how dark a night might look it’s ten times darker under a forest canopy. Unable to see she could run right into a hardwood trunk or trip over exposed roots. She had a flashlight in her pocket but turning it on would give away her position instantly. Without light she could break her neck, or worse, break a leg.
She could end up immobilized but still conscious, end up unable to walk and forced to wait for the half-deads to find her. She needed to get out of the woods—but going back was out of the question.
Ahead of her she saw a patch of wan radiance and headed toward it, her hands outstretched, feeling her way forward. Her boots shuffled forward spasmodically, just waiting to be trapped by thick underbrush or to be sucked down into a puddle of mud.
The light revealed a clearing maybe fifty yards on a side and strangely regular in shape. A few thin saplings grew there but mostly it was covered with overgrown grass, yellow and thin with the season. She stepped out of the woods and into the relatively bright space, relief flooding through her body, and then she tripped over a rock. The hard, half-frozen ground connected with her chin and her teeth smashed together with a horrible clinking sound.
She struggled onto her side, then sat up and looked behind her. The stone she’d tripped over was pale, almost ghostly white in the moonlight. It was rough on top but straight on the sides, worn down by wind and rain over the course of centuries but once, long ago, it must have been straight and smooth. A slab of rock planted upright in the soil. Like a gravestone.
She had stumbled right into an abandoned cemetery.
50.
When she knew what to look for it was obvious. The low stones were badly eroded, ground down by time’s wheel until they were just tall enough to trip over.
She could see where they made neat rows, however, and at the far end of the clearing she could see twisted bars of metal, the remains of a pair of wrought iron gates.
There were little graveyards like this all over the countryside of Pennsylvania, Caxton knew. Developers hated them because they were legally required to move the bodies if they wanted to tear up the land. More often than not they just left them in place. It was no great shock to find one in the woods behind her house. There must have been a church nearby in some past decade or century but it had been burned or pulled down since. Nor was there was anything to fear from the graves, she told herself—vampires slept in coffins, yes, but they didn’t bury themselves in ancient churchyards just for the ambience.
Something snapped maybe ten yards from her head. A fallen branch or maybe a crust of frost on the ground. It could have just been a cat or a deer—or it could have just been a branch laden down with rain finally giving way.
Caxton froze anyway. Her entire body craned toward her ears, her whole brain tuned up in anticipation of the next sound.
It came in a series of tiny pops, like a string of firecrackers going off but much, much softer. Maybe something had trod on a carpet of pine needles. Caxton lowered herself inch by inch until she was lying flat on the ground, trying to make herself small, trying to make herself invisible.
“Did you see that?” someone warbled. It was the squeaky voice of a half-dead.
After a moment she half-heard a muttered reply. It sounded negative.
She cursed herself for lying down, for moving at all. In the darkness, if she’d been perfectly still, maybe they would have walked right past her.
She had one bullet left in her Beretta. The flesh of half-deads was rotten and soft and she could probably beat another one to pieces. If there were three of them, however, or if they were faster than she expected, it would all be over.
She tensed her body, ready to strike upward if anyone came close. She would try her best to destroy them, if there were two of them. If there were three, or more, she would shoot herself in the heart. It would prevent her from being raised as a vampire.
“There, what’s that?” a half-dead asked.
There were two of them. There had to be two. She prayed there were two.
Then she heard a third voice.
“You two, leave us alone,” someone else said, someone who had to be standing right behind her. She rolled over and looked up into a pale silhouette with a round head. It wore a pair of tight jeans and a black t-shirt. Its ears were dark and ragged-looking.
Scapegrace.
Caxton brought her pistol up and fired her last round point blank into the vampire’s chest. The bullet tore through his shirt, then pranged off into the trees. It didn’t even scratch his white body. She hadn’t really expected to kill him—even in the dark she could see the pinkish glow of fresh blood moving beneath his skin—but at the least she’d expected to make him turn and snarl. He didn’t even laugh at her.
He just crouched down next to her and touched the grave marker she’d tripped over.
He didn’t look at her or touch her.
She tried to ask a question but her throat kept closing up. “What… what are you going to…”
“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “Don’t say anything unless I speak to you first. I can kill you,” he added. “I can kill you instantly. If you try to run away I can catch you.
I’m much faster than I used to be. But I want to bring you in alive. I mean, those are my orders. I think you know what She wants. I’ve also been told that if I hurt you a little, that’s okay. That it might even help.”
He faced her, then, and she had a bad shock when she saw how young he looked.
Scapegrace had been a child when he killed himself. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most. His body was still painfully skinny and hunched. Death hadn’t made him a grownup overnight. He still looked like a little boy.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” he said to her. “I hate it.”
Caxton turned her face away hurriedly. She knew her own features had to be wracked by fear. Snot was running across her upper lip and cold sweat was breaking out on her forehead.
“I can see some things in the dark but I can’t read this,” he told her, running his fingers across the headstone. The lettering there had mostly worn away but here and there an angle or a fragment of a curved inscription could still be seen. “Maybe you can read it better. Read it to me.”
Her throat shuddered and she thought she might throw up. She fought her body until it was back under her control. She couldn’t quite read the letters but maybe it would help to feel them, she thought, to trace them with her fingertips. Trembling fear lanced up her forearm as she ran one finger across the face of the stone. She could make out a little:
ST PH N DELANC
JU 854 – JULY 1854
She told him what she had discovered. “I think—I think it says Stephen Delancy, died July 1854. The date of birth is h-h-harder to m-m-make out,” she chattered.
Caxton felt as if someone were pouring out cold water over her back. It had to be at least partially the weird feeling she always got around vampires, the cold sensation that she got standing next to Malvern’s coffin or whenever Reyes had touched her.
But most of that skin-crawling horror had to come from the fact that at any moment he could kill her. Tear her to pieces before she could even raise her arms to ward him off.
“Do you think he was born in June or July? Did he live for a full month or only a few days?” Scapegrace knelt down beside her and ran a hand across the gravestone as if he were caressing the face of the infant buried below. “I guess there’s one way to find out.”
“No,” she screamed, as he dug his pale fingers into the soil and started tearing out clods of earth. She threw herself at his back and beat on his neck with her empty pistol. Finally she got a reaction out of him.
Turning from his kneeling posture he grabbed her around the waist and slung her away from him. The empty Beretta flew out of her hand and into the darkness. She couldn’t see where it went because she was too busy reeling across the graveyard.
