32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5

by David Wellington

  Which was not to say she didn’t cheat with the cards.

  It had not been easy for the Malvern widow and daughter to stay out of the workhouse. Without a man to support them they had fallen on untraditional occupations to pay the rent and keep food on the table. They had both learned quite early that the world was not fair, and that there was no reason that they must be fair to it in turn.

  Justinia’s partner dropped the knave of hearts, a strong lead. The man to his right, a tinker who smelled of grease and road dust, threw the nine. Justinia played the queen, preserving her king because she knew that the tinker’s partner couldn’t beat her play. She had used a little sleight of hand to appear to shuffle the cards, while in fact merely arranging them so that she knew everyone’s hand. The deck, in other words, was stacked—though in such a careful, apparently haphazard way it would take a true master of the game to see through her ruse.

  At the ripe old age of seventeen, she’d already learned how much better it was to be clever than lucky.

  She took the trick, and the next two, but let the tinker and his partner have enough that when she won it did not look like more than skillful play. The tinker scowled, but just then her mother came down the stairs wearing little more than a nightdress. Mama looked tired, but she waved for the tinker to follow her back up.

  Another game began with new players. Another guffaw when the ceiling began to creak. The sound was carefully timed to draw attention away from Justinia’s shuffling. She and Mama were getting very good at this gimmick.

  By the end of the night she’d garnered seven shillings from the game, while Mama had earned as much upstairs. As she packed the cards away and rose to blow out the candles, she found the tinker waiting for her by the door. “I’ve tupped the dam, now I’d sample the filly,” he said, with a leer that showed missing teeth.

  She pretended to be shocked and nearly slammed the door in his face, but he held up a pair of shillings and she let her eyes go wide.

  “Ye’d bid so little?” she demanded. “There is one thing every girl possesses which she may only sell once. She should ask a proper price, at least.”

  The tinker’s smile did not change, but one of his eyes screwed up in doubt. Still, he doubled his offer. After a little more protestation, Justinia threw the door open and welcomed him back inside.

  Though she hadn’t actually kept count, it was probably the hundredth time she’d sold her maidenhead. She lay back on the bed and pretended to be in pain while in her head the cards spun and fell across the table, the pips so black and red.

  3.

  It hurt to run—Clara’s jaw felt like it was floating loose inside her head, and every time it bumped into the rest of her skull it sent a new jolt of agony down her neck. Yet she poured on the speed as her attacker raced across the road and into an empty field on the far side. Dry, dusty weeds slithered across Clara’s pant legs as she followed, all the vegetation stained gray by the light of the crescent moon. It was dark in the field and she might have lost her quarry if not for the buzzing orange sodium lamps of the nearby highway. The yellow sweatshirt he wore was a patch of slightly paler light in the gloom, and she focused on hurrying after it, her legs pumping as she hurtled over the uneven ground.

  Ahead lay a picket fence stained with mold. He vaulted it with his good arm, barely pausing to look back and see that she was still after him. When she reached the fence herself she climbed over it and dropped to a crouch in the shadows of the far side. He could have been waiting for her there in ambush, and she very much wanted to avoid another beating.

  She saw no sign of him. Nor did she hear his footsteps running away. He had to be close, she thought.

  Beyond the fence lay the back lot of an auto parts store. The chassis of a rusted-out car hunched low in the weeds that sprang up through the broken concrete. A pair of hulking Dumpsters stood against the back of the store, a pool of shadows between them that could hide anything. Clara trained her weapon on the space between the two Dumpsters and tried to calm her breathing. She couldn’t hear anything over the beating of her own heart.

  The only smart thing to do in a case like this was to go back to the convenience store and call it in. Give the local cops the best description she could and let them chase the bastard. But Clara knew the chances of them ever finding the guy were slim. She hadn’t seen his face and she couldn’t even say if he was white, black, or Asian. He might have left fingerprints all over the convenience store, but fingerprints were only useful in identifying people who had been in jail or the armed forces, and even then it could take weeks to get a match.

