He did not think about the fact that he was a man alone penetrating into a lair that was crawling with the creatures. That female — he had never encountered anything like that. It had been clean and perfumed. It had felt soft and smooth, if immensely strong. He had not seen the face, but he knew that there had been beauty, perhaps great beauty. Its scent still lingered: Arpège and womanhood. Its touch had inflamed him even as it had made his flesh crawl. He wanted to bathe, to get its smell off him . . . and he wanted never to bathe again.Was it the traveler, still alive after all?He knew that the safety of the book was everything, but he also had to kill this vampire. He had never wanted to kill a vampire so much, not in all the years he’d been at it. This thing could walk the streets without a problem. The idea of vampires that could function in the human world was horrifying.He came to a T — blank wall ahead, a passage to the right sloping up, another to the left sloping down.He stopped, shone his flashlight first in one direction and then the other.
