Teaser Tuesday: Post-Action Scene

Here's another quick teaser from the in-progress urban fantasy novel. I've been thinking a lot about pacing while working on this one, and how it's easy to overdo it on action scenes in an effort to make things 'fast-paced'. Having some 'post-action' scenes to ease the reader back into a slightly lower gear can be a good idea, I've found.(Of course, you're now going to see the post-action scene completely out of context, where its function won't be at all obvious. Er, enjoy!)

If you ever want to know whether you suffer from claustrophobia, just lock yourself in a pitch-black stone cube and wait to see if you go crazy. Trust me, you’ll find out soon enough.The adrenaline rush from our rooftop escape wore off a few minutes after the door closed. My legs suddenly felt like they were made of jelly. I collapsed to the ground, my back against the ‘sarcophagus’ where Hightower was sleeping. Or dead.Before that day, it had never really occurred to me that a vampire could be killed. I knew it happened occasionally, but I suppose I’d always thought that it was somehow voluntary - in other words, that such powerful beings would only die because they wanted to die. They didn’t age. They didn’t succumb to illness or misfortune like the rest of us. They couldn’t be murdered…or so I’d thought.Those men had looked like they knew what they were doing when they broke into Hightower’s apartment. And those spears - I’d heard people say that you could hurt a vampire by ‘impaling’ them and had always just assumed that meant a traditional stake-through-the-heart scenario. Those odd steel spears suggested otherwise.Against all reason, I felt myself drifting to sleep. I didn’t fight it. There was nothing I could do until the door opened, and something told me I was going to need my strength if I was going to survive the night.