Glauer marched her forward, into the clearing. She didn’t take much prodding. She knew she was sunk. She lifted her hands carefully over her head. Normally she would have put them behind her head with her fingers laced together, but she didn’t want Glauer thinking she was grabbing for the shotgun. He walked her between two trailers, then told her to stop when they were still ten yards from the advanced position of the SWAT teams. A dozen guns were pointed at her all at once.
“All this for one subject?” she asked.
Nobody answered her.
“Is that you, Glauer? I’ll expect a full report,” Fetlock blared. “Alright. Hand her off to Sergeant Howell.”
One of the SWAT troopers moved forward, his carbine pointed right at Caxton’s face. He used his free hand to grab her by the neck and shove her head down, then let his weapon fall on its strap so he could cuff her hands behind her back. “Down on the ground, on your face,” he ordered. She complied. He searched her thoroughly, then shackled her feet, too. She did not try to get up.
Four more SWAT troopers came forward. They lifted her at her upper arms and her thighs and carried her forward, her face still looking down at the ground. She didn’t resist, nor did she try to go limp. They had ways of dealing with people who resisted, even passively, and she did not want to get capsicum swabbed into her eyes. She’d been exposed to pepper spray often enough in her life already. They carried her for some distance, then she heard the doors of the paddy wagon clang open, and they threw her inside. Steel benches ran along either side of the back compartment of the wagon, with attachment points for various kinds of chains and shackles, but they didn’t put her in a seat, they just laid her on the floor on her stomach and left her there as if they were afraid to touch her any more than that. They did not slam the doors shut behind her.
For a very long time nothing seemed to happen. She couldn’t see anything, even when she dared to look up. The back of the paddy wagon was pointed at the road out of the Hollow, and there was nothing out there but the dust the cops had raised on their way in. It still hadn’t settled. How much time had passed since they arrived? A few minutes at most. It felt a lot longer.
All around her she heard radios bleating and men talking in low tones. She knew what was going on only because she recognized what it felt like. This was the calm after a major operation, the time when cops were just milling around, still expecting a drugged-up lunatic to take another shot, still ready for anything, but also knowing that nothing was likely to happen. The moment when peace had been restored but nobody really believed it. A lot of things had to happen in that time. Perimeters had to be established and secured and double-checked to make sure they were secure, and then approved by superior officers. Casualties had to be counted, assessed, tended to, and removed from the scene. (Glynnis, she thought. Now Glynnis had proved to have some guts.) Every detail had to be squared away, recorded, and then relayed back to headquarters so people there knew their people in the field were safe.
Only then, after all that, would Fetlock even dare to step outside his mobile command center. She knew exactly where he would go first. So she was not surprised when he walked around to the back of the paddy wagon and stared down at her.
She expected him to gloat. He did not. This was a major get for him—she’d been a fugitive for two years, and her capture would remove a major blot from his record. But he didn’t look particularly happy. He looked like he was still waiting for something else. Maybe he wanted her to cry, or show some sign that he’d truly beaten her. Or maybe it was something more.
“I’m secured,” she told him, as if she were still a cop. As if he wanted her report. “Are you going to take me back to jail now?” she asked. She didn’t feel like she had the energy left to make a threat or bluster at all.
“Not yet,” he said, and nothing more. He nodded at someone she couldn’t see, and the doors of the paddy wagon were shut, leaving her in the dark.
Something was wrong. Something was going on.
She had no idea what it could be.
36.
The defense of the Hollow collapsed all at once. The men dropped their guns and the women drew back toward their homes, where their children were waiting. The windbreaker cops moved quickly through the tiny village, this time letting the SWAT troopers cover them. Witchbillies were rounded up with textbook efficiency, their hands bound behind them with plastic cuffs. They were marched into the clearing and their names checked off against a comprehensive list.
