13 Bullets

40.

“Enough!” Reyes shouted, from somewhere, from nowhere.

Everything stopped—time stopped, motion stopped. Caxton was all alone. The molten metal receded, draining away to reveal the mill floor once again. The iron still filled runnels in the floor, which provided some light, and the blast furnace still smoked and spat out great gusts of red sparks. But the heat became if not bearable at least survivable and the air thinned out until Caxton could breathe without pain.

The metal pouring from the giant crucible slowed to a trickle and she climbed down her chain to stand on the mill’s floor without being burned.

In one corner of the mill a trapdoor creaked open on rusty hinges. She walked toward the portal timidly, unsure of what was happening. She could see stairs leading downwards into darkness but nothing more.

On unsteady, tired feet, she stepped down onto the first riser. The stone step was cold against her bare foot, cold enough to make her toes curl. After spending so long in the conflagratory heat of the burning mill she’d forgotten what cold could really feel like. She took another step down and braced herself against the metal edge of the trap door. She was relatively certain that as soon as she descended far enough it would close after her with a tooth-loosening clang, or perhaps it would even snap shut when she was only a few steps down the stairs, closing like a mouse trap on her already-battered body. She wouldn’t put anything past this nightmare.

“Laura, please, join me,” someone said from down in the darkness. There was a lot of Central America in the voice, an accent she wasn’t expecting. She took another step, and another. The trap didn’t clang shut. Eventually she made out a little light filtering up from below, a little yellow light that guttered like a flame in a mild breeze.

She walked down further—and found that she knew this other room very well. A narrow vaulted space, the walls lined with shelves holding jars and boxes and rolled-up blankets. It was the same cellar storage area where she had first entered the mill. The place the half-deads had brought her in her casket. The offending piece of furniture was still there, its lid closed now. A candle in an antique holder stood at one end of the casket. Sitting on the other end was a man of average build and height. He wore a hooded sweatshirt (with the hood down) over an Oxford cloth white buttoned-down shirt. His skin was the color of walnut shells and he had a black roll of hair that looked carefully combed. He smiled at her and showed her a mouth of small, round teeth, very human teeth, but she knew this was Efrain Reyes.

It was Reyes as he had appeared in life. Before he died and became a vampire.

“When the mill was in use they would store borax and lime down here. That’s what you smell,” he told her. He patted the casket lid next to him, offering her a place to sit.

Honestly she hadn’t smelled anything. The smoke from the burning mill had scalded her nasal passages and left her unable to smell at all. She didn’t correct him, just sat down next to him. There wasn’t enough room on the casket to sit apart so she ended up touching him, hip to hip, arm to arm.

“I wanted to talk with you directly,” he told her, once she was comfortable. “She advises against it.” Caxton knew somehow he meant Malvern, that Justinia Malvern had made up the rules of this conversation. The information must have come through the part of Reyes inside Caxton’s head. “This is all supposed to be done in silence. She even calls it the Silent Rite.”

“You’re in contact with her… right now?” Caxton asked.

Yes, she heard inside her mind, but he only shook his head. “I can’t answer that.”

It was as if he wasn’t aware of what she’d heard. As if he didn’t know that their connection ran both ways. “I can’t tell you anything until you’ve accepted the curse.”

“Then what do we have to talk about? Because I refuse to… to do what you ask,” she told him. She could no more do that than she could say the word out loud.

“You’ll have to kill me yourself.”

Suicide, he thought, the word is suicide, but she can’t say it. She’ll do it though.

It is inevitable; the curse drives them to it. She must be ready. “I’m not asking for anything. It has to be your own choice. You have to accept this thing to be one of us.”

“I can’t... I’ve seen Malvern, in her coffin...”

There was a rustle of silk behind her and Caxton tried to turn around but she moved so slowly. Someone stood behind her but no, there was nothing human back there. Finally she managed to turn enough to see that a woman had joined them. A female vampire, pressed up against the shelves as if she were holding on for dear life. She wore a long purple silk dress cut shockingly low in front but fluffed out below with an honest-to-God hoop skirt. A powdered grey wig perched high her bald head, concealing her pointed ears. She had a black satin eyepatch over one eye and clotted blood smeared around her lips.

It was Malvern. Justinia Malvern, as she must have looked when she was an active, well-fed vampire. An icon of strength and power. She didn’t move, or smile, or speak. Her single eye studied Caxton without blinking. In that eye Caxton saw the truth that the strong appearance hid so well. Malvern was desperate. She was asking for help, and at the same time she was studying Caxton, trying to decide if she was worthy.

“She needs us, Laura. You can’t imagine her suffering. We have to help her and to do that you need to become one of us. Your life is kind of pathetic, okay? I don’t mean to be cruel.” His voice changed as she spoke, the Central American accent coarsening, turning into a growl. Malvern vanished without warning, leaving nothing behind but a smell of blood that lingered in the air and slowly changed, almost fluidly, into the smell of baking manure.

Caxton didn’t understand at first—then she slowly turned her head back to face him. The dream was over, and reality had returned. Nothing had changed, she was still sitting on the casket with him, the only light still came from the flickering candle.

He wanted her to think she was still in the dream—otherwise, why the subtle transition? But where he had been human before and fully dressed now he wore only his sweat pants and his skin was whiter than soap flakes. She looked up and saw his bald head, his pointed ears. His mouth full of wicked teeth.

He had looked like an individual before, like a human being unique among all the others in the world. Now he looked just like the vampire she’d helped kill, the one Arkeley had destroyed with the jackhammer.

Congreve, she heard in her head. It was the name of the dead vampire. Reyes would never have volunteered as much, surely? Unless perhaps he didn’t care anymore. If he was certain she was about to die, maybe.

“It’s all up to you,” he said, handing her something heavy and strangely shaped.

She looked down, slowly, and saw that it was a handgun. Her own Beretta, in fact.

“She thought maybe you would understand. That maybe you’d be willing to help?

But this part’s up to you. You lift that, and you put the barrel in your mouth.”

Caxton frowned in confusion. Her hand lifted the weapon without any effort at all.

Her muscles contracted to bring the pistol closer to her face. It would be harder, she knew, to put the gun down than to do as he said. She tried to call up the sense of oblivion she’d had in the dream. She tried to focus on how this one step would solve everything.

She wanted to please him. It startled her a little to realize it. She’d tried to please and impress every authority figure in her life—her father, her superiors in the Highway Patrol, Arkeley. Why not the vampire who had taken such control of her?

“Come on, Laura. I’ve got other things to do, okay?” He didn’t touch her or the weapon. “Most people figure this out pretty quick. When I saw her in her coffin, I got it right away. I knew what she was offering, and I knew I wanted it. It’s immortality, Laura, and it’s contagious! What a wonderful thing! Why are you holding back?”

Caxton hadn’t thought she was. She thought she was being good. The gun kept coming closer, inching through the air toward her lips. Her teeth opened up. Her tongue pushed her dry lips open.

Her will, and Reyes’ will, were fused together. She could feel him inside her like a worm burrowing between the hemispheres of her brain. Justinia Malvern had done this to Reyes, she realized, with just one look, by catching his eye for just a moment.

The old vampire had raped the electrician from across a room in the time it took him to install a light bulb. Now he was doing the same thing to her, using that same power. He had made Congreve and the other, the vampire who cut off his pointed ears daily. Reyes was an expert at this. How could she possibly hope to resist?

The handgun touched her lips. She felt the cold metal on her sensitive skin like an electric shock. Her eyes crossed as she looked down at the barrel. Just a few more inches. The weapon only had a few more inches to traverse and then she knew her finger would tighten on the trigger.

“Your mother did it. Your father smoked three packs a day, he understood,”

Reyes breathed. He was so close to her. He wasn’t looking at her. “Your lover’s well on her way. I did it without hesitation. It’s not this hard.”

Caxton’s finger moved on the trigger. A tremor, a twitch.

Arkeley came down the stairs then, his feet making no sound on the risers. He came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She couldn’t see him but she knew it was him. Just like in the burning mill. “You’re not as fragile as you think,” he told her. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. A nice, final thought to cap off her life.

You’re not really here, she thought. But then she didn’t understand—how could he be there, if she was wide awake? He’d appeared in her dream but this, his presence in real life, was quite impossible.

As soon as she thought it he disappeared. His hand left nothing but a little warmth on her shoulder. Her own hand suddenly felt very, very heavy and the gun fell away from her lips. It was still pointing at her flesh but the barrel rested on her chest, just to the left of her sternum. If she fired she would blow out her own heart.

“No,” Reyes said, a huge noise in the little room. He moved fast, too fast for her to follow. The gun flew away from her, into a corner of the room and her hand ached as if it had been slapped. “No. No, no, no. Joder,” he moaned, “how are you so stupid? I don’t have time for this.” He looked at her then and his bloody eyes were filled with rage and hatred. His arm swung out and she flew off the casket to land in a heap in the corner.

41.

Reyes got up and grabbed her hair in one enormous hand. He pulled her up until she was standing, looking into her eyes.

“I thought the whole silence thing was mierda but I guess not. I want you to forget everything I said to you, okay? You forget everything and you sit right here and you don’t move a muscle till I come for you again.”

She nodded. She possessed no more willpower whatsoever. If he told her to stand on one foot and cluck like a chicken she would have.

“Alright. Fine, damn it! You have to be so stubborn, well I can outstubborn you, perra. We’ll start all over again tonight.” He rubbed at his eyes and mouth in frustration and turned away from her. She expected that he would take the candle and leave her in the dark, that he would climb the stairs and leave her all alone. His destination, however, was a lot closer at hand. He opened up the casket on the floor and climbed in, leaving her to watch by the flickering light of the candle.

It must be dawning outside, she realized. The night must have been over.

The first night, anyway. How many more times would she be subjected to the dreams of the burning mill? How many nights would it take before she did shoot herself, before she did, finally, accept his curse?

A burbling, liquid noise came from the casket. He was so certain that she was safe, that she couldn’t harm him, that he would leave her right there next to his deliquescing body. And he was right. She couldn’t so much as twitch a thumb. To prove it, she looked down at her hands, at her right thumb. She prepared to will it to move, to pour all of her remaining psychic energy into making it jump just a little bit.

A futile task but one she felt she needed to perform before she just gave up. If she could prove to herself that even this, just twitching her thumb, was out of the question, then why should she fight even a moment longer? She would just do what Reyes asked of her. She started willing her thumb to move, but before she could really begin a voice out of nowhere startled her.

“What if it works?” Arkeley asked her. He was standing on the stairs, just out of sight. It was his voice, though.

What? she asked, unable to open her mouth. She could still think it.

“What if the thumb moves?” he asked. “What are you going to do then? Are you going to keep fighting?”

It was an absurd question. You’re not real, she said, as she had said to him before. And just as before, it worked. He vanished. She felt a little bit pleased with her ability to at least control her own phantasms.

When he was gone she tried to return to the matter at hand, but it took her a long time to remember what she’d been doing. She couldn’t seem to... to think right, every time she would try to hold something in her head it would just fly away from her again. She was going to do something, she remembered. Something important.

Some vital, last step. Yes. She was going to move her thumb.

She looked down at the thumb and thought, okay, if you can twitch, then twitch.

The thumb moved. Just a little jerky spasm, a trembling almost. But it moved.

She looked up at the stairwell to see if Arkeley was there, ready to jeer, to ask her what happened next. He wasn’t there, of course, because he’d never been there. He had not been real. But that didn’t get her off the hook. What next? What did she do next?

Moving her whole hand seemed like a good idea. She tried to make a fist. Slowly, very slowly because she was so tired, the hand folded up into a weak fist.

She felt a very weird kind of anger. She’d really wanted her hand to disobey her, frankly. She was far more comfortable sitting there, doing nothing, waiting for Reyes to climb out of the coffin. But if she could make a fist, then she could probably stand up. And that meant she had to stand up.

“You’ll need to do more than that,” Arkeley told her. He was back, hidden somewhere, somewhere very close by but not where she could see him. He was a presence in the room but she couldn’t have said where he might be. “You’re going to need to open the casket.”

She rose to her feet, taking her time about it. Not in any kind of hurry at all. If Arkeley had insisted she move more quickly she would have banished him from her presence once again, maybe permanently. He didn’t, though. He offered no encouragement nor any kind of derision. He was silent. But he was still there.

She shuffled over to the casket until she was standing right over it. She looked down at the scorched hole in the lid where she’d shot through the wood. A curling white maggot clung to the edge of the hole.

Caxton bent at the knees and got her hands under the lid of the casket. With one quick motion she threw it open. She was expecting what she found inside, but not so much of it. She saw Reyes’ bones, just as she’d seen Malvern’s skeleton, but where Malvern’s flesh had been reduced to a quart or two of pasty glop, Reyes’ casket was half full of the viscous soup. Well, he had a lot more flesh to liquefy than Malvern did. Some of the long bones floated near the top, with whole colonies of maggots clinging to their knobby protrusions. The skull was at the bottom, fully submerged, staring up at her with its lower jaw hinged wide.

“You have to take the heart,” Arkeley told her.

She turned around, looking for the Fed. He was so close she could feel his body heat. Just like she felt the cold absence of Reyes’ humanity. She couldn’t see Arkeley, though. He was just in her head. She was careful not to say as much, though. Saying anything like that seemed to make him disappear, and she knew she could use his advice.

“Take the heart,” he told her again.

She looked for the heart but couldn’t see it. It wasn’t floating near Reye’s spine, nor had it bobbed up out of the bottom of the rib cage. There was something shadowy at the bottom, resting on the silk upholstery of the casket. Something dark that wasn’t a bone. She started to reach for it, then stopped. She didn’t know if she could reach through the liquefied flesh.

“You twitched your thumb,” Arkeley told her. “You promised yourself that if you twitched your thumb, you would keep fighting. This is the only way.”

She closed her eyes and plunged her arm into the casket. The liquid clung to her, sticking to the hair on her wrist and forearm. She felt a bone bump against her skin, rough and terrifying. Maggots crawled on her skin, inching their way up her arm. She wanted to scream but she was still too foggy to make a sound. If she hadn’t been half-hypnotized she knew she would not have been able to take the heart.

In her semi-lucid state, though, she felt her fingers close around the shadowy organ and lift it free. The organic broth that was Reyes’ daytime body dripped from the heart. It splattered her shoes. The heart itself was writhing with maggots. She tried to shake them off but it didn’t work—they clung tight to it. The muscle in her hand pulsed gently against her palm, an almost imperceptible ticking rhythm. It told her she wasn’t finished.

She looked around at the shelves. Reyes had said the vaulted cellar had once been used to store lime and borax, and now that she was half-awake she could, in fact, smell them, a sort of alkaline bite in the air. At some point the cellar had been converted into a general storehouse, however, and the shelves were full of all manner of things. There were jars full of nails, bolts and other hardware. There were camping supplies and spare candles and box after box of Material Safety Data Sheets, government-required forms that explained what chemicals were present in the mill and how toxic they all were.

She took the biggest jar she could find and emptied it into the mess in the casket.

She crumpled a dozen or so sheets of paper and pushed them into the jar, careful to leave room for air to circulate. She’d been a Brownie once and she’d been camping enough times to know how to make a fire.

The candle Reyes had used to illuminate the cellar was guttering low when she was ready but it only took a moment to light her makeshift firestarter. Bright orange flames dripped down the sides of the jar. The paper blackened and crumpled quickly but she had plenty to work with and kept stuffing more and more inside. Then she dropped the heart into the jar.

She’d expected to have to feed the fire for hours as the wet heart dried out.

Muscle tissue, especially hearts, were notorious for being hard to burn. This was not true of a vampire’s heart. It might as well have been made of paraffin—it burst into flames instantly, blue flames so hot they shattered the glass jar and spat flaming refuse all over the cellar.

In the casket Reyes’s skull floated to the surface, the jaw wide in a scream Caxton heard just fine, a drawn-out, horrified scream. The scream of a creature being burned alive but unable to roll or run or get away from the flames.

And that was it. She had expected—or hoped for—something more dramatic.

After a few moments, though, the skull sank back down into the goo and was still once more. The scream in her head faded but remained, a distant sort of musical tone. It never quite disappeared but it was swallowed up in the background noise of her own head.

“Don’t feel bad for him,” Arkeley told her.

She coughed to find her voice. “I don’t. This son of a bitch raped me. Even now he’s inside of me. I’m glad he can feel this.”

She knelt down next to the burning heart and watched it shrivel and fall to pieces.

When it was nothing but orange embers, when the screaming had stopped, she picked up a smoldering piece of the heart with a rolled-up piece of paper and tossed it into the casket. The liquefied flesh inside went up like a fireball and cheerful little lines of fire ran across the wooden molding on the casket’s lip.

“What are you going to do next?” Arkeley asked her.

“I’m going upstairs,” she told him, because it was just that simple. But first she paused to find her Beretta. It felt very good, and very important, in her hand.

42.

A pair of half-deads were standing near the trap-door. They were carrying a coffin between them, a plain wooden box that might have held tools once but it was just about human-sized. The coffin was meant for Caxton, for her vampiric rebirth.

They’d built it while she slept.

One of them wore a chrome Kaiser helmet. He had been a biker four days earlier, a massively-built tough guy with a penchant for leather and grease. Reyes had taken him while he had stopped at a payphone. Nobody remembered who he was going to call. “It can’t be much longer now,” the half-dead said, his voice high and shrill. He rubbed his skeletal hands together until bits of dried-up flesh flaked off. “The sun is almost up.”

The other half-dead shook her fleshless head. “The sun. I didn’t think I’d ever see the sun again. I would have paid cash money to see it and now... Jesus. What am I? What did he make me into?” she asked. She sounded confused and more than a little scared. Reyes had found her jogging just before dawn, out on a lonely rural road still carpeted with the night’s haze. She had tried to run, but Reyes had been faster. “This is... this is hell. I’m in hell, I must be.”

“Don’t be so quick to write this off,” the biker told her. “It’s got its compensations.”

The female half-dead turned to look at her companion. “Compensations?

Spending the rest of time as an undead freak with no face has an upside, is that what you’re telling me? I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. My body is falling to pieces while I watch, literally corroded by contact with the air. Where the hell is the silver lining in this?”

“Well,” he told her, “it only lasts about a week.”

Caxton stepped out of the shadows then, a five-foot-long bar of solid iron in her hands. She brought it around in a sweeping blow that knocked the faceless head right off of his neck. His stringy body slowly collapsed to the floor.

She turned to face the other one, the female. The half-dead backed away from her, arms outstretched, begging. In a moment she was out of range and the heavy bar was an unwieldy weapon at best. Caxton threw it at her and winced as it clanged and rattled and banged on the concrete floor, well short of its target.

The half-dead turned and ran on wobbly legs. Caxton ran after her and caught her easily. She grabbed the female’s hand and tore it free, threw it into the dark corner of the mill. She grabbed the left arm and it came off with barely any pulling at all.

The half-dead screamed and screamed. Finally she collapsed to the floor. Caxton stamped on her head with both feet until the screaming stopped.

She took a moment to breathe, just breathe. She stood alone in the darkness of the mill. The vampire was dead. That was something, wasn’t it? She’d achieved something real and of tangible value. Maybe that was enough.

