13 Bullets

“Follow my lead,” he hissed at her. “If we don’t scare them off, we might just learn something tonight.”

They made it nearly all the way to the water without opposition. At the stream five of the half-deads waited for them, nearly invisible in the darkness. Caxton saw a hatchet come tumbling through the air toward her head and she turned her body just in time for the weapon to tear through her jacket sleeve. If her reflexes hadn’t taken over at just the right moment the hatchet would have collided with her sternum. She put that out of her mind and lifted the shotgun. Her shot destroyed one of the half-deads completely and took an arm off another. Arkeley fired two shots, one after the other, and a pair of them fell down into the water, no more than heaps of old bones.

That left only one of them standing and unharmed. It charged them even as they were recovering from their shots, a shovel held above its head in both hands. It squealed in rage as it closed the distance then brought the shovel down hard, blade first, right at Caxton’s shoulder.

Her very soul cringed as the shovel bit into her. She felt the impact, first, pain twanging up and down her arm and well into her chest. The blow didn’t stop there, though—she felt the blade of the shovel tear through layer after layer of cloth and finally lodge deep in her skin. Trickles of blood rolled down between her breasts and over the knobs of her spinal column. Her flesh stretched and tore and her muscles screamed in panic as they were wedged open. It felt like she was going to die, that her body was being torn apart.

Arkeley took his time, lined up the perfect shot, and blew off what remained of the half-dead’s face.

“Get up,” he told her.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” she panted, “but I think I’m hurt,” she said, pushing at a tree trunk, getting back to her feet. She hadn’t even realized she’d fallen down.

The wound hurt, bad, and she was shivering as she finally stood up and pawed at the torn sleeve of her jacket. “I think... I think it’s bad.”

“You’re fine,” he told her, though he hadn’t even looked at her wound. He stared up and back, at the way they had come. In the trees back there the half-deads were rallying. In a moment they would come running, rolling right over them. “Walk it off,” he told her.

She thought she might die there, in that dark place, because he wouldn’t take her seriously. She thought she might never see Deanna again. She followed him as he pounded across the stream, her feet getting wet yet again. They felt like frozen chunks of beef. Her breath came fast but without rhythm and she could hear her heart pounding in her chest, louder than the sound of her feet splashing in the water.

“I can’t… I can’t go any further,” she said. Pain was making her dizzy.

He turned, and stared at her, his eyes very thin slits in his face. They didn’t have time to stop like this, she knew it. She was holding him back. He looked right into her and then he said, “In a second I’m going to ask you if you’re okay. Your answer is extremely important. If you can keep fighting, or at least keep running, you have to say ‘yes’. Otherwise we have to run away and let them win this one. Now. Are you okay?”

A thickness in her throat kept her from answering one way or another. She managed to shake her head. No, she wasn’t okay. She was hurt, she’d been stabbed with a shovel. She was bleeding to death in the dark with enemies all around. She wasn’t alright at all.

The look on his face changed to one of utter unhappiness. Whether he was worried about her or about losing the fight she couldn’t tell in the darkness. “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” he told her, and pushed her forward.

She dashed up the far bank and right up to the solid stability of the camp. She pressed her good shoulder against the wall and reached up to explore her wound.

“You do that later, when you’re safe,” Arkeley said, his voice very loud. He tore at her hands and pulled her away from the wall.

Arkeley pushed open the front door and shoved her inside. He locked the door and turned around to scan the grim tableau of the main room, with its corpses wired into life-like postures. The barrel of his Glock 23 traversed from left to right before he even switched on the lights.

Outside the half-deads screamed for their blood. Where the hell was the sheriff?

Where were the cars from Troop J? Caxton started to sit down—she was feeling shaky, as if she might faint—but Arkeley scowled at her and she stayed where she was. They both pivoted around when they heard a noise from the kitchen—something was trying to get in. “There’s an open window in there,” she said. The same window she’d looked through when they arrived.

He dashed into the kitchen wing and fired two shots. Then he slammed the window shut and bolted it. “This won’t hold them for long,” he called.

Out on the porch the half-deads started beating at the camp’s walls, pounding to be let in. Their voices called out to her to let them in, to surrender. One of them called out her name and she nearly lost it but she shoved her hands over her ears and slowly regained control. When Arkeley came back into the main room she pointed at the far wing, the bunk room. There was only one window in there, a square vent high up in the wall that let in a few stray beams of moonlight.

“If we go in there we stay in there,” he said. “We can barricade the door and it will keep them out for a while. Maybe not long enough.” He looked up and pointed at a skylight in the pitched ceiling, maybe ten feet up. A length of white rope dangled from its latch, presumably so that someone could open it to catch the breeze on a warm evening. Arkeley shoved a chair underneath the skylight and climbed up to grab the rope. He yanked downward and the skylight fell open. “Alright, come on,”

he said.

“I can’t.” Caxton held her injured shoulder and shook her head. “I can’t climb up there, not like this.”

Arkeley studied her face for a second. Then he grabbed the wrist of her hurt arm and pulled it around in a looping spiral that made her do a little pirouette. Black spots burst inside her eyes. Her brain trembled with the pain.

He didn’t seem to think it was so bad. “If anything was broken that would have made you pass out. Now get up there. I’ll help as much as I can.”

She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to do anything except climb into an ambulance and get pumped full of painkillers. She climbed up on the chair and reached up. She could almost touch the frame of the skylight, but not quite.

“Use the rope,” he suggested.

“Will it hold my weight?” she asked.

“I only know one way to find out. Do it already!”

Sucking on her lower lip she wrapped the end of the rope around her fist. Then she jumped up and grabbed onto the frame. The thin metal of the frame dug into her palm and opened up a fresh wound but she managed to not let go. The rope dug into her other hand. She could feel it shredding under her weight but it would hold for the moment. From below Arkeley shoved at her, hard, and suddenly she was outside in the cold, dark air. A few stars shone down and let her see the shingled roof. It looked too steep, as if she would fall if she didn’t hold onto the skylight. She needed to help Arkeley up, though. Turning from the waist, her legs spread out for some minimal purchase, she reached down with her good arm and heaved him upward. He was a lot heavier than she’d expected, or maybe that was just fatigue from her wound.

On the way up he brought the rope with him. He pulled the skylight shut. Unless one of the half-deads was seven feet tall there would be no way for them to follow Arkeley onto the roof. They were safe—more or less.

In the yard below the half-deads gathered around the front of the camp. Their torn faces were white and vicious in the starlight. “Come down from there,” one shouted, its nasty little voice getting on Caxton’s nerves. “Come down and we’ll talk,” it said.

“We just want to get to know you a little better, Laura!”

She lifted the shotgun, then thought better. From ten yards away the shot would spread too wide to do much damage, even to a barely-intact half-dead. She reached with her bleeding hand into her jacket and drew her pistol.

“You’re going to be one of us, Laura!” the half-dead crooned. “It’s just a matter of time! Our master got inside of you, inside of your brains!”

She lined up her shot but Arkeley stopped her. “Don’t waste the bullet.” He pried up one of the shingles from the roof and held it loosely in his hand. It was nearly a foot square and when hurled it flew like a Frisbee. It bounced off the half-dead’s chest but it was enough to make the thing run away howling in terror.

“They’re cowards. You need to learn that. Now,” he said, “we can look at your shoulder.”

Caxton could barely balance on the pitched roof but she managed to shrug off her jacket. The cold air chilled her instantly and she started shivering again. “Am I in shock?” she asked, remembering a keyword from the first aid course she’d taken at the academy. You were supposed to repeat it every other year but nobody ever checked if you did or not and she’d never gotten around it.

He tore at the sleeve of her uniform shirt and exposed her skin to the night air. He touched the wound and his fingers came away bloody. She’d expected that, but then she’d expected them to come away caked in gore. His fingers were barely stained.

“For God’s sake,” he said, his voice scornful. She yanked away from his hands.

“What? What is it? Tell me!” she shouted. “Am I going to die?”

He stared at her in pure disgust. “That,” he said, gesturing at the wound on her shoulder, “isn’t deep enough to kill a house cat. Let me put it this way. Next time you get hurt this badly, don’t even bother telling me,” he said. “I can’t believe we threw away a real opportunity because you got a little scratch.”

“Jesus,” she said, and turned away from him. “It felt like I was getting cut in half.”

He only clucked his tongue at her in response. Down in the yard the half-deads laughed at her. She kicked at the shingles until several of them fell away and slid down toward the crowd below. That just made the half-deads laugh harder.

21.

Eventually the reinforcements came, their lights strobing through the trees, their sirens drowning out the cackling noises from below. Caxton sat up and nearly rolled off the roof. Arkeley grabbed her but wouldn’t look at her as she scrabbled for handholds.

There was a lot of shooting, none of which she could see. She remembered being down in the pit when they took down the vampire. “Jesus, I thought I was going to die.”

“When it’s time for you to die I’ll let you know.” There was a sneer in Arkeley’s voice. “Damn.” He pointed and she saw a crowd of half-deads running into the trees. “They’re going to get away. I wanted to capture at least one so we could torture some information out of it.”

“I don’t know if I could watch you torture something. Not even one of those freaks,” she said.

“Then I’ll just have to do it while you’re not looking.”

When the sheriff and the state troopers below had finished securing the hunting camp they put a ladder up against the roof so Caxton and Arkeley could climb down. An ambulance waited for her while the Sheriff himself wanted to talk to the Fed.

“Take your shirt off and sit down here,” an EMT in plastic gloves said. She did as she was told, sitting on the edge of the open back of the ambulance. It was freezing out and she didn’t like sitting there in just her bra but another EMT wrapped a silver anti-shock blanket around her and that helped. The first medic, a middle-aged woman cleaned out her wound with antiseptic that turned her skin orange and made her cut look like spicy taco meat. “This isn’t so bad,” she said.

“I’ve seen a lot worse.”

So had Caxton, of course. She’d just never been injured herself before, not even so unseriously. “Do I need to go to the hospital?” she asked.

“I’m going to recommend you get a tetanus shot and you’ll need to see a doctor to change your bandage every so often. But you can go home tonight and sleep—that’s the most important thing.”

Sleep. It would be nice. Over the last few nights she’d gotten maybe six hours sleep total. She closed her eyes right there, but the ambulance’s spinning lights pulsed blue on her eyelids and she came to again. The medic wrapped her shoulder with an Ace bandage and sent her on her way. Her shoulder ached pretty badly but she could move her arm just fine. She went looking for Arkeley and found him on the porch of the camp, studying a big state map. The sheriff stood rigidly next to him, holding a flashlight at just the right angle so the Fed could run his finger along the various routes and back roads. “Here, right?” Arkeley asked.

“Yeah, it’s called Bitumen Hollow. Tiny little place.”

Caxton bent down next to Arkeley. The Fed turned to stare at her as if she was in his light. She wasn’t. “What?” she demanded.

He replied as if she’d asked what was happening. Which would have been her second question. “The vampires struck tonight. This,” he said, waving his arm at the woods where they’d been ambushed by the half-deads, “wasn’t a trap. It was a diversion from what was happening here.” He poked at the map with his finger.

“You said the vampires struck tonight. Vampires, as in plural,” she said.

Arkeley bared his teeth at her and stared down at the map like he wanted to burn a hole right through it. “They worked together. The reports we have are pretty much useless in terms of piecing together a flow of events. We have a couple panicked 911 calls, a few cell phone recordings the sheriff was kind enough to share with me.

No real details but they all agreed on one fact: there were two of them, two males, and they were hungry. They took down an entire village. We’re going there right now to see what kind of evidence they might have left behind.”

She nodded and reached for her car keys. They were in her jacket, which happened to still be up on the camp’s roof. Arkeley stalked away in disgust when she told him as much. The sheriff turned off his light and folded up his map. “Not the most friendly sumbitch, is he?” the man asked. He had a handlebar mustache and a scar across his forehead that cut his eyebrow in half.

“I’ve been thinking I might have more fun working for the vampires,” she said, and he chuckled. She glanced at the map to memorize where they were headed. A sergeant from Troop J climbed up and fetched her jacket. He tossed it down to her and she snatched it as it fluttered through the air.

Back in the car he wouldn’t even talk to her. She started up the cruiser and got it back on the highway. They were only half an hour from the village. About halfway there she realized she couldn’t handle his silence for the duration of the trip. “Listen, I don’t know what I did to piss you off, but I’m sorry.”

For once he was in a mood to talk. “If I had known you weren’t really hurt, I wouldn’t have retreated so hastily,” he said, as if he were writing out a report. “I was counting on capturing at least one of them. Why else did you think I walked right into that trap? Maybe this night wouldn’t have been such a fiasco. Maybe we would have been in time to reach Bitumen Hollow while there was still a chance to help.”

“Now you’re blaming me before we even know what’s happened.” But of course she knew what they would find, just as he did. She didn’t want to see the village, or what was left of it. She didn’t want to do any of this. “If I’m not tough enough for you—”

“You will be. You’re going to toughen up in a hurry,” he told her.

“Or what?”

“There is no ‘or what’. You’re going to toughen up and that’s it. I don’t have time to find a new partner. I don’t have time to teach anyone else just how dangerous this game can be. Don’t let me down again.”

It was all he had to say. She had learned one thing, at least—she had learned when he was through talking and there was no point in asking more questions. She let him ride in brooding silence until they arrived.

Bitumen Hollow was just across the Turnpike, near French Creek State Park. It turned out to be a little depot town straddling the railroad line. A century earlier it might have served as a railhead for the local coal mines, judging by the giant rusting bins behind the town’s single real street. Now it served merely as a place for the local farmers to buy feed and fertilizer. Or rather it had served that purpose until a few hours previous. There was a little coffeeshop, a Christian bookstore, a discount shoe store and a post office. Lights burned in all four places of business, but nobody was home.

A ribbon of yellow police tape stretched across the road at either end of the street. Inside that cordon there were no living people at all. There were plenty of human bodies.

Arkeley wasn’t speaking to her. That was okay. She didn’t need any more guilt.

She ducked under the fluttering tape and walked the length of the street. She counted fourteen corpses. She kept meeting their eyes, which were open, and wide. There was a teenaged girl left hanging over a bench, her mid-section crushed by some unspeakable blow. The sleeve of her puffy coat had been torn open and the arm underneath was little more than torn meat. Caxton couldn’t look away from the girl’s face. Strands of thin blonde hair draped across her forehead, her nose. They stuck to the drying saliva at the corner of her mouth. In the darkness it was hard to tell what color her eyes were but they were very pretty.

In the Christian bookstore three bodies had been shoved behind the counter, all of their throats torn out. Whether they had run back there to hide or whether the vampires had stashed them back there for their own reasons, she didn’t know. There was a man who looked a little like Deanna’s big brother Elvin. He was wearing a hunting cap with red plaid flaps.

At the end of the street a late model car, a Prius, had collided with a lamp post.

The driver was spread across the front seats. Caxton couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. The face was removed completely and the bloodless tissue underneath didn’t look like a human head at all.

An explosion of light stunned Caxton. She blinked away the after-image and looked up to see maybe twenty sheriff’s deputies standing on the other side of the police tape. They waited respectfully like people lined up to watch a parade. Clara, the photographer, had taken a picture—that had been the source of the flash. She’d been photographing the crashed car’s license plate. “Hi,” she said, and Caxton nodded back in greeting.

“Whenever you’re ready, Trooper,” the sheriff said. “Take your time.” She realized they were waiting for her and Arkeley to finish their investigation. They had been given the right to the first look at the crime scene. The sheriff’s department would take over as soon as they were done.

“Arkeley,” she said, “are you finding anything useful?”

The Fed was bent over the teenaged girl. “Nothing I haven’t seen before. Alright, let them in.” He walked past her and lifted up the police tape. “Maybe they’ll see something I’ve missed. I’m extremely tired, young lady, and I think I want to go home.”

She blinked at him, then stepped aside to let the sheriff’s deputies pass under the tape. “Alright,” she said, more than a little surprised. “Let me bring the car around.”

“Actually,” he told her, “if you don’t mind I’d like to be by myself. I’m sure the Sheriff can give you a ride home.”

Very strange, she thought. Arkeley had to be up to something. He was going to do something he didn’t want her to see. “Okay,” she said. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to see it, either. She handed over the keys to the patrol car. “Come pick me up tomorrow whenever,” she told him, but he was already walking away.

“What’s eating him?” Clara asked her, but Caxton could only shake her head.

22.

Clara knelt down on the pavement to get a picture of the teenaged girl’s hand. There was a bloodless laceration running down the side of her palm. “This looks like a defensive wound,” she said, her uniform tie dangling between her knees. “Don’t you think?”

“I’m not really trained for that sort of stuff,” Caxton apologized. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was still doing in Bitumen Hollow except waiting for a ride home. She checked her watch and was surprised to find it was only half past eight.

The fight with the half-deads had felt like it took all night but in fact little more than an hour had passed, even with all the time they spent waiting on the camp’s roof.

She had been following Clara around because the photographer was a familiar face, the only member of the Lancaster county sheriff’s department that she knew by name. Supposedly she was keeping control of the crime scene, which technically belonged to Arkeley and the US Marshals Service. From time to time one of the sheriff’s detectives would come up to her and get her to sign off on a form or a waiver. She didn’t even bother reading them. It was pretty clear Arkeley wasn’t interested in traditional police work. His modus operandi was to put himself (and everyone around him) in danger and the let violence work everything out.

Where he had gone—by himself, in a state police patrol car that she was responsible for—remained a mystery to her. She recalled him talking about torturing half-deads for information. She had said she couldn’t sit by and watch that happen and he had suggested he would just do it while she wasn’t looking. Yet there were no half-deads in police custody. Where would he find one?

She might have been more diligent in trying to unravel his mystery if she hadn’t been so tired. She sank down on a bench in front of the Christian bookstore and rubbed at her eyes. Clara came and stood next to her. “Do you need something?”

she asked. “I’ve got a whole pharmacy in my purse. It’s back in my car—I’ll go get it.”

“No, no,” Caxton said, waving one hand at the photographer. “I’ll be fine. I’ve just been running on fumes for a while. A good night’s sleep and I’ll be one hundred per cent.” She smiled at the sheriff’s deputy, who just shrugged. Clara went over to the corpse of a farmer in a leather jacket who lay sprawled across the pavement not ten feet away. One of the farmer’s arms had been torn off and thrown in a trash can.

Much of his chest was missing altogether, as well as all of his throat. Clara hovered over him, not eighteen inches from the slack white skin of his face, and took a picture with her digital camera. “You’re fearless,” Caxton said, admiring the other woman a little. “I can’t handle the gore.”

Clara stood up and stared at her. “I thought you were in on that vampire kill last night on 322?”

“That’s different. When you’re fighting for your life the adrenaline keeps you going. But when it’s dead bodies just lying there I can’t handle it. Too many traumatic memories, you know?”

Clara nodded and came over to the bench again. “It used to bother me too, and I mean a lot. Let me show you a trick, though.” She handed Caxton the camera and mimed taking a picture. Caxton pointed the camera at the dead man in the road and studied the small LCD screen on the back of the camera. She wanted to turn away but Clara stopped her. “No. Look. Is the picture too dark?”

