“Nothing,” she said. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the blue light. She saw that the room had been changed around a little. The medical equipment had all been shoved back into the corners and the microphones and probes that had once hung down from the ceiling to constantly measure Malvern’s status had all been cleared away. The laptop remained, sitting alone on a metal stool. Caxton glanced down at the coffin propped-up on its sawhorses. Blood filled the coffin almost to the rim.
She was sure Malvern was in there, submerged under the dark fluid, but she couldn’t even see a shadow beneath the still surface. Then, as if in response to her stare, a ripple ran across the blood and five tiny peaks appeared in the surface. They pressed upward out of the coffin and she saw they were fingernails.
Malvern’s hand lifted from out of the blood, clotted fluid dripping and falling away from the fingers. There was more flesh on the bones than before—clearly being soaked in human blood was having the predicted effect on Malvern. She was rejuvenating, revivifying. Her hand reached for the keyboard of the laptop and she began to type. Character by character she spelled out a message for her new guest:
When the vampire was done typing her hand slithered back inside her coffin. It was all so quiet and stately and polite that Caxton felt an absurd urge to curtsey and thank her hostess for her kind hospitality. Scapegrace tapped her on the shoulder, then, and she turned back around. Then she lost her breath. There was a noose hanging down from the ceiling, hovering over a simple wooden chair. “That’s—for me,” she stammered. “So I can— so I can—finish myself off and complete the rite.”
“Yes,” Hazlitt told her. “I want you to know I opted for a lethal injection. I have one made up for myself. They wouldn’t hear of it.”
“It’s how your mother did it, right?” Scapegrace asked. He sounded almost solicitous, as if he really wanted to make sure he’d gotten it right. “She hanged herself? The symmetry of it appealed to us.”
“Yes, that’s right.” She nodded, trying to fight back by being more nonchalant than he was. Her stomach boiled with acid but she refused to let it show. Symmetry.
The kind of thing that would appeal to a vampire’s spiky, twisted, obsessive-compulsive mind. “She hanged herself. When I was very young. Is it time, now?” she asked, a lump in her throat. “Is it time for me to.” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “You know.”
“We’re not quite finished,” Scapegrace told her.
A half-dead entered the room and climbed up a step-ladder to hang a pair of thick iron chains from the ceiling. When he was done he took his ladder away and made room for two more half-deads, who dragged something in a big canvas sack into the room. There were ugly stains on one end of the sack. They grunted and cursed as they struggled with their burden but they didn’t complain openly. From time to time they would look up at Scapegrace as if they expected him to pounce on them and tear them apart just for fun.
Finally they got their bag open. Inside was a human body, a big one, dressed up in a dark suit. There was so much blood on the hands and face that Caxton couldn’t determine the race or even the sex of the cadaver.
No—wait, she thought. It wasn’t dead. It moved, though surely only by reflex, a twitch here or there, a last shudder before the body could finally succumb to mortal wounds. The half-deads attached the dangling chains to the body’s ankles and started hauling it up into the air. Scapegrace moved forward to help them lift it up, over the coffin, until the body dangled over Malvern’s submerged form with its out-stretched fingertips nearly brushing the surface of the pooled blood.
The body swung from side to side, first left, then right. Scapegrace and Hazlitt both kept looking at her face as if they expected her to have some kind of reaction.
She’d seen worse, she wanted to tell them. She’d scraped prom queens off the asphalt. Then she realized why they wanted her to see this particular body.
It had a small silver badge on its lapel, a star in a circle. The badge of a Special Deputy of the US Marshals Service.
53.
“Arkeley,” she said, “oh God, it’s Arkeley. You’ve killed him.” She had already known that he was dead, had already accepted it but this—this was proof. Tears shot out of her eyes and splashed on her shirt.
“Oh, there’s plenty of life left in him yet,” Scapegrace announced. “There had better be.” The half-deads shrunk away from the coffin and she understood intuitively. When they attacked her house they had been under Scapegrace’s orders to take both cops alive. Caxton so she could be turned into a vampire, and Arkeley so Scapegrace could torture him to death for what he’d done to Reyes and Congreve and Lares and Malvern and every vampire he could get his hands on.
Hazlitt touched the Fed’s throat. “He still has a pulse. It’s thready but it’s strong.
And he’s definitely breathing. Unconscious, though.”
Scapegrace smiled. “So let’s wake him up.” He stepped over to the dangling body and took Arkeley’s left hand in his own. He stroked the blood-stained skin for a moment, then lifted the hand to his mouth and with one quick motion bit off all four fingers down to the palm.
Fresh blood poured out of the wounds and mingled with the blood in the coffin.
Arkeley’s eyes flicked open and a mewling, cat-like sound sagged out of his chest.
He sucked in a horrible breath that caught on something broken inside of him and then he moved his lips as if he was trying to speak. Caxton couldn’t hear anything, though.
Scapegrace spat the severed fingers into Malvern’s coffin. They sank into the blood without a trace. “What’s that, Deputy? Speak up.”
“Spuh,” Arkeley rasped. It sounded like two pieces of paper being rubbed against each other. “Spesh.”
“Special Deputy,” Caxton said for him. A kind of gruesome smile, but yes, an actual smile appeared on the Fed’s upside-down face.
“Cax,” Arkeley sputtered. “Caxt—you. You knee.” He took another grating breath. “Need to…” He couldn’t seem to finish his thought.
Scapegrace didn’t like it at all. He reached for Arkeley’s other hand. “Do you have something more to say?” he asked. “Some last kind word for your young friend here? You’ve failed her, old man. She’s going to die, you’re going to die.
Everyone is going to die. You’ve failed everybody. Maybe you’d like to say you’re sorry. Go ahead. Whisper in her ear. We’ll all wait here patiently for you to think up your dying words.”
Caxton leaned close, leaning against the edge of the coffin. Her shirt trailed in the blood but she didn’t care. “Jameson,” she whispered. She’d never used his first name before and it felt strange in her mouth. “Please don’t apologize.”
“Kneel,” the Fed told her. It wasn’t what she was expecting. “Kneel before her.”
She recoiled from the words, from the very idea. She sought his eyes, wanting to let him know how angry she was that he would just surrender like that, that he would want her to embrace her doom so wholeheartedly. The light in his eyes was wrong, though. There was a distinct streak of defiance in the wrinkles around his eyes.
He’d never been wrong before. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head as if she were praying in church. She knew very well that it would take more than a simple prayer to save herself, though.
Down on her knees she saw something—a shadow tucked away in the near perfect darkness under the coffin. She saw the triangular shapes of the sawhorses and between them something else, something flat and angular. She squinted and saw that something had been secured to the bottom of the coffin with a silver X of duct tape. She squinted again and finally understood. It was a handgun. A Glock 23.
He must have put it there earlier, of course. Perhaps back on the night when Scapegrace and Reyes had come for Malvern and he had threatened to tear out her heart. He must have planned for this, just as he planned for every possible contingency. That was how you fought vampires—you never let them get the drop on you.
She glanced up at Arkeley’s face. He wasn’t giving anything away. She looked back at the pistol. She knew it held thirteen bullets—there would be nothing in the chamber. She looked up and around the room. “Scapegrace,” she said.
The vampire stepped closer. He was no more than five feet away. “Hmm?”
“Catch,” she said, and tossed the skull into the air. Instantly its high unearthly shriek split the air. Scapegrace grabbed at it, his white hands up and reaching.
She tore the Glock free from the tape holding it to the bottom of the coffin. She worked the slide to chamber