“Say what you like about Fetlock—and I’ll add some choice expletives myself. But he knows how to keep his own hide intact,” Clara observed, while she waited to find out what her own fate would be. She had come out of the trees with Urie Polder as soon as the immediate threat had passed. Now she was sitting with Glauer, their backs up against the mobile command center, their hands always in clear view. None of the cops were actively covering them with weapons, but that could just have been professional courtesy, or simply that all available law-enforcement units had better things to do.
The windbreakers moved quickly through the bungalows and trailers, gathering up the women with their children. Families were allowed to stay together but everyone had to be accounted for. That was just standard practice. The Hollow had presented an armed resistance to the police raid. You didn’t leave any potentially dangerous holdouts in their homes—somebody could always do something stupid, and a cop could get hurt.
Every gun in the Hollow was gathered up, logged, and checked off another list. Rounds were ejected from chambers (and logged on their own forms), plastic trigger blocks were inserted, and then the guns were sealed in plastic evidence bags. They were piled up inside the mobile command center in a padlocked cabinet. Other potential weapons—everything bigger than a paring knife—were identified and similarly stockpiled safely away.
The one casualty of the raid, Glynnis, was put in a body bag and hurried away so nobody could see her. So her death couldn’t inspire anyone to decide to start the fight all over again. Clara was grateful for this. She knew she wasn’t completely to blame for Glynnis’s death. The woman had been resisting arrest against two highly armed and alerted SWAT teams. It wasn’t like she’d been an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire. And Clara had had no idea that calling out to her would break her concentration, or what would happen then.
Still.
It was going to be a long time, if ever, before she forgave herself. That woman had been alive. She’d had a life, a community, probably friends and family. And now she was dead. If Clara had kept her mouth shut, things might have turned out differently.
She tried to distract herself by wondering how this had all gone down. There were no answers immediately available, so she turned to Glauer to see if he had any ideas. As the witchbillies were herded into the circle of cop cars, Glauer just watched it all, occasionally nodding to himself as if he were confirming some deeply held intuition.
“What is it?” Clara asked when she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Huh?”
She sighed in exasperation. “You’re thinking something. I know you well enough to see your brain working.”
He shrugged. “We led Fetlock here, right? Pretty good scheming on his part. When we fought those half-deads, when we had real evidence, he made his move. He fired you. Yanked me off the case.” He shrugged again. “He knew what direction we would jump. Straight toward Caxton.”
“Yeah,” Clara said, her cheeks burning. They’d acted so predictably. And as a result Caxton had lost her freedom. Having seen what Caxton had become, Clara figured that was probably a good thing. But she really didn’t like how she’d been used.
“Sure, that all makes sense,” Glauer went on. “But one thing keeps bugging me. His intel is too good.”
“What?”
Glauer nodded at a man standing a dozen yards away who was working his way down a printed checklist. Other cops were piling up various weird objects in front of him—cattle bones
inscribed with tiny hex signs. Bundles of feathers. Sticks made out of dried sage, gathered tightly together and tied with twine.
“He knew exactly what he would find here. He’s got a list of names, names of everybody in this village. Even though these are people who live off the grid. Half of them probably don’t have birth certificates. But he knows their names. How?”
“What are you suggesting?”
Glauer shrugged one more time. Then he clucked his tongue. “We didn’t give him those names. He needed us to bring him here, but he already knew enough to—”
“All will be explained,” Fetlock said.
Clara jumped awkwardly to her feet, keeping her hands out in front of her. She had not seen the Fed coming toward them—it was as if he’d just appeared out of thin air. “Marshal,” she said.
“Ms. Hsu.” Fetlock wasn’t looking at her. He was too busy scanning the clearing, visually inventorying the various efforts he’d organized, perhaps. “Officer Glauer. I’d like you to come with me—I’m about to interview Urie Polder. If you’re useful to me in that interview, I promise, I’ll let you in on the big secret.”
Clara turned to Glauer and they exchanged a puzzled look. That wasn’t like Fetlock at all. He never let anybody have the whole story.
