that they were alone together, that her father wouldn’t get home until after six. “Suck it,” he had said, his appendage dangling in front of her. “Suck it,” and his voice had been something broken, and sharp, and potentially dangerous.
She had resorted to tears, big sobbing tears of panic, and the boy had been so shamed he went away and never spoke to her again. It was the closest she’d ever come to being sexually violated.
What Reyes was doing to her, though, was far worse than any teenaged fumbling could ever be. He was forcing himself on her innermost thoughts, her secrets, the deepest, darkest parts of her. He read her like a book, picking at her memories. He found the memory of the boy and the tears and she could feel he was amused. She could feel him just as if he lay on top of her, the cold waxiness of his skin, the faint heat of blood, the smell of blood all over him. She was under his control, completely. She lacked even the will to fight him, or even to struggle, even to try to get away.
After a while the vampire closed his eyes but he didn’t move away. The violation stopped instantly but she could still feel him, some remnant of his intrusion inside of her skull. It made her brain itch. Vesta Polder’s amulet hadn’t done a damned thing to help her. The vampire reached down into the casket, presumably to lift her up.
She wasn’t going to get a better chance. She lifted the Beretta to the level of his heart and fired and fired and fired again, the noise splitting the silence wide open, the muzzle flashes so much brighter than the candle it was as if the sun had entered the room. Spent gas wreathed around Caxton’s face like smoke and the stink was oppressive. Her already battered ears rang and the vampire snarled like a wild animal.
When she stopped firing he grabbed the smoking hot barrel of the gun in one of his hands and threw it into the corner of the room. Her shots hadn’t even scratched his hairless white skin. She remembered what Arkeley had said: with so much blood in him a bazooka probably couldn’t scratch his skin. She had succeeded in one thing, though. The part of him inside her head lit up with rage. She knew she’d pissed him off, she could feel his anger burning inside of her. He reached down with both hands and picked her up and threw her against the nearest wall.
Her back collided with wooden shelves, dry and dusty, and they broke under her momentum. Glass jars bounced over her shoulders and head and shattered on the floor. The pain woke her up and bent her double at the same time, made her want to pass out even as it brought her fully to consciousness.
He was going to kill her, she thought. He would tear off her head and drink from the stump. Or maybe he would just punch her face in. There were so many ways he could destroy her body. Tears squirted from her eyes and she could do nothing but be afraid, she couldn’t even call out Deanna’s name, she didn’t even have time to worry what Arkeley would think about the mess she’d made. She had no mental energy to spend on anything but fear.
He strode toward her on his muscular legs, his eyes wide with hatred. Then he stopped, right in the middle of the cellar room, and stared at her. She had no idea what he was doing but she could sense how much it hurt. His body shook for a moment, a single, awful heave, and then his mouth opened and a thick scurf of clotted blood slid out of his mouth and dripped down his jaw.
Reyes dropped to his knees, the impact with the stone floor sounding like a thunderclap in the vaulted chamber. He coughed and choked and spat old blood out on the flagstones. He clutched at his chest and tore at the skin there with his vicious fingernails, leaving long pink trails across his pectoral muscles. He shook violently until he collapsed totally on the floor and lay there in his own sick.
Caxton could do no more than take a few breaths while she watched him curl around himself in pain. In her head the relic of him howled and she clapped her hands over her ears but the sound was inside of her. There was no shutting it out.
Eventually he recovered from his fit. She hadn’t moved an inch. He got to his feet and grabbed her around the waist and threw her over his shoulder and started climbing up the stairs.
37.
Reyes wasn’t going to kill her—at least not right away. He was still too full of undigested blood from the devastation of Bitumen Hollow. Whenever he even thought of drinking her blood his reaction was pure nausea.
She could feel these things in her own head. He had violated her brain and left something of himself behind when he withdrew, a relic, an image of himself. Now she could feel his thoughts. No words came across that channel, nor even images.
She could feel his unnatural heart pounding, though, pounding hard to move all that sluggish blood around, and she knew how sick he was. She got little bits of him, little inklings and fragments of thoughts. It was a link, and it was enough for her to know his moods and some of his motivations.
He wasn’t going to kill her because it would be a waste of blood. She remembered when Hazlitt fed Malvern he had said the blood had to be warm, and fresh. If Reyes killed her now her blood would go to waste. He couldn’t drink it and he couldn’t store it.
There was more to it, though. He wasn’t going to kill her—because he wanted something from her. Or to do something to her. That scared her, but she was getting used to being scared. Caxton’s fear reaction was becoming so familiar to her that she felt strange when she wasn’t scared. She felt, when she was unafraid, that she must be missing something.
Reyes carried her up the stairs, climbing no more than twenty-five feet. On the way down, in the dark of the casket, those stairs had seemed to descend forever.
They emerged at the top of the staircase into a vast open space surrounded on every side by thick walls. The concrete floor was cracked everywhere and green weeds sprang up from below. The scale and the emptiness of the place made her think of an abandoned factory but then her eyes adjusted to the moonlight slanting in through the long windows and she began to make out details. Chains hung from the ceiling in great profusion. Molds and casting equipment littered the floor like the playthings of a giant who has outgrown the need for toys. The tall windows were broken in places, panes of frosted glass having been replaced by plywood or filled in with ventilating fans. In the distance, at the far end of the concrete floor stood an enormous coke-powered blast furnace that must have gone cold decades earlier. A thirty-foot-wide crucible, an enormous reinforced cup that had once held hundreds of tons of molten steel at a time, hung before the furnace on one thick chain, the other having given way. The crucible’s lip dragged on the floor, mired in a vast wash of hardened slag. Reyes’ hideout was a defunct steel mill, she realized. There were a lot of them in Pennsylvania, mostly around Pittsburgh but she didn’t think she’d been carried that far. There were plenty of them around Philadelphia as well. She could be miles from the corn field where they’d caught her, or only hundreds of yards away. In the sensory failure of the casket ride she’d had no way to accurately measure distances. Her mind spun wildly, trying to figure out how far they’d taken her, to no avail.
At least she was somewhere, somewhere with light and sound so that her mind wasn’t adrift in darkness. She studied her surroundings as best she could while being bounced around on the vampire’s back. Reyes and his half-deads were using only one small corner of the vast cracked floor. The faceless minions had a good campfire going and had set up some furniture, old chairs and couches with springs sticking up through rotting cushions. Fifteen or so of them were gathered around the fire, watching the flames leap and dance, giggling amongst themselves at some no doubt unspeakable joke. They fell quite silent as Reyes approached. He tossed Caxton onto a mildew-stained easy chair and then squatted next to the fire. He made no attempt to tie her up or otherwise constrain her.
“If you’re not—” Caxton started, but she stopped instantly as they all turned to look at her at once. All those mutilated faces unnerved her and made her think of her own mortality. “If you’re not going to kill me then I need to go to the bathroom,”
she said.
She was expecting the half-deads to mock her, and they did. Their whining, high-pitched taunts made her cheeks red but she really did need to urinate.
“Pee in your fucking pants, bitch,” one of the half-deads screamed at her. His skinned jaw flapped open in amusement. “Yeah, come on, do it, I want to see this.
Pee in your pants!” He started chanting it over and over and some of the others joined in.
Reyes stood up and grasped the half-dead’s head in one long-fingered hand, his shoulder in the other. The
