"You know what we want. You know what She wants." Deanna squatted down in front of Caxton and folded her arms across her out-jutting knees. "We want you to kill yourself and get this over with."
"That"s what she wants," Caxton replied. "I asked what you want, Dee."
Deanna laid her head on her arms and looked away. She had to think about it. "This is just a little spat, what you and I are having right now. We can get over it and make up. I still love you. I still want to be with you. But there"s no way that can happen as long as you"re still human. So I want you to kill yourself, too."
Considering the way she felt right then it didn"t sound so bad. It would be an end to all the pain and all the fear. "I would resent you forever," she said. "I would hate you for what you turned me into."
Deanna smiled sadly. "No, I"m sorry, but that"s not true. Maybe at first you would be upset. But then you would get hungry. You would want the blood more than you hated me. Once you tasted it-well, once I tasted it I knew that this isn"t a curse. I don"t care, Pumpkin, if I"m going to get old and withered. I don"t care about how bad the blood tastes. When I felt how strong it made me I didn"t care about anything else. It"ll be the same for you. I promise."
Caxton was pretty sure Deanna was telling the truth. "But I"m so scared, Dee," she admitted. "You know about my mom." A tear gathered in the corner of her eye but she squeezed it back. Too much.
Deanna reached forward and stroked Caxton"s hair. "I know. I know you"re scared. But it only takes a second." She grabbed Caxton"s arms and lifted her up to her feet. "Come on. I"ll help you."
"No," Caxton said. "Let me do it myself." She was still shaky but she"d recovered enough to walk. She stepped over to where her iron bar lay on the bricks. "Let"s go over here in the moonlight," she said. "I can"t do it in a dark place."
Deanna"s smile was perfectly pure and innocent.
Caxton walked up to the caution tape and lifted her bar. Deanna had hurt her pretty badly but she"d been careful not to spill a drop of blood. Caxton wasn"t sure why but she knew it had to be important. "Maybe I should do it like this," she said, and dragged the sharp end of the bar across her left wrist.
"Pumpkin, no," Deanna breathed, raising one hand to stop Caxton. Then she dropped the hand and just stared.
A line of ragged pain ran across her arm. A razor blade would have made a neater incision but the wound wouldn"t have bled so much. Caxton watched dark blood surge up inside the wound, filling the narrow channel in her flesh. It welled up and over the edges of the cut and then spilled down her wrist. A drop splashed on the bricks, black in the moonlight.
"Oh, Pumpkin," Deanna said. She stared at the blood on Caxton"s arm. "What? Am I doing it wrong?" Caxton asked. Congreve, she remembered, had been unconscious, hurt, down on the ground and pa.s.sed out and a single drop of her blood had revived him. It had been like a shot of adrenaline pumped
right in his heart. Reyes had tortured and damaged her but he had never broken her skin.
Maybe they were afraid of the blood, as much as they wanted it. Maybe the blood made them crazy. Maybe it made them lose control. Deanna"s mouth was wide open. Her feet kicked at the bricks. A moment later she was running, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed as her jaws worried thin air. She almost seemed to get airborne at the end, her feet barely touching the ground as she moved as fast as a galloping horse, homing in on the blood.
Caxton timed it perfectly. She dropped to the ground and rolled to the left and Deanna went right past her, moving too fast to stop easily. The vampire collided with the upright spears of gla.s.s with a crunching noise, her arms flailing, trying to find something to hold onto, to stop her impact. Shattered gla.s.s filled the air like spinning, falling snow.
The sound... the sound was unearthly. A scream broken into pieces. A million tiny bells ringing.
A living human being would have been shredded. Deanna stood up slowly, her dress hanging from her limbs in tatters. Her skin was a maze of blood, dark, dead blood dripping away, rolling down her arms and legs. She tried to grab at it with her hands. She licked herself like a cat, trying to reabsorb all that lost blood.
It wouldn"t work. "It has to be fresh." Caxton said. "It has to be warm." Deanna looked up with her red eyes and there was confusion in them. She didn"t understand what had just happened to her. Then she saw Caxton"s dripping wrist and her mouth opened involuntarily. She took a step forward-and a jagged tongue of gla.s.s neatly impaled her foot. She let out a little yowl.
Caxton stripped off her uniform tie and wrapped it around her wrist, tugging at it until it hurt and then knotting it off as a tourniquet. No point in bleeding to death now, she decided. She let Deanna take a few more painful, injurious steps
toward her. She waited until all the blood had dripped away from Deanna"s flawless body, already healed but paler now, very much paler. She looked like she"d been carved from marble.
The pink had left her cheeks altogether. The blood wouldn"t protect her any longer. It would have been nice to have a Glock full of ammunition, but the jagged iron bar would serve just as well. Caxton brought it around in a long arc and plunged the sharp end right into Deanna"s rib cage. A little to the left of her sternum.
