fuss and she climbed into the driver’s seat, then took her handcuffs out of her belt and locked him to the door handle on the passenger’s side. Doing that gave him a chance to bite her on the neck, but he didn’t act on it.
“You’re being cooperative,” Caxton said, surprised.
“Because I know my time is about to come. The time when I kill you.”
“Sure,” Caxton said.
“Maybe you think I can’t do it. Maybe you think you have me right where you want me. But that’s your mistake—thinking you’re smarter than us. I couldn’t get at you in that cell. I had no weapons, and you were far away. Now, though, you’ve taken away that disadvantage. Now we’re all alone. You may have me handcuffed, but in time I’ll get free. I’ll break out of this bondage and then you’ll see. You’ll see exactly how stupid you’ve been.”
Caxton shook her head wearily. “Shut up,” she said.
“You don’t want to hear this? That’s understandable. Who wants to know that they’re about to die? I want you to hear it, though. I want you to be afraid. Because then you’ll make more mistakes. Desperate people don’t think clearly. They rush through things and don’t consider all their options.”
Caxton switched on the radio, but he just shouted over the music.
“Once I kill you, he’ll have no choice. Jameson will have to respect me. He’ll see what I’ve done, what he could not do himself, and he’ll know I’m worthy. He’ll give me the curse, then, and I won’t wait.
Some people fight it, I know. Jameson fought it for a long time before he realized what he’d been given.
But I will welcome it. I’ll turn a gun on myself, or maybe I’ll slit my own throat with a knife, so I can take my place among them that much faster. So I can achieve my dest—”
She reached across with her right fist and smashed him across the face. It was hard to get leverage like that, but she hit him hard enough to split his lip open and grind his cheek painfully against his teeth. His head flew to the side and bounced off his window.
“That was for your sister,” she said.
But it wasn’t. It was for her, for Caxton herself. Because the longer he prattled on like that the more she realized that he was just a kid, just a human being. His voice was human, not the rough growl of a vampire. She could hear him breathing, and trying not to whimper, even after she hit him. At least he stopped talking.
She hoped when the time came she could get him started again.
She didn’t take him very far. Just to the edge of the town, where the last few houses and roadside bars petered out and the dead trees grew thick and shielded the snow-covered fields from view. She pulled off on a narrow road she knew that led for miles back to an abandoned industrial park. There were no homes down that road and it was the wrong season to catch teenagers there parking. When she switched off the car’s lights nothing but the stars and the night glare off the snow let them see each other’s face.
She slipped her new gun out of its holster, then flipped on the flashlight and laser attachments. His eyes squeezed closed and he pushed up against his door when she shone the light in his face.
“You know something I need to know,” she said. “You know where Jameson is. Before, when I asked you, there was a corrections officer present. He restrained me from using excessive force. He’s not here now.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Carboy told her.
So she hit him again. Pistol-whipped him, in fact, with the butt of her gun. She raised a two-inch gash in his cheek that turned purple even before she got the light back in his eyes.
She had tortured half-deads before. She’d pulled the fingers off one of them, one by one, until it told her what she needed to know. Half-deads were monsters. Their bodies were falling apart the moment they came back from the dead. Their brains were curdled, and they bore very little relationship to the human being they’d once been.
Dylan Carboy was a murderer. The worst kind, a parricide with depraved indifference—he’d killed his family just to make himself feel tough. He’d killed the two employees of the storage facility just to get her attention. He’d repeatedly threatened her own life.
He was still human.
“I don’t have time to beat it out of you,” she said. She leaned over him and uncuffed him from the door.
His hands were still bound behind his back with the plastic restraints he’d worn in his jail cell. She pushed open the passenger door and felt cold air rush in and cleanse her face. It felt good. “Get out,” she said.
He stared at her wide-eyed.
“Get out. Go no more than ten steps from the car. If you run, I’ll shoot you in the legs.”
He climbed out of the car carefully, unable to use his hands. He stood waiting for her, staring through the car window at her.
“Take off your slippers and throw them in the car,” she said.
He complied. He was standing in an inch of snow, and he shuffled quietly from foot to foot.
“Does that feel cold? It should. In a few minutes, though, you’ll stop feeling it. That’s bad,” she told him.
“That’s when frostbite sets in. You know about frostbite, right, Dylan? Your toes will turn black. The nerves and blood vessels in your toes will die one by one. Once that happens, if they want to save your life your toes will have to be cut off. Maybe they’ll take your feet, too, if gangrene sets in, and it usually does.” She pulled the passenger door shut and then rolled down the window so she could keep talking to him. “I’m going to drive away now, and leave you here. You can walk back.”
Carboy’s lips curled back. “When I receive the curse, I’ll track you down, Caxton. I’ll return this torment and visit a thousand more upon you—”
She interrupted him. “Do you know about Malvern’s eye? She’s only got one, of course. She lost the other before she became a vampire. Now no matter how much blood she drinks, no matter how long she spends rejuvenating in her coffin, she still only has one eye. Body parts don’t grow back.” She shrugged.
“Let’s say the impossible happens, and Jameson does give you the curse. You’ll be the vampire with no feet. You’ll spend the rest of your life unable to walk and unable to hunt for victims. And of course, vampires live forever.”
“
She started the car and rolled up the windows. It was freezing inside. She could only imagine how his feet must feel.
She heard him shouting curses outside the car, but the engine noise muffled his words. She put the car in reverse and started to back up. He came running after her, of course, so she touched the accelerator and craned her head around to see where she was going.
She’d backed up a hundred yards before he started knocking on her window with his knuckles. She backed up another hundred before she rolled down her window. “Yes?” she asked.
He was breathing very hard. His face was pale and the hairs inside his nostrils looked frozen together. “I don’t know. I don’t know where the lair is.”
She started to roll up her window again. He pounded on her window and she saw he was crying.
“I’m telling the truth,” he promised. “He never took me there. I begged him to, but he said it was like hell, and mortals couldn’t survive there. He said he would take me there when I received the curse.”
“Think hard,” she said. “You have to know something more. You must have seen or heard something.
Do your feet still hurt?”
He nodded piteously. “Please—”
“Think hard,” she said again.
“Flowers,” he mumbled. “Malvern—”
“Make sense,” she told him, “or I’m leaving.”
“I never met Malvern, except in my dreams. There I saw her, and sometimes, I guess I saw what she saw. I saw her sitting up in her coffin, one night. Jameson had taken her out to get some air. I don’t know what this
