Night had fallen, just barely—the sky still showed a burning yellow through the black silhouettes of the trees.  The streetlights were on but some were still glowing a doubtful orange, occasionally flickering into life just to wink out again.  In the street the air had gotten colder, far colder than she’d expected.  She’d left her coat in the Mazda and she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth.

It was time to go home.  She thought of Clara, probably already waiting for her back at the house.  She could go home, feed the dogs, and then spend the evening curled up on the couch with Clara while the tv put them both to sleep.  It sounded just about perfect.

Maybe Clara would let her sleep with the light on for once.  After the chill she’d gotten from the mass vampire grave she didn’t feel the need to be frightened again for a long time.  The very last thing she wanted to do wass speand another minute in Gettysburg.

It was only a few blocks between the café and where she’d parked.  She walked quickly, keeping her head down.  She didn’t look up at the windows of the houses-turned-souvenir stores she passed.  When she did reach the Mazda she looked up, though, because she had heard something.

An alarm bell rang somewhere near by.  The harsh panicky sound might have come from blocks away but it was one of the sounds she was trained to identify.  It was a burglar alarm.  Not her area of expertise, she told herself.  Not her problem.

She was who she was, however.  She was a cop.  She stepped away from the Mazda and back into the tree-lined street.  The alarm was around a corner, she thought, away from the main tourist areas, deeper into the actual town.  It would only take a second to check it out.  She wasn’t supposed to do that, of course.  The State Police didn’t intervene in municipal criminal investigations.  According to standard operating procedure she should call it in and let the local police take care of it.

She was right there, though.  It couldn’t be more than a minute away on foot.  She would just take a look, get the street address where the bell was ringing.  It would only take a second.

Half-jogging she headed around the corner and up the block beyond.  The alarm came from a nondescript building across the street from the Gettysburg College campus.  The shrill noise bounced off the big brick buildings of the college and rattled down the empty street.  The streets which had been mobbed with tourists just a few hours before were deserted now.  She could see no one nearby.  If the local police were on their way, she couldn’t hear their sirens.

She moved closer, sticking to the shadows of the sidewalk.  She couldn’t hear anything except the alarm, which was loud enough to give her a headache.  She got close enough to see the building itself, which had two wide plate glass windows obscured by heavy venetian blinds.  A black owning over the doorway read MONTAGUE FUNERAL HOME.  A placard above the doorknob read CLOSED.

The door stood slightly ajar.  The doorknob had been wrenched sideways in its socket and it looked like the lock had been forced.

Okay.  That was all she needed to know.  She dashed across the street to the cover of some trees and took out her cell phone.  She called the Harrisburg office of the PSP and asked the PCO on duty to patch her through to the Gettysburg police department.  A woman’s voice answered, “Police Department Dispatch.  How may I direct your call?”

Caxton glanced at the building across the way.  There was no sign of movement within.  “This is Laura Caxton with the State Police, Troop H.  I’m at 155 Carlisle Street and I’ve got an activated burglar alarm.”

“I’ve already registered that alarm and dispatched a patrol unit,” the dispatcher told her.  “But thanks.  Are you available to assist if the Chief requests it?”

Caxton frowned.  “I’m off duty but, yeah.  If you need help I’m here.  What’s the ETA on your unit?”

“Upwards of five minutes.  Have you spotted any subjects?”

“No.  There’s sign of forced entry though.  It’s the mortuary down here.  I don’t see anyone outside or any suspicious vehicles, so—”

The alarm clanged wildly and then stopped.  Caxton peered through the lamp-lit gloom but she couldn’t see any change in the building.

“There’s definitely someone inside.  They just disabled the alarm and—”

One of the plate glass windows exploded outwards, sending jagged shards of glass skating across the street.  The blinds fluttered and broke apart and then a square wooden object protruded from the shattered window.  It lurched out to drop with a heavy thud on the sidewalk.

