Alain found the lamb bleating next to its dead mother. A casual inspection would have looked like a wolf got to it, but he could smell Vinnie and Reese on it. The carcass was still lukewarm in the cool night air, meaning they'd fed recently. Alain scanned the treeline ahead of him, but neither saw nor heard any sign of the two.

He'd only been a few minutes behind them at the outset, but they'd all been trained in evasion. Even knowing the same tricks, Alain had lost their scent a couple of times over the past four days, expanding their lead to most of a night or more, then gradually closing it again.

Alain looked back at the lamb. He needed to feed or he was going to start feeling it soon. As guilty as he felt about feeding on such a young creature, probably not even weaned from its mother's milk, it was going to die anyway without its mother. And without its blood, he might lose Vinnie and Reese.

The lamb struggled as he picked it up. Alain had mostly given up on prayer, figuring God had forsaken him, but he couldn't shake his grandmother's Catholic upbringing completely. "Forgive me," he prayed silently before quelling the bleating with a bite to the throat.

His tongue tingled. A sense of well-being washed over him, so strong, so powerful, it was like that tin cup of warm blood on the sixth night of the "practical demonstration" the Army had so kindly provided.

He and his unit had fed on sheep before. As the Army said, they were inferior to pigs, but superior to carnivores. Experience bore that out. But pigs paled in comparison to this. This was every bit as good as human blood. He resisted the urge to drink all its blood in one go, taking just enough to quell the rumblings in his stomach and quiet his cravings, then tried to drain some of its blood into his canteen, adding a few drops from a second canteen containing an anticoagulant solution. Still, he felt more satiated and stronger from those few mouthfuls of lamb's blood than he'd ever felt after gorging on a pig.

The irony wasn't lost on Alain. The substitute for the blood of man was the blood of the lamb. There was probably no scientific basis for why that would be, but the symbolic significance couldn't be denied.

He wondered why vampire lore hadn't mentioned this fact. Then he realized how ridiculous that sounded. Where was the big book of vampire lore? At some vampire university in Transylvania? He barely knew enough about his own condition to write a "Welcome to Vampirism" pamphlet, and half of what he knew he learned from the Army. He needed to stop being shocked at how little he knew.

Maybe most vampires knew about lamb's blood, but they never told the Army. It wouldn't be the first time the Army didn't know something. Maybe there were huge communities of vampires in Australia and New Zealand, living solely off lamb's blood and leaving their human neighbors alone. Not every vampire had to be some bedraggled French dandy or creepy Transylvanian count. Maybe half the guys on the night shift at the meat packing plants in Chicago were vampires, bringing home lamb's blood as a fringe benefit.

Alain snapped himself out of his reverie and picked up Reese's scent again, taking off after it. He hoped they'd either get hungry enough to eat a lamb or run into some Nazi soldiers soon, because if they didn't, civilians could end up in danger.

---

Alain reached the barnyard gate and prayed that Vinnie and Reese were stopping here to feed on the farm animals, not the farmer. He looked around for something he could use as a weapon and saw a pitchfork leaned up against the fence. He thought about breaking the handle to use as a stake when a woman's scream came from the barn. He shrugged off his pack, grabbed the pitchfork, and went running toward the barn.

Alain burst through the closed barn doors, seeing Vinnie at the far end of the barn, standing over a girl in her late teens or early twenties. She didn't appear to have been bitten, just frightened. The scream was bait.

Instinctively, Alain dropped to the right, throwing himself at Reese's legs as Reese swung a stake at the spot Alain's chest had previously occupied. Reese jumped to avoid Alain and danced to regain his footing as Alain rolled back onto his feet. Reese and Alain briefly circled each other, Alain pulling back to get more distance between him and Reese, but allowing Reese to position him so Vinnie was at his back.

Turning, Alain got himself perpendicular to the plane created by Vinnie and Reese so he had one on each side. Ten feet behind Reese, in the corner of the barn lay a slumped human body, an older man, probably the girl's father. Alain could smell the fresh blood. Reese had just fed.

Alain could imagine the conversation where Reese talked Vinnie into waiting to feed on the girl while he fed on the old man. They could lure Alain in and Reese would be freshly fed, while Alain would probably be aching and distracted, his reaction times slow, making him easy prey for Reese.

