When she stepped out of the bathroom Clara was standing next to the payphone.
She was smiling from ear to ear and her eyes showed nothing. She was trying to play it cool and be super- aggressive at the same time. Caxton remembered that dance, she even remembered pulling off the same moves. When Clara lowered her eyes and stepped to the left, just as Caxton was stepping to the right, she knew exactly how it felt, the little, trembling fears that multiplied the longer you held back, the big hope you shoved down so it wouldn’t overwhelm you but it kept busting out.
There was even a good song on the jukebox. She couldn’t remember the name of the artist or the title but it was a good song.
She missed that feeling, the butterflies in the stomach, the cold prickles on the back of her neck, she missed it so much that as Clara raised her hands she stepped right into them, closed her eyes as they touched her face, those hot little fingers tracing the smooth line of her jaw. Caxton just had time to exhale before Clara’s soft lips touched hers, moist, soft, exactly the right temperature. She had missed that most of all, those first, exploring kisses. The very first taste of a woman’s lips.
Clara’s mouth started to move and Caxton raised her own hands, not to touch Clara’s face but to gently, ever so gently, break contact.
Clara’s eyes were moist, her mouth a pursed question. “Aren’t you...?” she asked, a whisper.
“I’m in a relationship,” Caxton said. She was sweating under the bandage on her shoulder. “I need to go home. To her.”
Clara nodded and stepped to the right, to let Caxton past. Except Caxton chose the same moment to step left. They nearly collided with each other and it was enough to break the tension. They both sighed out a little shared laugh. Caxton covered the bar tab and they climbed back in the sheriff’s department car. They said very little on the ride to Caxton’s house but a tiny smile played on Clara’s lips the whole time. When she stopped the car out front they sat there for a moment listening to the dogs howl in their kennels. “I love dogs,” Clara said. “What kind?”
“Rescue greyhounds,” Caxton said as if she were admitting to a crime.
Clara’s eyes lit up. “Maybe some time you’ll introduce me to them?”
“Sure—some time, maybe,” Caxton said. She was blushing. Only when she popped open the door and felt the cold air on her cheeks did she realize she’d been blushing all the way home. No wonder Clara had kept smiling at her. “Thanks for the ride, anyway,” she said. “I’ll, uh, see you.”
“Don’t worry,” Clara told her. “I can wait a while to get my cute little fangs in that neck of yours.” She was laughing as she drove off.
Caxton fed the dogs—Deanna had forgotten again, even their water bowls were dry—and headed inside. She stripped in the kitchen and then dashed into the bed, burrowing under the covers before she could get cold. Deanna’s body under the duvet was sharp and angular but she snaked a hand around her lover’s stomach and up to cup one of her breasts. Deanna stirred in her sleep and Caxton started kissing her ear.
“Oh, Pumpkin, not tonight,” Deanna hissed. “You smell all bloody.”
With wounds on her hand and her shoulder Caxton supposed that was fair enough.
She went and sat in the shower for a long time, playing with the spiral pendant Vesta Polder had given her, watching the steam roll and roil around her until she finally, blessedly, began to nod off.
24.
In the morning she played with the dogs for a while. It was so cold outside and the kennels were so well- heated they didn’t want to go out, so she stayed with them and let them dance around her, snapping their teeth at her hair and her face, the way greyhounds showed affection. They were so beautiful, the lines of their bodies so sleek and perfect. Wilbur, who only had three legs but a truly beautiful blue fawn coat, kept curling up in her lap, twisting around and around as if trying to tie himself in a knot before just plopping down on her folded legs. She rubbed him behind his ears and told him he was a good dog. Lola, an Italian greyhound who already had a good home lined up in upstate New York, kept pressing her long nose against the door but whenever Caxton would push it open she would dance backwards from the frosty gust that burst in, snapping at the air with her teeth and rearing up on her hind legs to fight off the wind.
When Deanna found her there, covered in greyhounds, Caxton felt almost human again. Deanna just smirked at her as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She handed Caxton her PDA and disappeared again without a word.
She had a new email from “[email protected]”, which she figured had to be Clara. Her hand trembled as she opened it up—what if Deanna had seen it? What if Clara had called instead of emailing, and Deanna had picked up? But she was just being paranoid. For one thing, she’d done nothing wrong. She had stopped Clara before anything real could happen. For another, Clara’s email wasn’t embarrassing at all. It was one of the most professional correspondences she’d ever read and it contained nothing except the sheriff’s department report from Bitumen Hollow.
There wasn’t so much as a cordial salutation.
She actually felt a little let down. Clara coming on to her was a problem, really, but still... it had been so nice. She put that thought out of her mind and studied the report. What she read was cold and clinical and she tried to keep it that way, refusing to feel the horror of the people who had died in the sleepy village the night before. Most of the report was based on the eyewitness testimony of the assistant manager of the Christian bookstore, the one who had hit her with the big cross.
Once he’d calmed down he had turned out to be a pretty good observer. He’d seen the vampires enter the main street of the town, both of them dressed in black overcoats with the collars turned up to hide their mouths. If they’d been trying to pass as human they needn’t have bothered. Everyone in Bitumen Hollow knew everyone else —the two giant vampires (both well over six feet tall) stuck out like torn-off thumbs. Their first to die had been the teenaged girl, Victim #1, Helena Saunders. One of them picked her bodily up off the ground while the other one tore open the sleeve of her coat and bit into her arm, in the words of the survivor, “like you would gnaw on a ear of corn.” From there things just got nasty.
There had been no attempt to defend the town. No one had even fought back though a loaded hunting rifle was found under the counter of the coffeeshop and the woman who ran the post office (Victim #4) had a licensed handgun in her car. No police presence reached the town until it was far too late. It didn’t surprise Caxton too much. A town that small wouldn’t have a police department of its own, instead relying on the local sheriff.
Caxton skimmed through a lot of the report. There had been fourteen victims total and she really didn’t need to know how they all died. Fourteen. It was a much higher number than she’d expected. The two vampires that attacked Bitumen Hollow were pretty fresh. Their need for blood should have been easily quenched—at most they might have required a single victim each. Yet they had completely depopulated the village. Why? She thought about Piter Lares, who had intentionally overfed and stuffed himself full of blood so he could feed his elders, including Justinia Malvern.
The new assailants (the report listed them as Actor #1 and Actor #2, police-speak for the person who “acted” upon the victims) could have been gorging themselves to feed Malvern, but no, they needed four vampires to restore her. Anyway, she was still safely behind stone walls at Arabella Furnace.
As far as she knew.
A cold finger ran down her spine at the thought that the vampires might have attacked the abandoned sanatorium, that even now Malvern might be free, but no, surely Arkeley would have called her to tell her as much.
Unless they had attacked, and Arkeley had been killed.
She fed and watered the dogs and headed back into the house. She didn’t want to jump the gun on a paranoid whim but she had to know. There was no listing for Arabella Furnace State Hospital in the phonebook, and the state police databases she had access to via the internet didn’t even list it. While she dressed she called the Bureau of Prisons to ask for the number but they said any such inquiries had to go through official channels. The man on the other end of the phone wouldn’t even admit that such a place existed, of course.
“Look, the people there could be in danger. I know all about the place, I’ve even been there. It’s like a hospital for just one patient, and she’s a vampire.”
