23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

42.

You’re bluffing,” Caxton said.

“Am I? There’s one way to find out.” The warden fitted her finger through the trigger guard of her handgun. “I’m dead anyway. Maybe not today. Maybe not for years yet. But I have inoperable cancer. My one big chance was Malvern. She could make me immortal, she said. She promised. All it would cost me was a few of my prisoners’ lives, which was a price I was perfectly willing to pay. But it looks like she lied. It looks like she never intended to make me a vampire. When she wakes up tonight, she’ll probably kill me, and then bring me back as a half-dead. That’s almost worse than going out in a hospital bed with a drip in my arm. So I have no reason not to pull this trigger.”

“You think I care?” Caxton asked, trying to keep her voice from breaking.

“Oh, yes, I do,” the warden said. She cocked the hammer of her pistol. The muzzle hadn’t moved a hairsbreadth from where she had it jammed against her temple. “I know you, Caxton. I know you well enough, anyway. I’ve met enough dirty cops in my time—sometimes they ended up here, as prisoners, and sometimes they were just dropping somebody off. You get so you can tell right away. It’s like they have a certain smell.”

“A stink of corruption?”

The warden laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Ha! No. More like the smell of money. So I know you’re not dirty, because you smell like failure. You’re a good cop. You’re one of the good guys. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself. It explains why your life is such a wreck, doesn’t it? Because good guys always finish last, but it’s okay, because their hearts are pure.” The warden sneered. “You’re in here for kidnapping and torturing some schmuck who had information you needed. I could appreciate that approach—but you can’t. You actually feel bad about what you did. You confessed, and pleaded guilty, and now you’re doing your time like a nice little girl. It’s all bullshit, of course. I’ve had a front-row seat for twenty years now on what human nature really means. I’ve watched nice little girls come in here and turn into bloody savages in a week. Nobody’s clean in this world, but cops like you want so badly to believe it’s possible, you’ll do anything not to break the illusion. You won’t let me shoot myself because it would make you complicit. It would gnaw at you, for the rest of your life, that you let somebody die when you could have saved them.”

“Are you so sure? The man who taught me how to kill vampires—he would have cocked that gun for you. And I memorized everything he had to teach me.”

“I can see it in your eyes, Caxton. You still think you can come out of this without killing a real live human being. You think you can kill Malvern and walk away—go back to some kind of normal life. So no, you won’t let me kill myself. And if you take one step closer to this desk, I will shoot.”

The warden was right.

Caxton couldn’t let her shoot. The warden was right that it would gnaw at her. It would give her nightmares. Even when she did the right thing, when she protected people from harm, she had nightmares of the things she did. If she let this woman kill herself, it would haunt her forever.

She had no choice but to give in.

“So I guess we have a stalemate,” Caxton said. “A… hostage situation.”

“What? What what what?” Gert looked up and stared around the room. “Who has a hostage? What’s going on?”

Caxton sighed. “I’ll explain later.”

“You want me to kill her?” Gert asked, pointing her knife at the warden.

“No. Not right now,” Caxton said.

Gert’s head slumped forward. She was crashing—whatever drugs she’d taken were wearing off. In a minute she would probably fall asleep.

The warden smiled. “Interesting,” she said. “I put you in a cell with Stimson because I expected her to throttle you in your sleep, but instead, you’ve made a friend.”

“I couldn’t have made it this far without her.”

“Hmm. You honestly believe it, don’t you? That everyone deserves a second chance. That there’s a little bit of good in everyone. You must. I watched her kill Wendt, the CO in the SHU. You were right there, you know how that happened. Yet even still—you brought her along. You relied on her. Do you even know why she’s in prison? You might want to ask her some time. It might make you think twice about your choice of partners.”

“She’s done fine so far,” Caxton said, but she sounded halfhearted even to herself. “If I lower my shotgun, will you lower your sidearm?”

“No,” the warden said. “I think not. If you lower your weapon, I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

“Why?” Caxton demanded. “How does that help anyone?”

“It could help me a great deal. Malvern’s obsessed with you. She wants you alive so she can make you her plaything. Oh, she has big plans for Laura Caxton. But if you’re dead when she wakes up in a little while—”

“She’ll kill you. For thwarting her.”

“You really think so?” the warden looked upward as if considering it. “I know she’ll be angry, sure. But she’s too smart to throw away someone she needs, just because they disobeyed her once. And when she’s not fixating on you, she can be a very rational creature.”

Caxton had to admit that was true.

“And then at least I would have a chance of getting what I want—the curse. No, your dying right now would be great for me. I’m thinking about shooting you right now, shotgun in my face or not. I’m wondering if I can kill you before you kill me.”

“I doubt it,” Caxton said.

The warden pursed her lips in thought. “Yes. So do I. So that’s not how we’re going to play it, either.”