“You still need to get out of here alive,” Arkeley told her. She’d stopped looking for him. He was nearby, that was what mattered. “All that noise will bring the others.”

She nodded, accepting that he was right. She checked her Beretta. She had three bullets. There were at least thirteen half-deads still active in the mill. She couldn’t take them all on at once. She couldn’t take more than one or two at a time—she’d only prevailed against the biker and the jogger through the element of surprise. If they had been prepared, if she’d given them a chance to fight back, she would have lost. Her arms were shaky with stress and horror. She’d barely been able to lift the iron bar.

Okay, she thought, so if you can’t fight, then run. The trouble was she didn’t know what direction to head. The fire from the night before had burnt out and the mill was filled with darkness, great clotted heaps of it. There had to be an exit from the mill, a doorway leading out into the day, but she had no idea where to find it.

“If you can’t decide, head for the nearest landmark. That’ll at least help you get your bearings,” Arkeley told her. She turned and headed into the depths of the mill, toward the crucible and the cold blast furnace. The sun had smeared a little white light on the tall windows and she could make out a few details here and there. She could see enough that she didn’t trip over the piles of junk or the ankle-high molds that littered the floor.

She saw torn faces floating in the gloom, bodies swimming towards her out of the dark. She felt skeletal hands reaching for her. One touched her side, the wasted muscles of a half-dead hand closing on the fabric of her shirt. She swung her elbow backward, hard, and the hand fell away with a high-pitched squeak.

Ahead of her a red ruin of a face floated out of the gloom and she raised the Beretta and fired as the half-dead’s arms came up to grab her. The half-dead cracked apart and exploded, but that left her with only two more rounds. She ducked under the attack of another half-dead and ran around the side of the crucible.

Ahead she saw a pair of double swinging doors. A thin line of bluish light snuck in beneath them. She ran at the doors and threw her arms out to hit the pressure bars.

The doors screamed open and she burst out into a courtyard enclosed by high brick walls on every side. Yellow grass burst from the ground all around her. She saw workbenches and old tool racks but there was no way out.

She was trapped.

At least there was blue sky over her head. At least she was outside. She smelled the baking manure smell of Kennett Square and knew she couldn’t be far from help.

The south-eastern region of Pennsylvania was pretty heavily developed. If she could just get out of the courtyard she would be free.

There was no exit, however. No way out. She’d run right into a dead end. The walls on every side were solid, unbroken. They were too high to climb.

The double doors rattled and a half-dead poked its skeletal head out into the open air. She raised her pistol and it ducked back inside. “Arkeley,” she said, “what do I do?”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he had no better ideas than she did. She had two bullets and maybe ten or twelve half-deads chasing her. She had no time.

Caxton grabbed the rough edge of a wooden table—really just a big sheet of plywood nailed to some sawhorses—and dragged it toward the far wall. She jumped up on top of it but she was still about seven feet too short to grab the top of the wall.

The double doors started moving again. One inched open, scraping on the uneven ground. She stared at it, almost as if she were hypnotized again, unable to move. If all the half-deads came out, if they were armed even with just knives or clubs, she was dead. She couldn’t fight them all off.

“They’re cowards,” Arkeley told her. His voice was very soft. In the light of day she could barely hear him.

“What?” she asked, but she understood. “I only have two bullets,” she pleaded with him, but she knew perfectly well by that point that he was just inside her head.

That he was her own survival instinct, compartmentalized, made abstract.

She waited a moment to let the half-deads get clustered and then she fired both shots right into the crack between the two doors. She heard one high-pitched scream and a lot of excited shouts. Good enough. The gun was empty so she shoved it into her holster. Then she jumped down and grabbed another work table, then a pile of two-by-fours. Soon she had a rickety heap of wood that looked like it might collapse under its own weight, much less hers. She stared up at the tottering pile and thought there was no way she could get up it, no way she could then jump from the top of the assemblage and grab the lip of the wall.

She knew what Arkeley would say. You only have to do it once, and if you fall and break your neck, it won’t matter for very long.

With hands that shook badly she hauled herself up the makeshift scaffolding. She got her feet on the top level, an over-turned wheelbarrow. She put one foot on a wheel and it spun away from her. Carefully, her body trembling like grass in the wind, she got to the top and launched herself up the side of the wall. The heap collapsed beneath her, leaving her ten feet up in the air with no support.

One of her hands found the top of the wall and clamped on, hard. Her other hand swung free but she fought her momentum and made it grab the wall as well. Then she heaved, pulling her own weight up onto the top of the wall. From up there she could see that the courtyard was surrounded by mill buildings on three sides. The fourth side fronted a country lane. A road—which had to lead somewhere. It had to lead to safety. There was a fifteen-foot drop on that side. She didn’t let herself think about it, just lowered herself down as far as she could with her arms and then let go.

The ground came up very hard and very fast. It crushed the wind right out of her, making her broken ribs sing a high plaintive howl of agony but the rest of her seemed okay. No broken limbs, anyway. She rolled to her feet and started running down the road, intending to flag down the first car she saw.

She was free.

Part IV - Scapegrace

43.

His thoughts were red thoughts/ and his teeth were white. -Saki, “Sredni Vashtar”

They had a shower in the back of the local cop shop, with fresh towels and good soap and everything. It wasn’t too surprising—the local chief of police was a woman. Caxton was a little surprised not to find a bathtub, though she supposed that wouldn’t be too professional. She spent a lot longer getting clean than she probably needed to.

While disrobing she found Vesta Polder’s charm still hanging around her neck, grimy with her sweat and general dirt. She cleaned it off and held it up to the light and didn’t see anything different than she had before. It was just a spiral of metal, cool to the touch. Whether it had helped her or failed her she had no idea. Maybe that was how such things worked. Maybe it was entirely psychosomatic, or maybe it had been the only thing that saved her from Reyes’ domination. She imagined she would never know.

By the time she’d finished cleaning up the paramedics had already arrived to take a look at her. They told her she’d been very lucky, that the broken ribs she complained of were just sprained, and would heal nicely in a week or two. She had a lot of minor lacerations and contusions which they painted with antiseptic and put bandages on and then they went away.

Then she dressed up in the street clothes the chief had offered her, which were only a little too big, and sat down in the break room with a yellow legal pad and started trying to write her story down. Caxton had never been very good at long reports. They always made her think of writing papers in her abortive attempt at college. Still, she told the story as plainly as she could, with as much detail as she could remember. She only stopped when Clara arrived.

Clara. Caxton had asked specifically for the sheriff’s photographer to come drive her home. She had called Deanna, but mostly just to make sure she was okay.

Deanna was still in the hospital and couldn’t come for her. Clara had been her second choice, of course. When Clara came into the break room, though, Caxton knew better, just by way she felt seeing Clara again. She held out one bandaged hand and Clara took it, then came closer and just stood there for a moment before awkwardly leaning down and kissing Caxton on the top of her head.

Warmth—stemming from both embarrassment and other causes—spread through Caxton’s face and down her neck.

“We thought you were dead,” Clara said, her voice a little shaky. “We looked all night. Somebody called me yesterday morning because... because they thought I would want to know you were missing, and I came right away and joined the search party. We looked everywhere. We even checked out that steel mill but it was all locked up. Oh my God, I looked that place over myself and I didn’t see anything.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Arkeley said. “They’re masters of concealing their hiding places. They have charms to confuse the mind, especially by moonlight.”

“He insisted on coming along,” Clara said.

Caxton frowned. She wanted to ask what Clara meant, whether Clara had heard Arkeley’s voice as well, but then the Fed walked into the break room and sat down on the edge of the table. Caxton slowly realized he wasn’t just in her head anymore.

It was the real Jameson Arkeley, vampire killer.

It was truly weird to see him again. She had internalized him, made his personality part of her self, and it was the only way she had survived being Reyes’ captive. He had come to represent something vital and necessary to her. The flesh-and-blood Arkeley, by comparison, was someone she didn’t necessarily want to see.

She sighed. She had so much to tell him, though. So much he had to hear.

“Special Deputy,” she said, “I need to make a report to you.”

His face contorted, the wrinkles all running one direction then another as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or frown. He finally settled on a pained-looking grimace. “I’ve already got the Cliff’s Notes version. You killed Reyes.”

“I waited until dawn and then I burned his heart,” she said.

“Unnecessary understatement is almost as bad as pointless embellishment.”

She stared up at him, her face devoid of any emotion. What she had to say was going to be important to him. “He tried to make me one of them.”

Nobody moved or spoke after that. Nobody dared break the silence until Arkeley reached up and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me while we drive.”

She expressed her thanks to the local chief and they headed out back to where Clara’s personal vehicle waited. It was a bright yellow Volkswagen, a New Beetle with a flower vase built into the dashboard. It was a lot like Clara herself—tiny, cute, and it came from a whole different world than the one Caxton inhabited. A world she could visit for a while but she’d never be allowed to stay there. The vampires would make sure of it.

Caxton crawled into the back while Arkeley took the front passenger seat. His fused vertebrae trumped her sprained ribs, he announced. She leaned forward between the front seats and told him about her ordeal. Clara drove not west, toward Harrisburg, but south-east, back toward Kennett Square. Nobody bothered to tell Caxton why and she was too busy talking to ask.

“He used the Silent Rite on me, or at least that’s what Malvern calls it. Just one of a long list of what she calls orisons. Reyes called it a hechizo.” She didn’t mention how she’d learned that word, how she’d tortured a half-dead by pulling his fingers off. She didn’t want Clara to ever know about that. “It’s a spell, or maybe some kind of psychic power. Either way, it’s a violation of the brain. He shoved part of himself in through my eye sockets and took total control of my dreams. He could make me fall asleep against my will and he kept me in and out of the dream state. He showed me a vision of hell, I guess, and waited for me to commit suicide.”

“Hmph,” Arkeley said.

“Something you want to add?” she asked.

He glared back at her with eyes wide as if she’d forgotten her place. She supposed she’d never used that tone with him before. It made her want to say

“Hmph” herself.

“Every vampire I’ve studied killed him- or herself,” he told her. “It’s central to the curse. In Europe every suicide was questionable. They used to bury suicides at crossroads, the thinking being that vampires would be lost when they rose and wouldn’t know the way home. In other times, in other places they buried suicides with their heads cut off and turned upside down or fired a bullet through the heart.”

“A silver bullet?” Clara asked.

“That’s a myth,” Arkeley and Caxton said at once. Another opportunity to glare at each other.

“The curse drives you to take your own life. Once it’s in you the thought starts gnawing at you. You start thinking that all your problems would just go away if you were dead. That’s the last step in the change, and it’s necessary. He was very clear on that.”

“Reyes went through this same process, most likely,” Arkeley asked, voice neutral, just looking for data. “And Lares, and Malvern before him.”

Caxton shook her head. “No. Reyes didn’t require any of the dream magic bullshit. He already wanted to die. Malvern looked into his soul and he said ‘yes’, just like that. Congreve—that’s the vampire we killed together—took about three hours to convince. Reyes did him and the other one, the one with docked ears.

Congreve was a construction worker. That’s why he picked that site for his ambush.

He had a master’s degree in Renaissance music but he couldn’t find a job with his degree, so he ended up working construction on a highway project. He hated it, hated everything about his life. Reyes capitalized on that and convinced Congreve to blow his own brains out. It was too hard for her to make happy, healthy people into vampires, so she went looking for real losers. People with nothing to hold them to life.”

“Jesus,” Clara sighed. “I feel that way half the time.”

Arkeley ignored her. “The other one. With the mangled ears. Do you have a name?” he asked.

Caxton thought about it for a second. She bit her lip. It suddenly occurred to her for no reason at all that Clara trusted her and probably wouldn’t even try to stop her if she just reached forward and grabbed the steering wheel and give it a quick yank to the right. They were driving along the wooded bank of a dry streambed that ran maybe thirty feet down. The New Beetle would crumple like a soda can when it hit the rocks down there.

She sat back in her seat and pressed her knuckles against the sides of her head and pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her thought, though it had felt like any of the million other things in her head. It was Reyes, the part of Reyes that had colonized her brain. His curse was still trying to destroy her.

“Scapegrace,” she said, coughing out the name. She had to fight to make Reyes let it go but once she had the name she had the whole story. “Kevin Scapegrace. He was sixteen years old. Tall but skinny, too scared of his high school to get decent grades. The kids at school picked on him. One of them, an older boy, raped Kevin in the showers during gym class. Kevin was pretty sure that made him gay and he couldn’t live with himself anymore.” Caxton’s mouth hardened into a tight snarl.

“He’d swallowed a bottle of aspirin when Reyes found him. Reyes sat with him while the half-deads raided a drugstore. They brought back a bottle of Valium, and Kevin took that, too. Kevin didn’t really understand what he was being offered. He accused Reyes of raping him, too and now he hates what he’s become.”

She looked up and saw Arkeley staring at her. Clara kept glancing back over her shoulder and her eyes were tougher to meet. They were full of confusion and worry and a little fear.

“Reyes told you all that, before you killed him?” Arkeley asked, softly, as if he knew the answer already.

“No,” Caxton replied. She suddenly wished Clara wasn’t there. She licked her lips. “No. After.”

Arkeley nodded patiently. Damn him. He was going to make her say it out loud.

He was going to make her say it in front of Clara. “And how is that possible, Trooper?”

Caxton closed her eyes. “Because he’s still inside my head.”

44.

Clara drove them into the electrical substation, the same place they had originally thought Reyes was using as a lair. It might have been a completely different place the second time. For one thing she arrived in a car about half as big as the Granola Roller, with no armor and very few weapons. For another thing she knew the place was empty. Empty of everything except ghosts, anyway.

Clara stayed in the car while Arkeley lead her into the depths of the substation.

The day was starting to cloud up and the air had a bitter chill to it. It might snow soon, she thought. As they walked between the switch towers Arkeley gave her a moment to pull her coat tighter and then he started in with the questions.

“You can feel him in there? Even though he’s dead?”

She shrugged, pulling her collar close around her neck. “It’s difficult to describe.

There’s a chunk of him in my head. I get thoughts that I know belong to him, not to me. I can access his memories as if they were my own.”

“Does he tell you to do things? Do you hear his voice?”

She almost tripped over her own shadow. No, she didn’t hear Reyes’ voice. But she had heard Arkeley’s, even when he wasn’t there. She wasn’t sure if that made her crazy. “He’s... passive. It’s like he’s gone to sleep in there. Unless I want something from him he keeps to himself. If I do want something, like when you asked me about Kevin Scapegrace, then he wakes up and we fight. I’m winning, so far.”

Arkeley looked like he could have spat. He didn’t, he was far too cultured for that, he knew. “When Scapegrace and Malvern are dead we’ll take you back to the Polders. They’ll know how to get him out of there.”

“Seriously?” she asked. The offer was almost kind, something she didn’t expect from Arkeley.

“When Malvern is dead, yes.”

She frowned. “I thought you had a court ruling saying you couldn’t just kill her.

She can’t be executed.”

“Not unless she breaks the law. It’s hard to murder anyone when you can’t climb out of your own coffin. If I can get some evidence that she conspired with Reyes and Congreve and Scapegrace, though—if I can pin Bitumen Hollow on her, do you think any judge in this state will refuse me that pleasure?”

Caxton frowned. She felt a lot of clues fall into place, as if jigsaw puzzle pieces had fallen out of the box and landed perfectly aligned with each other, their tabs already intersecting. She had something. “That’s what this has all been about,” she said.

“Don’t oversimplify things.”

“Oh, I think that’s your job, and I wouldn’t dare to step on your toes. For twenty years you’ve kept this case perfectly black and white. No matter what it takes, no matter who says not to, you’ve always wanted to kill Malvern. To finish the job you started in Pittsburgh.” He didn’t stop her. She went on. “You can’t stand the fact that she survived. That you had a chance to destroy her but through simple chemistry she just didn’t burn as fast as the others. You can’t stand the fact that you failed. When the court ruled on her, when they said you couldn’t kill her—that ate you alive, didn’t it? You have a wife. Vesta Polder said you had a wife. Do you have kids?”

“Two. My son’s in college, up at Syracuse. My daughter’s an exchange student.

She’s in France.” His face fell. He wasn’t even looking at her—his eyes were turned up as if he were reading a note scribbled on the inside of his skull. “No,” he said,

“Belgium.”

“You really had to work for that.” She was being cruel but she figured Arkeley could take it. “This case is all you have. It’s your life’s work. That’s why you’re such a hardass about it. Why you don’t let anybody help you, because you won’t share the eventual glory.”

“I work mostly alone, that’s true. It keeps other people from being killed. If you had slept in yesterday the way you were supposed to—”

She stopped him. “What’s your son’s major? At Syracuse.”

He didn’t try to answer. He didn’t turn to upbraid her. He just trudged onward, toward the switch house.

“You’ll do just about anything to get the goods on Malvern, won’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Anything.” He pulled open the door of the switch house as if he wished he could tear it off its hinges. He turned on a flashlight and handed it to her.

He had one of his own. They stepped inside, into almost perfect darkness. Only a diffuse yellow glow came in through the mullioned windows, a dull radiance that illuminated nothing. Caxton played her flashlight beam over massive constructions of coiled copper wire and varnished wooden switches as long and thick as her arm.

They were as ornate as bedposts. They had to be the original circuit breakers from when the substation was opened a century earlier.

“What are we doing in here?” she asked. She shone her light on the floor and saw a trapdoor set in the cement. Just like the one at the steel mill. She didn’t want to go down through it. She really didn’t want to. “What’s down there?”

He pointed his flashlight at her face. “You tell me,” he said, his voice totally blank.

Maybe he was just being cruel to get back at her for questioning his private life.

Maybe he really wanted to know.

“We were right, weren’t we?” she asked. “Reyes did use this place as a lair.

Before he moved to the mill.” That much was guess work. For anything more she needed to ask the vampire in her head. She sighed and closed her eyes. Arkeley moved his light away and she was in total darkness. She reached down into the darkest corner of her brain—and felt a pale hand grab for her. It was just a metaphor, though, and she easily slipped out of the ghost’s grasp. “He spent a lot of lonely nights down there. Thinking. Planning. This is where he decided to trap one of us. Malvern didn’t like the idea, but he thought it would be funny. He also knew that you and I were responsible for Congreve’s death.” She opened her eyes, but all she saw were colorful spills of light, phosphor afterimages. The things the eye sees when there is no other input. “He told Malvern he wanted to catch one of us and take us apart. It would be funny, and it would make them safe again. I imagine he probably would have preferred to get you, since you were the one who did the actual killing.”

“Imagine again,” Arkeley said. His clothing rustled as he moved in the dark. He lifted the trapdoor and she heard echoes roll up from below. There was a considerably large space down there.

She pointed her light down the stairs and forced herself to proceed. At the bottom she stood in a wide space full of damp air that smelled of mildew and decaying leaves and something fouler but fainter. She swung her beam around and saw bodies.

Dead bodies—hundreds of them. It was worse than the hunting camp. These bodies hung from the ceiling by their feet, their arms dangling down, water running across their fingers to the floor. They were fixed to the walls, held in place with giant iron staples that had rusted over time. They crouched in the corners as if hiding from the light, as if they would raise their rotting arms to protect themselves if she approached. They were wired in place, held in position.

