Where before there had been no light, there was suddenly a light. A dim orange spark glowing all alone, stranded in the dark with her. It pulsed and flared yellow for a moment as if she"d breathed on an ember but then it sank back into dull orange. She reached for it, tried to keep it alive because she knew if she didn"t, if she didn"t do anything, it would blink out of existence and she would be all alone again.
The spark grew as she poured her will into it. It grew and smoldered and she smelled smoke and she was glad. It became an ember, and then a pool of burning radiance, and suddenly it gave off enough light for her to see where she was.
She was standing in the mill, right where she"d been when she fell asleep. The spark she"d thought she was nurturing was thirty yards away in the bottom of the half-collapsed crucible. It was more than just a little ember, she saw, it had just looked like that because it was so far away. It was a pool of molten incandescent metal and it swelled as she watched. It swelled and deepened and soon it spilled out over the crucible"s thick lip.
The liquid metal ran down channels carved in the floor. It filled up molds and etched lines of fire through the cracks in the cement. It gathered in great glowing heaps of slag, cooling and turning black only to be melted again by new waves of super-heated metal as more and more spilled out from the crucible.
Red light glared on every metal surface in the mill. Black smoke filled her lungs and she coughed wildly. The surging metal threatened to engulf her and she had to climb up on top of a huge mold before her feet her burned off.
Clouds of red sparks filled the air around the crucible, torrents of dark smoke obscured the ceiling just as the metal covered the floor, a lake of fire. The heat was intense-it made her eyebrows curl up and it singed her nasal pa.s.sages. She could barely breathe.
"No," she managed to shout before the fumes filled her throat and choked her and she coughed and coughed until she couldn"t speak anymore. "This isn"t real. This is just a dream!" Though it was like no dream she"d ever had before. She revised her statement: "It"s all in my head!"
It was true, she knew it was true. But it didn"t matter. If she fell into the molten iron she would still burn. Her skin would crisp and pull away from her muscles, her hair would catch flame. The pain would still be excruciating. Pain was all in the mind, too, and it would still hurt.
The liquid metal kept rising. Caxton grabbed at a chain hanging from the ceiling. The metal links were hot enough to scorch her palms but she knew she would climb up the chain if she had to.
The air roared around her, a hydrocarbon wind of burning iron. Her lungs grew dry and shredded inside her chest as she sucked in the air, trying to get one clean breath. Then her legs wobbled underneath her. Caxton tottered on the mold as it started to melt under her feet. The smoke in her throat made it hard to keep her balance as she kept coughing, a reedy, dry cough that hurt her lungs. She grabbed at the chain again and the metal burned her hand so badly she pulled it away, pure reflex. Her arm swung out and pulled her off balance as her feet shuffled on the mold, trying to find purchase as the metal edged up to touch her boots-
-and she opened her eyes.
She was awake. She was lying face down on the floor of the mill, her cheek pressed against the cold cement. The crucible stood empty and cold at the far end of the open s.p.a.ce. Behind her the half-deads were gathered around their fire, giggling away. How she had gotten so far away from them while she slept was a mystery. Had she crawled away in her sleep? She heard a sound like running water and looked up.
Reyes stood a dozen feet away. The drawstring pants were down below his b.u.t.tocks and he was relieving himself on a pile of old, rusted metal, p.i.s.sing out not urine but blood. When he was done he pulled up his pants and strode over to where she lay.
She didn"t have the strength to get up. She didn"t have the strength to lift her face from the icy floor. She couldn"t see any of him but his pale white feet. The toenails were thick and ragged. They looked like they could cut through flesh like steak knives.
"You don"t scare me," she managed to croak. She expected her throat to be scorched-she could still taste smoke in the back of her mouth. But of course that had all been a dream. "You were human, once. You were a sad little man who stayed home and jacked off to the bra advertis.e.m.e.nts in magazines-"
One of his feet moved backward, lifting off the floor. It swung away from her, and then it came back. He kicked her right in the stomach and she wasn"t ready for it. She felt like her guts liquefied inside of her body and came swimming up her throat, pressing down against her r.e.c.t.u.m. The pain was going to make her s.h.i.t herself. She clenched down hard and somehow kept everything together.
"You had nothing, you were n.o.body," she cried. "Now you"re even less. You"re unnatural. The light of the sun melts you, you-" He drew his foot back for another blow. She called out and he stopped, his feet spread on the cement, ready to kick her if she didn"t say what he wanted to hear. She would gladly have said anything, anything at all, but she had no idea what the right words would be. "What time is it?" she asked, just trying to stall.
The foot went back and hit her once more. It was like being struck by a moving car. She felt bones give way in her chest. The pain surged upward, to her brain, and without warning she- -opened her eyes and saw black smoke drifting along the ceiling. She looked down and saw the red glow of the burning metal once more. She was back in the dream.
In the few moments while she"d been awake her dream-self had been busy. Ignoring the searing pain in her hands, Caxton had clambered up a thick chain and hung suspended perhaps ten feet above the surface of the molten metal. With her legs wrapped around the chain and her arms holding her in place she was, for the moment, safe, but she didn"t see a lot of options as to what to do next.
