“When I realized what I was looking at, it was all I could do not to cry out in joy,” Chess said. “That would never have done, would it? They would have raised the reserve price. I got you for a song, my dear. Such a prize.”
The last known vampire, intact in her original coffin! He spoke honeyed words about how much he treasured her. About what a great acquisition she was, and how she would make him the envy of every fossil hunter the world round. He spoke all kinds of flatteries, enough to make her want to smile, should such a thing remain possible for her. And then he carved into her shoulder with a scalpel and a tiny trowel. Taking samples, he said, for proper scientific study.
“Sometimes I think you’re still in there,” he said with a chuckle. “Sometimes I see flickers of life. What secrets are you keeping from me, darling?”
This with another patronizing laugh.
Later he came back and carefully removed her gown, the better to examine all of her parts, he said. It did not escape her that he spent longer examining certain parts than others.
Could she but move a single finger, or close her own prized open jaws, she would have devoured him entirely then and there. There was no pain in his ministrations—she was far beyond the point of feeling physical pain—but the indignity was beyond the pale. She would rend him, tear him down to the sinews and the thews, she thought. She would—she would—
Her supply of energy was so low, the fires of her life so banked, that a single thought could stretch out over long nights, words creeping through the dried-up catacombs of her mind like blind maggots crawling after sustenance.
She would kill him. Of this she had no doubt. No matter how long it took.
In the end it took more than twenty years. Like a babe learning how to walk, she had to take fumbling, uncertain steps at first. She had to learn whole new realms of discipline, learn how to marshal her energies, to conserve the low, guttering flame of her existence—and then channel that precious heat into a single message, a single thought she let slip out into the room like a tendril of smoke, evanescent and teasing. She could only hope it would be enough, that he would be receptive enough to this most subtle of communications.
It was while he was carving out one of her finger bones, removing her dry flesh shred by shred. He had a jeweler’s loupe screwed into one eye, and he was bent so close to her that she felt the heat of his blood like summer’s sun shining down on her. She had never properly seen his face. She knew nothing of him he had not told her—or shown her. Yet he had touched every part of her, as intimate as any lover.
Chess is not my game, she whispered to him. If he could not hear her now, if his mortal brain was too thick and brutish to receive the words—but if—but if—
But perhaps ye’ll teach me to play.
He fell backward as if she’d struck him. His loupe fell to the floor in a trill of broken glass. He stared up at her with true horror in his features. And that alone was enough of a victory to send a thrill through her dry bones.
But the fact that he did not run away, that he did not flee, was worth far more.
I have ye, she thought, careful not to let the words loose outside her own skull.
32.
“Laura!” Clara shrieked. She wanted to slap Laura’s face or just yell at her for saying something like that, but she couldn’t catch her breath. The whole room seemed to spin as Laura stormed out onto the porch. Clara managed to follow her and saw her grabbing up guns. “Laura—”
“Don’t talk to me. I’ve spent two years building the perfect trap and you just ruined it.” Laura hurried down the porch steps and onto the road that led down to the Hollow.
Clara might have kept following her if a wooden hand hadn’t clamped down on her shoulder. She shouted in surprise, then whirled around to find Urie Polder standing there. The look on his face was perfectly impassive but his eyes searched hers as if he was trying to read her mind.
“Can you do that?” Clara asked.
“Do what?”
“I guess not.” She shuddered and pulled away from him. The wooden arm had always bothered her in a way she just couldn’t get past. “Look. We came here for a good reason. Not just because I wanted to see her.”
“I figured as much, ahum.”
“If she won’t listen to me, at least I can tell you. We’ve found clear evidence that Justinia Malvern isn’t just alive, but currently active. She’s been taking victims—multiple victims, every night. Which means she’s ramping up for some kind of major push. Obviously that means she’s looking for Laura—for Caxton—and so you’re all in danger. We’ve seen aggressive half-dead activity as well, which means she won’t be coming alone. Based on her previous tactics, we know she won’t just make a frontal assault. Most likely she’ll try to lure Caxton out into the open before she pounces.”
“Well, thanks for that,” Polder said, nodding.
“I’m totally serious here,” Clara insisted, because he didn’t seem upset enough. “We expect the strike to come within the next week. Maybe even the next few nights.”
“Sounds about right, ahum.”
Clara shook her head. “I know you have no reason to trust me.”
“Sure I do,” he told her. He sat down on a bench swing that hung suspended from the roof of the porch by chains. He kicked a little to get it moving. “You’re one of hers, and that’s as good a recommend as I can think up.”