In the center of the room a pair of bodies took pride of place. They were clearly meant as the masterpiece of the collection of bodies. They were both female and their skin was pale white, mottled with dark spots where fluids had gathered after they died. One was missing an arm but otherwise they were still intact. Their hair had been yanked out of their scalps. They were locked in an intimate embrace and they were kissing.

No, no they weren’t. Caxton moved closer for a better look. They weren’t just kissing. Their lower faces had been fused together, the lips and teeth cut away so they were like Siamese twins joined at the mouth.

“Tell me if I’m wrong. But I think he wanted to capture you, specifically,”

Arkeley said. “I think you turned him on.”

The sight failed to make her sick. She wanted to throw up, but her body wasn’t in the mood. Her emotions weren’t altogether her own. She wanted to have a visceral reaction to that much death. Reyes wouldn’t let her. Down at the bottom of her brain he looked out at his own creations, his re-creations, and he was proud of what he’d achieved. Whatever he felt, she felt too. Seeing the bodies brought him back to life, a little. He curled inside her, excited to see his old home again. “I need to get out of here,” she told Arkeley. Not because she wanted to flee in revulsion. Because she kind of liked what she was seeing.

“What was Reyes planning? What was his next step?” Arkeley asked her. He wanted the vampire to wake up, to surge inside of her. This identification between herself and Reyes was just another tool for him. He thought it would make it easier for her to remember Reyes’ plans. And it did, though the plans she recalled were from an earlier time. From when he’d first learned of Laura Caxton’s existence.

He had targeted her. She didn’t have to fight at all for that piece of information.

Reyes wanted her to play back that particular memory, as if it were a favorite record.

Reyes had specifically gone after her, Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton, regardless of what he might have told Malvern. He hadn’t really cared about removing the vampire killers. He’d wanted her, her body. When he had learned she was a lesbian, when his half-deads had gone to her house and seen her sleeping with Deanna (oh God, what had they seen? How many nights had they stood outside the windows and watched the two of them sleep?), he had become sexually aroused.

Vampires, she now knew, weren’t supposed to think of living humans as sexual beings. It was like a human wanting to fuck a cow. But Reyes had become obsessed with her. He had remembered all those men’s magazines he used to read when he was alive. He had always liked the girl-on-girl portfolios. They’d always got him so hot. He would imagine them sucking each other off, desperate for a real man to come along and show them what they were missing. If he made her a vampire then perhaps he could fuck her. Perhaps she would want to fuck him.

That memory, finally, was enough to make her sick. “Let me out of here,” she screamed. She spun around and the bodies looked back at her, their dead eyes all focused on her face. How they had worshipped her. Or feared her, yes, they all feared her, it was the last thing to pass through their faces, that fear. Reyes had loved that.

“What was his next move?” Arkeley asked. He stood in front of the stairs. “Was he going to make more vampires? Was he going to wait until he had four, to bring blood to Malvern? Where is Scapegrace right now?”

She shook her head. “Let me out,” Caxton said. The bones. The bones of the dead—death itself. Death called to her, her own death, suicide, the death of others, murder. Reyes stretched inside her brain like a predatory cat, languid, pleased with what he had created. No, there was no creation in that cellar. Pleased with what he had destroyed. “Let me out! Get away from me,” Caxton howled, unsure who she was talking to—the Fed or the vampire. “Leave me alone!”

45.

Up above ground, leaning against the side of Clara’s Volkswagen, Caxton rubbed at her face over and over, trying to make sense of things. She wanted to throw up but she kept thinking she would vomit up clotted blood, just as Reyes had. She wanted to sit down but she knew if she did she wouldn’t ever want to stand up again.

“The only reason I’m alive,” she said, muttering to herself, “is because I happened to fit into some vampire’s kink. Not just any vampire. A depraved vampire.” She tried to stop breathing. Her body freaked out, panicked, made her hyperventilate. What had made her think to stop breathing?

Vampires didn’t breathe, of course. They were dead things and they didn’t need to breathe. Living things, like state troopers, needed to breathe a lot.

“His curse is alive,” she sighed. “His curse is alive in me.”

Clara pushed a paper bag into her hands. Caxton realized that Clara must have been talking to her but she couldn’t hear her. She couldn’t hear anything. She breathed into the bag and slowly, slowly, she calmed down. She felt things slow down all around her. She felt the air on her skin and smelled fruit, maybe strawberries.

She took the bag away from her face. “Strawberries?” she asked.

Clara’s forehead wrinkled. “Strawberries and kiwi fruit, and a cup of unsweetened yogurt. How… how did you know what I had for breakfast?” The look on her face verged on fear.

Caxton waved it away. “I’m not psychic.” She crinkled the bag in her fingers. “I just have a good nose.” They laughed together. That helped. It helped an awful lot, actually.

“When you’ve stopped panicking, let me know,” Arkeley said. “So we can go back down there.”

With her eyes closed Caxton could pretend that Arkeley wasn’t really there. That he was just in her head again. Then he had to talk again and ruin it.

“I can wait until tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that Scapegrace will still be too full to hunt tonight. I’d say, eighty per cent sure. Which means that there’s only a twenty per cent chance he’ll tear someone’s throat out because you were too scared to help me.”

She opened her eyes and saw Clara standing not two feet from the Fed.

“Hey, asshole,” she said. She was a good foot and maybe three inches shorter than Arkeley. He outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds. “Yeah, you, asshole,”

she said. “I’m not going to let you do this to her, not twice. I don’t care what the stakes are.”

“Laura, call off your dog, will you? She’s yipping obnoxiously.”

Clara’s entire body tightened. Her muscles curled and flexed and extended and she looked ready to punch Arkeley right in the gut. Even her hair bristled.

“Are you going to strike me, sheriff’s deputy Hsu? Is that your intent? Because I have to say, the way you’re telegraphing your punch, you’d be lucky to touch my coat tails before I had you on the ground with two broken arms.”

Clara rolled her shoulders and tilted her head to one side, then the other. “You’re not worth the paperwork,” she said, and suddenly she was standing down. She hadn’t moved an inch but her posture and the slump of her shoulders spoke volumes.

“If you’re not going to hit me,” Arkeley said, “then please leave us alone. The trooper and I have things to discuss.”

Clara nodded and walked over to where Caxton leaned against her car. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” she said.

“I wish it were that simple,” Caxton breathed.

Clara reached across the space between them and cradled Caxton’s chin in her hand. She gave it a gentle squeeze, then made herself scarce behind a tower of switching gears. She could probably still hear them but Arkeley didn’t seem to mind.

“I want to help you,” she told him. “I do.”

He walked toward her as if he hadn’t heard her at all. As if she hadn’t said anything. She immediately felt guilty. She felt the way she had felt as a child when her father would give her the silent treatment. She tried to push that feeling out of her gut but it was no use. She braced herself, almost expecting him to slap her.

“I will do anything you ask. Except I won’t go back down in that hole.”

He nodded and came even closer. Close enough to touch her. He didn’t.

“When I was down there he came swimming up to the surface, like he wanted to poke his nose out. Like he wanted to see his creation one last time. It was horrible. I felt the way he felt. I don’t think my body can tell the difference between my emotions and his. I—I’m so sorry, but I can’t help you like that.”

“Alright,” he said, a sigh coming out of him.

“No, no, it’s not alright,” she said, and she felt herself on the verge of breaking down. “Reyes spoke to me down there. He spoke right into my head. Maybe not with words but... but he was aware. Still alive in me, somehow.”

He nodded. “Okay. I kind of expected that his ghost would plague you.”

“You expected—you knew—how can you know? How can you know anything about what I’m going through?”

“I know,” Arkeley told her.

“How?” Caxton said, squinting at him. “How do you know that?”

He picked up a stone and threw it hard at a transformer fifteen feet away. The metal box clanged accusingly. It was so sudden and so unexpected that it made Caxton jump a little.

“Piter Byron Lares dragged me down into his hiding place and stuck me there with a little hypnosis. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t take my weapon away. And he never spoke a word to me.”

Caxton thought back to when she’d read his report. She’d read about how violent and uncaring Lares had been, tearing apart an entire SWAT team, and she’d been more than a little surprised when the vampire had taken the Fed down through the river and onto his boat, still in one piece. But there had been an explanation. “He was saving you as a midnight snack,” she said.

“No he wasn’t.” Arkeley leaned on the car next to her and folded his arms.

“You can’t be saying—”

“He had only started the process with me when I killed him. He didn’t get anywhere near as far as Reyes got with you. I didn’t even know I was being raped by that pale son of a bitch. But a part of him broke off in my head, just like a part of Reyes got stuck in yours. Not so much that I could feel him in there, no. Just enough that every once in a while, maybe twice a year, I dream of blood.”

“You don’t need to—”

Arkeley turned to stare at her. “It tastes like copper pennies on your tongue. It’s hot, hotter than you expect, and very wet at first, but it clots even as it fills your mouth. It sticks in your throat but you swallow it down, you can feel it stringy and dark in the back of your throat but you force it down so you can have some more, another mouthful, and another. I know it so well now. The dryness of it, the clots in your teeth. The need.”

She had to look away. Because it didn’t sound as disgusting as he made it out to be. It sounded almost… tempting. She couldn’t stand for him to see the naked desire she knew was lighting up her face.

“He remembers the taste. He’s been dead so long there’s nothing else left of him, just the longing for that taste. And it’s never going to go away. If I killed myself today I don’t know if I would come back as a vampire or not.”

“But you know I would,” she said. “You know that I’m already one of them, whether I like it or not. And there’s no way back.”

“That I don’t know at all. I’m truly hoping the Polders know a way to exorcize this curse from you, Laura. The first step, though, has to be that we kill Scapegrace and Malvern. So nobody else has to share our dreams. So I want you to go back down that hole and look at those bodies again and tell me what his next step was going to be.”

He adjusted his weight with a grunt and was standing in front of her. He held out his hand to her but she wouldn’t take it.

“No,” she told him.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“No. I won’t go back down there. I don’t know how to get rid of this curse but I know if I go down there it’ll just make things worse. You find something else for me to do, some way to help you, and I will play along. But not if it means going down into that chamber of horrors again. Ever.”

46.

“Christ, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and look at this,” Caxton exclaimed, gesturing up at the air above their heads. It was winter outside the car. Big white flakes of snow were coming down, swirling in the wake of the car, gathering on the sills of the windows. The sky had turned a watery gray shot through with vaporous reefs of cloud. The road surface darkened and glistened with frost and Clara had to slow down to keep her little car on the road. In the back seat Caxton couldn’t seem to get warm. Clara turned the heat up for her but it wasn’t enough. She clutched herself, her arms close so they wouldn’t touch the cold glass of the window, and shivered. She was one of them. She was some kind of vampire in training. She thought of the cold feeling she’d gotten from the vampires—especially from Malvern, when she’d stood next to the dried up monster in her wheelchair.

She needed to get away from death and horror for a while. She needed to go home and be with the dogs and not think about anything for a long time. She had a couple of stops to make before that, however.

They dropped Arkeley off at the police station, where he’d left his car. Caxton had to climb out of the back to take his seat, so she could sit up front with Clara nearer to the heater. Her arms folded across her chest she tried to make eye contact with the Fed but he didn’t look back, just swaggered over to his car and clambered inside.

Caxton threw herself back into the Volkswagen and yanked her door closed. The cold was sending her into convulsions, her body trembling violently, her teeth snapping at each other, chattering so loudly she could hardly hear Clara ask if she was okay.

“I know it’s a stupid question,” Clara said when Caxton hadn’t answered. The smaller woman looked straight forward through the windshield. The wiper blades swung back and forth, a pendulum marking the time they just sat there. Caxton wondered if maybe the heater only worked when they were in motion.

“Listen,” Clara finally said. “Why don’t you come home with me tonight?”

Caxton shook her head. Her whole body shook so she reiterated in words, “You know I can’t do that.”

“No, not like that, we wouldn’t sleep together. I mean, you could sleep in my bed. With me, because I don’t have a guest room or even a real couch. But we would keep our clothes on. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone tonight.”

“You have no idea how alone I am right now,” Caxton said. It sounded bitter and she instantly wanted to apologize. She opened her mouth to do just that but the look on Clara’s face stopped her in her tracks. The hurt there was too guarded—if Caxton acknowledged what had just happened, it would only hurt Clara more.

Clara started up the car and got them on the highway headed west, toward Harrisburg. Caxton needed to see Deanna before she did anything else. She needed to hold Dee’s hand and figure out what her next step was.

They turned the radio on and drove in silence. Caxton watched the snow get thicker the farther they went and wished they could just magically be there. She was sure it would be warmer in the hospital. When they arrived, however, outside of Seidle Hospital, there was no parking available and they had to circle for blocks before they found a spot.

“You don’t have to come in,” Caxton said, which she had meant as a kindness but it made Clara squint as if she’d been struck. Caxton searched deep inside herself to find the humanity to know what to say. “I mean, it would really help me if you did, but you don’t have to.”

“I’ve come this far,” Clara said, almost aggressively, but there was a little smile on her face.

Caxton would have done anything for things to be comfortable between the two of them. But she guessed her life was just going to be complicated for a while.

Together they made their way back to the hospital, a big modern monolith of a building that looked across the river at the ruins of the Walnut Street Bridge. Caxton had never gone in through the main entrance—they had brought Deanna in through the emergency room—so it took her a while to get her bearings. Eventually she took Clara up an elevator and down a long hallway full of equipment carts and bad, but colorful, paintings. “Listen. It’s a semi-private room and her roommate doesn’t approve of women like us,” she told Clara. “Just so you know.”

“I’ll try not to stick my tongue down your throat while we’re standing over the hospital bed of your horribly injured domestic partner,” Clara told her, deadpan.

A laugh bubbled up inside Caxton’s chest and she snorted out all her frustration and leaned hard against the wall and closed her eyes for a second. God, she had needed that release. “Thanks,” she said, and Clara just shrugged. Caxton knocked and pushed open the door, which sighed a little. The two of them passed silently by the bathroom and into the main room, which was lit only by the flickering glow of the television set. The obese woman in the left-hand bed was asleep, her face turned to the wall, and Caxton tried to be quiet so as not to wake her. Clara waited by the door.

Caxton stepped over to Deanna’s bed and nearly screamed. It was empty.

She clapped a hand over her mouth and ran back out into the hall. Clara grabbed her arm and stroked her bicep. “They just moved her. Really,” she said. “It’s okay.

They just moved her.”

Caxton headed down to the nurse’s station and scowled at the woman there who was filling out a form on her computer. “Deanna Purfleet,” she shouted, when the nurse wouldn’t look up. “Deanna Purfleet.”

The nurse turned slowly and nodded. “I’ll call the doctor. It’ll just be a second.”

“Just tell me where they moved her to and I’ll go there. I’m Laura Caxton. I’m her partner.”

The nurse nodded again. “I know who you are.” She put on a pair of reading glasses and looked down at a phone directory. “Please sit down and wait for the doctor. You want to talk to him. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

Caxton didn’t sit down. She paced back and forth around the nurse’s station, studied the awards and plaques on the walls, took a cup of water when Clara brought it to her but she couldn’t sit down, not if she ever wanted to get up again.

The doctor came out of an elevator down the hall and she ran to him. It wasn’t the doctor she’d seen before. “Deanna Purfleet,” she said.

“You’re Ms. Caxton, I think?” he asked. He was a small Indian man with perfectly combed hair and very soulful eyes. He looked like he’d never smiled in his entire life. “I’m Dr. Prabinder, if you’d like to sit down—”

“Jesus, just tell me where she is! Won’t anyone tell me where she is?”

“There was a complication,” the doctor said, and everything turned rubbery and soft. The floor started to rise toward her face. Caxton looked around—she had plenty of time—and found a chair to slump into.

47.

Caxton sat in the morgue next to Deanna’s body on a gurney. Dr. Prabinder and Clara were nowhere to be seen. She was all alone in the semi-darkened room, surrounded on every side by rolling partitions. How she’d gotten there she couldn’t say. It was like she had blacked out, except she hadn’t, at all. The trip from the fourth floor down to the basement was all there in her memory. It was just so immaterial she hadn’t bothered to review the information.

There had been a complication, she remembered. She got up and walked around the gurney. She touched Deanna here and there. Twitched back the sheet that covered her. Deanna’s face was calm, at least. Her eyes closed, her red hair clean.

Her lips were pale but otherwise she didn’t look so bad. Caxton moved the sheet back a little more, though, and wished she hadn’t. Deanna’s breasts pointed in the wrong directions. Her chest was open like a ravenous mouth, her ribs like teeth reaching for a piece of meat. Her lungs and her heart lay collapsed at the bottom of that wound like a lolling tongue.

There had been a complication. Deanna had lost so much blood when she broke the kitchen window that she had required five new units of blood, most of it in the form of plasma. They had given her some whole blood because she had started to show the signs of acute anemia—coldness in the extremities even while her trunk was warm, a lasting and dangerous shortness of breath.

There had been a complication. A blood clot had formed, perhaps from one of her wounds, possibly from a bad reaction to the transfused blood. Dr. Prabinder had refused to speculate. The clot had entered Deanna’s blood stream and probably roamed around her body several times before it reached her left lung.

There had been a complication. A pulmonary embolus, Dr. Prabinder had called it. When it was detected they had rushed her immediately into surgery, of course.

They had tried to cut it out. And that was one complication too many.

“I really must insist, Ms. Caxton,” the doctor said, pulling one of the partitions back. “You’re not supposed to be here at all, and truly, it’s not appropriate for the morgue technicians to let you see her in this condition—”

“That’s Trooper Caxton,” Clara announced. She held up her badge.

“Oh, I... I didn’t know,” Doctor Prabinder said.

“This is a homicide investigation, Doctor.” Clara put her badge away. What she was doing was highly illegal. She was well outside of her jurisdiction. So was Caxton. Lying about a criminal investigation could get them put away for years.

Caxton wouldn’t tell, if Clara didn’t. She pulled the sheet back up over Deanna’s chest. Blood soaked through it almost instantly.

“When?” Caxton asked. She couldn’t get any more of the sentence out.

“What was the official time of death?” Clara asked.

The doctor checked his PDA. “Last night, about four fifteen.”

“Before dawn,” Caxton said. While she had been fighting vampires in abandoned steel mills Deanna had been slowly dying and nobody had known. There would have been nobody with her. Perhaps if there had been it could have been avoided.

Perhaps if Caxton had been there, listening to Deanna’s ragged breathing, she might have noticed some change. She could have summoned the doctor. They could have gotten Deanna into surgery that much quicker.

At the very least she could have held her hand. “I wasn’t here,” she said.

“No, no, come on,” Clara said.

“Ah, ladies, I know it is not my place to ask, but is it acceptable for this woman to investigate the death of someone so close? Is there not a conflict of interest?”

“She was alone,” Caxton said, ignoring him.

“Was there anyone in her room last night? Any visitors at all?”

The doctor shook his head in incomprehension. “No, of course not. We don’t let visitors in after seven and anyway she had posted a guard on the room.” He pointed at Caxton with his PDA. “Did you not know about the guard?”

