32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5

by David Wellington

  If she hadn’t known better, Caxton could have believed it was just an optical illusion. It had that feeling, that half-real sense of something seen out of the corner of your eye that can’t possibly exist. It could have been just a trick of the light.

  The night air grew thick, as if it was clotting around Caxton’s head. It became difficult to breathe.

  Laura.

  No one had spoken her name. It was all in her head. Yet she knew that voice so well. It was Simon’s father’s voice.

  Laura.

  “No,” Simon said behind her. “No, Dad. No! You’re dead!”

  His shrieking broke the spell. She hauled him backward, away from the trees. Her breath came back in a deep inhalation and she wiped sweat off her forehead. She turned and found Simon staring at the trees as if—

  Well. As if he’d seen a ghost.

  “Teleplasm,” she explained, though he hadn’t asked. “It’s what’s left behind when a spirit has pierced the veil of the living world and—”

  “Nobody says teleplasm anymore,” Simon interrupted, speaking softly. “It’s ectoplasm. Or better yet, ‘material psychic residue.’” He was still staring at the tree. The piece of teleplasm hung limp and lifeless once more. “I heard—he called my name, and asked me to—” Simon shook his head. He lifted his shoulders and turned away so he wasn’t facing the teleplasm anymore. “Ghosts.” He shook his head. “They’re not spirits, you know.”

  Caxton raised an eyebrow and waited for him to go on.

  “The latest theory is that they’re not dead people—that they’re not human at all. Instead they’re some kind of parasitic organism that feeds on human psychic energy. They’re mindless animals that somehow evolved a way to tap into our fears telepathically.” He closed his eyes and ran one hand over his sweat-slicked face. “God. That voice—it sounded just like my dad.”

  Caxton nodded. She remembered his uneasiness around the witchbillies, but she knew that wasn’t from lack of experience with the supernatural. “That’s right. You studied teratology in college. The study of monsters.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Caxton didn’t answer him directly. “A ghost can’t hurt you, not really. You can walk away from it at any time. It’s tougher than it should be, though, isn’t it? You want to believe what it’s saying. The person that voice belongs to is dead, you know that, but you want to hear their voice again. Some primitive part of you wants to believe it’s real, that they’re back.” She shrugged. “Vampires are even more susceptible than we are. Maybe because they’re more innately psychic than we are. A vampire wandering past these trees would get sucked in. Caught. Hopefully long enough that I could get the drop on them. Urie Polder and I have traps like this all over the ridge. We have other defenses, too.” She led him away from the line of trees and over to where a wooden post had been driven into the ground. A bird’s skull had been nailed to the top of the post, with a complicated hex sign painted in very fine strokes between its eye sockets.

  “That’s just freaky,” Simon said.

  “There’s a post like this every fifty feet in a wide perimeter around the valley. If you didn’t know they were here, you probably wouldn’t see them. But anytime something unnatural—a vampire, or a half-dead—crosses the perimeter, these things start shrieking. It’s an old vampire spell. What they call an orison. It was used on me once, and I assure you, it’s not a sound you ever want to hear.”

  “Magic?” Simon asked. “It’s bullshit.”

  “It’s real enough.”

  He shook his head. “Sure. But it’s unreliable. Too easy to counter. Any vampire worth her salt could just wave her hand and that skull would turn to powder. And if I’m right in thinking I know which vampire you’re after—”

  “There’s only one left,” Caxton insisted.

  Simon bent to study the bird skull more closely. “Justinia Malvern is a master at the orisons. She won’t fall for this.”

  “Maybe not. Her half-deads would, though. And she’s way too smart to just walk in here without some backup.”

  “You really think she’s going to come after you?” Simon stared at her in the darkness for a while. “You’re counting on it.”

  “She’s always had a certain fascination with me,” Caxton told him. “She likes to play sadistic little games with people. Your father learned that—” She saw him stiffen at the thought, so she relented a little. “Well. I learned that the hard way, myself. She wants to turn me into a vampire, just like her. Or at least kill me while trying.” Caxton sighed. “I guess when you’re three hundred years old and spend most of your time trapped in a coffin, you get your kicks where you can. I’m hoping that’ll be enough to draw her here. To where I can shoot her. But that’s the thing. I’m not counting on it. Because I know she’s smarter than that.”

  [ 1715 ]

  Hot blood everywhere. Great lashings of it, like a punch bowl full of the stuff spilled all over her. So wonderfully warm. The squelching horrible screaming pain was difficult to ignore, but—red—everything was red—

  —and then black.

  She heard her heart stop beating. She heard the perfect silence.

  And then. And then. So much.

  Her heart did not start beating again, no, but it convulsed all the same. It contracted with a rumbling growl. A desperate hunger.

  She opened her—eye. The other wasn’t there. It felt like the hole left behind by a pulled tooth. She understood this was proper, but she couldn’t exactly remember why.

  She stared up at her own ceiling. Flecks of blood still hung from the plaster. One droplet formed—she could see it with such exquisite clarsity—and then fell.

  Her body moved with incredible speed. Her head snaked to one side and her mouth—why did her mouth feel so strange?—opened wide. The droplet fell on the perfect center of her tongue.

