99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

For once she was answered. “It doesn’t have power steering, I’m afraid. It makes it frightfully difficult with one hand. Also, you’re the only one who knows where we’re going.”

“I am?” she asked, a little stunned. She had thought the two of them merely intended to get out of town, away from the manhunt she had ordered. Then she felt as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown on her. They didn’t want her to take them home with her, did they? Clara was there—

The vampire answered in his grunting, roaring voice. “You must know, I think, where she’s been taken. I could sense her before at something of a closeness, but now she’s gone. Somewhere to the east.”

“I don’t know—” Caxton stammered, but Geistdoerfer cut her off.

“Spare us the declarations of innocence. You must know where she is. I’ve seen your movie, Trooper. I know how closely your fate and hers are wound together. Now where, pray tell, has she gone?”

Caxton’s body froze convulsively with fear. They would hurt Clara—they would kill her. Would they do worse? She knew they could. “Please. Please don’t.”

The vampire grabbed her shoulders. Not hard enough to do any real damage. “Where is Miss Malvern?

I will not be stayed or halted, not after all this time!”

He didn’t want Clara. Her blood started running again in her veins. He wanted Malvern. It made sense.

Vampires held only one thing sacred. The young ones, the active ones, cared for their elders. It was how Malvern had stayed alive for three centuries, by preying on that reverence. Clearly this vampire wanted to take care of her in his turn. As old as he was, he was still a youth compared to Malvern. Caxton wondered what she should do. Would she actually let him get to Malvern? If he brought her blood, if he brought her back to some kind of active life, that would only make things doubly worse. She would have two vampires on her hands instead of one.

It wasn’t like she had much choice, though.

Geistdoerfer pointed the Beretta at her. “I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, but I think I grasp the finer points. We’re going to sit in the back. I’ll hold the gun, my colleague will sit there and be quietly menacing. You, my dear, will drive us to…to…?”

She could lie. She could drive them somewhere random, she could drive them to the state police headquarters in Harrisburg. The vampire would know, though. He could sense Malvern even at this distance. If she didn’t drive him where he wanted to go, he would just kill her. If she didn’t behave herself, he would have no reason to keep her alive. She wasn’t ready to sacrifice herself just to slow him down. “The Mütter Museum,” she finally admitted, sagging back into the leather of the driver’s seat.

“That’s in Philadelphia, isn’t it? Very good. You’ll take us there now, at a reasonable rate of speed, and you’ll do nothing to make us conspicuous, yes? If you drive off the side of the road or into traffic, I’ll be very upset with you. I’ve spent a lot of time keeping this car in good condition. I’ll also remind you that such dramatics might very well kill me, and your delightful self, but a crash would prove little more than an inconvenience to the boss here. So drive carefully. Okay?”

He raised the gun in his hand and pointed it directly at her forehead.

“Okay?” he asked again.

“Yes,” she said.

“Take the Turnpike,” Geistdoerfer said. “It’ll be the fastest this time of day.” He handed her the keys across the back of her seat and she started up the car.

When they got to Philadelphia, she wondered, how long would the vampire let her live? But at least for the moment she was still in one piece. For the moment she could still think, and try to form a plan.

Not a single idea whatsoever presented itself to her.

What choice did she have? She threw the car into gear and drove out of the lot.

34.

“Obediah?” someone called. It was the ranger Simonon! I looked out through the doorway & saw mounted men gathered in the clearing before the house. The Rebs had returned. “Obediah?”

he hallooed. “Is something amiss in there? I swear I heard gunfire just now.”

We were as rats, stuck inside a trap, & our time was limited. It seemed hopeless.

The Reb cavalry made camp outside the door & settled in as if prepared to wait for days if need be, lighting fires, tying up their horses to the trees, & breaking out what rations they had. We inside could do little but curse our luck; albeit quietly. We made no more noise than four church mice, I think.

The Ranger Simonon did not come in, nor send any man to so much as glance inside the door.

Neither Storrow nor I was foolish enough to think of trying to fight our way out. We possessed amongst us some small number of firearms, but in our desperate state we would have marched through that door only to be slaughtered instantly. We stayed well back from the doorway & tried not to be seen.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

35.

Outside, through the windows, she watched rural Pennsylvania go by. Houses lit up yellow and orange from shaded lamps, or a flickering blue where the televisions were on. Cars sat in the driveways, or tucked away in garages. Normal people were sitting down to dinner, or they had already finished and were washing up. Good people, and the bad ones too. Normal people. The people she’d pledged her life to protect. “There are a lot of cops in Philadelphia. A lot more than we have out here. I don’t know what you expect to do when you find Malvern,” she said, though she was afraid she did know, “but you’ll have to deal with them eventually. You’ll want blood. Either for her or for you, so you’ll have to feed. You can hide for a while, but—”

The muzzle of the Beretta touched the back of her head. Geistdoerfer snarled at her when he spoke.

“You’re in mortal danger, Trooper. Right now. It’s going to get worse. I can hear the panic in your voice.

Would you like me to put you out of your misery?”

“No,” she said, through gritted teeth.

“You’re not ready to die, then? You’d like to try to live awhile longer?”

She didn’t want to give him even that much. “Yes,” she said anyway.

“Then please don’t talk about what’s inevitable. It’s going to ruin my digestion.”

Was he trying to shut her up? Or was he trying to explain his own actions? The vampire depended on him. The monster couldn’t have gotten this far without Geistdoerfer. Maybe he wanted her to understand him. To forgive him.

Unlikely, she thought, but she kept that to herself.

“Can I turn on the radio?” she asked. Music might drive the darkest thoughts out of her head.

“I don’t see why not,” Geistdoerfer said. “Just keep it low.”

She nodded, then glanced down at the Buick’s dashboard. The radio was original to the car and not very sophisticated. She switched it on and a little rock music came out, mostly swamped in static. She tried fiddling with the tuning knob. The first station to come in clearly was a Christian talk channel, and she switched away again almost immediately. She didn’t want to hear about how she was going to burn in hell for eternity, not when death was so close. She eventually found a station playing classical music.

Something light and happy. Caxton didn’t know enough about classical to say who the composer might have been.

“Mozart,” the vampire announced, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “By God. I know this piece. I heard it played in Augusta once, at a Christmas festival. How…is there a music box in this vehicle? Yet it sounds so rich, like a full orchestra playing.”

She didn’t understand what he was asking. She didn’t want to speak unless her fear sounded in her voice.

“Just a bit after your time, I think,” Geistdoerfer said, “a man named Thomas Edison invented a way to capture sound out of the air and record it on a wax cylinder. Later they developed a way to then transmit those sounds across great distances.”

“Like the telegraph?” the vampire asked.

“A similar principle. Though it requires no wires.”

The vampire was silent awhile. Then he said, “There’s so much changed. The lights burning on this road, you see them? This would have been impenetrable darkness, in my time. All the world outside our little fires was darkness. You’ve pushed that back so far I don’t think you two can even imagine it, now.”

“You have so much to teach us,” Geistdoerfer announced.

The vampire didn’t seem up to giving a lesson just then, however. He didn’t speak again until they left the Turnpike.

It wasn’t much farther to the museum. They passed through the sweeping green lanes of Fairmount Park, where streetlights studded the gloom, then rolled into town beneath the high wall of the old state penitentiary. Philadelphia was a city of discreet zones, districts that had their own specific characters. It felt more like a collection of small towns than a metropolis. The neighborhood that housed the Mütter Museum was one of the more unusual sections.

The streets were not busy that night, though crowds gathered outside of pubs and small restaurants. The vampire kept his head down, invisible to anyone casually glancing through the car’s windows. Outside of a brewpub a couple of college-age boys hooted at them, but they were just admiring the Buick, not questioning its occupants.

Caxton wheeled down Twenty-second Street, passed the College of Physicians building, then ducked down an alley toward a small parking lot enclosed by buildings on three sides. There was no attendant; if you wanted to park there you were expected to fold up a five-dollar bill and tuck it through a slot near the exit. Only a couple of other cars stood in the lot.

Caxton pulled into an empty space and then shifted into park. The Buick’s engine thundered in complaint for a second and then died down to an idle. Her arm muscles twitched as she switched off the car and laid back in her seat. Her body wanted to cramp up into a single knot. She felt a horrible urge to just lie down on the seat and close her eyes. To accept whatever was coming.

It seemed the vampire wasn’t going to let her do that. “Miss, if you please, get out first.”

“Don’t try to run away,” Geistdoerfer added.

She let her head fall forward for a moment, slumped on her neck. She rubbed at her eyes. She couldn’t seem to master the bodily coordination to open the door. But then she did. She got her legs out, stretched them, lunged up with her torso until she was standing in the parking lot. Her body twanged with tension and fear, but she was standing up. That was what you did, when faced with an impossible situation. You kept going.

She climbed out of the car, but before she could even think of running the vampire was behind her, clutching her wrist in his hand. The grip was light, though she knew it could tighten without warning, and if it did it could crush her bones.

“We should really get inside, away from the madding crowd,” Geistdoerfer insisted. He took a step away from the car and they all heard the sound of fabric tearing. The professor looked down and Caxton did too. She saw that his bad arm had gotten snagged by the tail fin of the Buick and that his sling had torn.

“It doesn’t matter,” Geistdoerfer said. “I’ll fix it later.” His face was a mask of pain. Had he injured himself on the tail fin? He started to walk toward the museum, rubbing at his ruined wrist with his good hand. “Come on,” he said.

The vampire didn’t move. Caxton had no choice but to stand still.

There wasn’t much light in the parking area. Just a few overhead lamps that left plenty of shadows. Still she could see a trail of small drops of blood, round and flat, following Geistdoerfer wherever he went.

Blood had stained the torn end of his sling and as she watched it gathered there wetly, formed a hanging dome of shiny red. Then it detached and slid off to spatter on the oil-stained ground.

The vampire held her arm tight. “I’ve had to smell his life for hours now,” he told her. His voice was a low dusky growl. The purr of a big cat just before it pounced on a zebra. “I’ve sat next to him and smelt it, and held back as best I might.”

Caxton didn’t move. She knew what the sight of blood could do to a vampire. “He’s your only friend in the world,” she said. “Please, don’t—”

“I’ll need strength for what I’m to do here.”

Then he was off like a shot, closing the distance between himself and Geistdoerfer in one quick leap.

Caxton was dragged behind, held fast by his soft grip on her wrist. She fought and kicked and tried to pry his fingers loose with her free hand, but it was no use. It was like fighting against an industrial vise.

The vampire didn’t waste time tearing sling and sleeve away from the professor’s arm. He just bit right through the layers of cloth and deep into the flesh beneath, his teeth grating on the bones. Geistdoerfer screamed, but the sound didn’t get very far. The professor’s eyes glazed over as pain and shock took him, as the vampire tore and rent at his skin and muscle and sucked out his blood. For a moment it looked as if Geistdoerfer would die quietly, almost peacefully. Then his body started to shake, his limbs seizing in a convulsion of pain and horror. His eyes were blind by then, but his mouth kept working, his lips trying to form words. Caxton couldn’t decide what he was trying to say.

When it was done, when the last drop of blood had been sucked from his body, Geistdoerfer looked paler than the vampire. He hung limp and quite dead and the vampire stood holding them both, live woman and dead man, like a child playing with two mismatched dolls.

The beast’s eyes burned in the darkness then. His body rippled as if it were made of pale fog and a breeze was coursing through him. His emaciated frame seemed to swell as if the stolen blood had filled him up, distended him. When it was done he looked almost human. Or at least as close as he was ever likely to get.

He dragged the two of them over to a Dumpster in the alley and threw Geistdoerfer’s body inside without further ceremony. Caxton wasn’t surprised. Vampires and their minions held no reverence for human death. When the body was disposed of he dragged her to her feet and finally let go of her. She didn’t even think to run. With the blood in him the vampire would be even faster than before. Stronger.

Much harder to kill.

“She’s here,” he said. “Miss Malvern.” He wasn’t looking at her for confirmation. He had his head up as if he could smell the other vampire on the air. “She’s quite close. You did well, my friend, to bring me here.”

It was then, of all times, that Caxton’s cell phone chose to ring.

36.

In back of the pantry, we found the servants’ stairs, & thought we might be better hid on an upper floor. Every one of those steps creaked, and might have given us away. With time, however, we found ourselves at the top, and in front of a row of wide windows. The marksman & I peeked out through said apertures & watched Simonon playing cards with a sergeant who wore no shoes at all. We could speak up there, if we were soft about it. “I could get off a shot from here,”

Storrow said, running one hand along the massive barrel of his target rifle, “that would do the Union much good.”

“& get us all killed, in the bargain,” Eben Nudd pointed out.

Storrow nodded in agreement, but added nothing. I truly think he would have given his life, & been glad to do it, if he could remove the Ranger from play.

Through gritted teeth I asked my next question. “Why is he here, though? What does he want with this Obediah he keeps calling to?”

“You haven’t yet guessed it?” Storrow asked. He favored me with a grim smile. “Obediah Chess, he’s the master of this place, or else, he was.” He pointed at the oversized finial at the bottom of the stairs. It was in the shape of a pawn, as I have recounted earlier. “Don’t ask me how he came to his change of estate, but now he’s yer vampire. Simonon’s come to draft ’im.”

“The Confederacy is recruiting vampires now?” I could scarcely credit it, even from such villains.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

37.

The vampire stared at Caxton’s coat as her cell phone rattled out the opening bars of a Pat Benatar song. She closed her eyes as the phone buzzed against her side. Would this be the thing that finally got her killed?

The vampire didn’t stop her as she slowly reached into her pocket and took out the phone. It had stopped ringing. A moment later it chirped to tell her she had new voice mail. “It’s,” she said, about to tell him it was her phone. Then she stopped.

Geistdoerfer had frisked her back in Gettysburg. He had felt the cell phone in her pocket, had actually squeezed it. He hadn’t taken it away from her, though. Why not? At the time she had just assumed he didn’t consider it a threat. She had decided he was right—what use was it to her while he was watching her every move?

Maybe, though—maybe he had been trying to help her. He had seemed to want to aid the vampire in his plan, had in fact acted like he was part of it all. He must have known on some level, however, that it would end in his own death. Unless somebody stopped the vampire first. He couldn’t have helped her directly, not with the vampire right there. Had he been trying to give her a chance without giving himself away?

She would never know, now. But maybe she had gained a momentary advantage. Maybe she could use this.

“It’s a music box,” she said. “Like the one in the car.” She showed the phone to the vampire but he just shook his head. He wouldn’t even know what he was looking at. They hadn’t had LCD screens or keypads in his time.

“It plays music for you? Whenever you like?”

She had to think. She had to think what she could do. She couldn’t very well call the police. He would realize what was happening before she’d gotten more than a few words out. She couldn’t even listen to the message she’d just received—that would look too suspicious.

“I can make it play another tune,” she said, after a second. “Can I show you?”

He shrugged. He had plenty of time—the night was still young.

Caxton bit her lip and worked the keypad with her thumb. As quickly as she could she texted a short message to Arkeley:

at mm w vamp no gun

It was all she could think of. Looking up at the vampire, she hit send. The phone burbled in her hand, a happy little crescendo telling her the message was sent.

“Delightful,” the vampire said, actually smiling. “Perhaps later you’ll play me some more. Now, alas, I have much to do. Ladies first, if you please.”

She nodded and walked ahead of him. She could feel him behind her, his icy presence making her skin crawl. She walked around the corner to the museum entrance. The door was locked but the vampire just tugged at the handle until the lock mechanism groaned and snapped. A small torn piece of metal flew out and tapped Caxton’s hand. She walked through the opened door and into a broad lobby lit only by the orange glow of the streetlights outside.

Caxton had been to the Mütter Museum before, years past on a school trip. Long before her life had been about vampires. The place had spooked her out even back then. That was when it was well-lit and full of teenagers and college kids looking for a nasty thrill.

In the dark, in utter silence, the place was like a haunted mausoleum. A whole new kind of fear gripped her. It helped a little that there were no skeletons in the lobby, no two-headed babies floating in alcohol, just a broad staircase leading up, closed off with a velvet rope, and doors leading to a gift shop, some offices, and finally the museum. The building actually housed the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a meeting place for doctors and a sizable medical library. The museum was only a small part of the college tucked away in a corner of the building. Caxton headed through a doorway to her left, then walked through a maze of plasterboard walls housing a display of medical instruments used by Lewis and Clark.

Beyond that lay another exhibit, this one about the great epidemics of the last two centuries. The great influenza of 1918 was well represented—the signs on the walls described it as the greatest health crisis in history, responsible for more than fifty million deaths. She came up to a picture of a pile of bodies waiting for interment in a mass grave and she stopped.

No vampire could ever hope to match that kind of destruction. Yet if Malvern were revived she would certainly give it a try. She would need blood, whole oceans of it, to keep her going. The older a vampire got the more she needed every night. Arkeley had estimated once that it would take five or six murders a night just to keep her on her feet—and that even then she would still be hungry. Starved as she was, she was unable to hunt, unable to kill. Yet if this vampire found a way to revive her, where would she stop?

She would create new vampires to serve her, to protect her. She would slay indiscriminately, cutting a bloody swath through Pennsylvania. How many dead cops would it take before she was eventually brought down?

She couldn’t let this new vampire finish his task. So far fear for her own life had driven her, a desperate need to live just a little longer. But there were limits on even that terror.

“Not much farther, I think,” he said behind her.

Had Arkeley gotten her message? She truly hoped so. She walked away from the picture on the wall, walked farther into the building, and there it was. The Mütter Museum in all its awful glory.

It spanned two levels, a main floor below them and a broad gallery connected by a pair of carved wooden staircases. Every inch of wall space had been lined with cabinets, dark wood fronted in polished glass. Inside were bones, mostly—walls full of skulls showing variations in cranial anatomy, whole skeletons mounted on steel bars to show deformities of bone structure. On her left stood the casket of the saponified woman, a corpse the Mütter had bought to demonstrate how soil conditions could turn a human body into grave wax. On display around the room were a giant impacted colon, the brain of the assassin who killed President Garfield, the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng.

It was all very tastefully done.

Caxton walked out onto the gallery and looked down at the main floor below. There were a lot more skeletons down there, some in huge glass cases of their own. One held the bones of a giant, a man at least seven feet tall, standing next to the remains of a dwarf. They looked strangely like a parent walking with a child. Nearby stood a big wooden set of drawers which she remembered held thousands of objects that had been removed from human stomachs—coins, pins, broken pieces of lightbulbs.

Between those two displays stood a single wooden coffin on a pair of sawhorses. The lid was closed. It wasn’t part of the museum’s collection. “There,” she said, because she knew that Malvern was inside.

“Yes, thank you, I can see for myself.” The vampire grabbed her shoulder, not overly hard, and turned her to face him. “You’ll stay here,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

Her hands were in her pockets. She’d thought this might be coming. Despite what he thought, she still had her amulet. Because the ribbon was broken she couldn’t wear it around her neck—instead she’d put it in her pants pocket. Where she could reach it if she needed it. Out in the parking lot she hadn’t had a chance to grab it, but now she held it tightly. She could feel it getting warm.

