32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5

by David Wellington

Now the house was like a shrine to that night, and that death. Clara almost didn’t want to force him to go inside and relive those memories.

  Almost. But this was too important to ruin by worrying too much about one man’s feelings.

  “You got what I asked for?” Clara asked.

  “Basically. Let’s get out of the street,” he said, and took her arm and steered her toward the house’s broad porch. Inside she had some candles burning in the parlor. In the three days it had taken to contact Glauer by mail—the only safe way, since Fetlock had no power over the post office—she had done a pretty good job of cleaning the place up, if she said so herself. The broken furniture was cleared away, replaced with a card table and folding chairs she’d found in the basement. She’d tried to scrub the blood stain off the stairs, but Simon made little moaning sounds every time she started filling up buckets or pulling on rubber gloves. So instead she had covered over the stairs with old bed linens. The two of them never went upstairs anyway. That was where Jameson Arkeley had murdered his own wife, and the very thought of going up there made Simon turn pale and look like he was going to pass out. It just gave Clara the creeps.

  In the three days she’d spent with him, she had grown to realize just how profoundly damaged Simon was. He could seem perfectly normal for hours at a time. When he was out of the house the illusion was almost perfect. Yet eventually, always, something would trigger an attack of his nerves, and he would break down in a puddle of tears and snot on an instant’s notice. He would start by trembling violently and repeatedly insisting that no, he was okay, that this time he would be alright. That he could fight his way through the shakes. So far he’d been wrong every time.

  Then there were the times he just shut down. Clara would be having a perfectly normal conversation with him and he just wouldn’t answer a question. Or she would think he’d finished what he meant to say, because he stopped talking. But in fact he was just off in his own little world. Clara found that much harder to deal with than the melodramatic breakdowns, because she could just about imagine what that other world was like. He was replaying in his head the last time he saw his father. The thing his father had become, anyway, looming over him with a mouthful of fangs, speaking to him in that grunting, slavering voice that vampires had. Telling him he had a choice to make. To become a vampire himself, or die there and then. The same choice his father had given his mother just before he killed her.

  And then Laura had come in blasting away, and Simon’s father went away, too.

  Clara shivered just thinking about it. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t mention the word blood. Vampire is okay, and teeth. But not fangs. And definitely don’t talk to him about what happened upstairs.”

  Glauer took off his sunglasses and stared at her. “Seriously?” he asked. “This is—this is what you’re doing now?”

  “Just trust me. I’ve made real progress on the case.”

  “There is no case. You don’t work cases anymore.”

  “Then just humor me,” she said, her eyes flashing.

  He held up both hands for peace. She went in the other room and brought Simon out to meet him. The two men didn’t make eye contact as they shook hands, but they seemed civil enough. Clara sat them down around the card table.

  “Now. Glauer. I asked if you could bring me some files. Did you get a chance to snag them before you came here?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. Then he shut up, withdrawing, the way Simon did sometimes. Yet Clara knew this was for a very different reason. She hadn’t just asked him to pick up a few pieces of paper for her. She’d asked him to steal documents pertaining to an open investigation. To remove them from their proper place and give them to someone who no longer worked in law enforcement.

  That was a lot for a solid cop like Glauer to handle.

  “Just … just tell me what you can give me,” she said.

  “I can give you the gist of things. That’s all.”

  Clara nodded, trying to look patient. Like he could have all the time in the world to go on. Even though if he didn’t get to the point soon, she was going to rake her fingernails across his face in frustration.

  “Okay. So you asked about lab results on the bodies—the partial bodies—of the half-deads we fought in Bridgeville. I imagine you won’t be surprised when I tell you all the tests came back inconclusive. No fingerprints, no facial recognition, of course. And no bl—That is, no hemolytic fluid to type or sample.”

  That was standard for half-dead investigations, Clara knew. They weren’t like living people. They were decaying corpses given brief animation by the power of the vampire who slew them. There just wasn’t that much left of them. “Okay, but what about hair and fiber analysis? Shoe tread patterns, eyewear, dental records, distinguishing scars, features, piercings, tattoos?” Clara had, herself, written most of the book on how to identify walking corpses.

  Unfortunately, nobody else ever bothered to read it. Vampires were extinct, after all—that was the official party line. “They did some fiber matching on the hoodie the driver wore, and the jeans that one of the guys we put down in the diner parking lot had on. They got matches but nothing interesting. Cheap clothes you could buy at any discount store. In fact—the sweatshirt and the jeans came from the same store. Which suggests to me that maybe the clothes were bought after the subjects were killed.”

  Clara put her hand over her mouth. “Now, there’s a thought,” she said. “But it makes perfect sense. Malvern’s smart enough to know what we can do with a couple of fibers. She’d know better than to let us find where she’s getting her minions.”

  “Why’s she being so secretive?” Simon asked. “So now we know she has dead people to play with. It’s not like we didn’t know she’s a killer.”

  “If we could find out where she gets her victims, we could lay a trap for her,” Clara explained. “Or at least track her movements. But she’s still one step ahead of us. She gets her half-deads by preying on people who are off the grid, people who—”

  “Migrant workers,” Simon said.

