Glauer frowned. “Malvern must have come with him. She probably can’t move on her own now. It’s been a long time since she drank enough blood to be able to walk.”
Clara waved one hand in the air. She’d assumed as much already. “Right, right. So he brought her there. He killed the victim. She drank the blood. All that makes sense. But then she left. And he didn’t.”
Glauer never reacted the way Clara wanted him to when she was feeling clever. He didn’t jump up and down or laugh or tell her how smart she was. He just watched her face, waiting for her to draw the conclusion.
“Malvern left the store, and probably not under her own power. So that means there were other half-deads present. They all left with her, because she needed them to carry her. But not this one, not the one in the yellow sweatshirt. He stayed behind. He wasn’t waiting for the cops to leave.”
“No?”
“No! Damn it, he was waiting for us. For me. Malvern left him there—ordered him to stay, and only come out and attack when I showed up.”
“Interesting,” he said.
She wanted to lean right up into his face and scream for him to react more. For him to recognize that this was important. This was the first time Malvern had shown her hand in years. It was the first time she’d tried to kill them since she left the prison. Why now? Why at all?
That was the problem with Malvern. You never understood why she did the things she did until it was way too late.
“So what do you plan to do about that?” Glauer asked.
She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. What could she do about it? “I guess I’m going to keep looking for clues,” she said, defeated. Malvern had tried to kill her, and the best thing she could do in reaction was keep looking for fibers.
Just like she had been for two years.
She looked down at the bone fragments she’d been studying. There would be nothing there, she was sure, nothing she could follow. She suddenly felt very, very tired.
“You sure you don’t want a ride home?” Glauer asked.
She turned and stared at him. His face was impassive as usual, but his body language was strangely expressive—he kept jerking his chin, as if he wanted to look over his shoulder but didn’t want anyone to see him looking over his shoulder.
He was trying to tell her something.
“You have a lead of your own,” she said. “On a … a different case.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said. His eyes went wide, which meant he was lying. She had known him long enough to have all his tells.
“The case we don’t talk about,” she said, very quietly.
“I’ll give you a ride,” he said.
Which could only mean one thing.
Glauer thought he knew where Laura was.
[ 1715 ]
The same year that Mama died, Death began to attend upon Justinia’s gaming nights.
He never played, but sat in the back of the room, an untouched glass of liquor before him. He had skin as pale as consumption and the devil’s eyes, red and glowing with a light of their own. Rude as it might be, he kept his hat on indoors, a low-brimmed slouch hat that shadowed his face. He did not smile. He would wait until the games had all played themselves out, until the queue formed of men who would be staying after hours to pay court at Justinia’s bedside.
But Death was not waiting on her favors.
Always at the end of the night there would be one man, one broken fellow, down on his luck and down at the heels, who would stare about him in wild confusion as if wondering where all his money had gone. With many a backward glance and a pleading look (though he must have known there was little credit to be had at the gambling table, and less sympathy) he would take his leave, drunkenly running one hand across the stained wallpaper. And when the night’s loser took his leave, Death followed.
Justinia grew to look forward to his visits. She would pass him smiles he never returned as she laid out the cards on the red baize. Give him knowing looks though he never met her eye. Because she knew what was coming.
She had a rash of pinkish blemishes on the soles of her feet and her left palm. She had seen the French pox before. It had taken Mama, and now it was back for her.
The night that Death finally met her eye, she was ready. She nodded slowly to him, then rose from her chair and announced that she was tired and was calling an early ending to the night. The men around the table groaned and protested, but they left all the same when she put the cards away in their velvet sack and started blowing out the candles. One by one they trooped out, with money still in their pockets and lust still in their eyes, until Justinia and Death were quite alone.
“Will ye be so kind as to let me have one last drink?” she asked, taking up a decanter of brandy from the side table.
He waved the fingers of one hand in acquiescence. He was a patient man, Death, and seemed to have all the time in the world.
Justinia drank deep. The liquid fire coated her throat and made her cough, but it warmed her chilly bones. “There,” she said. “I’m ready if—”
He did not seem to move, but suddenly he had her by the throat. He forced her down to her knees on the hearth rug and now, for the first time, he truly met her gaze. “My name is Vincombe,” he told her. “And I need what you possess.”
“As ye like,” she said. His hand around her neck was as strong as iron. He held her down so she could not get away. She resolved to herself that she would not struggle. Her time had simply come. It was right that things should end this way.
“I’m no evil man,” he went on, and she wondered that Death should say such a thing, but she withheld her counsel. “I only take those as should welcome it. Though they never do.”
“I see,” she told him.
Then something strange happened. His eyes went wide. He released his hold on her. It was as if he’d seen something inside her. Something he didn’t understand.
Death—Vincombe—took a step back. He looked down at her again and opened his mouth wide. She saw the rows of teeth in his mouth, triangular and long and sharp as knives. The teeth of a vampire.
She reached up and untied her neckerchief, then drew it away from her throat and dropped it on the floor. Then, slowly, she tilted her head to one side, presenting her jugular vein.
“At your leisure, sir,” she said.
5.