No, no no, Caxton thought.

It was a casket, a big mahogany casket.  A much more ornate version of the hundred coffins she’d seen that afternoon.  Caxton knew better than to think some junkies had broken into the funeral home to steal something that would be so hard to sell on the street.  She had a much better idea who was behind the break-in.  Somebody who needed a coffin because his old one had gotten smashed.

“Trooper?” her phone chirped.  “Trooper, are you there?”

She bit her lip and tried to think, but there was no time.  “Cancel that patrol car, dispatch.  No, don’t cancel it—get as many people down here as you can, get them to clear out the vicinity.  Get all the civilians off the street!”

“Trooper?  I don’t copy—what’s going on?”

“Get everyone away from here!” Caxton shouted.

The vampire jumped up onto the jagged lower edge of the broken window and then leapt down into the street.  His skin was the color of cold milk, his eyes red and dully glowing.  He had no hair anywhere on his body and his ears stood up to sharp points.  His mouth was full of row after row of sharp teeth.

He looked as if he hadn’t fed in a century.  His body was emaciated, pared down by hunger until he was thinner than any human being she’d ever seen.  His skin stretched tight over prominent bones and the muscles on his arms and legs were wasted away to thin cords.  His ribs stuck out dramatically and his cheeks were hollow with starvation.  His skin was dotted with dark patches of decay and in some places it had cracked open in weeping sores.  He wore nothing but a pair of ragged grey pants that were falling apart at the seams.

He looked up the street, then back down as if he expected somebody to be there.  Then he looked right across at Caxton and she knew he could see her blood—he could see her veins and arteries lit up in the dark, see her heart pounding in her chest.

Caxton’s free hand went to her hip to draw her weapon.  It didn’t look like he’d fed that night.  If she was fast enough maybe she could keep him from ripping her to pieces.  Her hand touched her belt and found nothing there and she wasted a vital second looking down, only to realize her Beretta wasn’t there.  She’d left it in her car.

“Dispatch, I have a vampire over here—do you copy?  I have a vampire!” she screamed into the phone.  “Request immediate assistance!”

The vampire saw her.  His red eyes bored right into her.  She tried to look away but she couldn’t.

In an offhand, very casual way, she knew exactly what was happening.  He was mesmerizing her.  It had happened before.  Had she been capable of it she would have screamed, run away, at least tried to move her eyes.  But she couldn’t.  The vampire had the power to compel her.  The amulet at her throat grew warm as it fought that influence but it had little power of its own. Its purpose was to focus her own mental energies, to give her the clarity to fight the vampire’s psychic attack.  Unless she could reach up and grab it, turn her thoughts toward it, it was useless.  And until the vampire looked away from her she could do nothing but stare at him, her rational mind disconnected from her body.

The cell phone in her hand made loud buzzing noises.  Most likely it was the dispatcher on the other end asking her frantic questions.  She opened her fingers and the phone slid to the ground.  It bounced off the sidewalk but she couldn’t look down to see where it had gone.  She couldn’t look anywhere except into the vampire’s eyes.

And those eyes—they were cold, even though they were the color of fiery embers.  They were vacant of any emotion.  They were locked on hers with an unmatchable strength.  He could hold her there forever if he wanted to.  He could come over and tear her throat out with his hands and she would not be able to turn away or move an inch.

She heard police sirens coming closer but lacked the presence of mind to even hope for rescue.

He padded lightly into the street, coming closer.  He had all the time in the world and he knew it.  Unable to break his gaze, she did not see the police car approaching.  Focused intently on her, perhaps seeing nothing but the blood in her body, the vampire didn’t see the car either.

Whether or not the driver of the car saw him she didn’t know.  He came around the corner at high speed, his tires shrieking on the asphalt (she heard a plaintive cry from far off, that was all), and barreled down the street right into the vampire’s side, knocking him down and dragging him half a block as the car’s brakes howled and smoked.

