“And wherever there are half-deads, there are vampires. Yeah.”
“So Malvern is back, and active. Even though we haven’t seen one sign of her in two years. Even though she hasn’t so much as left a single victim where we might find them.”
“That just means she’s been careful.”
Glauer nodded. “Which she’s known for. So. With all that established, we have one burning question we really need to address.”
“Oh?” Clara asked. She shifted her weight around—her butt was falling asleep. It turned out to be a mistake, as it agitated the bruises all over her body and opened a few cuts that had finally stopped bleeding. Adrenaline had gotten her this far, but she knew that very soon she was going to crash. “What question is that?”
“What we’re going to do about it.”
Clara sighed. She inclined her head toward Glauer’s shirt pocket. His cell phone was there, with its battery in place. And as long as the phone had power, Fetlock could listen in on their conversation.
“Only one thing we can do about it,” she said. “We tell Fetlock everything. Lay out all the evidence, give him what we know. And let him make a decision about what to do next.”
Glauer grunted in response. Then he took his phone out of his pocket and ejected the battery. “What’s the real answer?” he asked.
“We find Laura. We find her, and we help her end this thing. We find her and we do everything we can to help her kill Malvern, once and for all.”
20.
At that particular moment, Laura Caxton desperately needed help.
Patience Polder had asked her about the birds and the bees.
“I understand this is not your … particular field of expertise,” Patience said. “That is, the ways of men and women on their marriage night.”
Behind her, one of her acolytes—the red-headed girl with braces, whose name was Tamar—laughed behind her hand. Her cheeks turned the color of her hair.
“Yet you must know something of what happens. You must have heard stories from your friends, and other women of your same age. You know, women who—well. I don’t wish to say normal women, which would suggest that—”
“Straight women. You’re asking if I have any straight female friends who got married. And yeah, pretty much all of them. Pretty much all of my friends from high school. A couple of them already have kids. A couple of them are already divorced.”
“So you must have heard whether the bridegrooms still carry their helpmeets over the threshold. I always found that custom so romantic. The bride so transported by the ecstasy of her new life that her feet must not be allowed to touch the ground, lest she lose some of the joy, lest she stop feeling as if she was walking on air …”
Patience had spoken of very little other than marriage since Simon Arkeley had come to the Hollow. That didn’t mean she slacked off in her duties—just that she turned every chore into an opportunity to further discuss the blissful state of marital union.
It made Caxton slightly ill. Still, when Patience had asked if Caxton was coming on one of her “herb walks,” Caxton had agreed without question. Every few days Patience Polder took a long, meandering walk through the woods around the Hollow—up and down both sides of the ridge, down into the shadows at the bottom of the valley. She took along a basket, a pair of dainty pruning shears, and an incredible knowledge of plants and their proper uses.
For Patience it was a chance to gather magical herbs and plants to use in her rituals, and also a time to teach her disciples about the local flora. For Caxton, it was a chance to check the perimeter with the best tracker in Pennsylvania. Patience didn’t miss anything. If a tree branch was broken or a stand of flowers stepped on anywhere in the Hollow, Patience would find it. It was one more guarantee that no one was sneaking closer to the house on the ridge.
“The wedding gown is white, of course, and most will tell you this is a token of the bride’s virginity. In fact, she wears white for the same reason this small flower does,” Patience said, kneeling down in the mossy forest floor and breathing gently on the white petals of a wildflower. The petals stirred in her exhalation and one, more delicate than the others, fell away from its stalk. Patience let it fall to drape across the ball of her thumb. She waited a long minute while the others just stared at her hand. Patience seemed totally unaware of the passing time. Caxton came close to tapping one foot to get things moving again, but the disciples wouldn’t have heard of it.
Eventually Patience turned her hand to the side, and the flower petal fell away. In its place it left a red mark on her thumb, the same size and shape exactly as the petal.
