Out on the lawn she got a weird surprise—colored light that bounced off the trees and flashed on the wet grass.

Light washed over her, lighting up her hands, her damaged forearm. The light got in her eyes. It was red and blue, or yellow, or white. No less than twelve patrol cars stood parked at odd angles on the sanatorium’s front lawn. Two ambulances and the Granola Roller joined them. Captain Suzie stood up out of the armored vehicle’s sunroof, an MP5 at her shoulder. Her free hand waved Caxton on.

Anger lit up Caxton’s face and made it hot. Where had all these people been? Why couldn’t someone else have killed Deanna for her? While they waited out on the lawn she’d been inside fighting for her life.

Then the Granola Roller’s rear door popped open and Clara jumped out, knee- and elbow-pads strapped over her sheriff’s department uniform. Somebody shouted for her to stop but she kept running until her arms were around Caxton’s chest.

“You didn’t get killed,” Clara said. “When I got your text message I went right to your house.”

“Text message?” Caxton asked. But yes—she’d sent one, right before she found Arkeley in the shed. Hours ago.

“You said you needed my help but you didn’t say what for. I went to your house and it looked like a war zone. The place was trashed and there were bodies everywhere. The dogs were whining like crazy.”

“The dogs?”

Clara nodded. “They’re okay. They aren’t hurt anyway, just scared. I figured you would want to know.”

The dogs were okay. That was something, some piece of good news to clutch onto. Caxton needed more. She needed more good, more life. More something to keep her from breaking down in hysterics.

“When I realized you weren’t there I called my Department and your Troop and the Bureau of Prisons and everybody I could think of, I hope that—”

Caxton leaned in and pressed her lips against Clara’s. After a moment of surprise the police photographer yielded to her embrace. It felt as if she were melting in Caxton’s arms. Half a dozen catcalls and cheers rose from the parked police cars but Caxton didn’t care. It had been a very long night.

“Thanks for coming to my rescue,” she said.

Clara’s eyes were very wide. The rolling, changing lights painted her face now red, now green, now blue.

Caxton strode up to the Granola Roller and nodded at Captain Suzie. She looked around and found Clara’s Sheriff as well. He was out of his jurisdiction but maybe the State Police had temporarily deputized him. She would worry about the paperwork later. “Somebody give me a shotgun,” she said. One was fished out of a patrol car’s trunk and carried up to her. “There are an unknown number of half-deads inside that building,” she said. “We need to find them all. But first we have to get Special Deputy Arkeley out of there. He’s not in great shape.” She realized too late that she had no authority over anyone there—she was just highway patrol, after all. “Does that sound good?” she asked.

Captain Suzie grinned down at her. “Lead the way, Trooper,” she said.

Caxton took six heavily-armed troopers with her, all of them carrying big powerful flashlights. She remembered the way to Malvern’s ward perfectly but still she hated going back into the darkness of Arabella Furnace. She felt as if those shadows could hide anything. When they finally reached the plastic curtain outside the ward she breathed a real sigh of relief. Nothing had jumped out at them. No pale shapes had darted from the shadows to tear them to pieces. “Okay, get that stretcher ready,” she said, and pushed through the curtain.

She was surprised to find Arkeley sitting up inside. She was a lot more surprised to find Malvern walking under her own power.

The old, old vampire didn’t look fully healed, not by a long shot. Her muscles were as thin and dry as vines in wintertime and they wrapped around bones easily visible beneath her papery skin. Her tattered nightgown hung on her like a tent. Her face was drawn and spotted and her one good eye looked only half inflated. But the blood Scapegrace and Deanna had brought to her must have been enough, just enough, to get her out of her coffin for the first time in over a century. She was standing up, walking even, advancing on Arkeley with her mouth open. Her teeth looked fully recovered—sharp, deadly, and numerous.

“That’s right. Come here,” Arkeley said. He was propped up on one arm. The other waved Malvern closer. “Come on, you old hag. You want it. You can have it.”

He had cut his hand somehow. There was fresh blood on his palm. Maybe he had never stopped bleeding—that was the hand with no fingers, the hand Scapegrace had bitten in half. When flashlight beams converged on the hand it gleamed wetly.

Caxton could feel the need, the desire, radiating from Malvern’s body. Every fiber of her newly reconstituted self wanted that blood. It would be all she could see, all she could think about.

She knew exactly what Arkeley was doing. A judge had determined a long time ago that Malvern was a human being, that she enjoyed protection under the law against physical attacks by the police. If Malvern made the slightest move to harm or injure a human being that changed. No court in the state would convict the state trooper who shot a vampire while she was attacking Arkeley. As soon as she touched him she was fair game.

She wanted to yell at Arkeley, to order her escort to drag him out of there. She wanted to save his life. She knew what he would say about that, however. His whole life, twenty years of it anyway, had been devoted to getting this one chance. He didn’t want anyone to blow it for him now.

Caxton stood her ground. She could feel the troopers behind her bristling. They wanted to attack. She held up her hands to stop them.

“Come on. Come on and take it,” Arkeley rasped.

Malvern glided toward him across the floor. Her hands, which lung loose at her sides, clenched and relaxed, clenched into tight fists and then released again. She had to know. She had had plenty of time to lie back in her coffin and imagine what it would be like to take a bite out of the Fed who had imprisoned her—what dreams of vengeance would she have had? Yet she also had to know what would happen to her. What that mouthful of blood would cost her.

“You can’t resist,” Arkeley taunted. “If you were human, maybe, you could handle this. But you’re a vampire and you can’t resist the smell of blood, can you?”

He scuttled toward her, his hand always outstretched, wagging in her face. He was verging on committing entrapment but Caxton decided that if they asked her in a court of law she would lie for him. Anything to give him this win.

A thin, translucent eyelid came down over Malvern’s eye. It shuddered gently as if she were about to faint.

“Come on,” Arkeley shouted. His body was shaking too. He had to be running on fumes. “Come on!”

Her mouth closed slowly. Painfully. Then it opened and a creaking sound like a paper bag being folded up leaked out of her. “Damn ye,” she said.

Then she turned around, slinked back to her coffin, and crawled over the lip. She lay back and let her wrinkled head rest on the silk lining.

“No,” Arkeley yelled, and slapped his injured hand against the floor. “I’ve spent too long on this. I’ve lost everything. Not again!”

With hesitant, weak little motions Malvern reached up and grasped the lid of her coffin. Then she pulled it shut with her skeletal hands.

That didn’t help nearly as much as she wanted it to. She could still love a monster, she knew, if she let herself. She could learn to love Deanna again, she could forgive her for what she’d done, and it wouldn’t even be that hard. But it looked like she wasn’t going to get the chance. Deanna would kill her—unless she killed Deanna first. Her decision was made. She would kill Deanna if she could.

The second thing she had to do was figure out how.

The conservatory greenhouse she’d finally found had once been a long, two-story space where brick walkways wound between tables and espaliers and giant flower pots. The walls and the sloped roof had been constructed of wide panels of plate glass, held in place by a framework of steel girders. It must have been a lovely place once, she thought, a refuge for the dying patients. A place for them to get out of their beds and get some sun. Time and weather had changed the greenhouse, however. The plants had either died or flourished far beyond what the inmates might have ever hoped for. Vines crawled up the glass walls, choking off the grimy panes, littering the brick floor with curled brown debris. The far end of the conservatory had been smashed in all together, perhaps by one of the violent storms that swept through the ridges of Pennsylvania from time to time. Yellow caution tape had been strung back there, tied from one girder to another to keep the staff out. She could see why—long spears of broken glass stood back there, lined up and stood on end, maybe by the same workers who had abandoned all that plaster compound and lumber outside the invalid ward.

Caxton needed a weapon. She waved her light around and found a piece of steel stanchion that had once secured a trellis in place. It looked half rusted and like it might come loose with a couple of kicks. With a rage born of fear and desperation she knocked it loose with her boot. She grabbed it up and immediately felt a little better, even though she knew the sense of security was an illusion. She had a steel bar the length of a riot control baton with one jagged, wicked-looking end. Against a well-fed vampire it might as well have been a piece of rope.

Next she needed to secure the door. She saw a terra cotta pot the size of a refrigerator that she thought she might be able to use as a barricade. She went to grab it, knowing it would take every ounce of her strength to move it, when the door slapped open and Deanna came roaring through.

She was twenty feet away—and then she was right next to Caxton and her pale arm lashed out like a camera flash bulb going off. Caxton’s face went hot with pain and her ears rang as if her head were a bell that had just been struck. She felt herself falling, tumbling backwards. Her nose ached almost immediately—it might be broken. She struggled not to fall over and then, when that became a hopeless endeavor, she struggled to catch herself on her hands.

Deanna reached down and even before she’d struck the ground Caxton was jerked back up into the air. Deanna punched her in the stomach and her breath flew out of her. Nausea wracked her body and she felt like she was going to throw up. Deanna’s hand came down on her forearm and she felt the bones there creak and rub together unnaturally. She lost control of her hand and her pathetic metal bar went flying, skittering across the rough brick floor.

Caxton couldn’t have kept standing if she’d been propped up. She dropped to her knees, knocking them badly, and grabbed at her stomach because she felt as if she’d been disemboweled and her guts were about to flop out. Deanna hadn’t cut her at all, though. There wasn’t a drop of blood on her, not even from her nose, which was hotly numb and sprained at the very least. She was in horrible pain and she felt like she would never stand up again but she wasn’t bleeding.

Deanna had thought through her attack. She’d been careful to keep Caxton in one piece. “What do you want from me?” Caxton sputtered.

“You know what we want. You know what She wants.” Deanna squatted down in front of Caxton and folded her arms across her out-jutting knees. “We want you to kill yourself and get this over with.”

“That’s what she wants,” Caxton replied. “I asked what you want, Dee.”

Deanna laid her head on her arms and looked away. She had to think about it. “This is just a little spat, what you and I are having right now. We can get over it and make up. I still love you. I still want to be with you. But there’s no way that can happen as long as you’re still human. So I want you to kill yourself, too.”

Considering the way she felt right then it didn’t sound so bad. It would be an end to all the pain and all the fear. “I would resent you forever,” she said. “I would hate you for what you turned me into.”