“Well, yeah,” Caxton said. “It’s night time. You need the flash.”

“Right.” Clara indicated the flash button and Caxton turned it on. “Now try to frame the picture better. Get all the details in, but without too much background.

Now, how’s the color balance?”

Caxton got the point all at once. “Yeah. Okay. It’s not a human being anymore.

It’s a picture of a human being. That’s not so bad.”

Clara nodded happily. “It’s all just colors and shadows and composition. I worry more about getting the color of the blood right than how much blood there is. Now,”

she said, but she stopped and turned her head as if she’d heard something.

Caxton jumped up. “What? What is it?” But then she heard it too. It wasn’t difficult. It was the sound of someone screaming, a man, screaming, distant and muffled as if he were trapped underground. Caxton followed the sound until she saw a manhole cover in the middle of the street. Shouting for help, she and Clara got down on the road surface and tried to pry open the cover with their fingers. It was like trying to push a dead patrol car uphill. A sheriff’s deputy with a crowbar rushed up and shifted the lid with a lot of grunting and straining. When the lid came off the streetlights revealed a rusted metal ladder leading downward into pure black darkness. Caxton took the lead, her feet dancing down the groaning rungs until she reached the bottom. She felt sewage squishing under her feet and the smell nearly overpowered her but she just reached into her pocket and found her mag-lite. Its narrow beam showed her weathered brick walls that curved up over her head and felt as if they would close in on her at any moment.

She shone the light farther down the passage and it caught the shaking figure of a man clutching a large wooden cross in his arms, maybe three feet long and two wide.

His eyes flashed terror when the light hit him and he screamed again. “No, no,” he said, “No, no, no,” he gibbered. “Keep away, keep away from me, behind me, get behind me, the Lord, the Lord, the Lord!”

Caxton moved toward him slowly, one hand held out to show him it was empty, the other holding the light. He was no vampire and no half-dead but he clearly wasn’t thinking straight, either.

“I didn’t mean to scream,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to give away my position! Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord. They can’t have me. They can’t have my blood!”

“I’m with the State Police, sir,” she said, her voice low and soft and almost crooning. “Everything’s okay now. The vampires are gone.” She was close enough to touch him, almost. She reached out to touch his shoulder, the way she’d been trained. A nice reassuring touch that wouldn’t threaten anyone.

“The power of Christ compels you!” he shouted, and swung his crucifix at her like a baseball bat. It caught her in the stomach and knocked the wind right out of her. She dropped her mag-lite in the muck and doubled over, the sudden darkness falling on her like a cave-in. “The power of Christ preserves me!” he screamed, and tried to hit her again. She heard the cross whistling through the dark air and shot out her hand to stop it. Twisting from the waist she pulled it away from him. The effort made her see stars, little traces of light that shot through her vision. She dropped the cross and grabbed him around the waist, catching both of his arms in her grapple.

She really hoped he didn’t try to bite her. She brought her knee up into his groin, hard enough to do serious damage.

Someone came up behind her with a more powerful light and she saw the man’s pupils constrict wildly. His face was inches from her own, his mouth open wide, his teeth glinting with saliva. But they were human teeth. He was gasping for breath—she had squeezed him so hard he couldn’t fully inhale.

Dumb, she thought. Fighting with vampires had made her forget everything she knew about subduing human beings. She could have really hurt the guy, whose only really crime was being scared. She released him and sheriff’s deputies pushed past her to cuff him and check him for weapons. “He’s not a perp,” she said, one hand over her face, deeply ashamed. “He’s a survivor.”

Up top, up on the street level again, she examined her own injury. Just a bruise on her stomach but it was tender and it would be yellow and purple come morning.

Well, she thought, she could just add it to the cut on her hand and the shovel wound on her shoulder, and call it a night’s work.

“Listen, somebody else can take the pictures,” Clara said. “I’ll take you home, now.”

Caxton nodded but she wasn’t quite finished with Bitumen Hollow. “Who is he?”

she asked.

“The assistant manager of the bookstore,” Clara told her. “He calmed down once we got him out of the sewer. As far as we can tell he’s the only one in the entire town who made it.” She frowned in anger. “He says he doesn’t remember how he got down in that sewer. The deputies are with him right now, working the virtual Identikit on the sheriff’s laptop.”

There had been no ID on the vampire they’d killed. What if they got a facial recognition match on one of the others? It could be a good break, just the kind they needed. “I need whatever they find sent right to my PDA, okay?” she said.

“Yeah, sure,” Clara told her. “I’ll send you the full report and all my pictures if you have the bandwidth.”

Caxton nodded. The state police were testing out new handhelds that had more memory and better wireless internet connections than the laptops in the patrol cars.

“I can handle it. Now,” she said, scratching her nose, “let’s get me out of here.”

“I’ll just sign out with the sheriff.” Clara dashed off and left Caxton there to nurse her new bruise. When she returned she’d taken off her tie and undone the top button of her uniform shirt. “Come on,” she said. “You can sleep in the car.”

23.

She couldn’t sleep in the car. Clara’s car was a rebuilt police Crown Victoria like almost every other police car in the world. It was a lot like Caxton’s own patrol car.

It was designed to provide a cop with all the information she needed to do her job—the dashboard was studded with instrumentation: the readout for a radar gun, the ubiquitous mounted laptop for checking license plates, the video recorder that monitored everything that happened both inside the car and from the perspective of its front bumper. The various radios squawked and muttered at random intervals.

The seat couldn’t recline because of the bulletproof partition immediately behind Caxton’s head to protect the driver and front-seat passenger from anyone in the rear compartment. The car was a workplace, not a bedroom. After trying to relax for fifteen minutes she grabbed handfuls of her hair and pulled, too frustrated to even speak.

Clara glanced over at her. “I know what you need,” she said, and took the next exit. She pulled into the lot of a one story building with white Christmas lights strung up under its eaves. A little tavern, bright, cheery light leaking from all its windows, the muffled sound of a jukebox playing some bad country song lingering in the air around it. They went inside and grabbed a couple of bar stools and Clara ordered them Coronas with extra lime. “There’s no way you’re going to sleep now. You’re wound up as tight as a spring.”

Caxton knew it was true. She didn’t particularly want the beer, though she didn’t refuse it. She wasn’t much of a drinker—she was a morning person, really, and had never managed to close out a bar in her life. Yet with the cold wet bottle in her hand and the taste of the lime on her lips she realized she’d been missing something for a long time, the easy, friendly good humor that comes from sitting in a bar with friendly people around you. She probably hadn’t been in a place like this since she’d met Deanna.

A fifty inch plasma screen sat at the far end of the bar playing a football game.

Caxton didn’t watch much television, either, and the bright light and constant motion kept drawing her eye. She didn’t care whatsoever about football but the bland normalcy of it was kind of nice.

Slowly her shoulders slid down away from her neck. Slowly her posture let up a little and she slumped forward on the bar stool. “This,” she said, “is not so bad.”

“Hey, look,” Clara said, and pointed at the television. The local station had cut away to a news report. It was just ten o’clock. They were leading with video shot out in the woods, with lots of strobing lights and a reporter who kept looking back at the camera with wide eyes and a tightly pursed mouth. Caxton had no idea what was going on until she saw her own face, looking pale and ghostly as it swam up out of darkness to be flooded with video camera lights. “Turn the sound on, will you?”

Clara asked the bartender.

“I don’t remember any cameras,” Caxton said, realizing that she was looking at the scene of the vampire kill. The aftermath, anyway.

“—still haven’t been allowed to see the body, I have to say,” the reporter droned,

“there’s a real sense of secrecy here as if the Marshals Service is covering something up. We have no information on the alleged vampire yet, even twenty-four hours later.

Authorities haven’t even released his name.”

Twenty-four hours? Had it really been only one day? Caxton put a hand over her mouth. On the television screen her emotionless face kept turning away from the light. She had a vague memory of being annoyed by a light, but she hadn’t realized at all that the media were there while she was being debriefed. The fight with the vampire had shocked her so much she must have been in a daze.

“A source in the Pennsylvania State Police gave us an interview this afternoon under condition that we didn’t reveal his identity. He says the alleged vampire was not given any kind of warning or any chance to surrender to authorities. Diane, there’s sure to be a lot more to this story in the coming days.”

“Thanks, Arturo,” the anchorwoman said. She looked calm and unfazed. “Stay tuned for lots more coverage of—”

“That what you wanted to hear?” the bartender asked. When Clara nodded he muted the sound again and switched over to a reality show about lingerie models working in a butcher’s shop.

“Wow, you’re going to be a celebrity, you know that?” Clara asked. “Every news station in the country is going to want an interview.”

“Assuming I survive the next few days,” Caxton said, under her breath.

“What?” Clara asked. When Caxton didn’t reiterate she shook her head. “Wow.

So what was the vampire like?”

“Pale. Big. Toothy,” the trooper answered.

“I was so obsessed with vampires when I was in high school. My friends and I would put on capes and fake fangs and make little movies of us hypnotizing each other with our best sexy looks. Man, I looked pretty good as a vampire.”

“I doubt it,” Caxton said. Clara’s eyebrows went up in what could have turned into real offense. “Don’t get me wrong. I bet you looked great. But not if you looked like a vampire. They’re bald as cue balls, for one thing. And those pointy little fangs?

Believe me, you don’t want to see the reality.”

Clara slapped the bar. “Vampires are, too, sexy,” she announced, her tone jaunty.

“Stop trying to ruin my schoolgirl fantasy! I don’t mind if they’re bald. I say, as long as we’re here in this bar, everything about vampires is sexy. Very, very sexy.”

Caxton smiled in spite of herself. “Oh yeah?” she asked.

“Hells yeah!” She reached over and grabbed Caxton by the bicep. “And big tough vampire hunters are even sexier!” They both laughed. That felt good, that comfortable, friendly laugh. “Don’t you think she’s sexy?” she demanded from the bartender. Her hand lingered on Caxton’s arm. It just sat there, doing nothing objectionable. Clara didn’t even look at her, just sucked at her beer bottle, but she didn’t take her hand away.

“I’d do her,” the bartender said, but he was watching the lingerie models make sausage in a big industrial meat grinder.

“I’ll be right back,” Caxton said, pulling away as she slid off her stool. Clara’s hand moved to the bar. Caxton ran back to the ladies’ room, where she threw some water on her face. Wow, she thought. Wow. The hand on her arm hadn’t just been warm. It had been hot, physically hot. She knew it was just an illusion, but wow. She hadn’t felt like that in a very long time. She missed feeling like that. She missed it a lot.

When she stepped out of the bathroom Clara was standing next to the payphone.

She was smiling from ear to ear and her eyes showed nothing. She was trying to play it cool and be super-aggressive at the same time. Caxton remembered that dance, she even remembered pulling off the same moves. When Clara lowered her eyes and stepped to the left, just as Caxton was stepping to the right, she knew exactly how it felt, the little, trembling fears that multiplied the longer you held back, the big hope you shoved down so it wouldn’t overwhelm you but it kept busting out.

There was even a good song on the jukebox. She couldn’t remember the name of the artist or the title but it was a good song.

She missed that feeling, the butterflies in the stomach, the cold prickles on the back of her neck, she missed it so much that as Clara raised her hands she stepped right into them, closed her eyes as they touched her face, those hot little fingers tracing the smooth line of her jaw. Caxton just had time to exhale before Clara’s soft lips touched hers, moist, soft, exactly the right temperature. She had missed that most of all, those first, exploring kisses. The very first taste of a woman’s lips.

Clara’s mouth started to move and Caxton raised her own hands, not to touch Clara’s face but to gently, ever so gently, break contact.

Clara’s eyes were moist, her mouth a pursed question. “Aren’t you...?” she asked, a whisper.

“I’m in a relationship,” Caxton said. She was sweating under the bandage on her shoulder. “I need to go home. To her.”

Clara nodded and stepped to the right, to let Caxton past. Except Caxton chose the same moment to step left. They nearly collided with each other and it was enough to break the tension. They both sighed out a little shared laugh. Caxton covered the bar tab and they climbed back in the sheriff’s department car. They said very little on the ride to Caxton’s house but a tiny smile played on Clara’s lips the whole time. When she stopped the car out front they sat there for a moment listening to the dogs howl in their kennels. “I love dogs,” Clara said. “What kind?”

“Rescue greyhounds,” Caxton said as if she were admitting to a crime.

Clara’s eyes lit up. “Maybe some time you’ll introduce me to them?”

“Sure—some time, maybe,” Caxton said. She was blushing. Only when she popped open the door and felt the cold air on her cheeks did she realize she’d been blushing all the way home. No wonder Clara had kept smiling at her. “Thanks for the ride, anyway,” she said. “I’ll, uh, see you.”

“Don’t worry,” Clara told her. “I can wait a while to get my cute little fangs in that neck of yours.” She was laughing as she drove off.

Caxton fed the dogs—Deanna had forgotten again, even their water bowls were dry—and headed inside. She stripped in the kitchen and then dashed into the bed, burrowing under the covers before she could get cold. Deanna’s body under the duvet was sharp and angular but she snaked a hand around her lover’s stomach and up to cup one of her breasts. Deanna stirred in her sleep and Caxton started kissing her ear.

“Oh, Pumpkin, not tonight,” Deanna hissed. “You smell all bloody.”

With wounds on her hand and her shoulder Caxton supposed that was fair enough.

She went and sat in the shower for a long time, playing with the spiral pendant Vesta Polder had given her, watching the steam roll and roil around her until she finally, blessedly, began to nod off.

24.

In the morning she played with the dogs for a while. It was so cold outside and the kennels were so well-heated they didn’t want to go out, so she stayed with them and let them dance around her, snapping their teeth at her hair and her face, the way greyhounds showed affection. They were so beautiful, the lines of their bodies so sleek and perfect. Wilbur, who only had three legs but a truly beautiful blue fawn coat, kept curling up in her lap, twisting around and around as if trying to tie himself in a knot before just plopping down on her folded legs. She rubbed him behind his ears and told him he was a good dog. Lola, an Italian greyhound who already had a good home lined up in upstate New York, kept pressing her long nose against the door but whenever Caxton would push it open she would dance backwards from the frosty gust that burst in, snapping at the air with her teeth and rearing up on her hind legs to fight off the wind.

When Deanna found her there, covered in greyhounds, Caxton felt almost human again. Deanna just smirked at her as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She handed Caxton her PDA and disappeared again without a word.

She had a new email from “Hsu_C@lcsd.pa.us”, which she figured had to be Clara. Her hand trembled as she opened it up—what if Deanna had seen it? What if Clara had called instead of emailing, and Deanna had picked up? But she was just being paranoid. For one thing, she’d done nothing wrong. She had stopped Clara before anything real could happen. For another, Clara’s email wasn’t embarrassing at all. It was one of the most professional correspondences she’d ever read and it contained nothing except the sheriff’s department report from Bitumen Hollow.

There wasn’t so much as a cordial salutation.

She actually felt a little let down. Clara coming on to her was a problem, really, but still... it had been so nice. She put that thought out of her mind and studied the report. What she read was cold and clinical and she tried to keep it that way, refusing to feel the horror of the people who had died in the sleepy village the night before. Most of the report was based on the eyewitness testimony of the assistant manager of the Christian bookstore, the one who had hit her with the big cross.

Once he’d calmed down he had turned out to be a pretty good observer. He’d seen the vampires enter the main street of the town, both of them dressed in black overcoats with the collars turned up to hide their mouths. If they’d been trying to pass as human they needn’t have bothered. Everyone in Bitumen Hollow knew everyone else—the two giant vampires (both well over six feet tall) stuck out like torn-off thumbs. Their first to die had been the teenaged girl, Victim #1, Helena Saunders. One of them picked her bodily up off the ground while the other one tore open the sleeve of her coat and bit into her arm, in the words of the survivor, “like you would gnaw on a ear of corn.” From there things just got nasty.

There had been no attempt to defend the town. No one had even fought back though a loaded hunting rifle was found under the counter of the coffeeshop and the woman who ran the post office (Victim #4) had a licensed handgun in her car. No police presence reached the town until it was far too late. It didn’t surprise Caxton too much. A town that small wouldn’t have a police department of its own, instead relying on the local sheriff.

Caxton skimmed through a lot of the report. There had been fourteen victims total and she really didn’t need to know how they all died. Fourteen. It was a much higher number than she’d expected. The two vampires that attacked Bitumen Hollow were pretty fresh. Their need for blood should have been easily quenched—at most they might have required a single victim each. Yet they had completely depopulated the village. Why? She thought about Piter Lares, who had intentionally overfed and stuffed himself full of blood so he could feed his elders, including Justinia Malvern.

The new assailants (the report listed them as Actor #1 and Actor #2, police-speak for the person who “acted” upon the victims) could have been gorging themselves to feed Malvern, but no, they needed four vampires to restore her. Anyway, she was still safely behind stone walls at Arabella Furnace.

As far as she knew.

A cold finger ran down her spine at the thought that the vampires might have attacked the abandoned sanatorium, that even now Malvern might be free, but no, surely Arkeley would have called her to tell her as much.

Unless they had attacked, and Arkeley had been killed.

She fed and watered the dogs and headed back into the house. She didn’t want to jump the gun on a paranoid whim but she had to know. There was no listing for Arabella Furnace State Hospital in the phonebook, and the state police databases she had access to via the internet didn’t even list it. While she dressed she called the Bureau of Prisons to ask for the number but they said any such inquiries had to go through official channels. The man on the other end of the phone wouldn’t even admit that such a place existed, of course.

“Look, the people there could be in danger. I know all about the place, I’ve even been there. It’s like a hospital for just one patient, and she’s a vampire.”

“Calm down, lady,” he said. “Look, we don’t do hospitals. We do prisons.”

She managed not to yell at him somehow. He said he would pass on her message but that wasn’t good enough. Hanging up the phone she stormed into the bedroom.

“Dee?” she yelled. “Dee? I need to borrow your car.”

Deanna was in the living room, lying on the couch watching television, the remote clutched in one arm that spilled down onto the floor and lay half-buried in the shag carpet. “I had one of my dreams about you last night,” she said when Caxton came storming in. “You were tied to a post and Roman soldiers were whipping your naked back. Blood was trickling down your hips in long, red tracks that looked kind of like chocolate syrup. I don’t think you should go anywhere today.”

Caxton made a fist and shoved it into her pocket. She didn’t have time for this. “I really, really need to borrow your car.”

“Why?” she asked. “Maybe I have things to do today.”

“Were you?” Caxton asked. It wasn’t the day Deanna did the shopping. Most days her car sat unused in the driveway. “Look, this is super important. Seriously, or I wouldn’t even ask.”

Deanna shrugged and looked at the TV. “Alright, if you want me to be a prisoner in my own home.”

Caxton was holding her breath, she realized. She blew it out slowly and then inhaled, just as slowly. Deanna’s keys were hanging on a hook in the kitchen, right next to the closet where she kept her pistol. She fetched them both. Outside the air was a little more than crisp. She pulled her uniform jacket around her chest and jumped into Deanna’s little red Mazda. She took off her hat and went to put it on the passenger seat but the remains of a take-out lunch from McDonald’s, including half a hamburger, were spread across the already-stained fabric. The narrow backseat was full of cans of paint and unopened packages of brushes and rollers, even though Deanna hadn’t painted anything in six months. She’d been restricting herself to the untitled project in the shed.