Instantly the spell was broken.  A stale breath burst out of Caxton’s lungs—she’d been holding it in the whole time—and she bent double, nausea and fear wracking her body.  She reached into her collar and grabbed the charm there, almost scalding herself on its stored heat.  Strength rushed back through her, making her blood surge.

“Is he dead?” someone yelled.  “Please tell me he’s dead.”

“Who?” she asked, before realizing the question was not directed at her.  She looked up to see two local police officers circling the vampire’s inert body in the street.  They had their weapons out but held upwards, at a safe ready.

“He’s not moving,” one of them said.  They were both male, dressed in identical uniforms.  One of them, the one who had last spoken, was broad through the shoulders but no taller than Caxton.  He prodded the vampire’s arm with his shoe.  The other one, a big wall of a man, stood back to cover his partner.

She knew with a dread familiarity that they would be dead in seconds if she didn’t act.  “State Police,” she shouted, and ran toward them as fast as her body would allow.  She felt drained and unsteady.  “Get back!”

The taller policemen looked up at her, his mouth forming around a word.  The other bent down to take a closer look at the vampire.  It happened then all in a flash.  The vampire lifted himself up on his elbows and twisted his head to the side.  His mouth opened, revealing hundreds of sharp translucent teeth.  They dug into the crouching policeman’s leg and bit down hard.

Blood slapped the front of the car, the legs of the standing policeman, the dark surface of the street.  The vampire must have bitten right through a major artery.  The crouching policeman screamed and tried to bring his gun down to shoot the vampire but before he got halfway down he was dead.  He slumped backwards and his skull smacked the asphalt with a noise that made Caxton wince.

The surviving policeman jumped back, wheeling his pistol around.  Caxton came up to the side of the car and grabbed at his arm, pulling him back still farther.

The vampire dragged himself out from under the car.  His mouth and most of his chest was covered in gore.  His skin looked less luminously white, had in fact taken on a vague pinkish cast.  He looked no less wasted and emaciated than before but Caxton knew that he would be a dozen times stronger with the policeman’s blood in him.

The live policeman bent his knees and grabbed his weapon in both hands.  He sighted down the barrel and put a bullet right into the back of the vampire’s bald head. Caxton watched the vampire’s skin buckle and open, saw the skull underneath crack under the bullet’s impact.  The wound closed over as quickly and smoothly as if the bullet had been fired into a bucket full of milk.  If the vampire even felt the shot he showed no sign.

“The heart,” Caxton had time to say.  “You have to destroy the heart.”  Even as she was speaking, though, the vampire turned slowly around to stare at the local cop.  The man’s face convulsed in fear and loathing and then suddenly went slack.  His body trembled and his arms fell loose at his sides, his gun forgotten in his hand.

It would have been easy for the vampire to kill Caxton and the remaining cop just then.  He might have done it just to keep them from following him—she’d seen vampires do that before.  Instead he rushed over to where the coffin lay just outside of the mortuary’s window.  He grabbed up the coffin, turned away from them, and dashed across the street and into the campus of the college.

In the distance a siren started to howl with a series of short wavering cries.

“What’s that?” Caxton asked.

The cop looked around him as if he couldn’t remember where he was.  “Tornado alarm,” he said.  “They wanted to get the people off the streets in a hurry.  It’ll just scare the tourists but the locals will know to get them to shelter.”

Caxton breathed a sigh of relief.  The dispatcher her taken her seriously.  There was no danger of a real tornado—the sky was clear and full of stars—but the siren would serve its purpose.  “That’s good.  Now, what we do next is—”

“Oh God,” the cop said.  “Oh, sweet Jesus—Garrity!”  He rushed to the side of his fallen partner and grabbed at his wrists, feeling for a pulse.  “He’s dead!”

“Yes,” Caxton said, as gently as she could.  “We have to get the thing that killed him.”