Clara glanced at her, then back at the doctor. “I was just brought in on this case.

I’m still catching up.”

“I... see.” Doctor Prabinder straightened up and squared his shoulders. “Now let’s get one thing clear. I wish to assist the police in any manner possible, of course.

But this is my hospital, and—”

“Doctor,” Caxton said, turning to face him for the first time. She gave him her best fisheye look. Caxton wasn’t wearing her uniform, she didn’t have a badge, and her weapon was still in the trunk of Clara’s Volkswagen. It didn’t matter. The look was what made you a cop. That perfectly uncaring, potentially violent look that could freeze most people in their tracks. “I need to know if anything unusual happened here last night. I need to know if anybody saw or heard anything weird or out of place. Anything at all.”

“Of course, of course,” he said. He looked down at his shoes. “But this is a hospital with a trauma ward in a major urban center. You must clarify for me, I have seen so many weird things...” He just sort of trailed off.

“I’m not talking about freak accidents. I’m talking about people with no faces being seen in the hallways. I’m talking about vampire activity.”

“Vampires, here?” He muttered something in Hindi that sounded like a brief prayer. “I saw on the news that—I hear some things, yes, and the bodies that came in—but oh, my, no, nothing like that last night! I swear it.”

“Good.” Caxton reached down and took Deanna’s hand. It was freezing cold but then so was hers. “Now I need someone to sew this woman up so I can bury her.

Can you arrange that?”

Dr. Prabinder nodded and took out his cell phone. “There will be papers to sign, of course, if that is not too much.”

“Of course,” Caxton said. She took out her own phone. Deanna’s brother Elvin was in her stored phonebook. Hopefully he would know his—and Dee’s—mother’s number. There were suddenly a lot of things she needed to do.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Clara said, and reached for her, but Caxton shrugged her away.

“I can’t feel anything right now,” Caxton tried to explain. She didn’t know if the grief was just too big and she was defending herself from it or if Reyes was in control of her emotions. To him Deanna’s death was only regrettable in that all that blood was going to waste.

It helped. There were a lot of phone calls to make and a lot of questions to answer. Somebody had to be calm and in charge.

Elvin wasn’t home. She left a message for him to call her back. Someone came and asked her about organ donation. She told them to take what they could. Deanna was wrapped up, taken away. They brought her back—her tissues weren’t good candidates for donation. She’d been dead too long for the major organs to be useful and her skin and eyes weren’t the right type. Caxton called Elvin again. Someone from the transplant center came down and demanded to know who she thought she was, offering up Deanna’s body parts for donation, when she wasn’t even a relative.

That conversation took far too long. For perhaps the first time she actually wished she’d bothered to get a civil union. It wouldn’t have given her any more rights but it might have forestalled a few of the less comfortable questions. She finally got hold of Elvin and he said he would come right away. He would bring Deanna’s mother.

Caxton flipped shut her phone and put it away. She turned around and there was Clara.

“How long have I been making phone calls?” she asked. She had a feeling a lot more time had passed than she was aware of. She was in a lounge, for one thing.

Hadn’t she just been in the morgue? Somehow she’d been moved to a well-heated lounge with a big window and comfortable chairs and lots of tattered magazines.

Maybe Clara had brought her there.

“Well, I already went and had lunch. I got you a sandwich.”

Caxton took the offered bag and opened it up. Tuna salad, white flesh in white mayonnaise on white bread. It didn’t appeal to her at all. She wanted roast beef and felt almost childishly peevish about it—why couldn’t Clara have gotten her roast beef? Why couldn’t she go right now and get a big rare steak, all full of juice, of, of—of blood?

She clamped down on that thought immediately and started eating the tuna sandwich. She was not going to let the vampire live vicariously through her.

“Listen, there’s something I haven’t heard anyone mention, but I think it’s important,” Clara said. She frowned and pursed her lips and finally spat it out. “Do we need,” she said, pronouncing each word separately, “to consider, well, cremation.”

Caxton blinked rapidly. “You mean for Deanna?” she asked. “Of course you do.

I mean, nobody else is dead right now. Yeah. Right. Cremation.” She didn’t so much think it through as let it come bubbling up in her head. “No.”

“No,” Clara repeated, tentatively.

“No. You saw all that blood. No vampire would leave so much blood on a body.

It was just an accident, Clara. Just a stupid fucked-up accident, the kind that still happens, you know? Not everybody gets killed by monsters.”

Clara nodded supportively, then opened her mouth to speak again. She stopped when the door behind her burst open. An enormous man with thin, straight red hair that fell past his shoulders came storming in. He wore a sheepskin coat and a look of absolute befuddlement. Behind him followed a woman with hair dyed to match his though it showed grey at the roots. Her face was a mess of red blotches as if she’d been crying, or drinking. Most likely both, Caxton knew.

“Who’s this, your new girlfriend?” Deanna’s mother asked.

“Hello, Roxie,” Caxton tried. She glanced up at the big redheaded man and her heart beat for the first time in hours. “Oh, Elvin, I’m so sorry.”

He nodded his massive head. “Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot,” he said. He looked around as if unsure of where he was.

“I’m going to go now,” Clara said.

“Jesus, don’t leave on my account.” Roxie Purfleet sneered at Caxton. “You work fast, huh? One of them’s not even cold and you’re on to the next.”

Clara slipped past her without further comment. Caxton sat the Purfleets down and started to explain what had happened.

48.

Deanna was dead, truly dead. It wasn’t hard to accept on a factual basis. Caxton could hold the knowledge in her head, she could walk around it, see it from all angles. She could see the repercussions, the paperwork she would need to file. She would have to cancel all of Deanna’s magazine subscriptions, for instance. She would have to change their insurance coverage, a precariously balanced set of documents which allowed Caxton to pay for Deanna’s medical bills with her own state employee insurance.

That didn’t begin to explain how she felt, however. The nitty gritty details of Deanna’s life didn’t add up to what had just happened. Deanna was dead. It was like the color blue had stopped existing. Something Caxton had always counted on, something she had built an entire life around, wasn’t there anymore.

It wasn’t fear of loneliness or loss of companionship that bothered her most. It was this existential hole in her world view. Deanna was gone—forever—and it had happened just like that, in the time it took to say out loud: Deanna was dead.

She found herself driving home, much, much later, an hour or two after sunset.

Roxie Purfleet had taken over her duties at the hospital, convinced she knew best what her daughter wanted done with her mortal remains. She’d refused to let Caxton even help plan the memorial service. Deanna’s body would go back to Boalsburg, where she’d been born. Caxton had listened a million times to Deanna moan and bitch about the place, about how she’d longed to get away from it as early as elementary school. But that’s where she would be forever, now.

Driving—Caxton was driving, she needed to focus on that. She watched the yellow lines on the road but soon found herself fixated on them, unable to look away. She forced herself to check her mirrors and her blind spot.

Deanna was dead. She wanted to call Deanna up and talk to her about what had just happened. She wanted to sit on the couch with the TV turned off for a second and just talk about what it all meant. Who else could she trust with such monumental news? Who else could she go to first?

Driving. Right. Caxton squinted as a semi roared past in the other direction, its headlights smearing brilliant light across her face. She blinked away the after-images and focused on the car, on the speedometer, on the gas gauge. Anything to keep her in the here and now.

Elvin, who was perhaps the only person in the world with less of a grip on what had happened than herself, had been kind enough to drive her back to Troop H

headquarters where she’d left her car. It hadn’t been touched since she’d suited up to get onboard the Granola Roller. She’d gone up and touched the patrol car’s metal skin as if it were a special machine that could take her back in time, to before Deanna died, to before she became half of a vampire. Then she’d turned around because she felt Elvin behind her, just standing there. His body sort of hovered halfway between leaving and coming closer, a mass being turned this way and that by some sort of emotional physics. Looming was the word that came to mind. He loomed over her and frowned, deep and long, and finally spoke.

“She really loved you,” he said. “She swore it. When I first found out she was a fag I was going to cream her, but then she said she really loved you, and I figured that made it okay. I mean, you don’t pick who you love. Nobody does.”

“I suppose not,” Caxton had replied, unsure what he wanted. A hug? A reminiscence of his sister?

“Thanks for the ride,” she’d said, and he had nodded, and that was that.

She blinked back a half-formed, inexplicable tear. Oh, God, driving—she had to watch where she was driving. She’d just missed the turn-off. She stopped the car and looked behind her. There was no one on the road back there. Slowly, with a noise of rumbling gravel, she backed and filled until she was headed back the right way. Then she drove up to the house without losing track of time even once. She switched off the car and the headlights disappeared and everything was dark. She sat in the cooling car and stared at the dark house. Deanna had always left a light on for her before.

It was only the whining of the dogs that spurred her to action. She had forgotten them—how could she forget them? But she had, she had forgotten her dogs and they hadn’t eaten in over a day. They were watered automatically with a gravity bottle but they hadn’t eaten. They would be starving. She didn’t even go into the house, just ran back to the kennels and grabbed a twenty-pound bag of kibble. She switched on the lights inside the kennel and gasped.

The dogs looked okay—but something had tried to tear their cages open. The greyhounds lay curled up behind warped and bent bars, crying and whining and yawning in fearful confusion. Blood and what looked like a strip of cloth hung on the bars near her. Caxton stepped closer and touched the damaged cage. It wasn’t cloth. It was corroded flesh, torn off in a hurry. A half-dead had been there and not very long before. Clearly it had meant to kill the dogs, only to get its arm torn open instead.

She let the dogs out and hugged them and poured them bowls of food. Hunger won out over their bewilderment and they ate greedily. She squeezed vitamins from a plastic bottle into the kibble and left them at it. Then she went back to her car and retrieved her Beretta and the box of cross points. With fumbling, half-frozen hands she loaded the pistol and then she went to the front door of the house.

Why had they come? She had expected they would leave the house alone, if nobody was inside. She couldn’t figure it out. She touched the knob of the door and knew instantly that it was unlocked.

Careful, wary of anyone who might be waiting just inside, she slipped on her flashlight and stepped through the door.

Cold silence blew past her, cold air rushing through the house. It leaked in around the cardboard over the kitchen window, the window that had killed Deanna. It swept down the hallway toward their bedroom. She reached for the light switch but it did nothing when she flicked it. She looked up and saw that the light fixtures in the hall had been smashed, all the bulbs broken.

Even in the darkness she could see the house had been ransacked. Sheets lay twisted and strewn across the hall as if they’d been dragged off the bed. Plates and pots and the iron skillet had been jumbled all together and thrown in a corner. Some were broken, but there had been no method to it. Whoever had done this had been in a hurry, or perhaps a frenzy. The pictures were torn off the walls and thrown on the floor. Her flashlight beam struck one of them and dazzled her with the reflection off the glass. She looked closer. It was a picture of Deanna and Caxton at an agility tournament, the two of them bent low, beckoning Wilbur across a balance beam.

God, what an amazing day that had been. The glass was cracked and the frame broken. She fished the photo out and put it in her pocket, trying to save something.

The bedroom was a real mess. Sharp claws or maybe knives had torn up the mattress and bits and pieces of foam rubber were scattered everywhere. Caxton’s closet had been rifled, most of her clothes just dumped in a heap. It was going to take so long to clean this all up, she thought. She turned around and gasped again when she saw that the intruder had left her a message. It covered half the bedroom wall and it looked like it had been painted in blood:

NO LIFE= NO SLEEP

BE WITH ME

She didn’t need a signature to know who had sent the message. It had to be Scapegrace, the last of Justinia Malvern’s brood. He wanted her to finish the transformation that Reyes had started. He was waiting for her to commit suicide and come be his partner in reviving Malvern. He must have somehow convinced himself that destroying her home would be an incentive toward that end. Maybe he thought it would depress her.

The piece of Reyes still curled around her brain pulsed, rejecting the idea, and she understood, a little—or rather she knew how little Scapegrace understood.

Vampirism had been a dark gift as far as the teenager was concerned. How could anyone not want that power and strength? He was telling her she no longer needed to sleep, that she could break out of the prison of her frail human flesh and emotions and become so much more.

“Then why does he cut off his own ears every sundown?” she asked, but Reyes fell silent on that matter. Thinking of the dead boy made her more sad than angry.

Petty destruction of other people’s property was the only outlet left for his rage, now that he had destroyed himself.

She checked the rest of the house but there was no one there. Scapegrace and his minions were long gone. She took another look at the bed and realized she would never be able to spend the night there. She decided to call Clara and see if her invitation still held. To get a better signal she headed out back, toward Deanna’s shed. The door stood unlocked and ajar, of course. Scapegrace had tried to hurt her dogs. He hated everything about the living. He would have destroyed Deanna’s art as well.

She stepped inside and closed her phone before she’d even found Clara’s number. She switched on the lights and they actually worked, the bare hundred watt bulbs in the ceiling flaring to life. The shed looked completely untouched. The three sheets hung slack from the ceiling, the light filtering yellow and red through the cloth.

Perhaps Scapegrace had seen something in Deanna’s art. Maybe he approved of using blood as a medium—though surely he wouldn’t have known what kind of blood it was. She turned to head back outside and stopped because she heard a footfall that wasn’t hers.

“Laura,” someone said, and for a bad moment she thought it was her father’s ghost inhabiting the sheets, just as he had inhabited the teleplasm in Urie Polder’s barn.

It was Arkeley who stepped out from behind the artwork, however.

“Special Deputy,” she said, her heart racing at first. It slowed down as she watched him come closer. She thought it might stop. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

His face was creased with sorrow. “Laura,” he said again, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to bring you this far into this.”

Was he actually apologizing for getting Deanna killed? Grief was like some kind of thicker skin she’d put on. Whatever he was saying just didn’t get through to her.

“It’s alright,” she said. It wasn’t, but the words came out of her like a yawn, completely unavoidable.

“I needed bait, you see. I needed you because they needed you. The only way to escape a trap is to spring it before they’re ready, remember?”

“You’ve taught me so much.” It was her body talking, not her heart. Her body wanted to go to bed. Clara. She had to call Clara, Clara had to come pick her up. It would be at least an hour before she could sleep. She started texting Clara because it was easier somehow than talking to her on the phone. She was done talking for the night.

“You don’t understand—” Arkeley insisted, but she shook her head. “Laura, you need to focus right now.” He stormed toward her and she was sure he was going to hit her again. She stopped breathing and her eyes went wide.

“What is so important?” she asked, finally finding her own voice. “What is so fucking important that I have to listen to you, tonight of all nights?”

Arkeley drew his weapon. A little gasp came out of her—she had no idea what he was doing.

“They’re outside,” he told her. “Waiting for us to walk out of here. Dozens of half-deads and at least two vampires.”

49.

“What do you mean, two vampires?” Caxton demanded. “We killed them all except for Scapegrace. You don’t mean—Malvern, you can’t mean that.”

“No, I don’t,” Arkeley said. He checked the action on his Glock 23. He gestured at her own Beretta where it lay inert in her hand. She checked to see there was a round in the chamber and then she raised the weapon to shoulder-height, the barrel pointed at the ceiling. “Malvern is still at Arabella Furnace. I had Tucker check on her fifteen minutes ago and there was no change in her condition. So we have to assume that we made at least one mistake.”

“We saw three coffins at the hunting camp,” she insisted. She didn’t want to hear what he said next, even though it was already echoing in the dark cloister of her own skull.

“That doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been another one somewhere else.”

Arkeley moved toward the light switch, careful to stay out of the shed’s wide doorway. “Let’s go over what I do know. I came here tonight to officially relieve you of duty. I was going to send you back to the Highway Patrol. Then I saw that something was wrong. There were maybe ten cars and trucks parked out on the road. I looked around but none of your neighbors were having a party. I abandoned my own vehicle and came in here on foot, through the woods. By then they were already setting up their ambush. There are six half-deads hiding out by the driveway, there are five of them stationed in the yard next door, and three more of them on the roof of the kennels. There will be more—those are just the ones I found. I saw one vampire giving them orders. His ears were docked so we have to assume that was Scapegrace. Then another vampire climbed out of your bedroom window.”

“You’re absolutely sure it was a vampire you saw coming out of the window?

How good a look did you get?”

He shook his head. “I can’t be certain of anything. But I saw something with pale white skin and long ears. Its hands were stained red.”

Caxton moved up to the other side of the doorway, just as she’d been trained.

When they left the shed they would go together, facing slightly different directions so they could cover each others’ backs.

She texted Clara and told her to summon reinforcements. She called in to headquarters to report an officer under fire. She knew nobody could get there in time—the closest barracks was twenty miles away. They were going to have to fight their way out on their own, just the two of them. She looked up at Arkeley. “Do we have a plan?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her. “Shoot everything that moves.”

Together they stepped through the doorway. Arkeley raised his weapon and fired even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She saw a shadow coming toward her, a shadow with a broken face, and she shot it center mass. It crumpled and fell without a sound.

There were more of them. Suddenly they were everywhere.

Shadows detached from the trees, pale shapes darted around them like wolves circling to the attack. There were no warnings given this time, no cryptic messages to draw them out. A half-dead whirled out of the dark, a six-inch knife in his hand, and Caxton smashed him across the face with her weapon. He went down but not before three more sprang out at her. “There are too many,” she shouted. “We need to get out of here!”

“Go,” the Fed yelled back, though he was only three feet away. “Go now!”

Caxton broke away from Arkeley and dashed to the side of the kennels, intent on getting something behind her at least. Otherwise they might sneak up on her. She expected Arkeley to run for cover as well, to protect himself.

He didn’t.

The Fed dropped into a firing crouch and moved out into the open space between the kennels and the house. His gun arm stood straight out from his body and it swung back and forth like a weathervane as he tracked some assailant she couldn’t see. He squeezed the trigger and bright fire leapt from his barrel. To her side, just inches from her left shoulder, a half-dead slipped downward to writhe in agony on the ground.

He spun and fired again—and a third time. Shadows howled and flopped in the darkness, but more of them appeared as if emerging from out of the night, as if they dropped from the moon-colored clouds. One leapt onto his back and bit at his neck with sharp teeth. He smashed its nose with his free fist and knocked it away. Another rolled into his legs and knocked him halfway down, dropping him to one knee. He shot her in the chest and she jerked backward. A half-dead grabbed his gun arm then and twisted.

He yelped in pain—Arkeley, of all people, cried out in pain. He must have been in agony. The half-dead must have caught him completely off his guard. Caxton wondered if his arm was broken.

Not that she didn’t have her own concerns. The half-deads were coming for her, too, though with far less force or numbers. Clearly they didn’t consider her to be a threat on Arkeley’s level. She found herself almost disappointed.

She fired at a dark shape that lunged down across the roof of the kennels and it fell to the ground with a hiss of exhausted breath. She kicked it in the legs and felt its flesh yield. Another half-dead reached down to try to grab her shoulders and he lifted her gun and fired without even looking.

“Go,” Arkeley shouted again. She looked over in his direction but could barely see him. He was surrounded on every side by Scapegrace’s servants. She discharged her weapon over and over, trying to thin out the crowd, even as she dashed out, away from the kennels. He was about to be overrun and she knew it but there was very little she could do. She couldn’t save him—she didn’t have enough bullets. Her only hope was to get away herself and find some backup.