His eyes blazed into hers. He was trying to hypnotize her—to freeze her in her tracks. Surely, she thought, he would feel something when it didn’t work. He would know she had some protection against him.

He said nothing, though. Maybe he hadn’t felt anything. Maybe he was just in a hurry. He brushed past her and then leaped over the side of the gallery, not bothering to take the stairs. He landed with a barely audible thump and moved immediately to the side of the coffin. For a second he stood motionless before it, then passed his white hands over its top, his head tilted back.

Someone walked up behind Caxton and she nearly screamed. A fingerless hand touched her shoulder and she turned to see Arkeley standing there. His face was a mask of torture in the gloom. His good hand held his old reliable Glock 23. It looked like he’d received her message, though clearly he hadn’t had time to really prepare.

He raised his ruined hand to his lips and she understood he wanted her to be quiet. What was he waiting for? She knew him well enough to believe he must have some plan, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be.

Below them the vampire lifted the lid of the coffin. It opened noiselessly. Inside lay Malvern. She was withered and her skin was covered in sores, but she looked far more healthy than the last time Caxton had seen her. That didn’t make sense—Arkeley had been starving her of blood for over a year, hoping she would eventually die of malnutrition. If anything it looked like she’d grown stronger. How was that even possible?

The vampire reached into the coffin and ran his fingertips across Malvern’s mottled cheek. He said something, so low she couldn’t make it out.

There was no more time—what was Arkeley waiting for? The Gettysburg vampire had found some way to cheat time. What if he knew some magical spell to bring Malvern back to her former self as well?

There was no time at all.

Her eyes wide, she stared at Arkeley, but he only shook his head. So she did the only thing she could think of. Grabbing the Glock out of his hand, she aimed down at the vampire and put three quick rounds into his back, into where his heart would be. One two three. The noise was immense in that hushed place—it sounded as if every glass case in the museum had shattered at once.

The vampire vanished into thin air. If she’d gotten him, if she had killed him, he would have just slumped to the floor. She must have missed the heart, or the blood that flowed in his veins, Geistdoerfer’s stolen blood, must have protected him.

“You idiot,” Arkeley said, his face congested with rage. “How could you screw everything up?” He didn’t wait for an answer but ran off, into the shadows.

38.

I was set to search the upstairs rooms, in case more fiends lay in wait for us. The task loomed large. Whatever soothing balm the excitement of battle may bring, it wears off powerfully fast.

Luckily the second floor was not so large, & the number of doors I faced small. Two were locked; a third led to a narrow stairs, by which one could access the cupola, which was ringed inside with a narrow iron gallery. I headed back, & tried the locked doors again. You can perhaps imagine my horrified surprise when I heard a muffled sound from behind one of them.

It might have been a pigeon, having found its way in through some broken window, I told myself.

But it was not. The sound I heard was high pitched, a keening whine that I had heard before. It was the voice of one of the fiends.

“I have a minié ball for you if you make another sound,” I said through the door, my voice just loud enough to carry through the wood. I knew I could dispatch the creature beyond that portal. I was worried more he would make some alarum that would rouse the cavalry outside.

“Alva?” the voice asked. “Alva, is it you?”

You will have already guessed the identity of my conversant, & you are correct. It was BILL. My horribly wounded & long-sought friend, found at last. So why then did my blood run cold to hear him?

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

39.

Caxton thundered down the stairs, her feet blurring on the steps, her weapon held high and ready, pointed at the ceiling. The vampire could be waiting for her at the bottom, in the shadows there. She could feel his teeth tearing into her flesh, ripping through her skin. He could be lying in ambush and she could be running right into his maw.

At the bottom of the stairs she turned and extended her arms, weapon in firing position. She looked around for pale humanoid shapes—and suddenly realized there were far too many of them. The skeletons in their cases all looked like vampires in the dark. The vampire she was chasing, while he no longer looked like a famine victim, was still rail thin, and would pass for a skeleton if he stood very still in a corner of the room.

Caxton pivoted slowly, trying to cover the entire room. This was madness. The vampire could see her just fine. Their night vision wasn’t supernatural by any means, but they could see blood—her blood—as if it glowed with its own red light. She was a walking neon sign as far as the vampire was concerned. At any moment he could spring on her, and he was fast, so fast she wouldn’t have time to get her gun around to fire at him.

The only sensible thing to do in her situation was run. Get out, get to a safe distance. Try to seal off the museum’s exits, then wait for dawn. Arkeley had taught her a long time ago, however, that whenever you tried to fight vampires in a sensible fashion they would just slip through your net. In the time it took her to lock the museum’s doors the vampire would be long gone—or he would already have killed her.

The only effective way to hunt vampires, Arkeley had shown her, was to walk right into their traps. To give them exactly what they wanted. It confused them, made them think you had more up your sleeve than you actually did.

There—she rushed forward, thinking she’d seen something move. She jabbed her handgun out, lined up its sights on center mass, started to squeeze the trigger.

Then she stopped. The shape she’d almost shot was the skeleton of a man who had suffered from crippling spina bifida. His bones looked as twisted and worn as driftwood.

The vampire laughed at her. Then she heard a chuckling, echoing sound that made her skin crawl. The sound seemed to come from all around her, from nowhere in particular. Had it come from directly above? She looked up with a fright, but saw nothing over her except for the ceiling. She didn’t feel much relieved, though. That laugh had crawled right in her ear and laid eggs in her brain. A dry, nasty, grating laugh that spun off into distorted echoes had chased off into the shadows.

She had no time to decide what that meant, if anything. She had a subject to collar. Caxton pressed backward, up against a display of pickled fetuses, some with heads, some without, some with more than the requisite number. Slowly, inching her way, covering the whole room before her, she headed back for the stairs. She was pretty sure the vampire wasn’t on the lower level.

She was wrong.

A white blur leaped over the top of Malvern’s coffin and barreled right at her. She brought her weapon around just fast enough to blast a hole in his face before he collided with her bodily, knocking her to the floor. He reared up, clutching his eyes, and she rolled to the side before he could strike downward with his fists. They connected with the floor hard enough to crack the wooden parquet.

“Shit,” she said, the word just leaping out of her mouth. He turned to follow her voice and she saw she’d ruined the bridge of his nose. Most of the middle of his face was hanging down by a flap of skin and she saw splintered bone in the wound. Even as she watched, however, white vapor filled in the hole with snaky tendrils that knitted together. In the time it took him to stand upright again, his face was completely restored.

He glanced at the coffin in the middle of the room, his face dropping in regret, and then he was moving again.

Caxton barely had time to dodge before the vampire swept past and up the stairs. Cursing—silently this time—she lifted her weapon again and dashed up after him, though he had already disappeared into the gallery. At the top of the stairs she swung around, covering the corners of the room. She didn’t see him.

There were two exits from the gallery—back through the maze of pasteboard walls and the exhibits, or out through a clearly marked exit door that returned visitors to the lobby. She dashed through the latter, knowing she was falling behind, that he was getting away. The velvet rope across the staircase had been torn from its mountings and she knew he had gone up.

Where was Arkeley, she wondered? Hopefully he’d run for safety. As far as she knew he didn’t have another weapon, and she didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to try to stop the vampire with his bare hands. It was up to her.

She took the stairs two and three at a time, breath pounding out of her mouth, sighing back in. Her body felt tight and constricted and she knew her adrenaline was starting to wear off. That was alright—she could replace it with raw, cold fear.

At the top of the stairs she dashed into a library, which must have been a beautiful room by daylight. In the orange streetlight that streamed through its tall windows, the rows of books and leather-upholstered armchairs looked rotten and decayed, as if the room had been abandoned to the elements for hundreds of years. To her left a door still swung on its hinges and she raced through. Beyond was a corridor that ran the length of the building, windows lining one side, the other lined with doors. Small marble tables stood between the doors. A pair of black leather driving gloves lay forgotten on the table nearest to her.

Four doors, she counted, and another staircase at the far end, leading down. The vampire could have used any of them.

She kept her back to the windows as she crab-walked slowly down the length of the hall. If he had taken the far stairs he was already gone, she knew. He would have fled through a back exit and she would never catch him. If he had taken one of the doors he might still be in the building, might in fact have trapped himself in a dead end. At the first door she reached out, touched the polished wood, tapped the doorknob with trembling fingers. If the vampire had been there recently she thought the knob might feel cold to the touch or perhaps the fine downy hairs on her hand would stand up. She felt no sense of unnatural presence there, however.

The next door led into an office, with the wordDIRECTOR in gold letters painted on the wood. Caxton touched the knob. Nothing; no sense of unease or disgust. She turned it slowly. It let out a sharp metallic creak and she stopped immediately. Had she felt something move nearby, something hidden in the dark?

She held herself as perfectly still as she knew how, tried to not even breathe.

What was it? There, she thought, a puff of breeze had caressed her cheek. She whirled around, ready to fire instantly, only to see that one of the windows was open a crack. A very delicate draft was coming through, nothing more.

Caxton bit her lip and moved to the third doorway. Her feet made only very soft sounds on the carpet.

She reached out her hand toward the knob, fear making her arm shake, and let her fingertips graze the brass knob ever so gently.

Nothing.

She breathed out, let go a little of her muscular tension. One more door to check. If there was nothing there then at least she would know she was safe, that the vampire was gone and that she wasn’t going to die that night. She moved quickly toward the fourth door, reaching for its knob.

Behind her the window crashed open, glass cracking with a jarring sound. A white mass shot through like a giant cannonball and blasted down the hall right toward her. Before she could even think the vampire had one hand at her throat. He smashed her backward against one of the marble tables, its edge digging painfully into her left kidney. He lifted her up again and then smashed her against the floor until her bones rattled inside her flesh. Only the thick carpeting kept her leg and arm from snapping on impact. He picked her up again and held her in the air, crushing her neck muscles with his powerful fingers. It felt like she’d had a handful of knives jabbed down her throat. She couldn’t talk—couldn’t breathe. If he closed his hand even a fraction of an inch more, she would die. Blackness swam through her vision as if big blobs of oil were dancing on the surface of her eyes.

He had spared her life once because she was a woman. He’d let her live a second time because she was useful to him, because she could drive a car. Clearly his patience was all used up.

Laura Caxton would have died then and there if it hadn’t been for the Mütter’s night watchman. He stepped out of the fourth door just then, perhaps alerted by the gasping, choking noises Caxton was making, and shone his flashlight right into the vampire’s eyes.

The vampire screamed in pain. He was a nocturnal creature, and that much light hurt him far more than bullets. He dropped her, his arms flying up to protect his sensitive eyes from the bright light. In another second he was gone, down the back stairs and away.

40.

I dropped to my knees & peered through the keyhole. The eye that looked back on me from the other side was shot with blood, & quite yellow where it should have been white. But I recognized the brown iris, the color of the rocks on Cadillac Mountain. It was Bill, indeed.

“Wait there, Bill, I have some others with me. We’ll bring you out of this captivity,” I swore.

“Alva, no, you have to leave. You can’t be here.”

“I won’t leave without you,” I told him. “I’m going to force this door, & the noise of it be damned.”

“No.” The high-pitched voice turned hard as flint. “I…can’t let you come in. I’d have to stop you, Alva. I would hurt you if you tried. Don’t make me do that.”

“What nonsense you speak!” Yet I felt my heart jump. I knew what Bill had become. My neck still ached, my side still bled with the wounds the fiends had given me, & now Bill was one & the same.

But it was Bill, my Bill! The only true friend I’ve ever had. A man I slept next to for two years in a tent too small for dogs to use. A man whose life & mine were wound together as tight as the strands of a little girl’s braided hair.

& yet I knew. I understood. “We can help, Bill. We can get you to a surgeon.”

“There’s nothing you can do for me now, Alva. It’s too late. You must forget our friendship, & leave me as I am. I beg you just to go! This is all I can do for you. Even as I speak my soul is writhing, my hands are reaching for a knife to stab through this keyhole!”

I fell back on my haunches, my brains reeling. “Oh, Bill, say it isn’t so.” But it was. He spoke no more, & a moment later, his eye disappeared from the keyhole.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

41.

The night watchman—his name tag readHAROLD —helped her sit up and lean back against the wall.

Caxton rubbed at her throat, trying to get circulation back into the crushed muscles there. “You okay?”

he asked her over and over, as if through sheer repetition he could make it so. “That guy coulda killed us both, and easy!”

That was true. The light had hurt the vampire, but only momentarily. He could have smashed it and then returned to his slaughter. He’d been too smart to take the chance, though. He couldn’t have known if Harold was armed, or if a platoon of police were behind him. She tried to explain that to the night watchman, and found she couldn’t. It felt as if her larynx were being rubbed against a cheese grater. She could breathe, though. Her lungs were heaving up and down just fine. So she nodded. She slipped the safety of Arkeley’s Glock back on and shoved the heavy pistol into her empty holster. It didn’t quite fit—the leather holster wasn’t designed for that particular model of handgun. After trying to force it, she finally just let it hang out a little.

Caxton rubbed at her eyes, her mouth. She let her body calm down on its own, let it take its time in doing so. She’d been very, very close to death. Well, it wasn’t the first time. She knew what to do, which was to try to take it as easy as possible. If there was any real damage to her throat, then running around and chasing vampires would probably just make it worse.

Besides, the vampire was already gone. Once again he’d escaped her. Once again she’d failed.

Harold disappeared for a while, but finally came back with a paper cone full of cold water. It felt very good going down and she thanked him, even managing to squeak out her appreciation in words that only felt like butter knives as they came out of her. “I’m,” she said, and paused for a second. “I’m Trooper Laura Cax—”

“Oh, yeah, I know who you are,” he said, a big goofy smile on his face. He was a short guy, maybe fifty years old with curly scraps of pale hair sticking out of the bottom of a navy blue baseball cap. He wore gray overalls and yellow Timberland boots.

“Did Ark—” she stopped. Trying to pronounce hard k sounds made her feel as if a nail was lodged in her esophagus. “Did the other officer tell you I was here?” she finally managed to ask. She glanced down at the paper cone in her hand. A single drop of water remained lodged in the fold at its bottom. She licked it out eagerly and wished she had more.

“What, Jameson? Aw, no. He didn’t tell me about you. I just recognized you, is all. From that movie Teeth . That was awesome.”

She wanted to roll her eyes. Instead she said, “Thanks.” Then she grimaced. Another hard k .

“That one scene, where Clara kisses you for the first time? That was so fucking hot. I must’ve watched that like a hundred times.”

Caxton rolled her eyes. That scene always embarrassed her when she watched it. Had she really been that easy? “I have to see something,” she said. Slowly she rose to her feet, bracing herself against the wall behind her. When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t fall over again, she made her way down the stairs at the end of the hall. At the bottom a fire door stood half open, cool air from outside billowing in.

She pushed it open and stepped outside, the night feeling good on her face for once. She breathed in a deep lungful that soothed her throat, then looked around. She stood on the edge of the parking lot. The Buick stood just where she’d left it. She saw the Dumpsters as well, one of which held the dead body of Professor Geistdoerfer. “Harold,” she called back over her shoulder, “I need your help.”

It was not easy getting the corpse out of the Dumpster. It took real work to lift Geistdoerfer over the lip of the container. Harold took the weight from her so she didn’t have to just dump the dead man on the asphalt. Once that was done they carried him inside the Mütter building, Harold holding his feet, Caxton carrying him with her hands laced under his armpits. Geistdoerfer’s wounded hand dragged on the ground, but it didn’t leave a trail of blood. Every drop had been drained from his body and none of it had gone to waste.

Caxton knew that the body was a possible threat. The vampire had killed him and by so doing had established a magical link between the two of them. It was within the vampire’s power to call Geistdoerfer back from death, to literally raise him as a servant who could not fail to do the vampire’s bidding. It could happen at any time, over enormous distances, so they had to watch the corpse every second. She needed a place to keep it while she decided what to do next.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia was mostly a meeting place for doctors and researchers, with lecture halls and conference rooms taking up most of its space. In the basement, however, there was a suite of rooms used for preparing specimens for the museum. It looked remarkably similar to the facilities in the Civil War Era Studies department at Gettysburg College, though the equipment was much older and less shiny. They laid out Geistdoerfer on an autopsy table there. Caxton folded his arms across his chest to try to give him some dignity, then wondered what to do next. They would need an ambulance or a hearse to take him to a funeral home. She would have to try to locate his family to let them know where they could pick him up. Then she would also have to convince them to cremate him.

First, though, she needed to start coordinating with the Philadelphia police, let them know there was a vampire loose in their streets. Her cell phone didn’t get any reception in the basement, so she left Harold in charge of watching the body while she went upstairs. Halfway there she ran into Arkeley coming down.

“He got away,” she said.

“Of course he did.” The scars that crisscrossed Arkeley’s face didn’t constrain him from throwing her a look of utter contempt. If anything, they made his sneer look worse. “You couldn’t wait ten more seconds?”

She tried to ignore him. “I need to call the loc-c-cal c-, the c-, the authorities,” she gargled, holding up her phone. She tried to push past him, but he stopped her.

“Don’t bother. I contacted them when I got your text message. I had already warned them something like this might happen.”

Of course he had. Arkeley had always been ready for bad things to happen. It was how he lived his life.

It was his most basic philosophy. She let her shoulders sag and put her phone away.

“They’ll have units all over this part of town by now. Cops flashing their lights down every alley and back lot, helicopters up and scanning the rooftops. Of course it won’t come to anything.”

No, she supposed it wouldn’t. Vampires were smarter and faster than garden-variety criminals. They knew instinctively how to blend into the shadows, how to use the night to their advantage. The regular police had little chance of finding him.

Caxton glanced at her watch. It wasn’t even midnight. This late in the year the vampire would have plenty of darkness to work with, maybe seven more hours. How far could he get in that time? Or perhaps he would stay nearby, find a good hiding place where he could sleep through the day. Then he could come back the next night to try to rescue Malvern again.

“You damned fool. I expect you to screw things up from time to time. But it looks like even I underestimated your ability to ruin a perfectly good plan.”

Exhaustion pushed down on her shoulders, but anger lifted her up: sudden, hot anger. Indignation. “Shut up,” she said, wishing she had thought of some better words. Like maybe, How dare you?

“I’m doing my best. You threw me into this shitty situation and I’m doing everything I c-can.” The hard k sounds didn’t hurt so much when she was pissed off, she realized. “I’m the one chasing this bloodsucker, not you. I think I deserve a little respect.”

“Oh?” he asked.

“Yes. If I hadn’t taken action he could have revived Malvern. He could have carried her out of here while you just watched.”

Arkeley’s deep-set eyes twinkled a little, even the one under his paralyzed eyelid. “Interesting,” he said.

“Fucking fascinating,” she replied, though she had no idea what he was talking about.

