13 Bullets

13 Bullets

By

David Wellington

Part I - Lares

1.

Though far and near the bullets hiss/

I've scaped a bloodier hour than this.

-George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Giaour

Incident Report filed by Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley, 10/4/83 (recorded on reel to reel audio tape):

Through the rain there wasn’t much to see. The all-night diner stood at the corner of two major streets. Its plate glass windows spilled a little light on the pavement. I handed the binoculars to Webster, my local liaison. “Do you see him?” I asked.

The subject in question, one Piter Byron Lares (probably an alias), sat at the diner’s counter, hunched over in deep conversation with a middle-aged waitress. He would be a big man if he stood up but leaning over like that he didn’t look so imposing. His face was very pale and his black hair stood up in a wild shock of frizzy curls. An enormous red sweater hung off him—another attempt at camouflaging his size, I figured. He wore thick eyeglasses with tortoise-shell rims.

“I don’t know what they teach you at Fed school, Arkeley, but I’ve never heard of one them needing glasses,” Webster said, handing me back the binoculars.

“Shut up.” The week before I had found six dead girls in a cellar in Liverpool, West Virginia. They’d been having a slumber party. They were in so many pieces it took three lab technicians working night and day in a borrowed school gymnasium just to decide how many bodies we had. I was not in a good mood. I had beaten one of the asshole’s minions to dust with my bare hands just to find out his alias. I wasn’t going to slow down now.

Lares stood up, his head still bowed, and took a leather wallet out of his pocket.

He began to count out small bills. Then he seemed to think of something. He looked up, around the diner. He rose to his full height and looked out at the street.

“Did he just make us?” Webster demanded. “In this weather?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. About a gallon of bright red blood erupted across the diner’s front window. I couldn’t see anything inside.

“Shit!” I screamed, and pushed my way out of the car, across the sidewalk, the rain soaking me instantly. I burst inside the diner, my star bright on my jacket, but he was already gone and there was nobody left alive inside to be impressed. The waitress lay on the floor, her head nearly torn off her body. You read about them and you expect vampire wounds to be dainty little things, maybe a pair of bad hickeys. Lares had chewed most of the woman’s neck off. Her jugular vein stuck out like the neck of a deflated balloon.

No. More like a straw.

Blood spilled off the counter, blood had splattered the ceiling. I unholstered my service revolver and stepped around the body. There was a door in the back. I had to stop myself from racing back there. If he was in the back and I ran into him in the shadows by the men’s room I wouldn’t survive my curiosity. I headed back out into the rain where Webster already had the car running. He’d been busy rousing the locals. A helicopter swooped low over our heads with a racket that was sure to get complaints tomorrow morning. The chopper’s spotlight blasted holes in the shadows all around the diner. Webster got us moving, pulled us around the alley behind the restaurant. I peered through the rain at the dumpsters and the scattered garbage. Nothing happened. We had plenty of backup watching the front of the restaurant. We had heavy weapons guys coming in. The helicopter could stay up there all night if it needed to. I tried to relax.

“SWAT’s moving,” Webster told me. He replaced his radio handset.

The dumpster in the alley shifted an inch. Like some homeless guy inside had rolled over in his sleep. Both of us froze for a second. Long enough to be sure we’d both seen it. I brought my weapon up and checked the action. I was loading JHPs for maximal tissue damage and I had sighted in the pistol myself. If I could have gotten my gun blessed by a priest I would have. There was no way this psychopath was walking away tonight.

“Special Deputy Arkeley, maybe we should back off and let SWAT negotiate with him,” Webster told me. His using my official title meant he wanted to go on the record as doing everything possible to avoid a violent takedown. Covering his ass.

We both knew there was no chance of Lares coming peacefully.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said, my nerves all twisted up. “Yeah.” I eased off on my grip on my pistol and kicked angrily at the floorboards.

The dumpster came apart in pieces and a white blur launched itself outward, out of the alley. It collided with our car hard enough to knock us up onto two wheels.

My door caved in and pinned my arm to my side, trapping my weapon. Webster grabbed for his own handgun even as the car fell back to the road surface, throwing us both up against our seat belts, knocking the wind out of me.

Webster reached across me and discharged his weapon three times. I could feel my face and hands burning with spent powder, I could smell cordite and nothing else. I was deaf for a good half minute afterwards. My window exploded outwards but a few tiny cubes of glass danced and spun in my lap.

I turned my head sideways feeling like I was trapped in molten glass—I could see everything normally but I could barely move. Framed perfectly in the shattered safety glass was Lares’ grinning, torn-up face. Rain was washing the blood off his mouth but it didn’t improve his looks. His glasses were ruined, twisted arms of tortoiseshell and cobwebbed lenses. At least one of Webster’s shots had gone in through Lares’

right eye. The white jelly inside had burst outward and I could see red bone in the socket. The other two bullets had gone into the side of his nose and his right cheek.

The wounds were horrible, bloody, and definitely fatal.

As I watched they undid themselves. It was like when you run over one of those shatterproof trash cans and they slowly but surely undent themselves, returning to their former shape in seconds. A puff of white smoke in Lares’ vacant eye socket solidified, plumped out into a brand new eyeball. The wound in his nose shrank away to nothing and the one in his cheek might as well have been a trick of the light.

Like a shadow it just disappeared.

When he was whole and clean again he slowly took the broken glasses off his face and threw them over his shoulder. Then he opened his mouth and grinned.

Every one of his teeth was sharpened to a point. It wasn’t like in the movies at all. It looked more like the mouth of a shark, with row after row of tiny knives embedded in his gums. He gave us a good, long look at his mouth and then he jumped over our car. I could hear his feet beating on the roof and he was all at once on the other side.

He hit the ground running, running toward Liberty Avenue.

The SWAT team arrived at the corner before he did, sliding out of an armored van, four agents carrying MP5s. They wore full helmets and riot armor but it wasn’t standard issue. Their commanding officer had insisted I give them a chance to modify their kit. We all knew what we were getting into, he told me; we’d all seen plenty of movies before.

So the SWAT guys had crucifixes hot-glued all over them, everything they could get, from big carved wood Roman Catholic models with gruesome Jesuses hanging down to dime-store nickel-plated crosses like you would find on a charm bracelet. I bet they felt pretty safe under all that junk.

Lares laughed out loud and tore off his red sweater. Underneath it his torso was one rippling mass of muscle. White skin, hairless, poreless, writhed over the submerged lumps of his vertebrae. He looked a lot less human with his shirt off. He looked more like some kind of albino bear. A wild animal. A mankiller.

2.

Incident Report filed by Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley, 10/4/83 (Continued):

“Don’t fucking move!” one of the cross-covered SWATs shouted. The other three dropped to one knee and raised their MP5s to their shoulders.

Lares rolled forward from the waist, scooping his arms through the air like he could reach over and grab them from a distance. It was an aggressive movement. It was meant to be aggressive. The SWATs did what they’d been trained to do. They opened fire. Their weapons spat fire at the rain and bullets tore through the dark air, narrowly missing our unmarked car. Webster shoved his door open and stepped out into a big puddle. I was right behind him. If we could catch the bastard in a crossfire maybe we could do more damage than he could heal.

“The heart!” I shouted. “You have to destroy the heart!”

The SWATs were professionals. They caught their target center mass more than they missed him. Lares’ big body spun around in the wet. The helicopter came roaring overhead and lit him up with the spotlight so we could see better what we were shooting at. I fired three rounds into his back, one after the other. Webster emptied his clip.

Lares pitched forward like a tree falling down, right in the gutter. He put his hands down to try to stop his fall but they slid out from under him. He lay there unmoving, not even breathing, his hands clutching at handfuls of the tiny yellow locust leaves that clogged up the sewer grate.

The SWATs traded hand signals. One of them moved in, weapon always pointed right at the back of Lares’ neck, ready to take a brainstem shot, a traditional kill shot.

He was aiming at the wrong place but I didn’t think it mattered at that point. There were no visible bullet holes in the subject—they must have healed instantly—but he wasn’t moving. The SWAT stepped closer and kicked at one overly muscular leg.

Lares spun around on his side without any warning at all, far faster than a human being could move. He got one knee under him and grabbed at the SWAT’s arm to pull himself up. He had no trouble whatsoever getting a grip on all those crosses.

The SWAT started to react, bringing his MP5 up, ducking down in a firing crouch.

Lares grabbed his helmet in two hands and twisted it right off. The policeman’s head came with it.

For a second the decapitated SWAT stood there in a perfect firing crouch. Blood arced up from his gaping neck like a water fountain. Lares leaned forward and lapped at it, getting blood all over his face and chest. He was mocking us. He was goddamned making fun of us.

The SWAT leader started shouting “Man down, man down!” into his radio but Lares was already up and coming for him. He plowed through the rest of the SWATs in a single motion, his fingers tearing at their armor, his mouth fastening around the leader’s neck. Those shark-like teeth bit right through the SWAT leader’s padded collar. They bit right through a wooden cross and snapped it in pieces. I made a mental note: the cross thing was a myth.

The SWATs died one after the other and all I could do was watch. All I could do was stare. I brought up my weapon as Lares turned and jumped right at us. I would have fired except I was afraid I would hit Webster. Lares was that fast. He went low, diving to grasp Webster around the waist. My partner was still trying to reload his weapon.

Lares tore Webster’s leg off at the thigh. He used his mouth. Blood was everywhere and Lares drank as much of it as he could get down his throat. Webster didn’t start screaming for a long, horrible second or two. He had time to look at me, his face registering nothing but surprise.

When Lares had finished feeding he rose to a standing posture and smiled at me.

His half-naked body was caked with gore. His eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks were glowing pink and healthy. He leaned toward me. He was a good seven feet tall and he towered over me. He reached down and put his hands on my shoulders. His eyes stared into me and I couldn’t look away. The hand holding my weapon lost all strength and dangled at my side. He was weakening me, softening me up somehow. I could feel my brain itch—he was hypnotizing me, something, I didn’t know. He could kill me any time he wanted. Why was he wasting time with my brain?

Over our heads the helicopter chewed angrily at the air. The spotlight lit up Lares’

back and made his hair glow. His eyes narrowed as if the light hurt him a little. He grabbed me around the waist and hauled me up to dangle over his shoulder. I could barely move. I tried to kick and hit and fight but Lares just squeezed me harder until I felt my ribs popping like a string of fireworks. After that it was all I could do to breathe.

He didn’t kill me. He had such strength in his arms it would have been easy to kill me, to squeeze me so hard my guts shot out of my mouth. He kept me alive, though, I assumed as a hostage.

He started to run. My body bounced and flopped on his shoulder. I could only see what was behind us. He was running toward the Strip District, toward the river.

When I was planning this takedown I had convinced Pittsburgh Traffic to shut down a big patch of city, to keep the streets empty. I wanted a safe environment in which to pull off my showdown. Lares must have sensed the unusual quiet of the streets.

He ran right out into traffic, cars slaloming all around us, steam from the pouring rain rising from their hot lights like the breath of angry bulls. Horns shrieked all around us and I panicked and called out for God—if one of those cars hit us it might not damage Lares at all but I would surely be crushed, broken, impaled.

I could barely see for pain and wet eyes and the stabbing blare of headlights. I was barely cognizant of the fact that Lares had run out onto the 16th Street bridge. I could feel the helicopter above me, following me, its rotor blades pulsing in the dark.

I felt Lares bend and flex his legs and then—freefall. The asshole had jumped right off the bridge.

We hit the freezing waters of the Allegheny River so hard and so fast I must have broken half a dozen bones. The cold surged through me like I was being stabbed with icicles all over my body. My heart lurched in my chest and I felt my entire circulatory system seizing up. Lares pulled me down, down into the darkness. I could barely see his white, white face framed by floating black hair like dead seaweed. Breath surged out of me and I started swallowing water.

We must have been under only a few seconds. I couldn’t have survived any longer than that. Yet I remember him kicking, his legs snapping through the water. I remember the helicopter’s searchlight slanting down through the murk, now this way, now that way, now too far away. Then I couldn’t see anything. Air hit my face like a mask of ice had been nailed onto my skull but at least I could breathe. I sucked a great lungful of cold, cold air down inside of me until my body burned. Lares dragged me up over the fiberglass gunwale of a boat, a boat that bobbed and tilted alarmingly under our combined weight. He dragged me, only half alive, below decks.

3.

Incident Report filed by Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley, 10/4/83 (Concluded): Slowly, achingly, warmth returned to my fingertips, my toes. My brain spun inside my head for a while and I couldn’t make any sense of my surroundings, I could just hear ringing in my ears. I could taste my own death on the back of my tongue. I had come that close.

Lares bent over me, his fingers probing in my ears and mouth. He tore my shirt away from my neck and shoulder and probed the veins there, tapping at them to get the circulation going. Then he left me there, unbound, all but forgotten. He hadn’t said a word to me, not one word. I wasn’t supposed to be a hostage, I realized. I was going to be a midnight snack. I’d made enough heat for him that he felt he had to run home, to go to ground. That didn’t mean he had to go hungry.

My eyes adjusted to the absolute darkness of the boat’s hold, eventually, and I began to make out some details. It was a cramped little space that smelled of diesel fuel and mildew. It was cold, not as cold as it had been under the river but icy cold all the same. I guess if you’re dead you don’t need central heating. The usual boat stuff filled most corners of the room—life preservers like giant orange candies, a pair of aluminum oars, folded tarpaulins and sailcloth. Five coffins were leaned up against the shelves and bulwarks or lay flat on the floor. They were relatively plain, dark wood affairs in that elongated hexagonal shape that says “coffin” whenever you see it, even though I don’t think anyone had built a coffin like that in fifty years.

They had brass handles and they were all propped open so I could see the overstuffed satin linings. One of them was empty. It was the biggest and it looked about the right size for Lares. It would have looked comical, even cartoonish, except in juxtaposition with the other four, which were all occupied.

The bodies in the coffins were decayed beyond recognition. They were bones, mostly, tied together with scraps of flesh. Some showed old brown stains where blood had washed over them. One had nearly a full head of long white hair like uncombed cotton. One had a single eyeball still in his head, though it was shrunken and dried up until it looked like a white prune. None of the skulls were human. The jaws were thick, sturdy bone full of broken teeth. Just from the teeth I knew they were all vampires. Maybe they were Lares’ family, in a perverse way. Maybe there was a whole lineage of them sleeping in that cramped little ship’s hold.

There was something about them, something that made my skin crawl. It took me a long time to realize what it was. The bones in those coffins weren’t dead. They were moving. Just barely, just almost imperceptibly, but the bony hands were reaching out. The necks were craning forward. They wanted something. They were desperate for it, desperate enough to strain their dried-up sinews to get at it. As decayed and dilapidated as they might be, these corpses were still undead and still aware of their surroundings. Vampires were supposed to live forever, if they weren’t killed. I guess maybe they didn’t stay young forever, though. Maybe that was too much to ask.

Lares caught my attention as he started moving around the little space. He looked different. I focused my eyes and saw that the curly hair on top his head had been a wig—it was gone now and his head was as white and as round as the moon.

Triangular ears poked out on either side. Those weren’t human ears. I guess I was finally seeing what a vampire really looked like. It wasn’t pretty.

Lares knelt next to one of the coffins, his hands bracing him on the wooden lip.

He lowered his head over the body and his back began to shake. One of his laughing eyes kept me pinned the whole time. With a horrible retching sound he vomited a half pint of blood into the coffin, right over the corpse’s face. He clutched at his sides and heaved again, and again, until the skull was bathed in clotted gore.

Steam rose from the hot blood in the cold room. Steam wreathed the skull, the rib cage of the corpse. Steam coalesced like watery light around the bones, wrapping the vampire remains in illusory flesh and skin. The body plumped out and began to take on something like human form as the blood dripped into the corpse’s mouth.

Lares moved to the next corpse. He started coughing and blood flecked his lips.

Like a mother bird feeding her young he coughed himself into a spasm until blood dangled in thick ropes from his mouth. Where it touched the corpse steam rose up and a second transformation began. Skin like old mildewed paper rattled as it stretched around the second corpse’s ruin. Dark skin, criss-crossed with scars. This one had a tattoo on his bicep. It read “SPQR” in jagged, sloppily-done letters.

The pink hue I’d seen in Lares’ cheeks before was gone. He was white as a sheet again. If he was going to feed all of his ancestors he would need to find another blood donor, and soon.

I didn’t like my chances.

He managed to vomit up blood all over a third corpse, just with what he had inside of him. He was throwing up death. The death of the waitress in the diner. The deaths of the SWATs we’d foolishly thought were safe under twenty pounds of crosses. He was throwing up bits of Webster, the good cop, throwing up part of Webster’s body.

Lares turned to look at me directly. His whole body was shaking. Trembling, even shivering. Feeding his grandparents had taken everything he had. Before he’d fed on the waitress in the diner, had he been this shaky? He tried to meet my gaze but I refused to let him hypnotize me again.

I looked down at my right hand. I was still carrying my sidearm. How I could have held onto it through being carried over Lares’ shoulder, through the shock of hitting the river, through being dragged into the boat was a mystery. The cold must have turned my hand into a solid claw around the weapon.

Lares lurched toward me. His speed was gone. His coordination was shot. He was still a bulletproof vampire.

I knew it was hopeless. The SWATs had hit him center left with full automatic machine gun fire but the bullets had never even pierced his skin. They hadn’t even grazed his heart, the only vulnerable part of him. I had nothing better to do at that moment, though, then to shoot every last bullet I had.

I discharged my weapon into his chest. I shot him. Again and again until I was deaf with the noise and blind with the muzzle flash. I had three bullets left in my gun and I put all of them into his chest. The hollow point rounds tore him open, splatted the boat’s hold with bits and strips of his white, white skin. He tried to laugh but his voice came out as a weak hiss, air escaping from a punctured tire.

I saw his rib cage torn open, exposed, flayed. I saw his lungs, slack and lifeless in his chest. He came closer. Closer. Closer. Close enough—I reached out with my left hand and grabbed at the twisted dark muscle that had once been his heart.

He howled in pain. So did I. His body was already repairing the damage I’d done, his cells knitting back together around the gun shot wounds. His ribs grew back like scissor blades crunching down on the more fragile bones of my wrist, trapping my hand inside of his body. His skin grew back over my arm and pulled at me, pulled me toward him.

I plucked his heart out like pulling a peach off a tree.

Lares’ face turned dark with horror, his eyes wild, his mouth flapping open like he couldn’t control it, blood and spit flying from his chin. His nostrils flared and a stench like an open sewer bellowed up out of every one of his orifices. The heart leapt in my hand, trying to get back where it belonged, but I used the tiny shred of strength left to me to squeeze, to hold on. Lares slapped at me with his hands but there was no real strength left in his muscles. He dropped to his knees and howled and howled and howled. It started to sound like mewling after a while. He was losing the strength to even scream properly.

Still he wouldn’t just die. He was holding on to what strange kind of unlife he had ever possessed, clutching like a junkie at an empty syringe, trying through sheer willpower to not die.

His eyes met mine and he tried to suck me in. He tried to hypnotize me, to weaken me once more. It didn’t work.

When he finally stopped moving it was nearly dawn. I held his heart in my clenched fist and it felt like an inert stone. The other vampires, the decayed ones, came slithering out of their coffins, reaching for him, reaching for me. They didn’t understand what had happened. They were blind and deaf and dumb and all they knew was the taste of blood. I kicked them away and through the pain, through the shock, managed to get to my feet.

