The vampire took a step backwards. My two .45s didn’t waver. I don't think she was afraid of them, though. She had already shrugged off quite a few bullets.

How did one kill one of these things? Holy water? Garlic? A stake through the heart? I was sure there was something wooden around here, but nothing in the shape of a stake.

My bullets, though mostly ineffectual, had slowed her down a bit, and regenerating had taken energy out of her. Could I overwhelm her with sheer firepower? I resisted the urge to glance around for weapons the golems may have dropped.

She had asked where we were, so maybe I could stall for time. "Where are you from? How did you get here?"

She sneered. "I don't talk with my food." She straightened up to her full height. "I am a queen of the night."

"Huh," I said. I gave a fractional shrug without moving my guns off target. "And I'm the grand duke of kicking your ass. Nice to meet you, your highness."

"Do you think you can defeat me with your pathetic mortal weapons?"

I was getting a little tired of the megalomaniacs in this castle. "It seems to me Dr. Frankenstein already defeated you with pathetic mortal weapons once. You were a prisoner, weren't you?" How Frankenstein could have kept something like this contained, I had no idea. Up to a minute ago, I hadn't even known vampires existed. Who knows what other stuff that psychopath had experimented on. Or maybe this was his idea of a girlfriend?

She hissed furiously and lunged for me. I shot out both her eyes.

Now, if anyone had told me to trying shooting out both eyes at the same time with a different gun in each hand I would have told them they were full of shit. But I did it. This new body had awesome reflexes and I’d apparently kept all my info loads from Hungary. Unfortunately, it didn't slow her down. She swatted my guns aside with a painful slash across my left forearm that knocked my arm across against my right. Then she was on me.

I staggered back as her unnatural mass hit me and almost fell.

I jerked my head away from her gnashing fangs and smashed her face with my left elbow. I didn't want to destroy my guns again. Instead of beating her with it, I put my right-hand .45 against her temple and squeezed one off.

Her eyes were already regenerating as my shot jerked her head to the side and sprayed brain matter all over the hall wall. This was impossible, magic shit, that I could blow her brains all over the place and they were back in her head a second later. Or maybe her head got emptier and emptier as I blew the stuffing out of it. I didn’t know, but the hall was a lot brainer now and the wound was already healing.

She slashed at my face, her clawed fingers outstretched. The nails had horribly elongated. My cheek was cut before I could jerk away. I slammed my right forearm across her throat and jammed my left .45 into her ribs, firing it again and again until the slide locked back. She twitched and hissed, but continued screeching in my face.

I felt something slice at my torso. Her feet had also turned into sharp claws. I stepped forward, carrying us both. She was holding onto me with hands and feet, gnashing at my face with only my forearm keeping her from biting it off with her needle-sharp fangs.

I stepped forward and tripped over one of the fallen golems. Rather than catching my balance, I turned my trip into a lunge and threw myself at the nearest wall.

I crushed her between my body and the wall, my forearm applying my full weight to her throat. Cartilage crunched under the force, and for a blessed moment, her screeching cut off. I pulled my forearm back and slammed a right elbow strike to her jaw, cracking it, then I grabbed her by the collar and pulled her in.

I had just seen this bitch regenerate from multiple sets of life-ending wounds. I had no time to let anything like chivalry make me hesitate. Pa taught me to never hit a girl. This thing was no girl. I dropped my .45 and drew back my massive right fist.

Her jaw was already snapping back into place with unnatural force, and she was still raking at me with her claws. My biceps and neck were a mass of slashes. I drove my fist into her face. Her head slammed into the wall with enough force to crater it, leaving the back of her skull embedded in the wood paneling.

I hit her again and again. Her skull seemed unnaturally hard, but since I'd never actually punched someone in the face until their head cracked like an egg before, I didn't know how much force it takes to do it to a normal human. Probably fewer than this. The wall splintered as her head was driven back into it. My hand ached as I continued to pound.

Her clawed hands dropped away and went limp, and I hesitated, not to give her a break but to take a look at the splinters jutting out from the broken wood paneling. I snatched at the biggest one I could see and broke it off.

I stepped back. Her body remained suspended with her feet a meter off the floor with her head jammed back into the wall. I took my splintered chunk of plywood and stabbed it at her chest where I thought her heart should be. It barely broken her skin before the chunk of wood broke. The wall creaked as her head pulled itself back together.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Well, shit.”

I had to try something else. I dropped the mag and slide and holstered my empty left-hand 1911. I picked up the mostly empty gun I’d dropped with my left hand then drew my big combat knife with my right. I was getting ready to stab her in the throat when she kicked me.

Her head was still embedded in the wall, shifting and healing, when one of her legs just snapped up and kicked me straight in the chest. It felt like I had been shot with a cannonball.

It knocked me back across the hall. I crashed against something hard and fell in a clamor of metal as I smashed into a decorative suit of armor on the other side of the hall. Pain in my spine blossomed to match the agony in my chest. The metal suit was crushed between my body and the wall, and I collapsed in a pile of metal plates.

No time to feel sorry for myself. Ignoring my injuries, I jumped to my feet. The vampire woman was still prying herself out of the hole in the wall, bones snapping back into place.

