“Why don’t you both just back up, okay?” Caxton said, in her cop voice.
“You don’t want to go down there,” Wally said. “There’s something down there you don’t want to see.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Caxton slowly rose to her feet and holstered her weapon. “Anyway, I don’t intend on going down there, not tonight. It’s barely eleven-thirty. I’m going to wait until dawn.” The only sane time to enter a vampire’s lair was when you had plenty of daylight to burn. “I know you think the vampire might hurt you if he sees me here. You’ve got to trust me, though. I’m going down there tomorrow and I’m going to kill him. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”
“That’s fine,” Wally said. “But what about her?”
Caxton spun around again, but she was far too slow. The trap had lifted at an angle and a white shadow was snaking out of it, reaching for her. Raleigh’s hands fastened around her ankles like a pair of vise grips and pulled her roughly down into the darkness before she could even start to scream.
She saw the old woman’s face recede above her as she was carried downward. “Like I said,” the old woman said, “you aren’t welcome here, lady.”
Chapter 55.
Caxton’s face collided hard with a wall of solid rock and bright flecks shot through her vision. Then everything went dark. She thought maybe she had a concussion or even that she was dead, but in fact the trapdoor had just closed over her, and she was faced with the most profound darkness she’d ever experienced: midnight in a coal mine.
A thin hand grasped one of her ankles. She was dragged across the stone floor, rough still with the marks of where some old miner had cut this chute with a shovel and a pickaxe and maybe a few sticks of stolen dynamite. The entrance to the lair was through a bootleg mine—a narrow passage cut by night down toward a coal seam the miner didn’t own. Maybe just one man, maybe an entire family, had worked for years chopping through the soil and rock looking for the black glint of coal. The ceiling, Caxton knew, would be held up only here and there by rotten timbers. The passage would be no wider than a man’s broad shoulders. She pushed out her arms and felt the uneven wall on either side. She tried to grab on, but Raleigh was much stronger than Caxton now, and Caxton couldn’t get enough grip on the rock to even slow the vampire down.
For a long time she was carried along like that, her face bouncing on the floor, the skin of her ankle crying out in pain where Raleigh held her. Then the forward progress stopped, and Caxton’s leg was dropped to the floor. Still she couldn’t see a thing, though she knew that Raleigh would be able to see her just fine—at least, she could see Caxton’s blood, her arteries and veins and capillaries lit up in the pitch darkness like an inward-curling maze of neon tubes.
Caxton fully expected to die in that darkness, unable to see when the vampire descended on her and tore out her throat. Maybe she would have a fraction of a second’s warning. Maybe she would feel the cold and sickly aura that emanated from Raleigh’s being before the bite came. Or maybe not.
Then there was a clicking sound, and lights sputtered to life all around Caxton, glaring down at her from a ceiling high above. Caxton rolled onto her back, the backpack squishing uncomfortably beneath her, and tried to sit up. A white hand pressed down on her throat and she lay back down—she had no choice.
Raleigh easily overpowered her, and there was no point in fighting.
Caxton still had her pistol in its holster at her belt. She darted her hand downward and tried to grab at it, but Raleigh was ready for that, too. She got to the gun first and drew it neatly, then twirled it on her finger.
The vampire was still dressed in the remains of her winding sheet, with duct tape bunching it around her hips and throat. Over top of that she had put on a ballistic vest. A type IIIA, of course, with a steel trauma plate over her heart. “This,” she said, lifting the gun in her hand, “is useless. How many times did you shoot Daddy with it? And he barely felt it.”