I found a can of gasoline in the engine room. I found a matchbook in the disused galley of the boat. I set them all on fire and stumbled up and out into the cold rain, pitched headlong onto a narrow wooden dock and waited for the sun to come up, waited to see if the local police would find me first, or whether hypothermia and my injuries and general horror would finish me off.

Part II - Congreve

4.

A fool there was and he made his prayer

(Even as you and I)

To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair

(We called her the woman who did not care)

But the fool he called her his lady fair.

-Rudyard Kipling, The Vampire

Twenty years later Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton pulled apart a road flare until red sparks shot across the leather elbow of her uniform jacket. She dropped the sputtering flare on the road and turned around. She’d felt something behind her, a presence, and on this particular night she had reason to be seriously creeped out.

The man behind her wore a tan trench coat over a black suit. His hair the color of a steel wool was cut short and close to his head. He looked to be in pretty good shape but he had to be at least sixty. Maybe seventy. In the flickering light of four in the morning the creases on his face could have been wrinkles or they could have been scars. His eyes were hooded by deep, pouchy lids and his mouth was nothing more than a narrow slot in the bottom half of his face.

“Good evening,” he said, his voice thick and a little hoarse. His face folded up like a gas station road map. He was smiling, the kind of smile you give a child you don’t particularly like. The smile submerged his tiny eyes entirely. “You don’t have a badge on your uniform,” he went on, making it sound like she’d forgotten to wash behind her ears.

“We don’t wear them,” she told him. This guy was starting to piss her off. “The State Policeman’s good conduct is the only badge he needs,” she said, more or less quoting what she’d been taught as a cadet. The black suit and the trench coat gave him away at once—he might as well have had “FED” written on his back in big white block letters—but she scanned his chest and found his badge, a five-pointed star in a circle. The badge of the US Marshals Service. “The Sergeant said he was going to call the FBI,” she said.

“And they called me, just like they’re supposed to. I only live a few hours away and you could say that I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. Please, don’t make me wait any longer. When I arrived your sergeant told me to find you. He said you were the last one still here who saw what happened.”

Caxton nodded. She unstrapped her wide-brimmed trooper’s hat and scratched the top of her head. Fatigue and shock were fighting over who got to make her sit down first. So far she’d beaten both of them back. “I suppose that’s right.” She held out her hand. Maybe her dislike of this man merely stemmed from how much she disliked this night in general.

He didn’t take her hand. He just stood there like both his arms were paralyzed.

“My name is Special Deputy Arkeley, if that’s what you wanted. Can we just get on with this and worry about the civilities later?”

Maybe he was just an asshole. She shrugged and pushed past him, assuming he would probably follow. When she got to the top of the rise she turned around and pointed at the roadblock just in front of the Turnpike onramp. The DUI Enforcement trailer stood in the middle of the road, abandoned for the time being. Orange lights up on sawhorses stabbed at the dark, their light skittering around the dead tree branches that arched over the road. The strobing light made Caxton’s eye sockets ache. “We’re Troop T. We’re highway patrol for the Turnpike, and that’s all. We were not prepared for this.” He didn’t look like he cared. She went on. “Three fellow officers and I were working a standard sobriety check right here. Nothing special, we do this every Saturday night. It was about fifteen minutes past ten and we had three cars lined up for us. Another car, a late model, black luxury vehicle, stopped about fifty feet short of entering the line. The driver hesitated then attempted to perform a u-turn. That’s something we see a lot of. People realize they’re going to fail the tests so they try to evade us. We know how to handle it.”

He stood there as quiet as a church mouse. He was just listening, his posture said.

Absorbing whatever she was going to give him. She went on.

“Two units, troopers Wright and Leuski, had been at station in their patrol cars there and there.” She pointed at where the cars had been waiting on the shoulders of the road. “They engaged the subject in a classic pincers maneuver and forced him to a stop. At that time he opened the door of his car and rolled out onto the road surface. Before Wright and Leuski could apprehend him he ran to the west, toward that line of trees.” She pointed again. “The subject evaded arrest, though not before he left some evidence behind.”

Arkeley nodded. He started walking away from her, toward the subject’s abandoned vehicle. It was a Cadillac, a CTS with a big blocky nose. A little pale mud flecked the running boards and there was a bad scratch down the driver’s side door but otherwise the car was in immaculate condition. It had been left just as it had been abandoned except that its trunk had been opened. Its flashers pulsed mournfully in imitation of the brighter lights up at the roadblock.

“What did your people do then?” Arkeley asked.

Caxton closed her eyes and tried to remember the exact series of events. “Leuski went after the subject and found the, well, the evidence. He came back and opened the subject vehicle’s trunk believing he had enough in the way of exigent circumstance to warrant an intrusive search. When we saw what was inside we realized this wasn’t just some drunk running away so he didn’t have to face the Intoxilyzer. Wright called it in, just like he was supposed to. We’re Highway Patrol.

We don’t handle these kind of criminal matters, we turn that over to the local police.”

Arkeley frowned, which fit his face a lot better than his smile. “I don’t see any of them here.”

Caxton almost blushed. It was embarrassing. “This is a pretty rural area. The cops here work weekdays, mostly. Someone’s always supposed to be on call but this late at night the system tends to break down. We have a cellular number for the local guy but he isn’t answering.”

Arkeley’s face didn’t show any surprise. That was alright. Caxton didn’t have the energy left to make excuses for anybody else.

“We put in a call to the county authorities but there was a multi-car pile-up near Reading and the sheriff’s office was tied up. They sent one guy to collect fibers, DNA and prints but he left three hours ago. They’ll have more people here by morning, they said, which leaves us standing watch here all night. The Sergeant noticed this then,” she said. She indicated the car’s license plate. It was a Maryland tag. “There was clear evidence of an alleged criminal crossing state borders. And it was bad, pretty much bad enough the Sergeant felt that bringing in the FBI made some sense. Now you’re here.”

Walking around behind the car Arkeley ignored her as he studied the contents of the trunk. She expected him to gag or at least wince but he didn’t. Well, Caxton had met plenty of guys who tried to look tough when they saw carnage. She stepped around to the trunk to stand beside him. “We think there are three people in there. A man and two children, genders unknown. There’s enough left of the man’s left hand to get prints. We might get lucky there.”

Arkeley kept staring down into the trunk. Maybe he was too shocked to speak.

Caxton doubted it. She’d been working highway patrol for three years now and she’d seen plenty of wrecks. Despite the barbarity of the murders and despite the fact that the bodies had been shredded and heavily mutilated, she could honestly say she’d seen worse. For one thing there was no blood in the trunk. Not so much as a drop. It also helped that the faces had been completely obliterated. It made it easier to think of the bodies as something you’d cut up in biology class. It made it easier to not think of them as human beings.

After a while Arkeley looked away. “Alright. This is going to be my case,” he said. Just like that.

“Now, wait a second—you were brought in as a consultant, that’s all.”

He ignored her. “Where’s the evidence the subject left behind?”

“It’s up by the tree line. But goddamnit, tell me what you meant by that. How is this your case?”

He did stop then. He stopped and gave her that nasty smile that made her feel about six years old. He explained it to her in a voice that made her feel about five.

“This is my case because the thing that killed those people in that trunk, the thing that drank their blood, was a vampire. And I’m in charge of vampires.”

“Come on, be serious. Nobody’s seen a vampire since the Eighties. I mean, there was that one they caught in Singapore two years ago, the one they burned at the stake. But that was a long way from here.”

He might as well not have heard her. He walked up toward the trees then and she had to rush to catch up. He was about four inches taller than she was and he had a longer stride. They pushed a few branches aside and saw that the wild trees grew only a single stand deep, that beyond lay the long perfect rows of a peach orchard, its dormant trees silver and gnarled in the faint moonlight. A wicked-looking five-strand barbed wire fence stretched across their path. They stopped together when they reached the fence. “There it is,” she said. She didn’t want to look at it. It was a lot worse than what was in the trunk.

5.

Arkeley squatted down next to the fence and took a small flashlight out of his pocket. Its beam was impressively bright in the gloom. It traveled the length of the evidence, a human hand and part of a forearm. The skin had been torn right off of it leaving exposed bone and tendons and flayed blood vessels like fleshy creepers. At the stump end the blood vessels curled up on themselves while the remaining flesh looked crushed and raw, hacked at with a not-so-sharp knife. The arm was tangled inextricably into the barbed wire. There would be no way to remove it without cutting the fence.

Caxton had seen lots of bad things. She’d seen decapitations and eviscerations and people whose bodies were turned almost inside out. But this was worse. This was the thing that was going to make her throw up, if she looked at it too hard.

Because it was still moving. The fingers clutched at nothing. The muscles in the forearm tensed and pulled and then fell back exhausted. It had been doing that for nearly six hours since it was torn off the body of the subject.

“What does it mean?” Caxton asked. She was tired of fighting and she thought Arkeley might actually know. “How does that happen?”

“When a vampire drinks your blood,” he told her, his voice almost friendly, “his curse gets inside of you. It eats at you, at your corpse. The next night you rise and you do his bidding because he’s all that’s left in your heart and your brain. You live for him. You serve him. The curse burns inside of you and makes you an unclean thing. Your body starts to decay faster than it should. Your skin peels off like a cast-aside shroud. Your soul curdles. We call them half-deads. In Europe they used to be called the Faceless.”

“This guy was a vampire’s slave?” Caxton asked. “I’ve heard about vampires having slaves but I didn’t know you could cut their arms off and they would keep moving. They don’t talk about that in the movies.”

“He was disposing of his master’s victims. That’s why he didn’t want to be stopped. He was heading out to the woods to bury the bodies in shallow graves.

Shallow enough that when they came back to life tomorrow they would be able to claw their way out and rise to serve their new master. We need to cremate the corpses before sunset tomorrow.”

“The families might not like that. Especially since we can’t even contact them yet, since we don’t know who they are.” Caxton shook her head. “Maybe we can post a guard down at the morgue or something.”

“I’ll take care of the paperwork.” Arkeley took a Leatherman multi-tool out of his breast pocket and snipped at the barbed wire with a tiny bolt-cutter. Soon enough he had the flayed arm free. He clutched it to his chest where the fingers tried to grasp at his buttons. They were too weak to get a good grip.

“I assume you’re going to take that thing without even giving me a receipt,” she said as he stood up, cradling the arm like a pet. “I could shoot you for interfering with an official investigation. You’re supposed to be a consultant!”

He heard her. He didn’t face her or do anything really but she could tell he’d heard her and that he was tired of playing games. His body stopped moving and sagged in place as if he’d been switched off. The words that came out of him next were like wind escaping from a dying set of bagpipes. “Nobody ever knows what it’s like,” he said. She had no idea what he meant until he continued. “They think they do. They’ve seen all those movies, all those idiotic movies. They think vampires are something you can reason with. Something you can explain away. They don’t understand. They don’t understand that we’re fighting animals. Wild beasts.”

“At least tell me what you plan on doing with the evidence.” She couldn’t bring herself to call it an arm.

He nodded and started up again. His power source replaced. “There’s a hospital near Arabella Furnace with the facilities I need. You can call there tomorrow and talk to them about getting it back, if you really want it. My advice is to burn it but apparently we haven’t reached the point yet where you’re comfortable taking my advice.”

“What’s the number of this hospital?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m going to be in Harrisburg, at the State Police Headquarters. I want you to report there so you can repeat everything you told me to the Commissioner.”

Caxton must have looked shocked. Honestly she didn’t know why the Commissioner would want to hear her report in person. But she knew better than to ignore a direct order from a Fed.

“Go home now. Get some sleep and I’ll see you tomorrow,” he told her. Then he walked away, into the night.

The Sergeant grabbed her shoulder when she came back to the roadblock. She must have looked like she was going to pass out. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she told him, and he backed off. He didn’t say a word when she announced she was going home.

The drive back to Wyomissing flickered in and out of her consciousness. She couldn’t remember falling asleep at the wheel but whole mile markers would go by without her noticing them, despite her training. It was like she’d been drugged and she started to worry that maybe she would drive right into a ditch or a utility pole.

She stopped at the first diner she found and drank two big cups of coffee. It helped a little. She kept her speed down on the back-country roads she used for the last third of the journey, lightless, often unpaved stretches of track where the trees pressed in close on either side, their curving arms flashing at her in the headlights, the grey weeds that sprouted up out of the ground before her waving like seaweed.

She couldn’t escape the feeling that the whole world had changed. That something horrible and new had come to life in the darkness outside, the chilly blackness that filled up the sky. Something big and dangerous and toothy, still made shapeless by her ignorance. It infected everything, it had gotten inside her head. Her teeth felt encrusted. She could sense the dirt under her fingernails. It was just exhaustion and low-grade fear, she knew, but it still made her itch inside her own skin. Everything had turned bad. The old familiar roads she’d driven a thousand times, ten thousand times, seemed more bendy, less friendly. Usually the car seemed to know the way to go but tonight every turn and jog of the path took more strength out of her arms. She rode the brake down every hill and felt the car labor beneath her as she crested another rise.

Eventually, finally, she pulled her patrol car carefully into the wide driveway next to the Mazda and switched everything off. She sat there in the driver’s seat for a moment listening to the car ping, listening to the thinned-out rise and fall of the last of the year’s cicadas. Then she popped open the door and slipped in through the garage. The ranch house she shared with her partner was perfectly quiet inside and mostly dark. She didn’t want to disturb the stillness, didn’t want to track any horror into her own home, so she left the lights off. She unstrapped her holster and hung it in the closet as she passed through the kitchen with its humming refrigerator, passed through the hall unbuttoning her uniform shirt and pulled it down over her arms. She wadded it up inside her hat and put them both on the chair next to the bedroom door. Inside Deanna lay sleeping in their queen-sized bed, only a tuft of spiky red hair sticking up above the covers at the top, and, at the other end, three perfect little toes that had sneaked out from underneath. Caxton smiled. It was going to feel so good to climb into that bed, to feel Deanna’s bony back, her sharp little shoulders.

She would try as hard as she could not to wake her up. Caxton unzipped her uniform pants and pulled off her boots one at a time. Suppressing the groan of pleasure it gave her to have her feet finally free she stood there for a moment in just her bra and panties and stretched her arms above her head.

Behind her something tapped on the window. She pulled the curtain aside and shrieked like an infant. Someone stood out there, a man, his face torn into strips of hanging skin. She screamed again. He slapped a white hand against the window, the fingers wide. His face beckoned at her. She screamed again. Then he broke away and ran. As Deanna stirred behind her and freed herself from the duvet, Caxton couldn’t look away from the dark silhouette that loped across the garden behind the house. She watched until he slipped between the dog kennels and Deanna’s shed and disappeared from view.

“Pumpkin, what is it, what is it?” Deanna shouted again and again, grabbing Caxton from behind.

“He only had one arm,” the trooper gasped.

6.

The State Police Headquarters in Harrisburg was a brick box with big square windows, surmounted by a radio mast. It sat just north of the city in an under-developed patch full of road salt domes and baseball diamonds. Trooper Caxton spent most of the day sitting around out back, waiting for Arkeley to show up. It was supposed to be her day off. She and Deanna were supposed to go up to the Rockvale Square Outlet stores and get some new winter clothes. Instead she sat around watching the civilian radio operators come out for their smoke breaks and then hurry back inside again. It was a chilly November day.

The sun was up, though, which was a wonderful thing. Caxton hadn’t been able to sleep after the half-dead tapped on her window. Deanna had somehow managed to curl back up in the warm sheets and doze off but Caxton had sat up and waited for the local police to come and pick at the dead plants in her garden. She’d sat up and talked to them and watched them make a hundred mistakes but it didn’t matter.

There was no evidence in the garden, no sign the half-dead had ever been there. She hadn’t really expected as much.

Now, in the sun, in the fresh air, she could almost pretend it hadn’t happened.

That it was some kind of dream. She sat on a picnic table behind the Headquarters’

lunch room with her hat in her hands and tried to will herself back into having a normal life.

There was the question, of course, which kept tugging and pulling at her. The question of why. Why the half-dead had come to her house. Her house specifically.

If it had gone after Wright or Leuski, that might have made a certain amount of sense. Those two had chased the thing right into barbed wire. But why her? She’d been running the Intoxilyzer. She’d been in the trailer the whole time. It just didn’t make sense.

If she concentrated very hard she could not ask herself the question for whole long minutes at a time. She refused to let it rattle her. She was a State Trooper, for fuck’s sake. A soldier of the law—that’s what they called her when she graduated from the academy. A soldier, and soldiers don’t panic just because somebody tries to give them a little scare. She told herself that enough times to start believing it.

She read case reports and pursuit logs to fill the time, which was only slightly less boring than watching the smokers come in and out. Arkeley came for her at three o’clock. By that point she was ready to sign out and go home. “I’ve been waiting here all day,” she told him when he stepped through the back door to collect her.

“I’ve spent all day getting search warrants and court orders. Which of us had more fun today, I wonder?”

“Stop talking to me like I’m a child,” she demanded.

His smile only deepened.

He lead her up to the Commissioner’s office, a corner office with two windows on the top floor. The other two walls were lined with the deer antlers and the head of one very large twelve-point buck. A rack of antique fowling guns sat immediately behind the desk as if the Commissioner wanted to be able to perforate anyone who brought him news he didn’t like.

Arkeley would have been a good candidate. After she’d finished giving her report and Arkeley had made an introductory statement the Commissioner gave him a look of pure hatred. “I don’t like this, but you probably already guessed as much. The nastiest, ugliest multiple homicide in decades and you just come in and take it away from us. A US Marshal. You guys guard courthouses,” he said, leaning way back in his chair. He was bald on top but it hadn’t reached his forehead yet. The bottom button of his uniform strained a little at keeping his gut in. He had a full Colonel’s birds on his shoulders, though, so Caxton stood at attention the whole time he was talking.

Arkeley sat in his chair as if his anatomy was constructed for some other kind of conveyance, as if his spine didn’t bend properly. “We also capture the majority of federal fugitives,” he told the Commissioner.

“Trooper,” the Commissioner said, without looking at her. “What do you think of this piece of shit? Should I run him out of town?”

She was pretty sure it was a rhetorical question but she answered anyway. “Sir,”

she said, “he’s the only living American to have successfully hunted vampires, Sir.”

She stayed at attention, staring up at the brim of her hat like she’d been taught.

The Commissioner sighed. “I could block this.” He gestured at the paperwork spread across his desk. Most of it was signed by the Lieutenant Governor. “I could hold it all up, demand verification, demand copies in triplicate. I could stall your investigation long enough for my own boys to take care of the vampire.”

“In which case, young man, more than a few people would die. Not only that, they would die in a truly horrible way.” Arkeley wasn’t smiling when he said it.

“There’s a cycle to these things. At first the vampires try to hide among us. They disguise themselves and bury their kills in privacy and seclusion. But over time the bloodlust grows. They need more and more blood every night to maintain their un-life. Soon they forget why they were trying to be discrete. And then they just start killing wholesale, with no moral compunction and no mercy. Until this vampire is brought down the body count will continue to rise.”

“Why have you got such a hard-on for this?” the Commissioner demanded.

“You’re willing to make enemies, just so you can horn in on this.”

