Tooth and Nail
an excerpt

Clyde was white as a sheet and laying face-down on the ground. I didn't need to be a vampire to tell he was dead. Anyone would have looked at that form and known it was a corpse. One thin – no, frail – arm was up over his head, the other under him. He wore a long, heavy coat, galoshes over his shoes, thick corduroy pants, a flannel shirt. He looked like a retired lumberjack. His hair was thin, patchy, his scalp splotchy with age. His face was lined.

His eyes were open wide. He'd died in absolute terror of what killed him.

My last living mortal friend looked so very, very old.

I spent a half minute just standing there over him, staring. It took some time for the vampire instincts to kick in. He'd been dead for a few hours at most. He'd been drained of all blood – I couldn't smell any and there wasn't any on the ground. Even in the rain there'd be some left if he'd bled out here. He'd been killed somewhere else, drained and brought here in his own car, then left behind. Or he'd been killed by someone who met or followed him here and drained cleanly before being ditched. A part of me – the part of me that always hunts – started to make me turn around and go back, look for his footprints, smell his car. The part of me that remembered an old friend from high school kept staring at him, though. He must have been, God, well, we'd graduated together. He was eighty three years old.

Same age as me.

I reached down and wrapped my right hand in one corner of my coat, then gripped his shoulder and turned him very slowly. The neck had been slit with something sharp. It hadn't happened here. If it had, there'd still be blood no matter how big a barrel the killer had held under him when he made the slice. He probably didn't live long enough to bleed to death; he'd probably drowned before that. Leaning closer, I could smell the blood when I tilted his head back a little, dead blood, pooled in his lungs. My stomach turned. He didn't even appeal to the very worst part of me as food. He was just a dead thing. His mouth was open, the skin stretched tight around his eyes – mad, with the whites showing as big as a Kennedy half-dollar. His eyebrows were up, stretched high. Water had pooled in the lines and crevices of his face and ran out of his eyes like great tears when I moved him.