Caxton balanced her hat on top of an open can of paint that had dried to the consistency of hard plastic and hoped for the best. Backing out of the driveway she adjusted the mirrors and in minutes she was on the highway, headed for Arabella Furnace.

On the way she played with the car’s radio, looking for a news report. There was another IED explosion in Iraq and some kind of golf scandal—Caxton didn’t really follow sports and didn’t understand what they were saying. There were no reports of vampire attacks on abandoned tuberculosis rest homes, no bugles playing Taps for a Fed who had died in the course of his duty, but the lack of news failed to reassure her.

By the time she arrived it was well past noon and sprinkling rain. The sun was blinking on the wet leaves that dotted the road and the narrow track that lead to the hospital had gone to mud. The little Mazda nearly got stuck but Caxton had years of training in getting cars through bad patches of road. She pulled up on the lawn below the faceless statue of Health or Hygiene or whatever and was a little bit relieved, but just a little, to see her own patrol car parked on the same stretch of grass. Arkeley had at least come to Arabella Furnace the night before. When he’d indicated he wanted to be alone he must have gone to see Malvern.

It occurred to her that maybe he had taken one look at Bitumen Hollow and known the vampires were gorging themselves, and therefore known they would attack that night. But then why would he have gone alone, and left her behind?

Because he didn’t trust her, of course. Because she’d acted like a wimp when she got stabbed with a shovel. Because she’s said she couldn’t watch him torture a half-dead. He must have decided she was a liability.

The corrections officer at the front desk recognized her but he still made her sign in. When she saw him she knew her worst fears hadn’t come true. The vampires hadn’t successfully freed Malvern.

“What happened here last night?” she asked, laying down the pen on his sign-in sheet.

“Something happened, something big,” he told her, his eyes wide.

“Something? What kind of something?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “I just work days. This place, at night? You’d have to nail my feet to the floor to keep me from running away.”

She wanted to ask him a million more questions but she figured there might be better informants. From memory she tried to find Malvern’s ward, only to get lost and have to circle back. Finally she retraced her steps, took a left instead of a right, and saw the plastic curtain that sealed off the ward. The hospital was immense and most of it was dark—she could easily have gotten lost for hours if she hadn’t been shown the way before.

She pushed through the plastic and into the blue light and there, of course, was Arkeley, sitting patiently in a chair. He looked healthy enough, though his hair was greasy. Presumably he hadn’t showered since she’d seen him last.

Malvern was nowhere to be seen but the lid of her coffin was closed tightly shut.

Caxton went straight to Arkeley. “Are you alright?” she demanded.

“Of course I am, trooper. I’ve been having a lovely chat with my old friend.” He knocked on the lid of the coffin. There was no answer but Caxton assumed Malvern was safely inside. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Caxton nodded. She looked around but didn’t see Hazlitt. Maybe he slept during the day, she decided. “I though—I know it sounds crazy but I had this idea. The vampires that slaughtered everyone in Bitumen Hollow last night were gorging on blood. I thought maybe they were going to attack this place, that they were gathering blood for her. I guess I jumped to a dumb conclusion.”

“Hardly,” he told her. “They did exactly as you suggest. Or at least they tried.”

25.

The previous night, when she was being kissed by a pretty girl in a bar, Arkeley had been fighting for his life. He laid out the story for her quite calmly and without a lot of recrimination. He never once said he wished she’d been there to help.

Arkeley had taken one look at the corpses in Bitumen Hollow and knew that trouble was brewing. He had seen the number of bodies and he knew how many vampires were responsible. He did the math in his head. Remembering the way Lares had fed his ancestors—“Not that I’d ever forgotten it,” he said, with a shudder of distaste—he had realized the vampires were through waiting. The two of them couldn’t hold enough blood to fully revivify her but they could at least get her up and walking under her own power. They would strike that very night—he was certain of it. So he had taken the patrol car and proceeded immediately to Arabella Furnace.

“Without me,” she said, in a partial huff.

“Shall I finish my story, or should we argue?” he asked.

He arrived at the hospital at approximately nine o’clock. He warned the corrections officers on duty about what was coming and then he went into Malvern’s private ward. He found her there significantly decayed from when he’d last seen her, when he cut off her blood supply. She was unable to sit up and was reclining in her coffin. Most of the skin on her skull had worn away and her single eye was dry and irritated. One arm was crossed over her chest. The other hung limply out of the coffin, its talon-like fingers draped across the keyboard of a laptop computer. Arkeley had thought she had simply flung it out in despair but while he watched her index finger trembled and then stabbed down at the “E” key, then fell back as if that slight effort had completely exhausted her.

Hazlitt appeared, his manner suggesting he was unhappy about something. He explained that Malvern was averaging four keystrokes a minute. The doctor allowed Arkeley to view what she had written so far:

a drop lad it is ye sole remedie a drop a drop one onlie

“You’re killing her, Arkeley,” the doctor told the Fed. “I don’t care if she’s already dead. I don’t care if this can go on forever. To me it’s death, or worse.”

“If she wants to live so badly she should stop typing to conserve her energy,”

Arkeley told him. “Maybe you should take that computer away from her.”

Hazlitt looked as if he’d been struck. “It’s the only connection she has to the outside world,” he insisted.

Arkeley dismissed the argument with a shrug. He sent the doctor home at ten o’clock PM, although Hazlitt had indicated he wished to stay with his patient.

Arkeley assured the him that he would keep her safe through the night.

Alone with her, the only distraction the very sporadic click of her withered nail on the keyboard, Arkeley drew his weapon and placed it on a heart monitor outside of Malvern’s reach. He did not, in fact, get a chance to use it.

The vampires, the remaining two members of Malvern’s brood, came to him around two in the morning. Their cheeks were pink and their bodies radiated palpable heat. They appeared without a sound, one from the main entry to the ward, the other rising up out of the blue-edged shadows of the room. Arkeley had not seen him come in, even though he’d been expecting them.

One of them tried to hypnotize the Special Deputy. The other moved fast as lightning across the room, his hands out to grab Arkeley’s shoulders, his mouth wide to bite off his head. Both of them stopped in mid-attack when they saw what Arkeley held in his hand.

This was, after all, the man who always wore a seatbelt and never kept a spare round in the chamber. He was prepared for them. Before they arrived he had taken certain precautions using surgical instruments that were readily available in the ward.

With a bonesaw and a pair of pliers he had removed part of Malvern’s ribcage. A young healthy vampire could repair that kind of damage almost instantly but Malvern was starved of blood and far too old to even feel what he was doing. His amateur surgery had revealed Malvern’s heart, a cold lump of black muscle that felt like a charcoal briquette in his hand.

When the two male vampires came at him, he gave her heart a little squeeze. It started to crumble under the slightest pressure. As weak as she was she found the energy to crane her head back, her toothy mouth yawning open in a voiceless scream.

The vampires froze in place. They could see what was happening. They looked at each other as if communing silently about what to do next.

“I’m going to present you with a few options,” Arkeley told them. He refused to make eye contact with either one—though he believed himself to be able to resist their wills he didn’t want to find out the hard away. “You can kill me. Either of you could do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, my last spasm of life would travel down my arm and I would crush this heart into oblivion. You can stand there all night waiting for my arm to get tired, but you only have four hours before the sun comes up. How far are you from your coffins?”

They didn’t answer. They stood there, their red eyes watching him, and waited to hear a third option.

“You can just leave now,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “That way everybody survives.”

“And why should we trust you, who have already harmed us?” one of them asked. His voice was rough and thick with the blood that surged in his throat.

“You who slaughtered our brother,” the other said, biting his words into the air.

“You could destroy her the moment we step away.”

“If I kill her I’ll have to face trial as a murderer. I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.” Arkeley started to shrug but the gesture would have moved his hand and pulled Malvern’s heart right out of her chest. The moment that happened there would be no reason in the world for the vampires to let him live. “If I’m going to die tonight, though, I’m going to take her with me.”

The vampires disappeared without another word, leaving as quickly as they had come. They must have believed him.

When he was sure they were gone Arkeley had made the rounds of the guards in the hospital. They had done as he had told them. The vampires had no need for blood—they were replete with it—and when the corrections officers gave them no resistance they had walked right past. Nobody in the abandoned hospital had been harmed in the slightest.

When Arkeley returned to the private ward he found that Malvern had typed a new line on her computer:

boys my boys take him

Luckily for Arkeley her brood hadn’t gotten the command until it was too late.

“You,” Caxton said, when he’d finished his story, “haven’t got any blood in your whole body. Just ice water.”

“I’m glad you think so. While they were standing there I was sure my hand was going to cramp up.” He smiled, not his condescending smile, not the smile he showed his partner’s girlfriends. Just a normal human smile. It looked out of place on him but not entirely repellent. “Eventually the sun came up. She pulled in her arm and I put the lid on her coffin. And now here we are.”

“You should have brought me along. We could have fought them together,”

Caxton insisted.

“Not like that. They were so full of blood a bazooka couldn’t have made a dent in them. There’s a reason they always feed before they fight. There’s an upside to this, however. They were bringing that blood for her, to regurgitate it all over her just like Lares did that night on the boat. Now they’ll have to digest it on their own. It’ll make them strong but it’ll slow them down, too. Tonight, and maybe tomorrow night as well, they won’t want to feed at all.”

“So you didn’t invite me along because you thought I would be a liability. You thought I would screw up your plan.”

“I thought,” he told her, “that you would get hurt. Do we have to do this now? I haven’t slept all night. Do we have to do it at all?”

Caxton seethed but she knew better than to argue with him at that moment. “Fine.

You’re done with me, that’s fine. I’ll go home to my dogs, then.”

He shook his head. “No. We’re changing your duties but you’re still on the team.

You can coordinate the detective work, find me some names and street addresses for Malvern’s boys. There will always be something for you to do.”

“Gee, thanks,” she spat.

“Don’t be like that. Almost nobody has what it takes to fight vampires, Caxton.

You gave it your best. Just because that wasn’t enough is no reason to feel bad about yourself. Hey.” He glanced away from her, instead looking down at the coffin.

He looked back at her and raised his eyebrows. “Want a peek?”

26.

Caxton glanced at the closed coffin. “I don’t—” she said, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t even sure what she was rejecting. Did she even want to stay on the case? Did she want to know another single thing about vampires, about evil and how nasty the world could really be?

Arkeley smiled. “It’s like seeing a caterpillar turning into a moth. It’s somewhat foul, but fascinating if you have the stomach for it.”

She was ready to say no. She was going to say no, and turn away.

“Every morning she goes through this, transforming totally like a larva in a chrysalis. Her body has to change so it can repair all the damage she took the night before.” He lifted up the lid. A weird animal smell came out, hot and musky but weird, too, unnatural. It made her think of the way the dog kennels smelled when the dogs were sick. “This is what immortality means.”

No. She just had to say no and he would put the lid back down. She was done with this case, with vampires. If he wanted her working a desk that was fine.

She stepped closer to the coffin. He threw the lid back and she looked down.

Malvern’s bones lay askew on the upholstery. Her enormous lower jaw had fallen away from the upper part of the skull. Her heart, which looked like a rotten plum, lay inside her ribcage, unattached to anything else. All the rest of her flesh had been reduced to a mucilaginous soup that stained the silk lining of the coffin, a gloppy mass that covered her pelvis and part of her spine. Pools of its lingered in the corners of the coffin and filled one of her eye sockets. Flecks of what looked like charred skin hung submerged in the fluid while tiny curved things like fingernail clippings clustered at the center of the mess. The smell was very, very strong, almost overpowering. Caxton leaned forward a little and studied the fingernail clippings. She could just make out little hooks protruding from one end, and the rings that segmented their tiny bodies.

“Maggots,” she gasped. Her face was inches from a maggot mass. Rearing up she nearly screamed. Now she could see them for what they were it was impossible to pretend they were something else. Her skin crawled, writhed away from the coffin.

Her lips retracted in a grimace of horror.

“One of evolution’s greatest wonders,” he told her. He looked completely serious. “If you can see past your own prejudices, anyway. They eat the dead and pass the living by. Their mouths are designed so that they can only survive on food of a certain viscosity. They are so adept at working together to break down necrotic tissue that they literally share a common digestive system. Isn’t that astounding?”

“Jesus Christ, Arkeley,” she said, bile touching the back of her tongue. “You’ve made your point. Cover her up, please.”

“But there’s so much you haven’t seen yet. Don’t you want to watch her come back to life when the sun goes down? Don’t you want to see her tissues recompose, her eyeball inflate, her heart reattach?”

“Just close it,” she breathed. She hugged her stomach but that just made it worse.

She tried very hard to breathe calmly. “That smell.”

“It’s wrong, isn’t it? That’s not how natural things smell.” She heard the coffin lid scrape closed behind her back. It helped, a little. “The maggots don’t seem to mind but dogs will howl if they smell her and cows will stop giving milk if she passes them by. People notice eventually, if they're near her long enough. Something feels wrong about her, something’s just not right. Of course by then she’ll already have ripped one of the big veins out of your arm so she can gulp down all the blood in your body.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she demanded. “It makes you feel good to put the little girl in her place.” Caxton stalked to the far corner of the room, as far as she could get from the coffin. “It must make you feel so tough in comparison.”

He sighed, a long, elaborate sigh. It made her turn around. There was no joy in his face. No desire to hurt her, she could tell. Just weariness.

“You were grooming me to be your replacement. Someone to keep fighting vampires after you’re gone.”

He shook his head. “No, trooper, no. I never even considered you a candidate. I won’t bullshit you. I owe you at least that much since you’ve been honest with me.”

She nodded heavily. There was no way she could win the argument. It was like when she used to fight with her father. He was a good man, too, but the rule was that in his house he was always right. It had been harder to remember that when she was a teenager.

Jesus, she thought, why was she thinking about her dad so much lately? Ever since the vampire, the now dead vampire, had hypnotized her she’d been thinking about him a lot. And she’d told Vesta Polder about her mom. It had taken her months to talk to Deanna about her dead parents. Arkeley had dredged all that up to the surface in record time.

Enough. It was over. When she’d seen the first vampire die she had thought that but now it was actually true. “I've got something you should see, too,” she said, and he looked at her expectantly. The argument hadn’t bothered him at all, because he knew that it was his investigation and that made him right. Fine, whatever, okay, she thought, knowing she would blow up later when he wasn’t around. She took out her PDA and scrolled to Clara’s email. She opened up two of the picture attachments and displayed them side by side. “A survivor in Bitumen Hollow gave us these,” she said. “There are a couple of interesting things.”

He bent close to look at the pictures on the small screen. She’d studied them already and she knew what he would see. The pictures had been assembled from a Virtual Identikit, mix-and-match software that let the sheriff’s department create full-color composite sketches of Actor #1 and #2. Like all such images they weren’t exact and they looked blocky and weird, more like pictures of Frankenstein’s monster than vampires. The skin tone was all wrong because the Identikit didn’t have an option for deathly pale, nor did it have red eyes (a kind of rich, warm brown was the best it could do) and it certainly had nothing like a vampire’s jaw line and teeth.

Yet the images struck a chord with Arkeley right away. “Yes. This is them,” he said, looking up at her. “This is good. It’s useful.”

Caxton nodded. “I thought so too. And look, we even have an identifying mark for one of them.” The Identikit artist had sketched in the long triangular ears of Actor

#2. The survivor had insisted, however, that Actor #1 had normal human ears but they were discolored on top, almost black. “His ears are different.”

“Because he tears them off daily,” Arkeley agreed.

“He what?”

The Fed picked up the PDA and brought it very close to his face. “The ears are a dead giveaway. Some vampires, young vampires, will try to hide them, to make themselves look more human. Lares did it for camouflage. I’ve read of others who did it out of self-loathing. They wanted to look human again. They'll wear wigs and blue contact lenses and even put rouge on their cheeks and noses to look more like us.”

“But every day… this guy tears his own ears off every day?”

Arkeley shrugged. “Every night. At dusk, when he wakes, he’ll find they’ve grown back.”

That just made Caxton think about the maggot mass in the coffin. “Some of them must hate themselves. They must hate themselves and what they have to do.”

“No one knows. The movies suggest they have deep and brooding inner lives, but I don’t buy it. I think they sit around all night thinking about blood. About how good it tastes and how bad they feel when they don’t get it. About how to get more without being found and executed. And about how long it will be before they stop caring about being found.”

Caxton felt as if she were standing in a cold spot. She held herself close. “Like junkies,” she said. Before she’d dropped out she’d known some girls in college who did heroin. They were individual people with thoughts and feelings before they started using the drug. Afterwards they were interchangeable, their personalities completely submerged under their need. “Like junkies who can’t quit their habit.”

“There’s a difference,” he told her. “Junkies eventually die.”

27.

“Something happened here last night, didn’t it? Something that could have been bad,” sergeant Tucker said, staring across his desk at them. The last time Caxton had seen him he’d had his feet up on the desk and he’d been watching television.

Now he was leaning forward, his eyes scanning the hallways that lead off in four directions from his station. “We had twenty-three COs on duty last night but I can’t get a straight answer out of everyone. One guy sees shadows moving around like his room was full of candles and they were flickering and shit. Another guy definitely saw a vampire walking across the lawn, pale skin, lots of teeth, bald as an egg, but he had orders not to even tell the asshole to halt.”

“That was my order,” Arkeley confirmed.

Tucker nodded. “And then at two-fourteen in the AM, the temperature in the hospital wing dropped by seven degrees. I got a recording right here on my computer. It was sixty-two, then it was fifty-five. By half past two it was back up to sixty. I’ve got video footage of something pale and blurry running across the pool room so fast I can’t even get image enhancement to work.” Tucker’s eyes narrowed.

“If you hadn’t been here, if it had just been my men—”

“I was here. The situation was under control the whole time.”

Tucker studied Arkeley’s face for a long time, then looked away and scratched at his close-cropped hair. “Yeah, alright. What can I do for you now?”

Caxton handed over her PDA and Tucker stared at the pictures on the small screen. “These are the vampires who were here last night,” Arkeley explained. “I need to know if they resemble any of the people on my list.”

Tucker tapped at his keyboard. “Right, the list of all the people who worked here in the last two years. I can’t say I recognize either of them but let’s look.” He swiveled his monitor around so they could see. The names from the list came up on the screen and he clicked each one to show them a picture.

“This is a pretty sophisticated database,” Caxton marveled.

Tucker pursed his lips and clicked through the names, one by one. “It has to be. I don’t know what this place looks like to you, but to me, it’s a corrections facility. I run it like I would any prison—which means I keep very close tabs on who goes in and out.”

“There,” Arkeley said, pointing at the screen. “Stop and go back a few.”

Tucker did so and soon they were all staring at a picture of one Efrain Zacapa Reyes, an electrician with the Bureau of Prisons who had come through Arabella Furnace the previous year. “I remember this guy, a little. He came in to replace some fluorescents and to set up the blue lights Hazlitt wanted in the hospital wing.”

A chill ran down Caxton’s spine.

