Every door she saw had a hefty padlock, some of them combination locks with purple or yellow dials, others that required keys to open. Was Arkeley inside one of these lockers? she wondered.
Was it his lair? Maybe he hung from the ceiling by his feet like a giant bat.
The thought almost made her smile. Vampires and bats had nothing in common. Bats were animals, normal, natural organisms that deserved a lot more respect than they got. Vampires were…monsters.
Nothing else.
She studied the doors, looking for one that didn’t have a lock. Even a vampire couldn’t lock himself into a storage space from the inside. She looked down the row of doors, all the way to the end where another corridor crossed laterally. She counted off the locks in her head—lock, lock, lock. Lock.
Another lock. Then—there. Near the far end, one narrow door had no lock on its latch.
It probably wouldn’t be that easy. Still, she had to check. She moved slowly down the hall, her back to one wall, her weapon up and ready. Her shoes clicked on the unfinished cement floor, a noise anybody could have followed. When she reached the unlocked door she stood to one side and slid the latch open with her left hand. The door rattled noisily and then opened on creaky hinges. Nothing jumped out.
She pivoted on her heel until she was facing the locker. She slipped off her pistol’s safety lever. She glanced inside—and saw immediately that it was empty. There had been no lock because no one had rented this particular locker, that was all.
Caxton let herself exhale. Then she froze in midbreath as raucous laughter ran up and down the hallway, echoing off the row of doors and making them all shake on their hinges. She swung around quickly, unable to tell which direction the laughter came from, and—
At the end of the hall, back by the elevators, a pale figure stood in the shadow between two light fixtures.
It was tall and its head was round and hairless and flanked by long triangular ears. Its mouth was full of long and nasty teeth, row after row of them. Her heart stopped—then started up again twice as fast when she saw the vampire held a shotgun.
Chapter 2.
Caxton’s brain reeled, leaving her unable to react for a critical second. Vampires didn’t carry guns.
Ever. They didn’t need them—at Gettysburg she had seen a single vampire mow down squads of National Guardsmen carrying assault rifles. Their claws and especially their teeth were all the weapons they ever needed.
The Beretta in her hand forgotten, Caxton could only stare at the shotgun as the vampire brought it up and pointed it in her direction. She barely managed to duck as his white finger closed around the trigger.
Somehow she recovered her wits enough to roll to the side, behind the open door of the empty storage locker. Buckshot pranged off the door and dug hundreds of long tracks through the white paint on the walls. When her hearing recovered from the noise of the shot she heard his bare feet slapping on the cement floor, running toward her, as she ducked into the locker and closed the door shut behind her.
Stupid, she thought—she’d done something very stupid. There was no way out of the locker, and no way to lock the door from inside. The door itself would be little barrier to a vampire, especially one that had already fed on the two men down in the lobby. Vampires were strong enough at any time, and close to bulletproof, but they grew exponentially tougher after they drank blood.
She backed up, feeling behind her with one hand until she found the back of the unit, and raised her pistol in front of her. When he tore the door open to get at her she might have one chance—she could fire blindly through the door and hope that somehow she hit him squarely in the heart, his only vulnerable part. If she shot him anywhere else his wounds would heal almost instantly. All the bullets in her gun wouldn’t even slow him down.
She pointed the nose of the pistol at the door. She aimed for a spot at the level of her own heart, then raised her aim about six inches. Arkeley was taller than her, she remembered. Arkeley—
The image of the vampire in the hallway was seared into her mind’s eye. She couldn’t not see it standing there, leveling the shotgun at her. Holding the shotgun with both hands.
Vampires healed all wounds they took after their rebirth, but any old injuries left over from their human lives lasted forever. Arkeley the vampire would still be missing all the fingers from one hand. This vampire had ten fingers, all the better to hold a shotgun with.
It wasn’t Arkeley. She hadn’t been able to process that fact while he was shooting at her, but as she waited for him to come and kill her she couldn’t deny it anymore. Whoever the vampire might have been, whatever he had become, he wasn’t her former mentor.
Which made things much worse.
There was only one way for a vampire to reproduce, and it involved direct eye contact. There were only two vampires at large in the world who could pass on the curse—Arkeley, and Justinia Malvern, a decrepit old corpse that Arkeley kept close to him at all times. If the two of them were creating new vampires, if Arkeley had become a Vampire Zero—
The door rattled in front of her. She steeled herself, adjusted her grip on the Beretta. She would shoot in just a second, when she thought her chances were best. She would let him start to tear the door open first.
The door rattled again. She heard a metallic click and knew instantly what had happened. The vampire wasn’t going to tear open the door at all. Instead he’d closed the latch with a padlock, sealing her inside.
He must have had one in his pocket, just for this eventuality.
Whoever he was, he was smart. Smarter than she, apparently. She cursed herself. You never ran into a place with only one exit—that was one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She should have remembered.
“Who are you?” she shouted. “Don’t you want to kill me?”
She didn’t really expect him to respond, and he didn’t. She listened closely as her voice echoed around the metal walls of the locker, listening for any sign that he might be standing directly outside the door. She heard nothing.
Then, a moment later, she heard his feet slapping on the floor. Moving away.
“Damn it,” she breathed. Was he running away? Maybe her backup had arrived and he was fleeing the scene. She couldn’t let that happen—she couldn’t let another vampire get away. Every one of them out there meant more sleepless nights, more searching. She had always pitied Arkeley for the way his hopeless crusade had devoured his life—he had spent more than twenty years trying to drive vampires to extinction, only to fail utterly at the last minute. She was beginning to understand what had pushed him so hard, though. She was beginning to understand that sometimes you had no choice, that events could drive you regardless of what you wanted. If she could get this guy, and Arkeley, and Malvern—all the vampires she believed to exist—if she could get them all she could stop. Until then she could only keep fighting.
There had to be something she could do. She looked at the walls around her, but they were made of reinforced sheet metal. She would never be able to kick her way through them. The door was fitted neatly into its frame. There was no way she could pry it open, no way to get her fingers around its edge and pull.
Then she looked up.
The lockers didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling—there was a foot and a half of open space up there.
The ceiling of the locker was nothing more than a thin sheet of chicken wire. The wire was higher up than she could reach, but maybe—maybe—she could jump up and grab it.
Shoving her Beretta in her holster—safety on, of course—she rubbed her hands together, then made a tentative leap. Her fingertips brushed the wire, but she couldn’t get a grip. She tried again and missed it altogether. Third time’s the charm, she promised herself, and bent deep from the knees.
The fingers of her left hand slipped through the wire. She closed her fist instantly as she fell back—and pulled the wire back down with her. The wire tore the skin of her fingers until they were slick with blood, and the noise was deafening as the wire shrieked and tore under her weight, but she was left with a hole directly above her that she could probably wriggle through. She grabbed the dangling wire with her other hand and started to pull herself up, a handful at a time. It felt like her fingers were being cut to ribbons, but she had no choice—she needed to get
