23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

13.

An hour earlier Clara Hsu had just been taken prisoner. They walked for quite a while through narrow corridors, passing through a number of doors that had to be opened electronically, and a few gates where COs in glassed-in booths buzzed them through. The prison was a big place, and Clara doubted she could find her way back alone if she had to, much less figure out a way through all those locked gates. Eventually they emerged from an underground tunnel into a building that felt more like office space than jail cells. The ceiling was made of acoustic tile that supported fluorescent light tubes, and the walls were normal plaster instead of cinder block or brick. Clara decided this had to be the administrative center of the prison, a place prisoners would rarely ever see. It made her feel a little more comfortable, anyway, to be away from the echoing cell blocks and the brutal architecture of restraint and control. Not that she thought that she was free, or that she would be unsupervised for even a second.

At the end of a long corridor lined with normal hollow-core doors they came to a reception lobby and then an oak door labeled WARDEN in chipped gold lettering. The CO with the stun gun indicated that Clara should open the door herself. She stared at the scratch on his cheek. The skin was starting to peel away at the edges. She was very afraid she knew what that meant.

She knocked gently on the door—her arms had gone weak—and then turned the knob. Inside the office her eyes were dazzled by orange and pink light. There was a massive picture window at the far end of the room, and the sun was just setting beyond it, a bar of red light on the horizon. The window looked out over a courtyard ringed with watchtowers and a twenty-five-foot-high curtain wall.

“Miss Hsu,” someone said.

Clara shielded her eyes to try to see who was talking to her. “It’s Special Deputy Hsu, please,” she said. There were at least three people in the room, not counting the CO who had come in behind her and had his stun gun leveled at her back. She blinked rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. There was a desk there, and a long rectangular coffee table running through the middle of the room, and two people in orange sitting on a sofa along one wall—

“I suppose there’s no need to pretend this is a routine interview,” said a woman standing next to the window. She was wearing a stab-proof vest over a conservative business suit. She had something in her hand that Clara thought at first must be another stun gun, but a moment later she saw it was a Black-Berry handheld.

Outside the window the sun winked out, done with the day.

In a few seconds it would be night. The timing wasn’t lost on Clara. “Maybe so, but I should point out that detaining a federal agent without an arrest warrant is a pretty serious crime,” Clara said. “If you let me go now, we can both save a lot of really annoying paperwork.”

“I would advise you not to move, or flinch,” the woman said. She had to be the warden of the prison, Clara decided, though she hadn’t bothered to introduce herself.

The coffee table stirred, and Clara nearly did jump back. She hadn’t been expecting that. She stared at the piece of furniture and saw that her sun-dazzled eyes had mistaken it for something it was not. It was a wooden box, six feet long, with a long, tapered, hexagonal shape.

“Oh, Christ,” Clara sighed, as its lid started to slide back.

Someone whimpered to her left. Clara looked over and saw the two people sitting on the sofa there. Now that the sun’s glare was less dazzling, she could see that they were both prisoners dressed in identical orange jumpsuits. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were gagged. One of them, a blond girl who looked like she couldn’t be more than nineteen, stared at Clara with imploring eyes.

Laura Caxton wouldn’t just wait and watch this happen, Clara thought, because she was pretty sure what was going to come next. Laura would fight.

But she wasn’t Laura. She had never been as brave as her girlfriend, could never be as tough as the famous vampire hunter. She was a glorified police photographer, and there was a big man—or something worse—at her back, ready to beat her into submission if she made the slightest move. So she stood there, still as a statue, and watched.

The lid of the coffin slid a little further, then overbalanced and fell to the floor with a crash. Clara felt as if a puff of cold air blew out of the coffin, but she knew it wasn’t that. Vampires were unnatural creatures. Their very existence felt wrong—it made the hair on the back of your arms stand up. It made your skin prickle.

Taking her time, moving stiffly Justinia Malvern sat up and looked around the room.