“Negative,” the cop said.  He reached for his radio and called for an ambulance.  Then he switched bands and shouted “Officer down, 155 Carlisle!”

“Good, good,” Caxton said.  He was following standing orders, she knew.  You didn’t just abandon a dead policeman in the street.  But unless they hurried they were going to lose the vampire.  “Now let’s go.”

He stared up at her.  “Garrity’s been my partner for eight years,” he said, apparently thinking that ended the discussion.  Under any other circumstances it probably would have.

Caxton knew she couldn’t afford to wait for the ambulance, however.  “Give me the car keys, then, and you stay here,” she insisted.  “I’m a State Trooper.  Come on!  He’s getting away!”

The cop stared at her with wondering eyes for far too long.  She could almost see the fog of grief and fear and anger swirling in his brain.  Finally he reached down into Garrity’s blood-stained trousers pocket and yanked out a set of car keys.  He pressed them into her hand without a word.

Caxton turned on her heel and jumped into the open door of the patrol car.  She backed away from the horrible scene in the street—one more chilling vision to give her nightmares for years to come, she thought—and wheeled the car around to face the campus.  A narrow road lead inbetween a cluster of long, low buildings.  She looked between them as she shot by but couldn’t find any sign of the vampire.  A few terrified-looking students were milling on the sidewalks but they paid little attention to her.  They were listening to the tornado siren, which was pulsing out its call faster and faster.

Up ahead the road widened.  The signs said “Constitution Avenue” but that meant little to Caxton.  She pressed down on the gas pedal and the cruiser jumped forward, pressing her back in her seat.  The vampire could have turned off any of the side streets she passed but all she could do was trust her luck and hope she caught sight of him.  She had only started to despair when she caught a glimpse of a thin white shape bobbing in the darkness ahead of her.  Yes, there—the vampire was still carrying the coffin, running right in the middle of the road ahead of her, his feet flashing and pushing him along far faster than any human could run.  Caxton poured on as much speed as she could and slowly gained on him.  The vampire’s white back glowed in her headlights.  He looked behind him now and again but never slowed down.  Caxton had her foot on the accelerator but even as parking lots and tree-studded quads flashed by her on either side he was nearly keeping pace on foot.

Her best bet, she decided, was to run him down with the car.  If she could get it on top of him, pin him underneath it, she might be able to hold him in place long enough to summon reinforcements.  The idea of taking him on by herself was suicidal, especially since she’d left her weapon in her own car.  She spared a single glance down and saw a riot shotgun bolted to the dashboard.  That was something, though shotguns were almost useless against a vampire who had already fed.  It might slow him down, and that was all she could hope for.

She roared after the vampire as fast as she could.  Constitution Avenue swung north around the far edge of the campus and she lost some ground as she had to turn to match the curve.  Ahead of her the vampire lifted up his stolen coffin in both hands and then pivoted to sling it at her.  She tried to veer out of the way as the massive wooden missile filled up her windshield.  Shrieking, she stamped on the brake as the glass in front of her cracked and buckled on impact.  The car rocked on its suspension and spun out, whirling around and nearly going up on its side.  One of the tires, then another burst with a noise like gunshots and the car fell back down onto the rims, listing hard to the side.   The airbag deployed with a screeching hiss, then almost instantly collapsed though the car was still moving.  Caxton was thrown sideways, colliding painfully with her door.  Her seat belt yanked her back down into her seat as the car bounced to an unsteady stop.

Through the starred windshield she could see a big football stadium ahead of her.  She had slalomed into its parking lot—fitting enough, since the car wasn’t going anywhere else that night.

She fought to get her equilibrium back.  There was no time to check herself for whiplash or other injuries—she had to move.  The vampire was still close by and she still had some slim chance of catching him.  She grabbed the shotgun from its rack, checked to make sure it was loaded (it was), then pushed open her door and stumbled out onto the concrete.  She staggered to her feet and looked around but couldn’t see the vampire.