  She went mad for a while then.

  She would not fully regain her mental faculties for another sixty-five years.

  12.

  Simon looked confused.

  “Most vampires, I know how to get to them. You cut your finger and flick a drop of blood at them, and it’s like a shark feeding frenzy. They stop thinking about anything but how good your blood would taste. That makes them stupid—pure, bloodthirsty predators. I’ve killed a lot of vampires that way. But Malvern’s smarter than the rest. I don’t know how she does it, but she’s got some way to overcome her instincts. The first time I met her, your father tried that trick on her, and she managed to just walk away. The last time I saw her, she had a chance to kill me. She had a chance to do anything she wanted to me. Instead she tried to use me—she tried to convince me I had killed her. She resisted her natural urge to kill me so she could fake her death—and it worked. Right now, the police think she’s dead.”

  “She is dead,” Simon insisted. “I mean, everybody thinks she’s dead. Everybody except you and Urie Polder.”

  Caxton grinned without merriment. “That’s exactly how she wants it. We were getting too close to her—I almost had her a couple of times. She knows how dangerous I am. There’s one trick she can pull, though, which will take me completely out of the picture.”

  “Oh? She has a way to kill you?”

  “Close enough. She can wait for me to die of old age.”

  He looked confused.

  “The smart thing for her to do right now is lie low,” Caxton explained. “She’s effectively immortal. As long as she doesn’t show herself in public the police will eventually forget about her. People will think vampires are extinct, and they’ll stop being afraid of them. If I’m not around to remind them how to fight vampires, they’ll never be ready for her when she pops back up. Twenty years from now—a hundred—it’s all the same to her. An eyeblink compared to the eternity she can live. She’s done it before, and she’s always come back … eventually.”

  Simon looked terrified by the prospect. Good.

  “But … she needs bloo
d,” Simon pointed out.

  “No. She wants blood, desperately. But she can live forever even if she never drinks another drop. She’s strong enough to handle the cravings, to control herself, for a long time. She’s strong enough to put aside whatever satisfaction she might get from killing me in exchange for her own safety. Now, if I had my freedom and unlimited resources, I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out where she’s hiding. I could scour every dark corner and musty old shed in Pennsylvania. I could spend years doing it. But that’s no longer an option for me. If I show my face outside of this ridge, I’ll get scooped up by the Feds right away. So instead I’ve built this very elaborate vampire trap—and I’ve laid my own plans for the future.”

  “Oh,” Simon said. “I think I know where you’re going with this, and—”

  Caxton wouldn’t let him derail her. “I know how to kill vampires better than anyone now living. I’m going to spend the rest of my life teaching the people in the Hollow how it’s done. I’m going to teach Patience Polder every one of my tricks. After I’m dead, she’ll teach others. Maybe her own children. And they’ll teach theirs. The point is, no matter how long Malvern goes to ground for, when she wakes up there’ll be somebody waiting with a gun pointed right at her heart.”

  “And you think that I can—that those children will be mine with Patience, and—”

  “You studied monsters in college. You’re a scientist who knows all about monsters. Don’t you see how that makes you perfect for this? You match up your technical knowledge with Patience’s gifts, and you’d make a hell of a team.”

  “Count me out,” Simon said. “That’s not what I want for my life.”

  “It’s not?” Caxton asked. She was a little surprised.

  “The last thing I want is to have anything more to do with vampires,” Simon told her. “That should be pretty obvious.”

  “A vampire killed your entire family,” Caxton said. “You don’t want revenge?”

  Simon rubbed at his eyes with the balls of his thumbs. “My father killed my entire family. My father killed my mother, and my sister, and even my stupid redneck uncle.”

  “No,” Caxton said. “Your father killed himself. His body came back as a vampire and did all those things.”

  “That means nothing! Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose everybody you’ve ever cared about?”

  “Yes, I do,” Caxton said.

  He stared at her. “I’ve spent the last two years in intensive psychotherapy. Just so I could function. I nearly flunked out of school. I can’t find a job. I don’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night. Every time I close my eyes I see—I see fangs. And those red eyes.”

  “Help me kill Malvern, and nobody else has to go through that.”

  “I don’t care! If she leaves me alone, she can live to be ten thousand and two, for all I fucking care,” Simon said. And then he turned on his heel and headed back toward the house. Maybe he intended to spend the rest of the night in his car rather than continue the conversation.

  Caxton stood out on the dark ridge and wondered what she’d said wrong.

  13.

  Eventually Simon got his car to start. There were more than a few shade tree mechanics in the Hollow—in rural Pennsylvania people knew their cars—but he refused any sort of help. He just sat there with his window rolled up despite the heat, turning the key again and again as the engine snarled and sputtered.

  Caxton stood next to the driver’s-side door and waited, thinking he would eventually change his mind and come back to the house to spend the night. After an hour had passed she recognized the stubborn streak he’d inherited from his father. She knew better than to try to butt heads with an Arkeley, honestly, but she was a patient woman.

  When even she had grown tired of waiting, though, she made a hand signal behind her back. Urie Polder went to the back of the car and kicked at the dirt there, disturbing a complicated pattern of thorns he had laid behind the car while Simon wasn’t looking.