Alain threw the pitchfork like a spear. The imagined conversation had been right about the slow reaction times. The pitchfork took Vinnie in the neck and drove him back toward the barn wall, embedding its tines in the wood. If Vinnie had been freshly fed, he'd have dodged it easily.

Alain turned back to face Reese, who caught him around the waist with a low tackle, his shoulder driving into Alain's stomach and lifting him off his feet. He pushed Alain backward into a low wall of hay bales that collapsed on the two of them.

Reese rose first, shrugging off the bales on top of him. Standing over Alain, Reese grabbed a bale and started bashing him with it. With his arms up to guard against the thudding blows of the bale, Alain noticed that Reese was straddling his left leg. Alain lifted his legs, brought them together and threw his weight into a sideways roll, bringing Reese down. Alain untangled his legs from Reese's and scrambled to a standing position.

Vinnie was struggling to pull the pitchfork out of the barn wall and his neck. Meanwhile, the girl he'd had on the floor was now up and holding an oil lamp. Actually, Alain realized, she wasn't so much holding it as swinging it and lofting it right towards him. "Die, you son of a bitch," she yelled in French.

It was Reese's vampire speed that saved Alain. He popped up, facing Alain, and took the lamp between the shoulder blades. The oil splashed out on his clothes and began to burn. Alain hadn't seen anyone of any sex remove their clothes that fast. Reese had his shirt and pants off in a jiffy, dropping them to the floor and stomping them out. And that jiffy was all the time Alain needed to find a weapon.

With the last stamp on his clothes, Reese looked up, trying to find Alain. Alain, behind him, dropped a loop of bailing wire around his neck and tightened the makeshift garrotte with all the strength being a vampire gave him. Reese panicked as it bit into the flesh of his neck and he scrabbled at the wire with his fingers, but Alain put a knee in his back and pulled harder. The wire cut most of the way through Reese's neck, wrapping around a bone. With a yank, Alain cracked the bone and pulled the wire through, severing the spinal cord. Reese's head fell to the floor. His body stood there and jerked for a moment before toppling down beside it.

In the tunnell vision of his attack on Reese, Alain hadn't noticed that Reese's clothing was merely one of many things splashed by flaming oil; the other things being dry hay bales. The bales were becoming engulfed.

Alain looked around for the girl. During the melee, she'd snuck behind Alain to the old man and was desperately trying to drag him to the door. Alain ran over to her and took the old man's body from her, slinging it over one shoulder. The girl launched herself at him, screaming and beating him with her fists. Alain used his free hand to grab her arm and drag her out of the barn.

The girl resisted, trying to pull away from him, back into the conflagration, but she couldn't break Alain's grip and he quickly took her and the old man's body to a safe distance from the blaze. He let her go and put the body down next to her. The girl sat on the ground and cradled the old man's head in her lap.

Alain turned back to the barn, but by now it was engulfed. He'd wanted to see Vinnie burn, make sure he was dead, but he'd see nothing now if he went back. He wanted to sniff for Vinnie on the air, but the burning barn overpowered all other smells and most sounds. If Vinnie wanted to attack, the confusion of the fire would provide excellent cover. Alain had to assume that Vinnie was either burning or had run off to lick his wounds.

Everything inside the barn was ablaze and the flames were heading up to the roof. Alain went to the well pump, and became his own one man bucket brigade. He wasn't going to save the barn, but his advantages in strength and speed allowed him to quickly douse the roofs of the main house, two henhouses, an outhouse, and the two sheds, making sure that stray sparks from the barn wouldn't set them alight too.

The barn's roof collapsed, sending up a shower of sparks, then the walls fell in. It resembled nothing so much as a bonfire now, a bonfire that smelled of wood tinged with burning flesh.

In the distance Alain could see lights and hear the sound of excited voices. People had seen the conflagration and were coming to help, or perhaps merely to watch. He thought about how to say "wait, let me explain" in French and decided it was time to go.

He picked up his pack from where he'd dropped it. The girl continued to cradle the man's head as she cried and talked to him, smoothing his cheek with her hand. Alain wanted to stay and try to comfort her, but right now he knew she'd be about as willing to let him do that as her neighbors would to let him explain how none of this was his fault.

He scanned around once more for any sign of Vinnie. He'd probably burned up in the barn, but you could never be too careful. Alain found no sign of him, took a last look at the girl, and then ran into the surrounding forest.