Deanna lowered her face until her voice was muffled by her folded arms. “I fought the curse, as much as I could. I tried not to sleep. It’s in your dreams that they make you hurt yourself. But that’s the merciful part, isn’t it? You don’t feel a thing as long as you’re dreaming. I wish I’d known what it was going to be like so I wouldn’t have been so afraid. I’m really sorry, Laura. I’m sorry I got so scared.
Otherwise I wouldn’t have told them about you.”
“What are you talking about?” Caxton asked, trying to keep her voice gentle.
“I told them I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t be one of them if because it would mean leaving you behind. Mr. Reyes said he had the answer for that, though. He said they could take both of us. He really seemed to like the idea.”
No, it hadn’t happened like that. It couldn’t have. Caxton felt like she’d gotten to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and found the picture didn’t match the cover of the box.
She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, Deanna. Your story is all mixed up.”
“What do you mean?” the vampire asked.
“This—this case—was all about me, at least, it was about me first. Because I stopped the half-dead at my sobriety checkpoint. That was how Reyes found out about me.” That was the one thing she actually knew for sure, the one clue she’d really had firm and solid in her mind the whole time. It was why Arkeley had drafted her into his crusade in the first place. It was why the half-dead had followed her home. Because the vampires wanted her as one of their own.
“Pumpkin,” Deanna said, rising to her feet. Caxton followed. “Does it really matter who did what first?”
“Of course it does.” It meant everything. The vampires had come after her.
They’d been obsessed with her. “This all began on the night of my sobriety check.
When the half-dead followed me home.”
Deanna shook her bald head, just a little. “No, Laura, no. It started weeks before that.”
“Bullshit,” Caxton huffed. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Anyway, how could you know that?”
“Jesus, stop already. You’re not this stupid!” Deanna stood up and Caxton followed, but it felt as if she got to her feet first. Deanna was still rising. Eventually she raised herself up to a considerable height. Had she grown after being dead? Or maybe her posture was just better. “That half-dead didn’t just accidentally run across your sobriety check. He was coming to get you.”
“No.” No, no, no, she thought. “No.”
“Yes.” Deanna reached out and grabbed Caxton’s shoulders. Hard enough to pinch. Maybe even to hurt a little. She really wanted to convince Caxton that she was telling the truth. “Congreve sent him to find you, and bring you to him, so you and I could do this together.”
“No,” Caxton said again.
“Yes. Because I was scared to do it alone. And because Reyes wanted a matching pair of us. I was so confused when you woke me up that night as if nothing had happened. Then you scared away the half-dead. The one assigned to you.”
No, Caxton thought, but she couldn’t say it. If she said it she thought it might come out as a yes. Because she saw it could be exactly as Deanna said. It could be.
But it wasn’t. Because if it was, if Deanna had been cursed that whole time and Caxton hadn’t even noticed, if she’d failed Deanna that badly—
“This whole thing, all the pain and suffering, was about me. And if you had just tried to talk to me, if you had just stayed with me that night I hurt myself—we could have been—we could have done it together—”
“No!” Caxton shrieked. She just wanted it to stop. She wanted it all to stop. She pulled out the Glock 23 and fired her last three rounds into Deanna’s chest, one two three.
The noise obliterated all words. If only for an instant.
Then Caxton looked down at what she’d done. The white silk dress was scorched and torn but the skin underneath wasn’t even singed. Deanna was completely unhurt.
“Oh god—you’ve fed tonight,” Caxton wailed.
“You’re my girlfriend. You’re supposed to want to be with me forever, no matter what! We’re supposed to want the same things. Why is this so hard for you?”
The fingers on Caxton’s shoulder compressed like an industrial vise. Caxton could hear the bones in her shoulder creak and start to pop.
“Don’t you love me anymore?” Deanna demanded.
58.
Deanna’s fingers dug into Caxton’s flesh like iron knives. Deanna’s fingernails were cut just as short as they’d been in life but still they tore through Caxton’s jacket and shirt as if they were razor blades. In a moment they would break the skin.
And what would happen then? Deanna was already enraged. If she saw fresh human blood would she even stop to consider what she and Caxton had once meant to each other? Caxton was pretty sure she wouldn’t.
She struggled to pull away, twisting her shoulders to the left and then the right.
Deanna’s face was a mask of anguish, her eyes wide, her jaw hanging open. All those teeth gleamed even in the minimal light of the invalid ward. Deanna’s head was moving backwards, rearing to strike at Caxton’s neck. The motion was painfully slow, perhaps unconscious. When it was complete Caxton would be dead. She’d watched Hazlitt die like that. She’d seen plenty of vampire victims.
Her arms and hands began to tremble. The death grip on her shoulders was cutting off her circulation. The empty Glock fell from her hand and banged noisily on an iron bedframe.
Caxton gritted her teeth and focused every ounce of strength she had into pulling away, tore herself out of the grip. Her jacket came off in long flopping pieces and she tumbled backward, tripping on the bedframe, her arms flying wide to try to catch herself. Deanna seemed to loom up over her as if she were getting even taller or as if she could fly up over Caxton’s head. She was going to strike from above so Caxton rolled to the side.
The vampire’s weight came down on the bedframe with a grinding, screaming noise of metal being twisted out of shape. Caxton was already rolling to a crouch and then up to her feet. Adrenaline made her feel like she weighed nothing at all, as if she’d been hollowed out and filled full of air.
She didn’t turn to look at Deanna. She just ran.
She ran without even bothering to turn on her flashlight. Her foot grazed a bedframe and she might have fallen down but fear lifted her back up. She slammed painfully into the double doors at the far side of the invalid ward, her hip connecting with the push bar. The doors grated open and she rushed through.
Deanna was behind her, one hand reaching to grab the door almost before she reached the hallway beyond. Caxton swiveled around sideways and ran down the hall with her mouth open, with breath bursting in and out of her body. Before she could even find a doorway Deanna smashed into her back, spilling her across the floor. Caxton got back up by sheer willpower and kept running.
Another door. The room beyond was lined with moldy tiles. She couldn’t see more than three feet in front of her face. She sensed something wrong with the room, as if it didn’t have enough walls or as if the floor was sloping downwards, something, yes, it was the floor, there was something about the floor. She stopped short and fell back to hug the wall.
Deanna came bursting through the door like a pale comet blazing through limitless space. Her face was wide open, her mouth craned back to swallow Caxton whole.
She looked in the gloom as if she were flying, truly flying—and then abruptly she disappeared from view.
Caxton tried to get some breath back into her body but there didn’t seem to be enough air in the world to fill the demand. The beginning of a splitting headache lit up the back of her skull as her brain shouted for more oxygen, more adrenaline, more endorphins, more anything. She pushed herself harder and harder against the wall as if it could absorb her, as if the tiles could part and let her inside, into a hiding place.
Deanna screamed in thwarted rage. The noise rolled around the room, reverberating strangely.
Caxton lifted her Mag-lite and switched it on. She played it across the grimy tiles, trying to understand what was going on. Five feet ahead of her the floor stopped short. Had she kept running forward when she entered the room she would have fallen into that pit. She looked at the door she’d come through and her light picked out faded black letters painted there: POOL ROOM.