  If she was right about the assailant’s identity, she would have less than a week to catch him and question him. And there were a lot of questions she wanted to make him answer.

  She had a small flashlight on her belt. Fumbling it out of its holster with her left hand—right hand still gripping her pistol—she flicked it on but held it low down at her side. She didn’t want to give her position away if she didn’t have to. Duckwalking to the side to get a better angle, she flicked the light up so that its beam speared the shadow between the two Dumpsters. Two eyes reflected the light like tiny lasers and she gasped in surprise. She hadn’t expected that to work—

  —and it hadn’t. The eyes belonged to a feral cat, which stared back at her as if wondering why she had interrupted its dinner.

  “Sorry,” she breathed. Then jumped again, as the door of the rusted-out car behind her flew open and the yellow sweatshirt bolted out of it, into the alley on the far side of the store.

  Clara cursed and jumped up to run again. She bolted around the corner, her weapon held out away from her body, barrel pointed at the ground just like she’d been taught. She shoved the flashlight into her pocket as she came around the front of the store and saw her attacker standing at the curb, looking one way, then the other as if he intended to cross the street.

  Except the street was a four-lane highway, and every few seconds a car went rocketing past at sixty miles an hour.

  “Stop there,” Clara called out, in her best cop voice.

  Yellow Sweatshirt looked back at her, his face still hidden by shadows. Then he ran right out into traffic.

  Clara threw herself forward, but a lifetime of conditioning kept her from entering the street. She got as far as the curb and found herself wobbling back and forth as if she were standing on the roof of a building looking down at a twenty-story drop. She could see her attacker darting side to side as he crossed one lane, then the next, while car horns blared and headlights made bright trails across her vision.

  Laura would have run into traffic to pursue the bastard. Laura was fearless, Clara told herself. Laura would have—

  She heard the squeal of air brakes and the deep, chest-shaking blare of a truck horn and looked up. She saw Yellow Sweatshirt staring into the lights of an oncoming semi. For just a split second she thought she saw the look of horror on his face as he edged back and forth, trying to decide which way to jump.

  He didn’t have time, regardless of what he decided. The truck plowed into him at seventy-five miles an hour. Or rather, the truck plowed right through him. His body didn’t crumple. It wasn’t dragged for half a mile on the truck’s bumper. When it hit him, he simply disintegrated, turning into a cloud of flesh and bone fragments like a water balloon when it’s pricked with a pin.

  The truck slowed to a stop, far too late.

  The horror of it barely registered on Clara’s mind. She couldn’t think about that, not when she finally knew, for certain. In that split second when the attacker had been lit up by the truck’s lights, she had seen exactly what she’d suspected. He didn’t have a face. The skin on the front of his head had all been clawed away, scratched off by his own broken fingernails.

  He had been a Faceless. A half-dead.

  The un-living servant of a vampire.

  4.

  “I’m okay,” Clara said, as Glauer poked at the fresh bruises on her jaw. “It’s not broken.
Ow! I said I was okay!”

  “I’ve already sent for an EMT crew. They’ll look you over, make sure you’re alright,” Fetlock told her. “Then you’re looking at a mandatory seventy-two hours of recuperative leave.”

  Clara stared up at her boss, trying very hard to mask the pure hatred she felt for him. U.S. Marshal Fetlock was a by-the-book kind of guy. The kind of guy who believed that if something wasn’t in the book, it didn’t exist. This wasn’t the first time he’d tried to screw up a case by insisting on protocol.

  “Sir,” she said, “with all due respect. This is a lead we have to follow up on. It’s the first clear sign we’ve found in two years that Malvern is still active.”

  “It’s nothing of the kind. Justinia Malvern died at SCI-Marcy. She’s not the one we’re looking for.” Fetlock folded his arms and stood up, breaking eye contact. He was done with the conversation.

