13 Bullets

Caxton glanced at the closed coffin. "I don't-" she said, but she wasn't sure. She wasn't even sure what she was rejecting. Did she even want to stay on the case? Did she want to know another single thing about vampires, about evil and how nasty the world could really be?

Arkeley smiled. "It's like seeing a caterpillar turning into a moth. It's somewhat foul, but fascinating if you have the stomach for it."

She was ready to say no. She was going to say no, and turn away.

"Every morning she goes through this, transforming totally like a larva in a chrysalis. Her body has to change so it can repair all the damage she took the night before." He lifted up the lid. A weird animal smell came out, hot and musky but weird, too, unnatural. It made her think of the way the dog kennels smelled when the dogs were sick. "This is what immortality means."

No. She just had to say no and he would put the lid back down. She was done with this case, with vampires. If he wanted her working a desk that was fine. She stepped closer to the coffin. He threw the lid back and she looked down. Malvern's bones lay askew on the upholstery. Her enormous lower jaw had fallen away from the upper part of the skull. Her heart, which looked like a rotten plum, lay inside her ribcage, unattached to anything else. All the rest of her flesh had been reduced to a mucilaginous soup that stained the silk lining of the coffin, a gloppy mass that covered her pelvis and part of her spine. Pools of its lingered in the corners of the coffin and filled one of her eye sockets. Flecks of what looked like charred skin hung submerged in the fluid while tiny curved things like fingernail clippings clustered at the center of the mess. The smell was very, very strong, almost overpowering. Caxton leaned forward a little and studied the fingernail clippings. She could just make out little hooks protruding from one end, and the rings that segmented their tiny bodies.

"Maggots," she gasped. Her face was inches from a maggot mass. Rearing up she nearly screamed. Now she could see them for what they were it was impossible to pretend they were something else. Her skin crawled, writhed away from the coffin. Her lips retracted in a grimace of horror.

"One of evolution's greatest wonders," he told her. He looked completely serious. "If you can see past your own prejudices, anyway. They eat the dead and pass the living by. Their mouths are designed so that they can only survive on food of a certain viscosity. They are so adept at working together to break down necrotic tissue that they literally share a common digestive system. Isn't that astounding?"

"Jesus Christ, Arkeley," she said, bile touching the back of her tongue. "You've made your point. Cover her up, please."

"But there's so much you haven't seen yet. Don't you want to watch her come back to life when the sun goes down? Don't you want to see her tissues recompose, her eyeball inflate, her heart reattach?"

"Just close it," she breathed. She hugged her stomach but that just made it worse. She tried very hard to breathe calmly. "That smell."

"It's wrong, isn't it? That's not how natural things smell." She heard the coffin lid scrape closed behind her back. It helped, a little. "The maggots don't seem to mind but dogs will howl if they smell her and cows will stop giving milk if she passes them by. People notice eventually, if they're near her long enough. Something feels wrong about her, something's just not right. Of course by then she'll already have ripped one of the big veins out of your arm so she can gulp down all the blood in your body."

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" she demanded. "It makes you feel good to put the little girl in her place." Caxton stalked to the far corner of the room, as far as she could get from the coffin. "It must make you feel so tough in comparison."

He sighed, a long, elaborate sigh. It made her turn around. There was no joy in his face. No desire to hurt her, she could tell. Just weariness.

"You were grooming me to be your replacement. Someone to keep fighting vampires after you're gone."

He shook his head. "No, trooper, no. I never even considered you a candidate. I won't bullshit you. I owe you at least that much since you've been honest with me."

She nodded heavily. There was no way she could win the argument. It was like when she used to fight with her father. He was a good man, too, but the rule was that in his house he was always right. It had been harder to remember that when she was a teenager.

Jesus, she thought, why was she thinking about her dad so much lately? Ever since the vampire, the now dead vampire, had hypnotized her she'd been thinking about him a lot. And she'd told Vesta Polder about her mom. It had taken her months to talk to Deanna about her dead parents. Arkeley had dredged all that up to the surface in record time.

Enough. It was over. When she'd seen the first vampire die she had thought that but now it was actually true. "I've got something you should see, too," she said, and he looked at her expectantly. The argument hadn't bothered him at all, because he knew that it was his investigation and that made him right. Fine, whatever, okay, she thought, knowing she would blow up later when he wasn't around. She took out her PDA and scrolled to Clara's email. She opened up two of the picture attachments and displayed them side by side. "A survivor in Bitumen Hollow gave us these," she said. "There are a couple of interesting things."

He bent close to look at the pictures on the small screen. She'd studied them already and she knew what he would see. The pictures had been assembled from a Virtual Identikit, mix-and-match software that let the sheriff's department create full-color composite sketches of Actor #1 and #2. Like all such images they weren't exact and they looked blocky and weird, more like pictures of Frankenstein's monster than vampires. The skin tone was all wrong because the Identikit didn't have an option for deathly pale, nor did it have red eyes (a kind of rich, warm brown was the best it could do) and it certainly had nothing like a vampire's jaw line and teeth.

Yet the images struck a chord with Arkeley right away. "Yes. This is them," he said, looking up at her. "This is good. It's useful."

Caxton nodded. "I thought so too. And look, we even have an identifying mark for one of them." The Identikit artist had sketched in the long triangular ears of Actor

#2. The survivor had insisted, however, that Actor #1 had normal human ears but they were discolored on top, almost black. "His ears are different."

"Because he tears them off daily," Arkeley agreed.

"He what?"

The Fed picked up the PDA and brought it very close to his face. "The ears are a dead giveaway. Some vampires, young vampires, will try to hide them, to make themselves look more human. Lares did it for camouflage. I've read of others who did it out of self-loathing. They wanted to look human again. They'll wear wigs and blue contact lenses and even put rouge on their cheeks and noses to look more like us."

"But every day... this guy tears his own ears off every day?"

Arkeley shrugged. "Every night. At dusk, when he wakes, he'll find they've grown back."

That just made Caxton think about the maggot mass in the coffin. "Some of them must hate themselves. They must hate themselves and what they have to do."

"No one knows. The movies suggest they have deep and brooding inner lives, but I don't buy it. I think they sit around all night thinking about blood. About how good it tastes and how bad they feel when they don't get it. About how to get more without being found and executed. And about how long it will be before they stop caring about being found."

Caxton felt as if she were standing in a cold spot. She held herself close. "Like junkies," she said. Before she'd dropped out she'd known some girls in college who did heroin. They were individual people with thoughts and feelings before they started using the drug. Afterwards they were interchangeable, their personalities completely submerged under their need. "Like junkies who can't quit their habit."

"There's a difference," he told her. "Junkies eventually die."