Before he moved to the mill.” That much was guess work. For anything more she needed to ask the vampire in her head. She sighed and closed her eyes. Arkeley moved his light away and she was in total darkness. She reached down into the darkest corner of her brain—and felt a pale hand grab for her. It was just a metaphor, though, and she easily slipped out of the ghost’s grasp. “He spent a lot of lonely nights down there. Thinking. Planning. This is where he decided to trap one of us. Malvern didn’t like the idea, but he thought it would be funny. He also knew that you and I were responsible for Congreve’s death.” She opened her eyes, but all she saw were colorful spills of light, phosphor afterimages. The things the eye sees when there is no other input. “He told Malvern he wanted to catch one of us and take us apart. It would be funny, and it would make them safe again. I imagine he probably would have preferred to get you, since you were the one who did the actual killing.”
“Imagine again,” Arkeley said. His clothing rustled as he moved in the dark. He lifted the trapdoor and she heard echoes roll up from below. There was a considerably large space down there.
She pointed her light down the stairs and forced herself to proceed. At the bottom she stood in a wide space full of damp air that smelled of mildew and decaying leaves and something fouler but fainter. She swung her beam around and saw bodies.
Dead bodies—hundreds of them. It was worse than the hunting camp. These bodies hung from the ceiling by their feet, their arms dangling down, water running across their fingers to the floor. They were fixed to the walls, held in place with giant iron staples that had rusted over time. They crouched in the corners as if hiding from the light, as if they would raise their rotting arms to protect themselves if she approached. They were wired in place, held in position.
In the center of the room a pair of bodies took pride of place. They were clearly meant as the masterpiece of the collection of bodies. They were both female and their skin was pale white, mottled with dark spots where fluids had gathered after they died. One was missing an arm but otherwise they were still intact. Their hair had been yanked out of their scalps. They were locked in an intimate embrace and they were kissing.
No, no they weren’t. Caxton moved closer for a better look. They weren’t just kissing. Their lower faces had been fused together, the lips and teeth cut away so they were like Siamese twins joined at the mouth.
“Tell me if I’m wrong. But I think he wanted to capture you, specifically,”
Arkeley said. “I think you turned him on.”
The sight failed to make her sick. She wanted to throw up, but her body wasn’t in the mood. Her emotions weren’t altogether her own. She wanted to have a visceral reaction to that much death. Reyes wouldn’t let her. Down at the bottom of her brain he looked out at his own creations, his re-creations, and he was proud of what he’d achieved. Whatever he felt, she felt too. Seeing the bodies brought him back to life, a little. He curled inside her, excited to see his old home again. “I need to get out of here,” she told Arkeley. Not because she wanted to flee in revulsion. Because she kind of liked what she was seeing.
“What was Reyes planning? What was his next step?” Arkeley asked her. He wanted the vampire to wake up, to surge inside of her. This identification between herself and Reyes was just another tool for him. He thought it would make it easier for her to remember Reyes’ plans. And it did, though the plans she recalled were from an earlier time. From when he’d first learned of Laura Caxton’s existence.
He had targeted her. She didn’t have to fight at all for that piece of information.
Reyes wanted her to play back that particular memory, as if it were a favorite record.
Reyes had specifically gone after her, Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton, regardless of what he might have told Malvern. He hadn’t really cared about removing the vampire killers. He’d wanted her, her body. When he had learned she was a lesbian, when his half-deads had gone to her house and seen her sleeping with Deanna (oh God, what had they seen? How many nights had they stood outside the windows and watched the two of them sleep?), he had become sexually aroused.
Vampires, she now knew, weren’t supposed to think of living humans as sexual beings. It was like a human wanting to fuck a cow. But Reyes had become obsessed with her. He had remembered all those men’s magazines he used to read when he was alive. He had always liked the girl-on-girl portfolios. They’d always got him so hot. He would imagine them sucking each other off, desperate for a real man to come along and show them what they were missing. If he made her a vampire then perhaps he could fuck her. Perhaps she would want to fuck him.
