“Left cheek, or right?”
2.
Caxton stared at the point of the hot nail. It was beginning to turn red. She knew if she didn’t struggle, if she let this woman brand her, she would be marked in more ways than showed on the skin. She would be giving the prison population a signal that she was weak, and vulnerable, and could be preyed upon.
There were a lot of women in SCI-Marcy who would be thrilled to get that sign from an ex-cop inmate. This would be only the first assault of many.
She waited until Guilty Jen flicked off the lighter and scooted forward on her knees, ready to bend down and place the nail against her face. She waited for a second longer, until she could feel the heat of it near her skin.
Then she twisted her wrists simultaneously, slipping them free of the hands that held her, and brought her hands around to smack Guilty Jen’s hand sideways. The nail went into the calf muscle of one of the women standing over Caxton. That woman howled and jumped in the air.
The hands on Caxton’s ankles slackened their grip, just a little. Caxton had been expecting that—it’s hard to pay attention when one of your friends is screaming in pain—and she capitalized on it by bringing her knees up to her chest as fast as she could and then kicking out, knocking Guilty Jen backward and away.
In a second Caxton was up, feet spread on the floor, torso bent low with her arms up to protect her head. Someone tried to grab her back and she rolled into it, head-butting them in the stomach hard enough to make them let go.
She still had no idea how many assailants she was facing or how long she had to hold them off before the COs bothered to check the kitchen. She could try to make a break for it, run out of the kitchen and back into the cafeteria, but she figured Guilty Jen had to be organized enough to have someone watching the door.
Her other option was to fight her way out. She danced backward, trying to get a wall behind her, and let her eyes flick around the room, assessing. She counted six orange jumpsuits. Jen’s girls were a mixed set, black, Latina, white, and Asian. That was weird: prison gangs normally formed up on racial lines. It looked like Jen had found something else to unite them.
Caxton could think about that later, if she got the chance. Right now she had a fight on her hands. Six women she would have to fight, including Jen, including the one with the burnt leg. They were already regrouping, getting ready to mob her. If they all came at her at once she would be done for. They could just pile on top of her and hold her down and beat her into submission.
She needed to thin the herd, right away. She looked for the opponent closest to her. To her left was a brown-haired white girl. Tattooed on her earlobes was a pair of tiny swastikas. She must have been a member of the Aryan Brotherhood once. Caxton felt no moral compunctions about grabbing a huge tureen full of boiling soup and sloshing it all over her.
The Nazi girl went down in agony, out for the count. A black woman wearing a do-rag came at Caxton from the right, puffing with anger. Caxton laid her out with a haymaker punch that probably fractured her jaw.
A third inmate tried to be sneaky and attack while her back was turned. Caxton threw her head back, hard, and felt her skull connect with the unseen woman’s nose. She felt the bones there break. Hot blood went spurting down the back of her collar. That must have hurt, Caxton figured, but it wasn’t necessarily enough to put her assailant down. Caxton spun in place and brought both fists toward each other, the knuckles digging hard into the woman’s kidneys.
She dropped to the floor, grabbing at Caxton’s hips and legs, but her hands just didn’t have the strength to grapple properly. Caxton looked down at her victim and thought about stomping on her head or her stomach. For a second she almost did, but she managed to pull back.
It was going to be hard to end this fight without killing anyone. Caxton had gone through plenty of unarmed- fighting courses at the State Police Academy in Hershey, but she’d never really bothered learning how to incapacitate enemies. On the perps she’d been taking down outside, those kinds of moves were never enough. You had to fight to kill or be killed yourself.
Caxton had spent years learning how to fight and kill vampires. Vampires were bigger than she was, much stronger, and much tougher. Any wounds she gave them healed over almost instantly. She had to remind herself constantly that Guilty Jen’s set didn’t have supernatural resistance to injuries.
Killing the downed woman would be a big mistake here. It would get Caxton in all kinds of trouble and mean losing what few privileges she had, as well as draw the kind of attention she most wanted to avoid. So when she turned to face Guilty Jen and her remaining two gangbangers, she hesitated for just a second, to give them a chance to run away.
They didn’t.
“Impressive,” Guilty Jen said. “But stupid. This counts as disrespect, you know that? And I can’t allow that, or I look like a bitch. So now I
“There are other ways to resolve—” Caxton began, but Jen’s two underlings were on her before she could finish her thought. One of them, a Latina wearing lipstick and mascara, came at her low and fast, hands stretched out to grab.
It was a feint, Caxton knew. The other one, a Korean woman, had a shank made from a metal spoon, flattened out and sharpened all around its edge. The leg of her coveralls was smoldering—it must have been she who caught the heated nail. The injury was slowing her down a little, but not enough.
Caxton took a step toward the Latina and raised one arm as if to strike—then launched herself at the Korean and came down hard on her burnt leg. She felt the knee there give way, and the woman collapsed under Caxton’s weight. She grabbed the shank out of the woman’s flailing hand and threw it underhand at the Latina, who was still coming toward her.
It went right into her eye.
For a moment everyone was screaming and rolling around on the floor. Then the two people who weren’t— Caxton and Guilty Jen—made eye contact, and everything else just fell away. Caxton’s entire focus shifted to the gang leader. It was a showdown, an old-fashioned gunslinger standoff, but without the guns.
Caxton didn’t need them. If she was tough enough and fast enough to fight vampires, one human woman shouldn’t pose a problem. She’d just proven she could handle a couple at a time.
Guilty Jen, however, was a little more than just the average gangbanger. She spread her feet, getting a good stance. Then she did something Caxton would never have expected. She leaned forward slightly. She bowed.
What that meant wasn’t lost on Caxton. She just had time for a brief spike of fear to go running through her veins before a roundhouse kick came at her face so fast she couldn’t avoid it.
Jen had martial arts training. That made her dangerous, even to someone like Caxton. Caxton threw up one arm in time to fend off the kick, but it connected with her wrist and made every nerve in her hand fire at once. Her fingers rattled around in her skin and she wondered if her arm was broken.
Caxton dropped to one knee and leaned over hard to the side as Jen followed up her kick with a sweeping arm attack that was aimed right at Caxton’s neck. The arm went instead over Caxton’s head, but Jen recovered and pulled back almost instantly, long before Caxton could bring her own hands down on the gangster’s knee. Jen’s leg flashed backward, out of Caxton’s reach, and Caxton knew she’d made a bad mistake. She had avoided the worst of Jen’s attacks, but only by putting herself in a vulnerable posture. The next attack was going to be a killing blow, and—
Jen cried out at the same time as something exploded behind her. She staggered forward, her stomach colliding with Caxton’s face, and they both went down in a heap. Caxton struggled to get free so she could see what was going on.
“You fucking shot me!” Jen howled. “That’s unnecessary force!”
A team of COs stormed into the kitchen. The one at the front had a guard sergeant’s stripes. He also had a
