“God will reward ye,” she said. “For ye have done His work.”
“Yes …” he said, finally. And his eyes drifted closed.
He was as thin as a fence post. His skin hung on him like a suit of clothing grown too big for his dwindling frame. Once he’d seemed enormous to her. Stronger than a lion. More fierce than a tiger.
No more.
“Yes. Rest yourself. Dawn will come soon, and ye will sleep.”
“Justinia … remember …”
“I remember everything. Master,” she said. She could not keep the sneer out of her voice, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I remember everything ye taught me. All of the orisons. All of the secrets. I remember how to stand in a fire without being burned. I remember how to draw the dead back from hell, and make them serve me, if I have tasted their blood. I remember how to hold men with my eye, and take away their minds.”
“And … the purpose …”
She placed one finger on her chin. “Purpose? Maybe I have forgotten one thing.”
His eyes snapped open again. But it was too late.
She had hidden a mallet in his lair while he was resting. A big ten-pound hammer, meant for breaking up houses. As he reared up in his coffin, reaching for her, she shattered his arms. Then his kneecaps.
His vampiric body could heal any injury—if it was given enough blood to fuel the transformation. But he had no way of getting blood now. It would take a long time for his bones to set themselves.
Until then he could do nothing but watch her, while she went down the line of coffins he’d protected for so long. Bolingen first. His creator. She pried open the bones of Bolingen’s chest—he was so decrepit she could do it with her bare hands—and plucked his heart out like a fruit from a tree.
Bolingen screamed, a noise she heard more inside her head than out. Vincombe gasped in sympathy.
She squeezed the heart in her hand until it burst.
Margaret next. Then Hoccleve, who had been Margaret’s father figure. His heart exploded in a puff of dust when she smashed it with the mallet. One by one she destroyed them all.
“There is not so much blood in this world,” she said when she had returned to Vincombe’s coffin, “that even one drop is left over to be shared. It is all for me,” she told him, the man she had thought was Death. The man who thought God gave him the gift of a new body, a new purpose. “I’m afraid ye need to go as well.”
“Ye … will … age too,” Vincombe gasped out. He was rolling from side to side in his coffin. He looked pathetic, like a turtle overturned on a beach, desperately trying to regain its legs.
She tortured him for years before she let him truly die.
18.
A lot of things happened all at once.
The Mazda hit the van right in its wheel well and the car’s lower front end screamed and deformed as it crumpled, one headlight exploding in a shower of glass as the two vehicles tried to fuse themselves together. The Mazda was too old to have airbags, so Clara was thrown forward against the steering wheel as her car came to a very abrupt—and not very soft—stop. The engine roared and then died, and Glauer’s head cracked against the windshield hard enough to sound like a gunshot.
For all that, the van got the worse end of the impact. It swung around on the road directly in front of the Mazda, its tires screeching and its back end fishtailing wildly. It was top-heavy and boxy and the driver must not have known to steer into the skid, because suddenly both wheels on the right side were off the ground and the van started to tip over. It fought a losing war with physics as all the energy of its previous velocity added to the energy of the collision sent it tumbling down the highway, rolling three times before it came to a stop. The noise and the vibrations were colossal and made Clara’s head buzz as she was thrown around in her seat belt like a rag doll.
Eventually things stopped moving, and she looked over at Glauer in the passenger seat. A line of blood crossed his forehead where he’d hit the windshield, but his eyes were tracking.
“I’m okay,” he said, a little too loud in the silence that followed the impact.
“Good,” Clara said. She felt like hell herself. The steering wheel had caught her across the chest and she could already feel bruises rising there. Her neck felt like someone had tried to shoot her head out of a slingshot, and she was terrified she might have whiplash.
“We need—to—go grab the half-deads, see what—what they have to say for themselves,” she said, clamping her eyes shut to cope with a sudden wave of dizziness.
“Yeah,” Glauer said. “Yeah.”
“Just give me one second to, to—”
A wave of sleep washed over Clara and nearly dragged her under.
Crap. That was one of the signs of concussion, wasn’t it? But she hadn’t hit her head. Had she? She couldn’t really remember.
“Local cops are inbound,” Glauer said, very softly. It was an invitation. A very seductive offer. They could just sit still. Wait for the paramedics to arrive, and let the local cops clean up the mess. “Less than five minutes.”
“Yeah,” Clara said.
“Caxton wouldn’t, though … she would …”
“She’d already be punching a half-dead to bits,” Clara agreed.
They stared at each other for a second. Daring each other to give up. Daring each other not to.
Clara’s memories of Laura won. She unbuckled her seat belt and shoved her door open, then staggered out onto the blacktop. She would not let the half-deads get away. Not this time.
Thus resolved, however, she faced a new problem. She couldn’t see where the van had ended up. She had a very bad moment where she thought it must have landed on its wheels—and simply driven away. That they’d achieved nothing.
But then she saw it, or what was left of it. It had flipped into a drainage culvert on the side of the highway, upside-down and nose first. Its wheels were still spinning wildly as they tried to grab at the air. The rear door had been torn off, but she could see only darkness in its exposed cabin.