“You seem to be under the false impression that our pale friend came here to rescue her.” Arkeley’s mouth moved in a way that might have conveyed some kind of emotion on a normal face. On his features it just looked like a worm crawling from one cheek to the other. “Come with me.”

42.

TIME it was that proved our undoing. We were in danger of our lives all that day. We dared not do anything to alleviate our fears, or to improve our situation. We periodically checked on Simonon & his men, but they did not stir or make any sign of decamping. I think we all guessed what they waited for. For night, & the return of the vampire, from wherever he had gone. We knew he was not in the house, for we had seen his coffin, & it was empty. If he did not return, would we be trapped for the next day as well, & the next? Simonon looked a patient man, for all the tales of his butchery Storrow could relate.

The day passed as they do. Soldiers know how to wait; it is what they learn best. We passed our time as we might. I longed to return to the door down the hall & speak again with Bill, but I did not.

As orange light tinctured the sky above the trees I think we all held our breath, uncertain whether to feel relieved, or affeared. There was some excitement in the Reb camp as well, of a not wholly different character, I think. The tension grew, & mounted, but it did not last long. We Yanks, German Pete, Storrow, Nudd, & me, crowded the window, & didn’t worry who might see our faces there.

None of us saw him come, though the horses smelled him perhaps. They bucked & tore at their lines, & made as if to bolt. Their neighing was the loudest thing I’d heard that day, I thought. & then he was present, the vampire Obediah Chess, standing next to the fire as if warming his pale flesh. As if he’d been there all along.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

43.

Arkeley led her back to the museum, back to the lower level, where Malvern still lay in her coffin. As they approached Caxton looked down at the old vampire, trying to piece things together.

There wasn’t much left of Malvern. Her skin had turned to paper, still snowy white but riddled with dark sores. It had pulled away in places, hanging in tatters. Most of her scalp was missing, revealing yellow bone underneath. Her triangular ears hung down ragged and limp. One of her eyes was missing—it always had been—and the other was just a milky blob of flesh that wobbled back and forth in its socket.

Caxton doubted she could see anything with that eye.

That didn’t mean she was gone, though. When Caxton leaned down over the coffin, Malvern’s head craned forward on its spindly neck, her jaws opening in slow motion. She could sense Caxton’s presence somehow, and was trying to bite her, to tear into her flesh and suck her blood.

When Caxton pulled back the jaws closed, just as slowly as they’d opened.

The vampire from Gettysburg, her vampire, should have looked like that. Any vampire over a hundred years old should be that decayed and weak. Though he had fed on Geistdoerfer’s blood, that should not have been enough. They still had no idea how he was able to walk, even to stand up. Much less how he could outrun a police cruiser or throw her around like a rag doll.

Arkeley cleared his throat. Caxton turned and saw him standing next to a display case. Inside stood the head and shoulders of a man with his skin and part of his musculature removed. His blood vessels had been painstakingly exposed and plasticized, painted different colors to differentiate between the veins and arteries. On top of the case stood a cheap black laptop computer. Arkeley popped it open and raised the screen so she could see it.

“You’ll remember that she warned us,” he said. “She told us that he would come for her.” He tapped the space bar and the computer woke from its sleep mode. On the screen a white window appeared, the text field of a word processing program. Malvern’s original message was displayed there in large italic type, completed and therefore a little more legible now:

comformeheshall

“Come for me he shall. Right,” Caxton said. “She was gloating. Laughing at us because she knew that soon enough he would come and take her away from all this. Bring her blood or—something. I thought maybe he knew some spell. She calls them orisons, right? Some orison to restore her.”

“Yes, I thought that too. Then I realized that she wasn’t that stupid.” Arkeley stepped in front of the screen and scrolled down the page. “Why give us even a cryptic warning? We wouldn’t have expected him to even know who she was. By telling us that he was coming for her she gave us plenty of time to prepare. I knew I needed more information so earlier this evening I set her up and let her type some more.”

He stepped away so she could see the screen. The next message read:

proteckt me you must it is your dutie laura

“Protect—” Caxton put a hand over her mouth.

“Ah. I think you’ve begun to get the point,” Arkeley said.

Caxton nodded. Yeah, she was getting it. The vampire of Gettysburg hadn’t dragged her all this way so he could revive Malvern. He’d come to destroy her. “But—they don’t fight among themselves. They cooperate.”

“Don’t ever assume that what you know about one vampire must be true of them all,” Arkeley told her.

“That’s a sure way to get yourself killed.” She knew that tone. She’d heard him use it a hundred times before. The tone of a schoolteacher correcting a student who could never seem to learn the most basic lesson.

“I couldn’t know this,” she said.

“I called you as soon as she was done typing. Didn’t you get the message?”

Her cell phone—she had received a message while standing out in the parking lot. Right before they’d come inside. “I wasn’t in a position to receive it,” she said. “He was standing there watching everything I did. It was the best I could do to send you that text message.”

He nodded but he didn’t look like he’d forgiven her. “Goddamn it,” he muttered. “I’ve been looking for a way to kill her for more than twenty years. I’ve devoted my whole career to it. The courts always stayed my hand. This would have ended so much misery and torment, so easily. If you had just been patient.”

Caxton’s cheeks burned, but she wasn’t going to take the guilt. “Your misery. Your torment.” It was true that he had been trying tirelessly to find some way to end Malvern’s scheming. To put an end to her existence. It was also true what Malvern had said. “This message,” she said, pointing to the screen,

“wasn’t for you. It was for me.” It was addressed to her directly, by name.

Arkeley snorted. “She knows better than to appeal to my kinder nature.” He picked up the laptop and moved it closer to the coffin, placing it on a display case just within Malvern’s reach.

The skeletal arm lifted slowly, very slowly, from the coffin, and the decayed fingers rested almost lifelessly on the keyboard. With painful slowness Malvern’s index finger tapped spastically at the H key.

The hand fell back for a full minute, the fingers opening and closing slowly as if they were too weak to even lie still. Then the hand moved on, skittering across the keys like a dried-up leaf blown by an autumn breeze, moving up and to the left to touch the E .

Something about the way the hand moved bothered Caxton. As slowly as Malvern moved from letter to letter, she was actually making pretty good time. “She’s speeding up,” Caxton said, frowning. She looked at the message already on the screen, the one begging for her assistance. “And she seems to have remembered how to use the space bar.” The first message, “ comformeheshall,” had been a lot less coherent. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. “What did you do?” She was afraid she already knew the answer.

“It took her days to type that last message. She averaged about a keystroke every four hours. I didn’t have that kind of time.” Arkeley kept his eyes on the screen.

“So you sped things up.” She was terrified that she knew how he’d done it, too. “Show me your arms,”

Caxton demanded.

Arkeley snorted again. She wasn’t kidding around, though. She needed to know. She grabbed his arm, his left arm. The one with no fingers. He didn’t fight her as she pushed up his sleeve. There was a thick bandage of clean white gauze around his wrist.

“You fed her,” Caxton breathed, not believing it, not knowing what it meant. It was a bad thing, she knew that. “You bastard. You fed her!” When Malvern had first become a ward of the court there had been doctors who took care of her. There had been two of them and she had been responsible for both of their deaths. They had fed her this same way—with their own blood. Arkeley had worked for years to get a court order forbidding them from doing just that. And now he was doing it himself.

Caxton could only shake her head in disbelief.

44.

The vampire wore a gentleman’s suit of clothes, & had a tarboosh upon his head worked with golden threads. His eyes burned with the light of the fire. His face was clean shaven & his white skin radiant in the darkness.

“You wished to speak with me?” he asked. Slowly, Simonon stood up from his camp table, & approached.

“I wish to beg your help,” the Ranger said. He was no coward, that man, I’ll say as much. “Jeff Davis wishes the pleasure of your company.”

“You’d sign me up,” the vampire chuckled. “You’d make me one of your privates. Or an officer, perhaps? I don’t relish the prospect of taking orders.”

“Then be a partisan like myself,” Simonon offered. “Choose your own targets, it will be allowed.”

“Really?” the vampire did not move at all, nor make any flourish of his hands. Yet we could see his muscles bunch, loose under skin that barely seemed to fit him. He was like a catamount about to spring on a deer. “& if I choose you?”

He lashed out then, with both hands, & his teeth fastened on Simonon’s shoulder. The Ranger screamed as flesh & bone parted ways & hot blood splashed the vampire’s mouth & cheeks.

Our surprise was matched only by the uproar amongst the Rebs below. Some raised weapons, & I saw sabers being drawn, but none rushed to aid their leader. He was dead already, & all present knew it. The vampire having finished his feast, he dropped his victim to the ground as a man might cast away the bones of a cooked and eaten chicken. Then he turned to look at the cavalry troopers who surrounded him.

“I am the master of this house, & have invited none of you to be my guest! You go back to Jeff Davis & tell him I’ll serve no man, nor God, nor the Devil himself. You go & tell him!”

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

45.

There were a million phone calls to be made while they waited for Malvern to spell out her next message. Far too many to keep straight. The local metropolitan police all wanted reassurances and advice. Arkeley took the brunt of that, nodding and yessing and confirming all the protocols. The Philadelphia Commissioner of Police spent half an hour of Caxton’s time demanding to know why she’d brought so much trouble to his city and what she planned to do about it. She offered to give a statement to the press, taking all the blame on herself, not that she really had the time. He grew silent then and when he spoke next it was to tell her he would take things from there.

It was only after she’d ended the call that she understood. She’d been trying to help, but instead he’d taken her offer as a threat. He must have heard what had happened to the Gettysburg tourist trade after she spoke to the press there.

Gettysburg—there were more calls, calls she was embarrassed to make, to Chief Vicente. He didn’t like being woken up. He sounded pleased to hear from her once she said where she was calling from, though, and why. “Don’t hurry back,” he said, with a little laugh to try to take the sting away. It didn’t work.

“Can I tell my men to stand down from alert, then?” he asked.

Caxton chewed on her lip. She hesitated long enough that he asked if she was still there or if her phone had cut out.

“Yeah,” she said, finally. “I’m still here. I think your people are safe.” It was what he wanted to hear—it was what he’d always wanted to hear. “We know what he wants and it’s here. I think he’ll try again tomorrow night.” Something still worried her, though. She thought of what Arkeley would say. He would want them to stay on their guard, just in case. Would it really hurt Gettysburg that much to keep the town’s cops on their toes? “I’m not going to guarantee anything, though. Can you keep the tourists away another day or two?”

“We don’t have any choice. Ninety percent of all hotel bookings for this week have already been canceled. Your vampire is costing us millions of dollars a day and I don’t see things changing until you give us the green light.”

She thought about Garrity, and Geistdoerfer. If the vampire killed another human being and drank his blood, how many millions was that worth? “You brought me in as a consultant,” she said, finally. “I can’t tell you what to do, just give you advice. And my advice is to stay sharp until we have a confirmed kill here.”

“You’re just covering your ass,” he said, almost making it a question. Or maybe an accusation.

Was she? Maybe. But just because he wanted to hear something didn’t mean she had to say it. “I think it’s for the best, Chief,” she said, finally, a little steel in her voice. “Even if that means erring on the side of caution.”

“I’m counting on you, Trooper,” he said. “You kill this jerk already. It’s your responsibility.” With that he hung up on her.

Arkeley put away his own phone and gestured her to come over to where he stood. She had one more call to make, though, and it wouldn’t wait.

When Clara answered, the line was full of weird echoes and distorted voices. Caxton’s blood ran cold until she heard her lover laugh and say, “What? What? No, shut up! It’s Laura. Hey, baby.”

Caxton smiled despite herself. “Do you have the TV on or something?” she asked.

“Yeah—yeah. Stop that! Sorry. Angie and Myrna are over and we’re having a Maggie Gyllenhaal film festival. Donnie Darko right now, and we already saw Secretary . Are you coming home? I’ll send somebody out for more beer.”

Caxton sighed and slumped down onto a wooden bench. A wave of jealousy washed through her like nausea. Clara had known Angie since high school. Every time Caxton had met her she had a different color hair. In her latest incarnation she was a little goth chick with dyed black hair and lots of lace shirts that never quite covered her belly button. She was supposedly straight, but everyone knew she had a crush on Clara. Myrna had well-defined arms and frosted blond hair that stuck out wildly from her head.

She was an ex, the last woman Clara had been with before she met Caxton. If she had asked point blank Clara would have told her that they were just friends, but for some reason she didn’t dare ask.

She didn’t dare say any of the things she wanted to. She had thought she would find Clara alone, with nothing better to do than listen to Caxton talk about how scared she’d been in the car, about how badly the vampire had hurt her, about how she’d almost been killed. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d used Clara as a sounding board. She couldn’t bring herself to ruin the girls’ movie night, though. “I’m in Philly,”

she finally said. “Probably will be all night. Maybe tomorrow night too. Can you feed the dogs?”

“Um, yeah, I can—are you okay? I mean, you’re obviously alive.”

“Yes.” Caxton scratched at one eyebrow.

“Well, that’s good. Because you know, I worry.”

“I know.”

Clara’s voice changed. The background noise cut out and the line got sharper, but it was more than that.

She was suddenly quite serious. “I just walked out back so I could hear you better. It’s cold out here.

You’re okay, right? I mean you’re not hurt.”

“Yeah.” Caxton closed her eyes. “Go back to your movie.” It was suddenly all she wanted. For Clara to be someplace safe and warm and to be surrounded by friends.

“Okay. Come home when you can.”

“Don’t doubt it,” Caxton said, and then she switched off the phone.

In the silence, in the darkened museum, she felt something dark stretching out its wings. All the fear and the pain were about to catch up with her. If she let them. When they did, she would curl up in a corner and just rock back and forth and mutter to herself. She would stop functioning.

That was not an option. To dispel the darkness she went back to the coffin and read what Malvern had typed on the laptop:

he’s been a soljer, ’tis most all i know

he was not grateful for what i gave him

some they like not the taste of blood

“Not particularly helpful,” Arkeley said, coming up from behind her. “We already figured she was the one who made him a vampire, right? And the fact that he was a soldier was just common sense, considering where he was buried.”

“Maybe we should try asking actual questions,” Caxton suggested. “Tell us where you think he’ll go to ground. Or what his name is. What I’d really like to know,” she said, “is how he can cheat time like that.

He’s half as old as you are, but he has the strength of a newly created vampire. How the hell does he manage that?”

Malvern’s hand reached for the keyboard. Caxton watched it drift across the keys, feeling their contours. Not for the first time she thought the hand moved like the planchette on a Ouija board.

Arkeley looked up at her. His mouth curled up on one side. “It’ll take her a while to answer those. That gives us plenty of time to check out the bones I came here for.” They left Malvern there tapping at the keys, and went deeper into the Mütter’s basements.

46.

A poor white, a planter who swore he’d never owned a slave, nor wanted to, was my first informant. I nearly ran him down in the road. He had all his worldly possessions on his back and said he was heading to the home of his brother and could not tarry long. Still, when I gave him water and a mouthful of what the soldiers colorfully call embalmed beef, he proved quite loquacious.

He knew roughly where the Chess plantation was, though he would never go there himself.

“Haunted by ghosts,” he assured me, “or somewhat worse.” His tone favored the latter. “Old Marse Josiah Chess built that place in the last century. Filled it up with all manner of unnatural things. Bones of great big lizards they dug up out the ground, and of elephants and tigers and the like. Human bones, too, or so I am told. They say he got himself killed for his peculiarities, either by a rebellious slave, or—”

I hazarded a guess. “Or somewhat worse.”

My man nodded happily. “His son Zachariah took the place over, and made a fine living out of it.

Died ten years ago. His son Obediah came next, but there’ll never be another in that line. Obediah ain’t been seen since ’fore the present unpleasantness.”

I thanked the man and hurried on. I was no more than a mile from my destination when I was stopped by a sentry and then brought to a camp where the Third Maine Volunteer Infantry were resting after many days of marching. I protested voluminously but knew it was no use: I would have to be vetted by the local Commanding Officer before I could move on. It’s easier, sometimes, moving behind enemy lines, I swear. The CO was a nice enough fellow, one Moses Lakeman. I told him of my destination and he swore on the Creator’s name. “I have a company out there right now doing picket duty, man! Tell me I’ve not sent them into the proverbial lion’s den.”

I could tell him nothing of the sort.

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

47.

Following Arkeley, she passed down a short hallway with a vaulted brick ceiling. Safety lights hung in cages every few yards and long rusted pipes hissed on either side of her. At the end of the corridor stood a large open room, sealed off by a thick metal door. Inside, heavy-duty air conditioners blasted cold air down from the ceiling, and Caxton started shivering instantly. The air felt weird in other ways, too. Very dry. The brick walls had been coated in generation after generation of whitewash, but there was a lot less light than in the hall and a lot more shadows. The room was full of enameled metal cabinets. They stood in long rows with just enough room between them for a person to pass sideways. Some were simple filing cabinets, some were big enough to be wardrobes, big enough to hold very large objects. Each cabinet had been labeled in a spidery hand, some of the ink so old and eroded that she could barely make out the strings of numbers and letters.

She had a feeling she knew what was in the cabinets. They weren’t as attractive or well polished as the display cases in the museum, but they probably served the same purpose. This had to be the real collection of the Mütter—all the bones and biological oddities and antiquated medical equipment the directors had amassed since the 1780s. The stuff that wasn’t fit for display, for one reason or another.

Arkeley stopped in front of a tall cabinet with three long sliding drawers. As he passed through the room he had picked up a leather-bound book, a big ledger with broken gold lettering on the front. It had to be a catalog of what was in the various cabinets. He bent to match the cabinet’s label against something in the ledger, then pulled loose a sheaf of white paper that had been folded into the book.

“Are we supposed to be down here?” she asked.

“Harold said it was fine,” he told her.

“Harold’s the night watchman.” She frowned. “He could very easily lose his job over this. What does he owe you?” she asked. Arkeley didn’t have a lot of friends—it had to go deeper than that.

The old Fed sighed. He closed the book and laid it on top of a filing cabinet. “About twenty years ago, Harold used to have a family. He ran a hardware store in Liverpool, West Virginia. He had a pretty wife and a pretty little girl named Samantha.”

Caxton’s mind made the connection. “Liverpool was the place where you first discovered Lares.” That had been Arkeley’s first vampire case, the one that had shaped his entire life. “I remember the details.

There was a kids’ slumber party. Six little girls. Lares—”

“Shredded them.” Arkeley looked right into her eyes. “I pulled Lares’ heart out of his chest with my bare hands, but Harold’s little girl didn’t make it. Neither did his marriage. He started drinking and he lost his hardware store. Moved out of the state, took a series of odd jobs. He’s never been right since. But he was good people then, as they say in Liverpool, and he’s good people now. Harold will keep his mouth shut and he’ll give us good warning before we’re caught down here. Now, help me with this. It might take two hands.”

She did as she was told. She reached down to open the bottom drawer of the cabinet, a metal tray long enough to hold a human body. The drawer pulls felt like ice in her hands. When the drawer slid out she found a long black vinyl bag inside with a zipper that ran its whole length.

