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"I’ll send in Sean to clean up the blood on the chair and rugs," the first giant said "Let’s go"

The two iant’s shoulder as they walked through the house I didn’t hear anyone elsearound in this part of the mansion besides them, so I cracked my eyes open But since all I could really see was the floor sliding by andsain

Finally, the giants stepped out onto a balcony I couldn’t tell exactly where ere in the ot the impression it was the far side of the house, the one that faced the olf course The air was cooler here, and I could smell the whiff of decay that ith the still water and rotting logs The sun had set while I’d been inside the library, and darkness had already covered the land

"Grab her feet and we’ll heave her out as far as we can," one of the giants said "You kno Dekes hates it when the gators crawl up on the lawn and start chewing on their legs"

The giant who’d been carryingeven roan Then he grabbed my shoulders while the other ether, they lifted me up and shuffled forward

"Onetwothree!"

They swung o and flinging h as their enorth would let them I felt my body rise up in an arc and quickly pluht before I hit the water was that I’d done this very saht

Ah, irony Going to be the death of me one day

Maybe even tonight

The usting, but I didn’t try to kick ht still be out on the balcony, watching toone hand, then the other, free of the garbage bag and unwinding the whole thing froet away from the vampire only to drown in the swa, I counted off the seconds in my head Tentwentythirtyforty-fiveAt the s, et s in the semidarkness

There wasn’t any current in thehad carried ht from the balcony that had arced out onto the landscape below I reh to keep one," the voice of one of the giants floated down to h Let’s go back inside"

A few seconds later, a door slaht I was dead, just like their boss did Good Now all that was left was to make sure the marsh and blood loss didn’t finish the job that the vampire had started

I stayed in the water, too tired and exhausted fro h, I spotted a ridge of land a little higher than the bog that surrounded s felt as nuhts strapped to ic on myself, but because there just wasn’t that much blood left in theed to heave my chest up out of the water

I lay there,so small My neck and shoulders pulsed with pain with every breath that I took, ribbons of red-hot agony winding tighter and tighter aroundthe hurt away, I e as I was in pain, I was still alive and not sliding into the cold, cold oblivion that was the alternative

I put one hand in front of the other, weakly kicking ers into the slipperyain Still panting, I rolled over onto my back and forced myself to sit up The ht streah the thick canopy of twisted trees that surroundedinit took for me to crawl over to the closest tree, wrap h bark, and pullto keep the world fro starbursts to a minimum Then I pushed away fro

Well, I don’t know if I’d really call it walking I stu worse than a drunken frat boy, with no idea of where I here I was going, and not really caring about either one at the ht now - stopping the rest ofout of s, including one in ht shoulder that went all the way down to es of the bone scraping against each other and threatening to break through the tight skin that was stretched over their noard alignht arm so I couldn’t set the bone, not by myself, but the bite marks needed to be covered up at the very least so that as left of my blood would have a chance to clot It was just dumb, blind luck that the vampire hadn’t hitfrenzy Otherwise, I would have bled out back in the library

I stooped down, dug ers into the mud at my feet, and plastered some of that on my wounds, but more of it seemed to slide off than actually stick to rass and ed on I don’t kno long I stu from one slippery step to the next, but finally, I ca that could help ht into the web, not even realizing it was there until I felt it stick toif I’d stumbled into some sort of trap, perhaps an elemental trip wire or an elaborate snare that a hunter hadline It tookto my bloody chest and realize what they were