"Fuck this."

I took off running down the hall. I didn't know where I was going, but anything was better than staying there and kung-fuing it up with a vampire. I didn't have much hope I could outrun her, but maybe my head start would give me time to think of something.

A shriek behind me told me I was out of time. I rounded a bend in the hall and it opened up into a wide balcony with two sweeping sets of stairs down to an impressive black-and-white tiled ballroom. On the far side of the room, floor-to-ceiling glass windows lined the walls. They opened onto a wide patio with a view all the way across the valley.

It could have held a hundred dancing couples and the orchestra to back them. Instead, it was packed with Russian soldiers. More were streaming up the stairs.

Dozens of wide eyes looked at me. Muzzles started to lift. I sidestepped three quick steps to my left and threw my arms up in the universal gesture.

"I surrender!" I called in Russian.

"It will do you no good!" a voice shrieked from down the hall. While dozens of rifles came up to point at me, none of them fired.

I kept my back pressed to the wall and my arms firmly raised, one of them still clutching my combat knife. For a moment, I just stared at the soldiers and they stared at me. The ones climbing the stairs started moving forward.

A moment later, the vampire burst out of the hallway and onto the balcony. Because I was standing to one side of the doorway, the first thing she saw was Russians and rifles. Her clothes were torn and bloody, but rather than looking like a damsel in distress, she looked like a thing of nightmare. At least I thought so. Her face was again twisted in monstrous rage, and her hands were crooked with elongated clawed fingers.

She shrieked in dismay and anger at the sight of the rifles. As one, the Russian soldiers shifted their aim from me to acquire this new threat.

I dropped my hands and threw myself to the ground as the world exploded.

It's amazing how several dozen bolt-action rifles can sound like a minigun designed by Harley-Davidson. Poppity pop pop poppity pop. The reports came in a rolling wave of deafening noise.

Pressed against the carpet, I did the flattest, quickest commando crawl I could, desperate to get away from the screaming bullets. The shrieking wail burbled away to a groan as the slew of bullets shredded the vampire's body.

Someone shouted “Halt, golem!” in Russian from the top of the stairs. The rifles with bayonets fixed swung down to point at me as I looked up. Their eyes were wide and fearful.

I let go of my knife and held up both open hands. "Surrender, surrender," I said in my most plaintive voice.

An officer stepped past the first two soldiers and loomed over me. He glanced past me towards where the crumpled remains of the vampire probably lay, sneered, then looked down at me and reached for his sidearm.

I thought rapidly. This new body might make me a certified badass, but against dozens of soldiers with rifles and bayonets at close range, this didn’t look good. I was rapidly discarding plans and thinking about how quickly I could push off from the floor as the man’s revolver cleared its holster.

He was just lining up a shot between my eyes when the man exploded. At least that's what it looked like from my perspective when an enraged, twisted, but rapidly healing vampire tore through his chest like a chainsaw dropped into a bucket of watermelons.

As the Russian officer exploded into red chunks of wet gore, I leapt up to my feet. I didn't know if she had caught sight of me, and I didn't wait around to find out. I vaulted over the rail of the balcony. I had time to regret it on the way down since the drop was at least six meters. I slammed down in a crouch, cracking the marble tile under my feet and slamming a fist into the ground, superhero style, to check my fall.

Around me, Russian soldiers pointed rifles in my direction, but I was already dashing through the crowd. I shoved one soldier into another and then ducked down a hallway under the balcony.

Three more Russian soldiers were making their way toward the ballroom. One was peering into a room a few paces down the hall. I cold-cocked him and took his rifle. His two friends looked at me in shock a his body hitting the floor.

Behind me, there were shouts from the soldiers in the ballroom, but also screams and gunfire. I guessed my former dancing partner had joined the waltz. I ducked into the first doorway as shots rang out. The soldiers still in the hall were struck by mis-aimed rounds, screaming in pain but not falling.

I stepped back into the hall and raised the Mosin rifle I had taken off the first soldier, firing as fast as my sights found a target and working the bolt with blazing speed powered by hard-wired reflexes. Both shots drilled a soldier on the upper chest before either finished working his rifle's action.

For the moment, no one in the ballroom was looking down this hall, so I took off running. By my reckoning, I should be heading towards the front of the castle. I worked the bolt on my Mosin Negant as I ran.

I turned the corner and suddenly there was a golem standing in front of me, and several more dead ones at his feet. With no hesitation, I stabbed my bayonet into his throat and pulled the trigger.

The room beyond the dead golems crashed. Timbers groaned. Something massive was moving inside it. I cautiously poked my head around the corner. There was a mangled mech in the middle of the large drawing room, sprawled out on the top of some dead golems. I recognized it immediately as Veronica's Hungarian machine.

Even as I spotted it, I saw Tamara's mech on the far side of the room, smashing its way out the windows into a courtyard beyond.

Now we were getting somewhere. I stepped up to the broken hole in the wall. Both girls stood in the courtyard beyond.

I raised my hand and opened my mouth, but just before saying something flippant, I realized what I must look like to them. I dropped the rifle and held up both hands as the two Hussars whirled on me, fear and determination in their eyes. “It's me, Sam! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!”