Laura Caxton was learning the value of boredom.
From where she sat on the porch she could see all the way down the side of the ridge. She could see the brown ribbon of dirt road that led nowhere in particular except down to the Hollow below. She could see the gulfs of wasteland that flanked the road on either side, slopes of green where weeds grew ten feet tall and the summer’s new crop of saplings burst up through the soil, fighting for a chance to reach the sun. This whole ridge had been clear-cut and then strip-mined once, leaving it terraced and raw to the elements, but that had been decades ago. Nature only needed to be left alone for one good summer before it took over again, and in the intervening years it had reclaimed the whole ridge for its own. Tangled in amid those plants were the rusted-out wrecks of old mining machines, scrapers and diggers and loaders. When the afternoon light hit a piece of broken glass from a shattered windshield it shone like gems scattered across the top of a green baize pool table. Small animals ran desperate and hunted through that expanse of verdure, shaking the stalks and making tiny noises that got lost in the rustling of the plants. The heat of the day made columns of warm air that rose as invisible pillars of wind, strong enough that the hen harriers who patrolled the ridge could ride them all day, hovering as dark specks up high, waiting for their chance to swoop down and make a kill.
The birds were teaching Laura all about boredom.
If you wanted to be a predator, you had to learn how to wait, and how to watch. You had to be patient. You had to sit and be still and let your prey come to you. It was boring as hell. It wasn’t like when she’d gone on hunting trips with her fathe
r, back when she was so young that even an hour spent out in the cold woods had seemed like an eternity. That had been all about tracking, and spotting a deer from a hundred yards away, and then the sudden noise and movement of the shot. No. This wasn’t like that at all. The birds were teaching her about conserving her energy. They were teaching her about keeping her eyes open all the time, not just when she expected to see something.
And they were teaching her that even boredom had its value. Because the more bored you got, the more annoyed you were at having to wait so long, the more grateful you would be when you finally got your chance to act. When the moment of the kill came, you would be so ready for it, so desperate for it, that you would not hold back. The harriers didn’t need conscience, or philosophy, or high technology. They just wanted to kill something so badly they made it happen.
The screen door behind Caxton banged, but she didn’t jump. Anyone coming out of the house was safe. By the sound of his boots on the doorstep she knew it was Urie Polder, who owned this particular shack, and who was sheltering her from the police.
Urie Polder had one good arm. The other one had been replaced by a tree branch, with long thin twigs for fingers. Because he was a Pow-Wow, a conjure doctor, he could make the wooden arm move almost as well as the one of flesh and bone. He wore a white T-shirt and a trucker cap (sans irony) and he was holding a Mason jar full of yellow liquid. Something dark stirred at the bottom of the jar.
“A little early to start drinking,” Caxton said, without bothering to smile. He would know she was teasing.
Urie shot her a shit-eating grin and held the jar up so she could see it. The dark shape at the bottom of the jar turned out to be three rusty nails tied together in a knot. “Fox urine an’ a charm,” he explained. “For keepin’ vermin out of my garden, ahum. Coneys and moles, and the like.”
He opened the jar and sprinkled the contents over the tomato and cucumber plants that sprawled over the side yard of the house. When he was done he fished the nails out of the bottom of the jar and buried them in the center of the vegetable patch.
He was not the weirdest person Caxton had ever met. But he was up there.
When he was done he headed back inside without another word. He knew better than to disturb Caxton in her vigil. Idle conversation could be pleasant, but it distracted you. It kept you from paying proper attention.
The harriers had taught her that, too. They were solitary creatures. Predators usually were. They didn’t need company while they waited out their prey. They kept to themselves, not chattering at one another, barely aware of each other’s existence. Mating season was over. Now it was time to hunt.
Caxton liked to think of herself as akin to the harriers now. She had gotten rid of all the human parts of herself that made her different from those hunters. She had perfected her method. She’d had no choice, really. If Caxton was a hen harrier, then it wasn’t field mice she was waiting on. It was a grizzly bear. The only chance she had was to pay attention.
Of course, she did what she could to even the odds. Sitting next to her on the porch swing, hidden under a blanket, were a twelve-gauge shotgun, two Glock handguns carrying thirteen rounds apiece, and a scoped hunting rifle that could put a round right through a steel pipe at three hundred yards. The harriers just had their talons and their hooked beaks.
6.
There were still two hours of daylight left when word came down from the house that a car was coming up the road. A few minutes later Caxton saw it for herself. With a pair of binoculars she checked its license plate, then confirmed that the driver was alone in the vehicle. A teenaged girl in a calico dress—one of Patience’s acolytes, probably—stood by until Caxton nodded that it was okay. The girl headed back inside, and Caxton rose from her chair but didn’t leave the shade of the porch.
The monster she lay in wait for was known to set traps and snares, and use people she knew against her as bait. She stayed very close to the guns.
The car, a late-model sedan, had trouble on the steep grade, but eventually it chugged to a stop just before the house. It brought a plume of dust with it that cut down visibility from Caxton’s aerie, but there was nothing to be done for that. The driver sat at the wheel for a while, staring at her as if she was a ghost. He was about twenty years old, dressed casually in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, which he slowly removed while they looked at each other. Caxton did not wave to him or give him any kind of signal. If this was a trap, or if he was coming here for the wrong reason, it was up to him to signal her.
