13 Bullets

The first thing she had to do was make a choice. It wasn't an easy one. She had to decide she was going to kill Deanna. It didn't matter what they'd been. It didn't matter who had failed who. She asked herself what Arkeley would say and she knew, he would say that Deanna was unnatural. A monster.

That didn't help nearly as much as she wanted it to. She could still love a monster, she knew, if she let herself. She could learn to love Deanna again, she could forgive her for what she'd done, and it wouldn't even be that hard. But it looked like she wasn't going to get the chance. Deanna would kill her-unless she killed Deanna first. Her decision was made. She would kill Deanna if she could. The second thing she had to do was figure out how.

The conservatory greenhouse she'd finally found had once been a long, two-story space where brick walkways wound between tables and espaliers and giant flower pots. The walls and the sloped roof had been constructed of wide panels of plate glass, held in place by a framework of steel girders. It must have been a lovely place once, she thought, a refuge for the dying patients. A place for them to get out of their beds and get some sun. Time and weather had changed the greenhouse, however. The plants had either died or flourished far beyond what the inmates might have ever hoped for. Vines crawled up the glass walls, choking off the grimy panes, littering the brick floor with curled brown debris. The far end of the conservatory had been smashed in all together, perhaps by one of the violent storms that swept through the ridges of Pennsylvania from time to time. Yellow caution tape had been strung back there, tied from one girder to another to keep the staff out. She could see why-long spears of broken glass stood back there, lined up and stood on end, maybe by the same workers who had abandoned all that plaster compound and lumber outside the invalid ward.

Caxton needed a weapon. She waved her light around and found a piece of steel stanchion that had once secured a trellis in place. It looked half rusted and like it might come loose with a couple of kicks. With a rage born of fear and desperation she knocked it loose with her boot. She grabbed it up and immediately felt a little better, even though she knew the sense of security was an illusion. She had a steel bar the length of a riot control baton with one jagged, wicked-looking end. Against a well-fed vampire it might as well have been a piece of rope.

Next she needed to secure the door. She saw a terra cotta pot the size of a refrigerator that she thought she might be able to use as a barricade. She went to grab it, knowing it would take every ounce of her strength to move it, when the door slapped open and Deanna came roaring through.

She was twenty feet away-and then she was right next to Caxton and her pale arm lashed out like a camera flash bulb going off. Caxton's face went hot with pain and her ears rang as if her head were a bell that had just been struck. She felt herself falling, tumbling backwards. Her nose ached almost immediately-it might be broken. She struggled not to fall over and then, when that became a hopeless endeavor, she struggled to catch herself on her hands.

Deanna reached down and even before she'd struck the ground Caxton was jerked back up into the air. Deanna punched her in the stomach and her breath flew out of her. Nausea wracked her body and she felt like she was going to throw up. Deanna's hand came down on her forearm and she felt the bones there creak and rub together unnaturally. She lost control of her hand and her pathetic metal bar went flying, skittering across the rough brick floor.

Caxton couldn't have kept standing if she'd been propped up. She dropped to her knees, knocking them badly, and grabbed at her stomach because she felt as if she'd been disemboweled and her guts were about to flop out. Deanna hadn't cut her at all, though. There wasn't a drop of blood on her, not even from her nose, which was hotly numb and sprained at the very least. She was in horrible pain and she felt like she would never stand up again but she wasn't bleeding. Deanna had thought through her attack. She'd been careful to keep Caxton in one piece. "What do you want from me?" Caxton sputtered.

"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 passed 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 glass with a crunching noise, her arms flailing, trying to find something to hold onto, to stop her impact. Shattered glass 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 glass 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.