Arkeley frowned. “So he would have been close enough to communicate with her. Close enough for her to pass on the curse.”

Caxton started to ask a question but then she remembered something. She wasn’t really on the case any more. She could help Arkeley out in whatever capacity he chose for her but her thoughts and opinions were no longer welcome. She felt a weird pang of loss, weird because it was very similar to how she felt when Clara had kissed her. Like she could see something, some whole new and exciting aspect of life, only to know she would never be allowed to explore the implications.

“I’ll admit there’s a similarity but this ain’t your guy,” Tucker said, startling her back to attention.

“And why is that?” Arkeley asked.

“Well, he was only on the hospital wing maybe like an hour. All he did was screw in some light bulbs, and I had three COs in there with him while he was doing it. If he tried anything they would have beaten him down on the spot—we do not fuck around at Arabella Furnace. Nobody mentioned anybody swapping blood or spit or anything wet.”

Arkeley nodded but he clearly hadn’t written off Reyes as a suspect. Caxton stared at the two pictures, the one on her PDA, the one on the screen. There was a distinct resemblance in the forehead and nose between one of the vampires and the electrician. There was one major difference, though.

“He’s Latin,” Caxton said. The picture on the computer screen showed Reyes as having skin the color of ripe walnut shells. The vampire, of course, was snowy white.

“Others,” Arkeley intoned, “have made that mistake many times before. Others who are now dead. When the vampire rises from the grave his skin loses all of its pigment. It doesn’t matter if they were Black, Japanese or Eskimo beforehand, they end up white. You saw for yourself,” he said to Caxton, “vampires aren’t just Caucasian. They’re albino. This,” he said, tapping the computer screen, “is one of our men.”

Tucker wasted no time printing off Reyes’ vital statistics. Caxton ran to the printer to gather up the sheets of printout.

“Tell me his LKA,” Arkeley said, referring to his Last Known Address. “We flushed them out of the hunting camp—they’ll need a new hiding place and most likely they’ll turn to a place where they feel comfortable.

She found the datum easily enough but shook her head. “It’s an apartment building in Villanova. They won’t want that, will they? Too much activity, too much chance of being noticed when they go in and out.”

Arkeley nodded. “They prefer ruins and farms.”

“Then there’s nothing here. Reyes lived in the same building for years, at least since 2001. Listen, let me try a cold call and see if I turn something up.”

Maybe—maybe if she could turn up some useful information then Arkeley wouldn’t consider her such a failure. She cursed herself for using his opinion to define her self-esteem. What stupider thing could she possibly do? Still. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed the emergency contact number, which was also the number of the building manager for the apartment building. When she’d established she was a police officer the manager was more than willing to talk to her.

She got what details she could and hung up.

“So?” Arkeley asked.

“Efrain Reyes was a nice guy, kept pretty much to himself, no wife or girlfriend, no family or at least no family that ever visited. The building manager thought maybe he was an illegal immigrant but had no proof of that.”

“He would at least need a green card to get in here,” Tucker clarified.

Caxton nodded. “The man I spoke to liked Reyes a lot, because Reyes fixed a problem with the building’s circuit breakers a couple of years ago for no charge. He was informed by the local police that Efrain Reyes died seven months ago in an accident at his workplace. He says he wanted to attend the funeral but was told that because no one claimed the body it had been given a quick burial at the State’s expense in the potter’s field in Philadelphia. He’s holding Reyes’ few personal effects in a box—he says there’s nothing unusual among them, just some clothes and toiletries. The apartment was furnished and Reyes doesn’t seem to have added anything to it.”

“He sounds like a ghost, not a vampire,” Tucker suggested.

Caxton shrugged. “From what I heard he sounded like a severe depressive.

Apparently the only thing he ever complained about was being tired, but the building manager suggested he missed more than a few days of work, especially in the winter.

Judging by the mail he got he read a lot of men’s magazines— Playboy, FHM, Maxim—but never went on a date or anything more social than a movie.”

Arkeley nodded as if was all starting to make sense. “A virtual non-entity that no one really missed when he was gone. Tell me how he died.”

“Industrial accident. He touched a live wire or something and died of cardiac arrest before the ambulance could even arrive. That’s what the building manager told me.” She studied the printout in her hand. “He worked at an electrical substation outside of Kennett Square.” She checked the printout again. “Let me make another call.”

Arkeley stood stock still while she called the substation’s offices. Tucker started a game of computer solitaire—then had to close it out when she hung up her phone after less than a minute. “You’re going to love this,” she said.

Arkeley’s eyebrows inched up toward his hairline.

“He wasn’t working at a substation. He was helping to dismantle it. The substation was a hundred years old and they were closing it down. Most of the buildings onsite are still standing but they’ve been permasealed. Which means all the windows are going to be covered with plywood and the doors padlocked.”

“A vampire could tear a padlock off with his bare hands,” Arkeley said. His face started to crease in a very wide smile.

“You said they liked ruins. Should we get on the road? We don’t have too much daylight left but we could at least scope the place out, and maybe get an order of exhumation for Reyes’ grave.

The smile on Arkeley’s face stopped short. “We?” he asked Caxton was about to reply when her phone rang again. She expected it was the building manager with a detail he’d just remembered but it wasn’t—the call was coming from State Police headquarters, from the Commissioner’s office. “Trooper Laura Caxton,” she answered, placing the phone to her ear. When the Commissioner’s assistant had finished relaying his message she hung up once more.

“We’ve been instructed to come to Harrisburg immediately.”

“We?” Arkeley asked again.

“We, you and me. The Commissioner wants us, and he says it’s urgent.”

28.

The Commissioner stood in his doorway when they arrived—never a good sign. It meant he was looking forward to having them at his mercy. They filed into his office and sat down across from his desk. The air in the room felt hot and becalmed and Caxton wished she could undo the top button of her uniform shirt, loosen her tie, but she knew it wouldn’t be allowed. There was a dress code to maintain. Arkeley just sat down in his awkward fashion, his fused vertebrae making it impossible for him to sit comfortably. He did his best at appearing as if this were just a routine meeting, perhaps a chance to prepare a new strategy. While Caxton stewed in uncomfortable silence the Commissioner busied himself at the front of the desk for a while, saying nothing, working with paper and tape.

When he was done five letter-sized color laser prints hung down from the edge of the desk. Portraits of state troopers, probably taken the day they graduated from the academy. They wore their hats with the chinstraps actually under their chins (by the next day, Caxton knew, they would learn to wear the strap across the backs of their heads) and looked out of the paper and over her shoulder as if toward some bright tomorrow.

“Would you like to know their names?” the Commissioner asked when they’d had time to look at the portraits. “There’s Eric Strauss. And Shane Herkimer. And Philip Toynbee. And—”

“I resent your implication,” Arkeley said. As evenly and dispassionately as he said anything. His left hand gripped the desk and he leaned forward to stare right into the Commissioner’s eyes.

“I haven’t even begun to imply,” the Commissioner fired back. He leaned forward in his chair and grasped either branch of a pair of antlers that had been turned into a pen and pencil set. “These five men died two nights ago. They were Troop H and they responded to a call for backup. Their deaths are inexcusable—five men lost to bring down one bad guy? These were well-trained troopers. They would have known how to handle themselves in a hazardous situation. That is, if they knew what to expect. They were not given sufficient information and they died because no one told them they were facing off against a vampire.”

Caxton was confused. She knew it wasn’t her place to speak out—the two men expected her to remain silent throughout this interview—but she couldn’t help it.

“We didn’t know either, when we called for them,” Caxton tried, but Arkeley held up one hand to quiet her. He looked at the other man as if he was ready to hear what came next.

The Commissioner made a low sound in his throat. “And let us not forget the two troopers and the local policeman who died watching the hunting camp. They died because they were sitting on a porch.”

Caxton shook her head. She wouldn’t speak, not after Arkeley warned her off, but she had to make some gesture of her incomprehension.

“I sent my two best trackers down to that camp,” the Commissioner said, looking at her as if he wanted to see her reaction. “They were Bureau of Investigations hotshots, top marks at the academy, life-long hunters, mountain boys—these two have bow-hunted for bear and come out on top. They set up shop in a hand-made blind a hundred yards from the camp and they waited to see if anybody was coming back to the scene of the crime. At least, that was the plan until your man Arkeley here called them and told them they were perfectly safe and they could sit on the porch, out in the open, where anyone could see them. Now they’re dead.”

She glanced across at Arkeley. He only nodded. He must have made the phone call while she was sitting with Vesta Polder. But why? What had made him think the porch was a safe place for the troopers? He must have at least suspected that the half-deads were coming back.

“I have their pictures here, too,” the Commissioner said, shuffling some papers on his desk. “Want to see?”

Arkeley stirred in his chair and cleared his throat before speaking. “I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at, but I do know what you’re missing. The thing you don’t understand, Colonel, is that we are not fighting gang-bangers, or terrorists, or drug dealers. We are fighting vampires.”

The Commissioner sputtered, “I think I know—”

Arkeley cut him off. “In the dark ages a vampire could live for decades unopposed, feeding nightly on people whose only defense was to bar their windows and lock their doors and always, always, be home before sundown. When it became necessary to slay a vampire there was only one way it could be done. There were no guns and certainly no jackhammers at the time. The vampire slayers would gather up every able-bodied male in the community. The mob of them would go against the vampire with torches and spears and sticks if they had to. Very many of them would die in the first onslaught but eventually enough of them would pile on top to hold the vampire down.” He paused and raised one finger in the air. “Let me be clear about this, they quite literally climbed on top of the vampire to keep him from running away, pressing their own bodies against his, exposing themselves to his toothy maw by necessity. Those who made it this far would usually die as the vampire struggled to get free. Often enough the vampire would get free and the process would start over. Eventually our forefathers would prevail, but only through sheer dint of numbers. The men—and the boys—in those mobs did not shirk from their duty.

They understood their terrible, grievous losses were the only way to protect their villages and their families.”

Fuming, the Commissioner stood up from his desk and came around to the front, so close to Caxton that she had to move her knees to let him pass. “I’ll use that story when I speak at the combined funeral next week. The families will be comforted, I’m sure. It will help them understand why their children had to be cremated before they were even allowed to say goodbye. It will help them understand why you felt it necessary to throw their babies to the wolves.”

Arkeley rose as if he would leave.

“We’ll finish this right now, right here,” the Commissioner told him.

Arkeley was taller. It let him look down his nose when he said, “You have no authority over me whatsoever.” He actually turned to go.

“Stop, Marshal,” the Commissioner said.

Arkeley did as he was told, though he didn’t turn to face the other man. The line of his back moved gently as he breathed. He didn’t look like a man with fused vertebrae. He looked like somebody who ought to be holding a broadsword in one hand and a flag in the other. In the hot, close space of the office his body seemed enormous and powerful. He looked like a man who could fight vampires. Caxton wondered if she, herself, would ever come close to that kind of presence and confidence.

“I have authority over her,” the Commissioner said. It made Arkeley turn back around. “I’m taking trooper Caxton off this case right now. You want to try to fight me? I’ll suspend her for using unauthorized ammunition in her weapon. Ha. I think I got you right there.”

Arkeley stood in total silence looking down at the other man. Caxton just did not understand what was happening. She was a nothing, a nobody, somebody barely fit to make phone calls for the Fed. The two men were acting though as if she were a bargaining chip. What did the Commissioner know, or at least, what did he suspect about Arkeley’s motivations that was still such a mystery to her?

“You want her pretty bad, don’t you? I saw it the last time you and I met, when you snatched her right up. I offered you ex-marines and special investigations boys but you wanted one little slip of a girl from highway patrol.” The Commissioner’s smile was a gouge in the middle of his bright red face. “She’s special. She’s special for some reason and you need her.”

Arkeley waited for him to finish. Then he cleared his throat, glanced at Caxton (the look was inscrutable), and sat back down. “What are you asking me for, really?” he said, finally. “Please, just spit it out. I’m a busy man.”

“I want to protect my troopers,” the Commissioner said. His attitude changed immeasurably—he had won, and he knew it. He sat down on the corner of his desk.

He and Arkeley might have been two old friends working out who was going to pay for lunch. “That’s all. I want you to let me do my job. There will be certain safeguards for anyone involved in this investigation, alright? There are two more vampire kills to be completed, but we are not going to lose any more personnel. This will be done by the book, by our best practices. My best practices. I will not let you use my boys as live bait anymore.”

Caxton’s mouth fell open.

“The survivors told me all about you, Arkeley. I’ve already called your supervisors over in Washington. They were very interested in hearing about how you just let my boys die, one after the other, biding your time, hiding in the shadows. My troopers had no idea what they were up against and you didn’t seem to care. In twenty-some years of law enforcement work I have never heard of such—”

“Done,” Arkeley said.

“I—you—wait. What do you mean?” the Commissioner stumbled.

“I mean that I agree to your conditions. The rest of it, all this nonsense about using state troopers as bait, the threat of calling my superiors, is immaterial. I really don’t care what you think happened the last two nights. I was there and you weren’t.

However, if you’re going to hold trooper Caxton hostage then I am acceding to your demands.”

Caxton’s brain reeled in the heat of the office. “This is about me?” she asked.

Apparently it was.

29.

Arkeley rose again, and this time he was going to leave. Caxton could just feel it.

“Any questions?” he asked.

The Commissioner nodded. “Oh yeah. I want to know what you’re doing every step of the way. I’ve got so many questions you’re going to feel like directory assistance from now on.”

Arkeley smiled, his most gruesome, face-folding smile. The one he used when he wanted someone to feel small. “Well, sir, I intend to raid a vampire lair tomorrow morning at dawn. That’s my next step. I’ll need some support on the ground and your troopers are my best resource for that. Take whatever safety measure you think are appropriate—gas masks, kevlar vests, whatever, but have them ready and mustered at the station nearest Kennett Square by four thirty tomorrow morning.

Trooper Caxton need not be among them.” He turned to look at her and gave her a new kind of smile. This one looked a little melancholy. “You, young lady, can sleep in. You’ve been enough help locating Reyes’ hiding place.”

She had the presence of mind to nod and shake his hand. He left without saying goodbye or anything else—well, she had expected that. But there was still one thing she needed from him, something she had to know.

The Commissioner gave her the rest of the day off. She started by racing down to the motor pool to catch Arkeley before he could leave. She needed to know the answer to a question she couldn’t have asked in the over-heated office. In the parking lot Arkeley was signing for an unmarked patrol car of his own so he wouldn’t have to rely on her vehicle. He looked mildly peeved to see her but at least he didn’t drive off while she just stood there.

“I have a right to know,” she told him. “In the Commissioner’s office you just gave up as soon as he tried to take me off the case. You’re a tough guy but you caved over me.” She tried to push a little self-esteem into what she said next, but it still came out sounding as if she doubted her own worth as a human being. “What is it about me that’s so important? Why can’t you afford to lose me?”

Originally she’d been convinced by his story, that because she had actually read his report she was the best prepared to fight vampires. Later she’d thought maybe he was grooming her as a replacement. When he took her to the Polders she’d honestly believed he wanted to keep her alive, that he was actually worried about her safety—but then after her failure at the hunting camp he’d been willing to write her off. She didn’t understand any of it, she didn’t understand why he valued her or why he disregarded her so easily. Why he tried to physically protect her or why he didn’t seem to care if she got hurt emotionally.

“The night I took over this case,” he said, his face neutral. “The night we met, a half-dead followed you home.”

She didn’t understand what that had meant, either. “I remember,” she said.

“You were on this case before I was. You’re part of the case. The vampires know you and they want something from you. I’d be a fool to let you out of my sight.”

She remembered what he’d said about Hazlitt. If someone was determined to be your enemy you gave them exactly what they want. The vampires wanted her. They were out to consume her, one way or another. So he would dangle her before their toothy mouths just so he could get close enough to jump down their throats himself.

“That’s… it?” she asked. Her heart sank in her chest. All the time she’d spent trying to prove herself, to impress him, was wasted. All that time and effort was wasted.

“That’s it,” he told her. He opened the door of his car and climbed inside. She let him go.

She was vampire bait. And that was all that she was.

She watched him drive away. She had no idea where he was headed. Perhaps he wanted to check out the substation near Kennett Square by himself, or maybe he wanted to exhume Efrain Reyes. Maybe he just didn’t want to be around her, maybe he was afraid she would be angry.

She was, of course. And confused. And sad. And afraid. And just a little bit relieved.

Relieved because she had finally found how she fit into the vampire investigation.

Because now she knew exactly where she stood with Arkeley.

She collected her own car and drove in the general direction of home, her over-worked brain a little assuaged by the sound of her wheels hissing on the asphalt and the rising and falling roar of the engine. She rubbed at her eyes and blinked a lot as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She didn’t even know why she expected to. Of all the emotions struggling inside of her none stood out so strongly as to require such an over-reaction.

Hunger blossomed inside of her and she knew it had to be bad if it could compete with all her other concerns. She pulled over at a place in Reading where they made good cheese steaks and ordered one “wit wiz,” which meant she wanted onions and Cheese Wiz, the traditional condiments. She sat down in a little booth with her steak and a diet Coke and chewed resolutely on the sandwich. It was good but her mind kept wandering and her tongue stopped tasting anything. She was half done with her meal before she stopped to think about the real issue, the thing that should have consumed her with panic and really made her cry.

The vampires wanted her for something. Something specific, something specific to her life. The half-dead who followed her home the first night had been sent on a mission. But what mission? Just to scare her? In that case it had been successful.

But she couldn’t imagine the vampires would waste time just on giving her a shock.

Her mind cast backward, a little desperately, looking for anything in her life that might explain the vampiric interest. She thought of previous cases she’d worked on, but nothing stood out. She worked highway patrol—how could that mean anything to Malvern and her brood? She tried to remember the car wrecks she’d seen, tried to draw some kind of connection but nothing came to her. She’d sent some people to prison, in her time, for driving under the influence, for possession of drugs. She had caught them, arrested them, testified against them in court. The perpetrators had been sad, broken people, though, people who needed to drink or inject methamphetamines more than they needed to stay out of jail. None of them had really put up much of a fight and they could never look her in the eye when they went to trial. How could a few drunk businessmen and stoned teenagers possibly matter to Justinia Malvern?

Caxton thought it must be something personal, then. But what? She wasn’t the kind of person who made a lot of enemies. She didn’t have a lot of friends, either—and that made her think of Efrain Reyes. A non-entity, Arkeley had called him. Someone with no real life. Someone no one would miss when he died. Caxton had a life, of sorts, but there were holes in it. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. She had a few friends in the Troop, but they rarely hung out together any more. The beer she’d shared with Clara Hsu had been the first time she’d been in a bar in months. Clara—Clara would wonder what had happened to her if she disappeared, but not for long. Deanna would be devastated, mentally destroyed, but the only real change in Deanna’s life post-Caxton would be she would have to go back to living with her alcoholic mother. If the one person who defined your life you had no life herself, what did that say about you? She had the dogs, who would miss her very much, but Caxton didn’t suppose dogs counted.

Malvern had been looking for a fourth candidate, someone she could add to her brood. Every cell in Caxton’s body squirmed at the same time. She stared down at the mess of grease and gristle on her plate and felt bile frothing in her throat. Was Malvern—could Malvern—turn her into a vampire?