“It was Harold who wrote to me recently to say the Mütter had a certain specimen that would interest me. When he told me it was dated from 1863 I thought it might do more than just satisfy my curiosity.”

He waved a folded piece of paper at her. “I did a little research before you arrived. Let me show you what I dug up. ‘Item 67-c, Lot 1863a. The remains, in part, of a male. Believed to be a vampire.’”

Arkeley looked down from the paper and nodded for her to unzip the bag. “I think we can confirm that.”

Caxton thought so too. She’d seen enough vampire skeletons—especially after the ninety-nine in the cavern in Gettysburg, she knew to look for that jaw. Rows of translucent teeth jagged outward from the mandible, some sticking so far out that they looked like they would have shredded the vampire’s lips every time he opened or closed his mouth.

“It’s a vampire, alright.” A vampire collected the same year as the battle of Gettysburg. The same year, presumably, that the cavern under the battlefield was filled with coffins. “You think this vampire knew our suspect?”

“It would be a surprising coincidence if he didn’t. Vampires are few in number at any given time. They seek each other out, when they can.” Arkeley read from his sheaf of papers. “‘Bones of a believed vampire. Remains of one Obediah Chess, of Virginia.’ You should recognize that name, I hope.”

She searched her memory. “Shit,” she said. She had it—kind of. “Malvern first came to America when she was already too weak to get out of her coffin. She was sold like a fossil, sold to a guy named, um,”

she worked for it, “Josiah. Josiah Caryl Chess.”

Arkeley placed a finger alongside his nose. “She killed Josiah, I’m relatively certain of that. He was found without any blood in his body. Not, however, before he had brought a son into this world.

Zachariah Chess, whose life seems to have been quite ordinary. Zachariah begat another son. Whose name was Obediah. Meanwhile Malvern rotted away quietly in the attic of the Chess plantation. I don’t know any details, but I will happily bet that it was Malvern who made Obediah what you see before you.”

The cold that gripped Caxton then had nothing to do with air-conditioning.

Arkeley continued to read from the paper he held. “‘Specimen obtained under unusual circumstances, donation of the War Department. Signed for by C. Benjamin, whom see for further particulars,’” Arkeley read. “Well, that would be tricky, since Dr. Benjamin died over a hundred years ago. But he was kind enough to leave us a few notes.” With his one useful hand Arkeley picked a sheet out of the packet and read it in silence, his head moving back and forth slowly for long minutes while Caxton could only wait.

Occasionally she looked down at the bones in the drawer, but that just made her feel cold.

“Can I see that when—”

“Done,” he said. He handed the sheet to her. It was an old photocopy of a much older document, written out in a long sloping hand. Caxton read it twice:

Specimen prepared by Captain Custis Benjamin, surgeon. At the request of a Colonel Pittenger with the War Department I have undertaken a preliminary examination. Results follow. Remains removed to the College of Physicians at Philadelphia for study on June 25, 1863. After dinner that night I took possession of two wooden boxes personally, and moved them immediately to the dissecting theater. There I performed an autopsy on the subject, assisted by my colleague, Doctor Andrew Gorman, a fellow Member of the College. Examination began at half past nine in the evening.

Subject was delivered in a skeletal condition. Under separate cover heart arrived packed in excelsior. Heart examined first; found that it weighed twelve and one half oz. (slightly heavier than average human organ), had a blackish red coloration, and oozed a pale milky secretion when probed. Had no particular smell, nor showed any signs of corruption despite being separated from the body for several days.

When returned to the remainder of the body, heart began action almost instantly. Production of milky secretion increased dramatically. Steam and palpable heat arose from the area of greatest activity and some reconstituted flesh visible after ten minutes time. This despite removal of heart from body cavity for extended period.

As requested by Colonel Pittenger, then moved on to application of four oz. human blood, secured from Doctor Gorman’s left arm. Reconstitution accelerated considerably. Muscle tissue began to knit together following one hour, at which time full suite of organs already visible.

Major Gorman expressed unwillingness to see body completely restored. I concurred. Heart removed at this time. Reconstituted flesh and structures collapsed rapidly, as an inflated bladder losing air through a puncture. Heart destroyed as per orders and male subject permanently deceased, as of one quarter past twelve, June 26, A.D. 1863.

When she’d finished she looked up at Arkeley. He was smiling like a cat with a mouth full of fresh mouse. “Would you care to say it first?”

She knew exactly what he was getting at. “No,” she said. “I think you’re jumping to a dumb conclusion.

This vampire’s heart had been removed for a couple of days. When they put it back, he started regenerating, sure. After a couple of days! Geistdoerfer found my vampire’s heart lying on top of his coffin. He put it inside and the vampire came back to life. I see what you’re getting at, but it can’t be the same thing. Too much time passed for that.” Surely the heart would have rotted away after a hundred and forty years. To think anything else was absurd. Yet how else could she explain her vampire’s condition? He had cheated time.

Still she wouldn’t believe it. She shook her head back and forth.

“Tell me, Trooper,” Arkeley said, his face a patient mask. “If the doctors here had not destroyed the heart—if they had saved it in another one of these cabinets—would you be willing to reunite it with these bones, just to prove your point? Would you take that chance?”

Caxton looked anywhere but his face. Then she pushed the drawer closed with her foot, shutting the bones away, out of sight.

48.

With the vampire below, our only path of egress was UP. We must find stairs to get away.

Thinking he had found the way to the cupola, Storrow rushed for the locked door, and burst it open. My heart was in my mouth, and I could not speak, though I knew that was the wrong door, and something of what lay beyond.

Eben Nudd was the first in. “Oh, Mercy,” he said. It was the harshest language I’d ever heard him use.

It was not hard to find the seat of his discomfort. The room beyond the door was another boudoir, perhaps that of the lady of the house. The fittings might have been sumptuous once, but I had little time to study their decay. One feature of that room demanded all my attention. It was a coffin, a simple box of pinewood, tapered at the bottom, & it was open. Within lay a creature unlike any we’d seen before.

She had the pale skin & the hairlessness of a vampire, & the pointed ears. She certainly had the fangs. Yet she looked to be some sixmonth-dead corpse, her body ravaged by the worm, her face a mass of sores & pustulent blisters. She had but one eye in her head; the other having collapsed long since, & rotten away perhaps. She made no movement, nor rose from her place, but only watched us with her remaining eye.

“Another,” Storrow breathed. “There is another?”

None of us had time to answer him. Bill, at that moment, slew German Pete with a single blow to the head. He had a massive truncheon made of the leg of a dressing table, and his hand did not stay a moment.

Eben Nudd did not wait for the hexer’s body to fall before raising his musket rifle. It was too late, though, for Bill had run off, and I never did see him again. From the look of him & from the state he was in, he wasn’t going to last too long.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

49.

“We know so little about them, really,” Arkeley said. “No scientist has ever written more than a partial description. They can’t be captured and put in zoos for schoolchildren to gawk at, and they’re thankfully rare enough that no one has ever tried. We don’t understand anything about their magic, their orisons, or even how their curse works. It defies everything we do know.”

“But do you understand what you’re saying? They’re stronger than us and maybe smarter. We can barely destroy them when they do crop up. The one thing we can count on, the one real advantage we have over them, is that they get old even faster than we do. That they wither away.” Caxton thought of the old stories of vampires who remained forever young, their looks and their strength bolstered by regular access to copious amounts of blood. That was the myth, the dream every vampire tried to make come true. It was what Malvern was still living for, the hope that someday she would be fully restored, if only she could get enough blood.

Now there was evidence—the bones in the drawer, the record of Custis Benjamin, Surgeon—that maybe it was possible. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but there was a way for vampires to live for centuries and not lose their power.

All they had to do was have somebody remove their heart from their bones and put it someplace safe.

Days, years, centuries later the heart could be returned to the body and the vampire would reanimate, almost as strong as ever, weak and hungry perhaps, but ready to hunt again.

It wasn’t quite eternal youth. But it was as close as they could get.

She thought of the way the vampire of Gettysburg— her vampire, she had come to think of him—had looked when she’d first seen him. Stringy, bad skin, limbs like sticks. His rib cage had stuck out prominently from his white flesh and his face had been hollow and depleted. That had to be what came of being denied blood for so many decades. Yet as soon as he started drinking again he had plumped out with surprising quickness.

“If you have a better answer, tell me,” Arkeley said.

Caxton fumed in silence, unwilling to give up her denial. Knowing that he was right anyway. “Okay,” she said.

“At the very least it’s a working hypothesis.”

“Okay!” she said again. She handed him the photocopy and he tucked it in his pocket. Caxton ran her fingers through her hair, her elbows out. Slowly she turned away from him. Exhaustion and fear caught up with her as if she’d been running down a dark corridor and smacked right into a wall she couldn’t see. “I just—I can’t—they’re too strong already! They’re too good at what they do. Now they have this power too. I guess they had it all along, but we were so in the dark we didn’t even realize it. We can’t keep up with them. I can’t keep up with them.” She started walking out of the room. Away from him, from the bones. She didn’t want to see any more skeletons, didn’t want to be around them. Ever again. “I can’t do this,” she said.

“Laura,” he called out.

It felt like she’d been doused in cold water. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken her first name. She had no doubt he used it calculatedly, to get her attention. She turned and stared at him from maybe twenty feet away. “I’m losing my shit,” she said.

“Then find it again. Now.”

She nodded. Swallowed, hard, her throat still bruised and thick. She fought her swimming head and got her focus back. “What’s our next step?” she said, finally.

His eyes widened a fraction. “You tell me.”

Fair enough. This was her investigation. “We go see what Malvern’s come up with, if anything. Then I’m going to go meet with the local cops. He’s probably not going to attack again tonight—not here or anywhere else. He’s already fed and he’s smart enough to get off the streets. Tomorrow night is another matter.”

He nodded and walked with her up the stairs, back toward the museum. He was pretty slow going up—one of his knees just wouldn’t bend sufficiently, so he had to climb the steps one at a time. He took a rest at the first landing, just stood there looking down at his shoes. She wanted to hurry him along, but out of respect she waited for him to catch his breath.

Upstairs Malvern had been busy. When they arrived at her coffin they found she’d written quite a bit on the laptop. Her hand still rested on the keyboard, but it was motionless, perhaps waiting for the next question, or maybe she’d just run out of energy.

What she had written, though, got a reaction out of them both.

the answers you seek i lack

but there is one other who knows

a dead man, in this house

i can call him

ye know my price

Caxton read the words on the computer screen again. “She’s saying she can raise Geistdoerfer as a half-dead. She’s suggesting he knows something we could use. How could she know that?”

“They can communicate without words, you know as much,” Arkeley said. “She sensed him coming.

She must have sensed Geistdoerfer’s death as well. I think we should do this.”

“No, no, no. No. Absolutely not,” Caxton said. “Never. Can’t be done. There is zero possibility here and you should just stop thinking about it right now.”

She said it to herself. Arkeley was back by the coffin, patiently asking Malvern questions and then waiting while she tapped out the answers, one painful letter at a time.

“No. We will never do that.” She stood in a corner muttering to herself. It made her feel crazy. But she wasn’t the crazy one. Arkeley was crazy for even considering this. He had changed. His wounds and his bitter regret had driven him insane.

“This is a nonstarter.” She knew perfectly well that it was the only way. That she was going to do it, that she was going to help Malvern bring Geistdoerfer back from the dead just so she could question him, was almost a given.

There remained, however, some residue of her former self, some resinous discoloration on her soul that still looked like Laura Caxton, soldier of the law. Some particle of her being that still believed in human dignity and compassion for the dead. There wasn’t much of it, just enough to make her feel extremely nauseous.

“It’s not even possible,” she said, aloud this time. “Malvern didn’t drain his blood. My vampire did.

Nobody can call back a half-dead except the vampire who killed him.”

Arkeley tapped the laptop’s trackpad. “I already asked that one,” he said. Malvern’s answer scrolled down onto the screen:

the curse is all of a part

“Which means what, exactly?” Caxton asked.

Arkeley shrugged. “It means it doesn’t matter. Any vampire can call a half-dead. As long as the corpse has had its blood sucked, the curse is in it. The same curse they all share. I believe her.”

“That’s…scary,” Caxton said. Malvern was an inveterate liar. A master manipulator. Believing her—trusting her—was absolute foolishness. “Look, we know her. We know she’ll say or do anything if she thinks it gets her one step closer to getting out of that coffin on her own two feet. She said she needs blood to do this, more blood—”

Arkeley scrolled up a little on the page:

my strength has flown i require more

“Exactly. She gets blood out of this. What happens if we feed her and then nothing happens and she says, ‘Oh gosh, guys, I guess that wasn’t enough blood. Maybe if you gave me a little more…’ I mean, how much are you willing to give her?”

Malvern had an answer for that, too:

one tenth part a woman’s measure

it will suffice

“Oh.” The average person had about six quarts of blood. So Malvern was asking for a little over a pint.

That much would revivify her considerably, but it would hardly be enough to bring her back to full health.

“If she demands more, she won’t get it. I was quite clear on that,” Arkeley said. “I’ve thought of all these things, Trooper.”

Caxton shook her head. No matter what he thought he knew, there was a catch somewhere. There always had to be when Malvern was involved. “It’s a trick.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is. It’s a trick to get blood from us. That’s the only thing she ever wants. The only thing any vampire ever wants. In exchange we get information we truly need.”

“This is worse than the worst thing I have ever done,” she said, talking mostly to herself.

“Shall we get started?” Arkeley asked.

She clamped her eyes shut and held her tongue. “Yes,” she managed to say, though that tiny part of her, that last shred of who she used to be, was screaming no.

She went down to the basement, where Harold was waiting. The night watchman didn’t ask any questions. He helped her as he had before, taking Geistdoerfer’s body, getting his arms under the torso while she took the legs. The body felt dry and lighter than it had before. She was very conscious of the fact that at any moment, with no real warning, her vampire, the vampire of Gettysburg, could call to Geistdoerfer. Even while she was carrying him the vampire had the power to reanimate him.

It didn’t happen in the time it took to carry the corpse up the stairs, nor while they tied his dead hands and feet together and laid him out on top of a wooden cabinet. From a display case nearby the shriveled head of a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead stared down at them, her mouth frozen in an eternal groan. Caxton turned away and saw a cat with two faces, one open and mewling, the other with its eyes and mouth permanently shut.

None of the room’s skeletons pointed accusing fingers at her. No formless voice came out of nowhere to say “ Thou shalt not. ” The museum was as silent and lifeless as it had ever been. Caxton knew better than to expect divine retribution, of course. She knew what her real punishment would be: more guilt, to haunt her every quiet moment. More nightmares.

Well, she was starting to get used to those.

When she was finished feeling sorry for herself she turned to find that Malvern had left another message:

i will take laura’s blood now

Steeling herself, fighting down all her instincts, Caxton started to unbutton her shirtsleeve. The physical pain, she told herself, would almost be welcome.

Then Arkeley stepped up and said “No,” and she stopped where she was. “No, that’s not necessary.”

Malvern’s hand began to move across the keys again.

“No,” Arkeley said again. He grabbed the hand and moved it away from the keyboard. He turned to look at Caxton. “I’ll donate the blood. I’ve already cut myself tonight. The wound hasn’t had time to close properly.”

In response, Malvern merely typed:

very well

GRIEST

But how thankful should we be to amerciful Providence that that awful tomb was not disturbed by anyone not having the knowledge necessary to deal with its dreadful occupant!

F. G. Loring, The Tomb of Sarah

50.

“What of HER?” Eben Nudd asked, pointing at the thing in the coffin. No man made answer. We had not time for demons any more.

We made for the next doorway down, the one which led up into the cupola. Storrow nearly dragged me.

We made what speed we could. Chess was on his way up, through the house. We could hear him shrieking, though none could understand the words he spoke.

Our shoes rang on the iron gallery, which was suspended from the dome by rods. We pushed through the broken section of the cupola & out into the night air, & the light of one million stars.

Around us the dark trees sighed & cast their limbs about. Storrow & Eben Nudd lifted me through the opening & then set me down on the slope of the roof, to hold on as best I might.

“We’ll have to climb down. Try not to fall, is my best counsel,” Storrow said. But then he turned.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“Ayup,” Eben Nudd said. We all had. It was the sound of feet falling on the iron gallery. It could be naught but Chess the vampire, hot on our heels. “I think—” the downeaster began, but we never learned what he thought.

Chess jumped up through the broken dome as if he’d been shot out of a parrot gun. He grabbed Nudd by the collar & twisted his head clean around, snapping his neckbones with audible sounds.

He did not bother to suck the erstwhile lobsterman’s blood, but only threw him off the roof to crash to the ground below.

“I’m not sure we’ve been properly introduced,” Chess said. His eyes burned like coals.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

51.

“What time is it?” Arkeley asked. He held his arm over a white enameled basin and rolled up his sleeve.

The gauze bandage around his wrist was brown with dried blood. When he removed it his arm was smeared red, the fine hairs turned dark and stuck to his skin. An ugly wound like a dried-up worm ran down the length of his wrist. “Trooper?”

Exhaustion passed through her like a cold wind. It had been a long time since she slept. “It’s, uh, four-thirty.” Clara would be asleep. “What—where is it? I put it down for a second.” Harold met her gaze with questioning eyes. She looked down at his hands and took a paper-wrapped lancet from him.

There were plenty of supplies in the museum basement for what they intended to do. On the table before her sat a graduated glass jar, a fresh roll of gauze, and a roll of surgical tape.

“We have to keep moving,” Arkeley told her. “If the sun comes up before she’s ready, we’ll waste an entire day. And more blood than I want to spare.”

Caxton nodded and bit her lower lip. Time to focus. She peeled the paper back from the lancet, a short rectangle of surgical steel with one sharp triangular end. She looked down at Arkeley’s arm. It was the one with no fingers. The palm was a flat square of flesh, so thick with scar tissue it didn’t even look human. It looked more like the paw of an animal. Caxton tried to drag the lancet across the wound but flinched away when Arkeley grunted and moaned in pain. A few dark drops of blood welled up out of the cut but nothing like the flow she’d expected.

“You can’t hesitate like that,” he said, gritting his teeth. “This isn’t like cutting open a bag of frozen peas.

You need to dig in. Deep.”

Caxton got dizzy for a second just listening to him. Holding the lancet very tight in her fingers, she leaned over and stabbed it deep into Arkeley’s arm. He shouted in pain but she ignored him and started reopening the wound with a resolute sawing motion. “Like this?” she asked.

“That’ll do,” Arkeley said. He moved his fingerless hand back and forth to work the muscles in his arm.

Blood seeped vigorously from the wound and rolled across his skin. “Now, the jar,” he said. Caxton brought it up underneath the wound to catch the blood. With his good hand Arkeley squeezed at his arm as if he were getting the last toothpaste out of a dried-up tube. Blood surged out of the wound, thick and dark, venous blood the color of red wine. It splashed and pattered on the sides of the jar, then started to fill it up. The meniscus of blood climbed up the white painted graduations on the side of the jar. Two ounces. Five ounces. Ten.

