23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

3.

Almost two hundred miles away, in Allentown, Clara Hsu was about to be sick. She was surrounded by bodies, corpses drained of their blood and then discarded like old ragged dolls.

The women around her ranged in age from thirty-five to fifty, but with some it was hard to tell—their arms and throats had been torn at, savaged by vicious teeth, by a vampire who needed their blood and didn’t care how much pain she had to cause to get it.

Clara felt her gorge rising and knew she had to do something, quickly. The smell and the colors—oh, God, the colors— were too much to take in, too much to bear. Luckily, she had a way of dealing with it. Taking a digital camera from the case around her neck, she started snapping pictures, creating a permanent record of the crime scene.

Clara had been just a police photographer once. Even a year ago that had been her whole job. She had worked for a rural county sheriff’s office, documenting methamphetamine busts and car accidents. Then she’d done something stupid. She’d fallen in love with Laura Caxton. Caxton’s life had been about vampires and nothing else. To stay a part of Caxton’s life Clara had agreed to go back to school for forensic criminology, where she’d learned all about latent fingerprints and hair follicle matching and the legal ins and outs of DNA testing. It had gotten her a place on the SSU, the special subjects unit—the Vampire Squad—and exposed her to parts of the human anatomy she had never guessed existed. Or wanted to.

She’d learned the trick of using her camera’s viewfinder to shield herself from the gore back in the old days, and luckily it still worked. You focused in on a flap of skin hanging loose over a ravaged jugular vein and you thought about composition, and lighting, and getting the color values right, and suddenly it was just a picture. Something created, something not quite real.

It was the only way she could handle this mess.

“They were having a Tupperware party,” Special Deputy Glauer said, squatting down next to her. Even if he’d sat on the floor he would have been a head taller than Clara. Big and muscular and with the kind of stiff mustache Clara always thought of as police issue. He’d been just a local patrol cop in Gettysburg when he met Laura Caxton, a good, solid peace officer from a town that went most years without seeing a single homicide. Now he and Clara were partners, in charge of tracking down and killing the last known vampire in Pennsylvania.

They were both in way over their heads.

“The hostess—she’s over there, most of her,” Glauer went on, pointing at a body he’d partially covered with a sheet, “—is one of the top advertising executives in town.”

Clara squinted through her camera. “That seems wrong.” She’d noticed, of course, when she came in that this wasn’t their typical crime scene. Usually the bodies turned up under bridges, in abandoned buildings. This apartment was in an old warehouse, but one that had been converted to expensive loft space. It was in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Allentown. “It doesn’t fit the profile.”

Glauer nodded. Together they’d been following the trail of Justinia Malvern, the last living vampire, through one murder scene after another. Vampires needed blood to fuel their unholy existence. The older the vampire got, the more blood it needed every night, or it weakened. Eventually it would lose the strength to crawl out of its own coffin at night and had to lie there rotting away in a body that couldn’t die. Justinia Malvern was the oldest vampire on record, well into her fourth century. Most of that time she’d spent trapped in her own coffin, too weak even to rise to feed. That had changed in recent years. She had been feeding a lot recently. Bodies had been turning up all over Pennsylvania. Always before, though, they’d belonged to homeless women or illegal immigrants, migrant workers or housekeepers, the kinds of people who didn’t get reported as missing when they failed to turn up for work one day. Malvern was smart. On bad days Clara was sure Malvern was smarter than she was. She’d known that the police would be after her, that she had to keep a low profile if she wanted to keep hunting.

And now—this. “If she’s taking this kind of risk,” Clara said, “it must mean one of two things. Either she’s desperate, she needed blood and she didn’t have time to find a safe supply. Or—”

“Or,” Glauer said, nodding, “she’s not worried about us anymore. We’ve been following her around, cleaning up her messes. Not giving her any reason to worry. Not since Caxton was arrested. Yeah.” He stood up slowly, the joints in his knees popping. “We don’t scare her enough to make her hide anymore.”

They both froze in place at the same time. They’d both been trained by Laura Caxton, the world’s last living vampire hunter, and they knew better than to jump, even when a shadow loomed over them from behind.

“Interesting theory,” their boss said. Deputy Marshal Fetlock of the U.S. Marshals Service was a thin man with jet black hair that had turned dramatically white at his temples. Clara sometimes thought it looked dashing, and sometimes thought it made him look like a skunk. “Write it up and send it to my email.”

Clara gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir,” she said.

The deputy marshal had come in through the main door of the loft and walked right through the one splash of blood in the entire place. Malvern had been careful not to spill a drop from most of the victims, but when she forced her way in she had attacked whoever came to the door first and there had been a short struggle. Clara was 100 percent certain that the blood’s type would only match one of the corpses in the room— Malvern had no blood of her own to spill, even if an unarmed human opponent could somehow injure her—and therefore the blood evidence was probably useless. There was no such thing as a forensic specialist, however, who could watch someone walking all over a clue and not wince.

“A change in her modus operandi,” Fetlock said, putting his hands on his hips. He looked very pleased with himself. “That could be good. It could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

Laura Caxton had fought vampires successfully by doing things most people considered suicidal. She had gone into their lairs at night. She had sprung their traps just to see what would happen. Somehow she had survived and the vampires hadn’t, because she was a warrior, a throwback to the time when vampire hunters had tracked their prey with swords and crossbows. Fetlock, on the other hand, was a very modern bureaucrat. He believed in doing every last thing by the book—which included disciplining anyone who broke protocol.

It also meant he made sure none of his people ever got in harm’s way. Clara was one of his people, so she could appreciate that. Up to a point. It hadn’t been lost on her, however, that in the time Fetlock had been tracking Malvern, a lot of innocent people had died. A lot more than Caxton would have felt comfortable with.