Raleigh threw the weapon into a corner of the room. Caxton watched it, trying to see where it landed. In the process she finally saw where she was: a chamber about twenty feet square. This wasn’t part of the bootleg mine, but a chamber of the original company mine, and it contained supplies abandoned when the mine was shut down. There were boxes that would have held dynamite and blasting caps, as well as enormous pieces of mining equipment, roof bolters and rod chargers. In one corner, leaning up against the wall, stood a pair of six-foot-long handheld drills that would have done wonders at boring through that trauma plate and impaling Raleigh’s heart—if there had been anyplace to plug them in. The equipment was falling to pieces, eaten at by rust or just general decay. It must have been sitting down here for decades after the mine was abandoned. If there was any dynamite in those boxes it would have gone bad before Raleigh was even born, most likely.
Raleigh followed her gaze. “It’s not much, but it’s home,” she said.
Caxton had just one chance. Raleigh didn’t know that she’d upgraded her weapon—she couldn’t know that Caxton was loading Teflon bullets that might, just might, penetrate the trauma plate. If Caxton could get closer to the gun, if she could just reach it—
She started crawling toward the gun with infinitesimal slowness, using her hands and her legs to scoot along the floor.
Raleigh had a radio on her belt that she lifted to her mouth. “Daddy, she’s here. She came just like you said she would.” Raleigh stared down at Caxton with a disdainful smile, then went on, “I got her inside just fine, and I’ve disarmed her. Just like we talked about.”
The radio spat and popped with static, but Caxton could hear Jameson calling from someplace else in the mine. “Don’t take any chances. Empty her weapon and then bring her to me.” There was a pause, then Jameson said, “There will be fifteen bullets in the gun, and maybe one in the chamber. Get them all.”
Raleigh took two long steps across the room and picked up the weapon. Caxton stopped moving.
The vampire turned the gun over and over in her hands. She found the safety and slipped it off. Then, holding the gun straight out from her shoulder, she pointed it down at Caxton’s face. It was a lousy firing stance, but at that range it wouldn’t matter. “Bang bang,” Raleigh said, with a little laugh.
“You could have killed me before this,” Caxton said, trying not to look down the dark barrel in front of her. “You’re saving me for some reason.”
“For Simon. When he accepts the curse, when he’s one of us, you’re going to be his first victim. Daddy and I have already fed.” Raleigh lifted the weapon a few inches and fired a shot straight over Caxton’s head. The noise of the shot made them both cringe as it echoed around and around the room, amplified by the close, hard walls. Raleigh made a face, her wicked teeth protruding from her pale lips, but then she fired again, and again, aiming just shy of hitting Caxton each time. The precious bullets pranged off the rock floor and ricocheted around the room, bouncing and clattering wildly, but unfortunately none of them went so far astray as to bounce back up and hit Raleigh. One did cut through the sleeve of Caxton’s shirt. She didn’t dare look, but she thought it had just missed breaking her skin. She pulled her arms in close to her body and tried not to flinch too much.
As Raleigh fired she counted out loud, but the words were lost until she stopped and said, “Sixteen.”
Caxton’s ears were still ringing as the vampire blew on the gun’s hot barrel, then shoved it, the safety still off, into one of the straps of her vest. “Now get up, and let’s go.”
Chapter 56.
Caxton went first, prodded on occasionally by Raleigh, who kept close behind, walking forward down a corridor lined with electric lights. Jameson must have strung up those lights himself—normally coal mines were left dark except for the lights on the miners’ helmets and their equipment. Here and there side galleries led away from the main hall, and these had been left dark—silent, empty channels carved through the rock where the only sound was made by dust falling and rocks settling. Once those halls would have echoed with clamor and activity as miners pushed a giant longwall cutter down the face, grinding out coal by the ton. Now it was as silent as the tomb it had become.
Or perhaps not quite silent. Caxton had little to do as she walked but look around her and strain her ears to pick up subtle sounds. It didn’t take long to notice a faint but deep roaring sound coming from deeper in the mine. Somewhere down these passages, through a series of left and right turns, the fire lay, blazing and raging as it had for so many years.
The sound was not the only evidence. She started to see wisps of smoke playing about the ceiling, braids of pale vapor that grew thicker and more agitated as she progressed. The peculiar smell of carbon monoxide came to