One of the acolytes gasped. Becky, the fat, pimply one who thought her mother was a fraud, who, when she’d come to the Hollow, had told everyone at dinner one night that magic was bullshit and it didn’t work. Caxton had had high hopes for that one. Then Becky had entered Patience’s orbit and soon she was the most zealous of her devotees. The one who hung on her every word, and would defend her pronouncements with physical violence if necessary.
On the plus side, Patience had recommended some kind of oil that totally cleared up Becky’s acne.
“Poison aster,” Becky said, and Patience nodded. “It’s poison aster. So the bride wears white because … she’s poisonous?”
Patience laughed. Not at Becky—she was no sadistic teacher with a fetish for mocking her students. No, when Patience laughed at you she made it feel as if she was sharing the joke you just told. “Because, silly, she can’t be touched. In some cultures it means death to touch a bride’s hand before the ceremony is complete. But we must never consider the bride to be dangerous herself. Instead, like the flower of this small plant, she is utterly fragile, her joy and her virtue so delicate they must be protected no matter the cost.”
Caxton shook her head and stopped paying attention. The girl was getting insufferable. If Simon had actually been there, he probably would have—well, he would have run away in panic. Just like he had before.
Yet Patience hadn’t taken offense at Simon’s response. Not at all. She knew from long experience that people who lacked the second sight—those poor mortals who could only see the present, not the future—often rejected her prophecies on an emotional level. Even if they knew she was right, in the long run. And Simon didn’t even have a reason to believe that Patience could predict the future.
To her, his cold feet were just that. A momentary lapse in what was to be a long and grand career of being her man. She had no doubts that the two of them would be very happy together … eventually.
Caxton hoped she was right. If Malvern did go to ground—literally—it could be generations before she rose again. She could sleep in the earth as long as she wanted. Long enough for humans to forget there had ever been such a thing as vampires, unless—
“Don’t step there!” Becky said, suddenly, and Caxton nearly fell over in her surprise.
“What? What? Why? Am I about to step on some dittany-of-Crete or something? Maybe a choice mushroom?”
“Miss Caxton, please, just take a step back. Without disturbing the soil just before you, if you please,” Patience said.
There was a look on her face that Caxton didn’t like. A look of focus that had completely displaced the dreamy romanticism.
“Well done, Becky,” Patience said.
The girl blushed so hard Caxton wondered if maybe Becky belonged in her, Caxton’s, ah, well, um, particular field of expertise. It would explain why she’d taken to Patience so quickly. “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Does anyone in the Hollow wear those?” Patience asked. “You were a policewoman at one time. I imagine you always make a note of people’s footwear.”
Caxton slowly lowered her eyes to the ground as she realized what they were talking about. The herb walk had been following a path of trodden-down grass that wound through the woods of the Hollow, a trail so wild that it might as well be an animal track. No one but Patience could have followed
it. Yet there were clear, muddy footprints all over the flattened grass at Caxton’s feet.
She knelt beside the prints and studied them carefully. They were the kind of prints left by rubber-soled tennis shoes. Sneakers. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.” Most of the Hollow’s residents went in for hobnailed work boots—or open-tied sandals, or bare feet altogether. Sneakers weren’t really appropriate for the rural setting.
“What does it mean?” Tamar asked.
“It means there are strangers on the ridges,” Patience announced. Not, however, in the voice she used when she foretold the future. Just her usual commanding intonation. “Tamar, draw a protective hex sign around this print. I want very much to know who left it. Charlotte, Sunshine, and Claire-Ann, you three go and fetch me all the sage you can find, and some flowers of the hawthorn if any are yet in bloom, and something alive. Something small, preferably, like a field mouse. I don’t want this casting to make too big a mess.”
“What are you going to do?” Caxton asked.
“Try to see if the intruder left any of himself behind. Any psychic residue I might be able to read, you know.”
“Sure.”
“It’ll take some time. And it’s disturbing to watch,” Patience told her.
