me. They could, though, and they obviously had.

Then I felt something slide, against me - a Slilken! Those carnivores haunt the Western Desert. They look like a moving sheet of sand, blown along the surface by the wind. When they find sleeping prey they cover it like a blanket and - I felt the teeth closing on my shoulder...

I jolted out of sleep, fighting a heavy leather coat that was pinning me down. It slowed me for a vital second and by the time my knife-hand was clear I'd realised that Faith was shaking me by the shoulder. The moment I heard her tone I knew we were in trouble . I could hear something coming, too.

She said something about Avon and then asked if I could hold a cross without being burned. She was holding out one of those fancy sword-hilt human things - I guessed that was what she meant. I took it to show her, but dropped it when I drew my Diran knife. I know what I'd rather take against an enemy.

There was a moment when she knocked the knife away - and there was no time to show her it was silvered against weres, and wood-inlayed to stake vampires. I thought I'd felt another knife in the pocket of the coat, but it was a wooden stake, not sharp enough to do much damage unless there was weight behind it.

I put the stake down beside me, ducked down for my knife, and moved the refridgeration unit out of harms way almost in one long movement. Whatever it was that was coming through that door, it wasn't having my bounty! I'd lived like a kid for too long already.

Then I was waiting, with my good Diran knife in my left hand and the stake and cross in my clumsier right. I was getting very tired of dangerous demons who aren't me. Faith had gone completely quiet - and I could hear something coming ....

The Vamp

I do a good cower.

It's partly the size thing, but it helped that I'd been leaning off the couch to push the fridge-unit out of sight. I just slid to the floor and let the coat come down half-over me.

The kid act won't always fool a vamp. This one seemed to have fallen for it, though. I guess he couldn't smell that I wasn't what I seemed, because of the Thesaluc blood on my clothes. Unless he was running a bluff, too.

I still hadn't sorted out how to handle the three weapons. I was keeping my knife in my strongest hand. The blunt wooden stake would need more weight than I'd got, to do any damage - but it was starting to dawn on me that
he was a big, heavy vampire. If I could chop him into falling onto it the stake might work.

I couldn't work out what I was supposed to do with the cross. I wished Faith had handed me a crossbow.

I started to move away from the vamp, staying sitting down on the floor, coat over hands, pushing myself away with my feet and whimpering. It took me out to one side, away from him, until I started to edge around him.

He probably thought I'd try to escape, if I reached the door - but my bounty was behind that couch and I wasn't leaving without it. I thought that if I could get the vamp from behind when the Slayer jumped him from the front there was a good chance of dusting him.