and go on for a while about theories of body politics or post-feminism until they ran out of steam. The people who actually appreciated her work scared Caxton. They didn’t seem all there—and worse, they made her wonder if maybe Deanna wasn’t altogether normal herself.
Arkeley moved around the shed carefully, taking it all in. Three white sheets—queen-sized—hung from the shed’s rafters with a few feet of empty air between them. They moved softly in the cold empty air of the shed, lit only by the early morning sun coming through the door. Each sheet was spotted with hundreds of nearly identical marks, roughly rectangular, all of them the same reddish brown.
There was no smell on such a cold day but even in the height of summer the marks gave off only the faintest tang of iron.
“Blood,” Arkeley announced when he’d walked around all three sheets.
“Menstrual blood,” Deanna corrected him.
Here it comes, Caxton thought, the moment when Arkeley got skeeved out and called Deanna a freak. It had happened before. A lot. But it didn’t come. He nodded and kept studying the sheets, his head tilted back to take it all in. When he didn’t say anything more for a full minute Caxton started to feel nervous. Deanna looked confused.
“It’s about taking something hidden,” Caxton blurted out and they both looked at her. “Something that is normally hidden away, disposed of in secrecy, and putting it up on display.”
The pride in Deanna’s face made Caxton want to melt on the spot. But she had to juggle her two partners. She couldn’t let Arkeley see any sign of weakness, especially not here in this deepest sanctum.
Arkeley breathed deeply. “This is powerful,” he said. He didn’t bother trying to interpret it, which was good. He didn’t try to explain it away.
Deanna bowed for him. “It’s taken me years to get it this far and it’s not nearly done. There’s a guy in Arizona who is doing something similar—I saw him at Burning Man a while ago—but he’s using any kind of blood and he lets anybody contribute. This is all me. Well, Laura has helped a few times.”
Caxton’s hands started shaking. “Okay, too much information,” she let out. It just came out of her. They both looked at her but she just shook her head.
“Perhaps we should get to the crime scene,” Arkeley suggested. She had never been so glad to receive an order.
14.
“What about garlic?” Caxton asked. By day the dead trees that lined the highways looked a lot less threatening. She supposed it helped that the vampire was dead.
There were some half-deads out there unaccounted for—the one driving the Hummer-2 that rammed them and the one-armed one that had scared the hell out of her, at least—but by all accounts they would be easy to round up and subdue now that their master was gone. The vampire was dead—it made the whole world look better. She was finally giving in to her curiosity, which she had kept leashed before because she was terrified of the answers to her questions. Now they seemed harmless, academic. “Will garlic keep a vampire away?”
Arkeley snorted. “No. In ‘93 I did a little extemporaneous experimentation on Malvern. I brought a jar of minced garlic into her room and when Armonk wasn’t looking I dumped it all over her. It made a pretty good mess and it pissed her off but no, no lasting harm. It might have been mayonnaise for all she cared.”
“How about mirrors? Do they show up in mirrors?”
“From what she’s said she loved looking at her reflection back in the good old days. She doesn’t like the way she looks now, that much is certain.” He shrugged. “I suppose that one has a grain of truth in it. The old ones will break any mirror they see. The young ones don’t care.”
“You already ruled out crosses. What about holy water, communion wafers, hell, I don’t know. What about other religions? What about the star of David or statues of Buddha? Do they run away from a copy of the Koran?”
“None of that works. They don’t worship Satan—and yes, I did ask—and they don’t practice black magic. They’re unnatural. If that makes them unholy, well, it doesn’t seem to hurt them any.”
“Silver,” she tried. “Or is that werewolves?”
“It was vampires, originally. Hollywood came up with the idea that werewolves can be killed with silver bullets. No one has actually reported a werewolf sighting in two hundred years so I couldn’t tell you about their vulnerabilities. As far as vampires go, silver has no effect.” He shifted in the passenger seat. He looked a lot less flexible than he had the day before. Fighting vampires took it out of him, she guessed. “We tried all these things out on Malvern in the first couple of years, back before Armonk started worshipping her and moaning about her rights. Sunlight, we found out, is obnoxious to her. It doesn’t set her on fire but it causes her pain.
Pretty much every kind of light causes her pain. She has to sleep during the day, there’s no way to keep her awake. Her body literally changes while the sun is up, repairing whatever damage she took during the previous night. You’ll have to come see the metamorphosis some time. It’s gruesome but fascinating.”
“No thanks,” Caxton said. “When this case is closed I’m done with monsters.
You can keep your title as the only American vampire hunter. I think I’ll stick with DUIs and fender-benders. So how did all these stories get started if nothing works?”
“Simple. Nobody likes a story with an unhappy ending. Until the last century—and the advent of reliable firearms—vampires pretty much had their way with us. The poets and the writers changed the details so as not to depress their readers with how bad the world could really be.”
“But if they had the reality to compare to—”
“That’s just it, they didn’t.” Arkeley sighed. “Every time a vampire pops up people say the same thing. ‘I thought they were extinct’. It’s because there’s never more than a handful of them anywhere in the world at a given time. And thank God for that. If they were any more common, if they were better organized, we’d all be dead.”
Caxton frowned with the effort of trying not to think too hard about that. She drove the rest of the way to Caernarvon and the hunting camp without small talk.
Arkeley was good at silence, a fact she was just beginning to appreciate. Some things weren’t worth talking about.
Patrol cars from three different jurisdictions sat parked on rolling grass near the hunting camp when they arrived—State Police, the county Sheriff and a sole vehicle for the local policeman, a middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform who stood outside looking like he wanted to throw up. Technically it was his crime scene and he had to authorize Caxton and Arkeley before they could go in. They waited till he felt well enough to check their ID.
“Are you going to be able to handle this?” Arkeley asked her. It didn’t sound like a dare, but that was how she intended to take it. “This won’t be pretty.”
“I’ve scraped prom queens off the asphalt, tough guy,” she said. “I’ve dug teeth out of dashboards so we could match dental records.”
Arkeley gave her a dry little chuckle for her bravado.
It didn’t look so bad from fifty feet away. The camp itself was a more elaborate affair than Caxton had imagined. It stood next to a chirping stream, protected in the shadow of some sixty foot willows. Most camps in Caxton’s experience were drafty little log cabins with steeply peaked roofs so they didn’t collapse under the weight of winter snows. Farrel Morton’s place might more accurately have been deemed a hunting lodge. A big main structure with lots of windows branched off into a newer wing and what Caxton judged had to be a semi-detached kitchen, judging from all the chimneys and vents. A porch ran the full length of the building, well supplied with rocking chairs made of rough-hewn logs with the bark still on. Under the peak of the roof Morton had mounted a brightly-painted hex sign, an old Pennsylvania Dutch ward against evil.
Apparently it hadn’t worked too well. Cops with their uniform shirts unbuttoned and their hats set aside were digging holes in the kitchen yard and out around back. They didn’t have to dig too deep.
“I thought the vampire’s victims all came back as half-deads,” Caxton said, looking down at a pile of bones and broken flesh that had come out of one of those holes. Maggots made the ribcage quiver. She had to look away. This was worse than traffic fatalities. Those were fresh and the colors were normal. These smelled bad.
Really bad.
“Only if he bade them to rise,” Arkeley explained. “He wouldn’t need very many servants, especially if he was
