anyway. Her only advantage had been the range of her Beretta, which would have allowed her to pick them off before they could reach her with their knives. In the blackness that advantage was lost—if she couldn’t see, she couldn’t aim. If she couldn’t aim, she might be better served just swinging the butt of her handgun back and forth and hope she pistol-whipped them all to death.
She could try to find a light switch—but in the process she would probably knock over an ottoman or a candelabra or something and give away her position.
Where the hell was Glauer? She had gotten out of one ambush but only ended up in a spot nearly as bad.
The little flashes of red and blue light coming in the windows showed her nothing at all where she lay behind the table. She could hear the half-deads moving through the foyer, spreading out to find her.
Time for another silent profanity to climb across her lips. When a victim was raised as a half-dead its soul died first, its personality wiped away and replaced with nothing but hatred and gleeful bloodlust. Yet it retained some part of his memory. These half-deads had been cops once. They’d been trained in how to search a room and how to keep a subject from escaping. She had no doubt they would cover the three doors that led off from the foyer. She had moments—mere seconds before she was surrounded.
Both ankles ached as she pushed herself up against the rear wall of the room and got her feet under her again. She didn’t think any of her bones were broken, but even if they were she needed to move fast.
Thinking her best bet was to move toward the back of the house, she pushed her way along the wall, feeling for the tapestry she’d seen on her way in. There—her hand touched the cloth, grabbed a corner of it. The door was just on the far side. She reached forward for its knob—and then yanked her hand back when the door jumped and thudded as if someone behind it was hammering to get out.
“Over there!” a half-dead squeaked. She heard them come toward her, running through the dark. One hit a chair and went sprawling to the ground with a pathetic yelp, but the others kept coming on. Caxton didn’t even know which way to run.
Then the door burst open and a powerful beam of light speared through into the foyer, lighting up two half- deads with steak knives raised high. The barrel of a shotgun came through the door next and it discharged with a roar, blasting Caxton’s ears with its report and filling her nose and throat with the stink of gunpowder so that she coughed and gagged.
The two half-deads fell out of the beam of light and thunked to the floor, not even having a chance to scream their last.
Glauer burst through the open door, pumping his weapon for a second shot. Evidently he didn’t see the third half-dead, the one that had tripped over the chair, coming straight at him with a fireplace poker.
Caxton reached out as fast as she could and grabbed the half-dead’s arm. She twisted it back hard and the poker fell to clunk on the floor. She saw Glauer raise his shotgun and had time to shout for him to stop, but it was too late. The heavy wooden stock came down right between the half-dead’s eyes and crushed in its skull.
“What do you mean, stop?” he asked when the creature dropped to the floor. He shone his heavy-duty flashlight in her face.
“I wanted to keep it alive for questioning,” she answered. She pushed the flashlight away. It was hurting her eyes. “What took you so long?”
He shrugged amiably. “There’s about fifty doors in this place and they were all locked.”
It didn’t matter. He was here now. Caxton did a quick calculation in her head. “There were seven of them originally, assuming Jameson raised them all.”
“Seven? There were seven cops called to this scene—”
Apparently he was just figuring out whom he’d been fighting. She raised a hand for silence. “I got one upstairs.” She grabbed the light out of his hands and pointed it at the two on the floor, their bodies twisted around by the shotgun blast and completely lifeless. She pointed it again at the one with the knocked-in skull. “That’s four.”
“Two more of them tried to get me back in the kitchen,” Glauer said. “Check this out.” He tried to show her a bad cut on his arm. “Went right through my jacket and my shirt. Just a little paring knife, but that guy wanted me bad.”
“Six, then, all dead—and one left,” Caxton counted, too busy to worry about his arm. She spun around with a sudden intuition and pointed the light at the front door. It hung open to the night. “Come on, hurry,” she said, and sprinted out across the porch and down into the street.
At first she saw nothing, just the cars piled up in the road. She had expected the last half-dead to steal one and make a break for it, and had just hoped it wouldn’t be the Mazda the monster chose. All the cars were in their proper places, though.
“There,” Glauer said, and pointed at the road. A thin layer of new powdery snow had coated the street since they’d arrived. A trail of boot prints curved away from the house and off to the west, toward the highway. Glauer started for the passenger side of her car, but she shook her head. “No time for that. We can catch him on foot.”
She raced down the street, her eyes bleary with the light from the streetlamps and the glare off the snow after the darkness in the house. She had no trouble following the trail, however—the footprints were dark against the snowy street and they headed due west, never weaving back and forth, never turning as if the half-dead had looked over his shoulder to see if he were being pursued.
She had a bad feeling she knew what that meant. Half-deads for all their wicked humor and spite were bound to the whims of vampires. They could no more resist the commands of their masters than they could make themselves alive and whole again. This one wasn’t just escaping a hopeless fight—no, it would have stayed until the bitter end if Jameson had so desired. It was carrying out some other order.
She ran as fast as she could, her work shoes slipping constantly in the wet slush. She hadn’t had a chance to put on proper boots. Glauer came chugging along behind her, more sure-footed but not as quick. Yet it was he who first caught sight of the half-dead ahead of them.
He shouted and pointed and Caxton followed his finger. There, a block ahead, the half-dead was moving fast. It was limping badly and one of its pant legs had been torn away. It had a nasty bloodless wound in its calf, where part of the muscle had been blown away. It must, she realized, be the one she had wounded with her wild shots on the stairs. Yet as crippled as it was, it forced itself along, forced itself to keep moving.
She had closed the distance to half a block when she realized they were about to run out of road. The street ahead curved southward to follow the creek, but the half-dead wasn’t turning with it. It hurried on forward in a straight line.
She tried to sprint after it and nearly fell on her face. “Glauer—grab it, quick,” she called, and the big cop shot past her, puffing mightily. She raced after them both and arrived at the built-up edge of the creek just in time to watch the half-dead jump awkwardly over the edge and split the dark water like a falling stone.
It disappeared with a gurgling whine and was immediately lost from view.
Glauer started to pull off his jacket as if he would jump in after it, but she grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, breath surging in and out of her chest. “You’d freeze to death in minutes.”
“But it’s getting away!” Glauer cried back.
“No it isn’t,” Caxton knew. She understood right away what Jameson had demanded of his creature.
She didn’t know if the icy water would have hurt it, but she knew half-deads didn’t breathe. She imagined they weren’t very buoyant. It must have sunk like a stone. Under the water its brain would freeze and that would be the end of its short un-life. “Back when we were working together—I mean, Jameson and me—it was standard practice to try to capture half-deads. That was our best source of information. He knew I would want to talk to this one, and he made damned sure I didn’t get the chance.”
Chapter 22.
Caxton and Glauer trudged back toward the house through the snow. It had grown significantly colder since they’d arrived in Bellefonte, and the sky had turned heavy and the color of lead. The snow flurry that had come just after dark had stopped, but it looked as if the clouds weren’t done for the night.
“What’s our next step?” Glauer asked, his voice nearly lost under the noise of their shoes crunching the powdery snow. It sounded like teeth grinding together to Caxton, teeth gnashing and tearing.