The problem was she wasn’t sure where to go next. The driveway lead straight out to the road and the possibility of help. Any police response would come from that direction, assuming she lived long enough for anyone to arrive. Arkeley had said there were half-deads stationed out there, however. They would almost certainly be laying in wait.

Instead she turned to the back of the drive, to where a ten-foot privacy fence cut through the trees. She got a foot in between two of the boards and lunged up and grabbed at the branches that protruded over the top. Adrenaline carried her up and over and she slid down the trees on the other side, branches whipping at her face and digging up long scrapes on her hands and arms. She rolled down a steep embankment and into the parking lot of the elementary school next door. In the moonlight the black asphalt sparkled underneath her.

She heard gunfire from the other side of the fence. One shot—two more. Then nothing. She tried to breathe normally, tried to control her urge to panic. Arkeley was probably dead, she decided. That was bad, in many different ways, but it didn’t change her situation.

The trees by the fence shivered and their dry leaves whispered as they rubbed together. Two half-deads were climbing up after her. Chasing her. They would be on her in a second.

She checked her weapon. She only had one round left. She was better off saving it, she decided. She climbed up to her feet and ran.

The school building was low and rectangular, a black edge in the night that she followed. She didn’t know if half-deads could see in total darkness or not—vampires could see your blood glowing in the gloom but what about their servants? It was one of the many things she should have asked Arkeley back when she’d had the chance.

Back when he was still alive.

Guilt dripped down her spine as she dashed around a corner and up a short stairway. She could feel guilt and run at the same time. Ahead of her lay a backstop and a chain-link fence, the pale dirt of a baseball diamond. She dashed through a narrow gap in the fence and slid in a patch of dark mud.

There were trees ahead of her. Not such a big surprise. There were trees everywhere in Pennsylvania. They might give her a little cover, she decided. They might shield her from half-dead eyes. She slipped between them and realized her mistake almost instantly. You can’t run at night in a forest, or at least, you can’t run very far. No matter how dark a night might look it’s ten times darker under a forest canopy. Unable to see she could run right into a hardwood trunk or trip over exposed roots. She had a flashlight in her pocket but turning it on would give away her position instantly. Without light she could break her neck, or worse, break a leg.

She could end up immobilized but still conscious, end up unable to walk and forced to wait for the half-deads to find her. She needed to get out of the woods—but going back was out of the question.

Ahead of her she saw a patch of wan radiance and headed toward it, her hands outstretched, feeling her way forward. Her boots shuffled forward spasmodically, just waiting to be trapped by thick underbrush or to be sucked down into a puddle of mud.

The light revealed a clearing maybe fifty yards on a side and strangely regular in shape. A few thin saplings grew there but mostly it was covered with overgrown grass, yellow and thin with the season. She stepped out of the woods and into the relatively bright space, relief flooding through her body, and then she tripped over a rock. The hard, half-frozen ground connected with her chin and her teeth smashed together with a horrible clinking sound.

She struggled onto her side, then sat up and looked behind her. The stone she’d tripped over was pale, almost ghostly white in the moonlight. It was rough on top but straight on the sides, worn down by wind and rain over the course of centuries but once, long ago, it must have been straight and smooth. A slab of rock planted upright in the soil. Like a gravestone.

She had stumbled right into an abandoned cemetery.

50.

When she knew what to look for it was obvious. The low stones were badly eroded, ground down by time’s wheel until they were just tall enough to trip over.

She could see where they made neat rows, however, and at the far end of the clearing she could see twisted bars of metal, the remains of a pair of wrought iron gates.

There were little graveyards like this all over the countryside of Pennsylvania, Caxton knew. Developers hated them because they were legally required to move the bodies if they wanted to tear up the land. More often than not they just left them in place. It was no great shock to find one in the woods behind her house. There must have been a church nearby in some past decade or century but it had been burned or pulled down since. Nor was there was anything to fear from the graves, she told herself—vampires slept in coffins, yes, but they didn’t bury themselves in ancient churchyards just for the ambience.

Something snapped maybe ten yards from her head. A fallen branch or maybe a crust of frost on the ground. It could have just been a cat or a deer—or it could have just been a branch laden down with rain finally giving way.

Caxton froze anyway. Her entire body craned toward her ears, her whole brain tuned up in anticipation of the next sound.

It came in a series of tiny pops, like a string of firecrackers going off but much, much softer. Maybe something had trod on a carpet of pine needles. Caxton lowered herself inch by inch until she was lying flat on the ground, trying to make herself small, trying to make herself invisible.

“Did you see that?” someone warbled. It was the squeaky voice of a half-dead.

After a moment she half-heard a muttered reply. It sounded negative.

She cursed herself for lying down, for moving at all. In the darkness, if she’d been perfectly still, maybe they would have walked right past her.

She had one bullet left in her Beretta. The flesh of half-deads was rotten and soft and she could probably beat another one to pieces. If there were three of them, however, or if they were faster than she expected, it would all be over.

She tensed her body, ready to strike upward if anyone came close. She would try her best to destroy them, if there were two of them. If there were three, or more, she would shoot herself in the heart. It would prevent her from being raised as a vampire.

“There, what’s that?” a half-dead asked.

There were two of them. There had to be two. She prayed there were two.

Then she heard a third voice.

“You two, leave us alone,” someone else said, someone who had to be standing right behind her. She rolled over and looked up into a pale silhouette with a round head. It wore a pair of tight jeans and a black t-shirt. Its ears were dark and ragged-looking.

Scapegrace.

Caxton brought her pistol up and fired her last round point blank into the vampire’s chest. The bullet tore through his shirt, then pranged off into the trees. It didn’t even scratch his white body. She hadn’t really expected to kill him—even in the dark she could see the pinkish glow of fresh blood moving beneath his skin—but at the least she’d expected to make him turn and snarl. He didn’t even laugh at her.

He just crouched down next to her and touched the grave marker she’d tripped over.

He didn’t look at her or touch her.

She tried to ask a question but her throat kept closing up. “What… what are you going to…”

“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “Don’t say anything unless I speak to you first. I can kill you,” he added. “I can kill you instantly. If you try to run away I can catch you.

I’m much faster than I used to be. But I want to bring you in alive. I mean, those are my orders. I think you know what She wants. I’ve also been told that if I hurt you a little, that’s okay. That it might even help.”

He faced her, then, and she had a bad shock when she saw how young he looked.

Scapegrace had been a child when he killed himself. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most. His body was still painfully skinny and hunched. Death hadn’t made him a grownup overnight. He still looked like a little boy.

“Please don’t look at me like that,” he said to her. “I hate it.”

Caxton turned her face away hurriedly. She knew her own features had to be wracked by fear. Snot was running across her upper lip and cold sweat was breaking out on her forehead.

“I can see some things in the dark but I can’t read this,” he told her, running his fingers across the headstone. The lettering there had mostly worn away but here and there an angle or a fragment of a curved inscription could still be seen. “Maybe you can read it better. Read it to me.”

Her throat shuddered and she thought she might throw up. She fought her body until it was back under her control. She couldn’t quite read the letters but maybe it would help to feel them, she thought, to trace them with her fingertips. Trembling fear lanced up her forearm as she ran one finger across the face of the stone. She could make out a little:

ST PH N DELANC

JU 854 – JULY 1854

She told him what she had discovered. “I think—I think it says Stephen Delancy, died July 1854. The date of birth is h-h-harder to m-m-make out,” she chattered.

Caxton felt as if someone were pouring out cold water over her back. It had to be at least partially the weird feeling she always got around vampires, the cold sensation that she got standing next to Malvern’s coffin or whenever Reyes had touched her.

But most of that skin-crawling horror had to come from the fact that at any moment he could kill her. Tear her to pieces before she could even raise her arms to ward him off.

“Do you think he was born in June or July? Did he live for a full month or only a few days?” Scapegrace knelt down beside her and ran a hand across the gravestone as if he were caressing the face of the infant buried below. “I guess there’s one way to find out.”

“No,” she screamed, as he dug his pale fingers into the soil and started tearing out clods of earth. She threw herself at his back and beat on his neck with her empty pistol. Finally she got a reaction out of him.

Turning from his kneeling posture he grabbed her around the waist and slung her away from him. The empty Beretta flew out of her hand and into the darkness. She couldn’t see where it went because she was too busy reeling across the graveyard.

She tumbled backwards, her feet kicking at the ground pointlessly. She came down hard across another gravestone, this one nothing more than a stub of rock sticking out of the ground like a decayed tooth. Her elbow collided with the stone and wild pain leapt up and down her arm. She didn’t think she’d broken anything—just hit her funny bone.

Scapegrace had made a hole three feet deep by the time she could stand again.

The bones and cartilage of her hand still thrummed with agony but she was going to be okay. She found herself crying, though, as he lifted a wooden box out of the ground. She couldn’t stand it—between the fear and the horror of what he was doing she thought she was going to start screaming, that she would run away even though she consciously knew he would just chase her down.

The box was of some light-colored wood, maybe pine, riddled with worm casts.

It was decayed so badly that she couldn’t tell if it had originally been ornate or plainly made. The baby-sized coffin broke apart in Scapegrace’s hands though he was clearly trying to be gentle with it. He brushed away the fragments of pulpy wood and the dirt and sediment that had collected around the body inside.

“My family had a big funeral for me,” he told her. “I could kind of see what was happening, like I was a ghost floating around the ceiling of the church. Everybody from my school was there and they walked past and looked down at my face and some of them cried, and some of them said things. Sometimes it was people I didn’t even know. Girls who would never have talked to me in the hall, not even if they needed a pen and I had a spare one. Some of them were really upset, like they finally understood what it was like, what they had done to me. That was kind of awesome.

Nobody would touch me, though.” Gently, with his thumb, he brushed debris away from the tiny body.

“Please,” Caxton said, the word strained and stretched as it came out of her.

“Please. Please.” He didn’t strike her but he didn’t stop what he was doing, either.

He shook the coffin a little and debris and dirt and other matter fell away. Vomit surged up her throat and she turned to the side, ashamed to show such disrespect but unable to stop herself from throwing up right then and there.

“When you’re on the other side of it, death just isn’t scary anymore. Actually, it becomes kind of fascinating. A lot of being a vampire is like that. It totally changes your perspective.” He held something round in his left hand, something about the size of an apple. With a half twist he removed it from the coffin. The rest of the infant’s remains went back in the hole and he kicked dirt over them. Then he turned around and showed her what he’d found.

It was the skull, of course. Stephen Delancy’s skull, which had been buried for a hundred and fifty years. “Look,” he told her. “He was only a few days old when he died.” He showed her the skull. It was packed full of dirt and smeared with dried fluids. It was horrible to behold, sickening. “Maybe he was never really born.” He considered the baby-sized cranium at length. “This will work,” he said. He rubbed at the skull with his thumbs and then stared deeply into its eyesockets as he chanted softly. She didn’t understand the words—she wasn’t even sure they were words he was speaking.

When he finished he closed his eyes and then held out one hand, the skull balanced on his white palm. After a moment the skull began to vibrate. She could see it blur with motion. A sound leaked out of it, a kind of wailing moan it couldn’t possibly make on its own—it didn’t even have a lower jaw. The scream grew louder and louder until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. Instead Scapegrace pressed it against her hands. “Take it,” he said, and she could hear him just fine over the shrieking. “Go on—my ears are more sensitive than yours. Take it!”

She took it in her hands and the screaming stopped instantly.

“I’m going to take you with me, back to Her lair. I need you to behave, though.

So we’re going to play a little game. You’re going to hold Stephen in both of your hands, because that’s the only way to keep him quiet. Nod for me so I know you understand.”

She shuddered. It made her head bob on her neck as if it weren’t fully attached.

She wrapped both hands around the skull. Something moved and chittered inside, some insect hidden in the dirt that filled the baby’s sinus cavity. She moaned a little but she didn’t drop the skull.

“Now you keep good care of that. If you take your hands away from it or if you drop it or if you crush it because you’re holding it too hard, I’ll hear it scream. Then I’ll have to hurt you. Really, really badly.” He squinted his red eyes and stared shrewdly into her face. “I’ll break your back. You know I can do that, right?”

She nodded again. Her whole body trembled.

“Okay, Laura,” he said. “Now move.”

51.

Scapegrace lead her out of the woods and back to the parking lot of the elementary school. She scanned the surrounding area with her eyes, desperately hoping someone would see them and call the police. No luck, though. She and Deanna had picked the place because it was out in the middle of the woods. Plenty of space for the shed and the kennels. Nobody around to complain about the sometimes bizarre noises greyhounds made. At night there was nobody around at all. Their nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away.

A car, a late model white sedan, sat waiting for them in the lot, its engine idling, its lights on. Doctor Hazlitt sat in the driver’s seat, looking nervous.

“She promised Hazlitt could be one of us,” Scapegrace told her. He was standing behind her so close she could feel his cold breath on her neck. “She promised him lots of things.” The vampire held open the passenger door for her. She could hardly open it herself while she held the baby’s cursed skull in her hands. She climbed in and realized she couldn’t fasten her seatbelt, either. She guessed that didn’t matter.

“Hello, Officer,” Hazlitt said. She didn’t look at him. He sighed and tried again. “I know you have no reason to like me just now,” he went on. “In a few hours, though, we will be allies. That’s how this is going to work out. Can’t we be civil to one another now?” When she didn’t answer he started up the car and turned onto the highway headed southeast. Toward the tuberculosis sanatorium where Justinia Malvern waited so patiently.

They were going to make her kill herself. She’d understood that before but she hadn’t considered how it might happen. Reyes had wanted it to be her own choice, and he had nearly succeeded in talking her into shooting herself. He’d wasted time trying to convince her—and before he could finish with her the sun had come up.

Scapegrace wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He would force her hand.

Judging by the methods of persuasion he’d used so far she imagined he would torture her until she begged for death. Then he would give her the means to do herself in.

Arkeley couldn’t stop them this time. Arkeley was dead. Tonight I’m going to die, she thought, and then tomorrow night I will rise as a vampire.

She wanted to fight them. She wanted it so badly—her body was wracked with the urge to attack, the need to kill the vampire and the doctor. Little whitecaps of adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, beckoning her on. But how? She had no weapons. She didn’t know any martial arts.

On the verge of panic she started breathing fast and shallow. Hyperventilating.

She knew it was happening but she didn’t know how to make it stop. Hazlitt glanced over at her, concern wrinkling his face.

In the back seat Scapegrace seemed bigger than he actually was. He was like some enormous growth, white and flabby like a cancer, filling half the car. “She’s just afraid. Her pulse is elevated. She might pass out.”

“Yes, thank you,” Hazlitt shot back, "I know the symptoms of an anxiety attack.

Do you think we should sedate her? She could hurt herself or someone else.”

“She might hurt you,” Scapegrace said, laughing a little. “Don’t worry. I’ll grab her if she has a seizure or something.”

Tiny sparks of light flashed inside Caxton’s eyes. They swam across her vision and were gone as quickly as they’d come. Her throat felt dry and thick and very cold with the air howling in and out of her body. She could hear her own heart beat and she could feel it pulling in her chest. Then bars of darkness appeared at the top and bottom of her vision like when they played old movies on television. The bars thickened and she heard a high pitched whining that filled up her head with its tone and then everything went all soft and fuzzy and out of focus.

She could hear Hazlitt and Scapegrace talking but only as if they were shouting through thick layers of wool. They were drowned out by the ringing in her ears. She could feel her body around her but it was completely numb, rubbery and dead. She could move if she really wanted to but just then she didn’t really want to.

The fear was gone altogether.

That was the best part. She knew things were still bad and that they wouldn’t end well, but her fear was gone and she could think clearly again. She didn’t want to sit up—that might break the spell—but she looked forward, through the windshield, and tried to see where they were going. There was something out there but it wasn’t the highway. It was pale and big and it had long triangular ears. It was a vampire, maybe Malvern. The vampire raised its hands to her and they were full of red blood. It was offering that redness to her, like a gift.

Scapegrace slapped her across the back of the head and her eyes whirled around in her head and she was back, the ringing gone from her ears.

“I said, are you okay?” Hazlitt yelled. He had one hand on her neck, maybe feeling for her pulse.

She wanted to bat him away but then she looked down and saw she was still holding the baby skull. Whatever had happened she’d managed not to let it fall out of her hands. She remembered she wasn’t allowed to let go of it. She pulled away from Hazlitt as best she could with her shoulders. “I’m fine,” she managed to say. Her voice sounded weaker than she felt. “What happened?”

“You swooned,” the doctor told her, his voice thick with gloating.

She scowled. She wasn’t the kind of woman who swooned. She thought about it, though. Once, when she and Ashley (Deanna’s predecessor) had been in Hershey on vacation, she had drunk chocolate martinis until she had literally passed out. She had woken up on the floor of the ladies’ room with a crowd of scared-looking cocktail waitresses looking down at her. It had felt a lot like what had just happened—but even that hadn’t made her feel so much shame.

Wow, she thought. If Arkeley could have seen her just then he would have had concrete proof of all the horrible things he’d ever said about her. Thank God he wasn’t in the car. Because he was dead.

She worked her face muscles, stretching out her jaw, puffing out her cheeks, trying to revive herself. By the time they reached the hospital she felt pretty much recovered. Hazlitt drove up onto the main lawn next to the statue of Hygiene and they piled out of the car, Caxton very careful not to drop the skull even though her palms were clammy with sweat.

Twelve or thirteen other cars were already parked haphazardly on the grass. They were all empty. A bonfire burned close to the front doors of the hospital. Caxton was pretty sure that the Corrections Officers who ran the place weren’t just having a weenie roast. She was right. As they walked up toward the entrance she saw the COs lined up on the ground near the fire, their hands tied behind their backs, their faces down in the grass.

She thought they must be dead. It was almost a relief to think that. When one of them moved her body sagged with brand new horror.

Tucker, the guard who had helped Arkeley find out Reyes’ personal information, strained his neck trying to look up and see who had arrived. Caxton did everything she could to look away, to not be seen, but it didn’t work. His eyes met hers for a moment and it was like they had a little conversation, it was like they had some of the magic of the vampires and they could communicate with just the firelight that shook in their eyes.

I’m so sorry, she tried to say with her eyes. But there’s nothing I can do.

His eyes were easy to read, even from twenty feet away. Help me, they said.

Please. Please help me.

That was her job, of course. Helping people. At the moment she was indisposed, however. Tucker was going to die because she hadn’t been strong enough. Just like everybody else. There was blood on her hands—the metaphorical kind, anyway.

“That guy means something to you?” Scapegrace asked. He didn’t give her a chance to deny it. He stormed over to where Tucker lay on the grass and scooped up the big CO in one arm. Tucker outweighed the vampire by probably a hundred pounds but it didn’t seem to matter. Scapegrace fastened his big toothy mouth around Tucker’s neck and bit down, almost gently. Like he was biting into an apple and didn’t want to spurt any of the juice. Then he began to suck.