Deanna smiled sadly. “No, I’m sorry, but that’s not true. Maybe at first you would be upset. But then you would get hungry. You would want the blood more than you hated me. Once you tasted it—well, once I tasted it I knew that this isn’t a curse. I don’t care, Pumpkin, if I’m going to get old and withered. I don’t care about how bad the blood tastes. When I felt how strong it made me I didn’t care about anything else. It’ll be the same for you. I promise.”

Caxton was pretty sure Deanna was telling the truth.

“But I’m so scared, Dee,” she admitted. “You know about my mom.” A tear gathered in the corner of her eye but she squeezed it back. Too much.

Deanna reached forward and stroked Caxton’s hair. “I know. I know you’re scared. But it only takes a second.” She grabbed Caxton’s arms and lifted her up to her feet. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

“No,” Caxton said. “Let me do it myself.” She was still shaky but she’d recovered enough to walk. She stepped over to where her iron bar lay on the bricks. “Let’s go over here in the moonlight,” she said. “I can’t do it in a dark place.”

Deanna’s smile was perfectly pure and innocent.

Caxton walked up to the caution tape and lifted her bar. Deanna had hurt her pretty badly but she’d been careful not to spill a drop of blood. Caxton wasn’t sure why but she knew it had to be important. “Maybe I should do it like this,” she said, and dragged the sharp end of the bar across her left wrist.

“Pumpkin, no,” Deanna breathed, raising one hand to stop Caxton. Then she dropped the hand and just stared.

A line of ragged pain ran across her arm. A razor blade would have made a neater incision but the wound wouldn’t have bled so much. Caxton watched dark blood surge up inside the wound, filling the narrow channel in her flesh. It welled up and over the edges of the cut and then spilled down her wrist. A drop splashed on the bricks, black in the moonlight.

“Oh, Pumpkin,” Deanna said. She stared at the blood on Caxton’s arm.

“What? Am I doing it wrong?” Caxton asked. Congreve, she remembered, had been unconscious, hurt, down on the ground and passed out and a single drop of her blood had revived him. It had been like a shot of adrenaline pumped right in his heart. Reyes had tortured and damaged her but he had never broken her skin.

Maybe they were afraid of the blood, as much as they wanted it. Maybe the blood made them crazy. Maybe it made them lose control.

Deanna’s mouth was wide open. Her feet kicked at the bricks. A moment later she was running, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed as her jaws worried thin air. She almost seemed to get airborne at the end, her feet barely touching the ground as she moved as fast as a galloping horse, homing in on the blood.

Caxton timed it perfectly. She dropped to the ground and rolled to the left and Deanna went right past her, moving too fast to stop easily.

The vampire collided with the upright spears of glass with a crunching noise, her arms flailing, trying to find something to hold onto, to stop her impact. Shattered glass filled the air like spinning, falling snow.

The sound... the sound was unearthly. A scream broken into pieces. A million tiny bells ringing.

A living human being would have been shredded. Deanna stood up slowly, her dress hanging from her limbs in tatters. Her skin was a maze of blood, dark, dead blood dripping away, rolling down her arms and legs. She tried to grab at it with her hands. She licked herself like a cat, trying to reabsorb all that lost blood.

It wouldn’t work. “It has to be fresh.” Caxton said. “It has to be warm.”

Deanna looked up with her red eyes and there was confusion in them. She didn’t understand what had just happened to her. Then she saw Caxton’s dripping wrist and her mouth opened involuntarily. She took a step forward—and a jagged tongue of glass neatly impaled her foot. She let out a little yowl.

Caxton stripped off her uniform tie and wrapped it around her wrist, tugging at it until it hurt and then knotting it off as a tourniquet. No point in bleeding to death now, she decided. She let Deanna take a few more painful, injurious steps toward her. She waited until all the blood had dripped away from Deanna’s flawless body, already healed but paler now, very much paler. She looked like she’d been carved from marble.

The pink had left her cheeks altogether. The blood wouldn’t protect her any longer. It would have been nice to have a Glock full of ammunition, but the jagged iron bar would serve just as well. Caxton brought it around in a long arc and plunged the sharp end right into Deanna’s rib cage. A little to the left of her sternum.

Deanna screeched and howled and tried to form words, to beg, to plead. Maybe to say goodbye. Caxton pulled the bar out and then she struck again, and again. Three times had to be enough, she thought. It needed to be. She didn’t have the strength to stab her partner a fourth time. Her arms felt like cut rubber bands.

Eventually Deanna stopped moving. Her red eyes stared up at the moon, her white face perfect still, untouched by horror or pain or death.

And what would happen then? Deanna was already enraged. If she saw fresh human blood would she even stop to consider what she and Caxton had once meant to each other? Caxton was pretty sure she wouldn’t.

She struggled to pull away, twisting her shoulders to the left and then the right. Deanna’s face was a mask of anguish, her eyes wide, her jaw hanging open. All those teeth gleamed even in the minimal light of the invalid ward. Deanna’s head was moving backwards, rearing to strike at Caxton’s neck. The motion was painfully slow, perhaps unconscious. When it was complete Caxton would be dead. She’d watched Hazlitt die like that. She’d seen plenty of vampire victims.

Her arms and hands began to tremble. The death grip on her shoulders was cutting off her circulation. The empty Glock fell from her hand and banged noisily on an iron bedframe.

Caxton gritted her teeth and focused every ounce of strength she had into pulling away, tore herself out of the grip. Her jacket came off in long flopping pieces and she tumbled backward, tripping on the bedframe, her arms flying wide to try to catch herself. Deanna seemed to loom up over her as if she were getting even taller or as if she could fly up over Caxton’s head. She was going to strike from above so Caxton rolled to the side.

The vampire’s weight came down on the bedframe with a grinding, screaming noise of metal being twisted out of shape. Caxton was already rolling to a crouch and then up to her feet. Adrenaline made her feel like she weighed nothing at all, as if she’d been hollowed out and filled full of air.

She didn’t turn to look at Deanna. She just ran.

She ran without even bothering to turn on her flashlight. Her foot grazed a bedframe and she might have fallen down but fear lifted her back up. She slammed painfully into the double doors at the far side of the invalid ward, her hip connecting with the push bar. The doors grated open and she rushed through.

Deanna was behind her, one hand reaching to grab the door almost before she reached the hallway beyond. Caxton swiveled around sideways and ran down the hall with her mouth open, with breath bursting in and out of her body. Before she could even find a doorway Deanna smashed into her back, spilling her across the floor. Caxton got back up by sheer willpower and kept running.

Another door. The room beyond was lined with moldy tiles. She couldn’t see more than three feet in front of her face. She sensed something wrong with the room, as if it didn’t have enough walls or as if the floor was sloping downwards, something, yes, it was the floor, there was something about the floor. She stopped short and fell back to hug the wall.

Deanna came bursting through the door like a pale comet blazing through limitless space. Her face was wide open, her mouth craned back to swallow Caxton whole. She looked in the gloom as if she were flying, truly flying—and then abruptly she disappeared from view.

Caxton tried to get some breath back into her body but there didn’t seem to be enough air in the world to fill the demand. The beginning of a splitting headache lit up the back of her skull as her brain shouted for more oxygen, more adrenaline, more endorphins, more anything. She pushed herself harder and harder against the wall as if it could absorb her, as if the tiles could part and let her inside, into a hiding place.

Deanna screamed in thwarted rage. The noise rolled around the room, reverberating strangely.

Caxton lifted her Mag-lite and switched it on. She played it across the grimy tiles, trying to understand what was going on. Five feet ahead of her the floor stopped short. Had she kept running forward when she entered the room she would have fallen into that pit. She looked at the door she’d come through and her light picked out faded black letters painted there: POOL ROOM.

The pool room—she’d heard Tucker mention it, once. She carefully folded up the twinge of guilt she felt for Tucker’s death and scanned the room, looking to see where Deanna might have gone. She sniffed the air. Any scent of chlorine was long gone, and she was pretty sure the pool had dried up. She did smell something nasty and unnatural, though, something that made her nose wrinkle. It was the smell of a vampire. Wherever Deanna had gone she was still nearby. Close enough to strike at any second. Was she playing some kind of game? Caxton didn’t think so.

She had to know more. But she didn’t want to move away from the wall. It felt as if her body had adhered to the tiles. She took one cautious step closer to the edge of the pool and pointed her light down over the concrete lip.

There was a sheer ten foot drop to the bottom of the pool. Down there she saw tiles, more tiles, endless rows of them. They had been white and smooth once but the black mold that had devoured the grout between them had spread across the crazed surface. Time and water had shattered some of the tiles and left the floor of the pool littered with tiny sharp fragments. A standing pool of dark scum filled one corner of the pool. A little to the left she saw a massive bronze drain, completely black with tarnish. Caxton moved her light slowly across the bottom of the pool. She had to know, she couldn’t just—

Deanna leapt up and nearly snatched the light out of her hand. Her jaws snapped at empty air and she fell back to land on her feet like a predatory cat. She stared up at Caxton with a look of pure and utterly simplistic hatred. There was a smudge of dark muck down the front of her white dress. She had run right through the door, ready to grab Caxton and kill her and feed on her blood. She hadn’t looked where she was going and she’d fallen into the pool. That was the solution to the big mystery.

Caxton stepped back, away from the edge.

Time to run again.

She pushed through the door and back out into the hall. She estimated she had ten or maybe fifteen seconds breathing room before Deanna found a ladder or climbed up out of the shallow end of the pool or figured some other way out. She couldn’t count on any more time than that. With her light on this time she retraced her steps. She had no intention of going back to the invalid ward, though.

It took her three or four seconds to find the door she wanted, the one marked CONSERVATORY. She pushed it open and went through into moonlight so bright it dazzled her eyes.

Behind her she heard Deanna screaming in frustrated rage once more. It wouldn’t be long, now, she told herself. She had better be ready.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, very softly.

“Dee,” she sighed. “Dee. You can’t be. You didn’t—you didn’t.”

“I didn’t kill myself?” Deanna asked. Her voice had that growling quality they got. Her skin was the color of skim milk. She could probably tie a steel bar in knots with her bare hands.

But she was Deanna, alive again. Or almost.

“I broke that window with my own hands. I cut myself up.” Deanna’s eyes wandered upward to Caxton’s. “I guess that counts,” Deanna said. Under the growl there was a breathy quality to the voice. A sexy kind of flutter. It made Caxton’s skin itch.

It would be technically incorrect to say that Caxton thought Deanna was actually alive. She knew better than that. Or rather, her brain knew better. Her body had its own ideas and its own memories. It remembered the shape of Deanna, the shape of Deanna when she was alive. It remembered her smell.