She got back in her car and rushed home. She needed to get inside and be safe for a while. She would definitely sleep in the next morning, she decided, and let other, more qualified people raid the substation.

She knew the road back to her house like the lines on her palm. She could drive the route half-asleep, and often did. Yet as she approached her own driveway she felt suddenly as if she’d never seen the place before. As if she were no longer welcome in her own house. Unnatural, Arkeley kept saying. Vampires were abominations against nature. Was this how that felt? To be around life and warmth and comfort and feel like you were visiting some alien world?

She started to pull into the driveway and stopped short because she’d heard something. A crash, a bright melody of glass breaking as if a window had been knocked in. She unholstered her weapon and slowly, taking every possible precaution, stepped down into the grass of her lawn. She couldn’t see anything from the front of the house so she edged around the side, toward the kennels and Deanna’s shed.

Shards of broken window pane littered the side yard, long triangular pieces leaning up against the side of the house. Someone wearing a hooded sweatshirt, maybe a teenaged boy, was standing next to the shattered window, his hands resting on the empty frame. He looked as if he were talking to someone inside the house.

“Freeze,” she barked in her best cop voice.

The boy turned to look at her. Flesh hung in tatters on his face. He was a half-dead. She discharged her weapon without even thinking too hard and the half-dead’s fragile body split apart in pieces. The chunks slumped to the ground.

The stink coming off of him made her eyes water. She stepped closer anyway, intending to search his pockets, when she finally had a chance to look in through the window.

Deanna stood there naked from the waist up, her outstretched hands, her lower face, her bare chest all covered in bright red blood.

30.

“Jesus, Dee, Jesus, what did he do to you?” Caxton sobbed. She wiped at Deanna’s face with a wet washcloth and found a three-inch-long wound along the edge of her chin. It was going to need stitches but that assumed she could get Deanna to a hospital before she bled to death. Caxton picked the larger shivers of glass out of the cut but that just made it bleed more. She pulled open the drawer where they kept their scissors and their twine and found a roll of thick masking tape. Lacking any better ideas she stretched a length of it across the cut and pressed down.

Deanna howled with pain. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut and her knees were up against her chest where she lay on the kitchen floor. Her hands were wrapped up in an old t-shirt that was already soaking through with blood. She had wounds all over the front of her body as well, tiny cuts and big lacerations. Caxton had called 911 and they were sending an ambulance but the blood kept flowing and flowing.

“What did he do to you?” Caxton asked again, smearing blood on her own face as she tried to wipe away her tears. If the ambulance didn’t come soon she would lose Deanna, just like she’d lost her mother. It was more than she could bear, especially with everything else that was happening. “What did he do?”

“Who?” Deanna wailed. She had been hypnotized, or perhaps just in shock, when Caxton found her but now she was recovering herself and the pain came too. Caxton shushed her and stroked her red hair but the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. She didn’t know what to do, how to save Deanna. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to scream herself. “Who?” Deanna asked again.

“The half-dead, the thing in the window,” Caxton gasped.

“There was nobody—” Deanna paused to scream for a while. “Nobody here.

Nobody but me and I—I couldn’t seem to wake up, I was having a dream and I couldn’t, I couldn’t—” She screamed again and Caxton picked her up and held her close. She was crying so hard she couldn’t see where the blood was and what was clean. “I dreamt you were being crushed under this, this, this heavy stone and your insides were squirting out, all of your blood. I woke up but only half way, I kept seeing your body torn apart, in pieces, I kept seeing it when I closed my eyes.”

“Shhh,” Caxton said, and held Deanna closer. Then she worried that if she put pressure on Deanna’s wounds they might re-open. She loosened her grip.

“I came in here,” Deanna whined, “into the kitchen because I heard something cracking, some glass, some glass was cracking. I went to the window and there was a crack running from the top to the side and there was a drop of blood rolling down from the crack. I couldn’t stand to see that so I tried to mop up the blood with my hand, but then more blood came and when I pressed, when I pressed on the crack it just split open and there was glass everywhere.” She buried her face in Caxton’s shirt. “There was blood everywhere. It was beautiful, Laura, it was so pretty.”

In the bedroom something crashed to the floor. Caxton looked up, alert again with a suddenness that surprised her. A soft voice swore in Spanish, a voice that wasn’t human.

There was another half-dead, inside the house.

“Dee, I have to let go for a second,” she whispered. “I have to do something but you’ll be okay.”

“No,” Deanna begged.

“You’ll be okay. The ambulance will be here any minute. Just do whatever the paramedics say and I’ll be right back.”

“No, please, please don’t leave me,” Deanna mewled. But there was nothing for it. Caxton gently lowered her back onto the kitchen floor. She checked the tape on Deanna’s cheek and saw that it was starting to peel away. She pushed it back down and it stayed, mostly. She drew her weapon again and glided down the hallway, toward the bedroom.

“Pumpkin, come back!” Deanna shrieked. “It really hurts!”

Caxton knew what had to be done, though. She stepped into the bedroom. A half-dead wearing a baseball cap and a football jersey stood next to the closet door.

He had knocked over her nightstand and her clock radio lay in pieces on the hardwood floor.

“Hostia puta,” he squeaked. He looked from side to side, his flayed arms spread against the wall. It was pretty clear what he planned to do next. He was all the way across the room from the open window. If he could run faster than she could, he could easily get away.

Before he’d taken three steps Caxton knocked his legs out from under him, smashing his upper body down to the floor. He called out but she sat down hard on his pelvis and lower spine and he could do no more than move his arms and legs along the floor as if he were trying to swim away.

“What did you do to her?” she asked, as cold as she could manage. If she lost control now she would just crack his skull and that would be the end of it. Not that she would mind but she needed information more than she desired revenge. “Tell me and I’ll let you go.”

“La concha de tu hermana,” the half-dead shouted, wriggling underneath her, trying to break free. She was stronger and it must have known that. It wasn’t going to get away without tearing itself to pieces.

“You came here looking for me, didn’t you? You wanted me but you tried to kill Deanna. Why? Why?” She bounced up and down on top of the half-dead until it screamed.

“I don’t know who you are, lady,” it cried out in English. “I got no idea!”

“You came here for me. Tell me why.”

The half-dead shook violently. “If I say something he’ll rip me up.”

“He who? The vampire, Reyes?” she demanded.

“I ain’t talking about President Bush, lady!” The half-dead underneath her grunted and groaned and rose a fraction of an inch off the floor, lifting her weight at the same time in a supernal act of will. With a gasp of frustration he collapsed again. “Me cago en Jesus y la Virgen, you might as well kill me now and get it over with, huh?”

Caxton thought about Arkeley and what the Fed would do to get the information.

She knew he would torture the half-dead. He would do exactly what the half-dead feared to receive at the hands of the vampire. The half-dead was less afraid of oblivion than of pain. She had said at the time that she would not be able to stand by while Arkeley did that. She couldn’t countenance torture, she’d told him.

Of course at that point no one had tried to kill Deanna.

She reached down and grabbed the index finger of the half-dead’s left hand. It felt wrong in her grip, not at all like a human finger. There was no skin on it and very little flesh—it was more like holding an uncooked spare-rib. She twisted it with all her strength and it came right off the half-dead’s hand.

“Coño!” the half-dead screamed, a pure, horrible noise, a sound of perfect pain.

The disembodied finger wriggled in her hand like a centipede. She threw it away from her. Then she reached down and grabbed the middle finger of the same hand.

She gave the half-dead a second to think about what was going to happen, and then, without a word, she tore the middle finger off, too.

His left hand had nothing but a thumb when he finally spoke. “He told us to come here and pick up whoever I found, that’s all, lady, please, stop now!”

“Who told you? Efrain Reyes?”

“Yeah, that’s who! He said to come get you, your tortillera girlfriend, your dogs, anybody who was here. He even told us how, with the hechizo.” She grabbed the thumb and asked what a hechizo was. “It’s a spell, a magic spell, kind of! Hey, lady, I’m telling you what you want to know, be nice, okay?”

“You hypnotized her? You hypnotized Deanna, is that it?”

The half-dead struggled again but he was growing weaker by the minute. He had no blood to spill but the pain seemed to take the fight out of him. “Yeah, but it only works when she’s asleep and dreaming.”

“Why us? Why were you sent to this house?”

“He doesn’t tell us that. He doesn’t fill us in on his big plans, he just says, vamos, and I go. Please, lady, please, I told you all I know.”

A siren wailed through the walls of the house. Caxton heard doors slamming and people running up to the door. “Alright,” she said. Then she grabbed her pistol and smashed in the back of the half-dead’s skull. He stopped wriggling instantly. Slowly, stiffly, her clothes sticking together where the blood had dried in the folds, she rose from the floor and holstered her weapon. Then she walked into the kitchen and opened the door for the paramedics. On the floor Deanna was curled up in a tight ball, weeping piteously. Her blood was everywhere.

31.

A stretcher rolled past Caxton’s face, not three inches away. It was being pushed at high speed up the main ramp to the Emergency Room entrance but to her it seemed to float unattended through boundless space, taking its time. The body on the stretcher was just a pile of blood-stained rags. She couldn’t even see a face. But then the body reached out a hand to her. The skin was scorched and falling away in places. Thick clotted blood was smeared across the fingers. She couldn’t even tell if it was a male or female hand.

Still. She reached out, touched it. The fingers curled around hers but then the hand was ripped away from her, the stretcher flying up the ramp. Somebody shouted for plasma and she squinted and tried to clear her head.

She’d been sitting in the hallway for hours and hours with no stimulation except the constant parade of mutilated bodies that flew by. She shouldn’t have been in the hallway at all—there was a waiting room for people like her, complete with six TV

sets and a couple hundred pounds of straight women’s magazines—but being a cop had its privileges. Most of the EMTs and nurses who passed by didn’t even give her a second glance, they assumed she was just guarding the entrance. In fact it just let her be a couple hundred feet closer to Deanna. They wouldn’t let her into the operating room or the recovery room. The hallway was as close as she was going to get.

That hand. It had been like something out of a dream but she knew it was real. It had touched her. She looked down and saw real blood on her fingers. Her hand smelled like gasoline and shit, a smell she knew all too well. The smell of a really bad car accident. The hand had been real and warm and alive.

Unlike the half-dead she had tortured and executed on her bedroom floor. Unlike the vampires who were coming to destroy her life.

Caxton sighed and crossed her arms and waited. She had tried reading a magazine but she was too distracted. Images and words jumped into her head unbidden. Not even things related to the investigation, not even memories of Deanna, just weird little scraps of thought. She kept wondering if the milk was sitting out on the kitchen counter, if it was going to go bad. The kitchen had to be as cold as the outside air since the window was completely gone. Pretty much anybody could climb in through the hole where the window had been—should she call someone, have them check the house, have them put cardboard, at least, over the window? If she did that should she ask them to go inside and put the milk back in the fridge?

She couldn’t shut her mind down. It didn’t work that way. Only sleep could turn off the brain and she was a long way from sleep. The banal thoughts, the endless, cycling inanities had their purpose, as excruciating as they were. They kept her from thinking the big thoughts, the real thoughts. The things that scared her.

Thoughts like, the fact that vampires wanted her dead. So badly they would send their minions to kill everyone in her house. Everyone. The half-deads would have killed her dogs, probably, just to be thorough about it.

Thoughts like, Arkeley had turned his back on her. She couldn’t even count on him to defend her against the dark things that wanted her life. He wasn’t done with her, he had some purpose for her, but she wasn’t going to be an active part of his investigation.

Thoughts like, is there really any difference between someone being hypnotized into breaking a window and impaling themselves on broken glass... and someone whose brain chemistry stops working one day, and they hang themselves in their bedroom? Her mother had had a good job and plenty of money. She had a perfectly good daughter to live for, a nice house, partners for bridge, church socials, potluck dinners. Holidays. Family. Vacations. Retirement. Her suicide had been a complete mystery to everyone who knew her. It had been a mistake, really, it had to have been.

Deanna had nothing to keep her living. No job, family who loathed her for what she was. A partner who cared and who tried but just didn’t have the time to be there for her. No future. Art that nobody understood.

Was it still suicide, if you had an excuse? If you were driven to it?

“Officer,” someone said, nearby. It was like the ghost that had called her in Urie Polder’s barn, a directionless, bodiless voice. “Officer,” the voice said again.

Caxton frowned and turned her head. A nurse stood there in blood-stained scrubs, a middle-aged woman with white hair up in a bun on top of her head. She wore heavy gloves, the kind you wear when you wash dishes. “Officer, she’s awake,” the nurse said.

Caxton followed her through halls, around corners, up stairs. She could not have found her way back if she was called upon to do so. They came to a room, a semi-private room with two beds. One held a morbidly obese woman whose entire lower body and thighs were wrapped up in plaster. A surgical gown had been draped over her breasts. The other bed held something that had been stitched together out of spare parts.

Jesus, Caxton realized, it was Deanna. “You look like Frankenstein’s monster,”

Caxton said.

Deanna tried to smile but the stitches in her jaw line kept her from moving her mouth too much. “Pumpkin... you left me,” she mumbled. Caxton took off her hat and leaned down to kiss Deanna’s puffy lips. The obese woman in the other bed let out a half-gasp, half-cluck of disdain but Caxton had learned to ignore that sound a long time before. She stood back up and took a better look at Deanna. The view didn’t improve the second time around. Glinting staples held the side of Deanna’s face together. The sharp ends of stitches, black and coarse like horsehair, stuck up out of the flesh of her chest and shoulders while bandages wrapped her hands until she looked like she was wearing bloody mittens. “You left me all alone,” Deanna said.

“Don’t talk, Dee. Just rest.” Caxton reached down and gently brushed the staples in Deanna’s face. They were real, solid, and the flesh underneath was red and inflamed.

A doctor came into the room. Caxton didn’t even look at him. She held Deanna’s eyes with her own and refused to let go.

“I’d like to bring in someone to talk with her. I know you probably don’t want to hear that but I’m not sure you have the right to stop me, either—do you have a civil union?”

They didn’t. They’d never bothered, since it wouldn’t be legally recognized anyway. It didn’t matter.

“I don’t object,” Caxton said. She started to reach for Deanna’s hands but they were so badly damaged she didn’t want to touch them. She held onto the railing on the side of the bed instead.

Deanna started to protest but Caxton just moved her chin back and forth a little and said, “Shh, it’s just to talk.”

“She’s pretty lucky, all things considered. She could easily have died. She lost a lot of blood and some of the fragments of glass went pretty deep. We’ll wait and see if there’s any nerve damage to her hands. The cut in her face is going to require reconstructive surgery and even then there will be scarring.”

Caxton held onto the railing as if she would be swept away on a dark sea if she lost her grip. It didn’t matter, she told herself. Deanna was going to live. At least, she would live until the next time someone tried to kill her. Maybe the next time Reyes would come for her himself. “I’m going to call in for a guard to stand watch outside this room, Doctor. This was an attempted murder.” The words sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth, like something she’d made up. It was real, though, she needed to convince herself it was real. “I’ll stay with her until the first shift arrives.”

“Very well.” The doctor moved to check on the obese woman in the next bed over. “It’s almost two o’clock now but I’ll call down to the desk and have them set something up.”

“Two o’clock?” Caxton asked, surprised. She glanced down at her watch and saw he was correct. “Shit. Dee, honey,” she said, “I have to go.”

“Whuh?” Deanna asked.

“There’s some place I have to be.” It was something she’d figured out in those long hours in the hallway. It was her next move.

32.

Caxton couldn’t figure out how to strap the vest around her stomach. One of the guys from the Area Response Team had to pull it tight behind her back and buckle it there. He also helped her with the knee, shin, and shoulder guards. She figured out the helmet for herself. “Larry Reynolds,” he told her, and stuck out a gloved hand.

She shook it and introduced herself.

“I’m sorry I’m so unfamiliar with this stuff. This is my first time in riot gear.” She squirmed for a moment, embarrassed, then admitted, “normally I’m highway patrol.”

“You were in on that vampire kill a couple of nights ago, right? That’s what they told us when we got assigned to this detail.” Reynolds had black paint under his eyes and it made it hard to read his expression. She couldn’t tell if he was annoyed to be saddled with such an untrained whelp as herself and was hiding it well or if he was honestly trying to be friendly. “Stick with us, keep your head down, and you’ll be alright.”

Another ART Detective came up and slapped Reynolds on the top of his helmet.

“Keeping his head down is about ninety per cent of Larry’s job.” Reynolds faked punching the new guy in the kidney and they broke away, laughing, dancing around each other like Caxton’s greyhounds. “I’m DeForrest, and I’ll be your stewardess this morning,” the new guy told her. He had Reynolds in a headlock. “We hope you enjoy your trip with Granola Roller airlines.”

Caxton had no idea what he was talking about but she smiled anyway. It had taken a lot of pleading to get assigned to this detail and she didn’t want the ART

guys to resent her presence. When a woman in riot gear came and offered her coffee from a thermos she took it as graciously as she could.

Truth be told, she needed the caffeine as much as she needed to be accepted. She hadn’t slept, even for a moment, not since she’d woken up the day before and realized why the vampires had decimated Bitumen Hollow. Her hands were shaking and if she looked at anything too closely or for too long its outlines grew fuzzy and indistinct.

“They’re infantile, I know, but they’re good men,” the woman with the coffee said. “DeForrest was a firefighter before he took this job. He was bored, he said. I assumed the first time I met him that he just wanted to play with guns, like a lot of people who sign up for the ART. He’s never discharged his weapon, not once, since he came to work with us, even when bad guys have fired on him. Reynolds dislocated his shoulder last year getting a five-year-old out of a trailer knocked over in a tornado.”

“Wow,” Caxton said.

“I’m Suzie Jesuroga. Captain Suzie,” the woman said, and shook Caxton’s hand.

“Laura Caxton. Trooper.”

Captain Suzie smiled. “I know exactly who you are. We’ve all been briefed about that vampire kill you pulled off over on Route 322. The Commissioner made us go over all the details. Today’s trip should be a little less hairy, considering we’ve got good daylight conditions and the extra precautions we’re taking, but I’m still glad to have you along. You want to get started?”

The four of them finished suiting up and ran through an equipment and weapons check. They’d been issued M4 carbines, military-grade assault rifles with underslung shotgun attachments. Caxton also carried her Beretta, loaded up with cross points.

The others had their own personal weapons—combat knives, revolvers, tear gas and smoke grenades. The ART had a little latitude, it seemed, in how they kitted out for an operation. Together they headed up, out of the locker room of the Harrisburg HQ

and down to a parking lot secluded by a line of trees. Darkness tinged the deep, rich blue of an impending dawn lay over the lot like a comforter. Arkeley waited for them there, wearing no protective gear at all, just his overcoat. It hung open and she could tell he wasn’t carrying anything other than his Glock 23 with its thirteen bullets.

“Captain,” he said, when they greeted him, “I'll express one more time my desire to leave this vehicle behind.” He nodded his chin at a giant white truck that took up two spaces in the parking lot. It was based on the chassis of a Humvee, Caxton thought, but it had been uparmored as if it were meant to roll through Tikrit instead of Scranton. Heavy metal plates had been welded to its doors, its hood, its roof, and all of the windows had been almost completely obscured except for small slits. Even the truck’s tires had been reinforced with heavy chains. What looked like a home-made air cannon had been mounted on the roof.