“Halfway there,” she said, in what she hoped was a reassuring tone.

“God fucking damn it,” Arkeley bellowed, pushing and squeezing at his arm.

Twelve ounces. fifteen. The wound wasn’t closing up, the flow wasn’t slowing down. Caxton gave silent thanks for that. She must have hit a big blood vessel. Would he need stitches? Seventeen ounces.

Twenty.

“Okay,” she said, and took the jar away. Blood splattered with a ringing noise in the white basin. Setting the jar aside, she wrapped Arkeley’s arm tightly with the gauze and then sealed the bandage with surgical tape. Red dots appeared on the white gauze almost instantly. “I might have gone too deep,” she said.

“Don’t worry about that now,” he told her. He put pressure on the bandage with the fingers of his good hand. “Feed her. It has to be warm to have any effect.”

It has to be warm, and fresh, and human, she thought. As much as vampires scared animals, they would never attack them. The blood had to be fresh, too—if it clotted they couldn’t digest it properly.

She moved quickly to the coffin. Malvern was straining to lift her head. Her hands were at the level of her throat, reaching up, unable to grasp the jar. Caxton didn’t want to get close enough to her toothy jaws to get bitten. There was no good way to do it otherwise, though. Hands shaking only a little, she tilted the jar over Malvern’s open mouth. The blood poured through the air and splashed on the vampire’s gray, shriveled tongue.

The effect was electric and immediate. Malvern’s body started to tremble, then white smoke lifted off her tattered nightdress, tongues of it licking up from her armpits, blowing back over her ragged head. The skin started to grow over her half-exposed skull instantly, the old dry leather there inching across the yellow bone. Malvern’s single eye grew wet and started to reinflate. Her hands reached up and grasped at the jar, tore it out of Caxton’s hands.

Caxton took a step back. She watched in disgust as Malvern licked out the contents of the jar with a probing tongue. The skeletal hands fleshed out visibly, the prominent knuckles and veins smoothing out as new muscle grew in under the skin.

A noise sagged out of Malvern, a long, whistling moan of pleasure. She dropped the jar, now spotlessly clean, and it rolled across her shoulder. Her hands lifted in the air as if she were giving thanks. Before she had looked like a pile of bones wrapped in a too-big pelt of leather. As Caxton watched the ravages of time reversed themselves until she looked like she’d only been dead a few months.

“Do it,” Arkeley commanded. “Call him.”

Slowly, creakingly, Malvern sat up in her coffin, hauling herself upright with her hands. She brought her knees up and hugged them to her chest, her gruesome head resting on protruding kneecaps. Luxuriously, almost dreamily, she turned her face to look on Geistdoerfer, who lay only a few feet away. She opened her mouth and a rattling sound came out, a noise like a metal rake dragging through a pile of leaves.

Malvern hadn’t spoken more than two words in over a century. And that was after she’d bathed in blood, her coffin filled with the life of half a dozen men. Twenty ounces wasn’t about to restore her rotten larynx.

Caxton had watched a vampire named Reyes call a half-dead once. He had literally called the corpse back from death. “Will it work if she can’t talk?”

Arkeley just shrugged.

Malvern tried again, this time managing a gargling rasp that sounded like she was choking. She turned to look at the three living humans behind her. Caxton grabbed for the charm in her pocket, expecting some kind of trick.

Arkeley’s Glock came out of its holster and the muzzle pressed against Malvern’s sunken chest in one fluid movement. Right over her heart. The old vampire hunter must have been waiting for just such a move.

Malvern’s head turned from side to side, just a little. As if she were afraid it might fall off if she shook it too hard. Then she reached out a hand toward the laptop and typed a quick message:

if i had but a little more…

“No fucking way,” Caxton said, and Arkeley nodded.

Malvern’s eye rolled in her head. She nodded, however, and typed some more. She looked back at Geistdoerfer, very pale and very dead on top of the display case. She stabbed at the keys, making a noisy rattle as she typed:

come to me. come back to me. hear me.

The words were similar to what Caxton had heard when Reyes brought back his half-dead servant. She repeated them over and over, filling up the screen with her commands. Geistdoerfer’s body didn’t so much as twitch.

Malvern’s bony fingers stabbed at the keyboard. The laptop jumped with every pounding keystroke.

She seemed desperate. Maybe she knew that if this failed they would never trust her again. That she would never get a chance at more blood.

come back. come back. come back and serve.

Harold gasped in surprise. Caxton turned to stare at the night watchman, who pointed at the corpse.

“There! His hands, look!”

Caxton looked. Geistdoerfer’s fingers were moving, it was true. His fingers were curling into tight claws that dragged across the top of the wooden case. His nails dug into the varnish and scratched across the surface, tearing at the wood.

Then his mouth opened wide and he screamed, a high-pitched, terrible scream that turned Caxton’s blood to ice water.

52.

“Take this as my calling card, ya Southron bastard,” Storrow spoke. He was lifting his target rifle to his eye & without further ado he fired, the recoil from the heavy weapon staggering him backward.

Now, that rifle was custom built for distant work, & could make twelve-inch patterns at some eight hundred yards. By necessity its balls were launched at some high velocity & with much power. This one took the top of Chess’ head & his tarboosh as well & spread them over half Virginia. The vampire’s body tottered for a while, sundered just above the bridge of the nose & thus unable to see, & his arms reached for us, but how could any creature that draws breath live long without the organ of sense?

It was over. We had won, & now were free to go. I thought of my Bill, & began to weep again, but there was naught for it. & even I felt some soaring of spirit when Chess’ white body finally fell over & lay still, skidding some way on the shingled roof.

Our peril was ended. We were all but home.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

53.

Geistdoerfer struggled against his bonds, trying to drag his hands up to his face. He moaned like a starving kitten, cried out sometimes like a man in pain. He writhed on top of the display case until he could press his nose and cheek against the smooth wood. With his shoulder he shoved himself along the surface until his head was hanging over the side. For a moment he lifted his neck to stare at them, to see the strange collection of people who were mute witnesses to his revival. Then he brought his head down fast and hard, smashing the sharp corner of the display case with his nose.

Caxton winced to hear cartilage snap and part under his pale skin. She watched in mute horror as he brought his head back for another bash that tore open part of his cheek. No blood oozed from the wound, but the skin parted like torn silk, revealing gray muscle tissue underneath. A third time he reared up, but Harold was already rushing across the room, grabbing at the rope that bound the dead professor, pulling him back, away from the edge.

“He’s gone crazy,” the night watchman gasped. “He’s trying to kill himself, again!”

“No,” Arkeley told him. “There’s not enough human left in him for that.”

Caxton turned away in disgust. She knew exactly what Arkeley meant. Half-deads were not human beings. They weren’t the people they had been before they died. The curse animated their bodies and it could read their memories, but their souls were already gone, their personalities completely cut away.

Half-deads existed only to serve their vampire masters. Beyond that they knew little but pain and self-loathing. The curse hated the body it possessed, hated it so much it took every opportunity to deface the physical form. Literally deface it, in fact—the first thing half-deads did on their rebirth was to tear and claw at their faces until the skin hung down in bloodless strips.

“Hold him tight. He won’t be very strong,” Arkeley said.

Harold grimaced. Caxton saw something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Had they pushed him past his limit? “This is it, Jameson,” he said. “After this I don’t owe you nothing. You and her get out of here and I pretend like I never knew you. Got it?”

“Yes, yes, fine, but please,” Arkeley said, “hold him.”

Harold twisted the rope in his hands. Geistdoerfer loosed a pained howl. He shook and strained and tried to tear free, but the rope just cut into his deliquescing flesh. After a while he started to settle down, and then he turned his damaged face to look right at Caxton.

A chill ran down her back as his dead eyes studied her. “I was dead. I was happier dead,” he said.

“What have you done to me?” His voice had risen in pitch and become a perverted mockery of the professor’s easy tenor.

Arkeley moved closer to the undead thing and crouched down to get on his eye level. “We have some questions for you. If you answer them nicely, we’ll put you out of your misery. Do you understand?”

The half-dead spat in Arkeley’s face. It was the kind of thing Geistdoerfer would never have done in life—the man had been cultured and refined. “I don’t serve you,” he whined.

Arkeley stood up and wiped the spit off his face with a handkerchief. He looked back at Malvern in her coffin and cleared his throat pointedly.

The vampire’s hand glided across the laptop’s keyboard.

i have raised him and it has drained me

i have not the strength to compel him

Maybe, Caxton thought. Or maybe she’d gotten what she wanted out of the exchange and she no longer cared what happened next.

The half-dead stared at the thing in the coffin and laughed, a fractured, ugly sound that bounced around the corners of the room. “You’re working with her ?”

“Why is that so strange?” Arkeley asked. “She’s the enemy of your killer. I’d think you’d want to help her.”

“Then you don’t know how it all works.” The half-dead let out another laugh, this time almost giggling.

“Oh,” Arkeley said, “I think I understand a little. I didn’t really expect you to be reasonable, but I thought we’d give you the chance. It didn’t work. So I guess we’ll have to go the more traditional route.”

Without warning he grabbed a handful of the half-dead’s hair and yanked upward, dragging his head up, wrenching his neck around. “What’s his name?”

“Who?”

Arkeley bounced the thing’s head off the top of the display case. “Harold,” he said, “maybe you could find me a toolbox from somewhere. I need a hammer and maybe a pair of needlenose pliers.”

“No,” the abomination moaned, and bounced on the wooden case as he tried to break free of Arkeley’s grip. As infirm and decrepit as he might be, though, Arkeley was still stronger than any half-dead.

“I think we’ll start by pulling his teeth out. Then maybe his fingernails.”

“Don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Arkeley asked. “Don’t hurt you? I tried to be nice.”

Harold let go of the rope and walked off into the shadows. Arkeley placed his good hand across the half-dead’s temple and cheek and then leaned down hard, using all his weight, pressing Geistdoerfer’s skull into the wood of the case. The thing screamed horribly.

Caxton licked her lower lip. It was suddenly very dry. “Arkeley,” she said. “You’re going too fast. Give him another chance, for God’s sake.”

The old man stared at her with pure anger burning in his eyes. Then one of his eyelids drooped down and flicked back up. Was that?—yes. Yes, it had been a wink, Caxton thought. A wink.

He thought she was playing a game. The oldest interrogation game: good cop, bad cop. That hadn’t been her intention. She just didn’t think she could bear to watch Arkeley torture even a dead man.

“Listen,” she said, leaning over a little to look into Geistdoerfer’s bloodless face. “Listen, maybe if you just tell me a few things, maybe this doesn’t have to be so bad. I mean, is that something you might do?”

The half-dead’s face writhed as if bugs were burrowing under his cheeks and lips. “I don’t know his name,” he said, quickly. “He never told me. He just said he was a soldier. And then he said he had been tricked, that he’d never wanted to be a vampire. That it was all a trick! Please!”

Caxton looked up and Arkeley let a little of the pressure off.

“Who tricked him?” she asked. She threw a thumb over her shoulder, gesturing at the coffin behind her.

“Her? Was it somebody named Justinia Malvern?”

“I…I’m not sure. I think so.”

Arkeley leaned on his head.

“Yes! Yes,” the half-dead screamed. “It had to be! That was why—why he wanted to kill her so badly.

Oh God! Tell him to stop!”

“I will,” Caxton said, “but first I need something more. Something we can use. You have to tell me what he’s going to do next. Will he try to kill Malvern again?”

“Y-yes. I think—I mean, I know he will. It was the one thing he wanted to accomplish. He knows you’ll catch him eventually. He wants to kill her first. That’s all I know—I swear!” His eyes swiveled to look past her. “Oh, God, please please please please please…”

Harold had returned. He had a long red toolbox in one hand. The other held a big power drill.

“You don’t have much time left,” she said. “You need to tell me something more. Just think, okay?

Don’t guess, but think. Will he come back tomorrow night?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know,” the half-dead creaked.

“Think!” she shouted.

“Yes yes yes, he will, he’ll come back, he’ll—he mentioned something once, he just said it in an offhand way, but but but—”

“But what?” she asked.

“That night you chased him. When you chased him onto the battlefield, he came back, he came back and we talked a little. He said you were dangerous. He said he might not be able to do what he needed to do by himself. That he might need help.”

“Help.” Caxton made a hard line of her mouth. “You mean reinforcements. More half-deads like you?”

The thing on the display case managed to wiggle its head back and forth in negation. “No. He swore he would never make a half-dead. He swore it a hundred times—I think—I think there was something there, some story he didn’t tell me. He seemed to think that killing people and drinking their blood could maybe be okay, but that calling them back from the dead was the real sin. I don’t know why.”

“Then where would he get reinforcements?” Caxton demanded. A high whining, grinding noise startled her. She looked up. Harold had stretched an extension cord across the floor and had plugged in his power drill. “We’re out of time,” she said.

“Other vampires!” the half-dead screeched. “He’ll come back with more vampires. More—maybe lots more.”

Arkeley grabbed his hair again and pulled his head back. “He’s going to make new vampires? That’ll take some time. At least another night. That’s good, that’s useful to us.”

The half-dead stared up into Arkeley’s hard eyes. “Why would he do that? Why make new ones when he already has ninety-nine of them waiting to strike?”

54.

A courier met me with certain papers, hastily-made copies of letters from the Ranger Simonon to his masters in Richmond. One of my spies had intercepted them en route and made the copies, then sent the originals on, as were his standing orders. I read the letters with a growing fear, that was not alleviated when I’d finished. I asked the soldier if he knew where this place was, the Chess plantation, and he said he did not, but could direct me on to Gum Spring, at least. I listened closely to the directions he indicated, and then was off again. My horse needed rest. I needed food, and perhaps a nice cigar, and time to smoke it. They say misery loves company, but I doubt the horse was capable of appreciating the sentiment.

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

55.

“I,” Arkeley admitted, his face blank, “may have made a mistake.”

“What are you saying?” Caxton demanded. She knew, of course. She just had to confirm it.

“The other vampires—the ones in the cavern—” the half-dead spluttered out. “They’re not dead. Just sleeping.”

“And you think he can wake them,” she said, speaking slowly to buy time. Time to think. Time to get her stomach under control.

“Yes, yes! He was quite clear on that.” The thing squirmed in its bonds. It seemed to think this was the simplest, most logical thing in the world.

“But there were no hearts,” she said, when she could speak again. “There were no hearts in the cavern—just bones. I checked every coffin. He can’t revive them unless he has their hearts.” At the time it had been reasonable to assume that the bones were dead. That the vampires were dead, permanently dead.

Her reasonable assumption was wrong. If a hundred vampires got loose—how much damage could they do before she could stop them? Could she even stop that many?

Arkeley was staring at her with a look of horror on his face. She didn’t need to say what she was thinking, because she knew he was thinking exactly the same thing.

“There were no hearts there,” she insisted again.

The thing that had once been Geistdoerfer was happy to fill her in. “When I entered the cavern there was a heart laid out on every coffin. Dipped in tar, wrapped in oilskin. I originally wanted to replace them all but he said no, I should let the others sleep. Together we gathered up the other hearts, to keep my students from disturbing them. We numbered them carefully and then we put them in a barrel.”

“I’ve seen that barrel,” Caxton said, turning to face Arkeley. It was in the specimen room of the Civil War Era Studies department of Gettysburg College. She remembered silver wood and hoops weathered down to rust stains. She had thought it was just one more artifact from the dig. “I’ve seen where it is. I know exactly where it is.”

The two of them stood there, looking at each other.

“If I can get somebody there in time, they can destroy the hearts. We can stop this before it even begins.”

Arkeley nodded as if he liked what she said. “This doesn’t have to end badly. Not if we can get to the hearts before the vampire does. You can call the Gettysburg police, tell them where it is, tell them how to destroy the hearts.”

She nodded and grabbed for her cell phone. Dialed a number she knew by heart. Finally someone picked up in Harrisburg. “This is Trooper Laura Caxton,” she said. “Put me through to the Commissioner, please. No, wait, he won’t be in yet. Just get me the duty officer in charge.”

The dispatcher didn’t ask any questions. After a couple of seconds a bored-sounding man answered from the operations desk. She explained quickly what she needed.

The duty officer grumbled, “We’ll need a warrant for that.”

That would take time. Maybe hours. They would have to wake up a judge—and the judge would want some paperwork. Some kind of evidence to justify barging into private property and seizing an old rusty barrel. It would take more than one trooper’s panicked testimony. “There are exigent circumstances. The barrel is going to be used in the commission of a violent crime. Maybe a lot of violent crimes.”

“That would be a first. I don’t know, Trooper—”

“Listen,” Caxton said. “Listen closely.” She closed her eyes and tried to think of the words to light a fire under the OIC. A hundred vampires. Caxton had once seen what just two vampires could do. They’d eaten the entire population of a small town, leaving only one survivor. A hundred vampires—vampires who had been starved for more than a century, vampires who would wake up emaciated and cold and very, very hungry—could depopulate Gettysburg in a single night. “Listen,” she said again. “I will take personal responsibility on this. You get a patrol unit down there now and get that barrel. If you don’t a lot of people are going to die. They’re going to die painfully and all their families are going to grieve for years. Because you wouldn’t trust me right now. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” he said, finally. “Hey—yeah, you’re that Caxton, aren’t you? The gay lady supercop they made that movie about. How much did you get paid for that?”

“Send the fucking unit right now!” she screamed, and flipped her phone shut.

Arkeley and Harold were both staring at her when she looked up.

“They’re sending a unit to look for the barrel,” she told Arkeley.

“It’s still dark out,” he replied.

“I know.” She fumed silently. “They’ll send one man in a patrol cruiser. He might think to take his shotgun with him, but probably not. If the vampire is there, if he’s beaten us to it, he’ll take our guy apart piece by piece. We just have to hope our man gets there first. I’ll go there as fast as I can and try to stop anyone from dying, but I can’t fly. It’ll take me hours to get back. What could I have done differently?”

Arkeley shook his head. He didn’t have a nasty comeback, didn’t so much as call her an idiot.

She checked her things. Her Beretta, fully loaded, was back in its holster. She’d gathered up her pepper spray as well, her handcuffs and her flashlight, recovered from Geistdoerfer’s pockets before they’d revived him.

She turned to look at the half-dead one last time. When she was gone she knew Arkeley would destroy the reanimated corpse, smash in its head and cremate the remains. He wouldn’t bother trying to contact the professor’s family, at least not until afterward. Fine, she thought. Let them sleep in. Let them get one last night of peace before they had to hear about how John Geistdoerfer had met his grisly end a second time.

She stepped over to where he lay on top of his wooden case. “I have one last question before I go,” she said. “No torture this time, no threats. I just want to talk to the man who used to own that body.”

The half-dead’s eyes were dry and yellow in their sockets. They focused on her as if they were glued in place.