That memory, finally, was enough to make her sick. “Let me out of here,” she screamed. She spun around and the bodies looked back at her, their dead eyes all focused on her face. How they had worshipped her. Or feared her, yes, they all feared her, it was the last thing to pass through their faces, that fear. Reyes had loved that.
“What was his next move?” Arkeley asked. He stood in front of the stairs. “Was he going to make more vampires? Was he going to wait until he had four, to bring blood to Malvern? Where is Scapegrace right now?”
She shook her head. “Let me out,” Caxton said. The bones. The bones of the dead—death itself. Death called to her, her own death, suicide, the death of others, murder. Reyes stretched inside her brain like a predatory cat, languid, pleased with what he had created. No, there was no creation in that cellar. Pleased with what he had destroyed. “Let me out! Get away from me,” Caxton howled, unsure who she was talking to—the Fed or the vampire. “Leave me alone!”
45.
Up above ground, leaning against the side of Clara’s Volkswagen, Caxton rubbed at her face over and over, trying to make sense of things. She wanted to throw up but she kept thinking she would vomit up clotted blood, just as Reyes had. She wanted to sit down but she knew if she did she wouldn’t ever want to stand up again.
“The only reason I’m alive,” she said, muttering to herself, “is because I happened to fit into some vampire’s kink. Not just any vampire. A depraved vampire.” She tried to stop breathing. Her body freaked out, panicked, made her hyperventilate. What had made her think to stop breathing?
Vampires didn’t breathe, of course. They were dead things and they didn’t need to breathe. Living things, like state troopers, needed to breathe a lot.
“His curse is alive,” she sighed. “His curse is alive in me.”
Clara pushed a paper bag into her hands. Caxton realized that Clara must have been talking to her but she couldn’t hear her. She couldn’t hear anything. She breathed into the bag and slowly, slowly, she calmed down. She felt things slow down all around her. She felt the air on her skin and smelled fruit, maybe strawberries.
She took the bag away from her face. “Strawberries?” she asked.
Clara’s forehead wrinkled. “Strawberries and kiwi fruit, and a cup of unsweetened yogurt. How… how did you know what I had for breakfast?” The look on her face verged on fear.
Caxton waved it away. “I’m not psychic.” She crinkled the bag in her fingers. “I just have a good nose.” They laughed together. That helped. It helped an awful lot, actually.
“When you’ve stopped panicking, let me know,” Arkeley said. “So we can go back down there.”
With her eyes closed Caxton could pretend that Arkeley wasn’t really there. That he was just in her head again. Then he had to talk again and ruin it.
“I can wait until tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that Scapegrace will still be too full to hunt tonight. I’d say, eighty per cent sure. Which means that there’s only a twenty per cent chance he’ll tear someone’s throat out because you were too scared to help me.”
She opened her eyes and saw Clara standing not two feet from the Fed.
“Hey, asshole,” she said. She was a good foot and maybe three inches shorter than Arkeley. He outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds. “Yeah, you, asshole,”
she said. “I’m not going to let you do this to her, not twice. I don’t care what the stakes are.”
“Laura, call off your dog, will you? She’s yipping obnoxiously.”
Clara’s entire body tightened. Her muscles curled and flexed and extended and she looked ready to punch Arkeley right in the gut. Even her hair bristled.
“Are you going to strike me, sheriff’s deputy Hsu? Is that your intent? Because I have to say, the way you’re telegraphing your punch, you’d be lucky to touch my coat tails before I had you on the ground with two broken arms.”
Clara rolled her shoulders and tilted her head to one side, then the other. “You’re not worth the paperwork,” she said, and suddenly she was standing down. She hadn’t moved an inch but her posture and the slump of her shoulders spoke volumes.
“If you’re not going to hit me,” Arkeley said, “then please leave us alone. The trooper and I have things to