“How could you do this to us? You know what I am. What I’ve been working on,” Caxton said. She stepped closer and touched Deanna’s strangely lumpy jaw. “You’re so cold,” she said. She leaned forward and touched her forehead to the vampire’s forehead. They used to do that, when they were alone, and things were quiet. They used to press up against each other. It felt pretty much the same this time.

“I didn’t have a choice. I mean—except I did. Congreve.” The vampire closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her toothy mouth. She shook with weeping.

Caxton couldn’t stand to see it. “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She put her arms around Deanna’s slender form. She wanted to press her tight until she warmed up again. Until she was a real girl again. A sob died in the middle of Caxton’s throat. It didn’t make it up to the surface. “How do you know about Congreve?”

Deanna pushed Caxton away. She used just enough of her strength to get out of the embrace, but underneath Caxton could feel just how much more power Deanna had if she chose to use it. It was like being shoved gently away by a pickup truck. Deanna wouldn’t hurt Caxton, though. She would never harm her lover. Caxton could feel it in the way Deanna touched her, in the way they moved around each other.

“They’re going to let us be together forever. That wasn’t possible otherwise.”

Caxton shook her head. “Forever. Sure. Forever like one of them. Have you seen Malvern?”

Deanna laughed and it almost sounded like her old laugh. “Of course I have. She called me here.” She was gone then, away from Caxton’s body and that felt wrong. Deanna sat down on one of the bedframes and hugged herself. Caxton kneeled down to bring their faces closer together. “Justinia is the one who made this possible. I was going to die, Pumpkin. I was going to die and I didn’t know how else to save myself.”

“Shh,” Caxton said, and she reached with her thumbs to dry Deanna’s tears. What leaked from the corners of the vampire’s eyes wasn’t water, though, but dark blood. Caxton wiped her fingers on her pants.

“Maybe you’d better tell me how this happened,” Caxton said. Yes. That was good. She had to start thinking like a cop again. But it was so hard with Deanna right there, a Deanna who still moved and spoke and wept.

“Congreve was going to kill me. It wasn’t anything personal. He was just in the neighborhood, hunting and he found me. He came to the house one night when you were out at work. The dogs started singing and the light in the shed went on. I went to see what was happening. I grabbed the long screwdriver from the toolkit and I went back there and I said, ‘Whoever’s in there, you’d better fuck off out of here. My girlfriend’s a cop.’ But nothing happened. So I went to the door of the shed and that’s when he grabbed me.”

“Congreve?” Caxton asked. But how was that possible? She and Arkeley had killed Congreve long before Deanna’s accident.

“Yes. His hands were really rough with calluses and they held me so tight. He told me I was going to die and I started screaming and begging. He told me to shut up and I tried. I really tried. He asked me if I was the artist, if the blankets in the shed were mine and I said no, because I thought maybe he was some crazy religious guy or something and he wanted to kill me for my art. He made me look into his eyes then and I saw he wasn’t human at all. I couldn’t lie to him then, not even if I wanted to. I said yes.”

“Oh, God,” Caxton moaned. “He hypnotized you. He transmitted the curse to you and you couldn’t even know what was happening.”

Deanna shrugged. “I don’t like to think of it that way. He was an artist too, he said. A musician. He really got my work, Laura. That has to count for something, right? He said talent like mine shouldn’t be wasted. He asked me if I wanted to live or die. Just like that. You know, I actually had to think about it.” Deanna looked down at her hands. She picked at the front of the dress. Caxton realized, suddenly, where she’d seen it before. It was the Best Person dress that Deanna had worn to her brother’s wedding. Had the Purfleets buried her in it?

“He made you like him. You must have said you wanted to live,” Caxton said, trying to get back on track.

Deanna nodded. “Then he went away. And I started having those dreams. The dreams about you bleeding to death.”

Caxton crab-walked backwards and sat down on a bedframe so she could face Deanna. They were two women, two living women sitting on beds, their knees almost touching. Two women just having a conversation. That was all, she told herself.

Deanna lowered her face until her voice was muffled by her folded arms. “I fought the curse, as much as I could. I tried not to sleep. It’s in your dreams that they make you hurt yourself. But that’s the merciful part, isn’t it? You don’t feel a thing as long as you’re dreaming. I wish I’d known what it was going to be like so I wouldn’t have been so afraid. I’m really sorry, Laura. I’m sorry I got so scared. Otherwise I wouldn’t have told them about you.”

“What are you talking about?” Caxton asked, trying to keep her voice gentle.

“I told them I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t be one of them if because it would mean leaving you behind. Mr. Reyes said he had the answer for that, though. He said they could take both of us. He really seemed to like the idea.”

No, it hadn’t happened like that. It couldn’t have. Caxton felt like she’d gotten to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and found the picture didn’t match the cover of the box. She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, Deanna. Your story is all mixed up.”

“What do you mean?” the vampire asked.

“This—this case—was all about me, at least, it was about me first. Because I stopped the half-dead at my sobriety checkpoint. That was how Reyes found out about me.” That was the one thing she actually knew for sure, the one clue she’d really had firm and solid in her mind the whole time. It was why Arkeley had drafted her into his crusade in the first place. It was why the half-dead had followed her home. Because the vampires wanted her as one of their own.

“Pumpkin,” Deanna said, rising to her feet. Caxton followed. “Does it really matter who did what first?”

“Of course it does.” It meant everything. The vampires had come after her. They’d been obsessed with her. “This all began on the night of my sobriety check. When the half-dead followed me home.”

Deanna shook her bald head, just a little. “No, Laura, no. It started weeks before that.”

“Bullshit,” Caxton huffed. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Anyway, how could you know that?”

“Jesus, stop already. You’re not this stupid!” Deanna stood up and Caxton followed, but it felt as if she got to her feet first. Deanna was still rising. Eventually she raised herself up to a considerable height. Had she grown after being dead? Or maybe her posture was just better. “That half-dead didn’t just accidentally run across your sobriety check. He was coming to get you.”

“No.” No, no, no, she thought. “No.”

“Yes.” Deanna reached out and grabbed Caxton’s shoulders. Hard enough to pinch. Maybe even to hurt a little. She really wanted to convince Caxton that she was telling the truth. “Congreve sent him to find you, and bring you to him, so you and I could do this together.”

“No,” Caxton said again.

“Yes. Because I was scared to do it alone. And because Reyes wanted a matching pair of us. I was so confused when you woke me up that night as if nothing had happened. Then you scared away the half-dead. The one assigned to you.”

No, Caxton thought, but she couldn’t say it. If she said it she thought it might come out as a yes. Because she saw it could be exactly as Deanna said. It could be. But it wasn’t. Because if it was, if Deanna had been cursed that whole time and Caxton hadn’t even noticed, if she’d failed Deanna that badly—
“This whole thing, all the pain and suffering, was about me. And if you had just tried to talk to me, if you had just stayed with me that night I hurt myself—we could have been—we could have done it together—”

“No!” Caxton shrieked. She just wanted it to stop. She wanted it all to stop. She pulled out the Glock 23 and fired her last three rounds into Deanna’s chest, one two three.

The noise obliterated all words. If only for an instant.

Then Caxton looked down at what she’d done. The white silk dress was scorched and torn but the skin underneath wasn’t even singed. Deanna was completely unhurt.

“Oh god—you’ve fed tonight,” Caxton wailed.

“You’re my girlfriend. You’re supposed to want to be with me forever, no matter what! We’re supposed to want the same things. Why is this so hard for you?”

The fingers on Caxton’s shoulder compressed like an industrial vise. Caxton could hear the bones in her shoulder creak and start to pop.

“Don’t you love me anymore?” Deanna demanded.

Blood. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was full of blood. The half-deads wanted to spill it, maybe in revenge for what she’d done to them and their masters. Maybe because when you were undead all you had in your heart was jealousy directed at the living. They wanted her blood. Then there was the vampire, the unknown vampire haunting the sanatorium, also searching for her, also wanting her blood. But for a different reason.

She heard a half-dead moving nearby. Its feet made less sound on the linoleum than a cat might make padding through a garden, but she heard it. Nothing like fear to concentrate the senses.

She had three bullets left. She knew better than to think they would be any use to her. She could put one of them in her own heart—that way she would at least not come back as a vampire.

Alternatively she could put one in her head. Then she would come back.

Would that be so very terrible? It would be a betrayal of Arkeley, true. But then he had never liked her. If she made herself a vampire at least her life wouldn’t end. It would change in many ways. But it wouldn’t end.

“Yes,” Reyes said, inside of her head. He’d been quiet all night. Either he was losing his grip on her, fading away, or he was just biding his time.

“Yes,” someone else agreed. “In the head.” Someone else.

A full-body shiver made her twitch in the shadows. She heard the prowling half-dead stop not ten feet away. She held her breath until he walked past her hiding place. When he was gone from earshot she let herself exhale a little.

Somebody else had spoken to her from inside her head. It hadn’t sounded like Reyes at all. Somebody else was in there.

“All of you can just shut the hell up,” she told them. A splintered chuckling sounded in the back of her throat as if she’d been laughing to herself. Not nice, she thought, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of a response.

She got up and made her way to end of the dark hallway, using little bursts of light from her mini-Maglite to find her way. The corridor opened out at its end to a wider hallway full of flats of building supplies—stacks of shingles and neat bundles of replacement floor tiles, pallets of lumber, row after row of sealed white plastic buckets full of plastering compound. Moonlight streamed in through a hole in the ceiling and painted everything a ghostly silver, but even in that eerie light Caxton could see the supplies must have been left there untouched for years, bought for some project that never really got started. Maybe they’d planned on fixing the hole in the roof. The wood was worm-eaten and slimy to the touch while some of the buckets had corroded away and spilled white powder in long sinuous drifts across the floor. She approached carefully, knowing that anything could be hiding in the shadows just outside the patch of moonlight. She glanced down at the powder spread across the floor. The wind coming down from the ceiling listlessly stirred the plaster. Slowly it worked at filling in a line of footprints. Laura was no tracker but she could see the feet were no bigger than her own. The tracks were fresh, too, sharply defined. A barefoot woman had come that way recently.

“Laura,” someone said in a room nearby. Or had they? Caxton’s mind wasn’t just playing tricks on her, she had a whole Vegas-quality magic show going on in there. She couldn’t be sure of anything. What she had heard sounded like a cough more than a word. And it sounded more like the building settling than like a cough. If she hadn’t know better she could have convinced herself it was just her imagination.