“When you searched me, Professor, you took my weapons away. You took my handcuffs, too. You found my cell phone, but you left it where it was. I don’t understand why you did that. You must have known what you’d found.”

“Oh, yes, Trooper. I knew what it was,” he said in that irritating high-pitched squeak.

“Why, then? Were you trying to help me? Did you think that might have made the difference, and helped me stop the vampire?”

The half-dead licked his dry lips with a gray tongue. His nose crinkled as if he’d smelled something foul.

“Maybe,” he said, finally. “If I say yes, will you let me go?”

“No,” she said, frowning.

“Then maybe I just didn’t think you could call anyone. Not while we were both watching you.” He turned his head away from her. “I’m a villain. If you’re done with me, just kill me already!”

She shook her head and grabbed at his shirt and his jacket. He struggled to pull away, to get his face away from her, but she wasn’t interested in that. Instead she shoved a hand in his pocket and pulled out his car keys.

Moving quickly, she went to the front door of the museum building and pushed it open. Outside a bright blue light filled the sky—the color of night just before the dawn begins. Everything that had happened since she’d gone to Gettysburg College to interview Geistdoerfer had happened in a single night, but now that night was over. A layer of frost lay over the cars in the street, on the wooden utility poles, ready to melt into morning dew. Nearby a bird was chirping, a repetitive, shrill little sound that made her scalp feel tight. She really needed some sleep.

Behind her she heard the rustling of clothing, and her hands twitched in paranoia. When she turned around it was only to see Arkeley filling the doorway. “I should be going with you, but I can’t.” His eyes burned in the blue light. Cold, fierce, angry. “This should be my case, but I was too frail to finish it. You need to be my hands on this one.”

It was her case. Caxton was sure of that. Still she could understand his frustration. He’d been working most of his adult life on trying to drive vampires to extinction. He must have watched her failures and mistakes with growing dread, knowing he could have done a better job. If only his body still worked, if only he still had his strength.

“I’ll get what I can out of Geistdoerfer—if he comes up with anything else I’ll call you. I’ll help as much as I can from a distance.” His face fell. “Do it right,” he said. “Be smart, and don’t get yourself killed.”

It was the closest thing he could manage to wishing her luck. She just nodded and moved on to the next task. That was how she would get through this—one simple decision at a time.

She hurried down the alley to the parking lot, where Geistdoerfer’s car with its suggestion of tail fins waited for her. Its windshield was covered in a thin layer of white frost, which she wiped away with her sleeves. Then she climbed in and started up the powerful engine, listened to it purr. The sky was brightening by the minute. When she felt the car had warmed up enough she put it in gear and headed out, laying her cell phone on the passenger seat beside her. There were a lot of calls to be made.

Her stomach growled noisily. She hadn’t eaten in a very long time. Her brain was fighting her, squirming painfully in her skull. Her body was breaking down. It needed sleep, and food, and peace.

Not a lot she could do about that. But maybe, something.

She couldn’t sleep, not yet. Peace was an abstract. Food, though, was a possibility. There were few diners in that stretch of Pennsylvania—mostly there were family restaurants, the kind that didn’t open until the farmers started their day. Not for a while yet. She found a fast-food place that was open all night, decided to waste a few minutes if it meant her body would calm down a little. If it meant getting some energy back.

She pulled up to the drive-through bay. Cranked down the old car’s manual window and let cold air blast inside, across her face. It woke her up some. She shouted her order at the microphone, but nobody answered. After a while she tapped the horn. The big pneumatic noise it made drew tiny birds out of the trees across the road. Finally a sleepy voice croaked out of the speakers. “How can we help you?” it asked.

“Give me an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee,” she said.

“Do you want milk and sugar?” the voice blurted. There was a bad feedback whine that nearly drowned out the words.

“No,” she shouted back.

“Hash browns for only thirty-nine cents more?”

Caxton grabbed the bridge of her nose and squeezed. “People are going to fucking die if you don’t just put a fucking sandwich in a fucking bag for me,” she said.

The speaker cut off with an electronic belch. Then the feedback returned. “I’m sorry, I missed that.”

Probably a good thing, too. Caxton exhaled noisily. “Yeah, give me some hash browns,” she said.

“Thank you, pull through.”

She drove up to the next window, took her food and paid for it. She tore into the greasy sandwich before she’d even gotten back on the Turnpike.

The road disappeared beneath her wheels. When she got to the toll plaza she pulled into the purple E-ZPass lane. The toll went on Geistdoerfer’s tab and she was through.

56.

Storrow regained his footing & grabbed at the degraded side of the cupola. “No reason we can’t go back the way we came, now,” he said, a smile on his face. “It’ll be a hard slog back through partisan country, but lackin’ Simonon, them horsemen we saw’ll be disorganized. Maybe we’ll actually make it back to the lines.”

I wiped my face with my hands. What would I do now? For what purpose should I go on? Bill was dead. I had my duty, I supposed, to my country. I could draw on that for strength, I told myself. I reached out a hand for Storrow to take. He did not accept my grasp, but instead loosed an anguished cry. I turned to look at him.

In that same instant all hope died. Chess rose up again with a fury I could scarce credit though I saw it myself. The vampire’s head was fully re-formed, though he was hatless now.

“Sweet Jesu,” Storrow barked. “We’re done for!”

“Get,” I told him, because suddenly I wanted him to live. We had argued, Storrow & I, & been at loggerheads, yet I wanted him to live so badly I would sacrifice myself to make it happen. Which is exactly what I thought I was doing.

I ran at the vampire with my head down, as fast as my hurt leg would allow. Under normal conditions this would have had all the effect of blowing on him with my breath. He was stronger by far than I, massively so, & invincible as far as I knew. Yet on the pitched roof I gained momentum as I ran heedless of my footing, & when I collided with the vampire we both were launched into lightless space.

For one moment only I felt suspended between Heaven and Earth, a spirit of the air. A moment after that I struck the dry Virginia soil below, which felt much harder than I recalled.

Pain was my portion, but for one moment more only. Then all feeling left my legs & aught below my chest. My back was broken. I needed no physician to tell me as much.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

57.

Leaves stirred up into the air, splatted across her windshield as she pulled off Route 15 and into the Gettysburg borough limits. The streets were empty, the day’s traffic not yet begun. It was well after eight and the sun was already above the treetops, a white glare in a sky full of dark clouds.

The Gettysburg College campus was just up ahead. She had not heard back from headquarters, did not yet know whether they’d beaten the vampire to his prize. She held her phone against the steering wheel, ready to answer it the second it started to ring.

She crested a low hill and eased off the gas as the car surged down into a dark hollow. The trees were buffeted by a stiff breeze and their half-naked branches lashed against each other, against the surging air.

It wasn’t much farther to the edge of the college. She pulled into the parking lot below Geistdoerfer’s old offices and jumped out, looking around for any sign of the patrol cruiser she’d had dispatched there.

It stood a bit away, at the end of the lot, its lights off. She approached it carefully, not knowing what she expected to see. Occasionally she glanced at the tree-lined sidewalks of the campus, at the darker shadows. There would be nothing there, of course. Her vampire would be asleep now, hidden tight away in some stolen coffin, waiting for the newly risen sun to go away.

She got up to the car, bent down with a hand over her eyes to look inside. A trooper in a wide-brimmed hat sat in the driver’s seat, hunched over. His hat obscured his eyes, but she could see his mouth was open.

No, she thought. Not another dead cop. Guilt skewered her kidneys like a thin knife. She put a hand on the door of the car, leaned down to get a closer look.

The trooper inside sat bolt upright, his mouth closing with a click she heard through the glass. He turned bleary eyes to look up at her, then frowned.

She fished out her state police ID and pressed it against his window. He nodded, then gestured for her to step back. Slowly he pushed open his door and clambered out.

“You Caxton?” he asked.

“Trooper Caxton, yeah,” she said, frowning.

He gave her a weary smile that spoke volumes. She didn’t impress him. He’d probably heard stories about her, maybe even seen the stupid movie. All he really knew about her, though, was that she had dragged him away from a nice warm bed and made him run a fool’s errand before the sun had even come up.

Hoping for the best anyway, she glanced at the backseat of his cruiser. No barrels there. “I’m ready to receive your report,” she sighed. “What’s your name, Trooper?”

“Paul Junco,” he said, leaning against the side of his car and stretching out long arms and legs. “I got here about six-fifteen,” he said, pulling a notebook out of his pocket, “yeah, six-oh-nineA.M., to be exact, on report of a barrel stored at this location that you requested we take into police custody. I obtained entry at six-thirteen with the aid of a maintenance lady, name of Floria Alvade, and proceeded to room 424, in the Civil War Era Studies department—”

“Where you failed to find any sign of a barrel. Come on, I need to see for myself.” She led the way.

Junco shrugged and kept up with her as she hurried inside. A woman in blue coveralls, presumably the same Floria Alvade, was buffing the lobby floor with a big metal waxer. Its furry wheel spat dust across Caxton’s shoes. When she saw them coming she switched the machine off.

“Miss Alvade?” Caxton asked. The woman nodded, her face a cautious mask. Lots of people looked like that when cops approached them. It didn’t mean anything. “I need to know, did anyone enter this building last night?”

The woman nodded at Trooper Junco.

“Anyone else? Anyone at all? Maybe a tall man, very pale skin, bald?”

“Like that vampire I seen on the TV?” Alvade crossed herself. “Oh, Mary preserve me, no! Just him, I swear. I been here all night, too.”

Caxton nodded and turned to go up the stairs. “How about you, Trooper? Did you see anybody leave as you were coming in?”

“I think I would have mentioned if I saw an undead bloodsucker,” he told her.

She whirled on him, fixed him with her hardest glare. Arkeley wouldn’t have put up with that kind of insubordination. She had to get tougher, had to rise above her bad reputation. Had to make people understand just how serious things had become.

“If you have any more glib comments to make, Trooper,” she told him, “I suggest you save them for your official report. Clear?”

His mouth hardened. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

She turned without waiting for anything further and raced up the stairs two at a time. She was winded when she got to the top, but she pressed on, past the classroom where she’d met Geistdoerfer, back to the specimen room where she’d seen the barrel. It was gone. She’d already known that. Seeing it for herself made a difference, though. It made her blood run colder, made her skin prickle.

The hearts were gone.

When she could think again, when her own heart wasn’t bursting inside her chest, she headed back down to the parking lot. Three local police cars were just pulling in, lights on but no sirens. Officer Glauer stepped out of one. Dots of toilet paper flecked his throat where he must have just finished shaving.

“You got my message,” Caxton said, by way of greeting.

“Yeah. All four of them,” Glauer replied. He fingered his mustache, an obvious tell. He was worried.

Good. She needed him worried. She needed him scared.

“I just called exigent circumstances so I could search a room up there,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder at the classroom building. “Turned up nothing. There are ninety-nine missing vampire hearts.

Whoever has them can wake up ninety-nine vampires when the sun goes down tonight. I’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I’d like to help you with that,” the big cop said. He reached into his car and picked up his hat. “The chief, on the other hand—”

Caxton nodded. She knew Vicente was going to be a problem. “I’ll talk to him, when he actually comes in to work.” She looked up at the sky. The clouds were thickening and turning dark, but the sun was up there somewhere. “What time did the sun go down last night?” she asked.

Glauer placed his hat carefully on his head. He squinted for a second as he tried to remember. “Just before seven. Yeah, I’d say ten till—that’s when I took my dinner break and I remember being very glad I was off the street. We kept our guard up last night, believe me, even if the chief thought we were safe.

So we have until seven to find those hearts?”

Caxton shook her head. “There might be another way.” She looked at Geistdoerfer’s Buick and decided it wasn’t the ideal vehicle for what came next. Her own Mazda was nearby, but it wasn’t marked as a police car. “You’re driving,” she said. “Maybe we can finish this in the next hour.”

He gave her a weak smile. “Christmas is still two months away,” he told her, but he didn’t waste any more time. He took her south through town, down the tourist lanes into the battlefield. Up Seminary Ridge and then down an unpaved road through a clump of trees. She remembered exactly where it was—in highway patrol she’d learned to make mental notes whenever she was called to a scene, to pick out the local landmarks so she could find her way back if she needed to, so she could give accurate directions to paramedics and firefighting units. The little dig site was still fresh in her memory from the last time she’d seen it, only two days before.

There were no cars at the end of the road. She got out and led Glauer and the four other cops down the path, about two hundred yards into the trees, back to where the dig site had been set up by Geistdoerfer and his students. The tents were still there and the campfire, but the ashes were cold and wet with dew.

Exhaustion and guilt formed ice crystals in her brain as she saw the place again. She should have known—somehow she should have known. She should have cordoned the place off, declared it an official crime scene. Of course she hadn’t been on active duty when she’d first seen it, but there had been plenty of time afterward. It had just not occurred to her. Jeff Montrose, the grad student who showed her around, had thought the place was dead, a simple crypt.

It helped her conscience a little that Arkeley hadn’t bothered to lock the site down, either. It helped a very little.

Okay, she thought to herself. My guilty feelings about the past help nobody. For the present: No more mistakes. Do this just like Arkeley would.

She drew her weapon from its holster. Checked the safety. “There won’t be any vampires down there, not now, but there could be others. Half-deads, or maybe deluded people who work for my vampire.

They may have gotten the hearts but didn’t have time to put them with their respective bodies. In that case they might be guarding the coffins right now.” She stood silent for a moment, listening for any sign of activity inside the tent. The nylon walls stirred a little in a breeze, but she didn’t hear anyone moving around. She stepped through the tall wet grass that left little dark ovals on her pant legs, and twitched back the door of the tent.

There was nobody inside. Not up top, anyway. She looked back at two of the cops who’d come with Glauer. Gestured for them to go around either side of the tent. There could be any number of monsters hiding in the trees around them—she did not want to go down into the cavern and have somebody pull the ladder up, trapping her inside.

She moved into the tent with just Glauer at her shoulder, half a pace behind her. He was so tall that the roof of the tent bowed outward around his head. She stopped and looked back at him, then down at his belt. He looked confused until she pointed directly at his gun. He frowned guiltily, then drew it.

His instincts, his cop training, had told him you didn’t enter a place looking for a fight. You didn’t draw until you were ready to shoot. In any other circumstance that would have been a good thing, proper firearms discipline. In the tent it was just dumb.

He drew his weapon, lifted it to shoulder height. The muzzle pointed up, through the roof of the tent. If he tripped or panicked his shot would go clear and not hit Caxton in the back. That made her feel slightly better.

She walked past the tables full of old rusty metal artifacts and whited lead bullets. The excavation at the far end of the tent was as she’d last seen it, with the ladder leading down into the cavern. One thing was different, but it took her a moment to place it. Somebody had turned off the lights down there.

She spun around looking for a generator, or a switch, or any way to get them back on. She couldn’t see anything. Instead of wasting more time looking for a way to get the power back on, she took her flashlight off her belt and swished its beam around the bottom of the hole. Nothing jumped out at her.

“Cover me,” she said, “then come down ten seconds after I get to the bottom.”

Glauer nodded. His eyes were very wide.

There will be nobody down there, she thought. There will be nobody down there except ninety-nine skeletons. We can spend the rest of the day grinding them down to powder and then burning the powder in a blast furnace. My vampire has the hearts, but without the bones that’s nothing.

It could be that easy. It really could. She knew better, though.

She put one foot on the ladder. Nothing grabbed her ankle. The rung held her weight. She put her other foot down and waited a second, then hurried down as fast as she could go. At the bottom she panned her Beretta back and forth at eye height, ready to shoot anyone who appeared. Nobody did. She scanned the cavern with her flashlight beam.

Behind her Glauer scampered down the ladder too fast. He missed one of the rungs and nearly fell.

She should have told him not to bother coming down.

“Remember the conversation we had that one time, about the worst things we’d ever seen?” Caxton asked him. “I think I have a new contender.”

Her flashlight lit up stalactites and stalagmites, old dusty broken furniture, mineral deposits. The cavern was otherwise empty—no bones, no coffins.

Somebody had moved them while she wasn’t looking. There could be only one reason why.

Back up top, she gathered the locals together and told them to start calling every name on their emergency phone tree, to get every available man out of bed or work or wherever he was and get them down to the police station. She asked Glauer to find Vicente for her, to start liaising there.

Her job had just become a lot more difficult. They would need to find the coffins, the bones, the hearts.

All of them. They would need to find her vampire, wherever he was sleeping the day away. They might need to do a lot more than that. She glanced at her watch. It was nine-fifteen. She had less than ten hours and no leads whatsoever.

No—there was one person she could call who might know what had happened in the cavern. One person who was responsible for the coffins. Deep in the stored phonebook of her cell she found an entry for Jeff Montrose, the graduate student from the department of Civil War Era Studies. She called him and after four rings got his message:

“Welcome…to the dark lair of Jeff, Mary, Fisher, and Madison. We can’t take your call right now, most likely because we’re hanging by our feet someplace quiet and gloomy. If you’d like to leave a message, a prayer for salvation, or your darkest desire, we’re just dying to hear from you!”

The phone beeped in her ear and she snapped it shut. She needed to talk to Montrose as soon as possible.

“Glauer,” she shouted, “call your dispatcher. I need a street address right now.”

58.

I looked to the side, which was all I could do, & caught sight of Chess rolling on his own ground, his hands clutching his sides. He, I knew, would not be slain by such a fall. He would be merely inconvenienced.

Storrow fired direct into the body of Chess, & then he loosed his second shell. The vampire curled like a moth that has touched flame, & shook, & screamed in anger & in pain. Not dead yet, & surely he would recover in a moment.

When he did Storrow fired again. Then he reloaded his weapon & when the vampire stirred he shot once more. Neither of us knew any way to permanently steal the vampire’s strange life, but Storrow understood the creature could be kept stunned, at least for a while.

Storrow did not speak to me as he carried out this ugly work. I did not know how many shells he possessed. It could have still ended in both our deaths, & perhaps it should have. Yet before too long we both looked up for we had heard some great noise in the woods around us, as of many men approaching. Had I seen then dead Simonon’s ghost riding a skeletal horse I would have not been so surprised as to see who led that host. For instead it was Hiram Morse, our cowardly deserter.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

59.

She spent the morning doing police work—real police work. Following up leads and examining crime scenes. There was plenty to find. The vampire had been busy.

By ten-thirty it started raining, a faint drizzle that felt more like mist. Water shook down from the trees and soaked the leaves on the sidewalks. Where Caxton’s shoes brushed away the oak leaves they left brown spiky stains on the concrete, shadows cut loose in the silvery light.

The chief arrived in a car with a gold badge on its hood and just a single blue light on top. He stepped out and glared at her, not even trying to hide his annoyance. He wore a heavy yellow raincoat with reflective tape across the back. He rushed toward her while opening an umbrella.

“You told me you had this under control,” he said.

“I told you to stay on your toes,” she replied.

It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say. It was a game she was playing, though, and she’d never been very good at games. This time she needed a solid win.

