turned away from the window and tried not to cough.
The half-deads were pulling on a chain hanging from the ceiling. The chain rattled through their skeletal hands and then suddenly it took on a life of its own. A counterweight descended quickly from the rafters as another chain shot toward the ceiling. A bundle wrapped in canvas was tied to the counterweight. Caxton was not too surprised when the half-deads cut it loose and it turned out to be a human corpse, a heavyset woman in the brown uniform of a UPS driver. She looked very pale, which meant she must have been drained of blood. One of Reyes’ victims. The half-deads laid her out carefully on the floor and unbuttoned her clothing but didn’t remove any of it. It looked like they were trying to make her comfortable, strangely enough.
The vampire came out of the shadows then. He had been lying on a flow of hardened slag, a pale spot in the shadows. He had been no more than twenty feet away from her the whole time. Hope slipped away from Caxton like water down a drain. The whole time she’d been climbing the broken carts and sniffing the foul air outside he must have been watching her. Well, of course he had. He wasn’t stupid enough to let her wander around unsupervised.
He didn’t so much as glance at her, though. He walked over to the corpse and touched the dead woman’s chest with one of his hands. His hand pressed against where her heart would be. He stared deeply into her glassy, sightless eyes, and muttered something in his low, growling voice.
The woman’s body started to twitch, muscles jumping here and there under her clothes. “Come back,” Reyes said. He was calling her—literally calling her back from death. “Come back and serve me. Come back and serve me!” The twitches graduated into full-blown convulsions, her heels kicking against the floor, her head flopping back and forth like a fish cast up on a dry wooden wharf. Her body stiffened with the spasm and a sour reek split the air, similar to the manure smell from outside but much sharper and more pungent. The dead woman’s hands curled into wicked claws as she reached for her face. Slowly, she sat up, while clawing again and again at the skin around her eyes.
She started to scream when strips of skin peeled off of her face, but she didn’t stop gouging with her nails at her cheeks and forehead—if anything, her clawing grew more urgent. She was going to tear off her own face, piece by piece. Caxton was watching a new half-dead be born, a replacement for the one Reyes had destroyed and thrown in the fire.
Reyes felt her disgust. The vampire turned to look at Caxton and for a long bad moment they just stared into each others’ eyes. Caxton felt him squirming around inside of her head, almost as if he were rifling through the filing cabinets of her mind, looking for something and not finding it. The vampire was upset, angry, nervous—though as soon as she sensed those emotions in him he clamped down hard on the psychic connection they shared. Her body writhed as if she were touching a live wire. He looked away and Caxton’s body collapsed backward onto the carts, her breath heaving in and out of her lungs. Her eyes fluttered closed and—
—she was back in the burning mill, still clinging to the chain.
She could hardly believe she hadn’t let go yet. She wanted it, suddenly, wanted it very badly. She could visualize the whole process. Her body would fall for a few seconds through empty space. She would collide with the surface of the molten metal below. Her skin would burn off instantly, she thought. Her muscles and her flesh would take a moment longer. There would be pain. She was sure it would hurt beyond anything she had ever experienced. But only for a second. And then... what?
Oblivion? Nothingness?
How tempting it was—how tempting to put everything behind her. She thought of her life even before she was imprisoned in the casket and how much of it had been utter misery. Working so hard for the approval of her superiors, the approval of Arkeley, the approval of her dead father. None of them had ever taken her seriously.
Then there was Deanna, Deanna who she loved so much, Deanna who was fading away while she watched. Deanna who had been vibrant and lively and sexy before, and now half the time she couldn’t get off the couch, Caxton would come home and find her there, wrapped up in a quilt, watching some celebrity gossip show on television. Or rather watching empty space, her eyes not even focused on the TV.
Caxton had vowed to save Deanna, to bring her back to life. But she was failing, she knew. If anything, Deanna was dragging her down.
The dogs—the greyhounds, her beautiful animals. They would miss her. They would howl for her, she knew. But somebody else would come along and feed them, and pet them, and soon enough they would forget. The whole world would forget Laura Caxton after a short season of formulaic grief. If she just ceased to exist, nothing, really, would change. Or rather, one thing would change. In the great balance sheet a certain amount of pain would be subtracted from the world. Wasn’t that a good thing? If she had the opportunity to reduce the world’s pain, by ending her own, wasn’t that the
All she had to do was let go.
She took one hand off the chain, and somewhere, somewhere outside of the dream, she felt Reyes the vampire start to smile. She looked at her hand. He wanted her to let go. Reyes wanted her to end the dream.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. It didn’t matter who wanted what. In a second she would be gone, erased from the world, and after that, who cared? Who cared if the vampires ate half of Pennsylvania? Who cared? She wouldn’t be around to feel guilty.
She removed her other hand from the chain. The muscles in her thighs quivered when they were forced to support her whole weight. She started to lean back. So easy. So easy, and it would solve every problem she’d ever had.
Strong fingers clutched at her left wrist. She screamed, expecting pain, but the fingers just held her, they didn’t dig into her flesh. They wouldn’t let her fall. She tried to turn her head and see who was holding her but it didn’t work—her neck didn’t bend that way. She couldn’t see the fingers as they shifted their grip, closing like a pair of handcuffs around her wrist.
“You’re not done yet,” the owner of the fingers said. The voice was quite soft and almost vanished in the furnace roar of the burning mill. She could tell, though, that the voice belonged to Arkeley.
40.
“Enough!” Reyes shouted, from somewhere, from nowhere.
Everything stopped—time stopped, motion stopped. Caxton was all alone. The molten metal receded, draining away to reveal the mill floor once again. The iron still filled runnels in the floor, which provided some light, and the blast furnace still smoked and spat out great gusts of red sparks. But the heat became if not bearable at least survivable and the air thinned out until Caxton could breathe without pain.
The metal pouring from the giant crucible slowed to a trickle and she climbed down her chain to stand on the mill’s floor without being burned.
In one corner of the mill a trapdoor creaked open on rusty hinges. She walked toward the portal timidly, unsure of what was happening. She could see stairs leading downwards into darkness but nothing more.
On unsteady, tired feet, she stepped down onto the first riser. The stone step was cold against her bare foot, cold enough to make her toes curl. After spending so long in the conflagratory heat of the burning mill she’d forgotten what cold could really feel like. She took another step down and braced herself against the metal edge of the trap door. She was relatively certain that as soon as she descended far enough it would close after her with a tooth-loosening clang, or perhaps it would even snap shut when she was only a few steps down the stairs, closing like a mouse trap on her already-battered body. She wouldn’t put anything past this nightmare.
“Laura, please, join me,” someone said from down in the darkness. There was a lot of Central America in the voice, an accent she wasn’t expecting. She took another step, and another. The trap didn’t clang shut. Eventually she made out a little light filtering up from below, a little yellow light that guttered like a flame in a mild breeze.
She walked down further—and found that she knew this other room very well. A narrow vaulted space, the walls lined with shelves holding jars and boxes and rolled-up blankets. It was the same cellar storage area where she had first entered the mill. The place the half-deads had brought her in her casket. The offending piece of furniture was still there, its lid closed now. A candle in an antique holder stood at one end of the casket. Sitting on the other end was a man of average build and height. He wore a hooded sweatshirt (with the hood down) over an Oxford cloth white buttoned-down shirt. His skin was the color of walnut shells and he had a black roll of hair that looked carefully combed. He smiled at her and showed her a mouth of small, round teeth, very human teeth, but she knew this was Efrain Reyes.