“It’s pretty noisy when it gets up to speed, I’ll admit,” Captain Suzie told Arkeley. “Are you afraid we’ll wake the vampires?”

Arkeley’s upper lip twitched in distaste. “No. Vampires don’t sleep during the day. They literally die anew every morning. It’s the half-deads I’m worried about.”

Captain Suzie just shrugged. “The Commissioner gave me my orders himself.

You can talk to him if you want to change the plan, but he doesn’t even come in to the office until nine. I’d just as soon get on the road now.”

Arkeley narrowed his eyes but he nodded and stalked off toward his own car, an unmarked patrol car that looked puny by comparison.

One by one the ART climbed inside the armored vehicle. The interior was packed with so much gear and the Team members were so bulky in their riot armor that there was barely room for the four of them. Reynolds drove and DeForrest took shotgun—almost literally, since he rode with his weapon in his hands. Captain Suzie rode beside Caxton in the back seat.

A man came out of the main building, his uniform shirt unbuttoned and his face unshaven. Caxton recognized the Range Officer from the less-lethal weapons test area, the one who had supplied her with her cross points. He popped open the hood of the armored vehicle and played around with the engine for a minute.

“It’s the old man’s baby, and he never lets it out without a personal inspection,”

DeForrest told Caxton, craning around in his seat to look at her, his helmet catching on the headrest of his seat and tilting over one eye. “He built the Granola Roller nearly from scratch.”

“I’m guessing I’m sitting in the very same Granola Roller,” Caxton said.

Reynolds snorted. “Yeah. It was never really meant for hunting vampire. The old man designed it for crowd control, you know, at demonstrations and protests and riots and such. Sometimes we call it ‘Extra Chunky,’ too.”

Caxton tried to figure it out but her fatigued brain couldn’t make sense of the name. “Why’s that?” she finally asked.

“Because,” DeForrest said, barely able to contain his mirth, “when you run over a hippy with this thing, extra chunky is about all that’s left.”

“Don’t be gross,” Captain Suzie said as DeForrest and Reynolds laughed in each other’s faces. She turned to Caxton. “I’m sure that I’ll have to do this about a hundred times today, but now, for the first time, I officially apologize for my men.

Reynolds, have you forgotten how to drive a stick shift or are we waiting for the vampire to die of old age? Let’s get moving!”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Reynolds said, and he started up the armored vehicle with a noise like boulders falling down a mountainside. The Range Officer waved them off and started buttoning his shirt.

They followed Arkeley’s car onto the highway and settled in for the long ride to Kennett Square, which was all the way down by the border with Delaware. The armored vehicle’s groaning and grunting engine noise made it impossible to speak and be heard inside the cabin but Caxton didn’t mind so much. She could barely form a coherent sentence in her head, much less make one come out of her mouth.

She had to hunch over against the door to look out the view-slit in her window, which meant exposing her bones to a constant jouncing vibration as the heavy truck ground over every minor imperfection in the roadway. Somehow she survived, though. She watched suburban lawns speed by, silver with frost and dark with fallen leaves. As they rolled out into more rural zones she let her eyes linger on the geometric regularity of farmers’ fields or the shaking, surging rattle of dark tree branches that leaned close over the road.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw a death’s head, and felt wriggling finger bones rattling in her hands. She saw Deanna covered in blood. She remembered what it was like to be hypnotized by a vampire, to feel as if she were drowning in death, as if the air had turned to glass and she were suspended inside of it. She reached up and touched Vesta Polder’s amulet through the thick layers of nylon and kevlar of her ballistic vest.

As the sun began to climb up from behind the ridges, a lemon-colored sliver on the horizon, she began to feel a little better. She was taking action, taking up arms against the thing that was trying to kill her, which had nearly killed Deanna. Arkeley, when he heard she had requested to come along on this raid, had said absolutely not.

While he had never expressly forbidden her he had thought, he told her, that he had made himself quite clear. He didn’t want her endangered. He didn’t think she could handle it.

She had told him about torturing a half-dead, how she had pulled the bastard’s fingers off, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, he had come around. He’d never actually said it was alright, but he had stopped insisting she stay behind quite so strongly. It was as good as she was going to get, she knew.

33.

They had to stop for gas outside of Lancaster. When the jumping, swaying truck finally came to a stop the ensuing quiet and calm shocked Caxton right out of her own head. She climbed out of the Granola Roller to stretch her legs and then leaned against the side of the vehicle with Captain Suzie while DeForrest pumped the gas.

He had to unbolt a layer of armor from the truck’s side to get at the gas tank. Inside the gas station the attendant watched them with dull eyes as if he saw state troopers in full combat gear every morning. Eventually Caxton realized he was asleep, sleeping sitting up in his chair. They were probably the first customers of his shift.

DeForrest froze, suddenly, even as Caxton was thinking about waking up the attendant to get some snacks. The ART guy let go of the nozzle and stepped away from the pump. He looked at Captain Suzie and without a word pointed up at a line of trees across the highway. “Over there,” he said.

“Can you confirm his sighting, Caxton?” Captain Suzie asked.

Fear stuck icy knitting needles into her heart. “Confirm… what?” she asked. She scanned the dead trees for the broken faces of half-deads, the shocking white skin of vampires, even just for movement of any kind. Then she noticed flecks of darkness, like pieces of shadow, swooping and darting among the trees.

A smile lifted her face a little and she turned around, shaking her head. The ART

behind her had dropped to shooting crouches, their weapons up and at their shoulders. They were deadly serious. They were terrified, and they were all looking at her.

“Those are just bats,” she said. “They’re nocturnal, and the sun’s coming up.

They’re flying home.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Bats.”

Captain Suzie frowned and put her weapon up but she didn’t move from her defensive crouch. “So there’s no danger?”

“No,” Caxton said. “There’s no connection. That’s just a myth.” She realized with a start that the ART didn’t resent her presence. As they climbed back inside the vehicle to resume their journey she understood that they were glad to have her along.

She was their trained vampire killer.

She just hoped the mission’s success didn’t depend on her expertise.

They pulled into Kennett Square just as dawn made the white lines on the road glow and seem to float above the dark asphalt. Maybe it was just Caxton’s lack of sleep. With the sun creeping up over the trees they moved through the quaint little town which the map showed as being quite literally square.

“What’s that smell?” Reynolds asked. Caxton had noticed it too, a thick, earthy smell that occasionally sharpened into something pretty nasty.

“This is the mushroom capital of the world,” Captain Suzie told him. “Didn’t you know that? That smell is the stuff they grow mushrooms in.”

DeForrest sniffed the air. “Shit?” he asked.

Captain Suzie shrugged. “Manure, anyway. They have to cook it in these long sheds, night and day, to sterilize it. This whole part of the state smells like that, pretty much all the time. I used to live around here. You get used to it.”

“You get used to the smell of cooking shit,” Reynolds said as if he were trying on the idea for size.

“So you hardly even notice it anymore,” Captain Suzie assured him. “After a couple of days you can get used to anything.”

What about torture, Caxton wondered? Could you get used to torturing your enemies for information? She was afraid she knew the answer.

They passed over a set of train tracks that made the Granola Roller rumble ominously and then they were there—the substation. The hideout of Efrain Reyes, if they were lucky. Or maybe if they weren’t.

Caxton checked her weapons, working the actions, chambering and unchambering rounds. The ART followed her example. Arkeley pulled up outside the substation’s fence and got out of his car. “What is he doing?” Captain Suzie asked.

The Fed answered for himself, slipping a hands-free phone attachment over his ear. He touched the tiny mouthpiece bud and the armored vehicle’s radio squawked.

DeForrest punched some buttons. “Say again, over,” he announced.

“I was saying that I’m going from here on foot,” Arkeley told them. “You can follow however you choose but this place was never meant for a military parade.”

“He’s making fun of your truck,” Caxton told Captain Suzie.

The other woman scowled. “He can make fun of my big nose, but I’m still not getting out and walking,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling.

The substation took up about two acres of ground, all of it surrounded by brick wall or chainlink fence. The ART had secured the plans of the place. It had been decommissioned by the local utility provider a year earlier (a bigger, better, and safer substation having already been built and hooked into the grid) and work crews were still taking it apart. There was more to it than simple demolition—there were all kinds of nasty chemicals and compounds inside the giant transformers that made up the bulk of the substation’s equipment, from sulfur hexafluoride gas to liquid PCBs. The transformers had to be taken apart piece by piece by trained professionals. Electrical engineers, to be specific—men like Efrain Reyes before he died.

Arkeley had gotten permission from the substation’s owners to search the place.

They’d given him a key to the padlock on the gate. There had been some concern that Reyes might have changed the lock but the key worked just fine. Arkeley pushed open the heavy gate and went inside.

Reynolds put the Granola Roller into gear and crept forward, staying twenty-five feet behind Arkeley at all times. The Fed moved forward briskly as if he knew what he was looking for. They passed down a narrow aisle flanked by two rows of tall switches adorned with stacks of round insulators that made them look like the spires of futuristic churches. Beyond lay the transformers themselves, thick, sturdy metal blocks standing in perfect rows.

“I though we were after vampires, not Frankenstein’s monster,” DeForrest joked.

Everyone ignored him. “What’s all this stuff for?”

“It steps down the voltage of electricity coming from the power plants,” Caxton explained, “until it’s safe to send to your house.” She pressed her face against the gunport in her window and tried to see what Arkeley must be seeing.

Nothing stirred in the substation except a few fallen yellow leaves that skittered around in the breeze, chasing each other back and forth.

Up ahead at the end of the row stood an old switch house, maybe a hundred years old. It was where the original circuit breakers for the substation would have been housed—maybe even fuses, if the place was old enough. It was a one-story building made of dark brown brick with mullioned windows that didn’t let much light in or out.

It had to be the place. Beyond lay the chainlink fence. Yellow corn stalks stood eight feet high outside the fence, fields of the dead vegetation running off in every other direction. If Reyes was hiding inside the substation he was in the switch house.

Arkeley went to the door and pushed it open. Whatever might have been inside the sun hadn’t touched it yet. He unholstered his weapon and took a flashlight from the pocket of his overcoat. “I’m going in, if anyone cares to join me,” Arkeley said over the radio.

“That’s not how we planned this,” Captain Suzie said into her own radio. “That’s not what the Commissioner wanted. It could be dangerous.”

“The sun’s up. We’re safe. Right? We’re safe,” Reynolds said. “The sun’s up.

Vampires can’t come out at day.”

“That’s right,” Caxton told him.

“I don’t care. We stay in the vehicle,” Captain Suzie said. She stared forward at Arkeley as if she could meet his gaze from the back seat of the armored vehicle.

The Fed stepped into the darkness. None of the ART moved.

“Deputy,” Captain Suzie called. “Deputy? Come in, Deputy. Give me a status report, give me something. Anything.”

“Special Deputy,” Arkeley’s voice corrected her. He remained out of sight. “I don’t have a lot a lot to report just now. I’ve found a large quantity of cobwebs and rusty equipment. Hold on. I just found a trapdoor. It looks like there’s a lower level.

I’m headed down.”

Caxton pushed open her door and jumped down to the ground before she knew she was really going to do it. Captain Suzie grabbed for her but Caxton slipped through her hands. She moved toward the switch house as the radio on her collar started yelling orders at her.

She was almost at the switch house’s open door when something moved in the corner of her eye. She turned, her rifle in firing position, and saw it again. Outside of the fence something was definitely moving around. She looked left and right and saw that someone had cut a hole through the fence, big enough for a grown man to duck through. She ran over and twined her fingers through the chainlink. “Arkeley,” she called, “I’ve found a back exit to the substation. There’s somebody out there.”

“Caxton,” he said. “Get back in that fucking truck. I’ve told you already—”

She stopped listening to him. Something was definitely moving, creeping through the corn field. It wasn’t an animal, either. It was a person, or maybe even several persons or… or several half-deads. She ducked under the fence and immediately heard rustling, a layered slithering sound as numerous bodies pushed through the dead stalks. She spun around, one eye down near the scope of her rifle, and then she saw them, six or maybe seven half-deads wearing hooded sweatshirts. They were dragging something through the corn, something big made of dark wood with brass hardware.

It was a coffin.

34.

She lifted her rifle to her shoulder and fired a quick burst of three shots but the half-deads were obscured behind dozens of rows of cornstalks, and moving—she didn’t hit anything, nor did she expect to. With the power of the weapon in her hands she could mow down half of the corn field but she’d been trained better than that. A rifle bullet could travel half a mile before gravity brought it down. Unless she could guarantee there were no innocent bystanders within a half-mile radius she couldn’t fire blind like that.

She could only watch, then, as the half-deads dragged their coffin through the corn. “Arkeley,” she said into her radio, “Arkeley, please come in, I have sighted a group of half-deads carrying a coffin, please advise. Arkeley, what do I do?”

“...bones, human bodies in... no sign of recent... a lot of dust,” he said. She figured he must be talking about the basement of the switch house and what he had found there. He must not have been able to hear her—she could barely make out a fraction of what he was saying. Presumably the signal was being partially blocked by the layer of dirt between them. That was immaterial, though. The half-deads were getting away. She looked back through the fence and saw the armored vehicle just sitting there. One member of the ART leaned out of an open door, staring at her open-mouthed.

“Captain Suzie,” Caxton said, “I need backup over here. They’re getting away!”

“My orders are to stay with the vehicle, no matter what. Our safety is more important than catching your vampire. Those are your orders, too, trooper.”

“Reyes will escape if we don’t get him now,” Caxton said. “If we get him now, by daylight, we can destroy his heart with no danger to us at all.”

“No danger? You said there were maybe seven of those creatures. There’s only three of us. You come back here right now, Caxton. If you won’t take an order from the Commissioner, maybe you’ll take one from me. Come back right now.”

Caxton looked from the armored vehicle back to the corn field. She could still hear the stalks rustling but the sound was growing faint. She didn’t know what to do.

She knew what Arkeley would do, however, in her situation. She knew exactly what he would do.

She pushed through the papery stalks and ran after the half-deads, her boots sliding in dark mud.

The fibrous leaves of the stalks slithered across her helmet and lashed at her exposed wrists. The thick stems of the stalks resisted her and she was certain that if she didn’t catch the half-deads soon she would trip and twist an ankle, maybe even break it. How stupid would that be, she thought, to cripple herself because she was so intent on revenge? After the third time she fell and caught herself on her hands in the clinging dirt she forced herself to slow down. The half-deads couldn’t be moving as fast as she did, could they? Weighted down by the coffin their frail bodies just couldn’t make that much speed. She pushed through a line of stalks with her rifle and it snagged, just for a moment, but enough to make her sway.

Weariness rose in her like a ghost filling out her body, seeping into the her nooks and crannies. She had to accept the fact that she was working on no sleep, that she couldn’t trust her body. Gasping a little for breath she tore her rifle off the cornstalk and slung it over her shoulder. It was a liability in that close space.

Standing still she looked around herself, trying to get her wind back, trying to get her bearings. She was well on her way to getting lost in the tall corn. Already she wondered if she could find her way back—there were no landmarks, no way to tell one patch of plants from another.

That kind of thinking didn’t help her, though. Shaking her head she sucked breath into her body and refused to give up, not when she was so close.

She raced down one row of cornstalks and quickly found what she was looking for, a swath of vegetation that had been crushed by the passing coffin. She moved alongside the track, keeping to a crouch, sure she was getting close. Soon she could hear the coffin dragging on the papery corn trash that littered the ground. A moment later she heard the half-deads whispering, not more than twenty feet from where she stood. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. When the sound of the moving coffin suddenly stopped she stopped, too.

“Do you see her, is there sign of her?” one of the half-deads hissed. There was no reply.

Slowly, careful not to make a sound, she brought her rifle around to a firing position. She grasped the shotgun attachment slung under the barrel with one gloved hand and moved forward slowly, steadily, her boots making very little noise in the soft mud. Ahead, through the close-planted stalks, she could make out shadowy figures. She took a step closer and parted the corn with the barrel of her weapon.

Through the narrow gap she made she could see open space, an aisle cut through the field as a firebreak. The clearing was full of half-deads. They were standing around the coffin, their heads low. One of them stood atop the casket, probably trying to get a better view of where she was.

She pointed the shotgun attachment and yanked the trigger. The half-dead on the coffin flew apart in filthy rags and shards of broken bone. The others started howling and running around in terror. One ran right past her, close enough to reach out and grab. She let it get away—she had more important business at hand. She stepped into the firebreak and spun slowly around, looking to see if any of the half-deads had been brave enough to stick around. She didn’t see any. She forced herself to ignore the coffin until she was sure she was alone. Then she bent to take a closer look.

It was a casket, as opposed to a coffin—unlike the hexagonal pine boxes the other vampires used, Reyes had switched up to a deluxe model, rectangular and surrounded by turned moldings. It had been, once, a handsome assemblage of polished cherry wood. The brass handles had probably been bright and metallic before the casket had been dragged through acre after acre of soggy dirt. Now the wood was splattered with dark earth, so thick on one end it looked as if it had been dipped in mud.

She stepped closer and put a hand on top of the wooden lid, half expecting to feel some evil presence beneath, but there was nothing. She remembered the cold feeling she’d gotten near Malvern, the absence of humanity. This could be the same.

She licked her lips and tried to open the lid. Something held it shut. Well, she supposed that made sense. The half-deads wouldn’t want it flapping open as they moved it around. She felt around the edges and found three nails holding the lid down.

She tried her radio but got no response. Had she run so far that she was out of range? It seemed impossible. She felt as if she’d run no more than a quarter mile.

She looked around. She couldn’t really remember which direction she’d come from.

She didn’t think she’d be able to find her way back—and even if she did, that would mean leaving the casket behind. The safe thing, the smart thing to do was to accept that, to just head back, try to make contact with the ART, and hopefully bring the others to the casket. But it sounded like such an impossible errand. If she left the casket even for a few minutes, surely the half-deads would come back for it.

Wouldn’t they?

Her vision blurred for a moment and took its time sharpening up again. She was really going to need to sleep soon. As soon as Reyes was dead, she decided. As soon as she’d killed him. She took the clip out of her rifle and emptied out the bullets. The empty container had a sharp metal edge she could use to break the nails.

She would probably ruin the clip in the process, effectively destroying the rifle. She still had her Beretta, which she placed on top of the casket where she could grab it at a moment’s notice.

She slid the edge of the clip between the lid and the body of the casket and tried to saw at the first nail. The clip moved back and forth a few times before it slipped right out of the gap and across the back of her wrist, gouging a tiny cut into her skin.

Tiny flecks of blood spattered the casket and her breath solidified in her chest for a moment. She half expected to hear Reyes stir inside, that the blood would call him somehow. But the casket remained motionless, as if it were completely empty.

She didn’t relish the prospect of looking inside and seeing the maggots, the bones, the deliquescent remains like those she had seen in Malvern’s coffin. Still.

