Glauer was still down on the floor, she thought. He was a sitting duck. The vampire would have had to break his hypnotic connection with the local cop to come down, but most likely Glauer was still dazed and unable to defend himself.
Well, there wasn’t much she could do for him if she couldn’t see. Even less if she was dead. She found the flashlight and switched it on before it was even out of her pocket. The beam twitched in her hand and she realized just how scared she was. Fighting to control herself, she pointed the flashlight down toward the electric map. Her light barely gleamed off the broken coffins down there, the beam illuminating nothing of use. She moved the light slowly across the floor at her feet, toward where she’d left Glauer.
She didn’t worry about giving his position away—or her own. She knew the vampire could see their blood glowing in the dark, a fine tracery of red where arteries and veins pulsed faster and faster.
The vampire laughed at her, an animal noise like a hyena would make. A cold and violent growl. She shuddered, her whole body shaking. Then she went back to looking for Glauer.
She found his ASP baton, abandoned on the floor. There was no sign of the cop. She thought about calling out his name but couldn’t seem to get her voice to work.
It was just too much. She’d been shot at, grabbed, even bitten. She was operating on no sleep and little food and there were vampires everywhere, vampires who had already killed most of her army. And now they were coming for her.
A sound leaked out of her throat, then. It sounded a lot like a whimper.
She willed her hand to stop shaking. Her chest was shivering as it dragged more and more oxygen into her lungs. She would start hyperventilating soon. She would get that under control too, but first she needed her hands. The flashlight beam steadied, moved slowly across the metal seat backs. She had to find the vampire.
She was covered in weaponry, but she didn’t think that would scare him off. In the dark he was at a distinct advantage. He could have killed her already, several times over. If he hadn’t attacked yet it meant he was toying with her. Playing with his food. Vampires were like that—real assholes. She concentrated on the fact that she was still alive. That was good, and useful. It meant she could still, possibly, save herself. She could worry about Glauer later.
The flashlight lit up another row of seats and then bounced off a white face. She saw squinting red eyes and a very toothy grin, and she yelped in fright.
The vampire leaped out of her light even as she brought her pistol around to shoot him. He moved with an awful grace, his limbs contracting and then extending like finely machined springs. She heard him land with a gentle thud, somewhere to her left. She spun on her heel, tried to follow him with her light, but she had lost him.
From very close by she heard him laugh again.
She tried desperately to remember her training. She needed to try to control the scene. That was something they’d taught her in the state police academy, in almost every class she took. You didn’t run into a dark alley until you knew who was waiting in the shadows. If someone was shooting at you, your first instinct should not be to return fire but to find cover.
Arkeley had taught her that sometimes those rules didn’t apply when you were fighting vampires, but at that moment she was willing to trust time-honored police procedure. She kept her back to the wall and started moving slowly to her left, toward the door to the control booth. If she could get a barrier between herself and the vampire, well, that would considerably extend her life expectancy.
She put her foot out, let it touch the floor. Another foot, another step. She reached across her body with her right arm—her gun arm—and waved the barrel of her pistol into empty space. The door was still open. That—that was good. She turned slightly and started to slide herself into the doorway.
Instantly cold hands descended on her shoulders and pulled her back. She screamed, a full-throated shriek of terror, as the vampire hurled her through space. She plummeted through the dark, sensing rows of seats passing beneath her, her arms and legs spinning, trying to find something, anything to hold on to.
She collided belly first with a pile of coffins and stopped screaming at once. All the air in her body was forced out as if she’d been wrung out by a giant hand. Her stomach burned with pain and her legs felt battered.
Desperate, panicked, she rolled over onto her back and pointed her flashlight back the way she’d come, back toward the top of the amphitheater. The vampire was right there, moving toward her, his hands up as if he intended to jump down right on top of her. She brought her gun hand up, but found it empty—the Beretta had fallen out of her grip on the way down. She threw the arm across her face instead in a purely reflexive gesture—there was no way the arm would protect her against the vampire’s attack. She waited out the split second it would take him to land on her, to kill her, waited it out with nothing but fear inside her, waited—and waited—
From up above she heard a surprised grunt. Then a noise like leather being torn. The vampire roared, but still he didn’t pounce on her, still she was alive. She decided to risk a quick glance.
Up top, on the walkway behind the topmost row of seats, the vampire was waving his arms furiously. It looked like it was waving for her to come help it.
Its chest was torn open. The skin hung away in flaps from exposed ribs that glistened with clotted blood.
Her light went right into its chest cavity and she saw—without understanding—that its heart had been torn out.
It collapsed with a mewling noise she found almost piteous.
She could find no sign of what—or who—had destroyed it.
88.
—LETTER OFALVAGRIEST (UNPOSTED)
89.
It was over. For the moment. Caxton was alone again, still alive, lying on a pile of broken timber that had once been some vampire’s coffin.
She had no way of knowing if Glauer was still in the room or not. She flashed her light around the corners of the amphitheater, looking for any trace of him, but found nothing.
She lay back for a while, uncomfortable but unwilling to move. Her body protested every time she lifted a limb or even moved her eyes too rapidly. She could be dying, she thought. The fall onto the pile of coffins had hurt—a lot—and for all she knew, she had internal injuries. She might have punctured a lung, or she could have a cerebral hemorrhage just waiting to bleed out if she tried to sit up.
She sat up slowly, determined to have at least a few more seconds when she wasn’t under the immediate specter of death. She brushed splinters and dust off her arms, then she used her hands and knees to roll up to a