Instead he popped open his door and stepped out into the yard, a bundle of small packages balanced precariously in the crook of one arm. He looked up at Caxton and smiled, and didn’t seem to take it the wrong way when she failed to smile back.
“I got your message,” he said. “Obviously.”
His name was Simon Arkeley. He was the son of the man who had taught Caxton most of what she knew about killing vampires. The boy was far less formidable than his father, but he had his uses. For one thing, he had a credit card.
“Urie will be pleased,” she said, nodding at the bundles in his arm. She stopped looking at him and went back to staring down the ridge. “He’s needed those roots for a while now. They don’t grow this far north.”
“They don’t grow anywhere except Mexico. At least not legally.” Simon came up the three steps to the porch and looked like he expected a hug or a kiss or at least a handshake. Caxton just kept watching the ridge. “Should I—go in? I guess?” he asked. His smile melted from his face. “Mom always taught me never to just walk into another practitioner’s house uninvited.”
“You’ll be welcome here. You’re from one of the old families.” Caxton let her guard down for a split second, just long enough to look him in the eye. Then she sighed and accepted that she could not, physically, monitor the ridge twenty-four seven. “Let’s get you inside.”
She held the screen door for him and followed him into the darkness of the front parlor. An old grandfather clock ticked away the hours in there, its pendulum swinging as it had for nearly two hundred years. When the coal company had come through this ridge, looking to tear open the earth, three villages had been completely displaced and their houses torn down. Only the Polders had managed to keep their land. They had refused to sell at any price, because there was no way to safely move that clock from where it stood. No one now remembered what would happen if the clock stopped ticking, but Urie Polder made sure to wind it every night without fail. Caxton thought it was probably just an old superstition, but she never said a word to Urie about his little ritual.
“Through here, to the kitchen,” Caxton told Simon. She took him into the main sitting room, where Patience Polder and her disciples were kneeling on the floor. The three girls facing Patience looked like something from another era. They all wore dresses that were old-fashioned fifty years before Caxton was born. What she’d grown up thinking of as Holly Hobby dresses. Their hair was braided or piled up in buns on the backs of their heads and they kept their eyes down when Simon entered the room.
Patience herself was dressed similarly, but all in white. Fifteen years old now, she was growing into a beautiful young woman, though no boy down in the Hollow would think of making time with her. Patience was destined for something special. Everyone knew that. Her mother, Vesta, had told them. Vesta hadn’t lived long enough to say exactly what that destiny entailed, but no one ever doubted her.
The girls had their hands together as if in prayer. They had pushed back the faded Persian carpet from the floor and had drawn a pentacle on the boards with a piece of sticky black bitumen. What they were calling on, or calling up, Caxton didn’t know, but she didn’t much care, either.
Simon stopped moving when he saw Patience. His eyes locked with the girl’s and for a moment the room grew very cold. One of the disciples shivered convulsively. Caxton had seen this sort of thing before and she knew to just wait it out. Eventually Patience looked away, and Simon headed toward the kitche
n again as if nothing had happened.
Yet when he dumped his armful of packages on the kitchen table, Caxton saw that he’d gone white as a sheet.
“You okay?” she asked, to be polite.
“She—that girl—” Simon shook his head. “I don’t know if I should bow every time I see her, or call in an exorcist.” He tried to laugh it off, as if he’d been joking. “She’s got some real magic in her. I mean, I can feel it.”
Urie Polder came in from the backyard and closed the screen door with his wooden arm. “She’s somewhat else, my Patience,” he said, nodding appreciatively at Simon. “Ye can tell magic by the way it makes your hair stand on end. I should think ye have that talent. Ye’re Astarte’s boy, ahum.”
“Mr. Polder,” Simon said, and shook the man’s human hand. “We met once at my father’s … funeral, but we never got a chance to talk. You knew my mother well, from what I’ve been told. I’m afraid she never talked about you to me directly.”
“There’s a reason for that, ahum,” Urie replied. “Seein’ as your daddy and my wife, Vesta, was lovers, contrary to their marriages. Bad blood there.” The placid expression on his face didn’t change. “No reason for us to perpetuate it, though, is there? Seein’ as all three of ’em is dead now.”
“No—no, of course not,” Simon said.
“That’s good, ahum. Well, ye’re welcome in my home. Now let’s see what you brung us, and what good can be made of it, shall we?”
7.
Urie Polder used his twig fingers to gently peel open each of Simon’s little packages, revealing tight little bundles of plant material that looked almost identical. Yet with each new discovery, the conjure doctor’s face lit up with a new gleam. Caxton had no real idea what they were good for. She only knew the names she’d given to Simon when she wrote to him. John the Conqueror root, monkshood, fetchbane, witch grass. Many of them were prohibited by drug laws, though none were simple narcotics or hallucinogens. Urie Polder had suggested he could do great things with them but that he had no access to them, geographically limited as he was.
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 3