“I prefer your first theory about what we’re seeing here. It’s desperation. Malvern is running scared. She knows we’re close,” Fetlock said. He bent down next to one of the victims and closed her eyelids with two fingers. Clara winced again. Now he was touching bodies that hadn’t even been documented properly. “All we need is one good clue. One mistake on her part. One lucky break.”

“All we need,” Glauer said, folding his arms across his chest, “is Caxton back on the team.”

Fetlock didn’t even look at the big cop. “Not going to happen. She’s in prison. End of story.”

Clara tried not to say anything. She knew it was futile. Fetlock had been the one who’d arrested Laura in the first place.

Worse than that. Laura had freely confessed to her crime and said nothing in her defense at her trial—she had pleaded guilty and let her lawyer go through the necessary motions. When it came time for the sentencing, the judge had asked if anyone had an opinion on what the sentence should be. Fetlock had actually stood up and asked for the maximum sentence allowed by law. After all, he claimed, Caxton had been a cop and should have known better than anyone the consequences of her actions. She had a duty not just to uphold the law, he had argued, but to epitomize it. Clara had started hating him that day, and yet… she had felt a certain grudging respect, as well. Because she knew if he was the one being sentenced, he’d still have asked for a maximum penalty. Fetlock was a by-the-book bureaucrat, but at least he had utter faith in his own convictions.

If Clara had spoken up then, and made an impassioned plea to have Laura brought back onto the team, she knew Fetlock’s first counterargument would be that Clara had been Laura’s girlfriend. That meant she couldn’t be objective about this. So there was no point in opening her mouth. And yet—

—Glauer was right. She knew it. She knew for a fact that the only person in the world who could catch Malvern at this point was Laura Caxton.

“She could consult, in a purely civilian capacity,” Glauer went on, saying it so Clara didn’t have to. “She could give us insights on this case that might crack it wide open, and—”

Fetlock frowned. “There’s no good way to set up that kind of relationship, not with her all the way up in SCI-Marcy.”

Clara couldn’t take it anymore. “You could request the court to have her transferred to SCI-Cambridge Springs,” she said. “That’s a minimum-security facility. The prisoners there are allowed real phone privileges. We could set up some kind of arrangement where she could get in on conference calls with us, tell us what we’re doing wrong.”

“She’s a criminal,” Fetlock growled. He made it sound like this conversation was about to end. “Do I have to remind you what she did? She kidnapped and tortured a federal prisoner.”

Clara sighed. “That guy was a sociopath—he’d killed his entire family just to impress a vampire. He knew where the vampire’s lair was and it was the only way Laura could get the information.”

“And that makes it okay?” Fetlock demanded. He stepped closer to Clara, picking his way through the carnage on the floor. “We’re law enforcement, Special Deputy. We swear to uphold the law. To put our faith in the law.”

Clara bit her lip. Laura had sworn that, sure. She’d also sworn to protect the innocent. How many lives had she saved that night? Lives the vampire would have taken, if she didn’t get to him first? If she’d been forced to kill the bastard for the information, Clara knew she wouldn’t have hesitated. Despite Fetlock’s attempt to have the book thrown at Laura, the judge had taken all circumstances into account before sentencing her and had thrown out most of the charges against her. Laura had still been required to plead guilty to a charge of kidnapping, and accept a sentence of five years’ imprisonment—the mandatory minimum sentence for that crime in Pennsylvania. Even with early release for good behavior it would be years before she was free.

How many people would Malvern kill before that day came?

“I know this is hard for you, Special Deputy,” Fetlock said, his voice dropping into an almost gentle pitch, “considering the relationship you had with her. But you have to accept the facts. She’s in jail because she broke the law.”

“It’s not right,” Clara said, knowing she’d already lost. “She deserves better. For all the people she saved—for all the good she did, she deserves better than to rot in a cell for so long. I mean, hell, without her there wouldn’t be a special subjects unit.”

Fetlock gave her a warm smile. “And because of her, it was almost disbanded. We walk a very thin line, Hsu, and we can’t afford to forget that. We have special powers to execute vampires on sight—the legality, the constitutionality of those powers has never been questioned, but if it ever was they would evaporate in a heartbeat. Then our job wouldn’t just be hard, it would be impossible. The three of us have to be above suspicion, at all times. Even just associating with a known felon is putting the future of the unit at risk.”

He had a point, of course. The SSU had been created as an ad hoc working group within the Marshals Service, but no high official had ever written up a charter for it or done anything to give it legal standing. So far no one had come forward to complain about what they were doing—the vast majority of people preferred not to publicly acknowledge that vampires were a real threat. But if they ever really screwed up, say by shooting a living human being by mistake, the press, government watchdog groups, and Internal Affairs would descend like vultures and the SSU would be no more.

“Alright, alright,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. She walked away from Fetlock, not even wanting to look at him. He turned instead to Glauer, who gave him a good-natured shrug.

Suddenly she didn’t want to be around either of them. She went over to the far corner of the room and pretended to study some scuff marks on the wall. Far enough away that Fetlock must have believed she couldn’t hear what he said next.

The Fed leaned in close to speak to Glauer. Man to man— they would be elbowing each other in the ribs soon enough. “So she’s in prison,” Fetlock whispered, and she could tell from his tone of voice that he was about to try to make a joke. He did that, every once in a while, and every time it made Clara cringe. “It’s not that bad, is it? I mean, come on. She’s gay. For her, this has to be like going away to summer camp.”

Glauer earned a little credit in Clara’s book then, because he didn’t laugh.