“I’d hoped we’d seen the last of you,” he said. He had a tight smile on his face that was probably the closest he could manage to a look of patient concern. “That’s why we brought you in. You’re supposed to know how to handle these things.”

The chief would have been briefed at least once by his officers. He had to know what was going on. Still he wanted to put the blame on her. To make her say it was all her fault. That wouldn’t help anybody.

Carefully she laid out their shared problem. “There were ninety-nine more skeletons in that cavern. Our vampire has managed to remove them all to an unknown location. He has also come into possession of the hearts that used to belong to those ninety-nine vampires. If he puts the hearts together with the bones he can wake them up. All of them. Tonight, just before seven, they’ll rise from their coffins and they’ll be very, very hungry.” She had to play this just right, she knew. Not step on his toes, but not kowtow to him either. “This is your show. You have some pretty tough decisions to make. I’ll be happy to advise you if I can.”

“You’re saying he came back here.” The chief just didn’t seem to get it. She needed to fix that. “You’re saying there are going to be more of them?”

Caxton nodded. “I’m sorry to drag you all the way out here. I just thought you should see this for yourself.”

Arkeley would not have played this game, she knew. He wouldn’t have had to. He would have bulled into town and demanded his due share of respect and power and he would have run things his way from the start. She’d already blown any chance of doing that—already squandered what goodwill the chief might once have felt toward her.

Glauer had filled her in on what had happened while she’d been in Philadelphia. Already Vicente had tried to undermine her. He’d made a big show of inviting her down to Gettysburg originally because he thought she could kill the vampire in one night and make all the bad things go away without putting any of his men at risk. She had been the famous vampire killer, the one they made that movie about—surely one vampire would be no problem for her to dispatch. It hadn’t worked out that way. Instead she had scared off all the tourists—the town’s lifeblood—and cost the local businesses untold amounts of money.

Everybody in this world has a boss, and the chief of police’s boss was the mayor. There had been an emergency meeting of the chamber of commerce. The National Park Service, which was its own little fiefdom in a town with more history than people, had weighed in as well. They weren’t happy at all. The mayor, who knew nothing about vampires, had come down hard on Vicente. Ripped him a new asshole, as Glauer put it (and this from a man who had trained himself never to curse in polite conversation).

Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster. Vicente had put the blame on the state police and more specifically on Trooper Laura Caxton. It had been her misconduct that had hurt the town, he claimed. In short, he had covered his ass. His question the previous night, when he had asked her if his men could stand down, had followed immediately.

He knew the danger his town was in—knew it intellectually, but didn’t really understand. He was a lot more worried about losing his job.

Which meant she had to convince him there were some things more important than political advancement. He could still send her packing if she didn’t get through to him. Send her away with polite thanks and say he would take it from there. She couldn’t let that happen. No more mistakes, she swore.

“Would you come this way, Chief?” she asked.

She led him down an alleyway between a bank and a dry cleaner’s. More yellow police tape blocked it off from traffic. Halfway down the narrow lane stood a car, a Ford Focus with New Jersey state tags. It looked like three people were sleeping inside, one in the driver’s seat, two in the rear seat leaning against each other.

“Jesus, no,” Vicente said, staring. She could feel his tension in the wet air. “That’s not—”

“I’m afraid so. Your people found the car early this morning, just as I was getting into town. At first they didn’t even think to connect it to my investigation.” Caxton took a key from Glauer and unlocked the driver’s-side door. When she pulled it open a foul wave of stink rolled out of the car. The stink of death.

“Officer Glauer heard the report on his car radio and put the pieces together. It’s important you look, Chief,” she said.

Vicente stared at her. She was pushing him hard, but she had no choice.

They had made a solid identification of Subject One, the woman sitting in the driver’s seat. Her face was a pretty close match for the picture on the driver’s license in her pocket. What was left of her face, anyway. Her name was Linda Macguire and she was—had been—a resident of Tenafly, New Jersey.

The state police records and identification unit up in Harrisburg had contacted her husband and he was on his way to make an official identification.

The two kids in the back were Cathy Macguire, aged sixteen and Linda’s only child, and Darren Jackson, also of Tenafly, aged seventeen. Cathy’s boyfriend. According to Macguire’s husband, Linda, Cathy, and Darren had been on vacation in Philadelphia the night before. They’d gone to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall.

Linda had most of her shoulder torn away, the tattered ends of her shirt wrapped around her neck. The kids had massive defensive wounds on their arms and both of their throats had been torn out. All three of them were exsanguinated, and only minimal bloodstains had been found on the car’s floor mats.

“What did he do?” Vicente asked, very quietly.

“He needed someone to drive him here from Philly,” Caxton answered. “Most likely he just approached the first car he saw and forced his way inside.” The door handle on the front passenger’s side showed signs of stress, as if the vampire had tried to rip the door open. “He kept them alive—at least, he kept the driver alive—so she could operate the vehicle. Times of death have not been established yet, so we don’t know if he killed the kids in Philly or only after he got here. When he was done with the driver he killed her, too.”

“You mean she could have been driving for hours knowing that her daughter and her boyfriend were already dead back there?” Vicente asked.

“He can be very persuasive when he needs a ride,” Caxton said, her cheeks turning red with shame. If she had refused to take the vampire to Philadelphia, if she had just forced him to kill her on the spot, these people might still be alive—

She had more important things to do than feel guilty.

“Shall we move on to the next scene?” Caxton asked.

The chief wheeled around to stare at her. “Don’t tell me there’s more bodies.”

Caxton looked over at Glauer. Glauer just shrugged and failed to make eye contact with anybody. He’d never worked a homicide case before. Neither had the chief. Hell of a way to start, Caxton thought.

60.

I lit out at once for Gum Spring. My orders were quite vague, which was hardly unusual, yet there was enough in them to chill me. A creature had been discovered there, a vampire. I thought such evils were banished from the earth. Yet this war had dug up so many ancient wrongs—fratricide, treason and espionage among the more mild.

At a field morgue in Maryland, I once saw teamsters fitting bodies for pinewood coffins. If the dead man in question proved too tall they would jump in with him, and trample on his feet and legs, until he became a shorter being and would fit better. Then there were the amputated limbs, stacked like cordwood, ripe with decay. When they found some man missing an arm or a leg they would place one from the proper pile in with his remains, taking no pains whatsoever to ensure the right man was matched with the right appendage.

I chastised such men when I saw their work, but only the first time. I learned quickly what every soldier knows. A man is counted lucky, who is buried by his mother back at home. For most a shallow grave on foreign soil is their only recompense for service, a grave dug deep as possible by the decedent’s friends, so that hogs and other animals may not root it up.

Should dumb animals, should nature herself have turned against us, what surprise is there in a risen corpse come to prey upon the living? None. Yet a vampire—what the deuce could this have to do with me?

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

61.

Bright yellow police tape wrapped around the house on Railroad Street leased to Jeff Montrose and three roommates. The house was a gray-painted clapboard affair with plenty of gables and a porch with white gingerbread details. Some of the carved wood had come loose and hung on rusty nails. Around the foundation clumps of ailanthus and hydrangea hung wilted and sodden. A basement window on the side of the house flashed with the trapped light of the police cruisers that filled the street.

Caxton shook out the collar of her jacket, spraying water everywhere, and hurried toward the house, gesturing at the white wooden porch with its loose gingerbread. “This house is rented in part to a graduate student at the college, one Jeff Montrose. I tried to contact him to ask him about the coffins but he didn’t answer his phone. Officer Glauer and I came here to see if we could find him, or at least figure out where he might have gone.”

Vicente went in first and then she followed. Glauer stayed outside. He didn’t explain why, but she supposed he didn’t have to. He’d already seen what was inside.

Vicente stamped his feet on a mat inside the front door. It was warm and mostly dry in the front room, a big living space with a pair of mismatched couches and a television on top of a plastic milk crate.

Beyond, through a high archway, stood the kitchen—dishes in the sink, a refrigerator full of leftover Chinese food.

In any normal crime scene the room would be full of forensics cops taking samples, lifting prints, cutting fibers from the stained shag carpet. There was no need this time. Caxton had already learned what she needed to know from the house from her previous visit.

She led Vicente up a wooden staircase that creaked at every other step. The old woven runner that draped across the risers was faded and worn through in places. Silvery light from an exterior window brightened the wall ahead of them and dazzled their eyes. At the top a hallway split off toward four different bedrooms. Three of the doors were closed. Mary Klein, Fisher Hawkins, and Madison Chou Zhang owned those rooms. All three were accounted for, safe at the homes of parents or friends far away from Gettysburg. They had left town after hearing Caxton’s press conference the day before, even though it meant skipping classes. Montrose had the fourth room, the farthest one from the top of the stairs.

Vicente paused with his hand still on the banister. He looked slightly out of breath. Caxton wondered if he’d ever seen a dead body before.

Together they stepped into the room where Jeff Montrose’s life had ended at approximately five-fifteen that morning, several hours before Caxton arrived back in town.

The walls of the room were lined with posters from various concerts, black ink on vibrantly colored paper. Clothes and books littered the floor, were heaped up by the cot that had served as Montrose’s bed. Videos and DVDs were stacked neatly on shelves, prominent among them a copy of Teeth .

Caxton hoped Vicente didn’t see it. A desk sat beneath the room’s single window, mostly covered in a big beige computer setup and thick sheaves of printer paper. In a chair before the computer Montrose remained just as Caxton had found him. He wore a white shirt open at the neck and wrists and a black cape lined with red velvet. He’d told her about that cape when she’d met him—he wore it when he did ghost tours in town. His eye makeup was impeccable, but the dark mascara and kohl stood in high contrast to the near-perfect whiteness of his face. Most of his neck had been torn away, but there was not a drop of blood anywhere in the room.

Vicente took one look at the body and started to vomit. He turned around in a circle until he found a trash can and hugged it to him as his chest and shoulders heaved.

Caxton waited patiently until he was done.

“The killer was our vampire, the original one. There’s no real question. He must have come here directly from the crime scene in the alleyway. He would have been told where to look for Montrose by Professor Geistdoerfer from the college.”

“The Running Wolf?” Vicente stared at her with wild eyes.

“Professor Geistdoerfer was the one who woke our vampire in the first place. I don’t think he understood what the consequences would be, at the time. Afterward the vampire controlled him through threats and intimidation. He’s…dead now.” Presumably dead again, and for the last time, she thought, but didn’t say.

“And this kid.” Vicente stepped a little closer to the body in the chair. He reached out and touched the cloth of Montrose’s cape. “Was he some kind of—Satanist?”

“No. A student of dark history.” Caxton frowned. “He was fascinated with ghosts and vampires and other unnatural things. That’s why he came to school here, to study the darkest period of American history. The people of the nineteenth century shared some of his more ghoulish interests.”

“So when a vampire came along he just jumped at the chance to help.”

Caxton shook her head. “Just because he was interested in vampires, that didn’t make him evil. My girlfriend was a goth, back in high school, and she read nothing but books on vampires. I can promise you she’s not evil. Lots of kids play vampires and victims.”

“Sure, we did that at my school, too. We’d tie black towels around our necks and run around pretending to bite each other, just like in the movies. Then we discovered girls and it all seemed kind of silly. This guy didn’t grow out of it, right?”

Caxton shrugged.

“And now he’s paid for it. Just a dumb kid.”

She pushed some papers aside on the desk and showed him what lay there. A simple wooden stake, a piece of wood about a foot long, sharpened at one end. “He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t an idiot,”

she said. “He knew something was up. I think he must have known all along, at least as soon as he heard on the news about how Officer Garrity had died. He must have known he was an accomplice, that he had helped bring the vampire back to life. He knew what was happening in this town.” She touched the pointy end of the stake. Montrose had probably known it was useless against a vampire that had already fed on blood that night. He’d studied vampires enough, had watched Teeth probably more than once.

The stake must have been the best thing he could get his hands on. “I don’t think he was a bad person, at heart. He just couldn’t seem to make up his mind which side he was on.”

Vicente shook his head. “I don’t understand, Trooper. Why did you want me to see this?”

Caxton leaned over the computer on the desk. “We found this when we discovered the body. He made no attempt to hide it.” The computer was in sleep mode. When she tapped the space bar the screen lit up right away. It displayed the client for Montrose’s student webmail account, with a message already opened:

Subject:

A Humble Request for Aid

From:

John Geistdoerfer

To:

Jeffrey Montrose

Priority:

Normal

My dear Montrose:

I’m afraid it’s come to the worst. The police are going to seal off the site, well, we should have expected that. I believe you met Trooper Caxton. She’s on her way just now to come interrogate me. Rubber hoses and the third degree. I think I’m man enough to take it, but what might be worse…Jeff, they’re going to seize the coffins and other artifacts and I doubt we’ll ever see them again. I know you share my passion for this find and I’d like to ask for your help.

What I have in mind may not be strictly adherent to the letter of the law. Don’t worry. I’ll take all responsibility, and pay whatever silly fine they want, if it comes to that. You will remember we discussed moving the coffins to a place where they could be better looked after. I’d like you to take the department van and start doing that today. Don’t tell anyone what you’re up to, though of course if you’re stopped en route don’t lie for my sake, either. Do it soon, Jeff, if you can.

I see big things for you, son, big things indeed. I see your name just below mine on the paper when we describe this find. There are times when the petty temporal concerns of we mortals must bow to the needs of history—I think in you I have found someone who shares that belief. You have my eternal thanks.

—John

62.

Hiram Morse had done his duty, according to general orders. When we first met resistance to our picket he had run back to the line as fast as he was able, & summoned aid, & much of it. He had brought the whole of the 3rd Maine with him, some twelve score men, & Colonel Lakeman at the front with his sword in the air. They carried lanterns through the wood to light their way, & it seemed like great fires moved through the trees there were so many. They made short work of Chess. The men got a length of rope around his neck, & hanged him from the tallest tree in his own yard, & settled in to watch him struggle & try to break free.

Eventually he seemed to realize the futility of his efforts & he let his body slacken on the line, yet still he did not die. It was during this part of his destruction that I asked to look on him, the creature who’d so utterly corrupted my Bill. It was allowed, & I was brought close, & looked in his red eyes. I had thought to spit on him, but when I saw the expression & great intelligence in his face I banked my wrath. For a good minute I did naught but look on him, & he on me. In the end I could muster up not enough hate to curse him.

He lingered long through the night & up until the dawn, when the light of day touched him like the finger of God. Then his flesh melted away like candle wax, & his naked bones fell from the noose.

They made me a stretcher, for I could walk no longer, and carried me hence.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

63.

Vicente read the message over a couple of times, just as Caxton had before him. While she waited she wondered about Montrose. The day and night before, the student had taken on a truly gruesome task.

Alone, unaided, he had moved ninety-nine coffins to a new location. She supposed that if you were studying to be an archaeologist you learned how to handle bones and not be creeped out by them. Still. It must have taken him all day. It must have left him exhausted.

Then he’d come home after all that hard and dirty work and put on his cape, the one he wore when he led his ghost tours. He had prepared his stake and sat down to wait and see what happened. He must have been so confused—wanting, desperately, to actually meet a real vampire in the flesh. Terrified because he knew he probably wouldn’t survive the encounter. She wondered what the two of them had talked about. She wondered if Montrose had, in the end, learned what he so badly wanted to know.

When the chief finished reading he looked down at the body again. He seemed to have recovered from his squeamishness. “I don’t get this. He helped the vampire. Why did it kill him?”

“Because Montrose could have told us where the coffins are. You’ll notice Geistdoerfer was careful enough not to give the location away in his email. Montrose here would be the only living person who knew it.”

“We need to find those coffins,” Vicente said. “We need to find them before dark.”

Caxton nodded. That was about half of what she’d wanted him to say. About half of what she’d wanted to get by bringing him down here and making him look at Montrose’s corpse. The other half would take some more finesse.

She lead Vicente out of the murder scene, down the stairs again and out onto the sidewalk. While they’d been inside the rain had turned serious. Glauer stood at attention by the chief ’s car, the brim of his hat completely soaked.

“Officer, I want you to organize a house-by-house search,” Vicente said, his face perfectly impassive. “I want you to bring in every man and woman we can get, have them check every possible place someone might hide all those coffins.”

“Yes, sir,” Glauer said, but he didn’t move at once. Caxton had already rehearsed him in his part of the drama that came next. “I think we can get about thirty people together, each of them with a vehicle. We’ll get right to it. There are hundreds of places like that in and around the borough. We’ll do what we can.”

“I sincerely hope so,” Vicente spluttered. “Do you know what’s at risk here?”

Glauer stood stock-still and said nothing. After a long, tense silence, he turned and looked across at Caxton.

Vicente broke the silence. “What is this? What aren’t you telling me?”

“This scene is considerably more violent than others we’ve seen from this vampire,” she said. She had thought, once, that this vampire was different. That he had some sense of honor or decency. Arkeley had known better—she should have listened to him. She should have known it herself all along. “I’m willing to call it a pattern. He started by wounding Geistdoerfer. He could have killed him then and there, but he had enough restraint to hold back. He moved up to provoked homicide with Officer Garrity, who tried to kill him. He then killed Geistdoerfer because he was hungry. The family from New Jersey,” she said, pointing in the direction of the alley and the death car, “he did because he was in a hurry. From there he went directly to this house. Montrose was actively helping him. He spent his whole life wanting to be a vampire’s best friend. The vampire killed him just because he knew where the coffins were—just to tie up one simple loose end. Human life has lost all meaning to this vampire, Chief. He’s become a real sociopath now, capable of acting in cold blood. He’s getting nastier and he’s not done yet.”

Vicente’s face was already pale. He turned to look away, up the rainy street. He wasn’t looking at her.

She moved around him, got right in his face. This was the dangerous part of the game, the part where she had to rely on him being a reasonable man. “Originally, he didn’t want to wake the others. He wanted to let them rest in peace. That was before he started to change. I think he’s more than capable now of bringing them all back. He won’t just wake up one or two of them—he’ll wake them all.”

“Pure conjecture,” Vicente said in a weak voice.

“Maybe so, but that’s what we have to go on.” Time to drive her point home. “Chief,” Caxton said, “I’d like to make a recommendation, if you’ll listen to it.”

Vicente scowled, but when he’d stared at her for a while he eventually nodded.

“You should completely evacuate the town.”

She stood her ground, waited for Vicente to start shouting. She didn’t have to wait for long. While he told her just what he thought of her idea she waited patiently for the verbal storm to blow over. She barely even registered what he was saying.

“We’ll search this town from top to bottom for those coffins,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to find them before nightfall. But if the search fails—”

“—You have a recommendation for when that happens, too?”

Caxton stared into his eyes. Directly into his eyes—like a vampire hypnotizing a victim. She lacked the magical powers, but she hoped her sincerity and her fear would have a similar effect. “If we can’t find the coffins before nightfall, we need to be ready. Ready for an army of vampires. Because that’s what we’re talking about. They’ll wake up hungry and they will kill everyone they see. Chief, I need you to authorize me to start planning for tonight.”