“If you’re asking why I chose to take this case I have my own reasons and I’m not going to share them with you.” Arkeley stood up and picked his papers off the desk one at a time. “Now, if you’re done pissing on my shoes, there are some things I need. I’d like to speak with your armorer. I need a vehicle, preferably a patrol car.

And I need a liaison, someone who can coordinate operations between the various local police agencies. A partner, if you will.”

“Yeah, alright.” The Commissioner leaned forward and tapped a few keys on his computer. “I’ve got a couple guys for you, real hotshots from the Criminal Investigations Unit. Cowboy types, grew up in the mountains and learned how to shoot before they started playing with themselves. I’ve got six names to start—”

“No,” Arkeley said. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. At least it felt that way to Caxton. “You misunderstood. I didn’t ask to be assigned someone.

I’ve already picked my liaison. I’m taking her.”

Caxton was looking at her hat. She didn’t see Arkeley point. It took her way too long to realize he meant he wanted her to ride with him.

“Beg your pardon, sir,” she said, when the rushing in her ears had passed, “but I’m a Patrol Unit. Highway Patrol,” she reiterated. “I don’t feel I’d be appropriate for what you want.”

For once at least it seemed he was willing to explain a decision. “You said I was the only living American to kill a vampire. You must have read something about me,”

he told her.

She’d read everything she could find while she waited for him to show up. It wasn’t much. “I read your incident report on the Piter Lares case, yes, sir.”

“Then you’re the second-best informed person in this building. Commissioner, I want you to release her from her current duties.”

“For how long?” the Commissioner asked.

“Until I’m done with her. Now. You,” he said, looking at Caxton, “follow me and stay close. I keep a certain steady pace and I expect you to match me or you’ll forever be asking me to slow down.”

She looked at the Commissioner but he just shrugged. “He’s a Fed,” his expression seemed to say. “What are you going to do?”

Arkeley lead her down to the Area Response Team’s firing range out back. The ART was the anti-terrorism squad, but they were also the ones who were called in to break up protests in the Capital. They had the equipment and the tactics for mass arrests and crowd control and they had a sizeable budget for less lethal weapons.

Which Caxton knew used to be called non-lethal weapons, until somebody got accidentally killed. The ART guys were all gun nuts and gadget freaks and had an experimental weapons firing range behind the HQ where they could test out their toys before they actually had to deploy them. It also let them get in a little target shooting whenever they got the itch. Caxton kept her hands over her ears as they came up on the range officer, who was firing what looked like an antique musket. It was loud enough to make her think he must be using black powder.

Arkeley eventually yelled loud enough to get the ranger officer’s attention. The RO took off his ear protectors and the two men had a brief discussion. Whatever Arkeley said made the RO snort in laughter, but he disappeared into an ammunition shed and came back out with a box of bullets.

Arkeley lined up thirteen of them on the firing stand and carefully, methodically loaded the magazine of his weapon. It was a Glock 23, Caxton saw. More firepower than most police handguns but it was no hand cannon. “You only load thirteen?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.

“That’s the capacity of the magazine,” he said, his voice thick with condescension. It was going to take a lot to warm up to this guy.

“Most people would load an extra round in the chamber, so they’re ready to shoot at a second’s notice. I do,” she said, patting the Beretta 92 on her belt.

“Tell me, do you not wear a seat belt while you’re driving, so you can save half a second when you get in and out of your car?”

Caxton frowned and wanted to spit. She dug one of the bullets out of the box and studied it. The slugs were semi-jacketed lead, about what she had expected and not enough to make the Range Officer so excited. Two perpendicular cuts had been made in the nose of each round, forming a perfect cross. She thought maybe she’d caught him in a mistake. “I read your report—you said crosses had no effects on vampires.”

“Luckily for me they work wonders on bullets.” Arkeley shouted to clear the range and sighted on a target thirty yards away, a paper target stapled to a plywood two-by-four. Caxton covered her ears. He fired one round and the target shredded.

The two-by-four exploded in a cloud of wood chips. “The slug mushrooms and breaks apart inside the target,” he explained to her. “Each piece of shrapnel has its own wound track and its own momentum. It’s like every bullet is a little fragmentation grenade.”

As much as she hated him, she had to let out a low whistle at that. So this was what you shot vampires with, she thought. She asked the RO to bring out another box in 9mm for herself.

“I can do that,” he said, his voice low enough to count as a whisper, “but they won’t be parabellum. Cross Points are against the Hague convention.”

“I’ll never tell,” Arkeley said. “Load her up.”

7.

“Down here, take the next right,” Arkeley said, stabbing one finger at the windshield. He settled back in the passenger seat, looking more comfortable there than he had on the chair in the Commissioner’s office. Maybe he spent more time in cars than offices, she thought. Yeah, that was probably right.

Caxton wheeled their unmarked patrol car around a stand of ailanthus saplings that bounced and shimmered over the hood. Twilight was about to be over: the night was just starting. According to the map they were right in the middle of the township of Arabella Furnace, named after a cold blast pig iron furnace that would once have employed the whole population of the town. There was nothing left of the furnace itself except a square foundation of ancient bricks, most of them crumbled down to dust. There was a visitor’s center there and Caxton had learned all about the history of cold blast furnaces while Arkeley took a pit stop.

Other than barking out directions he had very little to say. She had tried talking to him about the skinless face in her window the night before. She had not presented it as something that scared her. Though it still did, especially as the daylight dwindled in her rear-view mirror. She presented it as part of the case. He grunted affirmatively at her suggestion that he should know what had happened. But then he failed to add so much as a comment.

“What do you think it was about?” she asked. “Why was it there?”

“It sounds,” he said, “as if the half-dead wanted to scare you. If it had wanted to hurt or kill you it probably could have.” Any attempt on her part to get anything further out of him resulted in shrugs or, worse, complete apathy.

“Jesus,” she shouted, finally, and stopped the car short so they both hit their seatbelts. “A freak with a torn-up face follows me home and all you can say is that it probably just wanted to scare me? Does this happen so often in your life that you can be so jaded about it?”

“It used to,” he said.

“But not anymore? What did you do? How did you stop it?”

“I killed a bunch of vampires. Can we continue, please? We haven’t got a lot of time before the bodies start showing up in heaps.”

She studied him the whole length of the drive. She wanted to get the drop on him at least once, to prove that she wasn’t a complete child. So far she’d failed. “You’re from West Virginia,” she had suggested. It was the best she had. “There’s a hint of a drawl in your voice.” Plus she had read that his investigation in the Lares case had begun in Wheeling, but she left out that detail.

“North Carolina, originally,” he had replied. “Make a left.”

Fuming a little she crept forward onto the road he’d indicated. It looked more like a nature trail. In the headlights she could see it had been paved once with cobble stones but time had turned them into jagged rocks that could pop a tire if she drove too quickly. The drive wound between two copses of whispering trees, mixed maple and ash. Leaves had fallen in great sweeps across the way, suggesting that this road lead nowhere but the ancient past. Yet perhaps not—the way was never actually blocked. Someone might have tried to make the place look forbidding but they had stopped short of actually cutting off access.

“There’s no parking lot, there hasn’t been for fifty years. You can just drive up onto the main lawn and stop somewhere unobtrusive,” Arkeley told her.

Main lawn? All she could see was increasingly dense forest, the thick dark woods that had given Pennsylvania its name centuries earlier. The trees rose sixty feet high in places, in places even higher. She switched on her headlights—and then she saw the lawn.

It was not the manicured stretch of bluegrass she had expected. More like a fallow field aggressively reclaimed by weeds. Yet she could make out low stone walls and even, in the distance, a dry fountain streaked green and black by algae. She stopped the car and they got out. Darkness closed around them like a fog once the car’s lights flicked off. Arkeley started at once toward the fountain and she followed him, and then she saw their destination looming up in the starlight. A great Victorian pile, a gabled brick mound with wings stretching away from its central mass. On one side stood a greenhouse with almost no glass left in it at all, leaving just a skeletal iron frame festooned with vines. A wing on the far side had completely collapsed and partially burned, perhaps having been struck by lightning. A concrete bas relief above the main entrance named the place:

ARABELLA FURNACE

STATE HOSPITAL

“Let me guess,” Caxton said. “You’ve brought me to an abandoned lunatic asylum.”

“You couldn’t be less correct,” he told her. The smile on his face was different this time. It almost looked wistful, as if he wished it was an asylum. They approached the fountain and he laid a hand on the broken stone. Together they looked up at the statue of a woman pouring out a great urn that rested on her hip. The urn had gone dry years before. Caxton could see rust inside its mouth where the waterworks must have been. The statue’s free arm, maybe twice the size of a human appendage, stretched toward them in benediction or perhaps just welcome. Her face, whatever expression it may once have offered to visitors, was completely eroded. Acid rain, time, maybe vandalism had effaced it until the front of her head was just a rough mask of featureless stone.

“This wasn’t an asylum, it was a sanatorium. They used to bring tuberculosis patients here for a rest cure,” Arkeley explained.

“Did it work?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Three out of every four patients died in the first year. The rest just lingered on and on. Mostly the health authorities just wanted them out of the way so they wouldn’t infect anyone else. The cure amounted to fresh air and simple manual labor to pay for their keep. Still, the patients received three meals a day and all the cigarettes they could smoke.”

“You’re kidding. Cigarettes for people with a respiratory disease?”

“The cigarette companies built this place, and all the other sanatoria like it all over the country. They probably suspected a link between smoking and tuberculosis—smoking made you cough, after all, and so did consumption. Who knows? Maybe they just felt sorry for the infected.”

Caxton stared at him. “I wasn’t expecting a history lesson tonight,” she said. He didn’t reply. “You said that I couldn’t be more wrong. How else was I wrong?”

“It isn’t abandoned. There are still patients here. Well, one patient.”

She was left, as usual, without further information. She had to imagine what kind of hospital would be kept open for a single patient.

They entered through the front door where a single watchman in a navy blue uniform waited, an M4 rifle slung over the back of his chair. He wore the patches of a Bureau of Prisons corrections officer. He looked bored. He definitely recognized Arkeley, though he made no attempt at greeting the Marshal.

“What is this place? I’ve never heard of it,” she said,

“They don’t advertise,” Arkeley told her.

They passed through a main hall with narrow spiral staircases at each corner, leading both up and down. Large square vaulted chambers stood at every compass point. Arches here and there were sealed off with bricks, then pierced with narrow doorways with elaborate locks. Power lines and Ethernet cables hung in thick bundles against the walls or stretched away across open space, held up by metal hooks secured in the ceiling.

Caxton touched the dark stone of a wall and felt the massive coolness, the strength of it. Someone had scratched their initials in the wall right next to where her hand lay, a complicated acronym from a time of rigidly defined names: G.F.X.McC., A.D. 1912.

Arkeley didn’t stop to let her absorb the atmosphere of the place. He strode forward briskly, his squeaking footfalls rolling around the ceiling as echoes that followed her close behind as she rushed to keep up. They passed through a steel doorway and she saw where the paint had been rubbed away from the jamb by countless hands over time. They moved through a white corridor with plaster walls, studded by a dozen more doorways, all of them wreathed with cobwebs. At the far end a sheet of plastic hung down over an empty doorway. Arkeley lifted the plastic aside for her, a strangely comforting gesture, and Caxton stepped inside.

The ward beyond was bathed in a deep blue glow that came from a massive lighting fixture in the ceiling. The bulbs up there had been painted so that everything red in the room appeared to be black. The contents of the room were varied, and somewhat startling. There were rows and racks of obsolete medical equipment, enameled steel cabinets with bakelite knobs that might have been part of the Hospital’s official equipment. There were laptop computers and what looked like a miniature MRI scanner. In the middle of the room was a tapered wooden coffin with brass handles and a deeply upholstered interior. Cameras, microphones and other sensors Caxton couldn’t identify hung down over the coffin on thick curled cables so the coffin’s contents could be constantly and exhaustively monitored.

An electrical junction box with a single button mounted on its face stood next to the doorway. Arkeley pushed the button and a buzzer sounded deep inside the sanatorium. “You read my report. You know I set fire to all the vampires on that boat in Pittsburgh.”

Caxton nodded. She could guess what came next.

“You’ll also remember Lares only had enough blood to revivify three of his ancestors. There was a fourth one who went without nourishment. Strangely enough, the ones with skin and flesh burned just fine. The one without was merely charred.

She survived the blaze.”

“But vampires were supposed to be extinct in America,” she protested.

“Extinct in the wild,” Arkeley corrected her.

A plastic barrier at the far side of the room lifted and a wheelchair was steered into the coffin chamber. The man who pushed it wore a white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was a little skinny—otherwise he had no distinguishing features at all. Then again he was likely to appear nondescript in comparison to his charge. The woman in the wheelchair wore a tattered mauve dress, moth-eaten and sheer with use. She was little more than bones wrapped in translucent white skin as thin as tissue paper.

There was no hair on her head, none at all except for a few spindly eyelashes. The skin had broken and parted from the bones of her skull, in places having worn away altogether, leaving shiny patches of bone visible. She had one plump eyeball, the iris colorless in the blue light. Her ears were long and sharply triangular and riddled with sores. Her mouth looked broken, somehow, or at least wrong. It was full of shards, translucent jagged bits of bone. Caxton slowly made out that these were teeth. The woman had hundreds of them and they weren’t broken, either, when she looked closer. They were just sharp. This was what she had read about in Arkeley’s report.

This was one of the creatures he’d set on fire in the belly of the boat—a vampire, an old, blood-starved vampire. She’d never seen anything more horrible, not even the near-faceless half-dead who had peered in through her window the night before.

“Hello, Deputy. You’re on schedule—it’s just about feeding time at the zoo.” It was the man in the lab coat who spoke. He pushed the wheelchair closer to them than Caxton would have liked. She felt nothing from the vampire, no sense of humanity, just coldness. It was like standing next to the freezer cabinet in a grocery store on a hot summer day. The chill was palpable, and real, and wholly unnatural.

“Special Deputy,” Arkeley corrected.

“Feeding time?” Caxton asked, appalled.

The vampire’s eye brightened noticeably.

8.

“This blue light we’re standing in,” Caxton said. “It must be some, I don’t know, some wavelength vampires can’t see, right? So she can’t see us?”

“Actually she can see you just fine. She would see you in perfect darkness. She’s told me,” the man in the lab coat said. “She can see your life glowing like a lamp.

This light is less damaging to her skin than even soft white fluorescents.” He held out a hand. “I’m Doctor Hazlitt. I don’t think we’ve met.”

Caxton tore her gaze away from the vampire’s single, rolling eyeball to look at the man. She began to reach for his hand, to shake it. Then she stopped. His sleeve was rolled up to his bicep and she saw a plastic tube embedded in the soft flesh inside his elbow. A trickle of dried-up blood, perfectly black in the blue light, stained the end of the tube.

“It’s a shunt,” he told her. “It’s easier than using a syringe every time.”

Arkeley squatted down to look at the vampire eye to eye. Her fleshless hands moved compulsively in her lap as if she were trying to get away, as if he terrified her.

Caxton supposed she had every right—the Fed had once set her on fire and left her for dead. “Hazlitt here feeds her his own blood, out of the goodness of his heart,”

Arkeley announced. “So to speak.”

“I know it seems grisly,” the doctor told her. “We tried a number of alternatives—fractionated plasma and platelets from a blood bank, animal blood, a chemical the Army is trying out as a blood surrogate. None of it worked. It has to be human, it has to be warm and it has to be fresh. I don’t mind sharing a little.” He stepped over to a workbench a few yards away from the wheelchair and took a Pyrex beaker out of a cabinet. A length of rubber tubing went into the shunt, its free end draped over the lip of the beaker. Caxton looked away.

“Why?” she asked Arkeley. “Why feed it at all?” Her first instinct as a cop—to ask questions until she understood exactly what was going on—demanded answers.

“She’s not an ‘it’! Her name,” Hazlitt said, and stopped for a moment to grunt in moderate-sounding pain, “is Malvern, Justinia Malvern, and she was a human being once. That might have been three hundred years ago but please, show some respect.”

Caxton shook her head in frustration. “I don’t understand. You nearly got killed trying to destroy her. Now you’re protecting her, here, and even giving her blood?”

“It wasn’t my decision.” Arkeley patted his coat pocket as if that should mean something to her. It didn’t. He sighed deeply and kept staring at the vampire as he explained.

“When we found her at the bottom of the Allegheny, still in her coffin, we didn’t know what to do. I was still in the hospital and nobody much listened to me anyway.

My bosses turned her body over to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they would love to have her remains but while she was still alive they couldn’t take her.

They asked us to euthanize her so they could put her on display. Then somebody made a mistake and asked a lawyer what to do. Since as far as we know she’s never killed an American citizen—she’s been moribund like this since before the American Revolution—the Justice department decided we didn’t have a right to execute her.

Funny, huh? Lares was up and moving and showing signs of intelligence but nobody filed any charges when I put him down. Malvern here was half rotted away in her coffin but if I put a stake through her heart they were willing to call it murder. Well, that’s how it goes. She had no family or friends, for obvious reasons, so they made her a ward of the court. Technically I’m responsible for her welfare. I have to clothe her, shelter her, and yes, feed her. Nobody knows whether cutting off her blood supply will kill her but without a federal court order we’re not allowed to stop.”

“She’s earned her keep a dozen times over,” Hazlitt said. He was dismantling the siphon that had drawn blood out of his arm. “I’ve been studying her for seven years now and every single day and night of it has been rewarding.”

“Yeah? What have you learned?” Caxton asked.

The vampire’s face curled up. Her nose lifted in the air and rippled obscenely.

She had smelled the blood.

“We’ve learned that blue light is best for her. We’ve learned how much blood she needs to maintain partial mobility. We’ve learned what level of humidity she likes and what extremes of temperature affect her.”

Caxton shook her head. “All of which helps keep her alive. How does it benefit us?”

For the very first time Arkeley looked at her with a light of approval in his eyes.

“We’re going to find a cure, here.” Hazlitt came around a bank of equipment, his face sharp. “Here, in this room. I’ll cure her. And then we’ll have a vaccine and that will benefit society.”

“We don’t need a vaccine if they’re extinct,” Arkeley said. The two of them exchanged a hot stare for a moment of pure, easy hatred.

“Excuse me, I really do need to feed her.” Hazlitt knelt before the wheelchair-bound vampire and held up the beaker to show her the ounce or two of black blood at the bottom.

“Jesus, how long have you been studying her?” Caxton asked. “You said you’ve been doing this for seven years. But she must have been here for two decades. Who worked here before you?”

“Dr. Gerald Armonk.”

“The late Dr. Armonk,” Arkeley said.

Hazlitt shrugged. “There was an unfortunate accident. Dr. Armonk and Justinia had a very special relationship. He used to feed her directly, cutting open the pad of his thumb and allowing her to suck out his blood. She had a bad spell of depression in the nineties, you see, and even attempted suicide a few times. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, to feed her that way, but it seemed to cheer her immensely.”

“Armonk had a Doctorate. From Harvard, if you can believe it,” Arkeley said.

“For the first few days that I worked here, she was flush with life and really, actually, quite beautiful,” Hazlitt said. “Then she began to fade like a wilting rose.

What little blood I had for her just wasn’t enough.” He raised the beaker as if to press it to her bony lips. Arkeley grabbed it out of his hands, sloshing the thick liquid.

