No Dominion

The glass is breaking.

That's not the surprising thing; the surprising thing is that it didn’t shatter when he threw me against it. Shouldn’t come as a shock. This place, they went through a few front windows the first year they were open and decided it was more cost-effective to lay out the extra cash for the safety glass. Save them from having to replace it every time there's a brawl in here. Which is pretty regular I’d imagine. Any case, I’m not bitching. Wasn’t for the guy who had the bright idea, I’d be on the sidewalk right now, my good leather jacket cut to ribbons and my face sliced up in all kinds of new and interesting ways. But now it's breaking, it is most definitely breaking. I’m sure about that because my face is jammed up against it. The big question for me is whether this is the kind of safety glass that bursts into thousands of tiny pebbles when it breaks or the kind that turns into shards. Pebbles would be fine. Shards, not so much. The window creaks. Tiny fissures appear in front of my eyes.

OK, time to stop worrying about the glass, time to start worrying about getting this guy off of me. I can't expect any help from the bartenders or the crowd, not after they watched him pound on the bouncer with that pool cue. And I don't see any helpful officers of the law rolling up outside at this point. Not that I have any intention of being here when the cops show up. So, I guess it's just me and him. That’s OK, I can go this one alone. Not like it’s new to me or anything. I just wish he really was on PCP; if it was just PCP he'd be pretty easy to deal with. But this? This is gonna take grace and style, maybe even a little tact.

He shoves my face harder into the big front window. People out on the sidewalk flinch as they see my features squashed yet flatter against the glass. The glass creaks again. The fissures grow another millimeter. He's still screaming, babbling insanity at the top of his lungs, howling so loud I can barely hear Boxcar Willie on the jukebox:

You load sixteen tons and what do you get?

Another day older, and deeper in debt.

Ain't that the fuckin' truth.

He’s enraged that my face won’t just explode through the damn glass the way he wants it to. He rears back, and before he can slam my face forward, I've slipped to my right, spun, twisted my arm free of his grasp, winced as a clump of hair is torn from the back of my scalp, planted my right foot in the hollow behind his right knee, hammered my elbow into the back of his neck and sent him face first through the window in my place. The sidewalk audience scatters as he hits the pavement. I step through the dagger-edged hole he left behind. Shards it is.

He was spazzing the second he came out of the bathroom.

Before that, I hadn't even noticed him. Why should I? Not like I’m working; not like there’s any reason I should be doing anything but paying attention to the booze in my glass, the cigarette in my mouth, the pool game in front of me and the girl by my side. Especially the girl. Girl like this, most everyone in the place is paying attention to her. Want to be invisible? Hang out with a girl like Evie. All that red hair, the body that not only won't quit but works weekends and holidays, too. That smile. She’s the kind of girl guys like to look at, but most ar

After saving his girlfriend and the other patrons of a downtown bar from an out-of-control thug possessing superhuman strength, vampyre private detective Joe Pitt sets out to uncover the secret of the man's frightening power, journeying deep into Manhattan's vampyre underworld and into the middle of a conspiracy that threatens the entire vampyre community. Original.

Among the new voices of the twenty-first-century crime fiction, Charlie Huston . . . is where it's at.

-The Washington Post Book World

Charlie Huston is] a Bowery-bred Bram Stoker. . . . Joe Pitt is the sort of hard-boiled, one-liner-shooting character that readers of black-coffee detective novels and modern vampire fiction should embrace with a vengeance.

-The Examiner (Alexandria, Virginia)

Praise for Already Dead

Huston] creates a world that is at once supernatural and totally familiar, imaginative, and utterly convincing.

-The Philadelphia Inquirer

Vicious . . . a heady mix of noirish hard-boiled dialogue and East Village scumminess . . . a refreshing rejiggering of vampire mythology . . . The world that Huston creates is both brutal and vividly realized.

-Entertainment Weekly

From the Trade Paperback edition.