The footprints lead her eye to a wide set of double doors across the hallway. Black paint on the doors said INVALID WARD. Someone was sending her a message—she was supposed to go through those doors. It was a trap. Arkeley had taught her about traps. Shaking more than she would have liked, Caxton stepped up to the doors and pushed one of them open. It slid away from her easily, its hinges creaking just a little.

The room beyond was cavernous and extremely dark. Her light showed her that it had been stripped bare of anything that could be moved. All that remained in the room were cast iron bedframes painted with flaking white enamel. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred. Some had been pushed into a corner and some effort had been made to stack them on top of each other. The majority remained exactly where they’d been when the sanatorium was abandoned, standing in neat rows that ran away from her into impenetrable darkness.

How many people, how many generations of people had died in that room? How many men had lain in those beds coughing away their lives until someone came to cart their lifeless bodies away? How many ghosts did they leave behind? Caxton’s father had died like that, one little hitching cough at a time. He had died in a bed like—

Feather-light and soft something tapped her shoulder.

A fear leapt on her then, not an emotion but a living, breathing thing that crawled around her shoulders and neck as if looking for some place to hide. Caxton wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She tried to turn around and found that her body was completely paralyzed by fear.

Caxton stopped in her tracks and flicked off the light. Slowly she tried to breathe again. It pretty much worked.

“Laura.” Wind in some trees, maybe, making branches rub together. Yeah, sure. Trees. Maybe the first time she could have believed that. Through sheer dint of repetition she knew what it had to be. It was a vampire and the vampire was playing with her like a cat playing with a wounded starling. The skin on her arms erupted in goose pimples.

It might be Malvern. The bath of blood might have given the moribund vampire enough strength to call out like that from the other side of the sanatorium. Or it could be the other vampire, the complete unknown.

A cold breeze brushed across Caxton’s face, ruffling her hair. There had been no wind in the passage before—either someone had opened a door somewhere or—or—

She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She flicked on the flashlight just in time to see a pale hand flash away from her, dripping red. She gasped in horror and spun around, trying to find where the owner of the hand had gone. She couldn’t see anything. She flicked the light off again and brought her weapon down to low ready. Three.

A second passed and then another and nothing happened.

Caxton wanted to turn the light back on. She told herself she was only handicapping herself by not having it on. Vampires could see living people in the dark. They could see their blood. She imagined the vampire at that very moment looking at her. Would the vampire see her frightened face or just the blood surging inside her veins? She imagined what that must look like: the branching network of her blood vessels as if they’d been carefully surgically removed and then hung from the ceiling by wires. A human-enough shape, but empty, a throbbing tracery, bright red jagged lines pulsing tremulously in the cold air.

The vampire had to be within striking distance. At any moment he or she could pounce and tear Caxton apart. What was the hold-up? Standing there waiting for her own destruction, imagining the pain to come, was almost worse than actually dying.

She flicked on the light and held it straight out, daring the vampire to show itself. And the vampire obliged, stepping right into the path of the beam.

Thirty feet away, or maybe farther, the light showed her little more than a pale human outline. The vampire wore a white lacy dress that looked oddly familiar to Caxton, as if she’d seen it in a magazine or something. The colorless hands were full of blood.

Caxton had seen this apparition before. In the car, when she had passed out because she was so frightened. She had seen this vampire with bloody hands, beckoning, calling to her. Now the hands lifted, palms held out as if to catch Caxton’s light. The red fell away through the fingers. It wasn’t blood at all, Caxton saw. It was hair, clumps of short red hair.

“It all came out at once, Pumpkin,” the vampire said, moving closer. She moved so easily she might have been skating across the floor. “I thought you might like to see it one last time before it’s gone.”

Caxton’s bones hardened in place. She felt as if she were being fossilized. The sound that creaked up out of her wasn’t a name, it was the noise rocks make when they freeze in the winter and crack and split open. By the time it reached Caxton’s lips, though, that noise sounded an awful lot like Deanna’s name.

She switched on her light and pointed it at them. Their torn faces and their glassy eyes reflected the light perfectly. They were dressed in filthy clothes. One wore eyeglasses. A couple were missing hands or arms. There had to be at least twelve of them and they were all armed with kitchen knives, with sharpened screwdrivers, with hatchets or cleavers. One had a pitchfork. When the light hit them their mouths went wide and they ran at her even faster.

If she stayed where she was they would simply cut her down. She flicked off the light and dashed sideways, toward an empty doorway. The door itself lay flat on the floor of the room beyond as if its hinges had rotted away.

There was a window at the far end of the room but she could see instantly that it was barred. The room looked like a jail cell—what had it been, the psychiatric ward?

She could hear them coming. She’d run into the room on pure instinct, just trying to get away. Had they seen her? She didn’t know if half-deads saw any better in the dark than human beings. Had they seen her? She threw herself against the wall to one side of the door and breathed through her mouth. She heard them outside in the hall, their feet pounding on the linoleum tiles, their hands thumping against the plaster walls. Had they seen where she went? They had to be close. They had to be getting closer.

They went right past her. She couldn’t be sure but she thought they’d walked right past the door—she had to be sure.

She leaned out a little into the doorway to get a look and found one of them staring right back. His face was striped and raw where he’d torn away his own skin. His eyes were less hateful than pathetic, full of a weary sadness more profound than anything she could imagine.

Without even thinking about it she reached up with both hands and grabbed his head and twisted and yanked and pulled. He screamed but his flesh tore. It felt less like grappling with a human body than as if she were pulling a branch off a tree. Bones crackled inside his neck as his vertebrae gave way and then she was suddenly holding a human head. The eyes looked right into her—sadness transformed entirely into fear—and the mouth kept moving but it no longer had the breath or the larynx to scream with.

“Ugh,” she said, and threw the head into the room’s shadowy corners. Out in the hall his body kept walking but it had lost all its coordination. It was just muscles twitching with no purpose. Guilt and disgust erupted inside of her and she thought she might throw up. She glanced in the dark corner, wondering if the head was still moving. Wondering how much that hurt, to be beheaded but not killed outright.

Then she remembered the half-deads who had taunted her on the roof of Farrell Morton’s fishing camp. She thought about the one who attacked her with a shovel—and the one who had stood outside her window and tricked Deanna into cutting herself to ribbons. Then the guilt flew away on moth wings.
The headless body kept walking and soon enough it came up against a wall and started beating itself to pieces, its shoulder digging into the wall as if it wanted to push its way through.

The rest of the half-deads turned to look. They stood in the hallway in loose formation, their weapons out and ready but not pointed at her. They had walked past without knowing she was in the room—if she hadn’t looked, they might have gone right past her. It was hard to tell in the deeply dark hallway but she thought they looked surprised.

The pitchfork the headless body had been holding on to fell to bounce with a jangling sound on the floor. She scooped it up in both hands and felt its weight. It was heavy and over-balanced, the metal tines drooping low to the floor when she tried to lift it. It was a ludicrous weapon and one she’d never been trained to use.

She dropped it. It clanged on the linoleum. Then she drew her Glock.

The crowd of half-deads moved backwards. Away from her. That was good. Some of them raised their hands, though they didn’t drop their weapons.

She pointed the handgun at one of them, then another. She made them wince. They couldn’t know how many bullets she had left. She stepped out into the hallway, keeping them covered. She would shoot the first one that moved. Maybe that would scare them enough that they would scatter like frightened rats.

She really hoped so.

One of them had a pair of kitchen shears. He worked them nervously, the blades glinting in the few stray beams of moonlight. Another one wore a dark blue Penn State sweatshirt with the hood up around his ruined face. He was carrying a ball peen hammer. He could break her arm in a second if he got too close.
She took a step backward. The half-deads took a step forward. It wasn’t going to work. They would stop being scared in a second or two and they would rush her. There was no way she could survive if they all attacked her at once. If she didn’t shoot one of them soon they would call her bluff and it would be over.
She picked one. The one with the pitchfork. He didn’t look as scared as the others. Taking her time, lining up her shot, she aimed right at his heart and fired, thinking even as she squeezed the trigger, “four.”

The half-dead’s chest burst open and a stench of rotten meat rolled across her. For a second the others drew back.

Then they started moving toward her again. Their weapons brandished in their pale hands they advanced on her as if they knew exactly what she was thinking. As if they’d been counting her shots too and they knew she didn’t have a chance.

She fired again, wildly, cursing herself even as she snapped off an unaimed shot. If it hit anything she didn’t stick around to see. She ran back along the corridor, back the way she’d come. She could feel them behind her, chasing her. She could hear their feet slapping on the linoleum in the dark. Could they see better in the gloom than she could? She didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. She flicked on her light, more interested in seeing where she was going than in not giving away her position.

She pushed open a door and skidded around a corner, nearly collided with a filing cabinet somebody had left right in the middle of the hall. She pushed it over, adrenaline giving her the strength, and its clattering fall echoed all around her. Maybe one or two of the half-deads would trip over it.

Her breath froze her throat as it rushed in and out of her, and she ran, the light of her flashlight jumping up and down on the walls and floors ahead of her.

There's a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you.
-Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"

“Five,” Arkeley moaned.

She shoved the handgun into the empty holster at her belt. It almost fit. With the step-ladder and with hands that shook badly she managed to lower Arkeley onto the floor. She found rolls of gauze and surgical tape in a rolling cart.

“Five,” he said again, as if he’d just remembered something.

His injuries were terrible. The half-deads had really worked him over—his skin was a maze of cuts, most of them inflamed, and the skin that wasn’t sliced or torn was bruised and even chewed in places. His eyes were swollen shut and his mouth was black and swollen with bruising. Then of course there were the fingers that Scapegrace had torn off. Caxton wrapped his left hand in gauze that instantly turned red with bright arterial blood. She wound more and more bandaging around the wound, tight but not too tight. At least it was his left hand. He would still have the use of his right hand. He could still shoot.

Except—he wasn’t doing any shooting anymore. Not that night, probably not for months. He couldn’t even sit up.

A cold flash went through her when she realized she had been expecting him to get up this whole time and reclaim his gun. She had really thought that her part was done and she could let him mop up.

“Five,” he mumbled.

“Shh,” she said.

It wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t going to fight the half-deads. He wasn’t going to walk out of Arabella Furnace. It was up to her to get out, to run and get help. Maybe—maybe—she could save his life but it was all up to her.

