It was what she would one day become.
The body in the coffin had been human once. Then it had been more than human. For a while. It had pointed ears. It had the rows of wicked teeth. It had been like her. But it looked nothing like her otherwise. Its paper-thin skin sagged on its bones. Its white flesh was mottled with sores and blemishes. Its mouth hung permanently open, in the eternal rictus grin of a skull that has surrendered to time.
There were twelve coffins in Vincombe’s lair. Each held a dead thing, more rotten and decayed than the last. No, not a dead thing, because she knew they were still alive, if trapped in those faltering carcasses. She could hear their thoughts like whispers in her mind, like the sound of cards shuffling together for one last hand at the end of a long night’s dissipation.
“These are your ancestors, Justinia. Your family. This one is Bolingen. He created me to replace him when he grew old. Beyond him lies Margaret, who was like a mother to him. And so on. For more than a thousand years, the creatures in these coffins have served as the angels of death. They understood duty. They knew purpose.”
“They’re disgusting,” Justinia spat.
They are wise. I come to them when I need their counsel.”
Justinia shook her head in negation. Wise counsel? She could hear what they were thinking. What they were saying, over and over. Blood I must have blood blood give me blood where is the blood bring me blood.
It was the only thought in any of those rotting heads.
If Vincombe thought they still believed in his self-appointed role, his sacred duty, then he was fooling himself. Unless he couldn’t hear their actual thoughts. Unless …
“If ye will not accept the purpose I laid out for you,” Vincombe said, “then there is still something thou canst do. Something to justify your existence. Ye will feed them. Ye will gather blood, and bring it here. It is done like this.”
He crouched over Margaret’s coffin. She stirred within, though her muscles were so decayed she could barely lift her head an inch. Vincombe smiled down at the ancient mummy and then opened his mouth wide. His chest and stomach seized as he forced himself to vomit up the blood he’d drunk that night. It splattered across Margaret’s face, only a little of it getting in her mouth, though she twisted and rattled around trying to drink more.
With loving hands, Vincombe cleaned her, sweeping every drop of the regurgitated blood into her gaping mouth.
“This will be your purpose,” he said, shaking. Spent. “When I must lie me down in eternal wakefulness—for so must we all, one day—you will come and you will feed me. Just as others will come to feed you, in your time.”
Justinia’s eye went wide. He couldn’t be suggesting—but—ah, yes.
For the first time she saw the wrinkles around his eyes. The slenderness of his arms and legs, as if his muscles were beginning to wither away.
Vincombe was getting old.
She was too consumed by her own plotting and scheming to think that it would happen to her as well. Someday.
For now—this was information she could use.
“I humbly accept this burden,” she said, because it was what he wanted to hear.
16.
Clara hurried out into the parking lot, heading straight for her Mazda. If Glauer followed her, she decided, she would refuse to talk to him at all. It didn’t matter if he apologized for what he’d said, or even if he promised to help her find Laura. You just didn’t get to talk to people like that, not ever, and—
She nearly missed the van.
She had never been a true cop. She had started out as a police photographer and just recently become a forensic specialist. So she didn’t have the kind of instincts most cops developed, the kind of observational skills that became second nature after a while. But she had been a damned good photographer in her day, and the van was ugly enough to offend her sensibilities. It was a big black number with a scene of wolves howling at the moon airbrushed on its side, and not well. It was enough to make her turn up her lip in disgust. The kind of vehicle she and her friends in high school would have called a Molester Mobile.
It was sitting near the exit of the parking lot, and it might have belonged to a cook or a baker working in the back of the restaurant. But that didn’t explain why the van’s sliding side door was open, or why its engine was on.
She tried to do two things at once. She turned around quickly, intending to shout for help. She might not be talking to Glauer just then, but he was still a cop and the kind of guy who could intimidate the hell out of any would-be rapist. The second thing she tried to do was reach for her sidearm.
Bony hands stopped her in both endeavors. One wrapped around her mouth and she tasted dry, dead fingers as they slipped between her teeth. Another hand grabbed her wrist before she could even unbuckle her holster.
“Don’t move. Don’t say anything,” her attacker said, behind her. He had a high-pitched giggling voice she knew all too well. “We’re not going to kill you—yet.”
We, he said. Suggesting that there were others nearby. She had walked into a very nasty trap. And she knew exactly who had laid it for her, and just how bad things could get, and just how fast.
“That’s right. We’re going to take a little ride. Stay quiet and I won’t hurt you very much. Heh.”
Clara thought of two more things to do. This time she was more successful.
She twisted her wrist inside the skeletal grip that kept her hand away from her holster. The assailant’s fingers slipped down over the thicker part of her hand and lost their viselike grasp. Instantly her hand was free.
The other thing she did was to bite down very hard on the fingers in her mouth.
During her time studying to be a forensic analyst, she had been required to take at least one self-defense class. She had signed up for all four that were offered, and gotten straight A’s.
The assailant behind her screamed. Human teeth could, under stress conditions, bite right through the small bones of human fingers. Half-dead fingers were far less sturdy. The joints in her mouth separated at the knuckles and her mouth was full of dry, bloodless flesh. She desperately wanted to spit it all out—but not quite yet.
