in the gloom, so she reached down to see what had made that sound, but—
Malvern hit the door like an enraged sledgehammer. It shattered in its frame, chunks of wood and broken glass bursting through the tower room like a vicious rain. Caxton sat down hard, the stun gun held up in front of her as if it would do any good at all, and braced herself for an impact. But it didn’t come.
The doorway was empty.
“Oh shit oh shit,” Caxton breathed, because she knew what that meant. Malvern had destroyed the door just as a distraction. In point of fact, she would be behind Caxton, sizing up the back of her neck.
Caxton scrabbled upward as cold fingers brushed her spine. She swung around and threw herself behind the searchlight.
Malvern howled in joy. She bent at her knees, getting ready to pounce.
Caxton switched on the searchlight and hauled it around by its handle. A light as intense as a million candles hit Malvern right in the face.
Vampires are creatures of the night. They do not do well in bright light.
Malvern’s single eye burst and ran down her cheek as white goo. She screamed in pain and rage and her arms lashed out, smashing again and again at the lens of the searchlight, shattering the bulb inside and warping the metal reflector out of shape. It didn’t matter—the light’s work was done. Malvern was blind.
“Do ye think this matters? Ye’ve bought ye—yourself a second’s grace, that’s all,” Malvern growled.
“All I need,” Caxton said.
Malvern’s eyeball was already growing back, white smoke filling in the cavern of her eye socket. She didn’t even need the eye to track her prey, Caxton knew. She could smell Caxton, could hear her as she stepped backward.
Caxton raised her pistol and fired three times into Malvern’s rib cage. Right into her heart.
She had expected the pistol to fail. That its firing pin had been filed down or that there would be no bullets in the magazine. When she’d found it on the belt of the dead CO, she had been unable to believe her luck. A gun. Right where she needed it. Right when she needed it. It was too much to ask for. It had to be a trick.
The bullets tore through Malvern’s undead lungs, her sternum, and her heart. She screamed and thrashed and howled, crawled across the floor toward Caxton, her fingers reaching for Caxton’s ankles, her monstrous jaws snapping at thin air. But the red light in her fully healed eye was already going out.
The vampire dropped to the floor, suddenly very small. Very compact. Caxton thought she could pick Malvern up with her one good hand. Strange to think a creature that could do so much damage would ever come to look like that. She was dead. Caxton fired the rest of her bullets at point-blank range into the monster’s chest, into her heart, just to be sure. “Finally,” she breathed. It wasn’t the most profound thing she could say, she knew, but it was all she had strength for.
Then she closed her eyes and wept.
But not for long.
Another puzzle piece clicked into place. A gun, loaded with real bullets, exactly when it was needed the most. The half-dead who killed the CO hadn’t bothered to take it away. Even though every other gun in the prison had been carefully, methodically ruined.
There had been a package of sticky foam in the SHU, when Caxton needed it. Even though sticky foam was experimental and was banned from use in prisons until the kinks could be worked out.
Doors had been left open in the prison, doors that should have been locked. Oh, not the doors she had hoped would be open. But enough that she’d been able to move around relatively freely.
It hadn’t been easy, not at all. But then—if it had been easy, she would have seen through the game right away, wouldn’t she?
She bent down over Malvern’s corpse and studied its face, ran the fabric of the mauve nightdress through her fingers. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But something felt wrong. Something was wrong.
Then she got it. All at once, the puzzle put itself together in her head.
“Smart,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Always so smart.”
She saw the whole game now, from beginning to end.
And she knew Malvern had won.
60.
By five o’clock in the morning the fires had all been put out.
The vast majority of the prisoners were back in their cells, grumbling but more or less happy once the Feds started handing out food and coffee. A few were unaccounted for. The white supremacists barricaded in the cafeteria were still making demands, but it sounded like they were arguing among themselves in there and there was no place for them to go. A SWAT team of hostage negotiators had assured Fetlock that they could resolve the situation peacefully.
Up on the wall, Clara looked down at a prison that was as close to being back to normal as she could hope for. A lot of people had died, and a lot of people had suffered. But it was over.
Kind of.
Five o’clock. Clara checked her watch again. This was it, the end of the twenty-three-hour deadline. An hour still to go before dawn. By now she was supposed to be dead. She shuddered at the thought.
Fetlock and Glauer came up the stairs huffing and puffing.
She had called them and said there was something they needed to see. She wasn’t sure how she should present it, though. As the team’s forensic analyst, it had been her job to look at all the bodies, including Malvern’s. Fetlock didn’t seem to know what he expected her to find, but it was part of any investigation that you checked the bodies afterward, and he was a man who did everything by the book.
“She was here,” Clara said, when they looked at her expectantly. “Laura. I mean, Caxton. This is where she left the prison.” A makeshift rope had been dangled over the outside of the wall, tied at the top to a window of a watchtower. The rope looked like it was made out of nylon restraints buckled together, and it was more than long enough to reach the ground. “Most of the police units were inside the wall at that point, and the ones outside were busy at the main gate rounding up attempted escapees. Caxton could scale the wall here and run into those woods without being seen. She’s had at least a couple hours to get away.”
“I’ll find her,” Fetlock said. “The U.S. Marshals Service is good at that sort of thing, at least.”
Glauer looked sharply at their boss, but he didn’t say anything. What could he say? Laura was a fugitive from justice now. If she had returned to her cell and just waited for the cops to arrive, maybe all could have been forgiven. She could have served out the rest of her sentence quietly and then been released. But now she was a problem, and she had to be hunted down and arrested again, prosecuted again. Given a whole new sentence. Fetlock was never going to just let her go. He wasn’t that kind of man.
“Why did she run?” Glauer asked, confused. “I don’t get it. She was done! The vampires are all dead. Why would she make more trouble for herself?”
Clara knew that Glauer had personally been responsible for killing Forbin. He had been leading a SWAT team when they found two persons tangled up in a coil of barbed wire, apparently trying to struggle their way out. He’d had the presence of mind to realize that one was dead and the other was a vampire, and he had dispatched the latter without much fuss. Sometimes you got lucky.
Clara cleared her throat. “This isn’t actually what I wanted you to see. The vampire’s corpse is in the tower over here.” She led them toward the tower, working out her next words precisely. “I’d like to have a pretty serious autopsy done on the warden.”
“Why?” Fetlock asked. “You made a positive identification based on her clothing and build. This looks like a closed case to me. Do you know how badly I want this to be a closed case, Special Deputy Hsu?”
“Yes, sir. No more than Special Deputy Glauer or I do, I’m sure. The warden’s body was almost