“Five.”

“Okay already,” she said. “Five what? Five half-deads? I think there were more than that when I came in. If you tell me there are five active vampires here I’m going to soil my uniform.” She smiled and patted his good hand.

He sucked in a painful breath and then spoke all in a rush. “There’s only one more active vampire,” he said. He waited a moment, then finished. “There are five bullets remaining in your clip.”

Slowly she removed the Glock from her belt. She ejected the clip and counted the remaining rounds. There were only five left, just as he had said. That was impossible—she couldn’t possibly have already fired eight bullets, could she? She went over the recent combat in her head and realized she had.

She slipped the clip back into the handgun and holstered it again.

“Be more careful,” he said, his head rolling back and forth. “From now on.”

She nodded in agreement. He probably didn’t see it, though, because just then the lights went out.

It happened so quickly Caxton thought it had to be in her head. She blinked her eyes but the blue light didn’t come back. Featureless darkness filled all the available space around her, so thick she felt as if it were rubbing on her dry eyeballs.

“Oh God,” she said. “They know. They know something’s up—what do we do now?”

Arkeley didn’t answer. She reached over and grabbed his bloody wrist. He had a pulse, still, but he must have fallen unconscious.

Caxton searched her pockets, hoping she had some kind of light source on her. Something—anything. Scapegrace had taken most of her gadgets away from her, cellphone, PDA, handcuffs. “Oh, thank you,” Caxton whispered, not knowing who she was talking to. The vampire had ignored her mini-Maglite. He’d probably figured she couldn’t hurt anyone with it. She took it out and pointed it at Arkeley. The miniature flashlight spat out a foggy cone of pale blue illumination that dazzled her eyes for a second. It gave off just enough light for her to see that he was still breathing.

There was a telephone mounted on one wall. She grabbed the handset and pressed it to her ear. No dial tone rewarded her. She flicked the hook a couple of dozen times, trying to make it work, but no dice. Whoever cut the power must have cut the sanatorium’s phone lines, too.

Which meant they had to know everything. They knew where she was and what her first move would be.

If the half-deads—and the remaining vampire—knew she was in Malvern’s ward then her first goal had to be to get away. She couldn’t move Arkeley—he outweighed her considerably and she couldn’t drag him—so she decided she would have to leave him there on the floor. If the bad guys killed him out of spite she would hate herself forever but she imagined they would be too preoccupied trying to kill her.

Waving her light around she found the exit from the ward and slipped along the wall of the corridor beyond. The Glock stayed in her holster so she wouldn’t waste a bullet if she jumped at the first sight of her own shadow. That was an Arkeley kind of thing to do and she was proud of thinking of it. Of course, Arkelely would already have a plan by this point. He would already be putting it into effect.

“Think,” she said, trying to break the layer of fear that covered her brain like frost. “Think.” What could she hope to realistically achieve? She didn’t consider herself tough enough to take on another vampire and an unknown number of half-deads on her own. She’d only beaten Reyes because of Vesta Polder’s amulet, and Scapegrace had died of surprise, not any special quality she possessed. So if she couldn’t fight, what could she do?

She could run. She could get out of the hospital, get to some place where she could call for backup. It was the only realistic plan. The half-deads would try to stop her, she knew. She tried to think like a faceless freak. They hadn’t attacked her directly yet—no, they wouldn’t. They were cowards. Arkeley had told her as much. They would fall back, take away her ability to see and her ability to communicate. They would try to flush her out, to make her walk right into their traps. The half-deads would have secured the main entrance. Going out the way she came in would be suicide. She ducked down the first side corridor she saw.

She remembered her first visit to the sanatorium. She’d thought it was a big spooky maze then. With the lights out it was a lot more unnerving and a whole lot harder to find her way around. She knew generally what direction she was headed: southeast, toward the greenhouse wing. Yes, that would be good. If she could just get outside she would feel much safer. The moonlight might actually let her see something useful.

Her flashlight speared out before, illuminating a lot less than she would have liked. The corridor it lit up was a gallery of dim reflections and long shadows. Anything could be ahead of her, waiting for her. Anything at all. She kept her back to the wall and edged forward, a step at a time. There was nothing else for it.

She was halfway down the corridor, her eyes watching every doorway, when she began to hear a noise like something moving around inside the wall at her back. She shied away from it and heard it dash away from her, as if they’d scared each other off. It was a rhythmic skittering sound, or rather a whole group of sounds, the patter of tiny claws on wood, the thumping of a soft body dragging across broken plaster. Ahead of her, down the hallway, something oozed out of the wall and dropped to the floor.

She swung her light around and speared a rat with her flashlight beam. Its tiny eyes blazed as it looked back at her. Its nose twitched and then it bolted away.

“Nothing,” she said, trying to reassure herself. It came out a little louder than she’d meant it to.

Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, a half-dead hissed, “What was that?”

She stopped in her tracks. She stopped breathing. She switched off her flashlight. There was a tiny bit of light coming in through square inset windows in the double doors at the end of the hallway. A shadow moved across that light, a shadow like a human head.

“Did you see that?” someone else asked, with the same kind of squeaky, rat-like voice. Another half-dead. “Somebody had a light on and they switched it off.”

“Get the others,” the first voice said.

The double doors slammed open then and what looked like a never-ending stream of human silhouettes flooded into the hall.

PS: "LargeheartedBoy" asked me to do a "Book Notes" segment for his blog. It was a lot of fun to write--I basically came up with my ultimate zombie mix tape, circa 1990. Then I wrote a little story about each song. You can check it out here.

“Arkeley,” she said, “oh God, it’s Arkeley. You’ve killed him.” She had already known that he was dead, had already accepted it but this—this was proof. Tears shot out of her eyes and splashed on her shirt.

“Oh, there’s plenty of life left in him yet,” Scapegrace announced. “There had better be.” The half-deads shrunk away from the coffin and she understood intuitively. When they attacked her house they had been under Scapegrace’s orders to take both cops alive. Caxton so she could be turned into a vampire, and Arkeley so Scapegrace could torture him to death for what he’d done to Reyes and Congreve and Lares and Malvern and every vampire he could get his hands on.

Hazlitt touched the Fed’s throat. “He still has a pulse. It’s thready but it’s strong. And he’s definitely breathing. Unconscious, though.”

Scapegrace smiled. “So let’s wake him up.” He stepped over to the dangling body and took Arkeley’s left hand in his own. He stroked the blood-stained skin for a moment, then lifted the hand to his mouth and with one quick motion bit off all four fingers down to the palm.

Fresh blood poured out of the wounds and mingled with the blood in the coffin. Arkeley’s eyes flicked open and a mewling, cat-like sound sagged out of his chest. He sucked in a horrible breath that caught on something broken inside of him and then he moved his lips as if he was trying to speak. Caxton couldn’t hear anything, though.

Scapegrace spat the severed fingers into Malvern’s coffin. They sank into the blood without a trace. “What’s that, Deputy? Speak up.”

“Spuh,” Arkeley rasped. It sounded like two pieces of paper being rubbed against each other. “Spesh.”

“Special Deputy,” Caxton said for him. A kind of gruesome smile, but yes, an actual smile appeared on the Fed’s upside-down face.

“Cax,” Arkeley sputtered. “Caxt—you. You knee.” He took another grating breath. “Need to…” He couldn’t seem to finish his thought.

Scapegrace didn’t like it at all. He reached for Arkeley’s other hand. “Do you have something more to say?” he asked. “Some last kind word for your young friend here? You’ve failed her, old man. She’s going to die, you’re going to die. Everyone is going to die. You’ve failed everybody. Maybe you’d like to say you’re sorry. Go ahead. Whisper in her ear. We’ll all wait here patiently for you to think up your dying words.”

Caxton leaned close, leaning against the edge of the coffin. Her shirt trailed in the blood but she didn’t care. “Jameson,” she whispered. She’d never used his first name before and it felt strange in her mouth. “Please don’t apologize.”

“Kneel,” the Fed told her. It wasn’t what she was expecting. “Kneel before her.”

She recoiled from the words, from the very idea. She sought his eyes, wanting to let him know how angry she was that he would just surrender like that, that he would want her to embrace her doom so wholeheartedly. The light in his eyes was wrong, though. There was a distinct streak of defiance in the wrinkles around his eyes.

He’d never been wrong before. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head as if she were praying in church. She knew very well that it would take more than a simple prayer to save herself, though.

Down on her knees she saw something—a shadow tucked away in the near perfect darkness under the coffin. She saw the triangular shapes of the sawhorses and between them something else, something flat and angular. She squinted and saw that something had been secured to the bottom of the coffin with a silver X of duct tape. She squinted again and finally understood. It was a handgun. A Glock 23.

He must have put it there earlier, of course. Perhaps back on the night when Scapegrace and Reyes had come for Malvern and he had threatened to tear out her heart. He must have planned for this, just as he planned for every possible contingency. That was how you fought vampires—you never let them get the drop on you.

She glanced up at Arkeley’s face. He wasn’t giving anything away. She looked back at the pistol. She knew it held thirteen bullets—there would be nothing in the chamber. She looked up and around the room. “Scapegrace,” she said.

The vampire stepped closer. He was no more than five feet away. “Hmm?”

“Catch,” she said, and tossed the skull into the air. Instantly its high unearthly shriek split the air. Scapegrace grabbed at it, his white hands up and reaching.

She tore the Glock free from the tape holding it to the bottom of the coffin. She worked the slide to chamber a round and saw the vampire’s red eyes go wide. His brain understood what was happening but his hands kept going for the skull. He caught it and crushed it unthinkingly between his pale fingers. Fragments of yellow bone and clods of dirt swarming with worms trickled down the front of his shirt. The shrieking stopped.

Caxton pressed the barrel of the pistol against his chest and fired. He fell backwards, his head smashing on the concrete floor. His eyes swiveled around to fix on her. “Pretty good,” he said, and tried to get a knee under himself so he could rise and kill her. His limbs didn’t seem to want to cooperate. “Shit,” he said, and fell back.

“Go! Get help!” Hazlitt shouted at the half-deads. One of them rushed for the far exit, for the darkness there. Caxton pivoted on her heel and snapped off a shot and the half-dead’s back erupted in a cloud of rotten flesh and torn clothing. She turned to shoot the next one but it was gone, already having fled the room. The third half-dead crouched down on the floor and hugged his knees.