  Clara was surprised. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah—that was what she did the last time she was at large. She preyed on people who didn’t have family here, people who could disappear and not leave much of a trace. It took us far too long to figure it out.” She raised one eyebrow. “You look like you know something. Tell me.”

  “Nothing concrete. But I know somebody you might want to meet. Somebody who keeps track of all the people society pretends don’t exist.”

  [ 1782 ]

  Only a few steps out of their door, Justinia stumbled and nearly fell on her face. She threw out her arms and grabbed the stone wall to her side. Pressing her body against it, she clung on for dear life. Her legs would barely hold her up.

  Ahead of her in the alley Easling looked back in terror.

  How she’d grown to hate his smooth and unblemished face.

  “I am perfectly well, thank ye,” she said. “We must feed. Please—please lead the way, sir.”

  “You don’t look very well,” Easling said. The expression of concern and compassion in his red eyes made her want to rake at them with her claws. He’d been a fat and unappealing specimen in life. The changes of death—the colorless skin, the hairlessness, the way his new teeth protruded from his lips—made him too ugly to look upon. She would gladly have destroyed this thing, her miscreation. If she did not need him so very much.

  Looking down at her own hands, she saw that she had passed a certain Rubicon. She no longer resembled a withered crone. Her skin was no longer just thin and pockmarked. It was rotting, visibly decaying. She had come to the look of a corpse.

  She had known this would happen. She’d watched it happen to Vincombe. Seen all the others that came before him, and knew it was her fate.

  Rage filled her and gave her strength. She released the wall and staggered forward under her own power. She would not succumb, not yet. Blood would restore her. Enough blood and she would be whole an
d hale again. Enough blood …

  Was there enough blood in the world to hold back the ravages of time?

  “We must feed,” she said.

  “Return to your coffin. Rest. I’ll bring you tasty morsels. I’ll bring you a troupe of dancers, their vitality glowing within them,” Easling promised. “I’ll bring you anything you ask. Please. My love.”

  With her one shriveled eye she studied him as an entomologist might study a pinned beetle. What cruel mother had warped him so? Or had it simply been that vituperative wife of his? Some woman had twisted him, that was clear. When she’d been beautiful he’d desired to punish her, to hurl abuse upon her illusionary form. Now he saw what she really was, he worshipped at her feet.

  “I can still hunt,” she insisted. “The time has not yet come when I cannot kill for my own sustenance.” She pushed past him into the lane. Heaven help the first man I meet, she thought.

  Heaven help me, if he’s too strong to take.

  It was something like a prayer. Something too much. She shoved the pitiful mewling down with fists of anger and stalked forward, smelling for blood, her eye dancing across the cobbles, looking for the glow of it. That cheery red, that burned like welcome coals on a winter’s night. When she found her victim it was little more than a boy, some apprentice cobbler working late in his shop. She barely remembered spying him, barely recalled how she’d opened the locked door—had Easling helped her? She had been too far gone to push her companion away. Now here her prey was, this human wretch. He screamed. Sometimes they screamed.

  Sometimes they feared death.

  Life is just a game, she’d thought. Life is a hand of cards. You cannot choose which cards you are dealt, only how they are played. It had seemed so fair back then. When Vincombe had been hunting her. When she had only a mortal life to lose.

  For the first time in her entire existence, Justinia Malvern felt sorry for one of her victims. She eased the boy’s pain, snapping his neck while she supped at his arteries. He had been so frightened. So horrified that the world worked this way.

  I do not fear death, she thought. I who am death itself. I do not fear death. She thought it over and over again, a meditation, a rosary of her innermost belief. I do not fear death. I do not fear death. I do not fear death.

  But oh! I am so frightened now, for I grow old. …

  27.

  Patience Polder screamed in the night, and a shiver ran down Caxton’s neck. She bolted upright in her chair and grabbed for her pistols.

  Behind her, inside the house, Caxton heard Urie Polder stumbling around and then the yellow flicker of a kerosene lamp burst through the window behind her, destroying her night vision. Upstairs Patience had stopped screaming, but Caxton still wasn’t sure what to do. If there was something inside the house, already preying on the girl, then Caxton’s move was to rush inside, guns blazing. But it could be a diversion, meant to cover a frontal assault on the house. If she went inside she could be trapped in there, besieged by an army of half-deads, unable to escape if—

  “Come in here, trooper, and quick,” Urie Polder called.

  Caxton grunted in frustration, but she pushed open the screen door and ran up the stairs of the house. She found both Polders in Patience’s room. The father, shirtless and wild-eyed, knelt by his daughter’s bed, holding the lantern high. Patience was white as a sheet, sitting upright in bed and clutching the thick fabric of her nightgown as if she desperately wanted something to hold on to.

  “Tell me,” Caxton said. She had a pistol in either hand. The right hand covered the doorway and the stairs beyond, while the left, weaker hand kept guard over the window.

  “I woke to see a face in my window,” Patience explained. She knew better than to waste time talking about how scared she’d been. “A masked face. I thought they’d come for me. Yet when I screamed it disappeared.”

  “Coulda just been some manner of dream, ahum,” Urie Polder said, stroking his daughter’s hair with his wooden fingers.