“That’s okay. I’ve got a strong stomach.”
The girl surprised Caxton then, by actually looking a little irritated. Normally nothing could faze the great Patience Polder. Her zenlike countenance never cracked. But Caxton was pretty sure she saw Patience’s eyes flash, just for a moment.
“We will have to—we must remove—for this ceremony we—”
“You’re going to go skyclad,” Caxton interpreted.
It was Patience’s turn to blush. What a red-letter day.
So the girls were going to get naked. And they didn’t want Caxton around. She had a feeling she knew why—it was, after all, her field of expertise—but now wasn’t the time to make a stink.
No. Now was the time to talk to Urie Polder about a certain something he’d been holding on to for years.
21.
She made it back up the side of the ridge in record time. Caxton had been all over these heights so many times she knew every step of the way, knew, usually, where the gravel of the road was going to slip under her feet, knew where the mud on the side of the road would be too deep to cross. She slipped between tree trunks that looked so close together a bird couldn’t have flown between them, hauled herself up a slope of scree because she knew which rocks wouldn’t give way when she put her weight on them.
In ten minutes she was up to the house, breathing heavy and a little scratched up but not complaining. She raced to the porch and checked her pile of guns. All loaded, all ready to go, just like she’d left them. She shoved one of the pistols down the back of her waistband and yanked open the screen door.
“Polder!” she called. “Polder! Are you here?”
She could just hear the high-pitched whine of talk radio coming up from the basement of the house. She ran to the door and saw light emerging from the edges of its frame. There were very few places anywhere on the ridge where Caxton wasn’t supposed to go, but this was one of them. Whatever Urie Polder got up to down in his basement, he didn’t want anyone seeing him at it. He’d been very clear on that.
She knocked on the door, but apparently Urie Polder was too preoccupied to hear her—or maybe he’d just turned the radio up too high. He was starting to go a little deaf, after all.
Caxton pounded harder and kept calling his name, but there was no answer.
There was also no more time. If there were intruders in the woods, and they’d managed to get past all of Caxton’s safeguards, then they could come for her at any time. Come for every man, woman, and child in the Hollow. The vampires could—
No. Not just “vampires.” She wasn’t just facing some random blood-munches. There was only one left.
The worst of the lot.
Malvern. The vampire who had taken away Caxton’s girlfriend Deanna. The monster who took away Jameson Arkeley. The bitch who drove a wedge between her and Clara, and made sure Caxton would never have a life.
“Urie Polder,” Caxton shouted, yanking open the door, “I hope you’re decent, because I’m coming down there right now.” She had half expected the door to magically resist any effort to open it, but no, it swung right open. Somehow that made it seem much more wrong.
“Polder!” she shouted, one last time. There was no response.
She headed down the stairs, past ancient and rusted tools hung up on the walls, past Mason jars full of nails and boxes full of old, oil-stained rags. Nothing all that creepy. Her own dad’s basement had looked like that.
However, her dad’s basement didn’t have the world’s largest hex sign painted on its floor.
Tourists in central Pennsylvania often bought “hex signs” from little craft shops in Amish country. They would take the brightly painted signs home and put them over their garages or in their living rooms. The better sort of tourist might actually take the trouble to find out what the weird combinations of birds and trees and stars on their hex sign actually meant. They would probably get some simplified description of which symbol brought good luck, which one health, and so on.
They would most likely not be told that the people who painted the original hex signs in America were immigrants from Germany, and that in German, the word hex simply means “witch.”
The hex sign on Urie Polder’s floor was twenty feet across. It was the real thing. No bright paint, no cheerful little birds in rows. Oh, there were birds, but they looked about ready to scratch somebody’s eye out. This hex sign showed trees blowing in strong winds, and a man pushing a plow while a team of oxen strained forward. Surrounding the figures were words in Latin and Hebrew, five- and seven- and eleven-pointed stars, symbols of the zodiac and of the planets and of alchemical metals. Around the edge of the hex sign were Bible passages written out in ancient Greek. Plenty of other symbols decorated the hex sign as well, most of which Caxton didn’t even recognize.