She turned to Hazlitt next. She didn’t point her weapon at him—you never pointed a weapon at a human being until you were prepared to shoot them. He stepped behind a cart of medical instruments and raised his hands. He was too smart, she decided, to actually try something.

Scapegrace had rolled over onto his side and was pushing himself up into a sitting posture when she looked again. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. “You nicked it,” he said.

“What?”

“You nicked my heart,” he finished. He pushed upward with one knee but his arms were trembling. “That was pretty tricky.” He got up on both knees. “You waited until I’d given all my blood to Her. You waited for the moment when I would be at my weakest. Pretty tricky. Listen,” he said, rising to his feet. He lifted his hands into plain sight. “I’ll go quietly, okay? Don’t kill me.” He wheezed as he spoke—had she punctured one of his lungs? She would have given anything for a chest x-ray just then. “Please,” he continued. “You can lock me away forever, whatever you want. But please don’t kill me. I’m not even eighteen years old.”

“Don’t,” Arkeley breathed behind her. Don’t listen, he was trying to say. Arkeley. Was he still alive? He wouldn’t be for long unless she got him down and bandaged his wounds. She turned half around to look at him.

It was the opening Scapegrace had been waiting for. He flew across the room, a pale streak of lightning. Red blood erupted from Hazlitt’s throat and chin as the vampire tore off half of the doctor’s neck. Hazlitt gurgled out a scream. Caxton fired a round into the back of Scapegrace’s head, just by instinct. It didn’t even slow him down. She fired again into his back but he just redoubled his efforts, pressing his face and his rows of triangular teeth deep into the hole he’d made in Hazlitt’s neck.

Every drop of blood he drank would make Scapegrace stronger. He would be bulletproof in seconds. She needed to kill him instantly. Carefully, holding her breath, she lined up another shot and fired through the back of his t-shirt. The bullet tore through the vampire’s body and made him double over in howling pain. He staggered away from Hazlitt and fell across a rack of IV stands. They clattered to the floor as his hands clutched and clutched at nothing, at air. His legs shook like rubber bands and he collapsed to the floor and finally, convulsively, died.

Hazlitt took one last look around the room, his face and chest and the whole front of his body one continuous sheet of flowing blood. Then he slumped to the floor as well, just as dead as the vampire.

The half-dead in the corner jumped up and started running for the door. Caxton fired reflexively and missed him. She fired again and pulverized his left arm. The half-dead started whining in pain but he didn’t stop. She fired a third time and his whole body fell apart in pieces.

A millipede with long, hairy feelers had crawled out of the left eye socket and was working its way across the back of her hand. Its body looked wet and slimy. Its legs made her skin itch. It was all she could do not to jerk her hand away. If she did, though, she knew that Scapegrace would cripple her instantly. Knowing the teenaged vampire he would probably put the millipede in her hair, afterwards, just to torture her.

She bent her knees and gritted her teeth and tried not to care. It was just an insect, she told herself. It was extremely unlikely that it was poisonous.

Carefully she raised the skull to the level of her mouth. She took a deep breath and blew on the millipede, trying to knock it off her hand. Its head waved in the jet of air but then its back legs anchored between two of her knuckles. She blew harder, and harder, until she thought she might pass out again.

Scapegrace snorted out a mocking laugh. She sucked in air and then spat it at the millipede until it finally flew off of her hand. The vampire shook his head in amusement and then gestured for her to follow. “This way,” he said, “if you’re okay, now.”

Hazlitt ran ahead into the darkness and switched on a light in the corridor ahead. All but one of the fluorescent tubes in the corridor had been smashed. They hung above her like jagged glass teeth, sparking now and again. What little light remained was barely enough for her to find her way to the far end of the passage. They were headed directly for Malvern’s private ward—she recognized the route they took from her previous visits.

Scapegrace glanced at Hazlitt, then lifted aside the plastic curtain and went inside. Caxton started to follow but the doctor touched her arm and shook his head. Together they stood there for long minutes listening to Scapegrace retch up his cargo of stolen blood. Tucker’s blood, Caxton thought. Maybe Arkeley’s blood. He was feeding Malvern, of course, just as Lares had the night that Arkeley killed him. When Scapegrace was finished and the noises had stopped Hazlitt nodded at her. She pushed through the plastic curtain and stepped into the blue-lit room. Her eyes went out of focus for a moment, adjusting to the new light, and her head grew light. She thought she heard someone calling her name and she swam back to lucidity. She was so scared she thought she must be going crazy. “Laura,” she heard, again, a woman’s voice. Was it Malvern? No, that was impossible. Malvern’s vocal cords had dried up a hundred years ago. “Laura.” It was as clear and as loud as if someone stood behind her, calling her. She turned but she knew nobody would be there. It was as if a ghost were talking, like the ghost in Urie Polder’s barn.

“Officer?” Hazlitt said, looking a little concerned.

“Nothing,” she said. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the blue light. She saw that the room had been changed around a little. The medical equipment had all been shoved back into the corners and the microphones and probes that had once hung down from the ceiling to constantly measure Malvern’s status had all been cleared away. The laptop remained, sitting alone on a metal stool. Caxton glanced down at the coffin propped-up on its sawhorses. Blood filled the coffin almost to the rim. She was sure Malvern was in there, submerged under the dark fluid, but she couldn’t even see a shadow beneath the still surface. Then, as if in response to her stare, a ripple ran across the blood and five tiny peaks appeared in the surface. They pressed upward out of the coffin and she saw they were fingernails.

Malvern’s hand lifted from out of the blood, clotted fluid dripping and falling away from the fingers. There was more flesh on the bones than before—clearly being soaked in human blood was having the predicted effect on Malvern. She was rejuvenating, revivifying. Her hand reached for the keyboard of the laptop and she began to type. Character by character she spelled out a message for her new guest:

well come, laura

When the vampire was done typing her hand slithered back inside her coffin. It was all so quiet and stately and polite that Caxton felt an absurd urge to curtsey and thank her hostess for her kind hospitality. Scapegrace tapped her on the shoulder, then, and she turned back around. Then she lost her breath. There was a noose hanging down from the ceiling, hovering over a simple wooden chair. “That’s—for me,” she stammered. “So I can—so I can—finish myself off and complete the rite.”

“Yes,” Hazlitt told her. “I want you to know I opted for a lethal injection. I have one made up for myself. They wouldn’t hear of it.”

“It’s how your mother did it, right?” Scapegrace asked. He sounded almost solicitous, as if he really wanted to make sure he’d gotten it right. “She hanged herself? The symmetry of it appealed to us.”

“Yes, that’s right.” She nodded, trying to fight back by being more nonchalant than he was. Her stomach boiled with acid but she refused to let it show. Symmetry. The kind of thing that would appeal to a vampire’s spiky, twisted, obsessive-compulsive mind. “She hanged herself. When I was very young. Is it time, now?” she asked, a lump in her throat. “Is it time for me to.” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “You know.”

“We’re not quite finished,” Scapegrace told her.

A half-dead entered the room and climbed up a step-ladder to hang a pair of thick iron chains from the ceiling. When he was done he took his ladder away and made room for two more half-deads, who dragged something in a big canvas sack into the room. There were ugly stains on one end of the sack. They grunted and cursed as they struggled with their burden but they didn’t complain openly. From time to time they would look up at Scapegrace as if they expected him to pounce on them and tear them apart just for fun.

Finally they got their bag open. Inside was a human body, a big one, dressed up in a dark suit. There was so much blood on the hands and face that Caxton couldn’t determine the race or even the sex of the cadaver.

No—wait, she thought. It wasn’t dead. It moved, though surely only by reflex, a twitch here or there, a last shudder before the body could finally succumb to mortal wounds. The half-deads attached the dangling chains to the body’s ankles and started hauling it up into the air. Scapegrace moved forward to help them lift it up, over the coffin, until the body dangled over Malvern’s submerged form with its out-stretched fingertips nearly brushing the surface of the pooled blood.

The body swung from side to side, first left, then right. Scapegrace and Hazlitt both kept looking at her face as if they expected her to have some kind of reaction. She’d seen worse, she wanted to tell them. She’d scraped prom queens off the asphalt. Then she realized why they wanted her to see this particular body.

It had a small silver badge on its lapel, a star in a circle. The badge of a Special Deputy of the US Marshals Service.

A car, a late model white sedan, sat waiting for them in the lot, its engine idling, its lights on. Doctor Hazlitt sat in the driver’s seat, looking nervous.

“She promised Hazlitt could be one of us,” Scapegrace told her. He was standing behind her so close she could feel his cold breath on her neck. “She promised him lots of things.” The vampire held open the passenger door for her. She could hardly open it herself while she held the baby’s cursed skull in her hands. She climbed in and realized she couldn’t fasten her seatbelt, either. She guessed that didn’t matter.

“Hello, Officer,” Hazlitt said. She didn’t look at him. He sighed and tried again. “I know you have no reason to like me just now,” he went on. “In a few hours, though, we will be allies. That’s how this is going to work out. Can’t we be civil to one another now?” When she didn’t answer he started up the car and turned onto the highway headed southeast. Toward the tuberculosis sanatorium where Justinia Malvern waited so patiently.

They were going to make her kill herself. She’d understood that before but she hadn’t considered how it might happen. Reyes had wanted it to be her own choice, and he had nearly succeeded in talking her into shooting herself. He’d wasted time trying to convince her—and before he could finish with her the sun had come up. Scapegrace wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He would force her hand. Judging by the methods of persuasion he’d used so far she imagined he would torture her until she begged for death. Then he would give her the means to do herself in.

Arkeley couldn’t stop them this time. Arkeley was dead. Tonight I’m going to die, she thought, and then tomorrow night I will rise as a vampire.

She wanted to fight them. She wanted it so badly—her body was wracked with the urge to attack, the need to kill the vampire and the doctor. Little whitecaps of adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, beckoning her on. But how? She had no weapons. She didn’t know any martial arts.

On the verge of panic she started breathing fast and shallow. Hyperventilating. She knew it was happening but she didn’t know how to make it stop. Hazlitt glanced over at her, concern wrinkling his face.

In the back seat Scapegrace seemed bigger than he actually was. He was like some enormous growth, white and flabby like a cancer, filling half the car. “She’s just afraid. Her pulse is elevated. She might pass out.”

“Yes, thank you,” Hazlitt shot back, "I know the symptoms of an anxiety attack. Do you think we should sedate her? She could hurt herself or someone else.”