She reached down for her weapon and brought it up to a high ready position. Behind her she heard Glauer opening the Mazda’s trunk. Laura had kept a shotgun back there and Clara had never bothered to take it out.
They advanced carefully on the wrecked van, covering each other every step of the way. There was no sign of any half-deads around the vehicle, but they were crafty little bastards and you never turned your back on them unless you wanted to catch a butcher knife in your kidneys.
When Clara reached the back of the van, she pointed her weapon inside, then put one foot on the ceiling of the cabin, which was now its floor. No bony hand shot out to grab her ankle, so she threw a hand signal to Glauer and jumped inside. She could feel him behind her, his shotgun poised to blast anything that moved.
He needn’t have bothered. There were no half-deads in the cabin.
Just pieces of them.
Lots and lots of pieces. Arms and legs and rib cages. Organs and exposed bones, everywhere. No blood, of course, but the human body is full of other fluids, too, and these were splashed all over the walls of the van and dripped from the upholstery. Clara counted three heads. The eyeballs still rolled in the sockets and the teeth clattered together as if to bite at her, but they couldn’t reach.
A severed hand tried to crawl up the tilted bottom of the cabin, pulling itself along by its finger bones. Clara stamped on it until it stopped moving.
“Wow,” Glauer said behind her.
“Yeah.”
“What about the driver?”
Clara’s eyes went wide. She hadn’t considered him. The front section of the cabin was badly crumpled and the two front seats stuck up at odd angles. The windshield of the van was just gone. The force of the impact had broken the steering wheel off its pillar. She found the lower half of the driver right away—his legs were trapped under the collapsed dashboard. The upper half, though, was nowhere to be found.
“He must have been thrown clear
. Quick!”
Clara jumped back out of the van and followed its trajectory with her eyes. On the far side of the drainage culvert lay the parking lot of a grocery store, its lights so bright they ruined her night vision. She blinked as her eyes adjusted, then scrambled up the sloped side of the ditch and over the top, gasping for breath as her abused body refused to believe what she was demanding of it. She could hear her heart pounding as she clutched her weapon tight in both hands.
The driver—or at least, his top half—was crawling toward the lights of the market. His guts spooled out behind him, leaving a clear trail of how far he’d gone in just the few seconds since the impact. Pulling himself along on his hands, he kept glancing back toward Clara, as if he honestly thought he could get away.
He must have flown fifty feet when the van crashed. He’d covered another twenty feet under his own power. After being chopped in half.
“Stop, now!” Clara shouted, but he ignored her and kept crawling.
She started running toward him, but she kept slipping on the slope of the ditch. Eventually she managed to get clear and made a beeline right for him, shouting as she ran. “Stop or I’ll shoot your arms off! You’re wanted for questioning. Stop immediately!”
“Questions? I don’t think so,” the half-dead yelled back at her. Then it rolled over on its back and reached up to its face with both hands.
She was still twenty feet away. Too far to stop him.
At first Clara thought he was just going to scratch at whatever remained of his face. The way half-deads always did.
But then she realized she was wrong, that he had something completely different in mind. And she started dashing toward him as fast as she possibly could, even knowing she would be too late.
With a sickening persistence, the half-dead grabbed his own lower jaw in both hands and tugged and yanked and pulled until it snapped off.
You couldn’t get a lot of answers out of a suspect who couldn’t talk.
[ 1745 ]
Alone at last, and it was glorious.
No distractions. No obligations. She moved all the time, staying ahead of her pursuers. She covered her tracks well. Justinia used the orisons when she needed to, but relied more often on human stupidity to hide herself from those who would destroy her.
In Nottinghamshire there lived a man who fancied himself a great hunter of vampires. This because he had stumbled on a coffin in the bright light of day, and plucked out a still-living heart. He became a local hero, and was even given a stipend by the Crown for his good works. Justinia tore his arms off and let him bleed to death in a village square while terrified farmers watched. A waste of good blood, perhaps, but that night she visited half the houses in the village and reminded the people inside of what they were: a foodstuff for more powerful creatures.
In Leeds she was nearly caught by a mob with torches and long knives. They chased her up to the top of a church. Up on the lead roof they held her at bay, thinking that if they could keep her penned in until dawn they could destroy her.
She fought like a demon. They threw themselves on top of her, seemingly heedless of their own lives. She clawed and bit and tore them to pieces, their stink all over her, their blood flowing in runnels down the lead roof of the church, pooling in its gutters. When it was over she stood alone. She went to the belfry and rang the church bell over and over, laughing, calling, “Bring more, bring more! I’d have a sweet course to end my supper!” No one else came. She slept that day in the church’s crypt, daring them to come find her. Drunk on their blood. When night came once more she had sobered enough to make a quick and quiet exit from the town.
A witch met her on the road in Scotland two years later. The old woman offered no threat, nor asked Justinia to spare her life. There was something odd about the air that night. Even the crickets seemed to hold their breath. Justinia longed to take the witch’s blood, but for once reason got the better of her.
“Ye’re not what you seem, are ye?” she asked.
