read a sentence and then forget how it started before I reach the end. It just don’t seem to matter, you know? Like whatever this asshole was trying to say about Brad and Angelina just isn’t all that important anymore.”
“You knew I was awake,” Clara said.
“Well, you sat up, for one thing. That’s a fucking easy sign right there. Plus I saw your blood go faster. When you sleep your blood slows down. Your heart beats slower. Did you know I can see your heart? It’s like I got x-ray eyes. That’s pretty cool, I guess.”
It’s seriously creepy, Clara thought. “You’re not human anymore,” she told the vampire.
“What the fuck you just say, girl?”
Clara cringed. But she knew that as long as she was engaged in a nice, civil conversation with this bloodsucker, she wasn’t being dismembered, eaten, or tortured. That was worth something. “I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just—vampires don’t care about the same things human beings care about. You’re not supposed to. Celebrity gossip has got to be pretty low on the list of things important to vampires.”
“Yeah? What’s at the top?”
“I still feel pretty human. I mean, better. Stronger. But I’m still wondering about my kids, and what they’ll think about this change. And about their daddy. Except… I keep thinking about the hair on his back. It never used to bother me before, or at least, I put it out of my head. But now I keep seeing it, seeing him on top of me like I’m looking down at him from the ceiling and all I can see is this thick rug of hair. Oh, and his smell. He never would shower before we did it, that always bugged me. Now when I think about it, it kinda makes me sick.”
Vampires had their own body odor. One that didn’t wash off. They smelled like the bottom of a hamster cage—a sick hamster’s cage. It was a nasty, animal smell, very faint, but it was one of the signs a vampire was nearby. Clara could just smell it now from ten feet away.
“You’re—Hauser, right? I was there when you took the curse,” Clara said, for lack of anything better. “In the warden’s office. Where is the warden, by the way?”
“Dead,” Hauser told her. “That was pretty much the first thing Malvern did, when she woke up tonight and found out how fucked up things got during the day.”
Clara closed her eyes. If she’d had a plan—she hadn’t, not really, she knew she was screwed. But the brain kept trying to piece things together, even when all hope was gone. If she had consciously tried to think of a plan, it would have involved playing Malvern and the warden off each other. Widening the rift between the two of them. Apparently Malvern had taken the expedient course toward solving that problem.
“Hey, you. Hey,” Hauser said. She got up from the desk and took a step toward one of the other cages. “I know you’re awake.” The vampire kicked the cage and made it slide a foot and a half across the floor. Inside it someone struggled to grab at the bars and pull themselves upright.
“Laura,” Clara breathed, when she saw who it was.
Laura said nothing. She just sat down on the floor of her cage and lowered her head. One of her arms looked wrong. It was tucked up across her chest in a way that looked painful. Her face was bruised and one lip was puffy and swollen. But she was still alive.
“And you. Who the fuck are you?” the vampire snarled, and grabbed the third occupied cage. She picked it up easily and then dropped it to the floor with a deafening clang. The woman inside rolled over and batted at the bars with one weak hand.
“You can call me… Gert. Or Gerty, whichever… you like.”
“She was Laura—I mean Caxton’s cellmate,” Clara told the vampire. If she could get Hauser to sit down again, to sit calmly, there was less chance of her accidentally killing one of them. Clearly she had orders not to, but vampires sometimes didn’t know their own strength. “She helped Caxton escape from the SHU.”
“This piece of trash got out of the hole? Shee-it,” Hauser said. “She’s about likely to have a heart attack right now. Well, fuck her. She don’t have to survive very much longer. Just ’til five o’clock.”
Clara frowned. “What happens then?”
The vampire shrugged. “Ain’t up to me. It’s you three that decides. Malvern said twenty-three hours, and that’s what she’s got. When it’s almost up I’m supposed to ask you, do you want to be like me. Tougher than nails and live forever. Or do you want to die? Only there’s a catch.”
Of course there was. “What’s the catch?” Clara asked.
“You gotta be unanimous. All three of you become vampires or all three of you die. It seems kind of simple to me, but if even one of you vetoes it, you all get eaten.”
“I say yes, please,” Gert whispered.
In her cage, Caxton said nothing. She was picking at a piece of tape holding the foam rubber around a steel bar, just scraping away at it with a fingernail. She hadn’t even looked over at Clara. Hadn’t said a word.
Clara couldn’t help but think that was a bad sign.
53.
The tape came away, leaving Caxton’s fingers sticky and one fingernail broken. She dug a finger into the foam rubber wrapped around the bar of her cage and felt a sharp edge underneath. It was as she’d suspected—the bars weren’t bars at all, but strips of steel as flat as ribbons. You could cut yourself pretty well on the edge.
She looked up and saw the vampire standing over Clara’s cage. They were still talking. Well, that was fine. For now. She knew what Clara was trying to achieve. Hauser was a brand-new vampire. There was still plenty of humanity left in her—it took weeks for the bloodlust to take hold. Over time it would erode Hauser’s personality until there was nothing left. Each night she woke in a coffin she would feel less connection to the person she had once been. Each night she would think more and more often about blood, and how good it would taste running down her throat, and how little it mattered if she had to hurt people to get it. But for now, on her first night post- death, Hauser could be reasoned with. She could be talked around.
That wasn’t what Caxton had in mind, though.
They’d taken all her weapons. They’d taken her stab-proof vest when they came and found her in the stairwell, reeling in pain, barely able to move. They couldn’t take away her brain, though. Her knowledge of what made vampires tick.
She grabbed the naked steel bar of her cage and jerked her hand along the sharp edge. The pain was intense but short-lived. It barely made her gasp. She felt her skin give way, though, felt hot wet blood well up across the creases of her palm. She flexed her hand over and over again, pumping blood out of her veins, until it was dripping on the floor of her cage.
The vampire’s head lifted and she looked around. As if something was calling her name.
“Did I say something wrong?” Clara asked, trying to sound innocent. “I was just asking about your parents because—”
“Hold on,” Hauser said. Her nose twitched. Vampire senses were sharper than those of human beings. Where blood was involved they were positively acute. Like a shark, a vampire could smell blood a mile away. “There’s something—I shouldn’t—”
Caxton flicked her wrist. Droplets of blood stained the foam rubber bars in front of her. A few of them sailed through the air and splattered the floor outside the cage. She flexed her hand a few more times and then brushed her palm against the bars, spreading even more blood all over them.
There was no apprehension in her, no fear that this wouldn’t work. It would definitely work. It would almost certainly get her killed, too. That was okay. She’d stopped believing she could end this neatly. She couldn’t see a lot
