Mack nodded. David had carried him here, of course. Carried him piggyback in fact, because that was the easiest way for the slighter vampire to balance the more bulky human. David turned and Mack climbed up on his back again, and they set off, as fast as David could run, on a tangent from the road.

There was silence for a while, then David swore again. "They're moving pretty fast. They're going to catch up eventually." He left unspoken the reason why the others were moving faster than he. They didn't have to carry half again their own weight on their backs.

"They're tracking you by this mental thing, not by sound or scent or something, right?"

"Yeah. I see what you're getting at. I just need to vanish again."

"Yeah. Unless they can find you some other way, or find me?"

David considered, still running as he thought. "It's possible. A vampire can smell well enough to track that way, but it's a skill that requires some development to do well. They generally don't have to find hiding humans, or hiding vampires either. The first are usually making plenty of noise, out in the open, or are announcing their presence with lights, and the second they can sense. And they're not following our trail now, they're just cutting directly across."

David halted and glanced around. They were on the up slope of a small hill. The ground around was, as most of the desert in the area, cut with dry washes and studded with outcroppings of sandstone. A dozen yards or so away one such outcropping rose in a jumble of wind-rounded shapes. He ran towards it, and in a series of bounds he crossed it, just to break the obvious trail of footprints, should the vampires happen to try and track him physically, then left from there at a different angle, headed for a dry wash. He jumped down into it, and stopped there, letting Mack get down. Not waiting any longer, he dropped into the trance state, pure white surrounding him as he closed his eyes.

The pursuing group halted when he vanished. Given how hard distance was to judge, perhaps they thought he had moved beyond their range. The one survivor of the other pack would be able to tell them that he could vanish, but they wouldn't know exactly what that meant. The group moved forward again, then zigged and zagged, casting around for a trail, but it wasn't long before they gave up and left, and soon the sense of them had disappeared into the night.

David slowly came back to himself. Mack was sitting on the sandy floor of the wash, looking tense, his heart rate up. "They're gone," said David. "It worked, we lost them."

"Whew! That was pretty intense!"

David laughed and shook his head in amazement. "Sure, intense. Let's get going. It's early enough we can make some distance before we have to hole up for the day."