“Tonight? Tonight, when you’re going to single-handedly take on a hundred vampires with your sidearm?”

“No. I need you to help me gather my own army. I need officers, I need guns, and I need you to stay out of my way. I need you to stop thinking in terms of jurisdictions. I need you to stop thinking of this as an investigation and start thinking about this as a war.”

64.

I arrived in time to see Chess hang, and to watch his mansion burn. It should have ended there, with the vampire’s second and final death. Yet like this war the tale has no conclusion yet; and like the unquiet grave, it seems, any finality it offers is temporary at best.

If the War Department wants my final assessment of what happened at Gum Spring, then let it have this: Private Hiram Morse should get a medal. Then he should be horsewhipped. The cur was good enough to search the burnt ruins of the Chess plantation and find the decrepit female still partially alive; or undead, or whatever the mot juste may be; and then to bring her down to where the Army Investigators waited, where they were already examining what remained of Obediah Chess. I would guess he was drunk with the praise he’d already received for giving them one vampire on the end of a rope. He must have thought his rewards would be doubled when he returned a second, and this one still capable of interrogation. Surely he cannot have known what vital knot he was unraveling. By recovering her body he may have changed the course of this war; yes, and of history. But he has also given me the most profane duty I ever hope to receive, and robbed all my future nights of sleep, however many they may be.

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

65.

So much to be done. Caxton’s weary body felt it piling up on her as if she were being buried alive.

Local police had to be rounded up, given cars, given maps that broke down their search areas. Radios had to be synchronized. The dispatcher, with an exasperated sigh, routed dozens of messages an hour to the unit in Caxton’s car. Houses, museums, inns, tourist centers had to be searched. Schools, the hospital, every building of Gettysburg College (especially there, no stone could be left unturned there).

The fire station, the old houses that were headquarters for ghost tours or guided tours of the battlefield.

Restaurants, gift shops. The 7-Eleven. There were plenty of buildings that were too small to hold all the coffins, but they might have basements.

There were phone calls to be made. Always there were more phone calls.

Caxton called the state police barracks just outside of town, and the one in Arendtsville. She needed more eyes, more cops, more people to come and help look for coffins. She waited on hold for long minutes, far too many of them, just to talk to the Commissioner up in Harrisburg. She called the National Guard armory, only to be told that they couldn’t mobilize without a direct order from the governor.

The governor wasn’t available to take her call.

She oversaw roadblocks being thrown up across the major roads. Local cops from Harrisburg, Arendtsville, and Hanover could man those. She oversaw hospital staff, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and maintenance men as they packed up necessary equipment, spoke in low tones with administrators about moving patients out of their rooms, out to the available beds in nearby towns. Always someone wanted to argue, someone wanted to claim that a given patient couldn’t be moved, that their condition was too delicate. The vampires wouldn’t care, she tried to explain. They didn’t care if somebody was dying of leukemia or brain cancer or pernicious infections. Blood was blood, and if the donor couldn’t get up and run away, all the better.

She scared a lot of people. She saw their faces go white, saw their hands tremble as they failed to meet her gaze. Laura Beth Caxton’s heart went out to them. Arkeley would have been pleased—if they were scared they would move faster. It would inspire them to get away. She needed to be more like Arkeley.

When their voices broke, when they begged her to understand, she hardened herself and told them what was coming.

More calls. She called in school buses, talked to principals and superintendents, called the local Greyhound station. Called the National Guard again and asked if they could send troop transports. A lot of people had already left Gettysburg, including most of the tourists. A lot of the townies had stayed put.

She needed to get more than five thousand people out of harm’s way and she needed to do it before six o’clock, her absolute, positive deadline for the evacuation. The National Guard had a fleet of vehicles fueled up and ready to go, but they couldn’t dispatch them without the approval of the governor, or, if he was completely unreachable, the lieutenant governor.

The lieutenant governor was away from his office at the moment. Did she want to leave a message? His personal assistant wasn’t really sure how to get hold of him, even if it was an emergency.

Operations like this didn’t just happen. They had to be obsessively planned. Everyone wanted oversight and everyone wanted to cover their respective asses. People couldn’t be pulled away from necessary jobs, life-and-death-type jobs. There were authorizations she needed just to use the right kind of weapons—much less to requisition them. A police operation this size normally took months to organize, to get all the necessary people and equipment in place at the right time. She had just a few hours.

Not every piece of news was cataclysmic. The Harrisburg Police Department had a long-standing agreement with the borough of Gettysburg, a convenient blurring of jurisdictions that had never been legally questioned. They were happy to send some men down. Would ten suffice? Caxton wanted a hundred, but she took what she was offered.

“What about helicopters?” she asked. The coffins could be hidden somewhere out in the woods around the battlefield. They could be sitting on a rooftop somewhere, someplace her searchers couldn’t easily get to. Aerial support would help the searchers coordinate their efforts, too. Harrisburg had two helicopters, though one was in for scheduled maintenance. It could be prepped and fueled and in the air within a couple of hours. They’d send them down as soon as possible.

The local Harrisburg PD had a special arrangement with the state police as well. They knew she was serious, and they wanted to help any way they could. She couldn’t thank them enough.

Glauer called her several times. “Nothing,” he always said. “Nothing. A couple people wouldn’t let us search their houses, but these are good people, people I’ve known all my life.”

“Make sure they get evacuated in the first wave,” Caxton said. “Then search their houses after they’re gone. This is an emergency.”

They put an announcement on the radio, on TV and over the Internet. All citizens of the borough of Gettysburg should report to the closest school or government building and await transport out of town.

Under no circumstances should they try to leave town in their own vehicles. Caxton had seen how bad the traffic could get on a normal day—the streets of Gettysburg would have been hopelessly snarled, the evacuation hopelessly gridlocked in honking horns and flashing lights and road rage and minor accidents and maybe major accidents too. The rain would make it worse.

Some of them tried. She got calls from all over town and had to send units to untangle the mess, to calm people down, to get them in line. Every officer she sent to chase down an unruly motorist was one less officer she had for the door-to-door search.

A call came in from the mayor. Did she think she would find the coffins in time? Did she think that this could be resolved without loss of life? Did she think the mayor and his staff should be evacuated by the helicopter they’d seen circling the town?

No, no, and no. Caxton closed her eyes for a moment and waited for the mayor to stop talking. She said no a few more times, barely listening to the questions.

“Nothing to report,” Glauer said, over the radio in her car. “I’d estimate we’ve searched twenty percent of the buildings in town.”

It was already three o’clock.

Caxton sat up straight, hung up on the mayor. So much time had passed and there was still so much to do. People were lined up around the block at the post office, at the town hall, at the visitor’s center.

Waiting for buses to take them away.

She called the National Guard again. Begged.

“The governor, or in an emergency, the lieutenant governor…”

She flipped her phone closed. Tried to breathe through her nose. Then she opened the phone again.

She called the state police again, got them to send every available liquor enforcement officer. Getting the LEOs onboard doubled the number of people she had who could work traffic details, man roadblocks, help search.

The press called her. Over and over. Did she think they would find the coffins in time? Did she really believe that Gettysburg was about to be overrun with vampires? Didn’t she think that story was a little hard to swallow?

She did not waste time on the press.

More calls, more to do. She got through to the sergeant at arms at the Harrisburg headquarters.

Outlined the equipment she needed as if she were ordering out of the L.L. Bean catalog. Except instead of sweaters and fleece vests she wanted patrol rifles and riot gear. The man hung up on her once, so she called back and threatened him, pulled rank. Then she pleaded: please, please, please.

“Even if I have that stuff I need a special order, in writing, from the Commissioner, and he’s out of his office right now,” the sergeant at arms told her.

The National Guard had everything she needed. They had piles of it, all kept in perfect working order, oiled up, ready to go. Mountains of ammunition, rack after rack of rifles. Plus plenty of people to carry them, including more than a few veterans from Iraq. Soldiers. Real soldiers.

The lieutenant governor was meeting with an educational task force and no, his personal assistant didn’t think he could deliver a message right now.

“Do you understand what is going to happen? Do you understand how many people are going to die?”

He didn’t have to understand. That wasn’t his job.

She called the Commissioner of the state police in Harrisburg. Got put on hold. She didn’t have time to wait on hold. She couldn’t afford not to talk to him. She put her phone on speaker, borrowed Chief Vicente’s cell, and kept making calls.

By four-thirty the Commissioner was available to talk to her. “Yes, I understand how serious this situation is. I know it’s an emergency. You want to tell me what kind? I’m a little in the dark here. I sent you in there to chase one vampire, and you come back to me saying you might have a hundred of them.

If this is a mistake, if you blow this—”

“I won’t,” she promised. If she did blow it, if she failed, she doubted she would live long enough to have to worry about losing her job. “You have to trust me. I have a chain of evidence as long as my arm, I have information from trusted informants, but I don’t have time to write it up in a report and send it to you. I need you to just do what I say, and not ask any more questions. Otherwise a lot of people are going to die. Tonight.”

“You don’t think you’ll be able to find the coffins before sunset?”

The last report she’d had from Glauer said that they’d covered maybe forty percent of the town.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I’d like to say yes, but I can’t afford to be wrong.”

There was a long, deadly pause on the line. Caxton could hear the Commissioner breathing, but that was about it.

“Alright.”

Caxton could hardly believe her ears. “You’re saying yes?”

“I am.”

She couldn’t thank him enough.

The governor called her next. He apologized for taking so long getting back to her. Asked her how she was holding up, and what she needed, and what he could do to help. He would mobilize the National Guard immediately, send the troop transports she needed, send helicopters, soldiers, weapons. As fast as humanly possible. “A small force should arrive before sunset tonight. More will be sent out as they become available. Please, Trooper, I am asking you to please protect the Commonwealth.”

“Sir, I’m truly grateful,” she said, meaning it. “I just—I didn’t expect you to—I didn’t—”

“You have some interesting friends, Trooper,” the governor said. “So—is there anything else you need?”

“Can you send any tanks?”

He laughed, in a good-natured way.

She ended the call. Dialed Arkeley. “I don’t know what you did, but—”

He sounded distorted and weird. As if he were in a car moving under speed, or maybe it was just the rain interfering with the signal. She didn’t know where he was or what he was up to, didn’t have time to ask. His reply was to the point. “I’ve earned a lot of favors over the last twenty years, because I knew a day like this would come. I used up every ounce of political capital I had.”

As a U.S. Marshal, Arkeley had guarded a lot of courthouses in his time and gotten to know a lot of judges. Politicians listened to judges. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“That’s enough.” Arkeley was silent for a moment. “There’s one more thing I might be able to do for you. It’s drastic.”

“These are drastic times,” she said.

“Okay. Let me get back to work.”

Caxton agreed and hung up.

One more phone call.

She dialed her own home number, waited for Clara to pick up. It took six or seven rings.

“Hello?”

I need to tell you what’s happening, Caxton thought. I need to tell you what’s going to happen when the sun goes down.

I need to tell you that I might get killed tonight. That I will probably get killed tonight. I need to tell you that.

“Hello?”

The words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. None of them.

I need to say good-bye, she thought.

“Laura? I know you’re there—I saw it on the caller ID. What’s going on?”

Caxton opened her mouth. Forced something out. “I love you,” she said.

Nothing from the other end. Then a low, soft sound. “I love you, too,” so low, whispered so gently that it could have been an echo on the line.

Caxton flipped her phone shut. She couldn’t say another word.

Shaking and dizzy with lack of sleep, lack of food, overdoses of caffeine and terror, she climbed out of her car for the first time in hours. She walked half a block down to the post office, where a big white uparmored personnel carrier was loading the very frightened citizens of Gettysburg. National Guardsmen in full uniform helped them climb up through the rear hatches, smiled at them, told them it was going to be alright.

She looked at her watch: six-twenty-three.

66.

I hurried into General Hooker’s headquarters as soon as I arrived and was directed to a room upon the second floor. Inside I found the female propped up by pillows in a comfortable bed. A single candle burned behind a silk screen, leaving the room in great dimness. Any more light would cause her physical pain, I was told. She was well provided with writing materials and much ink, and had already covered several pages with a fine and flowing hand. When she turned her singular eye upon me a chill flushed through me, as if the very marrow of my bones had been replaced with ice, yet I barely hesitated as I strode to the bed and kissed her rotten hand. I had been told she was a spy for the Union now, and had provided much useful intelligence, and was an honored guest of the general. I was also told she would drink my blood if she could. Yet she assured me she was sated, and that I should be at my ease. I did not enquire as to from whose veins she had drawn her rations that night.

She told me much of her history; how she had been brought to America in the last century (and by her considerable decay I believed it), and how she had been an ornament in the house of the Chess family that whole time, unable to climb out of her gilded coffin. She told me of how she came to know Obediah Chess when he was a child, forbidden to approach her but unable to heed his parents’ good offices. It was only after the commencement of hostilities, however, that she had convinced the lad to join her in immortal unlife. He had honored her as a second mother (his first lost to a fever when he was a babe). He had fed her first from his own blood, then brought the vital fluid of others to her upon reaching his majority and accepting her curse. He had found it quite easy, she said, to procure the needed substance in time of war, when persons could go missing without question, especially slaves who might be believed to have run off in the chaos.

She spoke fondly of that time, as others now speak of peacetime and the prosperity and abundance we once took for granted.

I asked and learned at once her name, which was Justinia.

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

67.

By six-thirty the town was empty of civilians. The weapons and the troops had arrived and were being offloaded in Lincoln Square. Approximately 65 percent of the town’s buildings had been searched. Not a single coffin, heart, or vampire had been found. The sun was a yellow smear on the clouds, only partly visible through the dark net of tree branches that obscured the view to the west. It was time to stop looking for the coffins, and time to start fighting vampires.

Down in the square her troops had gathered. They stood in small groups, smoking cigarettes, or sat on the sidewalk, leaning up against historical buildings, conserving their energy for the activity to come.

She’d rounded up about seventy-five, almost all men. Not enough, not nearly enough, but it was the best she could do. They were all trained in how to handle firearms. That was something. Liquor enforcement officers in navy windbreakers and baseball hats. Local cops and fellow troopers. SWAT professionals from Harrisburg and National Guardsmen in camo, heavy armor strapped across their chests, night-vision goggles dangling from their helmets. Many had brought their own weapons, mostly pistols and shotguns.

She frowned at the latter—shotguns were almost useless against vampires. Luckily she had better weapons at hand.

The rifles and grenades sat in big crates hastily removed from unmarked trucks, piled high in a crushed flower bed, laid out end on end on the sidewalk between the parking meters. The grenades were individually wrapped in plastic, then buried in packing peanuts. The rifles lay in neat rows inside the box, secured by Styrofoam spacers. She picked one up and checked its action, made sure the modified barrel was firmly secured to the receiver. The plastic stock fit into the crook of her arm and she kept the flash hider pointing straight up.

“Listen up, guys,” Glauer boomed out, loud enough to make her flinch. “Some of you know me, but most probably don’t. I guess you all know who this is.”

“Yeah,” one of the guardsmen said, nodding happily. “That chick from Teeth .”

Caxton stared at him. He couldn’t be more than nineteen years old.

“She’s the boss,” a LEO with a silver beard but no mustache said. “Our designated field commander.”

She’d never heard the term before. It sounded like something he’d read online or in Soldier of Fortune magazine. “I’m Trooper Caxton, that’s good enough for now. You’ve all been filled in on why you’re here, I’m sure, so I’ll be brief.” She looked around, made sure she had their attention. A few were still chatting among themselves, but mostly these men were professionals. They knew when to listen. “In a few minutes it’ll be fully dark. They’ll come out then and hopefully our air support will see where. We need to be ready to move as soon as we get that report. When we engage the enemy it is crucial that you have the right mind-set. This is not a raid. We are not here to take anyone into custody. You must shoot to kill, from your first shot, and you must not hesitate. Not a single vampire can be allowed to escape tonight.”

She hefted her weapon, showed it to them. “Anyone recognize this?”

“It’s a patrol rifle,” one of her fellow troopers shouted, raising an index finger. “You point that end at your target and it goes boom.”

A few of the others chuckled.

Caxton looked around and found a guardsman. “Give me your body armor,” she said. The soldier hesitated, so she grabbed the straps of his vest and started pulling them loose. “These won’t help, by the way,” she said. “The vampires won’t be shooting at us. Armor will just slow you down.” She thought about ordering all the guardsmen to take off their armor, but she decided against it. It might give them some purely psychological comfort. The guardsman she’d grabbed shrugged out of his vest and she took it from him, then looked around again and found a big orange pumpkin that had been set up as part of a hotel’s fall decorations. She wrapped the pumpkin in the vest, and set the armored pumpkin down on the asphalt and had everyone back away from it, made sure they were clear by twenty feet.

“This is a patrol rifle, yes. A Colt AR6520. A little heavier than you’re probably expecting. The barrel has been upgraded to fire fifty-caliber BMG rounds. The magazine has a capacity of twenty rounds—remember that. Also, remember this.” She sighted carefully on the armor vest, switched off her safety, and put a single round right through both the ceramic armor plate and the pumpkin.

Stringy orange glop erupted from inside the armor, splattering a couple of nearby cars.

“You’ll want to avoid any friendly fire incidents,” she said.

A lot of the men laughed then. She hadn’t expected them to. It was good, though. The laughter would help bond them together as a unit. It would help take the edge off their anxiety. She knew she could use some of that herself.

She couldn’t let it get out of hand, though. “I’m giving you this kind of firepower because the only way to kill a vampire is a direct shot through the heart.” She put a hand over the left side of her chest. “Even then you can’t be guaranteed of a clean kill. When we see them at first they’re going to look mostly dead, very skinny and pale. A fifty-caliber round will take them down just fine. Once they drink some blood, though, they become all but bulletproof. These,” she said, flicking the safety back on and then holding her rifle in the air, “may still work. Or maybe they won’t.” She pulled another crate open and gestured for the men to start arming themselves.

“They’re faster than we are. They are much, much stronger. They have no compunction whatsoever about ripping your head off or tearing your guts out. How many of you have been hunting before?”

As she’d expected, most of their hands went up. They were Pennsylvanians, most of them born and bred between two ridges. They probably learned how to shoot looking down the sights of a .22-caliber rifle at a white-tailed buck.

“Clean shots, careful shots. Heart shots every time, just left of center mass. You have twenty rounds. Do not waste any of them on head or leg shots. You’ve probably been trained to try to incapacitate a victim without mortally wounding him. Forget that, right now.” She looked around at the men under her charge.

The National Guardsmen, many of whom had fought in Iraq, didn’t need to be told as much. They numbered less than a third of her troops, however. The rest were one kind of cop or another, and cops were drilled and trained endlessly to not kill people, to not even take a shot if they thought it might lead to a death. It would take more than a stern warning to break them of that conditioning. Maybe, she thought, when they saw what they were up against, when the vampires came howling for their blood, they would just get it.