“Maybe not quite yet,” he said.

The vampire lifted a shaking hand. Anger flared in her eye.

For a lingering moment no one said anything. Hazlitt opened his mouth only to shut it again quickly. Caxton realized he must be terrified of Arkeley. He had recognized the Marshal when he arrived, had even spoken to him with a certain familiarity. How many times in the previous twenty years had Arkeley come to this little room, Caxton wondered? How many times had he grabbed the beaker?

But no. This was a familiar scene for everyone but herself. Yet she understood, from the relative postures of the two men, that Arkeley had never interrupted the ritual before this night.

It was Arkeley who broke the silence. Clutching the beaker in both hands he looked right into the vampire’s eye. “We’ve had reports of half-dead activity,” he said, quietly. Softly, even. “Faceless. The woman over there saw one. I burned its arm this morning. There’s only one way to make a half-dead, and it takes a young, active vampire. A new vampire. Have you been naughty, Miss Malvern? Have you done something foolish?”

The vampire’s head rolled to the left and then the right on the thin column of her neck.

“I have a hard time believing you,” Arkeley said. “Who else can make a vampire but you? Give me a name. Give me a last known address and I’ll leave you alone.”

The vampire didn’t reply at all, except to let her one eye roll downward until it was focused on the blood in the beaker.

“Don’t be a bastard,” Hazlitt hissed. “At least not more than usual. You know how much she needs that blood. And look. It’s already clotting.”

“Alright.” Arkeley lifted the beaker and pressed it into the vampire’s out-stretched hand. She clutched it in a shaky death-grip that turned her knuckles even whiter.

“Enjoy it while you still can.”

“What is your problem tonight?” Hazlitt nearly shrieked.

Arkeley straightened up and tapped his jacket pocket again. It made a tiny snare sound—there was a piece of paper in there. “I said we couldn’t cut off her blood supply unless we had a court order. Well, this new vampire activity lit some fires under some very important posteriors.” He drew out a long piece of paper embossed with a notary’s seal. “You are hereby ordered to cease and desist feeding this vampire as of right now.” Arkelely smiled broadly. “Sometimes it helps to be the guy who guards courthouses.”

The vampire stopped with the beaker halfway to her mouth. Her eye swiveled upward to squint at Arkeley.

“If you were human you would try to make it last,” the Fed told her. Caxton had never seen him enjoy anything so much. “You’d know it was your last taste, ever, and you’d try to savor it. But you’re not human, and you can’t resist, can you?”

The vampire’s mouth drew back in a kind of sneer. Then a long gray tongue snaked out between all those teeth and started lapping hungrily at the blood in the beaker, licking long black streaks up the side. It was gone in a moment.

9.

“It will start with palsy. Uncontrollable shaking. Then she’ll begin losing tissue mass. The skin will peel back from her hands and then the muscles will rot. They’ll become lifeless claws. Her legs will atrophy even more quickly and become nothing but dead stumps. In time her eye will dry up and collapse.”

Hazlitt sat on top of an antique electrocardiogram machine, its pens splayed outward, and puffed occasionally on a cigarette that mostly sat ignored between two fingers. “Maybe, eventually, she’ll die. We don’t know.”

“If it keeps her from making more vampires I don’t care,” Arkeley said. “Is there a real reason why we’re bothering with this?” he asked.

In the center of the room, near the coffin, Justinia Malvern sat in her wheelchair, the empty blood beaker clutched in one near-lifeless hand. Her other hand rested on the keyboard of a laptop computer perched on top of the coffin.

“You know she can’t speak. Her larynx rotted away years ago. This is the only way she can express herself.” Hazlitt rubbed the bridge of his nose with one thumb.

He smiled at his charge as she worked up the strength to peck at one of the keys with a talon-like finger. “You should be more patient, Arkeley,” the doctor said.

“You might learn something from someone so old and wise.” When she had finished she folded her hands in her lap and looked up at them, her face quivering with emotion. Hazlitt turned the laptop around so they could see the screen. In 36-point italic letters Malvern had spelled out:

my Brood shall Devouer ye utterly

Arkeley chuckled. Then he stood up and started walking out of the room. “I’ll be back to check on you both,” he told Hazlitt. “Frequently.” Caxton followed him out.

In the white light of the hallway Caxton blinked and rubbed at her eyes. She followed Arkeley’s footsteps around to a desk in the hub of the building where a corrections officer with sergeant’s bars sat watching a portable television, a sitcom maybe. The reception was so bad that the laugh track was indistinguishable from static.

“What can I do you for, Mr. Marshal?” The CO slowly took his feet down from the desk and picked up the keyboard of his computer.

“Good evening, Tucker. I need some information on the staff here. More specifically I need to know the name and current address of everyone who worked here in say the last two years. I need to know if they still work here and if not, why they left. Can you get me that information?”

“Not a problem.” Tucker fiddled with his mouse for a while and hit a key. Down the hall a laser printer rattled out three sheets of paper.

Arkeley smiled, an altogether warmer and more human smile than he’d ever given Caxton. “You have to love this modern world. It used to take days to get a report like that. Listen, Tucker, what’s the turnover here?”

The guard shrugged. “Shit, it gets creepy at night here. Some people can’t take it.

Others, like me, we’ve got balls enough to stick around. I’d say half of the faces I see come through here don’t last a week. Maybe ten guys in the last year. Then there’s cleaning, maintenance, construction crews, safety inspectors, whatever. They come through here so fast they never introduce themselves.”

Arkeley nodded. “I was afraid of that.” He turned to Caxton. “Any of those people could have had contact with Malvern.”

“Which means any of them could be our vampire now,” Caxton responded.

Arkeley nodded. She’d gotten something right. She felt embarrassed and vindicated at the same time. Arkeley grabbed the sheets of paper off the printer and jogged back to where she waited. “Hazlitt is supposed to keep her in isolation but you saw him. He’ll do whatever she asks.” Arkeley shook his head in disgust.

“Every doctor we bring in here falls in love with her.”

“Does she hypnotize them?” Caxton remembered that part of the report.

“She has far more to offer them than just her piercing gaze,” Arkeley replied, scanning the sheets.

“So why not drag him out of here right now, have him replaced?” Caxton demanded. “You have some funny ideas about police work.”

Arkeley nodded, accepting what she said. “Listen,” he told her, “if somebody wants to be your enemy, there’s only one thing you can do. You give them exactly what they want. It confuses them and makes them wonder what you’re up to. If I fired Hazlitt tonight he would start thinking about ways of breaking Malvern out of here. If I let him keep her company at least I know where to find them both.” He shook his papers. “Alright. Now we go home and get some rest. In the morning we’ll start running down these names. It’s always better to hunt for vampires by daylight.”

Caxton could hear the good sense in that. They headed back out to the parking lot where dew had collected on the hood of the car and fogged up the windows.

Caxton got the car started and drove back out toward the nearest highway, Route 322, which would take them most of the way back to Harrisburg.

She turned up the heater, trying to dispel the chill of the night air. It was hard to get warm after the things she’d seen and been exposed to in the previous two days.

The cold seemed to have seeped into her flesh. It made her bones hurt. She wanted to turn on the radio but didn’t dare—what if Arkeley disapproved of her taste in music? It wouldn’t be worth the fight, or what it did to her self-esteem. She got it, really, she was just a highway patrol trooper, he was some kind of big-time Fed. She was willing to bow to his experience, to treat him with respect. Yet whenever he chastised her she felt as if she were a complete failure. She needed to grow a thicker skin, at least when she was around Arkeley.

She was surprised, so deep in these thoughts as she was, when he was the one to break the silence. She was almost shocked when he commended her. “You asked some excellent questions back there,” he said. “With some training you might make an adequate detective some day.” She had imagined, in her private thoughts, that when he said such a thing (presumably after he found her standing over a heap of dead vampires) that he would sound a little sheepish, as if he should have seen the potential in her all along but had been blinded by his own arrogance. Instead he sounded like he always had—like an elementary school teacher handing out report cards. But this one had a B+ on it. She would take what she could get.

“I need to learn about these monsters,” she said, “if I’m going to be any help to you. And I want to be a help to you.”

“You will, one way or another. And I’ll help you, too. No matter what happens this is going to be a big case. When I went up against Lares it meant a big step up in my career,” he told her. “You will no doubt be promoted if we can stop this thing from killing too many people.”

She shook her head. She hadn’t really thought about that. “I didn’t become a trooper to get sergeant’s bars. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind a raise in pay grade. I’m in this car though because I believe in what I do. When we graduate from the academy, they make us say the honor call. They make us say it a lot, until we start believing it. ‘I am a Pennsylvania State Trooper. I am a soldier of the law. To me is entrusted the honor of the force.’ They used to really mean that bit about being soldiers. Troopers weren’t allowed to marry and they lived together in barracks, just like soldiers. They didn’t let women join until the Seventies.”

Arkeley was quiet for a while. When he spoke again he sounded almost pensive.

“It must not have been easy for you to enter such a conservative organization. I imagine there would be some resistance to women being in your position, even now.”

“Wow, you’re preaching to the choir,” she laughed.

“In fact you’ve probably faced some direct adversity yourself. A woman doing a man’s job—there would have been talk. Idle talk, in the locker room, perhaps.”

“Sure. A lot of the guys like to mouth off,” she said.

“They would have made you a figure of fun. They would have names for you.

Hurtful names, though perhaps accurate.”

Caxton started to blush. She wasn’t sure where he was going with that line of inquiry. “Yes, they call me names. They call everybody something, so—”

“They probably make a good deal out of your lesbianism.”

Her lips pressed together and she heard a roaring in her ears. She watched the other cars passing them in the left lane. She was driving too fast and she made herself ease up on the gas.

“You are a lesbian, aren’t you? I made the assumption based simply on your haircut,” Arkeley told her. “I could be wrong.”

She shifted in her seat and glared at him. “Yes, I’m gay,” she shouted. She couldn’t seem to control her voice. “Which means what to you? I don’t care if you know. I don’t care who knows, I’m proud of who I am. But that doesn’t give you a right to—to—it should mean nothing. It has nothing to do with this fucking case!”

“Quite true,” he agreed, looking completely unruffled.

“Then why would you say things like that to somebody? Goddamnit, Arkeley!”

He cleared his throat. “I took the time to play this little game with you because I need to train you out of the habit of bullshitting me, Trooper. You may talk about being a soldier of the law all you like. You may say you want to help me. It’s completely immaterial. You’re in this car for only one reason.”

A metallic blue Honda shot past them going at least ninety and stopped him from finishing his sentence. The unmarked patrol car rocked on its shocks with the near collision and Caxton slapped her horn. The Honda slowed down just enough to pull right in front of them, dangerously close.

“What the hell?” she demanded, and hit the horn again. She took her foot off the gas completely and went for the brake.

Another car, a Chevrolet Cavalier that desperately needed a car wash, came up on her left. It matched her speed. As she tried to slow down, the Chevy’s driver copied her. In the rear-view mirror she saw a third car coming up from behind. They were boxing her in. She glanced across at the driver of the Chevy just as he looked at her.

His face was torn to ribbons.

10.

“They’re following me—they were at my house and now they’re following me,”

Caxton said. In the rear-view she saw her undead pursuer drift ever closer toward the bumper of her patrol car.

“I doubt it,” Arkeley told her. “Hold on.” The car behind them—a Hummer-2—smashed into them and the patrol car shrieked as metal tore into metal.

The half-dead back there wasn’t trying to make them crash. Caxton had enough experience with police pursuits to understand. The driver behind her was showing her the limits of the box. She sped up a little, keeping just inches away from the car boxing them in from the front, and whirled around in her seat to keep all three assailants in sight.

“They’re not here for me?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” Arkeley took his weapon from its holster. “When I took down Lares he was feeding his ancestors. He brought them blood. I did some more research and I found others who’d seen similar behavior. Vampires lust for blood, but they worship the creatures who gave them the curse. When I threatened Malvern back in the hospital I brought this on us. Roll down your window and lean back.”

She did as he asked only a moment before he lurched across her body and fired two shots into the Chevy on her left. The half-dead driver threw his hands across his face but they exploded in clouds of bone fragments and withered flesh. His head cracked and pulled apart and the car spun off the road and smacked into a tree.

Caxton watched in her rear-view as its headlights swiveled out crazily, pointing in different directions, a moment before they went dark.

From behind the Hummer-2 rammed them again. The half-deads were not pleased. Caxton grabbed the steering wheel so hard she felt it in her shoulders.

“Okay, my turn,” she said. She spun the wheel and stamped on the gas. The patrol car shot forward and smacked into the rear right wheel of the Honda in front of them. The tire slipped on the pavement and the car spun out to the left, letting Caxton surge forward and around the out-of-control vehicle. She’d had three days training in pursuit evasion tactics—everyone in Highway Patrol had to take it. As she sped into the darkness ahead, finally free of the box, she turned to grin at Arkeley, truly pleased with herself. “Do you know how to use the car radio?” she asked him, gesturing at the dashboard set with her chin. “Go ahead and call Troop H dispatch.

We need every available unit.”

Arkeley stared at her. “You little idiot,” he breathed. She didn’t look at him, just focused on keeping control of the car. She was doing better than ninety on a road rated for sixty at the most. “If we had let them, they would have taken us right to their master.”

“To the vampire,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But you shot that guy!” she protested.

“I had to make it look like we weren’t just playing along.”

Caxton gritted her teeth and glanced in her mirrors. The Hummer was still back there, laboring to keep pace with her. She eased off the gas a hair—not enough to make him think she was letting him catch up. The Honda was still trying to get turned around after its sudden stop. A green traffic sign flashed by. “The exit for New Holland is coming up. Do I take it or not?”

“We’ll have to try to guess from their behavior which way they want us to go.”

Arkeley bit off the words and spat them out. He was holding on to the door handle with one hand while the other held his weapon up, barrel pointed up. If the bouncing, jostling car made him fire by accident the bullet would exit the car as quickly as possible. “If he starts to weave to the left—”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Two motorcycles came screaming up the on-ramp behind them and rumbled quickly up behind the patrol car. The riders weren’t wearing helmets but then they didn’t have any faces either. One of the half-dead riders pulled up on the right of Caxton, forcing her into the left lane, away from the New Holland exit. At least that answered her question. The other motorcyclist gunned his engine with a sustained explosive noise and pulled up next to her front left wheel.

The motorcycles weren’t much of a threat on their own—she could ram them off the road with one swivel of her wheel. The one on her right, though, had a big rusty hunk of metal in his hand, a cleaver, at least eighteen inches long. He brought it back with his arm straight and then swung it right into the side of the car. There was more noise than damage to the car’s body but her right-hand headlight flickered out in a shower of sparks and she was half blind, hurtling through the Stygian woods at eighty-five miles an hour. Reflexively, even as he was pulling his cleaver free, she swerved to the left to get away from him. The biker on that side swung out wide and narrowly missed getting clipped by her front left wheel. Glass and bits of metal smacked and skittered and danced across the windshield as the patrol car rocked up and down on its shock absorbers and the wheels slipped away from her.

Caxton struggled to regain control of the car. Her remaining headlight washed the road surface from left to right as the car sagged on its tires but she was good at this, she’d had years of practice driving under hazardous conditions, and she didn’t panic. She straightened the car out and poured on a little more speed. Maybe the Hummer would have trouble keeping up but she figured the bikers knew where they were taking her.

“Are you sure they’re not trying to kill us?” Caxton demanded.

“Ninety per cent so,” Arkeley replied. “Normally half-deads herd victims to the master. After all if we die out here the vampire can’t drink our blood. Then again, if they think I’m enough of a threat they may not want to take any chances.”

“You’re a known vampire killer,” Caxton said. “If I were them I’d consider you a pretty serious threat. Please, please, please, can we call for some backup?”

He nodded. He didn’t waste time suggesting that maybe she was right for once and maybe he was wrong. He picked up the radio handset and called it in, just like he should have ten minutes earlier. Dispatch from Troop H started calling in cars.

Then an orange sign flashed by them so fast she could barely see it, its phosphorescent paint glowing eerily in the near-total darkness. She didn’t have a chance to read it but she knew what the color meant: road work ahead.

She took her foot off the gas. The Hummer behind her grew bigger in her rear-view but she tried not to sweat it. She had no idea what was coming—anything from a lane shift to a complete road closure. She could feel panic rising in her chest.

The biker on her left had a monkey-wrench. He started to draw back his arm, clearly intending to smash in her remaining headlight. There were no streetlamps on this stretch of highway—this was a rural route where people were expected to bring their own lights. If he smashed her lamp she was going to be blind.

With a desperation she’d never felt before she rolled the wheel over and slammed right into him. The bike twisted under the impact, its front wheel flying up. The biker, pinned against the side of the patrol car, shot out his hands and tried to grab on to her door but his skinless fingers scrabbled uselessly on the slick metal and glass. He disappeared from view, there one second, far behind her in the dark the next. His motorcycle span on the asphalt kicking up sparks.

She stood on the brake and the Hummer swerved to avoid hitting her. The other biker passed her by, his broken face turning to watch her go. While he wasn’t watching the road his machine kept going in a perfectly straight line, right into an orange traffic cone. The PVC cone was meant to survive even the worst collisions but his bike wasn’t. It flipped end over end and landed right on top of its operator.

Caxton pumped the brakes. She could read the signs now. There was an emergency detour she couldn’t quite make. There was a complete closure of the road in front of her. Behind her the Hummer stopped short, its brakes howling.

She rolled toward a stop, the car unwilling to slow as quickly as she wanted it to.

Sheer willpower wasn’t helping. The road surface was covered in a chalky dust and in places it had been peeled away to reveal a much rougher layer below. The car jumped and bounced and Arkeley shoved his handgun into its holster. Finally, at last, the car ground to a halt, sliding the last few feet. It rocked forward, then back, and threw the two of them around in their seatbelts. Dust drooped from the air, settling again on the road, and silence fell with it.

Directly in front of them stood a roadblock of sawhorses and bright yellow collision barriers. Beyond the road surface had been completely cut up and torn through, leaving a six foot deep pit in the earth. Mud-spattered construction vehicles, abandoned power tools, boxes of rags and supplies and stacks of traffic cones littered the hole. Overhead an ancient and gnarled silver maple arched across the roadway, its twinned propeller-like seeds spinning down through the night air.

High up in the mostly denuded branches something huge and white caught a few rays of light from her headlamp. As she watched, about a quarter of the white thing broke off from the main mass and fell like a stone. It hit the hood of her patrol car hard enough to make her scream a little. When she’d recovered herself she looked through the windshield and saw a construction worker in an orange vest staring back at her with dead eyes. His throat had been completely torn out, as well as part of his collarbone and shoulder. His skin was pale, and there was no blood on him at all.

Before the car had time to stop trembling from the impact, the vampire leapt down from the tree to land right next to her, separated from her fragile body by only the width of her door. His eyes met hers and she could not look away.

11.

The vampire stood at least six and a half feet tall. He was not as muscular as she had expected—perhaps she had thought every vampire would be as big as Piter Lares.

This one had a thin, whip-like quality that made her think of a predatory cat—fast, vicious, over-designed. He was completely naked and completely hairless. His ears stuck up on either side of his head and came to sharp points.