Reyes’ heart would be in there, dried and shrunken until she could crush it in her hands. She took up the clip and wedged it under the coffin lid again. She put her back into it and the nail broke, the wood shrieking as it came loose. The second nail parted almost instantly when she put some pressure on it. Sweat was collecting under her helmet and running down the back of her ears. Her back ached and she knew that when she stood up straight again it would scream with pain. Just one nail left. She got the clip under the lid one more time, but before she started to saw at the final nail she closed her eyes and thought of Deanna, bloody and helpless on the kitchen floor. It gave her back some strength, to think of just how badly she wanted to destroy Reyes. The third nail came out in pieces so that she had to hack at the wood to get it free, but she did it. The lid was open, she could just throw it back and look inside.

Some basic fear possessed her and she stopped for a second, goosebumps breaking out all over her arms. She stood up, and the stiffness in her back made her groan. She picked up her Beretta from the top of the casket and she looked around, looking for any ruined faces peering out of the corn. She didn’t see anything.

The heart. She had to destroy the heart. With her boot she pried open the lid, then kicked it wide. She raised her weapon and pointed it down into the red silk-lined interior of the casket.

Nothing. It was empty. In her fatigued state she could hear the vampire laughing at her, cackling in cold delight.

Then something cut her across the back of the legs, slicing right through her uniform pants and making her body sing with pain. She collapsed, falling forward, right into the casket. It all happened in the time it took her to switch off the safety on her pistol. The lid of the casket came down across her back and knocked her down onto the upholstery. It had all been a trick.

35.

Light dripped into the casket from a crack where she’d damaged the lid. Otherwise she was trapped in total darkness. She tried to heave, to buck open the casket but they were sitting on it, the half-deads were sitting on it and laughing at her. She heard them drive nails through the lid, sealing it shut again. She couldn’t get any leverage to push against them, she could barely roll over. Her legs burned with a narrow edge of pain where she’d been cut. She was trapped—they would bury her alive.

She screamed to think of it, to imagine being buried under six feet of dirt. Already she could smell nothing but her own sweat and her own fear, the air in the coffin growing stale as it circulated in and out of her lungs. Every time it went out of her it had a little less oxygen in it. How long would it take to use all the oxygen up?

She screamed again but it was no use. The only ones who could hear her would take delight in her distress. It didn’t matter—she screamed a third time, and slapped at the padded lid of the casket, desperate to get free.

Her body slid around inside the casket and she realized the half-deads were dragging her away from the firebreak. Her body bounced painfully as the casket grated over ridges and furrows, broken cornstalks, stones half-buried in the ground.

Caxton’s heart raced and her breath came faster and faster. She couldn’t stop it.

She could feel her Beretta flopping around at the bottom of the coffin. She must have dropped it inside when they cut her legs. She tried to reach for it but her shoulders hit the side of the coffin and she couldn’t bend down far enough. The constriction drove home just how small her prison was—only a little bigger than her own body—and she screamed again at the thought that she couldn’t sit up, she couldn’t bring her knees up—every muscle in her body twitched as it felt the constraint.

The casket jumped as it was dragged over some particularly large obstruction and the pistol smacked her ankle with a smarting pain that turned the darkness around her green for a moment, an optical illusion born of exhaustion, panic and physical pain.

She tried to remember if the weapon’s safety was still on, if she had chambered a round. If she had—if the gun was ready to fire—it could go off with the next bump.

A cross point round could come out of its barrel faster than the speed of sound. It could shoot off in any direction, but a lot of those directions intersected her body.

Just one more thing to scream about.

She worked her hand down as far as she could. Her fingertips glanced off the hard edge of the gun’s barrel, she could feel the slickness of the metal. Her shoulder dug through the casket’s upholstery, came up hard against the wood beneath. She lunged, and shoved, and tried to brace herself with her legs.

Another bump, a jostling bump that smashed the bones of her shoulder together and made her grunt in shock, but the Beretta slid half an inch closer. She grabbed it with her fingertips and drew it, millimeter by millimeter, closer to her palm. It kept trying to bounce away again but she refused to let it go. Finally she had it in her hand and the weight and the power of the weapon helped her calm herself down, made her breathe just a little easier.

“Yes,” she shouted, as she worked her finger through the trigger guard.

The casket stopped moving with a sudden lurch that wrenched her back. One of the half-deads knocked on the lid. Its voice, though muffled, was as irritating as ever as it asked, “Everything okay in there?”

She tried to figure out where the voice was coming from using just her ears. It was difficult—the acoustics in the casket were terrible, echoes rolling back and forth in the narrow space. She pressed the barrel of the pistol against the casket lid.

The half-dead giggled at her. “I’d get comfortable if I were you. It’s a long—”

She squeezed the trigger and light and heat and noise filled up the casket in a wave of overpressure that made blood drip from her ears. She was blind and deaf and her hands were burning and she realized what a terrible mistake she’d made—what if she’d deafened herself permanently? What if the shock wave from the explosion had ruptured her ear drums?

Her vision came back slowly, showing her a slanting ray of weak sunlight that poured through a nearly perfectly circular hole in the lid of the coffin. She could see a little sky through the hole, the yellow of the dead corn stalks. Whether she’d hit the half-dead who had been taunting her or not she couldn’t say.

The stench of cordite filled her nostrils and she wanted to retch, to stop breathing the fumes altogether, but her body knew better than her brain. It sucked deeply from the fresh oxygen coming in through the bullet hole.

For a long time nothing happened. The casket didn’t move. She could hear her heart beating but it sounded strange, deeper and slower than she’d expected. Then she heard a sound at last, a faint, twittering sound, a bird calling somewhere out in the corn. Her eardrums were intact. It was the best thing that had happened since she fell into the casket and she wanted to cry sweet tears of relief.

Then the casket started moving again, bouncing and jumping over the rough ground, if anything faster than before. She held on as best she could, shoving her weapon in its holster and grabbing at handfuls of upholstery to keep from being thrown around so much. The slick silk kept slipping through her hands and soon they ached from the constant exertion of just holding on.

Minutes passed, long minutes she could only measure by counting slowly to herself, onnnnne, twooooo, threeee... she was almost certainly counting too quickly or too slowly but she had no other way to mark time. After a while her legs began to twitch, either from the wounds on the backs of her calves or from being compressed in such a tiny space.

The half-deads picked her up and carried her after a while. They moved slower than they had while dragging the casket through the corn field but Caxton didn’t mind. The ride got a lot less bumpy.

Darkness closed over the bullet hole in the lid. She thought they might have covered the opening with a cloth or something. She stuck her pinky finger through the hole, careful not to extend it too far, to not give the half-deads an excuse to grab it and do something horrible with it. She felt nothing out there but cool air. She tried again and again felt nothing.

The casket suddenly tilted forward at a very steep angle and she slid up into the top half, her head jammed painfully to one side. She struggled to push her arms up past her shoulders, to push against the top of the casket with her hands to take the pressure off of her neck.

The coffin lifted and fell. Again, it lifted and fell. Again, a moment’s respite and then it lifted—to fall again. She realized what was happening. The bullet hole had gone dark because they were inside of a building. The lift and fall came from the motion of the casket as the half-deads carried it down a flight of stairs.

She tried to count the risers but she lost track every time the casket lurched and she was thrown back and forth. It was a long way down and she had lost track of how much time had passed. She felt as if she were floating unbound in space and then grasped tightly by enormous fingers, her body shaken violently by a giant spectral hand with each step down.

She didn’t notice at first when the downward motion stopped. The half-deads set her down without any fanfare, the casket creaking a little on a stone or concrete floor. Then she heard their footfalls, and the echoes of their footfalls, getting softer as they walked away from her.

Then there was no sound at all.

She slapped the lid of the coffin again and again, but got no reply.

“Hello?” she said, willing to hear their squeaking voices if that was the reply she got. “Hello?” she shouted, wanting someone, anyone, to speak to her. Sure, she had shot at them, but wouldn’t that make them want to taunt her even more? “Hey you fuckers!” she screamed. “Hey, calling all faceless geeks out there, somebody say something!”

She heard her own echoes but nothing more.

“You can’t just leave me here!” she screamed, getting a little hysterical. She knew they could do, and had done, just that.

36.

Caxton slept.

Somehow her body had given out, somehow whole hours of panic had ebbed away, all force spent, and little bits of sleep had rushed in, dark breakers on the shores of a planet with no sun. Inside the casket her breathing had come more shallow, her eyes had rolled back in her head. She had slept.

If there were dreams in that dark slumber she could remember little of them afterward. She had a sense of rolling over in blackness, of tumbling, of falling free through infinite lightless space. There was no fear in the dream, though when it ended she screamed, her body thundering around her, her pulse beating very hard.

Her eyes fluttered open and she was awake, awake and lying silently on the upholstery of the casket. She cleared her throat and blinked her eyes and tried to reconcile where she was with waking life. It wasn’t easy.

A tiny finger of light slipped in through the bullet hole in the casket lid. It was so pale and faint that she thought it might be a hallucination but it grew stronger as she watched it. It danced and shifted from side to side and soon a sound came to join it, a repetitive slapping sound, a rasping two part sound, slip slap, slip slap.

Bare feet walking on stone. And the light—it possessed the guttering motion and the warm yellow light of a candle flame.

“Hello,” she breathed, but her throat was dry, painfully dry so it felt like it was stuck shut. She tried to clear her esophagus but nothing would come loose. She coughed and coughed and the footfalls stopped and she held her breath, wanting them to come back, terrified they would leave her alone inside the casket, even though she knew that whatever made that sound, whatever horror was approaching her, would not be a friend, or a rescuer, but a monstrosity.

The feet came closer and the light brightened. It moved to one side and then stayed put, as if the owner of the feet had set the candle down beside the casket.

Caxton tried to breathe as calmly as she could.

The casket rocked back and forth as the unseen monster tore at the lid. It made no sound, no grunt or gasp. The nails in the wood shrieked and tore. The wooden lid cracked down the middle, splinters brushing Caxton’s lips and then it came away altogether, air rushing into the casket, her eyes narrowing in even the miniscule light of the candle. She saw the ceiling above her, perhaps fifteen feet away, a vaulted mass of bricks held up by stout square columns. On either side she saw the walls of the cellar room lined with shelves, the shelves heavy with jars and cardboard boxes and rolled-up blankets. She had no idea where she was.

A pale face slid into view. She’d been hoping for a half-dead but her hopes were dashed. She saw the round, hairless head, the triangular ears, the face of Efrain Reyes looking down at her. His eyes were dark slits, vaguely reddish in the flickering light. His mouth was heavy with all those teeth. She sensed that he had just woken himself, that he was still half asleep, as she was. Had night just fallen? Had she been in the casket for an entire day, alone with her dreams?

Reyes wore nothing but a pair of drawstring pants. His skin was a snowy white but with just a tinge of pink that made him look feverish instead of healthy. He leaned down closer until his face was eighteen inches from hers. She felt the same absence of humanity or warmth she remembered from when she’d stood next to Justinia Malvern. It didn’t surprise her this time.

He stared down into her eyes and she tried to look away but he grabbed her chin and held her, as sure and steady as if her face was bolted to his hand. She would never have the strength to break that grip.

His eyes went wider and she saw red tears wash across his pupils, as if blood had replaced every fluid in his body. She saw his pupils grow larger and larger until they filled up half her vision. She had been hypnotized by a vampire before but this was nothing like the paralysis she had felt then. That had been a general deadening, an anesthetic effect. This time she was quite conscious, to an almost painful degree, of what was being done to her. Something passed between them, from his mind, into hers. It moved silently, invisibly, but it was something very real. It was all in her mind, certainly, but it carried with it a physical sensation, a very real, very unpleasant feeling of being invaded.

Caxton had never been raped. There had been a boy in high school who didn’t understand what she meant when she said she wanted to wait, to save it. She hadn’t understood herself, really, and hadn’t known how to stop him when he would shove his hands inside her clothing and grab her, physically grab handfuls of her flesh in a painful grip. One day after school when they’d gone back to her house to theoretically study he had taken out his penis once and rubbed it up and down on the back of her hand, begging her to turn her hand over, to grasp him the way he was always grasping her. The boy’s need, his absolute desperation, had sickened her and she had pulled away. He had stood up next to the bed and loomed over her then and she had been very much aware of the fact that they were alone together, that her father wouldn’t get home until after six. “Suck it,” he had said, his appendage dangling in front of her. “Suck it,” and his voice had been something broken, and sharp, and potentially dangerous.

She had resorted to tears, big sobbing tears of panic, and the boy had been so shamed he went away and never spoke to her again. It was the closest she’d ever come to being sexually violated.

What Reyes was doing to her, though, was far worse than any teenaged fumbling could ever be. He was forcing himself on her innermost thoughts, her secrets, the deepest, darkest parts of her. He read her like a book, picking at her memories. He found the memory of the boy and the tears and she could feel he was amused. She could feel him just as if he lay on top of her, the cold waxiness of his skin, the faint heat of blood, the smell of blood all over him. She was under his control, completely. She lacked even the will to fight him, or even to struggle, even to try to get away.

After a while the vampire closed his eyes but he didn’t move away. The violation stopped instantly but she could still feel him, some remnant of his intrusion inside of her skull. It made her brain itch. Vesta Polder’s amulet hadn’t done a damned thing to help her. The vampire reached down into the casket, presumably to lift her up.

She wasn’t going to get a better chance. She lifted the Beretta to the level of his heart and fired and fired and fired again, the noise splitting the silence wide open, the muzzle flashes so much brighter than the candle it was as if the sun had entered the room. Spent gas wreathed around Caxton’s face like smoke and the stink was oppressive. Her already battered ears rang and the vampire snarled like a wild animal.

When she stopped firing he grabbed the smoking hot barrel of the gun in one of his hands and threw it into the corner of the room. Her shots hadn’t even scratched his hairless white skin. She remembered what Arkeley had said: with so much blood in him a bazooka probably couldn’t scratch his skin. She had succeeded in one thing, though. The part of him inside her head lit up with rage. She knew she’d pissed him off, she could feel his anger burning inside of her. He reached down with both hands and picked her up and threw her against the nearest wall.

Her back collided with wooden shelves, dry and dusty, and they broke under her momentum. Glass jars bounced over her shoulders and head and shattered on the floor. The pain woke her up and bent her double at the same time, made her want to pass out even as it brought her fully to consciousness.

He was going to kill her, she thought. He would tear off her head and drink from the stump. Or maybe he would just punch her face in. There were so many ways he could destroy her body. Tears squirted from her eyes and she could do nothing but be afraid, she couldn’t even call out Deanna’s name, she didn’t even have time to worry what Arkeley would think about the mess she’d made. She had no mental energy to spend on anything but fear.

He strode toward her on his muscular legs, his eyes wide with hatred. Then he stopped, right in the middle of the cellar room, and stared at her. She had no idea what he was doing but she could sense how much it hurt. His body shook for a moment, a single, awful heave, and then his mouth opened and a thick scurf of clotted blood slid out of his mouth and dripped down his jaw.

Reyes dropped to his knees, the impact with the stone floor sounding like a thunderclap in the vaulted chamber. He coughed and choked and spat old blood out on the flagstones. He clutched at his chest and tore at the skin there with his vicious fingernails, leaving long pink trails across his pectoral muscles. He shook violently until he collapsed totally on the floor and lay there in his own sick.

Caxton could do no more than take a few breaths while she watched him curl around himself in pain. In her head the relic of him howled and she clapped her hands over her ears but the sound was inside of her. There was no shutting it out.

Eventually he recovered from his fit. She hadn’t moved an inch. He got to his feet and grabbed her around the waist and threw her over his shoulder and started climbing up the stairs.

37.

Reyes wasn’t going to kill her—at least not right away. He was still too full of undigested blood from the devastation of Bitumen Hollow. Whenever he even thought of drinking her blood his reaction was pure nausea.

She could feel these things in her own head. He had violated her brain and left something of himself behind when he withdrew, a relic, an image of himself. Now she could feel his thoughts. No words came across that channel, nor even images.

She could feel his unnatural heart pounding, though, pounding hard to move all that sluggish blood around, and she knew how sick he was. She got little bits of him, little inklings and fragments of thoughts. It was a link, and it was enough for her to know his moods and some of his motivations.

He wasn’t going to kill her because it would be a waste of blood. She remembered when Hazlitt fed Malvern he had said the blood had to be warm, and fresh. If Reyes killed her now her blood would go to waste. He couldn’t drink it and he couldn’t store it.

There was more to it, though. He wasn’t going to kill her—because he wanted something from her. Or to do something to her. That scared her, but she was getting used to being scared. Caxton’s fear reaction was becoming so familiar to her that she felt strange when she wasn’t scared. She felt, when she was unafraid, that she must be missing something.

Reyes carried her up the stairs, climbing no more than twenty-five feet. On the way down, in the dark of the casket, those stairs had seemed to descend forever.

They emerged at the top of the staircase into a vast open space surrounded on every side by thick walls. The concrete floor was cracked everywhere and green weeds sprang up from below. The scale and the emptiness of the place made her think of an abandoned factory but then her eyes adjusted to the moonlight slanting in through the long windows and she began to make out details. Chains hung from the ceiling in great profusion. Molds and casting equipment littered the floor like the playthings of a giant who has outgrown the need for toys. The tall windows were broken in places, panes of frosted glass having been replaced by plywood or filled in with ventilating fans. In the distance, at the far end of the concrete floor stood an enormous coke-powered blast furnace that must have gone cold decades earlier. A thirty-foot-wide crucible, an enormous reinforced cup that had once held hundreds of tons of molten steel at a time, hung before the furnace on one thick chain, the other having given way. The crucible’s lip dragged on the floor, mired in a vast wash of hardened slag. Reyes’ hideout was a defunct steel mill, she realized. There were a lot of them in Pennsylvania, mostly around Pittsburgh but she didn’t think she’d been carried that far. There were plenty of them around Philadelphia as well. She could be miles from the corn field where they’d caught her, or only hundreds of yards away. In the sensory failure of the casket ride she’d had no way to accurately measure distances. Her mind spun wildly, trying to figure out how far they’d taken her, to no avail.

At least she was somewhere, somewhere with light and sound so that her mind wasn’t adrift in darkness. She studied her surroundings as best she could while being bounced around on the vampire’s back. Reyes and his half-deads were using only one small corner of the vast cracked floor. The faceless minions had a good campfire going and had set up some furniture, old chairs and couches with springs sticking up through rotting cushions. Fifteen or so of them were gathered around the fire, watching the flames leap and dance, giggling amongst themselves at some no doubt unspeakable joke. They fell quite silent as Reyes approached. He tossed Caxton onto a mildew-stained easy chair and then squatted next to the fire. He made no attempt to tie her up or otherwise constrain her.

“If you’re not—” Caxton started, but she stopped instantly as they all turned to look at her at once. All those mutilated faces unnerved her and made her think of her own mortality. “If you’re not going to kill me then I need to go to the bathroom,”

she said.

She was expecting the half-deads to mock her, and they did. Their whining, high-pitched taunts made her cheeks red but she really did need to urinate.

“Pee in your fucking pants, bitch,” one of the half-deads screamed at her. His skinned jaw flapped open in amusement. “Yeah, come on, do it, I want to see this.