“She might hurt you,” Scapegrace said, laughing a little. “Don’t worry. I’ll grab her if she has a seizure or something.”

Tiny sparks of light flashed inside Caxton’s eyes. They swam across her vision and were gone as quickly as they’d come. Her throat felt dry and thick and very cold with the air howling in and out of her body. She could hear her own heart beat and she could feel it pulling in her chest. Then bars of darkness appeared at the top and bottom of her vision like when they played old movies on television. The bars thickened and she heard a high pitched whining that filled up her head with its tone and then everything went all soft and fuzzy and out of focus.

She could hear Hazlitt and Scapegrace talking but only as if they were shouting through thick layers of wool. They were drowned out by the ringing in her ears. She could feel her body around her but it was completely numb, rubbery and dead. She could move if she really wanted to but just then she didn’t really want to.

The fear was gone altogether.

That was the best part. She knew things were still bad and that they wouldn’t end well, but her fear was gone and she could think clearly again. She didn’t want to sit up—that might break the spell—but she looked forward, through the windshield, and tried to see where they were going. There was something out there but it wasn’t the highway. It was pale and big and it had long triangular ears. It was a vampire, maybe Malvern. The vampire raised its hands to her and they were full of red blood. It was offering that redness to her, like a gift.

Scapegrace slapped her across the back of the head and her eyes whirled around in her head and she was back, the ringing gone from her ears.

“I said, are you okay?” Hazlitt yelled. He had one hand on her neck, maybe feeling for her pulse.
She wanted to bat him away but then she looked down and saw she was still holding the baby skull. Whatever had happened she’d managed not to let it fall out of her hands. She remembered she wasn’t allowed to let go of it. She pulled away from Hazlitt as best she could with her shoulders. “I’m fine,” she managed to say. Her voice sounded weaker than she felt. “What happened?”

“You swooned,” the doctor told her, his voice thick with gloating.

She scowled. She wasn’t the kind of woman who swooned. She thought about it, though. Once, when she and Ashley (Deanna’s predecessor) had been in Hershey on vacation, she had drunk chocolate martinis until she had literally passed out. She had woken up on the floor of the ladies’ room with a crowd of scared-looking cocktail waitresses looking down at her. It had felt a lot like what had just happened—but even that hadn’t made her feel so much shame.

Wow, she thought. If Arkeley could have seen her just then he would have had concrete proof of all the horrible things he’d ever said about her. Thank God he wasn’t in the car. Because he was dead.

She worked her face muscles, stretching out her jaw, puffing out her cheeks, trying to revive herself. By the time they reached the hospital she felt pretty much recovered. Hazlitt drove up onto the main lawn next to the statue of Hygiene and they piled out of the car, Caxton very careful not to drop the skull even though her palms were clammy with sweat.

Twelve or thirteen other cars were already parked haphazardly on the grass. They were all empty. A bonfire burned close to the front doors of the hospital. Caxton was pretty sure that the Corrections Officers who ran the place weren’t just having a weenie roast. She was right. As they walked up toward the entrance she saw the COs lined up on the ground near the fire, their hands tied behind their backs, their faces down in the grass.

She thought they must be dead. It was almost a relief to think that. When one of them moved her body sagged with brand new horror.

Tucker, the guard who had helped Arkeley find out Reyes’ personal information, strained his neck trying to look up and see who had arrived. Caxton did everything she could to look away, to not be seen, but it didn’t work. His eyes met hers for a moment and it was like they had a little conversation, it was like they had some of the magic of the vampires and they could communicate with just the firelight that shook in their eyes.

I’m so sorry, she tried to say with her eyes. But there’s nothing I can do.

His eyes were easy to read, even from twenty feet away. Help me, they said. Please. Please help me.

That was her job, of course. Helping people. At the moment she was indisposed, however. Tucker was going to die because she hadn’t been strong enough. Just like everybody else. There was blood on her hands—the metaphorical kind, anyway.

“That guy means something to you?” Scapegrace asked. He didn’t give her a chance to deny it. He stormed over to where Tucker lay on the grass and scooped up the big CO in one arm. Tucker outweighed the vampire by probably a hundred pounds but it didn’t seem to matter. Scapegrace fastened his big toothy mouth around Tucker’s neck and bit down, almost gently. Like he was biting into an apple and didn’t want to spurt any of the juice. Then he began to suck.

Caxton had no recourse but to scream for him to stop. She might as well have yelled at an avalanche—if anything she just spurred him on. The CO’s face went grey, then white. It never got as white as the vampire’s skin. His eyes rolled around in his head and his body quivered but he never screamed. Maybe Scapegrace had crushed his larynx. When it was over the vampire just threw the body down on the ground. It was useless. Blood ringed his mouth, bright red blood. “They’re all going to die,” he told her. Some of the other COs whimpered. One began praying in a sobbing, warbling voice.

Scapegrace took him next.

After the third or fourth victim had been drained Hazlitt cleared his throat. “Leave the rest for now,” he said. “Justinia wants to talk to our guest.”

Scapegrace jumped up and ran his forearm across his wet mouth. He moved across the grass so quickly he left trails in the air. Without seeming to move at all he had his hands around Hazlitt’s neck. He forced the doctor down to the ground until he was kneeling on the wet grass, looking up into the vampire’s eyes with sheer terror bringing waxy sweat onto his forehead.

“You’re not one of us yet,” Scapegrace said. “You think you can remember that?”

The doctor nodded emphatically. The vampire let him up and then they all went inside.

When she knew what to look for it was obvious. The low stones were badly eroded, ground down by time’s wheel until they were just tall enough to trip over. She could see where they made neat rows, however, and at the far end of the clearing she could see twisted bars of metal, the remains of a pair of wrought iron gates.

There were little graveyards like this all over the countryside of Pennsylvania, Caxton knew. Developers hated them because they were legally required to move the bodies if they wanted to tear up the land. More often than not they just left them in place. It was no great shock to find one in the woods behind her house. There must have been a church nearby in some past decade or century but it had been burned or pulled down since. Nor was there was anything to fear from the graves, she told herself—vampires slept in coffins, yes, but they didn’t bury themselves in ancient churchyards just for the ambience.

Something snapped maybe ten yards from her head. A fallen branch or maybe a crust of frost on the ground. It could have just been a cat or a deer—or it could have just been a branch laden down with rain finally giving way.

Caxton froze anyway. Her entire body craned toward her ears, her whole brain tuned up in anticipation of the next sound.

It came in a series of tiny pops, like a string of firecrackers going off but much, much softer. Maybe something had trod on a carpet of pine needles. Caxton lowered herself inch by inch until she was lying flat on the ground, trying to make herself small, trying to make herself invisible.

“Did you see that?” someone warbled. It was the squeaky voice of a half-dead. After a moment she half-heard a muttered reply. It sounded negative.
She cursed herself for lying down, for moving at all. In the darkness, if she’d been perfectly still, maybe they would have walked right past her.

She had one bullet left in her Beretta. The flesh of half-deads was rotten and soft and she could probably beat another one to pieces. If there were three of them, however, or if they were faster than she expected, it would all be over.

She tensed her body, ready to strike upward if anyone came close. She would try her best to destroy them, if there were two of them. If there were three, or more, she would shoot herself in the heart. It would prevent her from being raised as a vampire.

“There, what’s that?” a half-dead asked.

There were two of them. There had to be two. She prayed there were two.

Then she heard a third voice.

“You two, leave us alone,” someone else said, someone who had to be standing right behind her. She rolled over and looked up into a pale silhouette with a round head. It wore a pair of tight jeans and a black t-shirt. Its ears were dark and ragged-looking.

Scapegrace.

Caxton brought her pistol up and fired her last round point blank into the vampire’s chest. The bullet tore through his shirt, then pranged off into the trees. It didn’t even scratch his white body. She hadn’t really expected to kill him—even in the dark she could see the pinkish glow of fresh blood moving beneath his skin—but at the least she’d expected to make him turn and snarl. He didn’t even laugh at her. He just crouched down next to her and touched the grave marker she’d tripped over. He didn’t look at her or touch her.

She tried to ask a question but her throat kept closing up. “What… what are you going to…”

“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “Don’t say anything unless I speak to you first. I can kill you,” he added. “I can kill you instantly. If you try to run away I can catch you. I’m much faster than I used to be. But I want to bring you in alive. I mean, those are my orders. I think you know what She wants. I’ve also been told that if I hurt you a little, that’s okay. That it might even help.”

He faced her, then, and she had a bad shock when she saw how young he looked. Scapegrace had been a child when he killed himself. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most. His body was still painfully skinny and hunched. Death hadn’t made him a grownup overnight. He still looked like a little boy.

“Please don’t look at me like that,” he said to her. “I hate it.”

Caxton turned her face away hurriedly. She knew her own features had to be wracked by fear. Snot was running across her upper lip and cold sweat was breaking out on her forehead.

“I can see some things in the dark but I can’t read this,” he told her, running his fingers across the headstone. The lettering there had mostly worn away but here and there an angle or a fragment of a curved inscription could still be seen. “Maybe you can read it better. Read it to me.”

Her throat shuddered and she thought she might throw up. She fought her body until it was back under her control. She couldn’t quite read the letters but maybe it would help to feel them, she thought, to trace them with her fingertips. Trembling fear lanced up her forearm as she ran one finger across the face of the stone. She could make out a little:

ST PH N DELANC
JU 854 – JULY 1854

She told him what she had discovered. “I think—I think it says Stephen Delancy, died July 1854. The date of birth is h-h-harder to m-m-make out,” she chattered.

Caxton felt as if someone were pouring out cold water over her back. It had to be at least partially the weird feeling she always got around vampires, the cold sensation that she got standing next to Malvern’s coffin or whenever Reyes had touched her. But most of that skin-crawling horror had to come from the fact that at any moment he could kill her. Tear her to pieces before she could even raise her arms to ward him off.

“Do you think he was born in June or July? Did he live for a full month or only a few days?” Scapegrace knelt down beside her and ran a hand across the gravestone as if he were caressing the face of the infant buried below. “I guess there’s one way to find out.”

“No,” she screamed, as he dug his pale fingers into the soil and started tearing out clods of earth. She threw herself at his back and beat on his neck with her empty pistol. Finally she got a reaction out of him.