Deanna screeched and howled and tried to form words, to beg, to plead. Maybe to say goodbye. Caxton pulled the bar out and then she struck again, and again. Three times had to be enough, she thought. It needed to be. She didn"t have the strength to stab her partner a fourth time. Her arms felt like cut rubber bands.
Eventually Deanna stopped moving. Her red eyes stared up at the moon, her white face perfect still, untouched by horror or pain or death.
It wasn"t easy crawling out of the ruined conservatory, even with no more vampires on her trail. Caxton cut her hands on broken gla.s.s crawling out of a shattered pane and knew she was going to need a teta.n.u.s shot after she sc.r.a.ped herself on rusted iron. She got free at last, though, and headed for the front of the building, moving quietly, slowly to avoid half-deads. She was going to go get help for Arkeley. That was the end of it. Once he was safely on his way to a hospital (a.s.suming he wasn"t already dead) the case would officially be closed.
Out on the lawn she got a weird surprise-colored light that bounced off the trees and flashed on the wet gra.s.s.
Light washed over her, lighting up her hands, her damaged forearm. The light got in her eyes. It was red and blue, or yellow, or white. No less than twelve patrol cars stood parked at odd angles on the sanatorium"s front lawn. Two ambulances and the Granola Roller joined them. Captain Suzie stood up out of the armored vehicle"s sunroof, an MP5 at her shoulder. Her free hand waved Caxton on.
Anger lit up Caxton"s face and made it hot. Where had all these people been? Why couldn"t someone else have killed Deanna for her? While they waited out on the lawn she"d been inside fighting for her life.
Then the Granola Roller"s rear door popped open and Clara jumped out, knee- and elbow-pads strapped over her sheriff"s department uniform. Somebody shouted for her to stop but she kept running until her arms were around Caxton"s chest.
"You didn"t get killed," Clara said. "When I got your text message I went right to your house."
"Text message?" Caxton asked. But yes-she"d sent one, right before she found Arkeley in the shed. Hours ago.
"You said you needed my help but you didn"t say what for. I went to your house and it looked like a war zone. The place was trashed and there were bodies everywhere. The dogs were whining like crazy."
"The dogs?"
Clara nodded. "They"re okay. They aren"t hurt anyway, just scared. I figured you would want to know." The dogs were okay. That was something, some piece of good news to clutch onto. Caxton needed more. She needed more good, more life. More something to keep her from breaking down in hysterics.
"When I realized you weren"t there I called my Department and your Troop and the Bureau of Prisons and everybody I could think of, I hope that-" Caxton leaned in and pressed her lips against Clara"s. After a moment of surprise the police photographer yielded to her embrace. It felt as if she were melting in Caxton"s arms. Half a dozen catcalls and cheers rose from the parked police cars but Caxton didn"t care. It had been a very long night.
"Thanks for coming to my rescue," she said. Clara"s eyes were very wide. The rolling, changing lights painted her face now red, now green, now blue.
Caxton strode up to the Granola Roller and nodded at Captain Suzie. She looked around and found Clara"s Sheriff as well. He was out of his jurisdiction but maybe the State Police had temporarily deputized him. She would worry about the paperwork later. "Somebody give me a shotgun," she said. One was fished out of a patrol car"s trunk and carried up to her. "There are an unknown number of half-deads inside that building," she said. "We need to find them all. But first we have to get Special Deputy Arkeley out of there. He"s not in great shape." She realized too late that she had no authority over anyone there-she was just highway patrol, after all. "Does that sound good?" she asked.
Captain Suzie grinned down at her. "Lead the way, Trooper," she said.
Caxton took six heavily-armed troopers with her, all of them carrying big powerful flashlights. She remembered the way to Malvern"s ward perfectly but still she hated going back into the darkness of Arabella Furnace. She felt as if those shadows could hide anything. When they finally reached the plastic curtain outside the ward she breathed a real sigh of relief. Nothing had jumped out at them. No pale shapes had darted from the shadows to tear them to pieces. "Okay, get that stretcher ready," she said, and pushed through the curtain.
She was surprised to find Arkeley sitting up inside. She was a lot more surprised to find Malvern walking under her own power.
The old, old vampire didn"t look fully healed, not by a long shot. Her muscles were as thin and dry as vines in wintertime and they wrapped around bones easily visible beneath her papery skin. Her tattered nightgown hung on her like a tent. Her face was drawn and spotted and her one good eye looked only half inflated. But the blood Scapegrace and Deanna had brought to her must have been enough, just enough, to get her out of her coffin for the first time in over a century. She was standing up, walking even, advancing on Arkeley with her mouth open. Her teeth looked fully recovered-sharp, deadly, and numerous.