Caxton studied him. She had plenty of time—he didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry, as if he would kill them when he felt like it, when he got around to it. They both knew she wasn’t going anywhere. His eyes were reddish and bright. Seed pods from the maple tree had stuck to his skin here and there—a faint sheen of sweat covered him from head to toe. His skin, which had looked so white before, actually had a slight tinge of pink. He had just sucked the blood of the dead construction worker, after all. The poor dead man must have been the only one around the work site, perhaps a night watchman.

The vampire cleared his throat as if he wanted her to look at him some more. Was he vain? Did he want her to think him beautiful? She actually wondered. Did she find him beautiful? Like Malvern in the hospital he radiated no humanity at all. It was strange, she would never have said that Arkeley was particular human-seeming. Yet the Fed gave off some kind of aura, a human warmth or perhaps it was just a smell.

The vampire had none of this. The only comparison she could make, and it really jumped out at her, was that the vampire was like a marble statue of a person. Its lines and contours could be perfectly carved, immaculately replicated, but you would never mistake him for something alive. He was like Michelangelo’s statue of David.

Perfect but hard and cold. His penis drooped flaccidly against his thighs and she wondered if he had any use for it. Did he find humans attractive? Did vampires have sex with their own kind?

He padded closer to the car and placed one hand on the frame of the open window. He bent down to look inside, his lower jaw falling open to show his frightening number of teeth. From behind her Caxton was aware of a certain sound, an irritating buzz like the droning wings of a mosquito. As the vampire’s face came closer to her she heard the noise double in volume. It really was quite annoying. It was Arkeley, she realized. He was saying something but she couldn’t make out the words. Well, he’d never said anything she particularly wanted to hear before, so she saw no reason to start paying attention to him now.

The vampire’s hands came down around her, his powerful fingers clutching at her uniform shirt and her belt. She moved through space, dragged inexorably along by his power, in one slightly sickening, perfectly fluid motion she was outside of the car and dangling from his hands. She was floating, weightless, and she felt like a little girl again, she felt as she had when her father used to pick her up and carry her around.

How wonderful it had been to surrender everything to that embrace. How much joy she had taken in being a doll in her father’s arms.

She looked for the vampire’s eyes again but his face was turned away from her.

She frowned, wanting very much for him to look at her once more. A hole appeared in his forehead, a gaping, fluttering black hole that spat dark fluids and fragments of bone. A second hole appeared in his cheek and she saw the back of his head burst open and suddenly, quite suddenly, she was falling.

Bang—she hit the ground. And pain flashed like lightning in her arm.

The pain smashed her lungs open. Breath gasped out of her. She hadn’t realized she had been holding it in before. She could hear again—she hadn’t know she was deaf a moment earlier. She looked down at her hands then up at the vampire. There was no marble statue up there. There was a beast, a thing of sharp teeth and bloody eyes and it was going to kill her. In fact it—he—had been in the process of killing her when Arkeley shot him twice in the face.

“Jesus,” she shrieked, “Jesus,” the vampire had been shot twice in the head and all he did was drop her. He was hit, hit bad, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough.

She raced away from him, scuttled away on hands and feet and panic erupted in her throat and she nearly threw up.

The fucker had hypnotized her. She grabbed for her gun and turned to shoot him in the heart, as many times as possible.

Before she could do more than free her weapon from its holster the vampire’s hand closed on her neck. As fast as she had moved away from him, he had come at her even faster. He picked her up and threw her away, even as two more gunshots made the night air jump and shiver. She was flying and this time she knew she was going to hit hard, knew it was going to hurt. She collided with a sawhorse painted orange and white. It caught her right her navel, right at the top of her thighs and she kept going, twisting over it, agony jarring through her femurs as they flexed and twisted and nearly shattered. She slumped forward and her momentum carried her over the barrier and into the exposed pit beyond, the place where the road had been peeled away.

Caxton fell for six feet that felt like six miles, her hands clawing at naked air, her legs pinwheeling. She landed with a splash in a puddle of freezing cold mud that got in her eyes, her mouth, her nose, threatening to choke her, to drown her. She sputtered and clawed at her face and sucked in one painful breath that made her ribs ache.

She was still alive.

Up above, beyond the pitch dark wall of the trench, two more gunshots sounded.

Then another one. She waited for a fourth shot but it didn’t come. Was Arkeley dead? If he was she was all alone in the bottom of the hole. She sat up and looked around but couldn’t see any way out—no ladder, no ramp, not even a rope she could climb. Given enough time she could probably find a way up to the top. She doubted she would be given enough time.

Even as she thought it the vampire appeared on top of the barricade. He looked down at her and his eyes were red mirrors that caught the starlight and shone it down on her. With a wave of nausea she tore her gaze away from his.

“You.” His voice was thick, and low, and it had a raspy, rumbling growl in the back of it. “Are you Arkeley?”

He didn’t know? He’d laid such an elaborate trap to catch the Fed but nobody had bothered to tell him if Arkeley was a man or a woman? Caxton didn’t think before she answered. “Yeah, I’m Arkeley.” He looked doubtful so she tried to convince him. “I’m the famous vampire killer, bloodmunch. I tore your daddy’s heart out, that’s right.”

He stared down at her and she looked at her feet. She could feel his gaze on her like the laser sights of two sniper rifles painting her back. Finally she heard him laugh. It sounded a little like a dog choking on a half-swallowed bone.

“Little liar,” the vampire said, still chuckling. “Lares was no kin of mine. You’re the other one, the partner. I’ll be back for you,” he sang. And then he disappeared from view.

“Damn,” she whined, not entirely sure why she’d wanted to pretend to be Arkeley. Surely if he’d believed her the vampire would have come down and snuffed out her life on the instant. Yet perhaps that would have given the real Arkeley a chance to get away, or at least to gather reinforcements. That idea was based on the presumption, with no basis in known fact, that the vampire hadn’t already killed the Fed.

She pounded at the walls of the pit with her fists, scattering clods of dirt and pebbles and achieving nothing whatsoever else. “Fuck!” she shouted.

As if in echo, she heard another gun shot, this time from a whole new direction.

12.

“Freeze!” someone shouted and she heard a whole volley of shots. “This is the State Police!” came next. It was followed by horrible screams.

The pit was full of road grading equipment and supplies. Caxton searched through boxes of tools, looking for anything she could use to help her get up top again. Her reinforcements had arrived—the backup Arkeley had called for, back when the half-deads were chasing them. The troopers had arrived and they were getting slaughtered.

Two beams of light shot over her head—someone had a car up above and they had turned on the headlights. The vampire must have been right in the path of the beams. She heard him hiss in pain. He appeared at the top of the pit again, this time as a silhouette against the new light, his left forearm pressed tight against his eyes. A severed human head with part of its neck still attached dangled by its hair from the curled fingers of the vampire’s left hand. Caxton prayed silently that it wasn’t Arkeley’s head.

Exit wounds appeared on the vampire’s back, dozens of them spraying bloodless translucent tissue. The vampire staggered backwards until it was crouched on top of the barricade, howling in pain. Caxton drew her own weapon and sighted on his back.

He dropped the head. He lowered his forearm. Then he fell backwards like a tree falling in the woods. When his long body hit the ground at the bottom of the pit it cracked the loose pavement there.

Caxton remembered Arkeley’s report, had all but memorized it. She knew that unless the vampire’s heart was destroyed it would get up again. She had only a few seconds. Bullets were pretty much useless—even if she emptied her clip into his chest she knew she couldn’t be assured of hitting the heart dead on. She looked to her side, to the boxes of tools, and found what she wanted. A pile of palings had been left in the pit, the kind of wooden poles surveyors use to mark out where a new highway will go. She lifted one, a square-cut, mud-stained length of unfinished wood maybe six feet long and an inch and a half thick. It even had a day-glo orange ribbon tied to its flat end like a pennon on a lance. She took it up in both hands, lifted it over her head to stab directly downwards.

With all of her strength she brought it down, sharp end first, right into the vampire’s rib cage, right into that white skin like carved marble. It might as well have been stone she attacked. The stake shivered all the way up its length, driving long splinters into the meat of her hand. Its point splayed out, twisted and broken.

She brushed away the debris and found a tiny pink point on the vampire’s skin where she’d stabbed him.

“That skin is tougher than steel,” Arkeley said. She looked up and saw his head and shoulders above the barricade. He had a bad scrape up one side of his face but otherwise he looked unharmed. While she stood there being surprised he lowered himself down into the pit to stand next to her. She didn’t think until it was too late to ask him to help her out of the pit.

The vampire didn’t move, didn’t so much as breathe. He was a dead thing and he looked far more natural that way. Caxton lifted her hand to her mouth and tried to pull out a splinter with her teeth. “What do we do next?” she asked, as a little blood welled up out of the ball of her thumb. In the dark she could barely see it drip, a tiny fleck of it splattering on the vampire’s foot.

The effect, however, was sudden and electric. The vampire sat up and his mouth opened wide. It swam toward her out of the sharp shadows at the bottom of the pit, some deep sea fish that could swallow her whole. She started to scream, but she also started to jump out of the way. It wasn’t going to matter—the vampire was faster than she was.

Luckily for her Arkeley had been ready all along. He fired one of his cross points right into the vampire’s mouth and broke off a dozen of its teeth. It didn’t look as if it even hurt the monster but it changed his course, slightly, enough that its leaping attack missed Caxton by a hair’s breadth.

“Help me,” Arkeley insisted. Caxton slowly got to her feet, badly shaken by the near miss. “I can’t hold it for long,” he shouted, and she shook herself into action.

Arkeley fired two shots into the vampire’s center mass. He must be running out of bullets, she realized.

He had slowed the vampire down, at least. The monster knelt in the mud, his balled fists punching at the ground, his head bowed. He started to get up and Arkeley shot him again. He’d had thirteen bullets to start with—how many did he have left?

Caxton looked at the tools around her but she knew they wouldn’t be enough.

She ran to the far side of the pit and found what she wanted. It was a compact little vehicle with an exposed driver’s seat and a simple three-speed transmission. It was designed to cut very narrow defiles through concrete or asphalt. To this purpose its entire front comprised a single three foot wide wheel rimmed with vicious shiny steel teeth. On its side the manufacturer’s name was painted in black letters: DITCH

WITCH. Caxton jumped up into the driver’s seat and reached for the starter.

Nothing happened. She slapped the control panel in frustration when she saw there was no key in the ignition. The cutter had been immobilized for the night, presumably so teenagers wouldn’t steal it and go for joy-rides cutting up the highway.

Arkeley fired again but the vampire was on his feet. He tottered back and forth and then he took a step toward the Fed. It was impossible for someone to take so much damage, to incur so much trauma, and still walk but the vampire was doing it.

He was perhaps six feet from Arkeley. He would close that distance in seconds.

Caxton grabbed the gear shift of the Ditch Witch and threw it into neutral, then shot back the hand brake. She jumped off the back and shoved the machine forward. The pit’s floor was slightly uneven and the whole compact mass of the construction machine rolled slowly, inexorably forward. Caxton drew her own weapon and fired at the vampire’s head, one shot at another, blasting apart his eyes, his nose, his ears.

The vampire laughed at her, at the futility of her shots. His shattered eyes repaired themselves as she watched, filling in his broken eye sockets. Yet in the second or two it took him to heal he was blind. He couldn’t see the Ditch Witch rolling right toward him until it was too late.

The toothed wheel dug deep into his thigh, his groin. He fell backward as the mass of the machine rumbled on top of him and stopped, pinning him to the ground.

He tried to get up, tried to shift the Ditch Witch’s mass but even he wasn’t strong enough to lift a half ton vehicle with almost no leverage.

“Hey,” someone shouted. Caxton looked up and saw a state trooper on the rim of the pit, his wide-brimmed hat silhouetted against the low light. “Hey, are you alright down there?”

“Get the power on,” Arkeley shouted. “There should be a master switch up there, get the power on!”

The trooper disappeared from view. A moment later they heard an electric generator sputter to life then settle down to a throbbing growl. Caxton had no idea what Arkeley had in mind. A trooper brought a portable floodlight up to the barricade and blasted the pit with white light that made Caxton look away. The vampire, still trying to free himself, let out a yowl like an injured mountain lion. They didn’t like light, she decided. Well, they were nocturnal after all. It made sense.

Arkeley limped over to the tool cases. He found what he wanted and plugged it into a junction box. Caxton could hardly believe it when he came to stand next to the vampire’s side, an electric jackhammer in his hands.

He shoved the bit into the vampire’s chest, just to the right of his left nipple. The same place Caxton had hit him with her wooden stake. Arkeley switched on the hammer and pressed down hard with all his weight. The vampire’s skin resisted for a moment but then it split wide open and watery fluids—no blood, of course—gouted from the wound. As the hammer’s bit dug through the vampire’s ribs the monster started to squirm and shake but Arkeley didn’t move an inch. Strips of skin and then bits of muscle tissue like cooked chicken—all white meat—sputtered out of the wound. The vampire screamed with a noise she could hear just fine over the stuttering racket of the power tool and then... and then it was over. The vampire’s head fell back and his mouth fell open and he was dead. Truly dead. Arkeley laid the jackhammer down and reached into the vampire’s chest cavity with his bare hands, searching around inside to make sure the heart was truly destroyed. Eventually he pulled his hands free and sat down on the ground. The body just lay there, inert, a thing now as if it had never been a person.

The troopers lifted them both out of the pit and Caxton saw what had happened up top while she was trapped. Two dozen state troopers had shown up to support her. Five of them were dead, their bodies torn to pieces and their blood completely drained. She knew them all by sight, though thankfully they were from a different troop than her, Troop H when she was Troop T. She wouldn’t have called them friends. She felt a lightness in her head, in her spirit as she passed by the bodies, as if she couldn’t quite connect with what had happened.

The vampire was dead. It was like that was the only thing that could happen that night, the only event of even the slightest importance. The vampire was dead.

Caxton was barely aware of her own body when they sat her down in the back of a patrol car and made sure she was okay. An EMT checked her for injuries and the surviving troopers asked endless questions about what had happened, about the car chase, about the naked vampire, about how many times she’d discharged her weapon. She would open her mouth and an answer would come out, surprising her every time. She was in shock, which felt pretty much like being hypnotized by a vampire, she realized.

Eventually they let her go home.

Part III: Reyes

13.

It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

-Le Fanu, Carmilla

In the morning, with sunlight coming in through the windows, Caxton got up without disturbing Deanna and pulled on some clothes, anything, really. It was freezing in the little house and there was frost on the garden. She turned on the coffee maker and left it belching and hissing then went out and fed the dogs out in the barn. Their breath plumed out of the kennels. They were happy enough to see her. She let them out to run around for a while on the wet grass, none of them willing to test the limits of the invisible fence, content, for the moment, to stay in their safe little patch of lawn bordered by winter-quiet trees. She watched them play, snapping at one another, knocking each other over, the same game dogs had been playing for a hundred thousand years and still nobody ever won. It made her smile. She felt surprisingly good, maybe a little stiff where she’d fallen on her arms and her ribs the night before, a few bruises here and there from when the vampire had yanked her out of the car. But mostly she felt good, and healthy, and like she’d achieved something.

So she was quite confused when she started crying. Not big noisy sobs, just a little leakage from the eyes, but it didn’t seem to want to stop. She wiped it away, blew her nose, and felt her heart jump in her chest.

“Pumpkin?” Deanna asked, standing mostly naked in the back door, just a sleeveless t-shirt on that covered everything the law required. Deanna’s red hair stood up in a bed head shock of spikes and she shivered visibly. She’d never looked more beautiful. “Pumpkin, what’s wrong?” she asked.

Caxton wanted to go to her, to grab her around the waist, to ravage her. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop crying. “It’s nothing. I mean, really, I have no idea why I’m crying. I’m not sad or... or anything, really.” She wiped at her eyes with her fingers. It had to be a delayed stress reaction. They’d taught her about those in the academy, and told her she was no tougher than any civilian. Like everyone else in her class she had thought, yeah, right, and fallen asleep during the seminar. She was plenty tough. She was a soldier of the law. But she couldn’t stop crying.

Deanna rushed out on the grass, the dew squishing up between her toes, and grabbed Caxton up in a stiff kind of back-patting embrace. “There’s some guy at the door who wants to see you. Do you want me to send him away?”

“Let me guess. Old guy, lots of wrinkles, with a silver star on his lapel.” Caxton pushed Deanna away, not ungently. She grabbed the flesh of her own upper arm near her armpit through her shirt and gave it a good twist. The pain was sudden and real it stopped the crying instantly.

At the front door Arkeley stood waiting patiently, his mouth a meaningless slot again. When he saw Deanna, though, his face started to glow. She opened the door to let him into the kitchen and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. Caxton stayed a little away from him, not wanting him to see her irritated eyes.

He smiled even more broadly but shook his head. “I can’t drink the stuff. It gives me ulcers. Good morning, trooper.”

Caxton nodded at him. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said. “I thought we were done after last night.”

He shrugged. “While we were busy having so much fun yesterday some people were out there doing real police work. Fingerprints, dental records from the half-deads, what have you have turned up no identification on the vampire yet, not even a name. But we do have this.” He handed her a computer printout. She recognized it immediately as an entry from the nation car license plate registry. It listed the license plate number from the Cadillac CTS that had started the vampire investigation, the car full of bodies that the one-armed half-dead had abandoned. The sheet listed the name and all known addresses of the car’s owner.

“This is our vampire?” Caxton asked.

Arkeley shook his head. “Our best guess is that it’s the victim. The one in the trunk. His fingerprints turned up nothing but his son’s did and blood typing suggests everyone who was in that car was related.”

“What kid has been fingerprinted?” Deanna asked, her nose wrinkling up. “I thought you only got printed if you got arrested.” She poured some cereal in a bowl but didn’t bother with milk. Breakfast tended to be an informal affair at their house.

“We’ve been printing kids as fast as we can for a couple years now,” Caxton told her. “It helps identify them if they get kidnapped. At least that’s what we tell their parents. It also means the next generation of criminals will almost all have their fingerprints on file when they start committing crimes.”

Arkeley sat down unbidden in one of the cheap Ikea chairs around the kitchen table. He had that same uncomfortable posture she’d seen before whenever he sat in a chair. He must have seen the question in her face. “The Lares case nearly killed me,” he explained. “I had to have three vertebrae fused together. This one last night was easy.”

Caxton frowned and studied the printout. It indicated that the car’s owner had been named Farrel Morton and that he owned a hunting camp near Caernarvon. Not too far from where she’d been working a standard Intoxilyzer sweep just two nights earlier. She put the pieces together. “Jesus. He took his kids hunting and the whole family got eaten alive. Then the living dead stole his car.”

“There are human remains at his hunting camp. A lot of them,” Arkeley told her.

Deanna stamped her bare foot on the floor. “No fucking shop talk in the kitchen!”

she shouted. It was a habitual war cry and Caxton winced.

“Quite right. There’ll be time enough for the gory details later.” He and Deanna traded a look of complete understanding that made Caxton wince again. He would never have looked at her like that. Maybe she shouldn’t have cared, but she did.

“You’ve got quite the partner here, trooper,” Arkeley said, rising painfully to his feet. “Have you two been together for very long?”

“Almost five years,” Caxton said. “Should we get going? The crime scene is getting old by now.” Not that it was likely to matter much with the perpetrator dead but there were rules in police work.

“How did you meet?” he asked.