“Alright,” Caxton said. “Tell me how it goes.”

“I’m going to walk out of here. You aren’t going to follow me. After that, you can do whatever you want. Go downstairs, get yourself killed. That way I still win.”

“There’s a chance I won’t die down there.”

The warden laughed. “A slim one, I suppose. But say you do live to see the sun go down tonight. What will you do then?”

Caxton shrugged. “I’ll rescue Clara. Then I’ll kill Malvern.”

“You think she’ll make it that simple? A woman who has spent the last three hundred years surviving when all the world wanted her dead, and it will just come down to one last showdown with her latest nemesis? She’s too smart to let you get close enough to try.”

Caxton had to admit the woman had a point. “She’s made a mistake this time. She’s decided she’s willing to risk everything for a chance to turn me into a vampire, and now she’s got herself stuck in a corner. She can’t leave the prison—there must be a hundred cops outside right now, waiting for her to make a move. So she’s got nowhere left to run.”

“You may be underestimating her.”

Caxton’s blood surged in her head. That, of course, was always the worst mistake you could make with a vampire. Especially a smart one. She’d spent the last few years learning just how foolish it was to underestimate Malvern. But she didn’t see what kind of trick the old vampire could pull this time. She had finally run out of clever ideas.

Hadn’t she?

“If you live long enough, you’re going to find that things aren’t exactly what they seem here. Where Miss Malvern is involved, I suppose they never are.” The warden stood up very slowly from her desk. “Well. I’ll be off now.”

“Wait,” Caxton said, as the warden started edging toward the door. “Where’s Clara? Just tell me that much.”

“She escaped,” the warden said. “The little bitch hurt me, bad, and got away when I was lying on the floor curled up in a ball of pain. Last thing I heard she was shacked up with one of the gangs. I don’t know where.”

Caxton nodded in gratitude, and relief, and a funny mixed-up pride in Clara for being so tough. “And where’s Malvern? You said yourself that you’re afraid of what’ll happen when she wakes up. Tell me where she is and I’ll make sure that never happens. If I can find her before nightfall—”

“I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew. I’m still holding out a certain hope that this is going to work out for me.”

“That you’ll become a vampire? That’s what you really want?”

“Everyone has a dream,” Bellows said. She shrugged. “I’ll tell you what I know, because it isn’t going to help you. She went off somewhere at dawn with a couple of half-deads. Presumably to her coffin. I don’t know where the coffin is. It’s not in my office, which is the last place I saw it. When I asked the half-deads where they put her, they said they were sworn not to tell me. That’s when I realized, you see, that she didn’t trust me. That she might not fulfill her promise.”

Caxton grunted in frustration. “Good-bye, warden. I’m sure we’ll meet again,” she said, with as much menace as she could put in her voice.

“Yes, I think we will. Though perhaps not the way you’re hoping for. Now, if you’ll excuse me—there’s much for me to do before the sun goes down. I really must be going.”

Bellows headed quickly for the door then. Caxton turned in place, keeping the shotgun trained on the warden. But the older woman didn’t even look back as she left the room.

When the door had closed behind Bellows, Caxton went over to the desk and studied the papers there. There were several dozen sheets, all of them printouts of chat transcripts. Caxton remembered when she’d seen the warden’s BlackBerry, and thought there was something familiar about the archaic language on the screen. It had been enough to make her think—if only on a subconscious level—that Malvern was involved. Now she could see that it had definitely been Malvern talking to the warden.

The transcripts went back for months, since shortly after Caxton’s trial. Malvern must have been following the news very closely, and she had learned what prison Caxton would be sent to, then had begun to seduce the warden, making promises to get her to betray her duty. It looked like it hadn’t been very hard. The transcripts revealed how much the warden hated her prisoners, saw in them everything that was wrong with herself and every other human being she’d ever known. Over just a few pages of conversation, Malvern had convinced the warden that sacrificing everything—her career, her life, the lives of all her COs—would be worth the curse Malvern offered as reward.

Caxton was a little surprised to find the papers. It would have been easy for the warden to take them with her, to fold them into her pocket before she left, and yet she hadn’t. She’d left them in plain sight.

The transcripts were a confession of sorts. Caxton wondered—had the warden left them behind because she had no desire to hide her guilt? Or was she just so convinced that Caxton was going to die that it didn’t matter whether she saw them or not?

Or was it all part of Malvern’s latest insidious scheme? Did she want Caxton to see the transcripts? Had she ordered Bellows to leave them behind?

“Where—where are we—what’s—next?” Gert asked. Her eyelids were drooping and she was swaying back and forth on her feet.

“I’m going downstairs,” Caxton said.

“Oh? Okay let me just get my stuff and—”

“But you’re not coming with me,” she told her celly