  Clara was still sitting on the curb, exactly where she’d been when her team came for her. The state police—who still owed her a few favors—had blocked off the highway and set up road flares so she could see. In the two hours it took Fetlock and Glauer to arrive, she’d already collected several dozen bone fragments and scraps of the yellow sweatshirt and begun to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  A puzzle missing most of the pieces. She’d found no part of the dead thing’s head, much less its face, and unless she could prove that it displayed the classic pattern of faceless self-mutilation, she had no real evidence of her theory.

  And she was going to need real, tangible proof. Fetlock’s own theory, that Malvern had died in the prison riot two years ago, was flimsy at best. The body they’d recovered, which he claimed belonged to Malvern, had been burned beyond recognition. It had been missing one eye and it was dressed in the charred remains of Malvern’s clothing, true. But Laura Caxton, the disgraced vampire hunter and Clara’s former lover, had left them a message saying that Malvern had faked her own death, and was still out there. She had then escaped from the prison and gone on the lam, with the stated intention of finding Malvern and ending things.

  Fetlock had secured the prison—by the book. Which meant hundreds of women had died or been seriously wounded, but none of his own team had been hurt. For handling the situation and for finding Malvern’s “body,” he’d been promoted and given charge of his own special unit tasked with hunting down and capturing Caxton, now a fugitive from the penal system. Clara and Glauer were not members of that unit—nobody really trusted them to arrest Caxton if they found her. Instead they’d been left to their own devices, in a kind of paid retirement. They were permitted to follow their own leads and do all the detective work they wanted, though Fetlock never followed up on the clues they found. Clara suspected he only kept them around because he expected Caxton to get back in touch with them, and he wanted to listen in on that phone call. So far he’d been disappointed in that hope.

  Clara and Glauer both hated Fetlock, for very good, if personal, reasons. They both kept working for him because he was their only chance to close the case. To find Malvern—and Caxton—and put this gruesome chapter of history to bed.

  “Sir, the man I chased showed the classic signs of being a vampire’s servant. His face was gone. Scratched right off his head. He did not bleed when I shot him. When I find a piece of his arm with evidence that I did, in fact, hit him, that will clinch it. But the fact that he was turned into pulp by the truck collision, and that there isn’t a single drop of blood on the road at the collision site—”

  “Special Deputy Hsu,” Fetlock said, in that slow, smoldering tone that meant he wasn’t listening to a word she said. “The man you chased couldn’t be a half-dead. Half-deads can only be animated after a vampire drains their blood. They rot away very quickly—on average, they last less than a week following their animation.”

  Clara fought the urge to roll her eyes. She didn’t need a lesson in the facts of undeath. But she knew better than to stop him midrant.

  “Since the last extant vampire was killed two years ago, it’s quite impossible that this subject,” he went on, gesturing at her mosaic of bone fragments, “was a half-dead. He would have rotted away long, long ago. I don’t have an explanation for why there’s no blood on the scene. But I don’t need one. Clearly you were mistaken. You only saw the subject’s face for a moment and in unusual lighting conditions. I don’t have to point out how easy it is to make a misidentification in those circumstances. What you’re claiming is impossible. And once we rule out the impossible, the improbable, however unlikely, must be the truth. J. Edgar Hoover used to say that.”

  Clara’s eyebrows drew closer together. She couldn’t resist saying what she said next, as much as it might hurt her. “Sherlock Holmes, you mean.”

  Fetlock shook his head and laughed. “No, no, no. Holmes’s famous line is ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’”

  Clara squeezed her eyes shut. She might have laughed out loud if Glauer hadn’t touched her jaw again. “Ow! Stop doing that. Sir. U.S. Marshal Fetlock, sir. I need to follow up on this. Just let me run some tests. That’s what you hired me to do.”

  “Seventy-two hours of mandatory recuperative leave,” Fetlock repeated. “Those are the rules. I’ll have the local sheriff’s department come down and collect evidence here. They’ll check it out for you. If you like, I can have them send you the results of their inquiry—but only after you’ve finished your recuperative leave.”

