I Travel by Night by Robert R. McCammon

back and forth. Eyes that sparked red in the light of the flickering tapers were aimed quickly in the direction of Lawson and his charge, and just as quickly averted.
    The young blonde vampire leaned forward to sniff Ann’s hair. Ann cringed away with a start and brought her six up into firing position. The girl laughed and snatched the dark green jockey’s cap from Ann’s head. Putting it on her own head, the less-than-human creature darted away to join the dancers, the speed of her departure blowing the tapers dead in her candleabra.
    “I neglected to tell you,” said Lawson, “how fast they… we… are. Take a good long look. You may never see such a sight again.” If you live after seeing this one, he thought grimly.
    The music urged the vampire dancers to further exertions. As they spun around the chamber, in which mounted upon the walls were rotten gray tapestries that had become part of the decor of swamp decay and twisted vines that had burst their way through from the outside, they became almost indistinguishable from each other, their blood-fed bodies merging one with another in the blurring of their motion.
    Lawson smoked his cigar and watched the dancers. He was aware that at the center of the chamber, and at the center of the ring of bodies, was a single chair. And in that chair was roped the body of a woman, dressed in dirty clothes, with a black hood over her head. The head was slumped forward, the body slack.
    “Is that…Eva?” Ann whispered. “ Dead ?”
    “I don’t know,” Lawson answered, though he expected the worst. The Dark Society was not going to allow any of them to walk out of here.
    The blonde female vampire who wore Ann’s cap suddenly came out of the ring, grinning and whirling around and around like a human top. She got up close to Ann and stopped her motion, and she smelled Ann’s hair and neck and in the next instant her body shivered with desire and her mouth opened wide. Her lower jaw unhinged, the fangs slid out and her eyes of cornflower blue flamed with bloodneed as she gripped the back of Ann’s neck and thrust her mouth toward the woman’s throat.
    Before Ann could react, Lawson shot the creature in the side of her head. The noise of the shot made the music abruptly skreech to a halt and the ring of dancers froze in their steps. As the blonde vampire staggered back, her mouth open in an O of shock and her body already beginning to break apart and burn from the inside out, Lawson calmly plucked the jockey’s cap from the thing’s head. He gave it to Ann, and said, “Ready your six, but don’t move.”
    The vampire’s long blonde hair caught fire and sizzled away in a matter of seconds. Her face rippled and turned black as it burned. She clutched at her throat as if recalling the moment of her turning, and as she spun around and around in a mad and agonized parody of the dance her eyes sank inward and burst into black pools that bubbled and smoked before they became dried craters, her burned facial features imploded, and her head began to wither like a grape left out in the blazing sun. From the ruin of the mouth and the collapsing throat came a piercing scream of rage. Lawson had heard such a scream before, but he knew this sight and this sound must be nearly knocking Ann to her knees. With the passage of four more seconds, an empty green gown stained dark with old blood fell upon a pile of ashes and a pair of ashy brown shoes.
    Silence ruled.
    It was broken by someone clapping.
    “Impressive!” said a man from amid the ring. “Im… pressive !” He continued clapping as he came forward, easily, without fear, from the throng. “I had heard you had a weapon that…shall we say…gave you an advantage, but this …ah, quite a show!”
    “Thank you,” Lawson replied. He kept his drawn Colt, the one with the grip of yellow bone, ready at his side. “Would you like to see another example of it?”
    “No need! Let’s just call it a nice magic trick, eh?” He