Caxton had no recourse but to scream for him to stop. She might as well have yelled at an avalanche—if anything she just spurred him on. The CO’s face went grey, then white. It never got as white as the vampire’s skin. His eyes rolled around in his head and his body quivered but he never screamed. Maybe Scapegrace had crushed his larynx. When it was over the vampire just threw the body down on the ground. It was useless. Blood ringed his mouth, bright red blood. “They’re all going to die,” he told her. Some of the other COs whimpered. One began praying in a sobbing, warbling voice.

Scapegrace took him next.

After the third or fourth victim had been drained Hazlitt cleared his throat. “Leave the rest for now,” he said. “Justinia wants to talk to our guest.”

Scapegrace jumped up and ran his forearm across his wet mouth. He moved across the grass so quickly he left trails in the air. Without seeming to move at all he had his hands around Hazlitt’s neck. He forced the doctor down to the ground until he was kneeling on the wet grass, looking up into the vampire’s eyes with sheer terror bringing waxy sweat onto his forehead.

“You’re not one of us yet,” Scapegrace said. “You think you can remember that?”

The doctor nodded emphatically. The vampire let him up and then they all went inside.

52.

The tiny skull in Caxton’s hands quivered and she nearly dropped it. She did let out a little squealing noise. Scapegrace and Hazlitt stopped to look back at her. The vampire grinned cockily at her predicament.

A millipede with long, hairy feelers had crawled out of the left eye socket and was working its way across the back of her hand. Its body looked wet and slimy. Its legs made her skin itch. It was all she could do not to jerk her hand away. If she did, though, she knew that Scapegrace would cripple her instantly. Knowing the teenaged vampire he would probably put the millipede in her hair, afterwards, just to torture her.

She bent her knees and gritted her teeth and tried not to care. It was just an insect, she told herself. It was extremely unlikely that it was poisonous.

Carefully she raised the skull to the level of her mouth. She took a deep breath and blew on the millipede, trying to knock it off her hand. Its head waved in the jet of air but then its back legs anchored between two of her knuckles. She blew harder, and harder, until she thought she might pass out again.

Scapegrace snorted out a mocking laugh. She sucked in air and then spat it at the millipede until it finally flew off of her hand. The vampire shook his head in amusement and then gestured for her to follow. “This way,” he said, “if you’re okay, now.”

Hazlitt ran ahead into the darkness and switched on a light in the corridor ahead.

All but one of the fluorescent tubes in the corridor had been smashed. They hung above her like jagged glass teeth, sparking now and again. What little light remained was barely enough for her to find her way to the far end of the passage. They were headed directly for Malvern’s private ward—she recognized the route they took from her previous visits.

Scapegrace glanced at Hazlitt, then lifted aside the plastic curtain and went inside.

Caxton started to follow but the doctor touched her arm and shook his head.

Together they stood there for long minutes listening to Scapegrace retch up his cargo of stolen blood. Tucker’s blood, Caxton thought. Maybe Arkeley’s blood. He was feeding Malvern, of course, just as Lares had the night that Arkeley killed him.

When Scapegrace was finished and the noises had stopped Hazlitt nodded at her.

She pushed through the plastic curtain and stepped into the blue-lit room. Her eyes went out of focus for a moment, adjusting to the new light, and her head grew light.

She thought she heard someone calling her name and she swam back to lucidity. She was so scared she thought she must be going crazy. “Laura,” she heard, again, a woman’s voice. Was it Malvern? No, that was impossible. Malvern’s vocal cords had dried up a hundred years ago. “Laura.” It was as clear and as loud as if someone stood behind her, calling her. She turned but she knew nobody would be there. It was as if a ghost were talking, like the ghost in Urie Polder’s barn.

“Officer?” Hazlitt said, looking a little concerned.

“Nothing,” she said. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the blue light. She saw that the room had been changed around a little. The medical equipment had all been shoved back into the corners and the microphones and probes that had once hung down from the ceiling to constantly measure Malvern’s status had all been cleared away. The laptop remained, sitting alone on a metal stool. Caxton glanced down at the coffin propped-up on its sawhorses. Blood filled the coffin almost to the rim.

She was sure Malvern was in there, submerged under the dark fluid, but she couldn’t even see a shadow beneath the still surface. Then, as if in response to her stare, a ripple ran across the blood and five tiny peaks appeared in the surface. They pressed upward out of the coffin and she saw they were fingernails.

Malvern’s hand lifted from out of the blood, clotted fluid dripping and falling away from the fingers. There was more flesh on the bones than before—clearly being soaked in human blood was having the predicted effect on Malvern. She was rejuvenating, revivifying. Her hand reached for the keyboard of the laptop and she began to type. Character by character she spelled out a message for her new guest:

well come, laura

When the vampire was done typing her hand slithered back inside her coffin. It was all so quiet and stately and polite that Caxton felt an absurd urge to curtsey and thank her hostess for her kind hospitality. Scapegrace tapped her on the shoulder, then, and she turned back around. Then she lost her breath. There was a noose hanging down from the ceiling, hovering over a simple wooden chair. “That’s—for me,” she stammered. “So I can—so I can—finish myself off and complete the rite.”

“Yes,” Hazlitt told her. “I want you to know I opted for a lethal injection. I have one made up for myself. They wouldn’t hear of it.”

“It’s how your mother did it, right?” Scapegrace asked. He sounded almost solicitous, as if he really wanted to make sure he’d gotten it right. “She hanged herself? The symmetry of it appealed to us.”

“Yes, that’s right.” She nodded, trying to fight back by being more nonchalant than he was. Her stomach boiled with acid but she refused to let it show. Symmetry.

The kind of thing that would appeal to a vampire’s spiky, twisted, obsessive-compulsive mind. “She hanged herself. When I was very young. Is it time, now?” she asked, a lump in her throat. “Is it time for me to.” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “You know.”

“We’re not quite finished,” Scapegrace told her.

A half-dead entered the room and climbed up a step-ladder to hang a pair of thick iron chains from the ceiling. When he was done he took his ladder away and made room for two more half-deads, who dragged something in a big canvas sack into the room. There were ugly stains on one end of the sack. They grunted and cursed as they struggled with their burden but they didn’t complain openly. From time to time they would look up at Scapegrace as if they expected him to pounce on them and tear them apart just for fun.

Finally they got their bag open. Inside was a human body, a big one, dressed up in a dark suit. There was so much blood on the hands and face that Caxton couldn’t determine the race or even the sex of the cadaver.

No—wait, she thought. It wasn’t dead. It moved, though surely only by reflex, a twitch here or there, a last shudder before the body could finally succumb to mortal wounds. The half-deads attached the dangling chains to the body’s ankles and started hauling it up into the air. Scapegrace moved forward to help them lift it up, over the coffin, until the body dangled over Malvern’s submerged form with its out-stretched fingertips nearly brushing the surface of the pooled blood.

The body swung from side to side, first left, then right. Scapegrace and Hazlitt both kept looking at her face as if they expected her to have some kind of reaction.

She’d seen worse, she wanted to tell them. She’d scraped prom queens off the asphalt. Then she realized why they wanted her to see this particular body.

It had a small silver badge on its lapel, a star in a circle. The badge of a Special Deputy of the US Marshals Service.

53.

“Arkeley,” she said, “oh God, it’s Arkeley. You’ve killed him.” She had already known that he was dead, had already accepted it but this—this was proof. Tears shot out of her eyes and splashed on her shirt.

“Oh, there’s plenty of life left in him yet,” Scapegrace announced. “There had better be.” The half-deads shrunk away from the coffin and she understood intuitively. When they attacked her house they had been under Scapegrace’s orders to take both cops alive. Caxton so she could be turned into a vampire, and Arkeley so Scapegrace could torture him to death for what he’d done to Reyes and Congreve and Lares and Malvern and every vampire he could get his hands on.

Hazlitt touched the Fed’s throat. “He still has a pulse. It’s thready but it’s strong.

And he’s definitely breathing. Unconscious, though.”

Scapegrace smiled. “So let’s wake him up.” He stepped over to the dangling body and took Arkeley’s left hand in his own. He stroked the blood-stained skin for a moment, then lifted the hand to his mouth and with one quick motion bit off all four fingers down to the palm.

Fresh blood poured out of the wounds and mingled with the blood in the coffin.

Arkeley’s eyes flicked open and a mewling, cat-like sound sagged out of his chest.

He sucked in a horrible breath that caught on something broken inside of him and then he moved his lips as if he was trying to speak. Caxton couldn’t hear anything, though.

Scapegrace spat the severed fingers into Malvern’s coffin. They sank into the blood without a trace. “What’s that, Deputy? Speak up.”

“Spuh,” Arkeley rasped. It sounded like two pieces of paper being rubbed against each other. “Spesh.”

“Special Deputy,” Caxton said for him. A kind of gruesome smile, but yes, an actual smile appeared on the Fed’s upside-down face.

“Cax,” Arkeley sputtered. “Caxt—you. You knee.” He took another grating breath. “Need to…” He couldn’t seem to finish his thought.

Scapegrace didn’t like it at all. He reached for Arkeley’s other hand. “Do you have something more to say?” he asked. “Some last kind word for your young friend here? You’ve failed her, old man. She’s going to die, you’re going to die.

Everyone is going to die. You’ve failed everybody. Maybe you’d like to say you’re sorry. Go ahead. Whisper in her ear. We’ll all wait here patiently for you to think up your dying words.”

Caxton leaned close, leaning against the edge of the coffin. Her shirt trailed in the blood but she didn’t care. “Jameson,” she whispered. She’d never used his first name before and it felt strange in her mouth. “Please don’t apologize.”

“Kneel,” the Fed told her. It wasn’t what she was expecting. “Kneel before her.”

She recoiled from the words, from the very idea. She sought his eyes, wanting to let him know how angry she was that he would just surrender like that, that he would want her to embrace her doom so wholeheartedly. The light in his eyes was wrong, though. There was a distinct streak of defiance in the wrinkles around his eyes.

He’d never been wrong before. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head as if she were praying in church. She knew very well that it would take more than a simple prayer to save herself, though.

Down on her knees she saw something—a shadow tucked away in the near perfect darkness under the coffin. She saw the triangular shapes of the sawhorses and between them something else, something flat and angular. She squinted and saw that something had been secured to the bottom of the coffin with a silver X of duct tape. She squinted again and finally understood. It was a handgun. A Glock 23.

He must have put it there earlier, of course. Perhaps back on the night when Scapegrace and Reyes had come for Malvern and he had threatened to tear out her heart. He must have planned for this, just as he planned for every possible contingency. That was how you fought vampires—you never let them get the drop on you.

She glanced up at Arkeley’s face. He wasn’t giving anything away. She looked back at the pistol. She knew it held thirteen bullets—there would be nothing in the chamber. She looked up and around the room. “Scapegrace,” she said.

The vampire stepped closer. He was no more than five feet away. “Hmm?”

“Catch,” she said, and tossed the skull into the air. Instantly its high unearthly shriek split the air. Scapegrace grabbed at it, his white hands up and reaching.

She tore the Glock free from the tape holding it to the bottom of the coffin. She worked the slide to chamber a round and saw the vampire’s red eyes go wide. His brain understood what was happening but his hands kept going for the skull. He caught it and crushed it unthinkingly between his pale fingers. Fragments of yellow bone and clods of dirt swarming with worms trickled down the front of his shirt.

The shrieking stopped.

Caxton pressed the barrel of the pistol against his chest and fired. He fell backwards, his head smashing on the concrete floor. His eyes swiveled around to fix on her. “Pretty good,” he said, and tried to get a knee under himself so he could rise and kill her. His limbs didn’t seem to want to cooperate. “Shit,” he said, and fell back.

“Go! Get help!” Hazlitt shouted at the half-deads. One of them rushed for the far exit, for the darkness there. Caxton pivoted on her heel and snapped off a shot and the half-dead’s back erupted in a cloud of rotten flesh and torn clothing. She turned to shoot the next one but it was gone, already having fled the room. The third half-dead crouched down on the floor and hugged his knees.

She turned to Hazlitt next. She didn’t point her weapon at him—you never pointed a weapon at a human being until you were prepared to shoot them. He stepped behind a cart of medical instruments and raised his hands. He was too smart, she decided, to actually try something.

Scapegrace had rolled over onto his side and was pushing himself up into a sitting posture when she looked again. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. “You nicked it,” he said.

“What?”

“You nicked my heart,” he finished. He pushed upward with one knee but his arms were trembling. “That was pretty tricky.” He got up on both knees. “You waited until I’d given all my blood to Her. You waited for the moment when I would be at my weakest. Pretty tricky. Listen,” he said, rising to his feet. He lifted his hands into plain sight. “I’ll go quietly, okay? Don’t kill me.” He wheezed as he spoke—had she punctured one of his lungs? She would have given anything for a chest x-ray just then. “Please,” he continued. “You can lock me away forever, whatever you want.

But please don’t kill me. I’m not even eighteen years old.”

“Don’t,” Arkeley breathed behind her. Don’t listen, he was trying to say. Arkeley.

Was he still alive? He wouldn’t be for long unless she got him down and bandaged his wounds. She turned half around to look at him.

It was the opening Scapegrace had been waiting for. He flew across the room, a pale streak of lightning. Red blood erupted from Hazlitt’s throat and chin as the vampire tore off half of the doctor’s neck. Hazlitt gurgled out a scream. Caxton fired a round into the back of Scapegrace’s head, just by instinct. It didn’t even slow him down. She fired again into his back but he just redoubled his efforts, pressing his face and his rows of triangular teeth deep into the hole he’d made in Hazlitt’s neck.

Every drop of blood he drank would make Scapegrace stronger. He would be bulletproof in seconds. She needed to kill him instantly. Carefully, holding her breath, she lined up another shot and fired through the back of his t-shirt. The bullet tore through the vampire’s body and made him double over in howling pain. He staggered away from Hazlitt and fell across a rack of IV stands. They clattered to the floor as his hands clutched and clutched at nothing, at air. His legs shook like rubber bands and he collapsed to the floor and finally, convulsively, died.

Hazlitt took one last look around the room, his face and chest and the whole front of his body one continuous sheet of flowing blood. Then he slumped to the floor as well, just as dead as the vampire.

The half-dead in the corner jumped up and started running for the door. Caxton fired reflexively and missed him. She fired again and pulverized his left arm. The half-dead started whining in pain but he didn’t stop. She fired a third time and his whole body fell apart in pieces.

Part V - Malvern

54.

There's a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you.

-Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"

“Five,” Arkeley moaned.

She shoved the handgun into the empty holster at her belt. It almost fit. With the step-ladder and with hands that shook badly she managed to lower Arkeley onto the floor. She found rolls of gauze and surgical tape in a rolling cart.

“Five,” he said again, as if he’d just remembered something.

His injuries were terrible. The half-deads had really worked him over—his skin was a maze of cuts, most of them inflamed, and the skin that wasn’t sliced or torn was bruised and even chewed in places. His eyes were swollen shut and his mouth was black and swollen with bruising. Then of course there were the fingers that Scapegrace had torn off. Caxton wrapped his left hand in gauze that instantly turned red with bright arterial blood. She wound more and more bandaging around the wound, tight but not too tight. At least it was his left hand. He would still have the use of his right hand. He could still shoot.

Except—he wasn’t doing any shooting anymore. Not that night, probably not for months. He couldn’t even sit up.

A cold flash went through her when she realized she had been expecting him to get up this whole time and reclaim his gun. She had really thought that her part was done and she could let him mop up.

“Five,” he mumbled.

“Shh,” she said.

It wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t going to fight the half-deads. He wasn’t going to walk out of Arabella Furnace. It was up to her to get out, to run and get help. Maybe—maybe—she could save his life but it was all up to her.

“Five.”

“Okay already,” she said. “Five what? Five half-deads? I think there were more than that when I came in. If you tell me there are five active vampires here I’m going to soil my uniform.” She smiled and patted his good hand.

He sucked in a painful breath and then spoke all in a rush. “There’s only one more active vampire,” he said. He waited a moment, then finished. “There are five bullets remaining in your clip.”

Slowly she removed the Glock from her belt. She ejected the clip and counted the remaining rounds. There were only five left, just as he had said. That was impossible—she couldn’t possibly have already fired eight bullets, could she? She went over the recent combat in her head and realized she had.

She slipped the clip back into the handgun and holstered it again.

“Be more careful,” he said, his head rolling back and forth. “From now on.”

She nodded in agreement. He probably didn’t see it, though, because just then the lights went out.

It happened so quickly Caxton thought it had to be in her head. She blinked her eyes but the blue light didn’t come back. Featureless darkness filled all the available space around her, so thick she felt as if it were rubbing on her dry eyeballs.

“Oh God,” she said. “They know. They know something’s up—what do we do now?”

Arkeley didn’t answer. She reached over and grabbed his bloody wrist. He had a pulse, still, but he must have fallen unconscious.

Caxton searched her pockets, hoping she had some kind of light source on her.

Something—anything. Scapegrace had taken most of her gadgets away from her, cellphone, PDA, handcuffs. “Oh, thank you,” Caxton whispered, not knowing who she was talking to. The vampire had ignored her mini-Maglite. He’d probably figured she couldn’t hurt anyone with it. She took it out and pointed it at Arkeley. The miniature flashlight spat out a foggy cone of pale blue illumination that dazzled her eyes for a second. It gave off just enough light for her to see that he was still breathing.

There was a telephone mounted on one wall. She grabbed the handset and pressed it to her ear. No dial tone rewarded her. She flicked the hook a couple of dozen times, trying to make it work, but no dice. Whoever cut the power must have cut the sanatorium’s phone lines, too.

Which meant they had to know everything. They knew where she was and what her first move would be.

If the half-deads—and the remaining vampire—knew she was in Malvern’s ward then her first goal had to be to get away. She couldn’t move Arkeley—he outweighed her considerably and she couldn’t drag him—so she decided she would have to leave him there on the floor. If the bad guys killed him out of spite she would hate herself forever but she imagined they would be too preoccupied trying to kill her.

Waving her light around she found the exit from the ward and slipped along the wall of the corridor beyond. The Glock stayed in her holster so she wouldn’t waste a bullet if she jumped at the first sight of her own shadow. That was an Arkeley kind of thing to do and she was proud of thinking of it. Of course, Arkelely would already have a plan by this point. He would already be putting it into effect.

“Think,” she said, trying to break the layer of fear that covered her brain like frost. “Think.” What could she hope to realistically achieve? She didn’t consider herself tough enough to take on another vampire and an unknown number of half-deads on her own. She’d only beaten Reyes because of Vesta Polder’s amulet, and Scapegrace had died of surprise, not any special quality she possessed. So if she couldn’t fight, what could she do?

She could run. She could get out of the hospital, get to some place where she could call for backup. It was the only realistic plan. The half-deads would try to stop her, she knew. She tried to think like a faceless freak. They hadn’t attacked her directly yet—no, they wouldn’t. They were cowards. Arkeley had told her as much.

They would fall back, take away her ability to see and her ability to communicate.

They would try to flush her out, to make her walk right into their traps. The half-deads would have secured the main entrance. Going out the way she came in would be suicide. She ducked down the first side corridor she saw.

She remembered her first visit to the sanatorium. She’d thought it was a big spooky maze then. With the lights out it was a lot more unnerving and a whole lot harder to find her way around. She knew generally what direction she was headed: southeast, toward the greenhouse wing. Yes, that would be good. If she could just get outside she would feel much safer. The moonlight might actually let her see something useful.