Nothing of the floor remained visible-the liquid iron had flooded the mill until the molds and tools and all but the uppermost lip of the crucible were submerged in burning, smoking metal. The mold she had stood on before had melted and was no more than a black stain on the reddish-orange surface of the bubbling sea below. The lake of fire was still rising, too-she could see it climbing up the windows, a thick meniscus of darkly glimmering slag spreading across the brick walls as still more molten iron poured from the crucible.
There was no way to go but up, and little enough above her worth climbing toward. She tried to wake up. She tried pinching herself, grabbing a thick fold of skin at her waist and twisting it, hard. The pain screamed through her belly but nothing happened. She pulled off one of her gloves and dropped it into the heaving liquid below. It struck the surface with a hiss and a gout of flame, then disappeared forever. She got her teeth into the sensitive webbing between her thumb and forefinger and bit down, hard. Harder. Hard enough to draw blood.
The pain didn"t wake her up. In desperation she closed her eyes and tried to imagine it all away, tried to find her way back to the waking world through sheer willpower. Again, she failed.
She thought of the cold mill, the long defunct mill of reality where the half-deads waited to taunt her, where Reyes kept beating the s.h.i.t out of her. Did she really want to go back there, she wondered? Was it so much better than the burning mill of her dream?
Desperate, alone, barely able to see or breath for the smoke, she clutched to the hot chain and sobbed. She couldn"t handle it anymore. The dream world was a h.e.l.l of fire. Reality was pain and torture. There was a third option, she knew.
She could just let go.
She tried to shove the thought away, to ignore it, but it kept coming back. It haunted her. She could just let go. Let go, and fall, and fall forever.
She awoke to find moonlight pooling on her face. She blinked away the silver illumination and sat up. The moon was coming in through a broken pane in the
mill"s high windows, painting a broad rectangular patch of floor with its light. Caxton tried to stand up. It wasn"t easy. Her entire midsection screamed with pain every time she moved, a tearing pain as if she were being pulled to pieces. Her legs ached where the half-deads had cut her the day before. Her head was full of ugly things and she kept having to snort and clear her throat and spit out b.l.o.o.d.y mucus. Some of the things in her lungs wouldn"t come out no matter how much she blew her nose.
Slowly, mindful of her aching rib cage, she rose to her feet and looked around. Reyes was nowhere in sight. The half-deads and their fire were halfway across the mill. She had moved, or been moved, in her sleep until she was well out of earshot of her captors. n.o.body was watching her. Nothing kept her from running away.
She felt like cold water was pouring down her back. It was impossible. She had been given a reprieve-somehow the vampire and his minions had just decided to ignore her. Did they think she was still unconscious, perhaps sleepwalking around the mill? Did they think that she was too weak to get away? It was too good to be true, she knew that, it had to be some kind of trap, but she also knew she had to capitalize on whatever small freedom she"d been allowed. Keeping an eye on the half-deads around the fire she hurried toward the wall of the mill. A pile of broken carts had been left there, miniature rail cars that had once moved ingots from one side of the mill to the other. The jagged wood and rusted wheels made a lot of noise as she clambered up to the top of the heap but there was no way to silence them. The pile shifted under her feet and hands but it was stable enough to let her get up to the bottom ledge of the tall windows.
She found a broken pane, an open s.p.a.ce as wide as her hand filled with chicken wire. Shards of frosted gla.s.s still hung from the wire. She carefully brushed them away and looked out.
The moon lit up a rural landscape for her, a tableau of black trees swaying and bending in the cold wind. A vacant lot stood directly behind the mill, perhaps a parking lot once or a railyard that had been so overgrown by weeds it no long served any purpose at all. A few rows of fifty-gallon oil drums stood forgotten and skeletonized by rust directly below her.
There was no way out. She was perhaps twenty feet up in the air. Even if she could break out the gla.s.s and somehow get through the wire she would have to drop to an unknown surface and trust she didn"t break her legs in the process. Something moved behind her and she panicked and nearly fell off the heap of broken carts. She looked back and saw a group of half-deads in the center of the mill floor. They held torches and were muttering amongst themselves. They weren"t looking at her but they had to see her-didn"t they? Maybe their vision wasn"t as good as hers. Maybe she was overestimating them.
Caxton turned her face once more to the broken window. It was good, it was helpful, just to get a whiff of fresh air. In a moment she knew she would be discovered and put back to sleep. Just a glimpse of moonlight on trees was worth the effort.
She breathed in deeply-and nearly choked. The air outside was foul with the smell of baking manure. She turned away from the window and tried not to cough.
The half-deads were pulling on a chain hanging from the ceiling. The chain rattled through their skeletal hands and then suddenly it took on a life of its own. A counterweight descended quickly from the rafters as another chain shot toward the ceiling. A bundle wrapped in canvas was tied to the counterweight. Caxton was not too surprised when the half-deads cut it loose and it turned out to be a human corpse, a heavyset woman in the brown uniform of a UPS driver. She looked very pale, which meant she must have been drained of blood. One of Reyes" victims. The half-deads laid her out carefully on the floor and unb.u.t.toned her clothing but didn"t remove any of it. It looked like they were trying to make her comfortable, strangely enough.