Pee in your pants!” He started chanting it over and over and some of the others joined in.

Reyes stood up and grasped the half-dead’s head in one long-fingered hand, his shoulder in the other. The vampire twisted his hands and the half-dead came apart in two pieces. Reyes threw them both into the fire. The flames leapt dangerously high as the broken body was consumed and a stink of unwashed horror rolled over them all.

There was no more chanting after that. Reyes searched about in a pile of junk for a moment and came up with a rusted tin bucket. He tossed it to her and she caught it.

“Gee, thanks,” she said, but she got up to walk away from the fire. The vampire didn’t even look at her as she walked far out onto the mill’s floor, well away from the half-deads. He didn’t need to. She could feel him inside her head and she knew she would never get away from him again, not really. He was with her even as she squatted over the bucket. She closed her eyes and tried to block him out but it wasn’t possible.

She left the bucket there and walked back toward the fire. It was brutally cold in the unheated mill and she figured that it was better to get over her squeamishness about her captor than it was to die of hypothermia.

A half-dead waited for her, a bag of fast food in his bony hand. She took it and realized just how hungry she was. She hadn’t eaten in well over a day and while adrenaline had confused her body into ignoring food for a while it couldn’t last forever. She opened the bag and found a cold hamburger and a flat, watery soft drink inside. The hamburger already had a bite taken out of it. She wasn’t sure whether the half-deads had gotten the food out of a dumpster or if one of them had taken the bite. It didn’t matter. She devoured the burger and washed it down with the syrupy clear soda. Her lips were chapped, she’d been so thirsty.

With her needs essentially met she climbed back onto the easy chair and wrapped her arms around herself. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do next.

Fatigue sapped her energy for a moment and she had to blink rapidly to clear her head. She wasn’t tired, not really—she’d slept all day. The feeling came back, a wash of listlessness that made her arms so heavy she had to let them fall at her sides.

Her neck ached with the weight of holding up her head.

It was Reyes, she realized. The vampire was playing tricks with her mind. Maybe he was just showing off the power he had over her—or maybe he really wanted her to sleep for some reason.

She thought of the half-dead she had tortured and killed on her bedroom floor. He had told her of the hechizo they used to make Deanna break the window. It only worked in dreams, he had said. Dreams. You had to be asleep to dream. Whatever he wanted her for he would use magic to get it, and his magic only worked if she wasn’t conscious enough to fight it off. She scowled at the vampire. “I don’t feel the least bit sleepy. I feel like staying up till dawn,” she told him, “so I can watch you melt into a puddle of goo.”

His reaction made her feel as if the force of gravity had been doubled. Her limbs dragged her down into the cushions of the chair, her body curling over on itself, her eyelids squeezing shut. She fought it and had just enough will power to push it back, to stay conscious. It took everything she had. She knew that the next time he tried to pull that trick she wouldn’t have the strength to resist.

He still hadn’t said a word to her. Piter Lares hadn’t spoken to Arkeley, either, when he dragged him back to his lair. Caxton wished she knew what that meant. She wished she knew what the hell was going on.

Reyes didn’t look at her. Instead he knelt on the floor and pushed one of his hands deep into the fire. Immediate pain rushed through him and Caxton’s body curled up in response. She felt only a fraction of what he must but it was enough to make her gasp in agony.

When he pulled his hand out of the blaze it was dark with soot and some flesh had burned off of his fingers, revealing narrow bones beneath. The flesh grew back over the space of a few seconds but the soot remained, darkening his white fingers.

Reyes came stomping over to her and dragged his fingers across her cheeks and forehead. She tried to turn her face away but his strength was beyond her measure.

He could hold her perfectly still, so still she couldn’t even wriggle like a worm.

His hands smelled like woodsmoke and burnt meat. She sensed his impatience as he drew complex symbols on her face with the soot under his fingernails. He was writing a word on her face, she realized, a single word: SUEÑO

It should not take so much work to make her accept the curse. A glance had sufficed in his own case, a chance meeting of the eyes. She was fighting too hard and it was taking too long.

“What curse?” she asked.

Reyes’ eyes went wide. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to have heard so much of his thoughts. He frowned and grasped her head in both of his hands. She tried to close her eyes but he pried them open with his thumbs and she couldn’t look away.

His red eyes bored down into hers like drills biting into soft wood. He tore her consciousness away from her as if he were ripping off her clothes. She couldn’t fight, she could barely utter a meek protest, a hissing “No...” under her breath.

In a moment she was asleep.

38.

Darkness claimed her, darkness far more profound and complete than the darkness she’d experienced inside the casket. There was no ground below her, nothing on either side of her, nothing above her. She lay motionless, unaware, inert.

Then something changed.

Where before there had been no light, there was suddenly a light. A dim orange spark glowing all alone, stranded in the dark with her. It pulsed and flared yellow for a moment as if she’d breathed on an ember but then it sank back into dull orange.

She reached for it, tried to keep it alive because she knew if she didn’t, if she didn’t do anything, it would blink out of existence and she would be all alone again.

The spark grew as she poured her will into it. It grew and smoldered and she smelled smoke and she was glad. It became an ember, and then a pool of burning radiance, and suddenly it gave off enough light for her to see where she was.

She was standing in the mill, right where she’d been when she fell asleep. The spark she’d thought she was nurturing was thirty yards away in the bottom of the half-collapsed crucible. It was more than just a little ember, she saw, it had just looked like that because it was so far away. It was a pool of molten incandescent metal and it swelled as she watched. It swelled and deepened and soon it spilled out over the crucible’s thick lip.

The liquid metal ran down channels carved in the floor. It filled up molds and etched lines of fire through the cracks in the cement. It gathered in great glowing heaps of slag, cooling and turning black only to be melted again by new waves of super-heated metal as more and more spilled out from the crucible.

Red light glared on every metal surface in the mill. Black smoke filled her lungs and she coughed wildly. The surging metal threatened to engulf her and she had to climb up on top of a huge mold before her feet her burned off.

Clouds of red sparks filled the air around the crucible, torrents of dark smoke obscured the ceiling just as the metal covered the floor, a lake of fire. The heat was intense—it made her eyebrows curl up and it singed her nasal passages. She could barely breathe.

“No,” she managed to shout before the fumes filled her throat and choked her and she coughed and coughed until she couldn’t speak anymore. “This isn’t real.

This is just a dream!” Though it was like no dream she’d ever had before. She revised her statement: “It’s all in my head!”

It was true, she knew it was true. But it didn’t matter. If she fell into the molten iron she would still burn. Her skin would crisp and pull away from her muscles, her hair would catch flame. The pain would still be excruciating. Pain was all in the mind, too, and it would still hurt.

The liquid metal kept rising. Caxton grabbed at a chain hanging from the ceiling.

The metal links were hot enough to scorch her palms but she knew she would climb up the chain if she had to.

The air roared around her, a hydrocarbon wind of burning iron. Her lungs grew dry and shredded inside her chest as she sucked in the air, trying to get one clean breath. Then her legs wobbled underneath her. Caxton tottered on the mold as it started to melt under her feet. The smoke in her throat made it hard to keep her balance as she kept coughing, a reedy, dry cough that hurt her lungs. She grabbed at the chain again and the metal burned her hand so badly she pulled it away, pure reflex. Her arm swung out and pulled her off balance as her feet shuffled on the mold, trying to find purchase as the metal edged up to touch her boots—

—and she opened her eyes.

She was awake.

She was lying face down on the floor of the mill, her cheek pressed against the cold cement. The crucible stood empty and cold at the far end of the open space.

Behind her the half-deads were gathered around their fire, giggling away. How she had gotten so far away from them while she slept was a mystery. Had she crawled away in her sleep? She heard a sound like running water and looked up.

Reyes stood a dozen feet away. The drawstring pants were down below his buttocks and he was relieving himself on a pile of old, rusted metal, pissing out not urine but blood. When he was done he pulled up his pants and strode over to where she lay.

She didn’t have the strength to get up. She didn’t have the strength to lift her face from the icy floor. She couldn’t see any of him but his pale white feet. The toenails were thick and ragged. They looked like they could cut through flesh like steak knives.

“You don’t scare me,” she managed to croak. She expected her throat to be scorched—she could still taste smoke in the back of her mouth. But of course that had all been a dream. “You were human, once. You were a sad little man who stayed home and jacked off to the bra advertisements in magazines—”

One of his feet moved backward, lifting off the floor. It swung away from her, and then it came back. He kicked her right in the stomach and she wasn’t ready for it. She felt like her guts liquefied inside of her body and came swimming up her throat, pressing down against her rectum. The pain was going to make her shit herself. She clenched down hard and somehow kept everything together.

“You had nothing, you were nobody,” she cried. “Now you’re even less. You’re unnatural. The light of the sun melts you, you—”

He drew his foot back for another blow. She called out and he stopped, his feet spread on the cement, ready to kick her if she didn’t say what he wanted to hear.

She would gladly have said anything, anything at all, but she had no idea what the right words would be. “What time is it?” she asked, just trying to stall.

The foot went back and hit her once more. It was like being struck by a moving car. She felt bones give way in her chest. The pain surged upward, to her brain, and without warning she—

—opened her eyes and saw black smoke drifting along the ceiling. She looked down and saw the red glow of the burning metal once more. She was back in the dream.

In the few moments while she’d been awake her dream-self had been busy.

Ignoring the searing pain in her hands, Caxton had clambered up a thick chain and hung suspended perhaps ten feet above the surface of the molten metal. With her legs wrapped around the chain and her arms holding her in place she was, for the moment, safe, but she didn’t see a lot of options as to what to do next.

Nothing of the floor remained visible—the liquid iron had flooded the mill until the molds and tools and all but the uppermost lip of the crucible were submerged in burning, smoking metal. The mold she had stood on before had melted and was no more than a black stain on the reddish-orange surface of the bubbling sea below.

The lake of fire was still rising, too—she could see it climbing up the windows, a thick meniscus of darkly glimmering slag spreading across the brick walls as still more molten iron poured from the crucible.

There was no way to go but up, and little enough above her worth climbing toward. She tried to wake up. She tried pinching herself, grabbing a thick fold of skin at her waist and twisting it, hard. The pain screamed through her belly but nothing happened. She pulled off one of her gloves and dropped it into the heaving liquid below. It struck the surface with a hiss and a gout of flame, then disappeared forever. She got her teeth into the sensitive webbing between her thumb and forefinger and bit down, hard. Harder. Hard enough to draw blood.

The pain didn’t wake her up. In desperation she closed her eyes and tried to imagine it all away, tried to find her way back to the waking world through sheer willpower. Again, she failed.

She thought of the cold mill, the long defunct mill of reality where the half-deads waited to taunt her, where Reyes kept beating the shit out of her. Did she really want to go back there, she wondered? Was it so much better than the burning mill of her dream?

Desperate, alone, barely able to see or breath for the smoke, she clutched to the hot chain and sobbed. She couldn’t handle it anymore. The dream world was a hell of fire. Reality was pain and torture. There was a third option, she knew.

She could just let go.

She tried to shove the thought away, to ignore it, but it kept coming back. It haunted her. She could just let go. Let go, and fall, and fall forever.

39.

She awoke to find moonlight pooling on her face. She blinked away the silver illumination and sat up. The moon was coming in through a broken pane in the mill’s high windows, painting a broad rectangular patch of floor with its light.

Caxton tried to stand up. It wasn’t easy. Her entire midsection screamed with pain every time she moved, a tearing pain as if she were being pulled to pieces. Her legs ached where the half-deads had cut her the day before. Her head was full of ugly things and she kept having to snort and clear her throat and spit out bloody mucus. Some of the things in her lungs wouldn’t come out no matter how much she blew her nose.

Slowly, mindful of her aching rib cage, she rose to her feet and looked around.

Reyes was nowhere in sight. The half-deads and their fire were halfway across the mill. She had moved, or been moved, in her sleep until she was well out of earshot of her captors. Nobody was watching her. Nothing kept her from running away.

She felt like cold water was pouring down her back. It was impossible. She had been given a reprieve—somehow the vampire and his minions had just decided to ignore her. Did they think she was still unconscious, perhaps sleep-walking around the mill? Did they think that she was too weak to get away?

It was too good to be true, she knew that, it had to be some kind of trap, but she also knew she had to capitalize on whatever small freedom she’d been allowed.

Keeping an eye on the half-deads around the fire she hurried toward the wall of the mill. A pile of broken carts had been left there, miniature rail cars that had once moved ingots from one side of the mill to the other. The jagged wood and rusted wheels made a lot of noise as she clambered up to the top of the heap but there was no way to silence them. The pile shifted under her feet and hands but it was stable enough to let her get up to the bottom ledge of the tall windows.

She found a broken pane, an open space as wide as her hand filled with chicken wire. Shards of frosted glass still hung from the wire. She carefully brushed them away and looked out.

The moon lit up a rural landscape for her, a tableau of black trees swaying and bending in the cold wind. A vacant lot stood directly behind the mill, perhaps a parking lot once or a railyard that had been so overgrown by weeds it no long served any purpose at all. A few rows of fifty-gallon oil drums stood forgotten and skeletonized by rust directly below her.

There was no way out. She was perhaps twenty feet up in the air. Even if she could break out the glass and somehow get through the wire she would have to drop to an unknown surface and trust she didn’t break her legs in the process.

Something moved behind her and she panicked and nearly fell off the heap of broken carts. She looked back and saw a group of half-deads in the center of the mill floor. They held torches and were muttering amongst themselves. They weren’t looking at her but they had to see her—didn’t they? Maybe their vision wasn’t as good as hers. Maybe she was overestimating them.

Caxton turned her face once more to the broken window. It was good, it was helpful, just to get a whiff of fresh air. In a moment she knew she would be discovered and put back to sleep. Just a glimpse of moonlight on trees was worth the effort.

She breathed in deeply—and nearly choked. The air outside was foul with the smell of baking manure. She turned away from the window and tried not to cough.

The half-deads were pulling on a chain hanging from the ceiling. The chain rattled through their skeletal hands and then suddenly it took on a life of its own. A counterweight descended quickly from the rafters as another chain shot toward the ceiling. A bundle wrapped in canvas was tied to the counterweight. Caxton was not too surprised when the half-deads cut it loose and it turned out to be a human corpse, a heavyset woman in the brown uniform of a UPS driver. She looked very pale, which meant she must have been drained of blood. One of Reyes’ victims. The half-deads laid her out carefully on the floor and unbuttoned her clothing but didn’t remove any of it. It looked like they were trying to make her comfortable, strangely enough.

The vampire came out of the shadows then. He had been lying on a flow of hardened slag, a pale spot in the shadows. He had been no more than twenty feet away from her the whole time. Hope slipped away from Caxton like water down a drain. The whole time she’d been climbing the broken carts and sniffing the foul air outside he must have been watching her. Well, of course he had. He wasn’t stupid enough to let her wander around unsupervised.

He didn’t so much as glance at her, though. He walked over to the corpse and touched the dead woman’s chest with one of his hands. His hand pressed against where her heart would be. He stared deeply into her glassy, sightless eyes, and muttered something in his low, growling voice.

The woman’s body started to twitch, muscles jumping here and there under her clothes. “Come back,” Reyes said. He was calling her—literally calling her back from death. “Come back and serve me. Come back and serve me!” The twitches graduated into full-blown convulsions, her heels kicking against the floor, her head flopping back and forth like a fish cast up on a dry wooden wharf. Her body stiffened with the spasm and a sour reek split the air, similar to the manure smell from outside but much sharper and more pungent. The dead woman’s hands curled into wicked claws as she reached for her face. Slowly, she sat up, while clawing again and again at the skin around her eyes.

She started to scream when strips of skin peeled off of her face, but she didn’t stop gouging with her nails at her cheeks and forehead—if anything, her clawing grew more urgent. She was going to tear off her own face, piece by piece. Caxton was watching a new half-dead be born, a replacement for the one Reyes had destroyed and thrown in the fire.

Reyes felt her disgust. The vampire turned to look at Caxton and for a long bad moment they just stared into each others’ eyes. Caxton felt him squirming around inside of her head, almost as if he were rifling through the filing cabinets of her mind, looking for something and not finding it. The vampire was upset, angry, nervous—though as soon as she sensed those emotions in him he clamped down hard on the psychic connection they shared. Her body writhed as if she were touching a live wire. He looked away and Caxton’s body collapsed backward onto the carts, her breath heaving in and out of her lungs. Her eyes fluttered closed and—

—she was back in the burning mill, still clinging to the chain.

She could hardly believe she hadn’t let go yet. She wanted it, suddenly, wanted it very badly. She could visualize the whole process. Her body would fall for a few seconds through empty space. She would collide with the surface of the molten metal below. Her skin would burn off instantly, she thought. Her muscles and her flesh would take a moment longer. There would be pain. She was sure it would hurt beyond anything she had ever experienced. But only for a second. And then... what?

Oblivion? Nothingness?

How tempting it was—how tempting to put everything behind her. She thought of her life even before she was imprisoned in the casket and how much of it had been utter misery. Working so hard for the approval of her superiors, the approval of Arkeley, the approval of her dead father. None of them had ever taken her seriously.

Then there was Deanna, Deanna who she loved so much, Deanna who was fading away while she watched. Deanna who had been vibrant and lively and sexy before, and now half the time she couldn’t get off the couch, Caxton would come home and find her there, wrapped up in a quilt, watching some celebrity gossip show on television. Or rather watching empty space, her eyes not even focused on the TV.

Caxton had vowed to save Deanna, to bring her back to life. But she was failing, she knew. If anything, Deanna was dragging her down.

The dogs—the greyhounds, her beautiful animals. They would miss her. They would howl for her, she knew. But somebody else would come along and feed them, and pet them, and soon enough they would forget. The whole world would forget Laura Caxton after a short season of formulaic grief. If she just ceased to exist, nothing, really, would change. Or rather, one thing would change. In the great balance sheet a certain amount of pain would be subtracted from the world. Wasn’t that a good thing? If she had the opportunity to reduce the world’s pain, by ending her own, wasn’t that the right thing to do?

All she had to do was let go.

She took one hand off the chain, and somewhere, somewhere outside of the dream, she felt Reyes the vampire start to smile. She looked at her hand. He wanted her to let go. Reyes wanted her to end the dream.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. It didn’t matter who wanted what. In a second she would be gone, erased from the world, and after that, who cared? Who cared if the vampires ate half of Pennsylvania? Who cared? She wouldn’t be around to feel guilty.

She removed her other hand from the chain. The muscles in her thighs quivered when they were forced to support her whole weight. She started to lean back. So easy. So easy, and it would solve every problem she’d ever had.

Strong fingers clutched at her left wrist. She screamed, expecting pain, but the fingers just held her, they didn’t dig into her flesh. They wouldn’t let her fall. She tried to turn her head and see who was holding her but it didn’t work—her neck didn’t bend that way. She couldn’t see the fingers as they shifted their grip, closing like a pair of handcuffs around her wrist.

“You’re not done yet,” the owner of the fingers said. The voice was quite soft and almost vanished in the furnace roar of the burning mill. She could tell, though, that the voice belonged to Arkeley.