Her flashlight speared out before, illuminating a lot less than she would have liked.

The corridor it lit up was a gallery of dim reflections and long shadows. Anything could be ahead of her, waiting for her. Anything at all. She kept her back to the wall and edged forward, a step at a time. There was nothing else for it.

She was halfway down the corridor, her eyes watching every doorway, when she began to hear a noise like something moving around inside the wall at her back. She shied away from it and heard it dash away from her, as if they’d scared each other off. It was a rhythmic skittering sound, or rather a whole group of sounds, the patter of tiny claws on wood, the thumping of a soft body dragging across broken plaster.

Ahead of her, down the hallway, something oozed out of the wall and dropped to the floor.

She swung her light around and speared a rat with her flashlight beam. Its tiny eyes blazed as it looked back at her. Its nose twitched and then it bolted away.

“Nothing,” she said, trying to reassure herself. It came out a little louder than she’d meant it to.

Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, a half-dead hissed, “What was that?”

She stopped in her tracks. She stopped breathing. She switched off her flashlight.

There was a tiny bit of light coming in through square inset windows in the double doors at the end of the hallway. A shadow moved across that light, a shadow like a human head.

“Did you see that?” someone else asked, with the same kind of squeaky, rat-like voice. Another half-dead. “Somebody had a light on and they switched it off.”

“Get the others,” the first voice said.

The double doors slammed open then and what looked like a never-ending stream of human silhouettes flooded into the hall.

55.

Caxton reached for her weapon but then stopped. She could hear dozens of feet pounding down the corridor towards her. She only had five bullets left. There was no way she could take on all the half-deads using the gun.

She switched on her light and pointed it at them. Their torn faces and their glassy eyes reflected the light perfectly. They were dressed in filthy clothes. One wore eyeglasses. A couple were missing hands or arms. There had to be at least twelve of them and they were all armed with kitchen knives, with sharpened screwdrivers, with hatchets or cleavers. One had a pitchfork. When the light hit them their mouths went wide and they ran at her even faster.

If she stayed where she was they would simply cut her down. She flicked off the light and dashed sideways, toward an empty doorway. The door itself lay flat on the floor of the room beyond as if its hinges had rotted away.

There was a window at the far end of the room but she could see instantly that it was barred. The room looked like a jail cell—what had it been, the psychiatric ward?

She could hear them coming. She’d run into the room on pure instinct, just trying to get away. Had they seen her? She didn’t know if half-deads saw any better in the dark than human beings. Had they seen her? She threw herself against the wall to one side of the door and breathed through her mouth. She heard them outside in the hall, their feet pounding on the linoleum tiles, their hands thumping against the plaster walls. Had they seen where she went? They had to be close. They had to be getting closer.

They went right past her. She couldn’t be sure but she thought they’d walked right past the door—she had to be sure.

She leaned out a little into the doorway to get a look and found one of them staring right back. His face was striped and raw where he’d torn away his own skin.

His eyes were less hateful than pathetic, full of a weary sadness more profound than anything she could imagine.

Without even thinking about it she reached up with both hands and grabbed his head and twisted and yanked and pulled. He screamed but his flesh tore. It felt less like grappling with a human body than as if she were pulling a branch off a tree.

Bones crackled inside his neck as his vertebrae gave way and then she was suddenly holding a human head. The eyes looked right into her—sadness transformed entirely into fear—and the mouth kept moving but it no longer had the breath or the larynx to scream with.

“Ugh,” she said, and threw the head into the room’s shadowy corners. Out in the hall his body kept walking but it had lost all its coordination. It was just muscles twitching with no purpose. Guilt and disgust erupted inside of her and she thought she might throw up. She glanced in the dark corner, wondering if the head was still moving. Wondering how much that hurt, to be beheaded but not killed outright.

Then she remembered the half-deads who had taunted her on the roof of Farrell Morton’s fishing camp. She thought about the one who attacked her with a shovel—and the one who had stood outside her window and tricked Deanna into cutting herself to ribbons. Then the guilt flew away on moth wings.

The headless body kept walking and soon enough it came up against a wall and started beating itself to pieces, its shoulder digging into the wall as if it wanted to push its way through.

The rest of the half-deads turned to look. They stood in the hallway in loose formation, their weapons out and ready but not pointed at her. They had walked past without knowing she was in the room—if she hadn’t looked, they might have gone right past her. It was hard to tell in the deeply dark hallway but she thought they looked surprised.

The pitchfork the headless body had been holding on to fell to bounce with a jangling sound on the floor. She scooped it up in both hands and felt its weight. It was heavy and over-balanced, the metal tines drooping low to the floor when she tried to lift it. It was a ludicrous weapon and one she’d never been trained to use.

She dropped it. It clanged on the linoleum. Then she drew her Glock.

The crowd of half-deads moved backwards. Away from her. That was good.

Some of them raised their hands, though they didn’t drop their weapons.

She pointed the handgun at one of them, then another. She made them wince.

They couldn’t know how many bullets she had left. She stepped out into the hallway, keeping them covered. She would shoot the first one that moved. Maybe that would scare them enough that they would scatter like frightened rats.

She really hoped so.

One of them had a pair of kitchen shears. He worked them nervously, the blades glinting in the few stray beams of moonlight. Another one wore a dark blue Penn State sweatshirt with the hood up around his ruined face. He was carrying a ball peen hammer. He could break her arm in a second if he got too close.

She took a step backward. The half-deads took a step forward. It wasn’t going to work. They would stop being scared in a second or two and they would rush her.

There was no way she could survive if they all attacked her at once. If she didn’t shoot one of them soon they would call her bluff and it would be over.

She picked one. The one with the pitchfork. He didn’t look as scared as the others.

Taking her time, lining up her shot, she aimed right at his heart and fired, thinking even as she squeezed the trigger, “four.”

The half-dead’s chest burst open and a stench of rotten meat rolled across her.

For a second the others drew back.

Then they started moving toward her again. Their weapons brandished in their pale hands they advanced on her as if they knew exactly what she was thinking. As if they’d been counting her shots too and they knew she didn’t have a chance.

She fired again, wildly, cursing herself even as she snapped off an unaimed shot.

If it hit anything she didn’t stick around to see. She ran back along the corridor, back the way she’d come. She could feel them behind her, chasing her. She could hear their feet slapping on the linoleum in the dark. Could they see better in the gloom than she could? She didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. She flicked on her light, more interested in seeing where she was going than in not giving away her position.

She pushed open a door and skidded around a corner, nearly collided with a filing cabinet somebody had left right in the middle of the hall. She pushed it over, adrenaline giving her the strength, and its clattering fall echoed all around her. Maybe one or two of the half-deads would trip over it.

Her breath froze her throat as it rushed in and out of her, and she ran, the light of her flashlight jumping up and down on the walls and floors ahead of her.

56.

Caxton rushed around a corner into a narrow hallway with no windows. She crouched down in the dark and tried to control her heartbeat and her breathing. Her blood was beating so loudly in her ears she thought anyone nearby must be able to hear it.

Blood. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was full of blood. The half-deads wanted to spill it, maybe in revenge for what she’d done to them and their masters.

Maybe because when you were undead all you had in your heart was jealousy directed at the living. They wanted her blood. Then there was the vampire, the unknown vampire haunting the sanatorium, also searching for her, also wanting her blood. But for a different reason.

She heard a half-dead moving nearby. Its feet made less sound on the linoleum than a cat might make padding through a garden, but she heard it. Nothing like fear to concentrate the senses.

She had three bullets left. She knew better than to think they would be any use to her. She could put one of them in her own heart—that way she would at least not come back as a vampire.

Alternatively she could put one in her head. Then she would come back.

Would that be so very terrible? It would be a betrayal of Arkeley, true. But then he had never liked her. If she made herself a vampire at least her life wouldn’t end. It would change in many ways. But it wouldn’t end.

“Yes,” Reyes said, inside of her head. He’d been quiet all night. Either he was losing his grip on her, fading away, or he was just biding his time.

“Yes,” someone else agreed. “In the head.” Someone else.

A full-body shiver made her twitch in the shadows. She heard the prowling half-dead stop not ten feet away. She held her breath until he walked past her hiding place. When he was gone from earshot she let herself exhale a little.

Somebody else had spoken to her from inside her head. It hadn’t sounded like Reyes at all. Somebody else was in there.

“All of you can just shut the hell up,” she told them. A splintered chuckling sounded in the back of her throat as if she’d been laughing to herself. Not nice, she thought, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of a response.

She got up and made her way to end of the dark hallway, using little bursts of light from her mini-Maglite to find her way. The corridor opened out at its end to a wider hallway full of flats of building supplies—stacks of shingles and neat bundles of replacement floor tiles, pallets of lumber, row after row of sealed white plastic buckets full of plastering compound. Moonlight streamed in through a hole in the ceiling and painted everything a ghostly silver, but even in that eerie light Caxton could see the supplies must have been left there untouched for years, bought for some project that never really got started. Maybe they’d planned on fixing the hole in the roof. The wood was worm-eaten and slimy to the touch while some of the buckets had corroded away and spilled white powder in long sinuous drifts across the floor. She approached carefully, knowing that anything could be hiding in the shadows just outside the patch of moonlight. She glanced down at the powder spread across the floor. The wind coming down from the ceiling listlessly stirred the plaster. Slowly it worked at filling in a line of footprints. Laura was no tracker but she could see the feet were no bigger than her own. The tracks were fresh, too, sharply defined. A barefoot woman had come that way recently.

“Laura,” someone said in a room nearby. Or had they? Caxton’s mind wasn’t just playing tricks on her, she had a whole Vegas-quality magic show going on in there. She couldn’t be sure of anything. What she had heard sounded like a cough more than a word. And it sounded more like the building settling than like a cough. If she hadn’t know better she could have convinced herself it was just her imagination.

The footprints lead her eye to a wide set of double doors across the hallway.

Black paint on the doors said INVALID WARD. Someone was sending her a message—she was supposed to go through those doors. It was a trap. Arkeley had taught her about traps. Shaking more than she would have liked, Caxton stepped up to the doors and pushed one of them open. It slid away from her easily, its hinges creaking just a little.

The room beyond was cavernous and extremely dark. Her light showed her that it had been stripped bare of anything that could be moved. All that remained in the room were cast iron bedframes painted with flaking white enamel. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred. Some had been pushed into a corner and some effort had been made to stack them on top of each other. The majority remained exactly where they’d been when the sanatorium was abandoned, standing in neat rows that ran away from her into impenetrable darkness.

How many people, how many generations of people had died in that room? How many men had lain in those beds coughing away their lives until someone came to cart their lifeless bodies away? How many ghosts did they leave behind? Caxton’s father had died like that, one little hitching cough at a time. He had died in a bed like—

Feather-light and soft something tapped her shoulder.

A fear leapt on her then, not an emotion but a living, breathing thing that crawled around her shoulders and neck as if looking for some place to hide. Caxton wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She tried to turn around and found that her body was completely paralyzed by fear.

Caxton stopped in her tracks and flicked off the light. Slowly she tried to breathe again. It pretty much worked.

“Laura.” Wind in some trees, maybe, making branches rub together. Yeah, sure.

Trees. Maybe the first time she could have believed that. Through sheer dint of repetition she knew what it had to be. It was a vampire and the vampire was playing with her like a cat playing with a wounded starling. The skin on her arms erupted in goose pimples.

It might be Malvern. The bath of blood might have given the moribund vampire enough strength to call out like that from the other side of the sanatorium. Or it could be the other vampire, the complete unknown.

A cold breeze brushed across Caxton’s face, ruffling her hair. There had been no wind in the passage before—either someone had opened a door somewhere or—or—

She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She flicked on the flashlight just in time to see a pale hand flash away from her, dripping red. She gasped in horror and spun around, trying to find where the owner of the hand had gone. She couldn’t see anything. She flicked the light off again and brought her weapon down to low ready.

Three.

A second passed and then another and nothing happened.

Caxton wanted to turn the light back on. She told herself she was only handicapping herself by not having it on. Vampires could see living people in the dark. They could see their blood. She imagined the vampire at that very moment looking at her. Would the vampire see her frightened face or just the blood surging inside her veins? She imagined what that must look like: the branching network of her blood vessels as if they’d been carefully surgically removed and then hung from the ceiling by wires. A human-enough shape, but empty, a throbbing tracery, bright red jagged lines pulsing tremulously in the cold air.

The vampire had to be within striking distance. At any moment he or she could pounce and tear Caxton apart. What was the hold-up? Standing there waiting for her own destruction, imagining the pain to come, was almost worse than actually dying.

She flicked on the light and held it straight out, daring the vampire to show itself.

And the vampire obliged, stepping right into the path of the beam.

Thirty feet away, or maybe farther, the light showed her little more than a pale human outline. The vampire wore a white lacy dress that looked oddly familiar to Caxton, as if she’d seen it in a magazine or something. The colorless hands were full of blood.

Caxton had seen this apparition before. In the car, when she had passed out because she was so frightened. She had seen this vampire with bloody hands, beckoning, calling to her. Now the hands lifted, palms held out as if to catch Caxton’s light. The red fell away through the fingers. It wasn’t blood at all, Caxton saw. It was hair, clumps of short red hair.

“It all came out at once, Pumpkin,” the vampire said, moving closer. She moved so easily she might have been skating across the floor. “I thought you might like to see it one last time before it’s gone.”

Caxton’s bones hardened in place. She felt as if she were being fossilized. The sound that creaked up out of her wasn’t a name, it was the noise rocks make when they freeze in the winter and crack and split open. By the time it reached Caxton’s lips, though, that noise sounded an awful lot like Deanna’s name.

57.

Deanna touched her mouth, her chin. Her fingers trailed down across Caxton’s throat and then wove themselves around her belt. In the blue, uncertain light of the tiny flashlight Deanna didn’t look half bad. Even if she was undead.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, very softly.

“Dee,” she sighed. “Dee. You can’t be. You didn’t—you didn’t.”

“I didn’t kill myself?” Deanna asked. Her voice had that growling quality they got.

Her skin was the color of skim milk. She could probably tie a steel bar in knots with her bare hands.

But she was Deanna, alive again. Or almost.

“I broke that window with my own hands. I cut myself up.” Deanna’s eyes wandered upward to Caxton’s. “I guess that counts,” Deanna said. Under the growl there was a breathy quality to the voice. A sexy kind of flutter. It made Caxton’s skin itch.

It would be technically incorrect to say that Caxton thought Deanna was actually alive. She knew better than that. Or rather, her brain knew better. Her body had its own ideas and its own memories. It remembered the shape of Deanna, the shape of Deanna when she was alive. It remembered her smell.

“How could you do this to us? You know what I am. What I’ve been working on,” Caxton said. She stepped closer and touched Deanna’s strangely lumpy jaw.

“You’re so cold,” she said. She leaned forward and touched her forehead to the vampire’s forehead. They used to do that, when they were alone, and things were quiet. They used to press up against each other. It felt pretty much the same this time.

“I didn’t have a choice. I mean—except I did. Congreve.” The vampire closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her toothy mouth. She shook with weeping.

Caxton couldn’t stand to see it. “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She put her arms around Deanna’s slender form. She wanted to press her tight until she warmed up again.

Until she was a real girl again. A sob died in the middle of Caxton’s throat. It didn’t make it up to the surface. “How do you know about Congreve?”

Deanna pushed Caxton away. She used just enough of her strength to get out of the embrace, but underneath Caxton could feel just how much more power Deanna had if she chose to use it. It was like being shoved gently away by a pickup truck.

Deanna wouldn’t hurt Caxton, though. She would never harm her lover. Caxton could feel it in the way Deanna touched her, in the way they moved around each other.

“They’re going to let us be together forever. That wasn’t possible otherwise.”

Caxton shook her head. “Forever. Sure. Forever like one of them. Have you seen Malvern?”

Deanna laughed and it almost sounded like her old laugh. “Of course I have. She called me here.” She was gone then, away from Caxton’s body and that felt wrong.

Deanna sat down on one of the bedframes and hugged herself. Caxton kneeled down to bring their faces closer together. “Justinia is the one who made this possible. I was going to die, Pumpkin. I was going to die and I didn’t know how else to save myself.”

“Shh,” Caxton said, and she reached with her thumbs to dry Deanna’s tears.

What leaked from the corners of the vampire’s eyes wasn’t water, though, but dark blood. Caxton wiped her fingers on her pants.

“Maybe you’d better tell me how this happened,” Caxton said. Yes. That was good. She had to start thinking like a cop again. But it was so hard with Deanna right there, a Deanna who still moved and spoke and wept.

“Congreve was going to kill me. It wasn’t anything personal. He was just in the neighborhood, hunting and he found me. He came to the house one night when you were out at work. The dogs started singing and the light in the shed went on. I went to see what was happening. I grabbed the long screwdriver from the toolkit and I went back there and I said, ‘Whoever’s in there, you’d better fuck off out of here.

My girlfriend’s a cop.’ But nothing happened. So I went to the door of the shed and that’s when he grabbed me.”

“Congreve?” Caxton asked. But how was that possible? She and Arkeley had killed Congreve long before Deanna’s accident.

“Yes. His hands were really rough with calluses and they held me so tight. He told me I was going to die and I started screaming and begging. He told me to shut up and I tried. I really tried. He asked me if I was the artist, if the blankets in the shed were mine and I said no, because I thought maybe he was some crazy religious guy or something and he wanted to kill me for my art. He made me look into his eyes then and I saw he wasn’t human at all. I couldn’t lie to him then, not even if I wanted to. I said yes.”

“Oh, God,” Caxton moaned. “He hypnotized you. He transmitted the curse to you and you couldn’t even know what was happening.”

Deanna shrugged. “I don’t like to think of it that way. He was an artist too, he said. A musician. He really got my work, Laura. That has to count for something, right? He said talent like mine shouldn’t be wasted. He asked me if I wanted to live or die. Just like that. You know, I actually had to think about it.” Deanna looked down at her hands. She picked at the front of the dress. Caxton realized, suddenly, where she’d seen it before. It was the Best Person dress that Deanna had worn to her brother’s wedding. Had the Purfleets buried her in it?

“He made you like him. You must have said you wanted to live,” Caxton said, trying to get back on track.

Deanna nodded. “Then he went away. And I started having those dreams. The dreams about you bleeding to death.”

Caxton crab-walked backwards and sat down on a bedframe so she could face Deanna. They were two women, two living women sitting on beds, their knees almost touching. Two women just having a conversation. That was all, she told herself.

Deanna lowered her face until her voice was muffled by her folded arms. “I fought the curse, as much as I could. I tried not to sleep. It’s in your dreams that they make you hurt yourself. But that’s the merciful part, isn’t it? You don’t feel a thing as long as you’re dreaming. I wish I’d known what it was going to be like so I wouldn’t have been so afraid. I’m really sorry, Laura. I’m sorry I got so scared.

Otherwise I wouldn’t have told them about you.”

“What are you talking about?” Caxton asked, trying to keep her voice gentle.

“I told them I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t be one of them if because it would mean leaving you behind. Mr. Reyes said he had the answer for that, though. He said they could take both of us. He really seemed to like the idea.”