  The car started on the next try. It sounded fine.

  Caxton knocked on Simon’s window until he rolled it down.

  “I am so out of here,” he barked. “Don’t try to stop me.”

  “I understand you need to go,” she told him. “I don’t blame you. Just—here. Take this.” She handed him a piece of paper. “This is the hardware I need.”

  He stared at the paper for a long time, as if his eyes could set it on fire. Eventually he grabbed it from her. “You have a lot of nerve, Caxton. Trading on my debt to you like this—it’s not cool.”

  She nodded in assent. “I never had any intention of making you do anything. I honestly thought you would want revenge. If that’s not the case, okay. But please. I need your help. I need you to get that stuff and bring it here. I can’t go get it myself.” She folded her arms on the sill of his window, bringing their faces closer together. “I saved your life, Simon, because I had access to all kinds of fun toys. Including Teflon bullets and high-powered guns. Right now I have none of that. I have a couple pistols and hunting rifles I could scrounge together. If Malvern showed up tonight, I honestly don’t know if I could stop her. You bring me the stuff on that list and maybe I’ll have a chance. Okay?”

  “Whatever,” he said, and pressed the button to raise his window. She had to yank her arms back to keep from getting them caught.

  A moment later and he was gone, rolling down the long gravel road in a plume of dust. Caxton watched him go until she couldn’t see his lights anymore.

  Then she went back to the porch, to sit by her pile of guns where she could watch the whole side of the ridge. And wait.

  Urie Polder came by a little later with a thermos of coffee. Some nights he would sit with her a spell, less for the sake of watching with her than for the cool breeze that came over the ridge in the evening. Most times they didn’t talk to each other—both of them were more comfortable with silence. This time, however, he asked, “You think that boy’ll come back?”

  Caxton shrugged. “Maybe. It may not matter. He may serve my purposes just as well by staying out there in the world.”

  If that confused Polder, he gave no sign of it.

  Caxton yawned. She reached for the coffee and poured herself another cup. It was going to be a long night. “We scared the hell out of him. He’s not going to keep this to himself. Oh, I don’t think he’ll go to the police. He’s too good a kid at heart to turn on me like that. But he’ll start talking, to somebody. Anybody who will listen. He’ll tell them all about the crazy cult of witchbillies out in the ridges, and how they’re obsessed with killing vampires.”

  “Ahum,” Polder said.

  Caxton nodded. “Eventually, that information will get back to Malvern. Somebody will tell somebody who will say something where somebody else can hear it. Malvern pays attention to this kind of thing—she’ll learn about my plans soon enough.”

  “And that’s what you want? For her to know everything you got in store?”

  Caxton let herself smile. “It’s exactly what I want. She can’t let it happen—she can’t let an entire new generation of vampire hunters get trained and raised for the sole purpose of destroying her. She’ll have to take action to stop it. Which means—”

  “Which means she has to come here, ahum.”

  Urie Polder looked frightened at the thought. Caxton couldn’t blame him. If Malvern came to the Hollow, there would be death, and maybe a lot of it.

  Caxton found that acceptable.

  [ 1721 ]

  Justinia had learned not to smile. Not when she wanted to put someone at their ease. The teeth tended to scare people.

  But there were so many subtler ways to toy with them.

  “Please, ma’am, I do not wish to die,” the little girl said. Tears streaked through the dirt on her cheek as Justinia held her face to the earthen floor of the little cottage. The flames that were already consuming the barn out back—and the bodies inside—danced in each of the little girl
’s tears.

  Amazing what one eye could see when it had been changed.

  Justinia could see the little girl’s blood. Not a drop of it had been shed yet, but even through that thin, fragile skin she could see the blood moving, throbbing through the tiny body. She could see the girl’s heart pumping in her chest, as if her flesh were made of glass.

  The thing in Justinia’s rib cage that was no longer a heart trembled in sympathy. How badly she wanted to rip this little creature open and suckle at her veins.

  “Ye wish to live?” Justinia asked. Normally her voice came out in a slurred growl, the words torn and rent as they passed over her wickedly sharp teeth. She had learned, however, to force her voice to sound soft and kindly.

  “I’d like to see my brother again, and my parents,” the girl squeaked.

  Justinia had to admire her composure. Usually when the hunt got to this point, the children could do nothing but scream.

  She was not unaware that she had once been the same age as this girl. That they had a great deal in common. In fact, she relished the jest of it.

  “But ye will see them, my dear. In heaven.”

  That was enough. The look in the girl’s face changed. This was the delicious moment that Justinia had sought, the moment when her prey realized the natural order of things. That she was going to die. That it was going to hurt a great deal. And that no one, no one at all, was going to come and save her.

  “Nooooo,” she moaned. “Noooooo.” Just like a cow. Like the live-stock she had become. A food animal.

  Justinia laughed—and smiled. All the better to show her great, big teeth.

  Enough.

  The word appeared in Justinia’s head as if it had been written across the back of her skull in letters of fire. She winced backward, releasing her hold on the girl. The girl still had the presence of mind to leap to her feet and run for the door.