The witch said nothing. But her eyes never left Justinia’s face, and her lips never stopped moving. She was whispering something, some chant or spell.
Justinia fled into the woods. She would never find out just what trap had been set for her, but from then on, she avoided any human who could work magic, and perhaps match her orisons.
As for the rest of the human race—they were fair game.
The blood. The blood was everything. Food and fuel. Joy and felicity. It filled her empty veins, suffused her skin with a pink glow. It made her strong, made her invulnerable even to musket balls and steel rapiers. It made her body sing, made her brain fizz in her skull.
She did not notice at first when it stopped working as well.
Had she been paying attention, she would have realized that she was taking more risks. Haunting more and more houses every night, wandering farther from her coffin as she sought out travelers on the roads and shepherds sleeping amid their folds. There had been a time when one victim in a night was enough to quench her thirst. Now it was two or more, or she would feel starved and mad the following night. Soon enough she had to have three men die at her hands every time she rose from her coffin, just to feel the strength she’d come to take for granted.
When the blood hit her tongue, when it jetted hot and red all about her, such questions of logistics and mathematics seemed quite abstract.
There came a time, however, when she could deny it no longer.
Her perfect, immortal body was starting to falter.
19.
The local cops arrived only a few minutes later in a great wash of red and blue light and the howl of sirens. Dozens of uniformed officers descended on the drainage culvert, weapons drawn and covering anything that moved.
Glauer waved his USMS ID over his head—holding it high in case any of the locals got trigger-happy and shot at him—and called out that all was clear. The local sheriff suggested he go get stuffed, that he wasn’t going to declare the scene clear until his own people were damned sure it was clear. “Which means you got so much as a squirrel down there with evil intentions, you better let me know.”
“Ah,” Clara said. “Our reputation precedes us.”
Back before Laura got arrested, the three of them had been the core of the SSU, the special subjects unit of the Pennsylvania State Police. Back then vampires had been all over the news—especially after what happened at Gettysburg—and they had received every manner of cooperation the local cops could provide, whether that be manpower, forensics labs, or just a place to sleep all day after a long night’s vampire hunting.
The cooperation had been freely given by smiling men who looked good on camera. It had been a prestigious thing to help the SSU.
Then the bodies started piling up.
Sometimes the only way to fight vampires—and it had been so ever since the Middle Ages—was to throw armed people at them until they couldn’t stand up or fight back. Jameson Arkeley had known that, and he had been personally responsible for dozens of local cops getting killed. He’d accepted those losses, because the vampires went down, too.
Laura Caxton had been a little gentler on the local manpower. At first. In Bellefonte, when she’d tracked down Jameson Arkeley himself, she had overseen an operation that left that local copshop almost unmanned.
The smiling men who looked good on camera had stopped shaking their hands after that. The SSU had the highest loss rate of seconded personnel of any working group in the history of the Pennsylvania State Police. Soon when you heard the SSU were coming to your town, you made a point of giving all your favorite people the day off.
Even now—when vampires were supposed to be extinct—the locals were afraid of them. They weren’t too thrilled about Clara and Glauer, either. They formed a perfect perimeter around the upside-down van and the two Feds, officers covering each other to both the right and the left, ready to shoot with or without a direct order. The sheriff stayed just outside of that circle, standing on the hood of his ow
n vehicle where he could see what happened.
Clara and Glauer knew the drill. They sat down in the tall, dusty weeds of the culvert and kept their hands visible. In a vampire investigation, even federal agents were subjects of interest until they were officially cleared. More than once, a cop who should have been somebody’s best friend, even somebody’s partner, had turned out instead to be a half-dead wearing his uniform. Or even worse, it could be a half-dead who still looked like their friend. It could happen that fast, the victim of a vampire being called back from death to serve his master.
Inch by inch the circle of local cops closed in on them. Taking their time, the uniforms kicked at the weeds, drew beads on suspicious shadows, and generally exhibited the kind of paranoia that could keep a cop alive.
Good for them.
It gave Clara and Glauer a chance to talk, anyway.
“Fetlock won’t like it. You know him—he’s been taking credit for years now for eliminating the vampire threat. If we turn up real, solid evidence that Justinia Malvern is still alive and active, he’ll—”
“He’ll shit bricks. Then he’ll tell us we were wrong. That our eyes were playing tricks on us,” Clara said. “That there can’t be any more vampires, because he knows for a fact that the last vampire died in that prison. And what Fetlock knows to be a fact must be true.” She scrubbed at her face with both hands. Then stopped abruptly, because it was the kind of thing a half-dead would do. One of the local cops might have heard that half-deads were sometimes called the Faceless, and would get the wrong idea. Carefully, she put her hands back up in the air.
“We do have it, though.”
“Have what?” Clara asked.
“Real proof. Solid evidence. Those were half-deads, no question about it. Maybe there’s some sicko out there with a fetish for zombies, and maybe he might dress up like a half-dead sometimes. Paint his face and so on. But nobody human could pull himself to pieces like this.” He nodded at the van, which was still full of body parts. “And even if he did, the pieces wouldn’t keep wriggling.”
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 9