Caxton froze. She had to decide, at that moment, whether she was going to let him inside of her real life or not. The cop stuff, the vampire fighting, that was important, sure, but this was her home, her dogs, her Deanna. The side she didn’t let anybody see, not even her fellow troopers. Of course she’d never had a partner before. He was her partner at least for the duration of the investigation and you were supposed to have your partner over for dinner and stuff like that. He would be going away soon, now that the vampire was dead. She decided the danger of letting him inside was minimal. “I rescue greyhounds,” she said. “From the dog tracks. When one of the animals gets injured or just too old they put them down. I give them a more humane option—I save the dogs and raise them to be pets. It’s an expensive hobby—most of the dogs you save are injured or sick and they need a lot of medical help. Deanna used to work as a veterinary technician. She used to sneak out heartworm pills and rabies sticks for me. She got fired for it, actually.”

Deanna leaned across the kitchen cupboards, stretching, one leg up in the air. “It was a shit job anyway. We were putting down animals all the time because people didn’t want to pay to fix them up.”

“I can imagine that would get disheartening,” Arkeley soothed. Deanna’s face grew radiant under the warmth of his sympathy.

Jealousy spiked upwards through Caxton’s guts. “Now she just does her art.”

“Aha, I knew it,” Arkeley said. “You’ve got an artist’s hands.”

Deanna waggled them for him and laughed. “Do you want to see the piece I’m working on?” she asked.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Caxton tried. She looked at Arkeley. “It’s contemporary. It’s not for everybody. Listen, you can see my dogs instead.

Everybody likes dogs, right?”

“When they’re safely behind a fence, sure,” Arkeley told her. “I can’t stand the way they lick. But really, trooper, I’d love to see your partner’s work.”

There was nothing for it but to head out to Deanna’s shed. Deanna put on shoes and a padded winter coat and headed across the lawn to work the combination lock.

Caxton and Arkeley followed along a little more slowly.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Caxton asked, once Deanna was out of earshot.

Arkeley didn’t play coy. “You always make nice with your partner’s wife. It gets you invited to dinner more often,” he told her.

They entered the shed with roses on their cheeks—it was going to be a truly cold day, it seemed. Caxton moved to stand up against one wall of the shed, extremely embarrassed. Her cheeks burned but not just because of the cold.

Deanna was as unabashed as ever. She’d shown her work to every person she could find who was even slightly willing to look at it. Most of the time she got polite silence in response. Some people would deem her work “interesting” or “engaging”

and go on for a while about theories of body politics or post-feminism until they ran out of steam. The people who actually appreciated her work scared Caxton. They didn’t seem all there—and worse, they made her wonder if maybe Deanna wasn’t altogether normal herself.

Arkeley moved around the shed carefully, taking it all in. Three white sheets—queen-sized—hung from the shed’s rafters with a few feet of empty air between them. They moved softly in the cold empty air of the shed, lit only by the early morning sun coming through the door. Each sheet was spotted with hundreds of nearly identical marks, roughly rectangular, all of them the same reddish brown.

There was no smell on such a cold day but even in the height of summer the marks gave off only the faintest tang of iron.

“Blood,” Arkeley announced when he’d walked around all three sheets.

“Menstrual blood,” Deanna corrected him.

Here it comes, Caxton thought, the moment when Arkeley got skeeved out and called Deanna a freak. It had happened before. A lot. But it didn’t come. He nodded and kept studying the sheets, his head tilted back to take it all in. When he didn’t say anything more for a full minute Caxton started to feel nervous. Deanna looked confused.

“It’s about taking something hidden,” Caxton blurted out and they both looked at her. “Something that is normally hidden away, disposed of in secrecy, and putting it up on display.”

The pride in Deanna’s face made Caxton want to melt on the spot. But she had to juggle her two partners. She couldn’t let Arkeley see any sign of weakness, especially not here in this deepest sanctum.

Arkeley breathed deeply. “This is powerful,” he said. He didn’t bother trying to interpret it, which was good. He didn’t try to explain it away.

Deanna bowed for him. “It’s taken me years to get it this far and it’s not nearly done. There’s a guy in Arizona who is doing something similar—I saw him at Burning Man a while ago—but he’s using any kind of blood and he lets anybody contribute. This is all me. Well, Laura has helped a few times.”

Caxton’s hands started shaking. “Okay, too much information,” she let out. It just came out of her. They both looked at her but she just shook her head.

“Perhaps we should get to the crime scene,” Arkeley suggested. She had never been so glad to receive an order.

14.

“What about garlic?” Caxton asked. By day the dead trees that lined the highways looked a lot less threatening. She supposed it helped that the vampire was dead.

There were some half-deads out there unaccounted for—the one driving the Hummer-2 that rammed them and the one-armed one that had scared the hell out of her, at least—but by all accounts they would be easy to round up and subdue now that their master was gone. The vampire was dead—it made the whole world look better. She was finally giving in to her curiosity, which she had kept leashed before because she was terrified of the answers to her questions. Now they seemed harmless, academic. “Will garlic keep a vampire away?”

Arkeley snorted. “No. In ‘93 I did a little extemporaneous experimentation on Malvern. I brought a jar of minced garlic into her room and when Armonk wasn’t looking I dumped it all over her. It made a pretty good mess and it pissed her off but no, no lasting harm. It might have been mayonnaise for all she cared.”

“How about mirrors? Do they show up in mirrors?”

“From what she’s said she loved looking at her reflection back in the good old days. She doesn’t like the way she looks now, that much is certain.” He shrugged. “I suppose that one has a grain of truth in it. The old ones will break any mirror they see. The young ones don’t care.”

“You already ruled out crosses. What about holy water, communion wafers, hell, I don’t know. What about other religions? What about the star of David or statues of Buddha? Do they run away from a copy of the Koran?”

“None of that works. They don’t worship Satan—and yes, I did ask—and they don’t practice black magic. They’re unnatural. If that makes them unholy, well, it doesn’t seem to hurt them any.”

“Silver,” she tried. “Or is that werewolves?”

“It was vampires, originally. Hollywood came up with the idea that werewolves can be killed with silver bullets. No one has actually reported a werewolf sighting in two hundred years so I couldn’t tell you about their vulnerabilities. As far as vampires go, silver has no effect.” He shifted in the passenger seat. He looked a lot less flexible than he had the day before. Fighting vampires took it out of him, she guessed. “We tried all these things out on Malvern in the first couple of years, back before Armonk started worshipping her and moaning about her rights. Sunlight, we found out, is obnoxious to her. It doesn’t set her on fire but it causes her pain.

Pretty much every kind of light causes her pain. She has to sleep during the day, there’s no way to keep her awake. Her body literally changes while the sun is up, repairing whatever damage she took during the previous night. You’ll have to come see the metamorphosis some time. It’s gruesome but fascinating.”

“No thanks,” Caxton said. “When this case is closed I’m done with monsters.

You can keep your title as the only American vampire hunter. I think I’ll stick with DUIs and fender-benders. So how did all these stories get started if nothing works?”

“Simple. Nobody likes a story with an unhappy ending. Until the last century—and the advent of reliable firearms—vampires pretty much had their way with us. The poets and the writers changed the details so as not to depress their readers with how bad the world could really be.”

“But if they had the reality to compare to—”

“That’s just it, they didn’t.” Arkeley sighed. “Every time a vampire pops up people say the same thing. ‘I thought they were extinct’. It’s because there’s never more than a handful of them anywhere in the world at a given time. And thank God for that. If they were any more common, if they were better organized, we’d all be dead.”

Caxton frowned with the effort of trying not to think too hard about that. She drove the rest of the way to Caernarvon and the hunting camp without small talk.

Arkeley was good at silence, a fact she was just beginning to appreciate. Some things weren’t worth talking about.

Patrol cars from three different jurisdictions sat parked on rolling grass near the hunting camp when they arrived—State Police, the county Sheriff and a sole vehicle for the local policeman, a middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform who stood outside looking like he wanted to throw up. Technically it was his crime scene and he had to authorize Caxton and Arkeley before they could go in. They waited till he felt well enough to check their ID.

“Are you going to be able to handle this?” Arkeley asked her. It didn’t sound like a dare, but that was how she intended to take it. “This won’t be pretty.”

“I’ve scraped prom queens off the asphalt, tough guy,” she said. “I’ve dug teeth out of dashboards so we could match dental records.”

Arkeley gave her a dry little chuckle for her bravado.

It didn’t look so bad from fifty feet away. The camp itself was a more elaborate affair than Caxton had imagined. It stood next to a chirping stream, protected in the shadow of some sixty foot willows. Most camps in Caxton’s experience were drafty little log cabins with steeply peaked roofs so they didn’t collapse under the weight of winter snows. Farrel Morton’s place might more accurately have been deemed a hunting lodge. A big main structure with lots of windows branched off into a newer wing and what Caxton judged had to be a semi-detached kitchen, judging from all the chimneys and vents. A porch ran the full length of the building, well supplied with rocking chairs made of rough-hewn logs with the bark still on. Under the peak of the roof Morton had mounted a brightly-painted hex sign, an old Pennsylvania Dutch ward against evil.

Apparently it hadn’t worked too well. Cops with their uniform shirts unbuttoned and their hats set aside were digging holes in the kitchen yard and out around back. They didn’t have to dig too deep.

“I thought the vampire’s victims all came back as half-deads,” Caxton said, looking down at a pile of bones and broken flesh that had come out of one of those holes. Maggots made the ribcage quiver. She had to look away. This was worse than traffic fatalities. Those were fresh and the colors were normal. These smelled bad.

Really bad.

“Only if he bade them to rise,” Arkeley explained. “He wouldn’t need very many servants, especially if he was trying to stay under our radar. Half-deads can’t disguise themselves as well as vampires can. His bloodlust would force him to keep taking more victims, but he wouldn’t want thirty slaves wandering around, doing nothing but drawing attention to themselves.”

“Closer on a hundred, if you count the ones inside.” It was the local cop. He still looked green but he had their identification in his hands. He returned it to them and let them head inside.

Caxton almost wished he’d refused them when she saw the kitchen. The scene inside made no sense and her brain refused to accept it. The smell kept screwing with her head. It was bad, extremely bad, but more than that it was wrong. The reptilian part of her brain knew that smell meant death. It knew enough to want to get away. She could feel it squirming at the base of her skull, trying to crawl away down her spine.

She focused on the details, trying not to see the big picture. That was tough.

There were cops everywhere in different uniforms, milling around, bagging evidence, doing their jobs. She could barely see them for the bones. It was like a crypt in there, not like a house at all. Bones were stacked like cordwood along the wall, on top of the white enamel stove, shoved into closets. Someone had sorted them into skulls, pelvises, ribs, limbs. “Obsessive compulsive disorder,” Caxton breathed.

“Now that may be something real,” Arkeley told her. “In Eastern Europe they used to sprinkle mustard seeds around a vampire’s coffin. They thought he would have to count them all before he could move on and if they left enough he would still be counting when dawn came. We don’t know much about what vampires and half-deads do when they’re not actively hunting. We know they don’t watch television—it confuses them. They don’t understand our culture and it doesn’t interest them. Maybe they have their own entertainment. Maybe they sit around sorting their bones.”

Caxton moved into the main room, mostly just wanting to get away from all the bones. What she found in the living room was worse. She crossed her arms across her stomach and held on tight. A couch and three comfortable-looking chairs stood in a semi-circle around a big fireplace. Human bodies in various states of decomposition sat as if posed, some with their arms around others, some leaning forward on their elbows. Baling wire had been used to keep them upright and in comfortable-looking postures. “Jesus.” It was too much. It made no sense. “I don’t get it. The vampire ate all these people. He kept their bodies around. Then he killed Farrel Morton and his kids and he felt like he needed to hide their corpses. Why the sudden change? What was different about Morton?”

“Somebody might miss him.” It was a photographer from the sheriff’s office. She was an Asian woman with long bangs draped cross her forehead. Caxton had seen her before somewhere. Some crime scene or other. “As far as we can tell the victims here are all Latino and Hispanic males, between fifteen and forty years of age.”

Arkeley, strangely enough, squinted in confusion. “And what does that suggest?”

he asked.

It was Caxton’s turn to shine, finally. Her nausea was swept away by her need to impress Arkeley. “It suggests they were migrant workers. Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians—they come up here every year to work in the mushroom sheds or picking fruit in the orchards. They move from town to town according to the growing season and they pay cash for whatever they buy so they don’t leave a paper trail.”

“Illegal immigrants,” Arkeley said, nodding. “That makes sense.”

“It’s smart,” the photographer said. She looked angry, pissed off even. Caxton knew some cops turned their fear and disgust into rage. It helped them do their job.

The photographer lifted her camera and snapped off three quick shots of a defleshed pelvis sitting on the coffee table. Someone had used it as an ashtray. “Real fucking smart. Nobody keeps track of migrants. Even if somebody back home misses them, what are they going to do? Come up here and ask the American police for help? Not a chance. They’d just get deported.”

“So the vampire was living here for months, feeding on invisible people,” Caxton said. “Then the owner showed up with his kids. Damn,” she said, thinking it through.

“They weren’t taking the bodies off to make half-deads out of them. They were going to dump them some place else, to draw attention away from here.”

“Yeah,” the photographer spat. “Don’t want to shit where you eat.” She snapped another picture, this time of an umbrella stand half full of umbrellas and half full of femurs.

“Alright, Clara.” A burly sheriff’s deputy grabbed the photographer’s arm.

“Alright, we have enough pictures.” He looked up at Arkeley and Caxton. “Have you two seen the basement yet?”

Caxton’s mind reeled. The basement. The camp had a basement. What kind of vault of horrors awaited them? They passed through a mud room and down a flight of stairs, Caxton holding one hand against the smooth drywall, the other gripping the banister. They headed down through shelves of preserves, thick and cloying in their Mason jars. They climbed over stacks of scattered sports equipment and roofing supplies. At the far end of the narrow cellar a group of state troopers wearing latex gloves stood in a semi-circle. What were they guarding? They stepped aside when they saw Arkeley and his star.

Caxton moved forward. She felt like she floated rather than walked. She felt like a ghost in the haunted camp. She pushed through the standing troopers. Beyond them in a shadowy alcove stood three identical coffins, all of them open, all of them empty.

Three coffins. “No,” she blurted. “No.” It wasn’t over. There were more of them, more vampires out there.

Arkeley kicked one of the coffins shut with a hollow sound.

15.

Outside Caxton sat down on the grass and put her head between her knees. It wasn’t over. She had thought they were safe again. She had looked at all the dead human bodies in the camp and she had thought that yes, they were horrible, but it was okay, okay in some sad way, because the vampire was dead. Because nobody else was going to get torn apart, nobody else’s blood was going to drained from a still-twitching carcass.

“She said ‘brood’. She said her brood would devour me,” Arkeley said. He stared out at a distant line of blue hills above the water. Mist rose from between the trees over there and it looked like ghosts to Caxton, like wandering ghosts coming out to plead, to beg to have their life back.

Ghosts. Ghosts could scare you but they couldn’t hurt you, not really. They couldn’t pull you to pieces and suck your life out. They didn’t use your bones as furniture.

“I was fooled. I thought she was being poetic.” Arkeley kicked at a spill of stones and they went clattering into the stream. “I thought Lares was pretty smart. He could pass as human he was such a good actor. Malvern has real cunning, though. She knew I would be watching her. She knew that one vampire, just one, would be bad, would create all kinds of havoc. But it wouldn’t be enough. What does it cost her to birth one of these monstrosities? And to do it while she’s being monitored night and day. For twenty years I thought we were safe. Clearly she was just taking her time, gathering her strength.”

Caxton’s chest heaved. She wasn’t sure if it was a sob or the precursor to vomiting. It was convulsive and spontaneous. It happened again, her ribs flexing as if something inside were pushing to get out.

“Let’s go,” Arkeley said. “We have to start chasing down our leads. All we have to go on is the list of people who worked at Arabella Furnace. Who knows. Who the fuck knows? We might get lucky.”

“Hold on,” she said. The thing in her midriff squirmed in annoyance. She wasn’t supposed to talk. A cough exploded out of her lungs.

“We’re wasting daylight,” he told her. “Get up.”

She shook her head. That was a bad idea. She hiccoughed and a ribbon of bile shot out from between her lips. Her breakfast came up in one great rush, a brown spray she couldn’t hold in. She rolled over on her side, her body shivering uncontrollably. “I don’t expect you to care about my feelings,” she whimpered. “But I can’t do this anymore.”

He squatted next to her. He jammed two fingers into her throat, feeling for her pulse. He took his hand away and she looked up at him, her cheek against the cool grass, her eye following his face. Then he slapped her.

The impact made her cry out and her body shook. She rolled up to a sitting posture and then forced herself to stand, pushing her back against the side of the camp, pushing herself up to a standing position. She stared at him, hot, pure hate coming out of her. He stood there and took it.

“There are dead people in that house,” he told her. “There will be more dead people tonight. And every night. Until we bag the other two.”

Five minutes later they were in the car. He drove this time. He kept his speed low, kept his eyes on the road. She sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. It was freezing but the icy air on her face seemed to help. She spent most of the ride on her cell phone, coordinating with the Area Response Team, trying to eliminate some of the seventy-nine suspects on Arkeley’s list. It was tough even talking, much less trying to keep straight in her head the various units she was assigning to various missions. The Bureau of Forensic Services had to be connected with the Records and Identification unit so they could work up a profile of what a vampire killing looked like, which was then sent on to the Bureau of Investigation so they could detach units from the troop-level Criminal Investigations Units.

Meanwhile the media were yammering for details and interviews with the infamous vampire killers. She was under orders from the Commissioner to send a prepared statement to his office for release to the press. She kept it as brief and non-sensational as possible. By the time she finished and signed off they were nearing Centre County.

When she hung up the phone she felt like her soul was going ninety miles an hour in a school zone. “I’m not cut out for this,” she suggested.

“What, working the bureaucracy? I’ve seen worse.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not cut out for vampire hunting.” She closed her eyes but she just saw bones, human bones. “Last night the vampire hypnotized me.”

“I remember,” he told her. “I was there.”

“No, I mean, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t fight it. What if the next one hypnotizes me, but you can’t shoot it in time?”

“Then you’ll die,” he told her. He didn’t look at her. He just said it.

“I’m not a weak person,” she insisted.

“That has nothing to do with it. Susceptibility to hypnotism is like hair color or how tall you are. It’s genetic and it means very little, most of the time.”

“But I’m susceptible, that’s what you’re saying. I’m not strong enough, mentally, to fight vampires. Seriously. I’m not cut out for this. I can’t do it.” Fear ate her like a wolf swallowing a gobbet of flesh. She shivered and her teeth chattered and her skin stood up. Proud flesh her mother used to call it. Her father called it goosebumps.

Just sitting there, knowing she would have to face another vampire, was scaring the hell out of her.

“When I slapped you, you were ready to bring me up on charges. And you would have been in the right. But you didn’t. Instead you came with me. That means you’re in the right place,” he told her.

She shook her head. She needed to stop talking and start doing something. It might help, anyway. “What’s our next step?”

Arkeley surprised her by pulling off to get some lunch.

“You’re hungry? I feel like I got kicked in the belly,” she said.

