She tumbled backwards, her feet kicking at the ground pointlessly. She came down hard across another gravestone, this one nothing more than a stub of rock sticking out of the ground like a decayed tooth. Her elbow collided with the stone and wild pain leapt up and down her arm. She didn’t think she’d broken anything—just hit her funny bone.
Scapegrace had made a hole three feet deep by the time she could stand again.
The bones and cartilage of her hand still thrummed with agony but she was going to be okay. She found herself crying, though, as he lifted a wooden box out of the ground. She couldn’t stand it—between the fear and the horror of what he was doing she thought she was going to start screaming, that she would run away even though she consciously knew he would just chase her down.
The box was of some light-colored wood, maybe pine, riddled with worm casts.
It was decayed so badly that she couldn’t tell if it had originally been ornate or plainly made. The baby-sized coffin broke apart in Scapegrace’s hands though he was clearly trying to be gentle with it. He brushed away the fragments of pulpy wood and the dirt and sediment that had collected around the body inside.
“My family had a big funeral for me,” he told her. “I could kind of see what was happening, like I was a ghost floating around the ceiling of the church. Everybody from my school was there and they walked past and looked down at my face and some of them cried, and some of them said things. Sometimes it was people I didn’t even know. Girls who would never have talked to me in the hall, not even if they needed a pen and I had a spare one. Some of them were really upset, like they finally understood what it was like, what they had done to me. That was kind of awesome.
Nobody would touch me, though.” Gently, with his thumb, he brushed debris away from the tiny body.
“Please,” Caxton said, the word strained and stretched as it came out of her.
“Please. Please.” He didn’t strike her but he didn’t stop what he was doing, either.
He shook the coffin a little and debris and dirt and other matter fell away. Vomit surged up her throat and she turned to the side, ashamed to show such disrespect but unable to stop herself from throwing up right then and there.
“When you’re on the other side of it, death just isn’t scary anymore. Actually, it becomes kind of fascinating. A lot of being a vampire is like that. It totally changes your perspective.” He held something round in his left hand, something about the size of an apple. With a half twist he removed it from the coffin. The rest of the infant’s remains went back in the hole and he kicked dirt over them. Then he turned around and showed her what he’d found.
It was the skull, of course. Stephen Delancy’s skull, which had been buried for a hundred and fifty years. “Look,” he told her. “He was only a few days old when he died.” He showed her the skull. It was packed full of dirt and smeared with dried fluids. It was horrible to behold, sickening. “Maybe he was never really born.” He considered the baby-sized cranium at length. “This will work,” he said. He rubbed at the skull with his thumbs and then stared deeply into its eyesockets as he chanted softly. She didn’t understand the words—she wasn’t even sure they were words he was speaking.
When he finished he closed his eyes and then held out one hand, the skull balanced on his white palm. After a moment the skull began to vibrate. She could see it blur with motion. A sound leaked out of it, a kind of wailing moan it couldn’t possibly make on its own—it didn’t even have a lower jaw. The scream grew louder and louder until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. Instead Scapegrace pressed it against her hands. “Take it,” he said, and she could hear him just fine over the shrieking. “Go on—my ears are more sensitive than yours. Take it!”
She took it in her hands and the screaming stopped instantly.
“I’m going to take you with me, back to Her lair. I need you to behave, though.
So we’re going to play a little game. You’re going to hold Stephen in both of your hands, because that’s the only way to keep him quiet. Nod for me so I know you understand.”
She shuddered. It made her head bob on her neck as if it weren’t fully attached.
She wrapped both hands around the skull. Something moved and chittered inside, some insect hidden in the dirt that filled the baby’s sinus cavity. She moaned a little but she didn’t drop the skull.
“Now you keep good care of that. If you take your hands away from it or if you drop it or if you crush it because you’re holding it too hard, I’ll hear it scream. Then I’ll have to hurt you. Really, really badly.” He squinted his red eyes and stared shrewdly into her face. “I’ll break your back. You know I can do that, right?”
She nodded again. Her whole body trembled.
“Okay, Laura,” he said. “Now move.”
51.
Scapegrace lead her out of the woods and back to the parking lot of the elementary school. She scanned the surrounding area with her eyes, desperately hoping someone would see them and call the police. No luck, though. She and Deanna had picked the place because it was out in the middle of the woods. Plenty of space for the shed and the kennels. Nobody around to complain about the sometimes bizarre noises greyhounds made. At night there was nobody around at all. Their nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away.
A car, a late model white sedan, sat waiting for them in the lot, its engine idling, its lights on. Doctor Hazlitt sat in the driver’s seat, looking nervous.
“She promised Hazlitt could be one of us,” Scapegrace told her. He was standing behind her so close she could feel his cold breath on her neck. “She promised him lots of things.” The vampire held open the passenger door for her. She could hardly open it herself while she held the baby’s cursed skull in her hands. She climbed in and realized she couldn’t fasten her seatbelt, either. She guessed that didn’t matter.
“Hello, Officer,” Hazlitt said. She didn’t look at him. He sighed and tried again. “I know you have no reason to like me just now,” he went on. “In a few hours, though, we will be allies. That’s how this is going to work out. Can’t we be civil to one another now?” When she didn’t answer he started up the car and turned onto the highway headed southeast. Toward the tuberculosis sanatorium where Justinia Malvern waited so patiently.
They were going to make her kill herself. She’d understood that before but she hadn’t considered how it might happen. Reyes had wanted it to be her own choice, and he had nearly succeeded in talking her into shooting herself. He’d wasted time trying to convince her—and before he could finish with her the sun had come up.
Scapegrace wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He would force her hand.
Judging by the methods of persuasion he’d used so far she imagined he would torture her until she begged for death. Then he would give her the means to do herself in.
Arkeley couldn’t stop them this time. Arkeley was dead. Tonight I’m going to die, she thought, and then tomorrow night I will rise as a vampire.
She wanted to fight them. She wanted it so badly—her body was wracked with the urge to attack, the need to kill the vampire and the doctor. Little whitecaps of adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, beckoning her on. But how? She had no weapons. She didn’t know any martial arts.
On the verge of panic she started breathing fast and shallow. Hyperventilating.
She knew it was happening but she didn’t know how to make it stop. Hazlitt glanced over at her, concern wrinkling his face.
In the back seat Scapegrace seemed bigger than he actually was. He was like some enormous growth, white and flabby like a cancer, filling half the car. “She’s just afraid. Her pulse is elevated. She might pass out.”
“Yes, thank you,” Hazlitt shot back, 'I know the symptoms of an anxiety attack.
Do you think we should sedate her? She could hurt herself or someone else.”
“She might hurt you,” Scapegrace said, laughing a little. “Don’t worry. I’ll grab her if she has a seizure or something.”
Tiny sparks of light flashed inside Caxton’s eyes. They swam across her vision and were gone as quickly as they’d come. Her throat felt dry and thick and very cold with the air howling in and out of her body. She could hear her own heart beat and she could feel it pulling in her chest. Then bars of darkness appeared at the top and bottom of her vision like when they played old movies on television. The bars thickened and she heard a high pitched whining that filled up her head with its tone and then everything went all soft and fuzzy and out of focus.
She could hear Hazlitt and Scapegrace talking but only as if they were shouting through thick layers of wool.
