on in her head. It had been alright when she and Clara had been talking about Malvern—Caxton could always switch everything else off when vampires were involved—but now that she was left alone with her own thoughts, it all came crashing in.
Clara was going to break up with her.
Caxton had watched her girlfriend trying to get up the nerve to say it. She’d been able to read Clara like an open book—they’d been together long enough to know each other’s gestures, each other’s private body language. Clara hadn’t been able to get the words out, but Caxton knew that there would come a time when she could. Either next month, at her next visit, or maybe even just in a letter, it would come.
Caxton couldn’t even get angry about it. She understood perfectly. She had never been a very good girlfriend. Always, as long as she’d known Clara, her life had been about other things. Well, one other thing—vampires. There had never been enough time for romance, for intimacy, for just sitting around talking about nothing, for casual glances, for lingering touches. There had never been a week when her job hadn’t got in the way, and there had been far too many nights when she’d been out chasing bloodsuckers and Clara had been forced to sit home alone, worrying, waiting for her to come back, waiting to get a phone call saying she’d been killed.
Now, with Caxton in prison, the relationship must seem utterly doomed.
The honorable thing, Caxton knew, would be to make it easy on Clara. To just accept defeat and give her back her freedom. And yet that would destroy Caxton utterly. Without Clara, what would she have in the whole world? She was never going to be a cop again, even after she served her time and got her release. Fetlock would never let her hunt vampires. So without her work, and without the woman she loved, what remained?
She had rescued dogs in the past. That had given her some sense of satisfaction. But the idea that dogs could replace both Clara and her calling was laughable.
The cell door closed behind Caxton with a buzz and a double thunk of locks slamming shut. She looked up and realized she had walked inside and walled up without even thinking about it. She glanced sideways and saw Stimson standing next to her, but her celly might as well have been in a different city. She wasn’t looking at Caxton. She wasn’t acknowledging her in any way.
The urge to talk to anyone, even Stimson, the need to unburden herself of her troubles, was compelling, even maddening. And yet she’d blown that chance, too, hadn’t she? Because she could never reach out to another human being without screwing it up somehow. Stimson had offered her kindness, and companionship, even friendship of a warped kind. And she’d pushed it away.
Caxton climbed up on her bunk and lay back. She closed her eyes and tried not to sob. It took some work.
Dinner came and went. She ate, but without paying much attention to what was going in her mouth. When she was done she got back up on the bunk and stared at the light fixture again. Just as she had the day before. Just as she would, she imagined, for the nearly eighteen hundred days yet to come.
When she heard the screaming start it barely registered.
In the dorms used by the general population of the prison you heard screams at night, sometimes, and you quickly learned to block them out. Women in prison had nightmares. A lot of them were mentally ill, but not in dangerous ways, so they were just crammed in with the rest of the inmates and convicts. The screams didn’t mean anything, and there was nothing you could do about them, anyway.
The SHU was much quieter at night, because the COs responded quickly to any excessive noise by forcibly extracting the offenders from their cells and dragging them away to cool-down rooms—what the prison called its padded cells. Still, even after the third or fourth scream, Caxton didn’t move, didn’t even roll over to wonder what was going on.
Stimson responded much more quickly She climbed out of her bunk and went to the small window in the cell door. She shielded her eyes with her hands as if she were studying what was going on out there.
A scream came next that sounded much closer. It was different from the screams Caxton expected, as well. It was longer, more drawn-out. It was a scream of real pain, of someone being violently hurt. Of someone being killed.
“Stimson,” Caxton whispered. “What’s going on?”
Caxton’s celly didn’t reply.
“Stimson!” Caxton hissed. “Come on. Tell me.” She sighed. “Gert,” she tried.
The other woman turned and glanced up at her with hard eyes. “What, are we friends now?”
Caxton tried to think of how to reply but she was forestalled by yet another scream. This one was cut off quickly. Abruptly. Caxton knew all too well what that meant. Someone had just been killed.
The speaker in the ceiling crackled to life. “Get back from your doors, right now!” it commanded. “There’s nothing to see.”
That was enough to make Caxton want to look out the window, too. She jumped down from the bunk and shoved her way in next to Stimson, their bodies touching as she tried to get a look.
There wasn’t much to see, after all. The SHU looked as it always had, blinding white paint, central guard post, single reinforced door at the far end. One thing was missing, though. Normally, even in the middle of the night, one guard sat inside the glass-walled guard post, while two COs walked circuits around the unit, keeping their eyes open, listening for trouble. Now the patrollers were gone and only one CO was visible inside the post.
“Where’d the others go?” Caxton asked.
“They hightailed it a couple of minutes ago,” Stimson told her. “Grabbed up their shotguns and booked out the door. That’s all I saw.”
Caxton looked at the CO in the guard post, and recognized her at once. It was Harelip, the female CO who had performed her body cavity search. The one who had knocked her down to the floor when she tried to read the warden’s BlackBerry.
“Alright, bitches, wall up for me now or there’s going to be some ass-whooping,” Harelip said over the intercom. Her voice echoed off the walls of Caxton’s cell.
Stimson ran back to the wall, but Caxton stayed where she was.
The screaming was far away again, when it came next. But there was a lot more of it.
“Laura!” Stimson called. “Get back! They’ll beat us both if you don’t.”
“Hold on,” Caxton said. “Someone’s coming.” And there was. A shadowy figure was coming down the hallway toward the big reinforced door of the SHU. As it stepped out into the light she saw it was a male CO in a stab-proof vest. His baseball cap had been pulled down low over his eyes, leaving his face mostly obscured. She could just make out his chin. It was red, but not with blood. The skin there had been scratched and torn at until it came away in long strips. She could see muscle tissue underneath, pinkish-gray and rubbery and bloodless.
“Oh, no,” Caxton moaned. “Not here. Not now.”
“Which one is Laura?” the half-dead CO asked. A moment later every door in the SHU unlocked itself with a heavy thunk.
11.
Caxton shoved against the cell door with her shoulder, but it wouldn’t move. The electronic lock had been released, but the mechanical lock was still in place. Someone was going to have to pull the lever on the outside of the door before she could get out.
There were two people on the floor of the SHU, two candidates who might let her out, but neither of them seemed like much of a bet.
“Murphy?” Harelip said, speaking into her microphone. She hadn’t turned off the intercom system, so her voice came down from the ceiling of Caxton’s cell. The female CO sounded worried but not panicked. Probably