The vampire came out of the shadows then. He had been lying on a flow of hardened slag, a pale spot in the shadows. He had been no more than twenty feet away from her the whole time. Hope slipped away from Caxton like water down a drain. The whole time she"d been climbing the broken carts and sniffing the foul air outside he must have been watching her. Well, of course he had. He wasn"t stupid enough to let her wander around unsupervised.
He didn"t so much as glance at her, though. He walked over to the corpse and touched the dead woman"s chest with one of his hands. His hand pressed against where her heart would be. He stared deeply into her gla.s.sy, sightless eyes, and muttered something in his low, growling voice.
The woman"s body started to twitch, muscles jumping here and there under her clothes. "Come back," Reyes said. He was calling her-literally calling her back from death. "Come back and serve me. Come back and serve me!" The twitches graduated into full-blown convulsions, her heels kicking against the floor, her head flopping back and forth like a fish cast up on a dry wooden wharf. Her body stiffened with the spasm and a sour reek split the air, similar to the manure smell from outside but much sharper and more pungent. The dead woman"s hands curled into wicked claws as she reached for her face. Slowly, she sat up, while clawing again and again at the skin around her eyes. She started to scream when strips of skin peeled off of her face, but she didn"t stop gouging with her nails at her cheeks and forehead-if anything, her clawing grew more urgent. She was going to tear off her own face, piece by piece. Caxton was watching a new half-dead be born, a replacement for the one Reyes had destroyed and thrown in the fire.
Reyes felt her disgust. The vampire turned to look at Caxton and for a long bad moment they just stared into each others" eyes. Caxton felt him squirming around inside of her head, almost as if he were rifling through the filing cabinets of her mind, looking for something and not finding it. The vampire was upset, angry, nervous-though as soon as she sensed those emotions in him he clamped down hard on the psychic connection they shared. Her body writhed as if she were touching a live wire. He looked away and Caxton"s body collapsed backward onto the carts, her breath heaving in and out of her lungs. Her eyes fluttered closed and-
-she was back in the burning mill, still clinging to the chain. She could hardly believe she hadn"t let go yet. She wanted it, suddenly, wanted it very badly. She could visualize the whole process. Her body would fall for a few seconds through empty s.p.a.ce. She would collide with the surface of the molten metal below. Her skin would burn off instantly, she thought. Her muscles and her flesh would take a moment longer. There would be pain. She was sure it would hurt beyond anything she had ever experienced. But only for a second. And then... what? Oblivion? Nothingness?
How tempting it was-how tempting to put everything behind her. She thought of her life even before she was imprisoned in the casket and how much of it had been utter misery. Working so hard for the approval of her superiors, the approval of Arkeley, the approval of her dead father. None of them had ever taken her seriously. Then there was Deanna, Deanna who she loved so much, Deanna who was fading away while she watched. Deanna who had been vibrant and lively and s.e.xy before, and now half the time she couldn"t get off the couch, Caxton would come home and find her there, wrapped up in a quilt, watching some celebrity gossip show on television. Or rather watching empty s.p.a.ce, her eyes not even focused on the TV. Caxton had vowed to save Deanna, to bring her back to life. But she was failing, she knew. If anything, Deanna was dragging her down.
The dogs-the greyhounds, her beautiful animals. They would miss her. They would howl for her, she knew. But somebody else would come along and feed them, and pet them, and soon enough they would forget. The whole world would forget Laura Caxton after a short season of formulaic grief. If she just ceased to exist, nothing, really, would change. Or rather, one thing would change. In the great balance sheet a certain amount of pain would be subtracted from the world. Wasn"t that a good thing? If she had the opportunity to reduce the world"s pain, by ending her own, wasn"t that the right thing to do? All she had to do was let go.
She took one hand off the chain, and somewhere, somewhere outside of the dream, she felt Reyes the vampire start to smile. She looked at her hand. He wanted her to let go. Reyes wanted her to end the dream.
It didn"t matter, she told herself. It didn"t matter who wanted what. In a second she would be gone, erased from the world, and after that, who cared? Who cared if the vampires ate half of Pennsylvania? Who cared? She wouldn"t be around to feel guilty.
She removed her other hand from the chain. The muscles in her thighs quivered when they were forced to support her whole weight. She started to lean back. So easy. So easy, and it would solve every problem she"d ever had. Strong fingers clutched at her left wrist. She screamed, expecting pain, but the fingers just held her, they didn"t dig into her flesh. They wouldn"t let her fall. She tried to turn her head and see who was holding her but it didn"t work-her neck didn"t bend that way. She couldn"t see the fingers as they shifted their grip, closing like a pair of handcuffs around her wrist. "You"re not done yet," the owner of the fingers said. The voice was quite soft and almost vanished in the furnace roar of the burning mill. She could tell, though, that the voice belonged to Arkeley.