Today it was covered with the spattered blood of dozens of victims.

I leapt from the top, swinging my sword to slice the head from the nearest vampire I could find. When that one was dust, I moved to the next one. I was vaguely aware of Nathaniel and Samiel fighting around me, and of Jude joining the fray, snarling and barking as he tore the vamps’ throats out.

I don’t know how long we fought. I punched, kicked, hacked, slashed and watched heads roll away, disintegrating into dust as they went. And I kept doing it, over and over and over again.

Still the vampires came.

Still more of them poured from the ground like cicadas emerging from hibernation. And nobody showed up to help us.

The Agency was a short walk from where we fought the tide. I imagined large numbers of Agents were engaged with trying to keep up with the souls pouring from the bodies of the dead, but why not send the rest of the Agents to fight the vampires? The Agency’s willfully blind attitude about not getting involved in the actions of other supernatural courts surely couldn’t extend to ignoring a massacre under their noses.

Or maybe it could, since the cavalry never arrived.

After several hours of killing vampires, I slipped.

I was tired, hungry and pregnant, and I wasn’t completely on my game after a week spent fighting battle after battle.

My boot heel skidded in a pool of blood, and so I was just a little shy of complete decapitation on the vamp I battled. I landed backward, banged the back of my head against the sidewalk, and saw stars for a moment.

My field of vision was filled with the slavering jaws of the vampire I hadn’t quite killed, ready to eat my face off. There was no time to think, no time to perform a spell.

Then the vampire was gone, and Nathaniel picked me up from the ground and carried me away.

“What are you doing?” I screamed. “We can’t leave. We can’t leave those people down there alone.”

“We cannot do any more,” Nathaniel said grimly. “There are four of us, and thousands of them.”

“We can’t leave,” I said again. I’d never run from a fight in my life.

Nathaniel landed on a nearby roof. Samiel was beside us holding Jude, still in wolf form, in his arms.

“Look,” Nathaniel said angrily, holding me by the shoulders so I could see what was below. “The city is overrun. We can’t do anything else.”

I stared down. It was so much worse from up here, where you could see the pouring mass of vampires undulating through the city streets, into the buildings and buses, leaving empty husks of humanity behind them.

It seemed that the more people who were killed, the more ferocious the vamps became.

“It’s a feeding frenzy,” I said, sickened. “How can we leave them down there, without anyone to defend them?”

“The police are fighting back,” Beezle said, his head popping out of my jacket.

From our vantage point on the roof we could see the teams moving in, hastily mounting barricades. The percussion of gunfire was added to the chorus of screams that echoed in the canyons of the city. My city, overrun by vampires.

“No,” I said angrily. “We have to go back. We have to help.”

Nathaniel’s hands rested on my shoulders and he spun me around to face him. His face was twisted in anger and, to my surprise, fear.

“Just what is it that you think you can do?” he said, giving me a little shake. “Do you not value your life at all?”

I saw Samiel move out of the corner of my eye, obviously intending to defend me from Nathaniel, but I slapped my ex-fiancé’s hands away before Samiel could.

“I value my life as much as you do yours,” I said. “But I don’t value it more than any of them do.” I pointed toward the terrified mass of humanity below.

“So you would kill yourself to save one of them?” Nathaniel said.

“I don’t think I’m superior to them the way you do,” I said coldly.

Nathaniel threw his hands in the air. “Gods above and below, you are the most thickheaded woman I have ever met. Do you really think this is about superiority? Think about your baby. Think about the people who love you. Don’t throw yourself away on the impossible.”

I stared at him, startled to realize that the fear in his eyes had been for me. He correctly interpreted the look on my face and sighed. “I do not know why you cannot credit me with human emotions, even after all we have been through.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. There would always be a part of me—although that part was shrinking almost daily—that would be suspicious of Nathaniel, that didn’t trust his veracity.

Samiel tapped me on the shoulder. This really isn’t the time for a heart-to-heart.

“Yeah,” Beezle agreed. “We need to get out of here before the police start firing on us just because we look weird.”

“The gargoyle is right,” Nathaniel said, lifting me up again. I felt a magical veil settle over us, hiding our appearance from human eyes. “The humans are in a state of panic, unable to distinguish friend from foe.”

“That, and Maddy’s covered in blood and carrying a sword,” Beezle added.

As we flew away I turned my head from the carnage below. I knew Nathaniel was right. I knew that continuing a battle we couldn’t win was foolish and pointless. We’d barely made a dent in the endless stream of vampires. But I’d never run away before, and leaving felt less like good sense than defeat.