She’d been born in 1695 in England, and had lived through every year of American history there was. Vampires lived forever if no one managed to kill them, but they didn’t age gracefully. Malvern’s skin was pale, paper-thin leather stretched tight over protruding bones. In some places it had worn away where it had rubbed night after night against the stained silk lining of her coffin. A patch on her forehead had eroded down to dull yellow bone. She wore nothing but a thin, almost transparent mauve nightdress that was nearly as tattered as her skin, but modesty hardly applied to something that had spent more time in a coffin than it had standing upright.

Her head was completely hairless. She didn’t even have eyelashes. She had long triangular ears, one of which looked like it had been chewed on by animals. She had one eye that was yellow and cloudy with cataracts. The other eye socket was empty except for a wisp of cobweb, a dark hole in her head surrounded by rotten skin.

Her mouth was full of broken fangs. Not just two sharp canines—Clara had been raised on that image of vampires, of suave counts with a pair of protruding but tiny fangs. Vampires in reality had teeth like sharks, their mouths packed full of row on row of wicked translucent blades. There were gaps in Malvern’s smile, a lot of them, but she still had plenty of teeth to chew with.

Her bony arms were folded across her chest. She opened them slowly, carefully, and placed a skeletal hand on either side of the coffin. With obvious pain but just as obvious determination, she levered herself up until she was standing on her own two feet. She swayed slightly, but she didn’t fall.

Clara gasped a little. She didn’t mean to. She’d read Laura’s notes, though. The first time Laura Caxton had seen Malvern, she’d been confined to a wheelchair, barely able to lift her arms to hold a beaker full of donated blood. Later on, when Malvern had assisted Caxton with her investigations at Gettysburg, the vampire had been too feeble to even raise her head. She’d been trapped in her own coffin, barely able to lick at blood dripped across her mouth. Clearly the blood she’d drunk at the Tupper-ware party, and at the roadhouse, had gone some way toward reviving her.

She had never spoken more than a few words, as long as Clara had been alive.

“I trust,” she said now, in a voice that was creaky and thick, but clear enough to be understood, “that my dinner is prepared.”

It was all Clara could do to be still as the warden went to the sofa and grabbed the blond prisoner. She was dragged up to her feet and pushed forward. The warden tripped the girl until she was kneeling next to the coffin, her head bowed. Her hair fell forward, exposing the nape of her neck from the hairline down to the loose collar of her jumpsuit.

Malvern struck like a snake. She might be slow and stiff, but where there was blood involved, there was always a way. Her broken fangs sank effortlessly through the flesh at the back of the prisoner’s neck, grating on the thick bones of her spinal column. The prisoner screamed and shook, tried to break free, tried to buck the vampire off her back, but Malvern’s fangs had a death grip on her, like a wolf’s jaws squeezing shut around the throat of a caribou. Malvern wrapped one spindly arm around the prisoner’s waist and pulled her close. That arm should have snapped like a twig, but instead it seemed to possess the strength of an iron bar. It stopped the prisoner’s convulsions and stilled her screaming as Malvern crushed her lungs and squeezed all the air out of her.

In a minute it was done. Malvern dropped the corpse to the floor, having no more use for it. Then she climbed out of the coffin and walked over to the warden. “’Tis a treat, to meet ye at last, my dear,” she said, and leaned in to kiss the warden on the cheek. The warden closed her eyes and sighed as if she were being greeted by a lover after a long separation. “And for you, Miss Hsu, my feelings are none but the warmest.” She came gliding over toward Clara as if she would kiss her as well. Her face loomed toward Clara out of the gloom of the office like a scarred moon. There was a narrow stripe of blood on her chin.

Clara did flinch then. The CO behind her grabbed her into a choke hold, then pinned her hands behind her back with his free hand, immobilizing her.

“Ah, I understand. Ye’ll not find this face a pretty sight, not yet. Well, we’ll change that anon. For now,” Malvern said, standing up a little straighter, “there is my second course to consider.”

The second prisoner on the sofa started to scream, even through her gag.