There was three hundred years of history in that circle. The history of people who’d come to Pennsylvania seeking opportunity and found coal mines and black lung. Of people who’d come for the state’s religious tolerance—only to watch the rest of the world move on without them until they looked like freaks. This was the history of a country where magic was supposed to be forgotten, where science was big business and big business was the only thing that mattered. And also of a country where people still read their horoscopes and went to storefront psychics to have their fortunes read and buried statues of saints in their yards when they wanted to sell their houses.
Sitting in the exact center of it was Urie Polder. He was not, thank God, skyclad. But he did have his shirt off, and she could see where his wooden arm attached to his shoulder. The wound that took his arm must have been horrifying to look at. Even now the skin there was red and irritated, torn to shreds that hung down in painful-looking flaps. The wooden arm wasn’t strapped to his body but instead sent out thick roots that burrowed into his flesh, presumably anchoring the artificial arm to his real, normal, bones.
He was facing away from her when she entered the basement. The radio was on loud enough to mask her footfalls—some right-wing pundit talking about how kids should be required to say the Lord’s Prayer every time they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, since they were basically the same thing. Caxton went over to the radio and switched it off.
Urie Polder’s head snapped around and he looked at her with bewildered eyes. He was breathing heavily and she realized she’d startled him. “I didn’t feel you come in, ahum,” he said.
Not, I didn’t hear you come in. Caxton understood the difference. “Your wards didn’t pick me up?”
He frowned, which was all the answer she needed. Then he reached for his white T-shirt and pulled it on over his wounded shoulder.
“She’s here. Or—or very close.”
“Yo
u sure about that?”
“Patience’s girls found footprints out in the woods. They’re casting some kind of spell over them now. But that already means somebody crossed our best line of defense—the teleplasm cordon—without setting it off. And if I can walk into your … your inner sanctum, here, without you being aware that somebody’s coming down the stairs, then—”
“They’s walking light, ahum,” Polder said, with a nod. He didn’t seem particularly concerned.
“It can’t be anybody else. Can it?” she asked.
Polder shrugged. “There’s always some way ’round magic. Even my magic. Could be anyone or anybody, if’n they knew the right countercharms. I haveta say, it don’t feel like her.”
“No?”
“Now a vampire, when she walks, she leaves a trace. A kinda foulness in the dirt. Makes things hard to grow where she set her feet. I don’t feel that just now.”
Caxton shrugged. “Alright, so it was a half-dead. One of her half-deads.”
“That’s as may be.”
“It doesn’t matter. We need to assume it is her, that she’s found us. Right?”
Polder didn’t disagree.
She wanted to get back to work. To make more preparations, to focus herself more on the task at hand. Yet there was something weird about Urie Polder’s basement. A sense of peace that she didn’t really feel, but which was … imposed on her. No, not that. It wasn’t so intrusive. But something about the big hex sign made her feel calm when she looked at it. “This sign,” she said. “It’s doing something to my head.”
Urie Polder laughed. “Nothin’ so sinister. This is my safe place. Ain’t much can get through these lines. Oh, it won’t stop bullets, or a rampagin’ monster. But the cares of the day, ahum. My worries. They stay outside, flutterin’ at the edges, wantin’ to get in, but they cain’t.”
“That must be nice,” Caxton said, though she was thinking how dangerous such a thing might be. People who didn’t have magic used drugs to feel that way. She shook her head. “Magic. I used to hear stories when I was a kid. My dad—he was a county sheriff—told me stories about things he’d seen out on dark country roads. But we never really believed, you know?” She thought of whom she was talking to. “No, you wouldn’t know about that. Outside this Hollow, people believe in science. Here it’s different.”
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 10