As if reading their thoughts, Fetlock went on. “You both still have a role to play here. That’s why I haven’t arrested you yet. And it’s why I’m willing to be frank. Now. Come along. We have a lot to do before the sun goes down.”
[ 1863 ]
Reb or Yank—it made little difference to Justinia.
She had profited well from the Chess boys, and never once had they complained of their lot. She had felt something akin to affection swell inside her breast for Obediah, her latest swain, as he took up the curse and became her knight protector. With burning eyes and skin the color of the moon he had stalked the war-torn fields, bringing back to her that which she required, and for two years she had regained a little strength, grown a little bolder. Thought, perhaps, that the future might not be so entirely bleak.
But war has a way of upsetting dreams, and bringing reality back to those who flee it. She was unable to sit up enough to watch Obediah hang, or the insults the Yankee boys imposed on his body. She did not see them take him away.
But she knew it was over.
She was discovered in time and brought away from the ruined house, startled as they moved her to see how far her mansion had fallen into disrepair. She had heard the guns, of course, and the screams of dying men. She had not realized Virginia itself could be wounded so—the fields untended, the woods allowed to grow gnarled and thick where once they’d been cleared away for agriculture. They took her to a little plain room and a soft bed, and there they made their schemes. She was barely aware what the Union spy asked of her, barely conscious when they brought their soldiers in, one after another, each more hideously wounded than the last in body or in mind. She knew they wanted to use her strength to end their war.
It meant so very little to her.
Time had changed its complexion for Justinia Malvern, nearly two hundred years after her birth. Years flashed by like the phases of the moon. A thought once begun could reach its conclusions after a full decade had passed. She was losing a war with eternity—not the way that mortal humans lost it, in some sudden flash of pain and light and then sudden darkness. No, this was a war of attrition.
With each day there was a little less of her. A little less of her beauty, a little less of her sharp mind.
If she was going to live forever she would have to stop relying on the kindness of lovers. If she was to be immortal, she needed to start thinking. Start plotting on her own.
And she was determined that she would be immortal.
She was not without resources, even at that late date. She could command the dead—her own dead, the victims of her knights, even. She could raise them from the soil and make them do her bidding. It was simply an act of will, an imposition of desires on minds no longer able to defend themselves. And if she still possessed one quality, Justinia Malvern had an iron will.
She called on her half-deads. A wagon was summoned. A daring escape by nighttime, and she was gone.
She would not learn what happened to the army of vampires for another century. She never bothered to inquire. It didn’t matter. They’d each given her some little quantity of their blood. Their strength.
As the wagon headed west and her coffin jounced and rattled in the back, she savored the taste of them. Savored her schemes and her imaginings. Yes, a new life, a life out on the frontier, where gunslingers mowed each other down in the high streets and the bodies were dragged off in smears of blood, spurs still spinning on their boot heels. A new life. A new life.
Any kind of life at all.
37.
Fetlock led the two of them toward the trailers that surrounded the clearing. Outside one of them stood a sentry in full body armor—one of the SWAT troopers from the raid. He had his face mask off and Clara saw he was a young man, barely more than a teenager, with a wispy mustache. He also had two different-colored eyes. One was a piercing pale blue, but it wasn’t as arresting as it might have been, since his other eye was golden. Not hazel. Not a human eye at all. It had the golden color and the vertical slit pupil one expected in the eye of a snake.
“Trooper Darnell,” Fetlock said, holding out a hand for the man to shake, “these are Clara Hsu and Special Deputy Glauer. For the moment, at least, he’s still a special deputy. Ms. Hsu used to be one of my employees, but she has since left the Marshals Service. They’ll be with us on this interview.”
Darnell nodded but didn’t say a word. His carbine hung from his shoulder, the barrel pointed at the ground, but Clara knew he could swivel it up to a firing position at a moment’s notice. He looked like the kind of guy who practiced such moves— snake eye notwithstanding.