He shrugged. “Try not throwing up next time.” He rolled into the parking lot of Yoder’s Diner, right next to a shiny black Amish buggy. The horse gave Caxton a look as she stepped out of the car. It swished its tail and she made clucking noises to calm it down. Arkeley headed inside without waiting to see if she would follow.

Caxton looked up at the ridgeline opposite the restaurant and sighed. In the deep, dark heart of her state the earth was wrinkled into high limbs of rock that blocked cell phones and radio waves and left the fertile valleys secluded from most of human society. It was why the Amish thrived there. Caxton had never liked this stretch of Pennsylvania too much, though. It was a place where her kind weren’t exactly welcomed, a power center for the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-nazis. Elsewhere in the state you saw billboards for Penn’s Cave or the outlet malls clogging up every roadside but here they disappeared. In their place you saw smaller, less colorful signs sponsored by the local churches with messages like: “WORSHIP Your LORD

In Fear” and “How did you SIN today?” This was the zone of central Pennsylvania called “Pennsyltucky” by outsiders, and they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

She stepped inside. The restaurant was familiar to her, at least—it was neutral territory where all the valley’s inhabitants could come together in peace. Yoder’s catered to farmers who needed to fuel up for a day of hard manual labor and also people who liked huge portions who weren’t watching their cholesterol. Arkeley went through the buffet and heaped up a plate of fried chicken, German potato salad and sweetened baked beans swimming with bits of gristly bacon. Caxton slid into an artificial wood-grain booth and ordered a small diet soda. She looked across the aisle at an Amish family, a grey-bearded patriarch with a mole on his cheek, his wife whose face had the texture of a dried apple, and their two cherubic sons who wore bright blue shirts and wide straw hats. Their eyes were closed, their hands folded.

They were saying grace. The table between them was laden with plates of pork chops and bowls overflowing with mashed potatoes with brown bits of skin half-submerged under the starchy surface.

Arkeley folded himself painfully into the booth and dug into his food. The thought of all that oily greasy chicken being shredded between Arkeley’s teeth made Caxton look away. She studied a woman in an enormous sweatshirt with a howling wolf painted on the front. She was shoveling red Jell-O into her mouth. Caxton just closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally.

“They drink blood, just like we eat food,” she said. Talking helped her ignore all the food being consumed. “You talked before about how they need more and more the older they get. Like those things in Lares’ boat.”

He nodded. “Malvern would need to bathe in blood to restore herself. It would take half a dozen kills to make her whole again, and she would need that much blood again the next night. And every night after that.”

“Christ,” Caxton said. The Amish man across the aisle shot her a nasty look for taking his Lord’s name in vain. She resisted the urge to show him her middle finger.

“They always need more? It has to level out after a while, right? Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough blood in the world after a while.”

“You’ve never seen evil before, have you?” Arkeley asked. He held up a spoon laden with ambrosia salad that vibrated with his breath. “Not true evil.”

She thought about it for a while. The horrors of the hunting camp were still with her. She only had to close her eyes and she saw them again. Still. She had seen killers before, human killers, and they had failed to terrorize her like this. They had been sick, sad little people who lacked the imagination to solve their problems in any nonviolent way. That didn’t make them evil—it made them damaged, but certainly not evil. “I’m not sure evil exists, not like you mean.” She put both hands on the tabletop and pushed against the edge, stretching her arms. “I mean, there’s a moral component to our lives, sure, and if you know you’re doing something wrong—”

“Evil,” Arkeley interrupted, “is never satisfied. Evil has no ending, no bottom.”

He swallowed noisily. “If it isn’t stopped it will swallow the world. Vampires are unnatural. They are dead things that get up and enact a mockery of living and it costs them, badly, to do it. The universe abhors them even more than it abhors a vacuum.”

She nodded, not really understanding. But she could feel how much of it he believed. How much he needed to destroy the remaining vampires. She could feel, also, the beginning of something inside of herself that matched his need. She wanted to close the remaining coffins. She wanted to destroy the vampires and she was standing on the edge of that desire and she wasn’t sure, if she stepped off the edge, if there would ever be a bottom to her wanting. Which, she realized, was exactly what had happened to him. He wanted to kill vampires the same way vampires wanted his blood.

“It’s dangerous, isn’t it, to learn too much about them?” she asked. “You start becoming something unnatural yourself.” She looked around at the normal, healthy, happy people all just eating lunch. They weren’t monstrous. They weren’t disgusting. They weren’t good or evil. They were natural. “Why did you bring me here?” she asked. “None of the suspects lived this far west.”

“I want you to meet somebody,” he said, and reached for the check.

16.

The road took them over a ridge and down the other side, then swerved to follow the course of a winding creek. The sun rode next to them, skipping along on top of the water. It kept getting in Caxton’s eyes and eventually she put on a pair of sunglasses, which helped a little.

Arkeley turned again later to take them across a covered bridge. Even rolling along at ten miles an hour the bridge rumbled and shook around them. Beyond the valley turned golden and brown, the grassy pasture land changing to cornfields that stretched for miles. Ancient electric fencing stretched alongside the road, rusted and intermittent. They passed old shacks that had collapsed in the wind and the rain, their wooden planks silvered with decay. She saw an aluminum silo that had been struck by lightning years earlier, its domed top blasted open as if by a giant can opener.

The road narrowed down to a single unpaved lane but Caxton wasn’t worried about oncoming traffic. There was something old and quiescent about the valley they sped through. There were crows out in the corn, enormous black birds that took turns leaping into the air and scouting for danger. There were surely mice in those fields, and gophers and hares and snakes but there were no people anywhere.

“You sure your friend is out this way?” she asked. “It looks pretty deserted.”

“That’s the way he likes it.” The road forked and Arkeley took a left. Within minutes the road had disappeared almost completely, replaced by a pair of narrow ruts in a strip of grass between two corn fields. The car bounced and jumped and threw Caxton around but eventually, finally, Arkeley pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. Caxton got out and looked around, hugging her arms against the chill in the air.

There were buildings around them, old, very old farm buildings. A two-story house, white with gingerbread trim. A barn with an open hayloft. A silo made of metal slats that looked like it would leak pretty badly. Sunlight slanted through it and striped the side of the house.

A black and white hex sign hung above the house’s front door, painted with geometric patterns more elaborate and more delicate than any she’d seen before, and Caxton had seen a lot of hex signs in her life. Typically they looked quaint and colorful. This one looked spiky and almost malevolent. It made her not want to go inside. Caxton saw a flash of yellow at one of the windows and saw a little blonde girl looking down at her. The girl twitched shut a curtain and she was gone.

“Urie!” Arkeley shouted. Presumably he was calling his friend. “Urie Polder!”

“I’m here, I’m in here,” someone said from behind the door of the barn. The voice was very soft, as if coming from far away, and thick with an accent she hadn’t heard since she was a kid. They walked around the side of the door and into the barn and Caxton took off her sunglasses to let her eyes adjust to the barn’s dimness.

She didn’t know what she’d expected to find inside. Perhaps cows or goats or horses. Instead the barn was used as a drying shed for some kind of animal skins hanging in almost perfect darkness. They hung draped on equally spaced racks about as tall as her shoulder. They were not uniform in shape or size but they shared a pallor so intense they were almost luminous in the dark barn. Caxton reached out toward one, wanting to know its texture. Before she could touch it, however, a shadow passed across its surface, or rather five small, oval shadows like the tips of fingers pressing on it from behind. She gasped and yanked her hand back. Had she made contact, she knew, she would have felt a hand pressing back against hers, and yet there was no one behind the skin, no one anywhere near.

“What is this?” she demanded. Arkeley frowned.

“Teleplasm,” he told her. She didn’t know what that meant. “Go ahead, head in,”

he said.

She shook her head. “I’ve had about enough of weird shit.” But his face didn’t change. He would wait there all day until she walked into the barn.

Caxton walked between two racks and stepped into darkness. The shadow inside the barn was nearly complete—after a few steps she was inching forward in almost complete blackness, the only light coming from the luminescent skins on either side.

The substance drew her eyes since there was nothing else to look at. She couldn’t see her own hands held out before her, fingers out-stretched, reaching for the far wall of the barn, but she could make out every tear and fold and blemish on the skins. They seemed to shimmer, or perhaps they were simply fluttering in a draft.

They had an illusory depth, as if they were windows into some moonlit place. She felt like she could look into their textured surfaces where faces seemed to pass and vanish as fast as breath on a cold pane of glass. The only thing about them that stayed the same from one moment to the next was their color, though occasionally from the corner of her eye she would think she had caught a flash of pigment, a reddish tinge like a bloodstain fading from view.

She walked carefully so as not to trip in the darkness but also so she wouldn’t touch the skins. After her first encounter with the ghostly fingers she’d had enough.

She was nearly at the far end of the barn—or so she guessed, as the racks of skins suddenly stopped and beyond lay only darkness—when something seemed to brush her hair. She spun around and heard a faint voice whisper her name. Or had she imagined it? Before she’d even really heard the voice it was gone and the barn’s silence was so complete, so certain that it seemed impossible she had heard anything.

“Arkeley,” she cried out, “what are you doing to me now?”

There was no answer. She turned around and saw that the barn’s doors had been shut behind her. She was shut inside with the skins, the teleplasm, whatever that was, and she wanted to scream for help, or just scream, scream for the sake of screaming—

“Laura,” someone said and this time it wasn’t just in her head. But that voice—so familiar, so impossible. It was her father’s voice.

He stood there. Behind her. One of the skins had lifted away from the rack, flapped away and folded itself into a mostly human shape. It had her father’s voice, and his eyes. It was wrapped in chains that rattled as he glided toward her, chains that shook and dragged on the floor of the barn, holding him down, holding him back. She put out a hand, either to touch him or to push him away, she didn’t know.

He’d been dead for so long. She knew it wasn’t really him. Was it? Was it some remnant of him, left over after his flesh had rotted away?

A smell of him, of shampoo and Old Spice, flooded the air around her. The temperature in the barn dropped twenty degrees in the space of a few seconds. He was close to her, so close she could feel the roughness of his hands, she could feel the hair on the backs of his arms, though they had yet to actually touch. She had missed him so much. She had thought of him every day, she had even thought of him when the vampire had held her up in the air the night before. Nothing had been as good since he died, nothing had been right, not even when she met Deanna, it hadn’t healed that wound.

“Daddy,” she breathed, stepping into his embrace. And then the lights switched on and there was just a skin, like an animal pelt, hanging on a wooden bar.

“Right you are,” someone said. A very human, very live voice. A man was standing behind the racks, a CATERPILLAR baseball cap on his head, his side burns growing down to meet each other under his chin. His eyes were soft and deep.

He was staring right at her. His voice was pure Pennsyltucky, down to the throat-clearing swallow he used like audible punctuation. “Right you are, Arkeley.

They’s drawn to her, ahum. She’s ghost bait.”

“It’s not the ghosts I’m concerned with,” Arkeley said. He was standing no more than ten feet away from her.

The other man—Urie Polder, she presumed—stepped around one of his racks and came up to her. He was tall enough to look down into her face and try to hold her eye. She broke his gaze, though, as she imagined most people did when they met him. He was missing his left arm. The sleeve of his t-shirt dangled over a wooden branch that he wore in the arm’s place, a length of gray-barked tree limb that had a knotted elbow and even three twig-like fingers.

What really freaked her out about Urie Polder’s arm wasn’t that it was made of wood. It was the fact that it moved. Its thin fingers wove around his belt buckle and hitched up his pants. His wooden shoulder and his flesh shoulder shrugged at the same time. “We oughter take her into the house, ahum. Vesta’ll do it there.”

“Yes, alright,” Arkeley said. He looked worried.

Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her hands. “My father—that was my father’s ghost. You showed me my father’s ghost just to—just to—” She stopped. “What the hell is teleplasm?”

“Most folks’d say ‘ectoplasm’, which is all but the same, but then you might have guessed,” Polder told her. “It’s ghost skin, ahum.”

“How do you skin a ghost?” she demanded.

“Well, now,” he said, grinning sheepishly, “not in any way the ghost might like, ahum.”

17.

It was cold in the barn. It was cold for an autumn day outside but in the barn it was pure winter. The two men turned toward the open barn door to leave but she stood rooted to the spot. Caxton felt rage bubble and spit in her stomach. “Hold on,” she said, and surprisingly enough they both stopped. “That was my father. You have my father’s ghost hanging on a rack.” She had no idea how it had happened, no idea at all why her father’s ghost in particular was in the barn but she wasn’t taking another step until she’d figured it out.

“Well now ghosts, them’s tricky, ahum.” Polder scratched his chin with his wooden hand. “It don’t really come down to that.”

She shook her head angrily. “I know his voice. I saw his eyes.”

“Yes,” Arkeley said. “It might even have been him. His spirit, anyway—or it could have been any kind of mischievous spook who wanted to toy with you. It might not even have been a human apparition. But whoever it was isn’t trapped here in one of these pelts. The teleplasms aren’t ghosts themselves. They’re more like clothing he can pick up and put on. It’s a substance that occupies this world and the other simultaneously, that’s all.”

She nodded at Arkeley. “I can guess what this was all about, though I’m pissed off at you all the same. If the teleplasm reacts strongly to me, that means I’m somehow open to psychic phenomenon. I’m a sensitive.”

“Young lady, based on what we just saw I think you could moonlight as a medium. Please, we need to go inside the house. Your visit with your father made a lot of noise in the spirit world. Anyone who was listening would have heard it—and they might come looking for you.”

As they pushed her toward the house she said, “So if I’m sensitive to ghosts I’m also sensitive to vampires. This explains how the vampire was able to hypnotize me so effortlessly last night.”

Arkeley confirmed it. “I was surprised how little resistance you had. So I brought you here where we can do something about it.”

Polder stood before the hex sign over his front door and waved his arm at it, his real arm. He drew a complicated pattern on his forehead with his thumb and something invisible relaxed. Caxton could feel the hex sign let go.

“Urie is a hexenmeister. I imagine you know the term?”

“Mostly where I grew up we called them pow-wow doctors, because they were supposed to have all kinds of secret Indian magic.” Caxton had never taken the old stories that seriously but then she’d never really believed in vampires either. After her adventures of the previous night and what she’d seen in the barn she was willing to suspend a little skepticism.

They headed inside the house where a woman waited for them. She wore a long black dress with a tight collar around her throat. Her blonde hair stood out from her head in enormous frizzy waves. Her long white fingers were covered in dozens of identical gold rings. “Vesta, it’s been too long,” Arkeley said, and he kissed her cheek. The woman’s eyes never moved from Caxton’s face.

“I’ve got water on for tea. Darjeeling, just as you like it,” she said. “With sugar, not honey, and a touch of milk. Please, don’t be surprised, Laura Beth Caxton. I know a large number of things about you already. I intend to learn many more.”

Caxton didn’t even open her mouth. She turned her head because she’d seen a flash of yellow out of the corner of her eye. It was the girl she’d seen in the window, and she vanished as quickly as she had before.

“Now you, Special Deputy, you should be kinder to this one. She’s risking much to help you in your vicious crusade.”

Arkeley almost hung his head.

“Don’t look so glum. I have a little something for your wife’s foot, here,” Vesta said, and handed the Fed a plastic bag full of a reddish, fibrous plant matter. “Make it into a poultice and have her wear it every night until she feels better.”

“You have a wife?” Caxton demanded.

“I killed a vampire twenty years ago, and another one last night. I had to keep myself busy in the meantime,” he told her. He thanked Vesta for her remedy and then he and Urie Polder went deeper into the house. Caxton was not invited. Instead Vesta Polder lead her into a sitting room, a dark but tidy space with a raging fire place and a lot of heavy, dark, wood furniture. Six straight-backed chairs stood against the wall. A round table with a velvet cloth sat in the middle of the room, a horsehair-stuffed armchair crouching behind it. Vesta took this chair, lounging across it with one leg hooked over an arm. Caxton stood before the table for a long while before she thought to take one of the chairs from the wall and put it across the table from Vesta.

On the table sat the teapot and a single tea cup as well as a large, carved wooden box with a Chinese dragon on its lid and a slim deck of cards. “You’ve seen these before, in a movie,” she said, tapping the cards against her wrist and then shuffling them one-handed. “But you don’t know what they’re called. They’re Zener cards.”

She fanned a few of them as if she were demonstrating a poker hand. “They are used by parapsychologists to test extra-sensory perception. They possess other virtues, as well.” On one side they showed a single symbol in thick black lines: a triangle, a star, a circle, three wavy lines or a square. “Now,” she said, “your instinct is going to be to tell me what you see.” She cut the cards and held one up so that Caxton could see it—a star.

“It’s a star,” she said.

“Yes, dear, I know it is.” Vesta put the card down on the coffee table and opened the carved box. “I see all. Now, please. From here on don’t say anything. Don’t try to project, don’t give me any clues. Just look at the cards.”

Caxton never touched the tea. One by one Vesta lifted the cards so that only Caxton could see them. After a moment she would put them face down on the table.

Occasionally she paused to study Caxton’s face as intently as if she were sketching it. Then she would reach into her Chinese box and take out a long brown cigarette and an equally long match. She would puff at the cigarette, filling the room with pungent, foul smoke until Caxton’s eyes watered. Then she would draw another card. This went on until she ran out of cards: then Vesta would shuffle the cards and start again. With each shuffle there were new instructions. Caxton should try not to look at the card. She should speak the card’s symbol in her mind, rather than visualizing it. She should try to clear her mind of thoughts altogether. Time seemed to slow down, or perhaps stop. Maybe there was something more in the cigarettes than tobacco.

Vesta gathered up the deck and shuffled it again. “Alright. This time, try to think of a symbol other than the one you see.” Caxton nodded and got to it. After they’d gone through five or six cards, Vesta surprised her. “You’re worried about Deanna.”

It was hard to concentrate on the card in front of her but Vesta rattled it between two fingers and she looked away from the other woman’s face. “She’s been out of work for a long time.”

“She’s been having bad dreams. Violent dreams—you had to wake her up last night because you were scared she would hurt herself. She’s scared too, scared that you’ll be killed.”

That makes two of us, Caxton thought.

“Focus on the card in your head, even when you look at the card in my hand. She is afraid of the future, it sounds like to me. Afraid because she does not know if you will let her stay with you. Yet you have never even considered asking her to leave.”

Caxton bit her lip. It was hard to even see the card in Vesta’s hand when she thought of Deanna. “You can read her mind, too? But she’s fifty miles from here.”

Vesta sighed. She put down the cards and took another cigarette out of her box.

It was her fifth so far. “I see the portion of her that exists within you.” She scattered the cards on the table. “This is hopeless. Some people grasp the technique in a moment, while others need additional help. Given enough time, enough sessions I might teach you some rudiments of psychic self defense. For now, this must do.”

She opened her box again and took out a brass charm on a black cord. “Wear it always, and try not to make eye contact with anyone who might harm you.”

Caxton took the pendant from Vesta and slipped it around her neck. The charm was a tightly-wound spiral that she could pass off as jewelry. Caxton was glad for it—she had half expected a pentacle or a gruesome crucifix.

“Those wouldn’t work for you. Their power requires faith which you do not possess.”

Caxton touched the cool metal at her throat. Deanna. Now that she was thinking about Deanna she couldn’t stop. “It’s not just a question of not kicking her out. I don’t want to lose her the way I lost my mother.”

Vesta stared at her and said nothing. It was as if she expected Caxton to tell her all about the sad, sorry tale of her mother’s insanity, the depression that had struck her after her husband’s death, her eventual suicide.