The quick-release catch on her holster came open with a pop and she filled her hand instantly with her Glock. Spinning around on her heel, she fired point-blank into the attacker’s chest.
He went down in a heap. A slim male, mid-twenties, wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Just like the one she’d chased out of the convenience store, the one who got smashed by the semi. This one was in bad shape, but there was no way Fetlock could deny he was a half-dead.
All he would have to do was take one look at the bastard’s face.
Or lack thereof.
Cooked spaghetti was the first thing that always came to mind when Clara saw one of these things. The second thing that came to mind was that she never wanted to eat spaghetti again. Half-deads were unnatural creatures, tormented by their own undead existence. They expressed that anguish by scratching at their own faces with broken fingernails until all the skin came off. What she was looking at was exposed muscle tissue, drained of blood, stretched thin over the man’s skull. His eyes swam like rotten oysters in a mass of twitching, stringy flesh. His lipless mouth stretched sideways in a grimace that showed off all his teeth.
He screamed for mercy, clutching his mutilated hand to his wounded chest. His voice was so high and squeaky it hurt her ears. She kicked him in the face and he shut up. That was something else they’d taught her at the academy. Always wear sensible shoes.
He’d said there were others. She took a step back toward the diner, scanning the parking lot, looking for any sign of another attacker. Behind her she heard a little bell ring and she nearly discharged her weapon in panic.
It wasn’t a half-dead behind her, though. It was Glauer. He didn’t say a word. He just moved to cover her with his own weapon.
“There’ll be more,” she said. “I don’t know how many.”
&n
bsp; She peered through the dark at the van, trying to see if there were any of them inside. She thought there might be someone in the driver’s seat, but it was hard to tell.
“Okay. Move forward, slowly. Our target’s that van.”
“Got it,” Glauer said, quietly.
They took it one step at a time, back to back, covering each other, keeping perfect firing arcs that covered the entire parking lot, just as they’d been trained.
It didn’t occur to Clara to look up.
“Anything?” Glauer asked.
“No, I—”
Her response was cut short as something sailed through the air toward her, moving far too fast for her to jump out of the way. Time seemed to slow down, so she had a perfect chance to see a big sharp kitchen knife come toward her, tumbling as it flew. She tried to turn sideways and managed to catch the knife in her hip. It went right through her skirt and pierced her skin, then fell away to clatter on the ground.
She couldn’t help herself. She cried out and fell to one knee.
Glauer was already on it. He spun, his handgun gripped in both hands, and fired at a dark shape on the roof of the diner. The shape exploded in a cloud of bone fragments and screams. Instantly three more shadows detached themselves from the side of the diner, over by the Dumpsters, and raced toward the van.
Glauer fired twice more, winging one of them and nearly taking its arm off. Clara tried to bring her own weapon up, but before she could aim the half-deads jumped in the van and it went squealing off into the night.
“Are you hurt?” Glauer demanded. “I’ll call for an ambulance, we’ll—”
“No fucking way are we sitting here waiting for backup,” Clara said. She hauled herself back up to both feet. She could stand on her injured leg, and that was good enough. She grabbed her car keys out of her pocket and ran toward the Mazda. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve seen the way you drive. We’re taking my car.”
17.
“This is a bad idea,” Glauer insisted, as she threw the Mazda into gear and sent it hurtling out onto the road.
“Seat belt,” she said.
He did as he was told.
She was bleeding all over her seat. The gash in her hip wasn’t deep, but it felt big. No time to do anything about that. She stamped on the accelerator and tore after the van, which she could just barely see ahead of her on the road. Its lights were off, but its paint job was darker than the dusty two-lane, so it looked like a massive shadow trying to escape the moonlight.
“Fetlock will have a hissy fit when he hears about this,” Glauer told her.
“Maybe he’ll have a stroke and we’ll get a new job. Would you please call this in already? It’s illegal in this state to use a cell phone while driving, or I’d do it myself.”
Glauer grunted unhappily, perhaps at being reminded of how to do his own job. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, then had to fumble with it for a while since he had removed the battery. Eventually he got it working. “This is Special Deputy Glauer with the U.S. Marshals. I am currently in vehicular pursuit of a late-model van, black with a painted mural on the side, headed northeast on the Washington Pike. Requesting all available assistance.”
Ahead of them the road wound through a brightly lit shopping mall. Clara could see the van better now and had eaten up most of its lead. She was only a few dozen car lengths behind. The half-dead driving the van was pushing it to its limits, but the top speed of a van could never beat the top speed of the Mazda. They would catch up, and very quickly.
The problem was—what then? Clara had never taken a class on vehicular pursuit. She had no idea how you were supposed to make an unresponsive subject pull over. Maybe she should have let Glauer drive after all.
She gritted her teeth. The wound in her hip was starting to hurt. But she was damned if she was going to let them get away now. Laura wouldn’t have given in to that kind of self-doubt. She shoved her foot to the floor and willed the car to go faster.