His behavior puzzled her somewhat.  She’d never seen a vampire run away from a fight before, especially after he’d fed.  A normal vampire should have been more than a match for the meager police response.  Yet she’d never seen a vampire so starved-looking before, either, at least not one that could stand up straight.

The shotgun cradled in her arms she dashed back toward the road—then turned around as she caught a flash of movement to her side.  Yes, there, she saw a pale shadow flitting between trees on the far side of the stadium.  She could never catch up with him on foot if he could run as fast as he had while she’d pursued him in the car.  She couldn’t just give up, though.  Her legs burned as she pounded toward the side of the stadium.  She reached for her cell phone but it was gone, of course.  She had dropped it while he had her hypnotized and she hadn’t though to pick it back up.  She was on her own.

Beyond the stadium lay a practice field.  She could see the vampire streaking across the close-clipped grass.  Beyond that lay trees and green hills lit only by the stars.  That was part of the Military Park, she thought, part of the battlefield that contained nothing but marble obelisks and heavy monuments to fallen soldiers.  It would get dark out there pretty fast between the trees and she didn’t have a flashlight, either.

She kept running.

She stopped at the top of the hill and tried to catch her breath.  She knew she should turn back.  There was no question.  Let the vampire go, let him get away.  It would disappoint Arkeley.  Once that had meant something to her but she had a life now, though.  She had Clara to think of, and the dogs.  If she were killed here—

She didn’t get a chance to finish the thought.  As Caxton turned around to head back to the lights of the campus behind her, the vampire was there.  He stood perfectly still behind her as if he’d been watching the back of her head the whole time.  His eyes burned in their sockets like the glowing ends of two lit cigarettes.

Caxton pried her own gaze away from those eyes and grabbed at the amulet around her neck.  She tried to bring the shotgun up, thinking only to blast those damned eyes right out of his head.  With an easy, swooping motion he closed the distance between them and knocked the weapon right out of her hand, sending it spiraling down the side of the hill.  It slid quite a ways on the wet grass.

He grabbed her head in both of his hands and brought his face within inches of her own.  She could smell the blood of the dead policeman on his breath.  His eyes went wide and his stare bored right into her but with the charm in her hand he couldn’t quite connect.  With a grunt of disgust he let go of her.

“I am a gentleman, miss, and I was taught to never raise my hand against a lady’s person.”  His voice was steely beneath the mushy growl that distorted every vampire’s voice.  Steely and brittle.  He frowned around his sharp teeth.  “I do not know what the etiquette books would say about a lady dressed in man’s attire.”

Maybe he wasn’t going to kill her, at least not right away.  Caxton was too stunned to really comprehend what that meant.  She glanced down and saw her white shirt and her tie.  “This is my uniform,” she said.  “I’m with the State Police.”

“I’ve killed once tonight, and that’s all I want, I think,” he said.  “But I warn you to leave me be.  I’ll not show mercy again, if our paths continue to cross.”  Then he threw her through the air, through darkness.  She felt wet grass smack the side of her face as hard as a concrete wall, and then she felt nothing at all.

The darkness enveloped her as if she were enclosed inside a giant clenched fist.  Then light burst in to her world again and she convulsed violently.

“No!” she screamed, her eyes flicking open.  The light had changed.  The air was warmer.  Where was she?  Where was—who was in front of her?  Was it the vampire?  Her hands shot out and she grabbed for the thing in front of her, grabbed for its throat, not caring if it would prove as hard as stone, and then she had it, she had her hands around its windpipe and it was solid, solid flesh, solid warm flesh—

“Oh, God, no,” Laura shrieked, letting go instantly.  The woman in front of her had black hair that fell in cute bangs across her eyebrows.  Her eyes were a rich brown, wet eyes that reflected Laura’s own screaming face.

It was Clara she had attacked.  Clara who was coughing and sputtering for breath.