  “Yes, sir,” Clara said, unable to suppress a sigh.

  Fetlock wandered off to talk to the state police on the scene. Probably to compliment them on what a fine job they’d done setting out the road flares in exactly the approved pattern. Clara buried her head in her hands and tried not to cry.

  Glauer poked her in the side.

  “Jesus!” she shrieked, sitting up again. “Did you not hear what I said? He kicked me right there. And yes, it hurts!”

  Glauer didn’t apologize, but his eyes were so full of concern she couldn’t help but relent. He was a big man, very broad through the shoulders, with a bristly mustache and a mouth that was always frowning. He looked exactly like what he had once been—the best cop on a local force in a town that never saw much crime. He came from Gettysburg originally—a place that owed a lot to Laura Caxton. Like most people who met her he’d been sucked into the vortex of her intensity, her driving need to destroy the vampires. Now, like Clara, he was still working Caxton’s last case for her, because she had taught them you couldn’t just give up when it came to vampires. That you couldn’t stop until you were sure they were dead.

  Glauer was a good man. He loved Caxton, in a very complicated way. A sort of messed-up mix of hero worship and religious awe—the way some people thought about their favorite sports heroes. He liked Clara like she was his own daughter, even though he was only about five years older than her.

  “Laura used to tell me, if it hurts, it’s still working,” he said. “And if you’re not bleeding, you can still work.”

  “She also used to tell me that she and I would be together forever and that I meant more to her than killing Malvern,” Clara pointed out.

  Glauer’s face didn’t change. The Laura Caxton he idolized was allowed to lie, if it could help her track down more vampires.

  Clara sighed again. “It was a half-dead. You believe me, right?”

  Glauer shrugged. “Enough that I want a copy of the sheriff’s report. You want a ride home?”

  “No, my Mazda’s still parked over there at the convenience store. I don’t want to leave it here overnight.” She struggled up to her feet. For a second she looked down at the bone fragments she’d been playing with, but she knew there was no longer any point in trying to make sense of them. “He’s going to screw up this lead,” she said. “Fetlock’s good at that.”

  “He keeps his people safe. Most of the time. That’s not the worst thing you can say about a boss in law enforcement.”

  Clara nodded. She knew that was true. “Caxton always tried
to protect people. But she understood that sometimes you have to take a risk.”

  Glauer had no reply to that. “Listen, I talked to the locals. They felt pretty bad about you getting attacked. They should have found that guy when they originally taped off the convenience store. Apparently when they went back in, after you chased him off, they found some ceiling panels had been moved in the bathroom. The guy must have been hiding in the ceiling the whole time they locked down the scene, then while you were working. Maybe he thought the cops had finally left, or maybe he just got bored with waiting.”

  “It would be a lot easier to hide up there if he was a half-dead,” Clara pointed out. “They don’t get stiff from sitting in a cramped position all day. They don’t even breathe, so if he just kept still they wouldn’t have heard him.”

  Glauer nodded, accepting this. “They finally got done checking out the store’s security tapes. Your guy was definitely the one who killed the clerk. They’ve got footage of him walking in there and beating the guy to death—and then tearing the security camera off the wall. What happened after that is anybody’s guess. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about chasing him into traffic. We have proof he was a killer.”

  Clara’s eyes went wide. It had never occurred to her to feel guilty. That was weird. Of course, Laura had taught her you didn’t need to feel guilty about killing half-deads, since they were evil, soulless abominations.

  If it turned out that her attacker had been, as Fetlock seemed to think, just a regular human being—

  “Wait a minute,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  Clara had that prickling feeling she got whenever things didn’t add up. She shook her head as if she could knock the mystery loose. “There’s … something weird here. Half-deads don’t drink blood. The guy I chased was the killer, but there was no blood on the scene.”