It was the longest thirty seconds I had experienced. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her and the look of pure terror on her face. Then whatever she was going through was over. She slumped back, closed her eyes, and began to snore.
Aahz motioned that we should move away through the books and old papers and scrolls.
“Okay, what just happened there?” Tanda asked a half-second before I asked the same question.
“Harold gave me the rope to save her from becoming a vampire,” Aahz said. “It seems that those left alive last night were the ones they liked.”
“So that was why Glenda’s body wasn’t in that morgue with the others,” I said.
“Exactly,” Aahz said. “They were trying to turn her, have her join them.”
I glanced back at where Glenda was snoring. “So she’s not going to be a vampire now?”
Aahz shrugged. “We’ll keep the rope on her until morning just to make sure.”
“How about for two days?” Tananda asked.
Aahz laughed and said, “Maybe.”
As far as I was concerned, we could keep the rope on her for the next month. When it came to Glenda, my motto was better safe than sorry.
Spending the night trapped in the middle of a culture’s entire history, afraid that at any moment I might get taken and have my blood sucked, is an experience I would not wish on my worst enemy. The room we were trapped in was huge, with a high, domed ceiling and row after row of shelves full of old books alternating with piles of ancient furniture. Unlike Aahz and Tanda, I was not the scrounge-through-old-things kind of person. Old stuff was dusty and usually boring, as far as I was concerned. I thumbed through a few books and blew the dust off some old scrolls that looked like cookbooks. I decided I didn’t want to know what they were trying to tell me about how to cook, so I wandered over to another aisle, found an antique couch tucked off to one side of a pile of furniture, managed to get most of the dust off of it, and lay down.