Turning from his kneeling posture he grabbed her around the waist and slung her away from him. The empty Beretta flew out of her hand and into the darkness. She couldn’t see where it went because she was too busy reeling across the graveyard. She tumbled backwards, her feet kicking at the ground pointlessly. She came down hard across another gravestone, this one nothing more than a stub of rock sticking out of the ground like a decayed tooth. Her elbow collided with the stone and wild pain leapt up and down her arm. She didn’t think she’d broken anything—just hit her funny bone.

Scapegrace had made a hole three feet deep by the time she could stand again. The bones and cartilage of her hand still thrummed with agony but she was going to be okay. She found herself crying, though, as he lifted a wooden box out of the ground. She couldn’t stand it—between the fear and the horror of what he was doing she thought she was going to start screaming, that she would run away even though she consciously knew he would just chase her down.

The box was of some light-colored wood, maybe pine, riddled with worm casts. It was decayed so badly that she couldn’t tell if it had originally been ornate or plainly made. The baby-sized coffin broke apart in Scapegrace’s hands though he was clearly trying to be gentle with it. He brushed away the fragments of pulpy wood and the dirt and sediment that had collected around the body inside.

“My family had a big funeral for me,” he told her. “I could kind of see what was happening, like I was a ghost floating around the ceiling of the church. Everybody from my school was there and they walked past and looked down at my face and some of them cried, and some of them said things. Sometimes it was people I didn’t even know. Girls who would never have talked to me in the hall, not even if they needed a pen and I had a spare one. Some of them were really upset, like they finally understood what it was like, what they had done to me. That was kind of awesome. Nobody would touch me, though.” Gently, with his thumb, he brushed debris away from the tiny body.

“Please,” Caxton said, the word strained and stretched as it came out of her. “Please. Please.” He didn’t strike her but he didn’t stop what he was doing, either. He shook the coffin a little and debris and dirt and other matter fell away. Vomit surged up her throat and she turned to the side, ashamed to show such disrespect but unable to stop herself from throwing up right then and there.

“When you’re on the other side of it, death just isn’t scary anymore. Actually, it becomes kind of fascinating. A lot of being a vampire is like that. It totally changes your perspective.” He held something round in his left hand, something about the size of an apple. With a half twist he removed it from the coffin. The rest of the infant’s remains went back in the hole and he kicked dirt over them. Then he turned around and showed her what he’d found.

It was the skull, of course. Stephen Delancy’s skull, which had been buried for a hundred and fifty years. “Look,” he told her. “He was only a few days old when he died.” He showed her the skull. It was packed full of dirt and smeared with dried fluids. It was horrible to behold, sickening. “Maybe he was never really born.” He considered the baby-sized cranium at length. “This will work,” he said. He rubbed at the skull with his thumbs and then stared deeply into its eyesockets as he chanted softly. She didn’t understand the words—she wasn’t even sure they were words he was speaking.

When he finished he closed his eyes and then held out one hand, the skull balanced on his white palm. After a moment the skull began to vibrate. She could see it blur with motion. A sound leaked out of it, a kind of wailing moan it couldn’t possibly make on its own—it didn’t even have a lower jaw. The scream grew louder and louder until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. Instead Scapegrace pressed it against her hands. “Take it,” he said, and she could hear him just fine over the shrieking. “Go on—my ears are more sensitive than yours. Take it!”

She took it in her hands and the screaming stopped instantly.

“I’m going to take you with me, back to Her lair. I need you to behave, though. So we’re going to play a little game. You’re going to hold Stephen in both of your hands, because that’s the only way to keep him quiet. Nod for me so I know you understand.”

She shuddered. It made her head bob on her neck as if it weren’t fully attached. She wrapped both hands around the skull. Something moved and chittered inside, some insect hidden in the dirt that filled the baby’s sinus cavity. She moaned a little but she didn’t drop the skull.

“Now you keep good care of that. If you take your hands away from it or if you drop it or if you crush it because you’re holding it too hard, I’ll hear it scream. Then I’ll have to hurt you. Really, really badly.” He squinted his red eyes and stared shrewdly into her face. “I’ll break your back. You know I can do that, right?”

She nodded again. Her whole body trembled.

“Okay, Laura,” he said. “Now move.”

“No, I don’t,” Arkeley said. He checked the action on his Glock 23. He gestured at her own Beretta where it lay inert in her hand. She checked to see there was a round in the chamber and then she raised the weapon to shoulder-height, the barrel pointed at the ceiling. “Malvern is still at Arabella Furnace. I had Tucker check on her fifteen minutes ago and there was no change in her condition. So we have to assume that we made at least one mistake.”

“We saw three coffins at the hunting camp,” she insisted. She didn’t want to hear what he said next, even though it was already echoing in the dark cloister of her own skull.

“That doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been another one somewhere else.” Arkeley moved toward the light switch, careful to stay out of the shed’s wide doorway. “Let’s go over what I do know. I came here tonight to officially relieve you of duty. I was going to send you back to the Highway Patrol. Then I saw that something was wrong. There were maybe ten cars and trucks parked out on the road. I looked around but none of your neighbors were having a party. I abandoned my own vehicle and came in here on foot, through the woods. By then they were already setting up their ambush. There are six half-deads hiding out by the driveway, there are five of them stationed in the yard next door, and three more of them on the roof of the kennels. There will be more—those are just the ones I found. I saw one vampire giving them orders. His ears were docked so we have to assume that was Scapegrace. Then another vampire climbed out of your bedroom window.”

“You’re absolutely sure it was a vampire you saw coming out of the window? How good a look did you get?”

He shook his head. “I can’t be certain of anything. But I saw something with pale white skin and long ears. Its hands were stained red.”

Caxton moved up to the other side of the doorway, just as she’d been trained. When they left the shed they would go together, facing slightly different directions so they could cover each others’ backs.

She texted Clara and told her to summon reinforcements. She called in to headquarters to report an officer under fire. She knew nobody could get there in time—the closest barracks was twenty miles away. They were going to have to fight their way out on their own, just the two of them. She looked up at Arkeley. “Do we have a plan?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her. “Shoot everything that moves.”

Together they stepped through the doorway. Arkeley raised his weapon and fired even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She saw a shadow coming toward her, a shadow with a broken face, and she shot it center mass. It crumpled and fell without a sound.

There were more of them. Suddenly they were everywhere.

Shadows detached from the trees, pale shapes darted around them like wolves circling to the attack. There were no warnings given this time, no cryptic messages to draw them out. A half-dead whirled out of the dark, a six-inch knife in his hand, and Caxton smashed him across the face with her weapon. He went down but not before three more sprang out at her. “There are too many,” she shouted. “We need to get out of here!”

“Go,” the Fed yelled back, though he was only three feet away. “Go now!”
Caxton broke away from Arkeley and dashed to the side of the kennels, intent on getting something behind her at least. Otherwise they might sneak up on her. She expected Arkeley to run for cover as well, to protect himself.

He didn’t.

The Fed dropped into a firing crouch and moved out into the open space between the kennels and the house. His gun arm stood straight out from his body and it swung back and forth like a weathervane as he tracked some assailant she couldn’t see. He squeezed the trigger and bright fire leapt from his barrel. To her side, just inches from her left shoulder, a half-dead slipped downward to writhe in agony on the ground.

He spun and fired again—and a third time. Shadows howled and flopped in the darkness, but more of them appeared as if emerging from out of the night, as if they dropped from the moon-colored clouds. One leapt onto his back and bit at his neck with sharp teeth. He smashed its nose with his free fist and knocked it away. Another rolled into his legs and knocked him halfway down, dropping him to one knee. He shot her in the chest and she jerked backward. A half-dead grabbed his gun arm then and twisted.

He yelped in pain—Arkeley, of all people, cried out in pain. He must have been in agony. The half-dead must have caught him completely off his guard. Caxton wondered if his arm was broken.
Not that she didn’t have her own concerns. The half-deads were coming for her, too, though with far less force or numbers. Clearly they didn’t consider her to be a threat on Arkeley’s level. She found herself almost disappointed.

She fired at a dark shape that lunged down across the roof of the kennels and it fell to the ground with a hiss of exhausted breath. She kicked it in the legs and felt its flesh yield. Another half-dead reached down to try to grab her shoulders and he lifted her gun and fired without even looking.

“Go,” Arkeley shouted again. She looked over in his direction but could barely see him. He was surrounded on every side by Scapegrace’s servants. She discharged her weapon over and over, trying to thin out the crowd, even as she dashed out, away from the kennels. He was about to be overrun and she knew it but there was very little she could do. She couldn’t save him—she didn’t have enough bullets. Her only hope was to get away herself and find some backup.

The problem was she wasn’t sure where to go next. The driveway lead straight out to the road and the possibility of help. Any police response would come from that direction, assuming she lived long enough for anyone to arrive. Arkeley had said there were half-deads stationed out there, however. They would almost certainly be laying in wait.

Instead she turned to the back of the drive, to where a ten-foot privacy fence cut through the trees. She got a foot in between two of the boards and lunged up and grabbed at the branches that protruded over the top. Adrenaline carried her up and over and she slid down the trees on the other side, branches whipping at her face and digging up long scrapes on her hands and arms. She rolled down a steep embankment and into the parking lot of the elementary school next door. In the moonlight the black asphalt sparkled underneath her.

She heard gunfire from the other side of the fence. One shot—two more. Then nothing. She tried to breathe normally, tried to control her urge to panic. Arkeley was probably dead, she decided. That was bad, in many different ways, but it didn’t change her situation.

The trees by the fence shivered and their dry leaves whispered as they rubbed together. Two half-deads were climbing up after her. Chasing her. They would be on her in a second.
She checked her weapon. She only had one round left. She was better off saving it, she decided. She climbed up to her feet and ran.

The school building was low and rectangular, a black edge in the night that she followed. She didn’t know if half-deads could see in total darkness or not—vampires could see your blood glowing in the gloom but what about their servants? It was one of the many things she should have asked Arkeley back when she’d had the chance.

Back when he was still alive.

Guilt dripped down her spine as she dashed around a corner and up a short stairway. She could feel guilt and run at the same time. Ahead of her lay a backstop and a chain-link fence, the pale dirt of a baseball diamond. She dashed through a narrow gap in the fence and slid in a patch of dark mud.

There were trees ahead of her. Not such a big surprise. There were trees everywhere in Pennsylvania. They might give her a little cover, she decided. They might shield her from half-dead eyes. She slipped between them and realized her mistake