13 Bullets

The tiny skull in Caxton's hands quivered and she nearly dropped it. She did let out a little squealing noise. Scapegrace and Hazlitt stopped to look back at her. The vampire grinned cockily at her predicament.

A millipede with long, hairy feelers had crawled out of the left eye socket and was working its way across the back of her hand. Its body looked wet and slimy. Its legs made her skin itch. It was all she could do not to jerk her hand away. If she did, though, she knew that Scapegrace would cripple her instantly. Knowing the teenaged vampire he would probably put the millipede in her hair, afterwards, just to torture her.

She bent her knees and gritted her teeth and tried not to care. It was just an insect, she told herself. It was extremely unlikely that it was poisonous. Carefully she raised the skull to the level of her mouth. She took a deep breath and blew on the millipede, trying to knock it off her hand. Its head waved in the jet of air but then its back legs anchored between two of her knuckles. She blew harder, and harder, until she thought she might pass out again.

Scapegrace snorted out a mocking laugh. She sucked in air and then spat it at the millipede until it finally flew off of her hand. The vampire shook his head in amusement and then gestured for her to follow. "This way," he said, "if you're okay, now."

Hazlitt ran ahead into the darkness and switched on a light in the corridor ahead. All but one of the fluorescent tubes in the corridor had been smashed. They hung above her like jagged glass teeth, sparking now and again. What little light remained was barely enough for her to find her way to the far end of the passage. They were headed directly for Malvern's private ward-she recognized the route they took from her previous visits.

Scapegrace glanced at Hazlitt, then lifted aside the plastic curtain and went inside. Caxton started to follow but the doctor touched her arm and shook his head. Together they stood there for long minutes listening to Scapegrace retch up his cargo of stolen blood. Tucker's blood, Caxton thought. Maybe Arkeley's blood. He was feeding Malvern, of course, just as Lares had the night that Arkeley killed him. When Scapegrace was finished and the noises had stopped Hazlitt nodded at her. She pushed through the plastic curtain and stepped into the blue-lit room. Her eyes went out of focus for a moment, adjusting to the new light, and her head grew light. She thought she heard someone calling her name and she swam back to lucidity. She was so scared she thought she must be going crazy. "Laura," she heard, again, a woman's voice. Was it Malvern? No, that was impossible. Malvern's vocal cords had dried up a hundred years ago. "Laura." It was as clear and as loud as if someone stood behind her, calling her. She turned but she knew nobody would be there. It was as if a ghost were talking, like the ghost in Urie Polder's barn.

"Officer?" Hazlitt said, looking a little concerned.

"Nothing," she said. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the blue light. She saw that the room had been changed around a little. The medical equipment had all been shoved back into the corners and the microphones and probes that had once hung down from the ceiling to constantly measure Malvern's status had all been cleared away. The laptop remained, sitting alone on a metal stool. Caxton glanced down at the coffin propped-up on its sawhorses. Blood filled the coffin almost to the rim. She was sure Malvern was in there, submerged under the dark fluid, but she couldn't even see a shadow beneath the still surface. Then, as if in response to her stare, a ripple ran across the blood and five tiny peaks appeared in the surface. They pressed upward out of the coffin and she saw they were fingernails. Malvern's hand lifted from out of the blood, clotted fluid dripping and falling away from the fingers. There was more flesh on the bones than before-clearly being soaked in human blood was having the predicted effect on Malvern. She was rejuvenating, revivifying. Her hand reached for the keyboard of the laptop and she began to type. Character by character she spelled out a message for her new guest:

well come, laura

When the vampire was done typing her hand slithered back inside her coffin. It was all so quiet and stately and polite that Caxton felt an absurd urge to curtsey and thank her hostess for her kind hospitality. Scapegrace tapped her on the shoulder, then, and she turned back around. Then she lost her breath. There was a noose hanging down from the ceiling, hovering over a simple wooden chair. "That's-for me," she stammered. "So I can-so I can-finish myself off and complete the rite."

"Yes," Hazlitt told her. "I want you to know I opted for a lethal injection. I have one made up for myself. They wouldn't hear of it."

"It's how your mother did it, right?" Scapegrace asked. He sounded almost solicitous, as if he really wanted to make sure he'd gotten it right. "She hanged herself? The symmetry of it appealed to us."

"Yes, that's right." She nodded, trying to fight back by being more nonchalant than he was. Her stomach boiled with acid but she refused to let it show. Symmetry. The kind of thing that would appeal to a vampire's spiky, twisted, obsessive-compulsive mind. "She hanged herself. When I was very young. Is it time, now?" she asked, a lump in her throat. "Is it time for me to." She couldn't finish the sentence. "You know."

"We're not quite finished," Scapegrace told her.

A half-dead entered the room and climbed up a step-ladder to hang a pair of thick iron chains from the ceiling. When he was done he took his ladder away and made room for two more half-deads, who dragged something in a big canvas sack into the room. There were ugly stains on one end of the sack. They grunted and cursed as they struggled with their burden but they didn't complain openly. From time to time they would look up at Scapegrace as if they expected him to pounce on them and tear them apart just for fun.

Finally they got their bag open. Inside was a human body, a big one, dressed up in a dark suit. There was so much blood on the hands and face that Caxton couldn't determine the race or even the sex of the cadaver.

No-wait, she thought. It wasn't dead. It moved, though surely only by reflex, a twitch here or there, a last shudder before the body could finally succumb to mortal wounds. The half-deads attached the dangling chains to the body's ankles and started hauling it up into the air. Scapegrace moved forward to help them lift it up, over the coffin, until the body dangled over Malvern's submerged form with its out-stretched fingertips nearly brushing the surface of the pooled blood. The body swung from side to side, first left, then right. Scapegrace and Hazlitt both kept looking at her face as if they expected her to have some kind of reaction. She'd seen worse, she wanted to tell them. She'd scraped prom queens off the asphalt. Then she realized why they wanted her to see this particular body. It had a small silver badge on its lapel, a star in a circle. The badge of a Special Deputy of the US Marshals Service.