No, it hadn’t happened like that. It couldn’t have. Caxton felt like she’d gotten to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and found the picture didn’t match the cover of the box.

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, Deanna. Your story is all mixed up.”

“What do you mean?” the vampire asked.

“This—this case—was all about me, at least, it was about me first. Because I stopped the half-dead at my sobriety checkpoint. That was how Reyes found out about me.” That was the one thing she actually knew for sure, the one clue she’d really had firm and solid in her mind the whole time. It was why Arkeley had drafted her into his crusade in the first place. It was why the half-dead had followed her home. Because the vampires wanted her as one of their own.

“Pumpkin,” Deanna said, rising to her feet. Caxton followed. “Does it really matter who did what first?”

“Of course it does.” It meant everything. The vampires had come after her.

They’d been obsessed with her. “This all began on the night of my sobriety check.

When the half-dead followed me home.”

Deanna shook her bald head, just a little. “No, Laura, no. It started weeks before that.”

“Bullshit,” Caxton huffed. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Anyway, how could you know that?”

“Jesus, stop already. You’re not this stupid!” Deanna stood up and Caxton followed, but it felt as if she got to her feet first. Deanna was still rising. Eventually she raised herself up to a considerable height. Had she grown after being dead? Or maybe her posture was just better. “That half-dead didn’t just accidentally run across your sobriety check. He was coming to get you.”

“No.” No, no, no, she thought. “No.”

“Yes.” Deanna reached out and grabbed Caxton’s shoulders. Hard enough to pinch. Maybe even to hurt a little. She really wanted to convince Caxton that she was telling the truth. “Congreve sent him to find you, and bring you to him, so you and I could do this together.”

“No,” Caxton said again.

“Yes. Because I was scared to do it alone. And because Reyes wanted a matching pair of us. I was so confused when you woke me up that night as if nothing had happened. Then you scared away the half-dead. The one assigned to you.”

No, Caxton thought, but she couldn’t say it. If she said it she thought it might come out as a yes. Because she saw it could be exactly as Deanna said. It could be.

But it wasn’t. Because if it was, if Deanna had been cursed that whole time and Caxton hadn’t even noticed, if she’d failed Deanna that badly—

“This whole thing, all the pain and suffering, was about me. And if you had just tried to talk to me, if you had just stayed with me that night I hurt myself—we could have been—we could have done it together—”

“No!” Caxton shrieked. She just wanted it to stop. She wanted it all to stop. She pulled out the Glock 23 and fired her last three rounds into Deanna’s chest, one two three.

The noise obliterated all words. If only for an instant.

Then Caxton looked down at what she’d done. The white silk dress was scorched and torn but the skin underneath wasn’t even singed. Deanna was completely unhurt.

“Oh god—you’ve fed tonight,” Caxton wailed.

“You’re my girlfriend. You’re supposed to want to be with me forever, no matter what! We’re supposed to want the same things. Why is this so hard for you?”

The fingers on Caxton’s shoulder compressed like an industrial vise. Caxton could hear the bones in her shoulder creak and start to pop.

“Don’t you love me anymore?” Deanna demanded.

58.

Deanna’s fingers dug into Caxton’s flesh like iron knives. Deanna’s fingernails were cut just as short as they’d been in life but still they tore through Caxton’s jacket and shirt as if they were razor blades. In a moment they would break the skin.

And what would happen then? Deanna was already enraged. If she saw fresh human blood would she even stop to consider what she and Caxton had once meant to each other? Caxton was pretty sure she wouldn’t.

She struggled to pull away, twisting her shoulders to the left and then the right.

Deanna’s face was a mask of anguish, her eyes wide, her jaw hanging open. All those teeth gleamed even in the minimal light of the invalid ward. Deanna’s head was moving backwards, rearing to strike at Caxton’s neck. The motion was painfully slow, perhaps unconscious. When it was complete Caxton would be dead. She’d watched Hazlitt die like that. She’d seen plenty of vampire victims.

Her arms and hands began to tremble. The death grip on her shoulders was cutting off her circulation. The empty Glock fell from her hand and banged noisily on an iron bedframe.

Caxton gritted her teeth and focused every ounce of strength she had into pulling away, tore herself out of the grip. Her jacket came off in long flopping pieces and she tumbled backward, tripping on the bedframe, her arms flying wide to try to catch herself. Deanna seemed to loom up over her as if she were getting even taller or as if she could fly up over Caxton’s head. She was going to strike from above so Caxton rolled to the side.

The vampire’s weight came down on the bedframe with a grinding, screaming noise of metal being twisted out of shape. Caxton was already rolling to a crouch and then up to her feet. Adrenaline made her feel like she weighed nothing at all, as if she’d been hollowed out and filled full of air.

She didn’t turn to look at Deanna. She just ran.

She ran without even bothering to turn on her flashlight. Her foot grazed a bedframe and she might have fallen down but fear lifted her back up. She slammed painfully into the double doors at the far side of the invalid ward, her hip connecting with the push bar. The doors grated open and she rushed through.

Deanna was behind her, one hand reaching to grab the door almost before she reached the hallway beyond. Caxton swiveled around sideways and ran down the hall with her mouth open, with breath bursting in and out of her body. Before she could even find a doorway Deanna smashed into her back, spilling her across the floor. Caxton got back up by sheer willpower and kept running.

Another door. The room beyond was lined with moldy tiles. She couldn’t see more than three feet in front of her face. She sensed something wrong with the room, as if it didn’t have enough walls or as if the floor was sloping downwards, something, yes, it was the floor, there was something about the floor. She stopped short and fell back to hug the wall.

Deanna came bursting through the door like a pale comet blazing through limitless space. Her face was wide open, her mouth craned back to swallow Caxton whole.

She looked in the gloom as if she were flying, truly flying—and then abruptly she disappeared from view.

Caxton tried to get some breath back into her body but there didn’t seem to be enough air in the world to fill the demand. The beginning of a splitting headache lit up the back of her skull as her brain shouted for more oxygen, more adrenaline, more endorphins, more anything. She pushed herself harder and harder against the wall as if it could absorb her, as if the tiles could part and let her inside, into a hiding place.

Deanna screamed in thwarted rage. The noise rolled around the room, reverberating strangely.

Caxton lifted her Mag-lite and switched it on. She played it across the grimy tiles, trying to understand what was going on. Five feet ahead of her the floor stopped short. Had she kept running forward when she entered the room she would have fallen into that pit. She looked at the door she’d come through and her light picked out faded black letters painted there: POOL ROOM.

The pool room—she’d heard Tucker mention it, once. She carefully folded up the twinge of guilt she felt for Tucker’s death and scanned the room, looking to see where Deanna might have gone. She sniffed the air. Any scent of chlorine was long gone, and she was pretty sure the pool had dried up. She did smell something nasty and unnatural, though, something that made her nose wrinkle. It was the smell of a vampire. Wherever Deanna had gone she was still nearby. Close enough to strike at any second. Was she playing some kind of game? Caxton didn’t think so.

She had to know more. But she didn’t want to move away from the wall. It felt as if her body had adhered to the tiles. She took one cautious step closer to the edge of the pool and pointed her light down over the concrete lip.

There was a sheer ten foot drop to the bottom of the pool. Down there she saw tiles, more tiles, endless rows of them. They had been white and smooth once but the black mold that had devoured the grout between them had spread across the crazed surface. Time and water had shattered some of the tiles and left the floor of the pool littered with tiny sharp fragments. A standing pool of dark scum filled one corner of the pool. A little to the left she saw a massive bronze drain, completely black with tarnish. Caxton moved her light slowly across the bottom of the pool.

She had to know, she couldn’t just—

Deanna leapt up and nearly snatched the light out of her hand. Her jaws snapped at empty air and she fell back to land on her feet like a predatory cat. She stared up at Caxton with a look of pure and utterly simplistic hatred. There was a smudge of dark muck down the front of her white dress. She had run right through the door, ready to grab Caxton and kill her and feed on her blood. She hadn’t looked where she was going and she’d fallen into the pool. That was the solution to the big mystery.

Caxton stepped back, away from the edge.

Time to run again.

She pushed through the door and back out into the hall. She estimated she had ten or maybe fifteen seconds breathing room before Deanna found a ladder or climbed up out of the shallow end of the pool or figured some other way out. She couldn’t count on any more time than that. With her light on this time she retraced her steps. She had no intention of going back to the invalid ward, though.

It took her three or four seconds to find the door she wanted, the one marked CONSERVATORY. She pushed it open and went through into moonlight so bright it dazzled her eyes.

Behind her she heard Deanna screaming in frustrated rage once more. It wouldn’t be long, now, she told herself. She had better be ready.

59.

The first thing she had to do was make a choice. It wasn’t an easy one. She had to decide she was going to kill Deanna. It didn’t matter what they’d been. It didn’t matter who had failed who. She asked herself what Arkeley would say and she knew, he would say that Deanna was unnatural. A monster.

That didn’t help nearly as much as she wanted it to. She could still love a monster, she knew, if she let herself. She could learn to love Deanna again, she could forgive her for what she’d done, and it wouldn’t even be that hard. But it looked like she wasn’t going to get the chance. Deanna would kill her—unless she killed Deanna first. Her decision was made. She would kill Deanna if she could.

The second thing she had to do was figure out how.

The conservatory greenhouse she’d finally found had once been a long, two-story space where brick walkways wound between tables and espaliers and giant flower pots. The walls and the sloped roof had been constructed of wide panels of plate glass, held in place by a framework of steel girders. It must have been a lovely place once, she thought, a refuge for the dying patients. A place for them to get out of their beds and get some sun. Time and weather had changed the greenhouse, however. The plants had either died or flourished far beyond what the inmates might have ever hoped for. Vines crawled up the glass walls, choking off the grimy panes, littering the brick floor with curled brown debris. The far end of the conservatory had been smashed in all together, perhaps by one of the violent storms that swept through the ridges of Pennsylvania from time to time. Yellow caution tape had been strung back there, tied from one girder to another to keep the staff out. She could see why—long spears of broken glass stood back there, lined up and stood on end, maybe by the same workers who had abandoned all that plaster compound and lumber outside the invalid ward.

Caxton needed a weapon. She waved her light around and found a piece of steel stanchion that had once secured a trellis in place. It looked half rusted and like it might come loose with a couple of kicks. With a rage born of fear and desperation she knocked it loose with her boot. She grabbed it up and immediately felt a little better, even though she knew the sense of security was an illusion. She had a steel bar the length of a riot control baton with one jagged, wicked-looking end. Against a well-fed vampire it might as well have been a piece of rope.

Next she needed to secure the door. She saw a terra cotta pot the size of a refrigerator that she thought she might be able to use as a barricade. She went to grab it, knowing it would take every ounce of her strength to move it, when the door slapped open and Deanna came roaring through.

She was twenty feet away—and then she was right next to Caxton and her pale arm lashed out like a camera flash bulb going off. Caxton’s face went hot with pain and her ears rang as if her head were a bell that had just been struck. She felt herself falling, tumbling backwards. Her nose ached almost immediately—it might be broken. She struggled not to fall over and then, when that became a hopeless endeavor, she struggled to catch herself on her hands.

Deanna reached down and even before she’d struck the ground Caxton was jerked back up into the air. Deanna punched her in the stomach and her breath flew out of her. Nausea wracked her body and she felt like she was going to throw up.

Deanna’s hand came down on her forearm and she felt the bones there creak and rub together unnaturally. She lost control of her hand and her pathetic metal bar went flying, skittering across the rough brick floor.

Caxton couldn’t have kept standing if she’d been propped up. She dropped to her knees, knocking them badly, and grabbed at her stomach because she felt as if she’d been disemboweled and her guts were about to flop out. Deanna hadn’t cut her at all, though. There wasn’t a drop of blood on her, not even from her nose, which was hotly numb and sprained at the very least. She was in horrible pain and she felt like she would never stand up again but she wasn’t bleeding.

Deanna had thought through her attack. She’d been careful to keep Caxton in one piece. “What do you want from me?” Caxton sputtered.

“You know what we want. You know what She wants.” Deanna squatted down in front of Caxton and folded her arms across her out-jutting knees. “We want you to kill yourself and get this over with.”

“That’s what she wants,” Caxton replied. “I asked what you want, Dee.”

Deanna laid her head on her arms and looked away. She had to think about it.

“This is just a little spat, what you and I are having right now. We can get over it and make up. I still love you. I still want to be with you. But there’s no way that can happen as long as you’re still human. So I want you to kill yourself, too.”

Considering the way she felt right then it didn’t sound so bad. It would be an end to all the pain and all the fear. “I would resent you forever,” she said. “I would hate you for what you turned me into.”

Deanna smiled sadly. “No, I’m sorry, but that’s not true. Maybe at first you would be upset. But then you would get hungry. You would want the blood more than you hated me. Once you tasted it—well, once I tasted it I knew that this isn’t a curse. I don’t care, Pumpkin, if I’m going to get old and withered. I don’t care about how bad the blood tastes. When I felt how strong it made me I didn’t care about anything else. It’ll be the same for you. I promise.”

Caxton was pretty sure Deanna was telling the truth.

“But I’m so scared, Dee,” she admitted. “You know about my mom.” A tear gathered in the corner of her eye but she squeezed it back. Too much.

Deanna reached forward and stroked Caxton’s hair. “I know. I know you’re scared. But it only takes a second.” She grabbed Caxton’s arms and lifted her up to her feet. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

“No,” Caxton said. “Let me do it myself.” She was still shaky but she’d recovered enough to walk. She stepped over to where her iron bar lay on the bricks.

“Let’s go over here in the moonlight,” she said. “I can’t do it in a dark place.”

Deanna’s smile was perfectly pure and innocent.

Caxton walked up to the caution tape and lifted her bar. Deanna had hurt her pretty badly but she’d been careful not to spill a drop of blood. Caxton wasn’t sure why but she knew it had to be important. “Maybe I should do it like this,” she said, and dragged the sharp end of the bar across her left wrist.

“Pumpkin, no,” Deanna breathed, raising one hand to stop Caxton. Then she dropped the hand and just stared.

A line of ragged pain ran across her arm. A razor blade would have made a neater incision but the wound wouldn’t have bled so much. Caxton watched dark blood surge up inside the wound, filling the narrow channel in her flesh. It welled up and over the edges of the cut and then spilled down her wrist. A drop splashed on the bricks, black in the moonlight.

“Oh, Pumpkin,” Deanna said. She stared at the blood on Caxton’s arm.

“What? Am I doing it wrong?” Caxton asked. Congreve, she remembered, had been unconscious, hurt, down on the ground and passed out and a single drop of her blood had revived him. It had been like a shot of adrenaline pumped right in his heart. Reyes had tortured and damaged her but he had never broken her skin.

Maybe they were afraid of the blood, as much as they wanted it. Maybe the blood made them crazy. Maybe it made them lose control.

Deanna’s mouth was wide open. Her feet kicked at the bricks. A moment later she was running, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed as her jaws worried thin air.

She almost seemed to get airborne at the end, her feet barely touching the ground as she moved as fast as a galloping horse, homing in on the blood.

Caxton timed it perfectly. She dropped to the ground and rolled to the left and Deanna went right past her, moving too fast to stop easily.

The vampire collided with the upright spears of glass with a crunching noise, her arms flailing, trying to find something to hold onto, to stop her impact. Shattered glass filled the air like spinning, falling snow.

The sound... the sound was unearthly. A scream broken into pieces. A million tiny bells ringing.

A living human being would have been shredded. Deanna stood up slowly, her dress hanging from her limbs in tatters. Her skin was a maze of blood, dark, dead blood dripping away, rolling down her arms and legs. She tried to grab at it with her hands. She licked herself like a cat, trying to reabsorb all that lost blood.

It wouldn’t work. “It has to be fresh.” Caxton said. “It has to be warm.”

Deanna looked up with her red eyes and there was confusion in them. She didn’t understand what had just happened to her. Then she saw Caxton’s dripping wrist and her mouth opened involuntarily. She took a step forward—and a jagged tongue of glass neatly impaled her foot. She let out a little yowl.

Caxton stripped off her uniform tie and wrapped it around her wrist, tugging at it until it hurt and then knotting it off as a tourniquet. No point in bleeding to death now, she decided. She let Deanna take a few more painful, injurious steps toward her. She waited until all the blood had dripped away from Deanna’s flawless body, already healed but paler now, very much paler. She looked like she’d been carved from marble.

The pink had left her cheeks altogether. The blood wouldn’t protect her any longer. It would have been nice to have a Glock full of ammunition, but the jagged iron bar would serve just as well. Caxton brought it around in a long arc and plunged the sharp end right into Deanna’s rib cage. A little to the left of her sternum.

Deanna screeched and howled and tried to form words, to beg, to plead. Maybe to say goodbye. Caxton pulled the bar out and then she struck again, and again.

Three times had to be enough, she thought. It needed to be. She didn’t have the strength to stab her partner a fourth time. Her arms felt like cut rubber bands.

Eventually Deanna stopped moving. Her red eyes stared up at the moon, her white face perfect still, untouched by horror or pain or death.

60.

It wasn’t easy crawling out of the ruined conservatory, even with no more vampires on her trail. Caxton cut her hands on broken glass crawling out of a shattered pane and knew she was going to need a tetanus shot after she scraped herself on rusted iron. She got free at last, though, and headed for the front of the building, moving quietly, slowly to avoid half-deads. She was going to go get help for Arkeley. That was the end of it. Once he was safely on his way to a hospital (assuming he wasn’t already dead) the case would officially be closed.

Out on the lawn she got a weird surprise—colored light that bounced off the trees and flashed on the wet grass.

Light washed over her, lighting up her hands, her damaged forearm. The light got in her eyes. It was red and blue, or yellow, or white. No less than twelve patrol cars stood parked at odd angles on the sanatorium’s front lawn. Two ambulances and the Granola Roller joined them. Captain Suzie stood up out of the armored vehicle’s sunroof, an MP5 at her shoulder. Her free hand waved Caxton on.

Anger lit up Caxton’s face and made it hot. Where had all these people been?

Why couldn’t someone else have killed Deanna for her? While they waited out on the lawn she’d been inside fighting for her life.

Then the Granola Roller’s rear door popped open and Clara jumped out, knee-and elbow-pads strapped over her sheriff’s department uniform. Somebody shouted for her to stop but she kept running until her arms were around Caxton’s chest.

“You didn’t get killed,” Clara said. “When I got your text message I went right to your house.”

“Text message?” Caxton asked. But yes—she’d sent one, right before she found Arkeley in the shed. Hours ago.

“You said you needed my help but you didn’t say what for. I went to your house and it looked like a war zone. The place was trashed and there were bodies everywhere. The dogs were whining like crazy.”

“The dogs?”

Clara nodded. “They’re okay. They aren’t hurt anyway, just scared. I figured you would want to know.”

The dogs were okay. That was something, some piece of good news to clutch onto. Caxton needed more. She needed more good, more life. More something to keep her from breaking down in hysterics.

“When I realized you weren’t there I called my Department and your Troop and the Bureau of Prisons and everybody I could think of, I hope that—”