“She hanged herself,” Caxton said, finally, blushing. “In her bedroom. A neighbor found her and cut her down and tried to make her look presentable. My mother had always been very proud of her looks. When I got there she was laid out on the bed and her hair had been brushed and someone had even put some make-up on her. But they couldn’t hide the rope burn all the way around her neck.”

Vesta nodded and exhaled a plume of smoke. “You worry about losing Deanna, well, that’s just natural. But when the time comes you’ll be ready to let her go. You’ll have to be. I see it as strongly as I see the waves in your mind’s eye.”

That last bit confused Caxton—until she finally looked at the card in Vesta’s hand. It showed three wavy lines.

“Now, come, let’s collect the boys.” They rose and headed into the kitchen, where Arkeley and Urie sat around an enormous table that had once been a door and now was mounted on plain wooden trestles. They had between them a pile of small objects, triangular in shape and almost pearlescent in color. Caxton picked one up and saw it was a vampire’s tooth. After killing the vampire the night before the Fed must have pulled out all his teeth with a pair of pliers.

Urie Polder swept the teeth into a satin bag and tied it closed with a thong. “Now that’ll do just fine, in way of payment, ahum.”

“What are you going to do with those?” Caxton asked.

“He’ll find something they’re useful for,” Vesta told her, ushering her toward the front door. “Waste not, want not.”

As they drove away the little blonde girl watched them from the window. Caxton had never gotten to meet her, and didn’t even know her name.

18.

Caxton drove to State College, only a dozen or so miles away, just to get out of the suffocating atmosphere of Pennsyltucky. The tree-lined avenues of the university town were full of students in bright and colorful parkas and windbreakers. They walked in pairs or groups of four or more, laughing amongst themselves, shouldering backpacks, their faces red with the cold but their heads bare. They were alive, that was the main thing. Very much alive, and their concerns were for the simplest things—sex, grades, beer—none of them wanted to skin a ghost or drain the blood of a living victim. They were young, too, unwrinkled, innocent in their own fashion.

It did her good to see them.

She was losing it, and she knew it. That she would drive so far just to see young people made her realize just how dark her life had become in such a brief period of time. She pulled into a parking space on College Avenue before a big stone gate that let her look all the way up the quadrangle. She undid her seat belt but didn’t get out of the car.

Arkeley looked up. He’d been studying his Blackberry since she’d started driving. “Good news,” he told her. “The Investigative Unit has ruled out seventeen of the suspects. They decided to run down the medical personnel and corrections officers first—the ones who might have actually had physical contact with Malvern.

They’re about half done.”

Caxton nodded. That was good news. “Malvern. It all comes back to Malvern.

How did she get here?” she asked. “She was in Pittsburgh when you found her, but she wasn’t born there, right?”

“No,” he said. He put the Blackberry in his coat pocket. “Vampires move around a lot—it’s how they stay one step ahead of people like us. It took me years to trace her route and I’m not done yet. I know she was born in Manchester, in England, around 1695. She terrorized that city for about sixty-five years before the bloodlust got too much of her and she couldn’t rise any more from her coffin. She lived for a while under the care of another vampire, a Thomas Easling, who was burned at the stake in Leeds in 1783. Malvern’s body was found among Easling’s property and it was assumed at the time that she was dead, just a mummified corpse. A curio. She was purchased for thirty five British pounds by a Virginian plantation owner, one Josiah Caryl Chess, who fancied himself a scholar of natural history. He had quite a collection of dinosaur and mammal fossils, so a moribund vampire must have been a prize find. He never bothered to remove her heart. She couldn’t move, after all, and even though he must have known she was still alive in there in some fashion—he may have even fed her—he was certain she was beyond harming anyone. Most likely she had him under her spell, though his journals suggest just the opposite. He was physically intimate with her at least once.”

“Shit, no,” Caxton said, her stomach squeezing down like a rubber ball. Caxton remembered then what Arkeley had said about Malvern and her current attendant, Doctor Hazlitt. She had more to offer him, Arkeley had said, then her piercing gaze. “But she would be all... look, I’m sorry if this is gross, but she’d be too dry.”

“Personal lubricants have been widely available throughout history. I know the ancient Romans used olive oil. And if you let her, if you play along, she can make herself look however you want. Your ideal woman. The illusion lasts as long as she wants it to.”

Something in Arkeley’s voice worried her. “You’ve seen her do it?” Caxton asked. She really wanted to ask if she’d changed her appearance for him—and if he’d succumbed. She couldn’t ask that, though, not in so many words.

He chuckled. “She’s tried plenty of tricks on me. I’ve been visiting her every few weeks for two decades now—she’s been trying to get me on her side this whole time. So far I’ve resisted.” He made it sound as if he couldn’t guarantee, even to himself, that he would always be successful. “Anyway. Chess died of blood loss, of course. No one ever officially put the blame on Malvern. She had never moved from her coffin, which was mounted in the front hallway as a kind of conversation piece.

Looking back now it’s pretty obvious that she sucked Chess dry but at the time they blamed a mutinous slave for his death. They locked Malvern up in the attic and forgot about her. The plantation was burned to the ground during the Civil War and she disappeared for a while. In fact the next time anyone has a record of her is when she showed up in the possession of Piter Byron Lares, and you know how that story goes.”

“Lares had plenty of moribund vampires, not just Malvern.”

Arkeley agreed. “They take care of their own. It’s almost like ancestor worship and it’s one of the very few things that can make them act irrationally. I assumed originally that the four vampires in Lares’ boat were all of one lineage, that one of them had made Lares while another had made the one who made Lares, and so on. I was wrong. By the time I discovered him Lares had been collecting old vampires for decades. Maybe he thought that by getting blood for them he was doing something good and nurturing. Maybe it helped assuage his conscience, assuming he had some kind of conscience. I don’t know. I’ve been studying vampires for twenty years myself and I still don’t know how they think. They’re just too alien to us.”

Caxton scratched under her armpit. She stared out through the windshield at the eighteen year olds walking by, their arms clutched around each other for warmth, their faces so clean. None of them knew what the future would hold, or what they would become. “You’ve been working the same case all this time.”

“Lots of cops define their careers with one case. The murderer who got away, the child who went missing and never showed up again.” Arkeley shrugged. “Alright.

You got me. I’ve never been able to get the Lares case out of my mind. I moved here, to Pennsylvania, to follow up on it. I’ve spent years getting to know people like the Polders who might have some information. And I’ve watched Malvern like a hawk.”

“And now when someone calls the FBI to say they have a vampire killing, they call you.” Caxton frowned. “That’s a lot of weight to carry around.”

“I do alright,” Arkeley told her.

Whatever. She should be focusing on the case, not feeling sorry for Arkeley.

“This is my first serious investigation,” she told him. “I’m no detective. But I think I have an idea of what’s been going on. Lares kept Malvern going until you killed him.

Then, through various bureaucratic channels, she gets installed at that hospital, at Arabella Furnace.”

“Right.”

“She tries to charm her way out, to talk her way out, she even eats one of the doctors but it’s no good. You’re sitting on her, just waiting for her to do something bad so you can punish her. She can’t just give up, though. She’s going to live forever, locked up in a withered corpse of a body forever, so the only option is to keep planning an escape, even if it takes twenty years to pull off. She’s getting a little blood but not enough to sustain her. She needs more muscle. So she creates three vampires.”

“More likely she created one of them and he created the other two—it would involve less direct risk for her.”

Caxton clucked her tongue. “Why three, though?. Why do they even need to bring the blood to her? One vampire could just steal her, coffin and all, and hide her where we’ll never find her. Then he could bring her back on his own timetable.”

“Her body is too frail to be moved around like that. If she broke in two pieces right now she might never have the strength to put herself back together. She needs to walk out of Arabella Furnace under her own power.”

Caxton added that to her store of facts. “Okay. So the big plan is to bring blood to her, the way Lares used to. But a lot of blood this time, enough to completely heal her. To make that happen she creates a vampire. He goes out into the woods and takes over Farrel Morton’s hunting camp, makes it his base of operations. He creates some half-deads to keep the place going and creates two more vampires. For months they stay on the down low, eating migrant workers, not showing themselves.

Biding their time. But why? Why haven’t they tried to free Malvern yet? Do vampires get stronger over time?”

“No—they’re never stronger than the first night they rise to hunt.”

Caxton nodded. “So the longer they wait the weaker they get, and the more risk they have to live with. Risk that somebody’s going to wander by the hunting camp and notice that it’s been turned into a mausoleum. Which is in fact pretty much what did happen. If that half-dead hadn’t come up against my sobriety check we wouldn’t know that any of this was going on. Farrel Morton shows up with his kids, looking for a weekend in the woods. He finds himself in a house of horrors instead. The vampires are so afraid of being discovered that they send a half-dead to dump the bodies somewhere else, to make it look like Morton never even went to the camp.

Why go to such lengths? When it didn’t work they had to leave home so fast they left their coffins behind. They’ve got to be desperate by now.”

Arkeley nodded.

“Desperate enough to attack the hospital?”

“Malvern’s plan isn’t ready to be put into action, not yet. She can be an astonishingly patient creature, when it suits her. Still, she doesn’t waste opportunities. She’ll have a backup plan and she will put it into action as soon as possible. Still, I don’t expect an attack right away. I believe I know why the three of them were biding their time.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s simple logistics. She needs a certain quantity of blood. Three vampires couldn’t bring her enough blood to fully revivify her. Four of them could. They were going to make another one.”

“Christ. But now—they’re down to two, half of what they need. That’s something, right? It’s a good thing.”

Arkeley scowled at her. “It buys us some time, that’s all.”

Caxton looked up. While they’d been sitting there talking the last of the afternoon had faded away. A streak of yellow marked the western horizon—the sun was going down. In perhaps fifteen minutes it would be dark. “People,” she said, “are going to die tonight, one way or the other.”

Arkeley didn’t bother to confirm it. He was too busy reaching for the Blackberry that buzzed urgently in his jacket pocket. When her cell phone began to ring as well she knew something must have happened. Something bad.

19.

Caxton drove fast but safe, keeping her wheels on the road. The blue flasher on the dashboard played hell with her night vision but she’d trained for this. When they reached Farrel Morton’s hunting camp she switched off the flasher and her headlights and rolled up in darkness. No need to make themselves a target.

An hour earlier, at dusk, the state troopers stationed at the camp had failed to report in on schedule. They were good men with a lot of years experience between them—they wouldn’t just have forgotten to call headquarters. The local cop had called Troop J dispatch and told them he would drop by and see what had happened. He expected the troopers were having radio trouble. He’d reported back twenty minutes later with the news that the troopers were nowhere to be found. He was going to take a look around the surrounding woods and see what he could turn up. He had not called since and his cell phone rang for a while and then went to voicemail.

The sheriff was sending two units. Troop J out of Lancaster was sending every available car. Caxton and Arkeley hadn’t waited to hear what came next. They were the closest to the camp and Arkeley seemed to like it that way.

“You’re almost smiling,” she said as she took the key out of the ignition. “You hoping that somehow this is all a big misunderstanding, that everybody’s okay?”

“No,” he told her. “I’m hoping this is exactly what it looks like. I’m hoping we get a second vampire tonight. I doubt it, though. They aren’t stupid.”

Caxton popped the trunk of the unmarked patrol car. She lifted out a riot shotgun and slung it over her shoulder, a Remington 870. The weapon had a shortened barrel and no buttstock so it was easier to carry around, and a black coating so it wouldn’t glimmer in the low light. It would be worthless against vampires—the relatively small

#1 buckshot was meant to stop a human being in his tracks, but it wouldn’t even penetrate vampiric skin. Against half-deads it might be more effective.

“They weren’t supposed to come back here,” she said, closing the trunk as quietly as possible. “That was the idea, right? It was too dangerous for the vampires to come back. They would know we were watching the place. They left their coffins behind and they weren’t coming back for them. That’s what you told me.”

“Are you going to blame me,” he asked, “when we don’t even know what happened yet?”

Caxton pumped the shotgun to put a round in the chamber. With her other hand she unlatched the holster of her pistol. “You want to lead?” she asked..

“With that kind of firepower behind me? Not a chance, you’d cut me in half at the first sign of any danger. You go first and I’ll cover you.”

The camp was dark, only a single light burning on the side of the building. It made the shadows deeper. She headed around the side of the kitchen wing, staying low, the shotgun pointing straight up. She came to an open window and decided to chance it. She flicked on the flashlight mounted to the top of the shotgun and checked to make sure he had her back. He did, of course. He might not like her very much but he was a skilled cop. Caxton stood up and pointed her light inside the house. Nobody jumped out at her so she took a quick look, panning the light from one side of the room to the other just as she’d been taught.

She saw what she’d expected. Stove. Refrigerator. Piles of bones. A half-dead could have hidden anywhere in the room, in the shadows, out of her beam of light.

She didn’t see any movement, though. She circled the house with Arkeley following behind her, covering her.

When she got to the back of the house, near the stream, a harsh, cackling laugh wafted through the trees and ran cold down her spine. She froze and ducked down into a firing squat and scanned the darkness all around. Her flashlight rippled across the trees on the far side of the stream and stopped when she found the source of the laugh. A half-dead was hanging in one of the trees. No, not hanging. It was secured to the tree with lengths of baling wire, its arms and legs bound securely. Only its head could move.

She thought immediately of the dead people wired into sitting postures in the camp’s living room. “Don’t fucking move!” she shrieked.

The creep laughed again. The sound of it irritated her. It got on her skin and made her feel grimy, like he skin was crawling with dirt and cold sweat. “Oh, I promise,” it said. Its voice wasn’t human at all, nor was it anything like a vampire’s voice. It was squeaky and infantile and nasty.

Arkeley came up on her left, his weapon pointed at the sky. He didn’t look at her, just at the half-dead.

“I have a message for you, but I’ll only tell if you’re nice,” the half-dead cackled at her. Before she could reply Arkeley shot it in the chest. Its ribs and the stringy flesh holding them together snapped open and shattered. Pieces of bone flew tumbling away from the tree. The half-dead screamed, a sound strangely similar to its laugh.

“Tell me now or I’ll shoot off your feet,” Arkeley said.

“My master awaits you, and you won’t like him so much!” the half-dead crowed.

“He says you’re going to die!”

“Tell us the goddamned message,” Caxton growled.

The half dead shook and rattled, its bones straining against the wire. As if the simple effort cost it enormously it lifted its arm and pointed one bony figure across the stream, deeper into the forest.

“Where is he?” Arkeley demanded. “Tell me where he is. Tell me.”

The half-dead was still shaking though, convulsing, tearing itself to pieces.

Without warning its head slumped forward and crashed to the ground. Clearly they wouldn’t get any more answers out of it.

Its arm remained pointing toward the shadowy woods.

Caxton stared at the out-stretched finger. “This is a trap,” she said.

“Yes,” Arkeley told her. Then he splashed across the creek and into the trees.

She rushed forward to catch up with him and take the lead again. Her boots hit the stream with a splash and freezing water soaked her socks. On the far side she hurried into the dark, her flashlight bobbing through the trees, its light swinging across the trunks, leaping up among the branches, searching among the roots.

When it became clear they weren’t going to die instantly she figured she could afford to ask more questions. “What happened to being cautious?” she asked. “To wearing seat belts and not keeping a round in the chamber?”

He turned to look at her in the near dark. “This way we know we’re in danger. If we headed back to the car they might spring on us without warning. When you know your enemy is trying to trap you the only course of action is to rush forward.

Hopefully you can spring the trap before your enemy is fully prepared.”

Half the time she thought he said things like that just so that he could be right and she could be wrong. She tramped after him into the gloom but she didn’t like it, not at all.

It didn’t take long to find the two state troopers and the local cop. They were wired to the trees just as the half-dead had been. Their bodies were twisted and broken—clearly they had died in terrible pain.

“The vampire,” Caxton breathed.

“No.” Arkeley grabbed the barrel of her shotgun and pushed it to move the flashlight around until it shone on the face of the dead police man. Blood dripped from his lacerated nose, blood still steaming with residual body heat. “No vampire would leave a body like that. They wouldn’t spill out blood on the ground, not if they had time to clean it up.”

“Lares spilled blood all over the place. I read your report.”

“Lares was desperate and in a hurry. This vampire can afford to take his time. We don’t even know his name.” He let go of her weapon. “We’re wasting our time.”

She turned to go.

Arkeley shook his head. “I didn’t say we were done here.”

Caxton spun around and saw it—a patch of dirt between two trees lifted and cracked open. A skeletal hand shot up and clutched at the air. She turned again and saw a half-dead coming at her between the trees, a butcher knife in either hand. She lifted the shotgun and fired.

The half-dead’s body exploded in a fountain of ash and dust, bones splintering into fragments, soft tissues bursting open, tearing, bouncing off the trees. The knives flashed forward and clattered together on the ground.

“Jesus!” she shouted. The thing had just… blown up, its body literally shredded by the tungsten shot.

“They rot pretty quickly. After a week or ten days they can barely hold body and soul together,” Arkeley explained. A half-dead appeared at his elbow and he pistol-whipped its jaw off, then fired one of his cross points right through its left eye.

If the half-deads were easy to destroy they had one advantage, however—superiority of numbers. There were suddenly dozens of them, cackling in the darkness, running between the tree trunks, their weapons shining in the moonlight or glinting in Caxton’s flashlight beam.

Reinforcements were on the way. The sheriff was sending two cars. She wanted to grab her cell phone and find out how soon they would arrive, but that would mean taking one hand off her shotgun. And there was no chance of that.

Something sharp dug into the flesh of her ankle just above her boot. She screamed and kicked at a skinless hand that was reaching up from below to grab at her. Finger bones went flying as her boot connected but the half-dead under her feet kept trying to climb up out of the dirt. She had the urge to shoot straight down but she would probably destroy her own foot in the process. Instead she waited for the half-dead’s scalp to crown up out of the dark earth and then she kicked it in with her boot. “Watch out,” Caxton shouted, “they’re coming up from the ground!”

Arkeley scowled at the darkness. “We don’t have enough bullets,” he said.

Caxton pressed her back up against a tree and pumped the shotgun. Where the hell were the reinforcements?

20.

“Do any of them have guns?” she asked, petrified.

“Not likely,” Arkeley told her. “They’re weak, and their bodies are soft with decay. If one of them tried to fire a gun the recoil would blow its arm off.”

“I think we should head back to the house,” Caxton said, doing her best to keep control of the obvious fear in her voice. She wanted to start screaming for help but that wouldn’t do anyone any good. “Let’s at least get out of these trees.” The half-deads were surrounding them on all sides. They were taking their time about pressing the attack and Caxton could imagine why. The assailants wanted to mob the two of them: one on one they couldn’t even get close, but if a crowd of them attacked all at the same time then Caxton and the Fed would be overrun, unable to shoot fast enough to keep all the knife-wielding monsters at bay.

Arkeley raised his weapon and fired. A half-dead she hadn’t even seen disintegrated in mid-air. “We can’t afford to lose them by going too far. But I agree, we’re in unnecessary risk here.” He turned to face the stream that ran between them and the house. A half-dead stepped out from behind a tree in front of him and he punched it with his free hand hard enough to send it spinning to the leaf-littered ground. Caxton stomped it as she followed close behind.