Fetlock turned to Clara and Glauer. “Trooper Darnell is an excellent field officer, but he has served me in quite a different capacity recently. I trust him implicitly, and I intend to make him a full member of the special subjects unit with all the commensurate ranks and privileges. Now. Come inside—our subjects are already secured and prepped. Hopefully they’re feeling communicative.”
Darnell threw a hand signal and two more SWAT troopers came over to flank the door. They weren’t acting like guards outside a temporary holding facility, but more like raiders preparing to breach a hostile structure. Clara was more confused than ever.
When Fetlock opened the door of the trailer, nobody jumped out at them with homicidal intentions. The Fed went inside, followed by the rest of them. Clara let her eyes adjust to the gloom inside the unlighted trailer and then looked around. It was a cramped space decorated only sparsely, with a dream catcher hanging on one wall and a shelf full of books taking up most of the living area. The tiny kitchenette was designed to fold up into the wall when not in use. It was folded down now, revealing a narrow table flanked by two benches. Urie and Patience Polder sat on one bench facing the door, crammed together in the narrow space. Patience’s hands were bound behind her with a plastic restraint cuff. Urie Polder had been secured with actual handcuffs, one cuff cinched down as tight as it allowed to hold his bone-thin wooden arm. The Polders looked fatigued but unhurt. They did not look up as Fetlock approached them.
Darnell stayed near the door, facing everyone in the small space. Fetlock squeezed into the unoccupied bench, facing the Polders, then gestured for Clara and Glauer to come stand next to him. It was a warm day outside and the air inside the trailer was stifling. Clara could hear the roof of the trailer ping in the sunshine.
“Mr. Polder,” Fetlock said, folding his own hands in front of him on the table, “you’ve violated a number of laws, and I’m afraid I can’t offer you much leniency. The charges against you are minor, for the most part. Tax evasion, possession of illegal weapons in the third degree, child endangerment, harboring a fugitive, resisting arrest … but they add up to
a pretty damning pattern. There will have to be jail time. Your daughter, on the other hand, is a minor. It’s possible I can convince the district attorney to show clemency in her case.”
It was Patience who responded. She hadn’t seemed to pay attention while Fetlock was talking, but suddenly she gasped and looked up with frightened eyes. “Father, that man by the door—”
“I feel it, baby girl, ahum,” Urie Polder responded. Then he laughed.
It was not a particularly mirthful sound he made. It was more the laugh of a man who sees that his leg is caught in a bear trap in the moment before the pain registers. “A man in a mask. We all just assumed you meant some manner of half-dead. S’pose I shoulda asked what sort of mask.”
Patience was staring at Darnell.
“What is it?” Clara asked, even though she knew it wasn’t her place to speak. She squatted down next to Patience and looked the girl in the eye. “Do you know that man?”
“A few nights ago, a man came to my window and peered inside while I was sleeping,” Patience told her. “He wore a mask over his face. A—a gas mask, I believe they are called. It was that man. I’m quite sure of it.”
Darnell didn’t move or react. Clara turned to look at Urie Polder. “They’ve been spying on you? But how did they get through your spells? Simon said there was no way anyone could get into this valley without your approval.”
“Lest they had their own counterspell, ahum,” Urie Polder assented. “That man there, he’s got the eye of a snake, you see it?”
“Yes,” Clara replied. “I—of course I see it.”
“Only ’cause he wants ya to.” Polder shook his head sadly. “I’ll bet he can hide it, as he likes. He’s got some strong virtue in him, that one, ahum. You. Fella. Where’d you get that serpent eye?”
Darnell surprised Clara by speaking in almost exactly the same accent and dialect as Urie Polder. “They’s plenty o’ Pow-Wows in this state, you know which rocks to turn over ya can find ’em,” Darnell said. “My pappy was Alphonse Darnell, you know that name?”
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 19