  “Could have, sure,” Caxton said. She kept her eyes on the window. It was wide open, and the darkness outside was absolute— Justinia Malvern herself could be standing out there and it would be impossible to see her in the glare of the lantern. “Urie, close and lock that window. It won’t keep them out for long, but it’ll give us some warning. Patience, set up some kind of protective barrier. A ward or something. We can’t afford to lose you.”

  The Polders knew better than to expect anything like empathy or tact from their houseguest. They did as they were told, staying close to each other for comfort. Caxton took a quick look down the stairs, then rushed down to the porch and checked her stash of guns. Nothing had been disturbed.

  A masked face, she thought. Masked. A half-dead might wear a mask to hide its disfigurement. She’d never heard of one doing so before, though. They liked scaring people. Liked creeping everyone out with their horrible visages. Maybe this one didn’t want to let on that it was a vampire’s minion. Maybe it had been sent to pass a message to Patience, and had believed the mask would keep her from screaming. Well. If that was the case it had failed in its mission.

  Maybe it was just supposed to make sure Caxton would stick close to the house.

  Caxton jumped over the railing of the porch and into a thicket of bushes at the side of the house. She ducked low for cover, then moved quickly around to the back, to the ground just below Patience’s window. She couldn’t see any tracks there, but she didn’t expect to—it was far too dark to make out footprints in the grass. She used the toe of her boot to feel around in the soil for the holes a ladder would have left, but found nothing.

  Damn. She did not want this bastard to just get away, to flee into the night leaving no clues behind. She wanted to chase it, wanted to hunt it through the trees atop the ridge. Wanted to track it down and then pull off its fingers until it told her what she wanted to know.

  But Malvern would know that, of course. She might have set this all up as a trap. She might have a hundred half-deads hiding in the trees, just waiting for Caxton to step away from the light and security of the house.

  Caxton shook her head to clear it. She couldn’t lose her cool like this. Couldn’t start imagining potential conspiracies, jumping at every shadow. There were just too many possibilities.

  She crouched low, her guns pointed at the ground. She closed her eyes and listened. Strained every fiber of her being into just hearing what was around her.

  The crickets were going crazy, like they did every night in the summer. Their chirping chorus swelled and broke and swelled again like an ocean of sound. Somewhere she heard an owl hooting in the woods. Down in the Hollow someone was listening to a transistor radio.

  Not so far off, much closer in fact, a twig snapped. As if someone had stepped on it.

  She spun around in that direction, tempted to open fire with a wild salvo of shots just in case she hit something. But the chances of that were too low. Keeping her head down, she duckwalked toward the sound, stretching her eyelids wide to try to soak up as much starlight as she could. The noise had come from a stand of trees just on the other side of Urie Polder’s vegetable garden. As she passed by the rows of cucumbers and summer squash, she saw broken stalks and a tomato that had been pulped when somebody stepped on it.

  Pouring on speed, she headed into the trees, in the direction the sound had first come from. She pushed her back up against a tree trunk and listened again, forced herself to stop breathing and just listen.

  She was certain she heard muffled footfalls from deeper in the trees. But nothing else. No sadistic tittering, no noise of an army of half-deads lying in wait.

  She hurried onward, following the footfalls as best she could. But by the time she emerged into a clearing in the trees, a quarter mile from the house, she already knew she’d lost her quarry. It just took too long when she had to stop every hundred yards or so and listen. The half-dead she was chasing was gone, already past the perimeter of teleplasm, past the protective circle of
bird skulls she’d planted. She knew better than to follow it further, out into a part of the ridge she hadn’t properly fenced off.

  Instead she looped back, looking for any sign of its passage. She found it quickly enough. One of the bird skulls had been smashed to bone splinters, broken beyond recognition. It must have been done quickly and by someone who knew what they were doing—it had been destroyed before it could get off any kind of signal. It should have started shrieking at the first touch.

  Which meant that Malvern already knew about her first line of defense—and knew how to bypass it.

  “Crap,” she said to the darkness.

  She did not receive a reply.

  28.

  Clara squinted through the windshield. “Seriously? There’s somebody still doing business back here?”

  Simon had brought them to a ghost mall in Chester County, a sprawl of concrete and asphalt and weeds. Once it had been a strip mall like any other in Pennsylvania, but the recession had hit the place hard. The storefronts were all dark, their once brightly painted signs faded by sun and rain until it was hard to tell what they had sold in their heyday. It looked like there had been a vitamin store, and maybe a Radio Shack, once. Now through the plate-glass windows Clara could see empty modular shelving and piles of debris where acoustic tiles had rotted away from the ceilings and fallen in heaps on the dusty floors.

  Glauer pulled into the parking lot without comment. It was hard to tell where the painted lines of the lot had once been, but it didn’t really matter. He pulled up in front of a line of stores and killed the engines.

  “It’s in the back. Kind of hard to find—there’s an old grocery store that hides it from view from the street,” Simon said, pushing open his door.

  Clara traded a suspicious glance with Glauer, but then she shrugged and climbed out into the summer heat. “You should probably stay here,” she said. “You look too much like a cop to fool anybody.”