Apparently the half-deads knew they couldn’t get away—not without playing dirty. Ahead of her the back door of the van swung open and flapped back and forth like the wing of a wounded bat. Inside she could see the half-deads grabbing on to anything they could to keep from falling out. One of them leaned out the back and threw something into the air.
It came arcing toward the Mazda’s windshield and Clara flinched sideways as if to avoid it, but she managed not to swerve as it smacked into her car. “What the hell was that?” she asked. She’d been too focused on the road to get a good look.
Glauer didn’t answer right away.
“What are they throwing?” Clara demanded again.
“It was—it was an arm,” he said.
Clara’s eyes went wide.
“Back at the diner I shot one of them in the arm. You know how they just come to pieces when you shoot them. He must have torn his wounded arm free and thrown it at us,” he said. He sounded like he was about to lose his lunch.
“Keep it together,” Clara said. “We need to—”
She stopped as a leg still wearing a hiking boot smacked against the windshield and a long crack shot through the glass.
“No fucking way,” she said. A silently shrieking head came sailing through the air toward her and she involuntarily swerved to avoid it. “Glauer—they’re tearing each other apart in there!”
“I guess … they have nothing else to throw at us,” he told her.
“Do something!”
The big cop turned to look at her, but she didn’t dare look away from the road long enough to make eye contact. “Like what?” he demanded.
“Lean out the window and shoot at them, duh,” she said, bracing herself as another leg bounced off the roof of the Miata.
“Are you kidding? This is a heavily populated area. It’s a shopping center on a Saturday night—there will be hundreds of civilians around us,” he said.
She flicked her eyes sideways and saw they were passing by a huge fabric store. There were plenty of cars in its lot—he was right. Any stray bullets he fired could potentially end up in that store, or the sports bar across the street. Damn it, she thought. Laura would have done it anyway. She would have been very careful with her shots, but she would have taken them.
Jameson would have just blasted away and not cared. Then again, Jameson Arkeley had ended up turning himself into a vampire, all the better to fight them. And that had not ended well.
“Fine,” Clara said. A once-human arm hit the road and the Mazda bounced as they rolled over it. “Fine, don’t shoot—but think of something else. How long did they say it would take our backup to arrive?”
“Ten minutes,” Glauer told her. “Tops.”
Clara shook her head. “Too long. We need one of these bastards intact so we can beat some information out of him. In ten minutes they’ll be all over the road. Or the driver will just pull into some side road with no street lamps and we’ll lose him. What else can we do? Come on, you’re a real cop. You must know something about car chases.”
He was silent for a second. Then, in the tone of a man at the very end of his rope, he said, “PIT maneuver.”
“What?”
“PIT maneuver. It stands for ‘precision intervention technique,’ though I was told the acronym originally came from ‘push in tire.’ It’s how you stop a fleeing car. When absolutely nothing else will work.”
Clara ducked involuntarily as an entire human torso came at her. It bounced off the side pillar of the Mazda, where the windshield met the side window. The thump it made deafened her for a second. “Is it dangerous?” she asked.
“Yeah. Very dangerous. This car’s too low, and the van’s center of gravity is too high. But it’ll work. I just don’t know if we’ll come out intact.”
“Screw it,” Clara said. “Laura wouldn’t think twice.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Okay. Pull up parallel to the van, with your front left wheel even with his rear right wheel. Match their speed as best you c
an.”
Clara did as she was told. The van tried to veer away, but the Mazda was far more maneuverable and she matched its motions. The half-dead hanging from the back of the van, the one who had been throwing body parts, reached out and tried to grab the Mazda. He lost half his fingers in the process. They went skittering and bouncing along the roof and side of the car, reminding Clara of the sound a tree branch makes when you don’t quite clear it. The half-dead pulled back in agony—but then returned with a severed arm, which he used like a club to try to smash in Clara’s window.
“What now?” Clara demanded. “Tell me what to do!”
“Establish contact with the side of the van, lightly as possible—you don’t want to wreck us with a bad sideswipe. Then, just when you make contact, swing the wheel hard to steer right into the tire.”
“That van has to weigh four times as much as this car,” Clara said. “That’s crazy, we can’t possibly hope to—”
“Now!” Glauer said, as the Mazda touched the side of the van with a horrible squeal. Then he grabbed the steering wheel and shoved it over, hard.
[ 1739 ]
“It’s alright,” she told Vincombe. “Shh. Just lay back.”
“I … can still … walk,” he insisted, as she pushed him back into his coffin. “I can … go out. My work …”
“Your work is done, master,” she said, and gave him a warm smile.
She’d been practicing it for weeks.
“No,” he breathed. But he could not resist her hands. She held him down against the silk lining of the coffin and eventually he relaxed. Eventually he succumbed to the great weariness that must be dragging him down. Every night he needed more blood just to stay on his feet. Every night it was such a chore, bringing enough victims to him. Enough to satisfy his hunger. And every time she had to come up with some pretext as to why God wanted the victim to die. Why it was a good thing, a noble thing that he drink from their veins.
She was bloody tired of it.
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 8