Excerpt: V-Squad

. . . The car swerved all over the road like a Delancey Street drunk trying to walk a straight line, and for a few seconds there the vampires inside it were tossed side to side.   John struggled to hold onto the wheel and at the same time fight off being pulled through the jagged top of the car.  The vamp who had a grip on his neck—and Eddie knew it was a vamp because he saw the fangs in his mouth—was squeezing John’s throat so tight that his fingers drove into his skin.  If he had been human, the guy would’ve broken his neck, and John already would be dead instead of fighting to keep the car from running off the road and into a tree.

Cursing under his breath, Eddie grabbed a samurai sword from the floor and shot straight up through the roof. 

The vamp didn’t see him until it was too late.  A swipe of the sword, and the next thing everyone in the car knew, the hand wrapped around John’s neck, as well as the arm attached to it, had fallen onto the seat beside him.  Eddie looked over his shoulder just in time to catch two more bloodsuckers come out of nowhere and latch onto the top of the car, and another one after that.

And then George and Henry were right beside him, swords in hand.  In a risky attempt to retrieve his arm the one-armed vampire stupidly tried to reach past Eddie into the car, but Eddie was pretty good with a katana by now and cut off the guy’s head with a swift flick of the sword.

The vampire’s body fell across the front of the car and onto the road, and with a thump! The car ran over it.  Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie got a glimpse of the bloody smear it left across the windshield.  John must have been unable to see through it to drive, because he uttered a dandy of a curse before he impatiently switched on the wipers.

With one down and three to go, Eddie pulled a stake from his bandolier and aimed it at the back of a vampire who had his mouth open, ready to bite Henry.  He had a ragged, savage look about him, like he’d been holed up in some nasty sewer beneath the streets of a great capital city for the past two hundred years.  Eddie had run into a lot of guys like him.  Mean characters who he was sure had been just like that when they were alive.

The vamp had to have been an old one, too, because he somehow sensed what was happening with Eddie at his back.  Before Eddie knew it, the vamp reached behind him and yanked the stake from his grasp.  With one hand he tossed Henry aside and without missing a beat aimed the stake at Eddie’s heart with the other. . .