23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

45.

Guilty Jen peered out through one of the narrow windows of the interrogation room. “Not long now. Maybe an hour until the sun goes down. Then we get out of here, right, girls?”

Queenie said, “Fuckin’ yeah.” The others seemed to agree with the sentiment.

Clara glanced over at Marty the former CO again, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. She had bought herself a little time, it was true. By convincing Jen to hand her over only to Malvern herself, she had kept herself alive a little longer.

Now it seemed like it wasn’t going to make any difference. Fetlock had to be out there somewhere. He’d had half the day to gather SWAT teams and get in place. And yet she’d heard nothing from him on the BlackBerry, nor had she or any of the others noticed if the prison was being noisily surrounded by cops. What was holding him up?

Maybe she’d been a fool to put her faith in her boss. She knew how slow he was to take action. He thought of it as being cautious. She also knew what Laura thought about people who were overly cautious when dealing with vampires. They might, it was true, survive through the night. But other people just died in their place.

Fetlock had been willing to bide his time when Malvern was at large, murdering people every night. He had wanted to let her have time to make a mistake, to give herself away. Instead he’d just given her time to work the kinks out of her master plan, to make sure of every little detail in her bid to take over the prison. Now—how many lives would he waste, waiting for the perfect time to strike? He had to be out there. He knew what was going on. But he wanted to make sure he, too, had every little thing just in place before he made his move.

Clara knew that the second the sun went beneath the horizon, her life was effectively over. She had long since given up hope that Laura would rescue her. Or maybe… maybe there was one tiny shred of hope left, but it was undernourished and rapidly fading away.

She looked up at the table as the BlackBerry rang once more. She stared at it, then at Guilty Jen. Maybe it was Fetlock, saying he was on his way—

“Hello?” Jen asked, pressing the button to set the handheld to speaker mode.

“Hello, Jen. Your friendly neighborhood warden again, just checking in.”

Guilty Jen slapped the table so hard the phone jumped. “I told you, bitch, we’re not negotiating with you. I want to talk to the cunt in charge, and I’m more than willing to wait until she wakes up.”

The warden chuckled. “Oh, I heard you the first time. I just wanted to bring you up to speed with the latest news. I know you and Laura Caxton are old friends, and I thought you’d like to know I just ran into her.”

Clara’s heart sped up. She made a point of not staring at the phone with wide eyes, not wanting to give away her excitement.

“She didn’t kill you, I see,” Guilty Jen replied. “I knew she was weak.”

“She might have, but I’m more slick than you give me credit for. Anyway, I left her heading down to the Hub. You know where the Hub is, don’t you, Jen? It can be reached easily from anywhere in the prison. Wherever you’re holed up, for instance, can’t be more than a few minutes away from there. All the doors between you and the Hub are open, by the way. Not that you have any reason to go down there, of course.”

“That’s right,” Jen said. “You’re not going to catch me out like a sucker. I’m not going down there just so you can ambush us and get your hostage back. What do you take me for, an idiot? Anyway, Caxton’ll be dead in an hour. When the vampire wakes up, she’ll suck her blood.”

“Are you so sure of that, Jen? You’ve never actually met Miss Malvern, have you? I have. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with her, actually. Enough to know she appreciates a nice ironic turn of events. She doesn’t want to kill Caxton. She wants to turn her out. You know, make her a vampire.”

“Bullshit.”

The warden was silent for a moment. “You can believe what you want. But I want to remind you of something. The first time you met Caxton, when you jumped her in the kitchens— she didn’t kill any of your set in that fight. She didn’t want a murder rap on her jacket. Even pulling her punches, though, she managed to make mincemeat out of every one of your girls.”

“If your hogs hadn’t come in before I had a chance, I would have—”

“You might have taken her, I know. You’re a real hard case, I get it. But when she’s a vampire, she’ll be ten times as strong and tougher than you can imagine. And she won’t have a single compunction left when it comes to killing worthless scum like you and yours. Just a thought I wanted to share.”

Every pair of eyes in the room was staring at the phone. Slowly, as each brain worked through what had just happened, the eyes turned toward Guilty Jen.

Clara knew what the sociopath was thinking. It might as well be written on her face. Laura Caxton had made a fool of her. She had disrespected Jen in a way that could not be forgiven. Under the very strange code of ethics that Jen followed, that meant Laura Caxton had to die. It would be preferable if she could die at Guilty Jen’s hands, but if Malvern wanted to shred her to pieces in a very painful way, that would have been enough.

If Malvern had different plans for her, though—if she wanted to make her stronger, more dangerous, and nearly bulletproof—

At the best, Guilty Jen would never get her revenge. At the worst, she would have a merciless bloodsucker dogging her trail for the rest of her life, which wouldn’t be a very long time.

“Stop looking at me, Featherwood,” Jen said. She chewed on her lower lip.

“Sorry, Jen,” Featherwood stammered, looking away.

“I don’t like being stared at.”

Featherwood shook her head. Clara wasn’t sure, but she thought the burned girl looked scared of something. “I’m not, I swear I’m not looking at—”

Guilty Jen hit the white girl hard enough to knock her halfway across the room. Featherwood’s head bounced off the wall and she slid down into a heap, but Guilty Jen was already on top of her, punching her again and again in the stomach.

Queenie and Maricón grabbed at her shoulders and tried to haul her away. For a while Guilty Jen fought them off, still punching her underling over and over, but eventually she let them pull her clear.

Featherwood sat up very slowly. She was bleeding from her mouth and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She looked down at the floor and wouldn’t lift her head, even when Guilty Jen said, “You got something to say?”

With a clearly painful effort, Featherwood gathered herself together enough to wheeze, “I’m sorry, Jen. I shouldn’t have looked at you like that, I—I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Guilty Jen said. “Don’t do it again.”

“That’s good, keep your people in line,” the warden said, and Clara jumped at the sound of her voice. She hadn’t realized the BlackBerry was still transmitting. “You’ll need them all if you’re going to take down Caxton.”

“Shut up, bitch,” Jen said, and grabbed up the PDA. “Did I not tell you, I’m not dealing with you?”

“Fine. Be that way. I have to go now, Jen. Good luck.” The warden ended the call abruptly.

Guilty Jen growled and shoved the BlackBerry into her pocket. “I’ve made my decision,” she said, “but it’s got nothing to do with what that dried-up old twat wants. This is about what I want, and that’s what—”

A sudden noise interrupted her. The sound of a gunshot, coming from quite nearby.

“What the hell was that?” Marty asked. Then he turned his face away as Guilty Jen stormed toward him. She didn’t bother to hit him—maybe all she’d wanted was to see him flinch.

“It don’t matter what that was,” Guilty Jen said. She glanced around the room, staring long and hard at Marty and at Clara. “Alright,” she said, “pack up. We’re moving out.”