“So—so—what are you—why aren’t you running around making preparations, then? There must be a million things to do to get ready.”
“There was. They’re all done. We knew about everything you said already.” He shrugged and his creepy wooden arm lifted in the air. “There’s been some half-deads around here, last couple of nights. One startled my Patience by lookin’ in her bedroom window last night, even. They found some way past the safeguards. Yes, they’re bound to attack just about any time. Won’t do nothin’ ’til tonight, though. Not while their queen bee’s still sleepin’. Miss Malvern’s going to want first crack at Caxton, and everyone knows it. ’Bout the only thing predictable she’s like to do. You thirsty, girl? I’ve got some sun tea brewin’ on the back porch, if you’d be partial to a glass, ahum.”
Clara could only stare at him.
“Wait,” she said.
He said nothing, just looked out over the trees that covered the ridge.
“Seriously?”
“Ahum.”
“You already knew this. You were already ready for it. My coming here doesn’t help you at all.”
“Complicates a few things. But it was nice of you, all the same, to think of us in our time of danger, ahum.”
“Crap,” Clara said, and raced off the porch and down into the trees.
It wasn’t hard to find Laura. There was only one path down to the Hollow. Laura was hurrying down the hill, her strides long to eat up the ground. Clara couldn’t match those strides, so she had to break into a sprint to come even with her. She was out of breath when she finally caught up.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to catch her breath and explain at the same time.
“I haven’t contacted you in two years. Did you really think I wanted to see you now?” Laura wouldn’t even look at her. She just kept walking, and Clara had to jog backward to keep pace with her and see her face. “I really didn’t mean to cause a problem. Glauer and I will leave right away, before it gets dark. I know my being here is a burden on you.”
“All of my plans are based around the concept that when Malvern attacks I don’t have to worry about anyone else. If you’re here, she’ll grab you up and use you against me. Just like she always has.”
“I … know,” Clara said. “I’ve been trying to turn myself into somebody who isn’t a liability. But I guess we’re not there now. I’m so sorry, Laura.”
Laura stopped walking then and finally looked at her. Clara blushed as those hard eyes scanned her face.
“Glauer said something recently, something I didn’t want to
hear,” Clara said. “He said you had to choose between me and the vampires. And that you picked the vampires. And that maybe that was the right choice.”
Laura said nothing at all.
“It’s true. What you’re doing here is important. I never meant to interfere. I’ll go now. It was—well. I was going to say it was nice seeing you. But between how embarrassed I am for wasting your time, and how pissed off I am that you think you’re allowed to talk to me like that, it wasn’t very nice at all.”
She started back up the path but stopped when Laura called her name.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. It sounded like she was dragging the apology out of herself. Like the words caused her physical pain. “I’m sorry. Too. I’ve just worked so hard, for so long.”
“I know.”
“I can’t afford to let anybody fuck that up.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to ever see you here again,” Laura went on.
“I kind of got that.” Clara started walking again, figuring they were done. Laura did not call her name again.
Clara didn’t walk very far, though. Before she’d taken more than a dozen steps, she heard a sound like a lawn-mower engine starting up, echoing over the ridges. She hadn’t seen any lawns down in the Hollow, and couldn’t figure what it might be. It grew louder, however, as she listened for it, louder and more insistent, until it was chopping up the air. She glanced up just as a helicopter shot by overhead, the roar of its engines enough to deafen her, its rotorwash enough to shake the trees all around her and send leaves raining down around her feet.
Then she heard the sirens and saw the flashing lights, as a dozen police vehicles came racing into the Hollow.
[ 1836 ]
He made a place for Justinia in his front parlor, eventually, in a marble casket lined with red satin. She imagined his wife must have objected to this, but then she was rarely seen around the plantation anymore.
Sometimes he fed her himself. Sometimes, when he needed to punish one of his slaves, he sent them in to give her what she required. They were so terrified, every time, and that was delicious, but it was the energy the blood gave her she savored the most. It gave her the power to wrap herself in illusion, to make herself resemble the creature he wanted, and that was almost as enjoyable for her as it was for him. She could almost forget, when he kissed her breasts, her belly, between her legs, that it was dry and flaking skin he caressed, that she had come to resemble the hateful thing she’d always been inside.
Sometimes she forgot she was a killer, even. Sometimes she forgot her sins. And then she was merely the mistress, the lover, the paramour. When he would trail one finger into her mouth, and let her nibble a bit, and take what she needed, it was a little bit like love.
There were worse things in the world than being a kept woman. Especially when those worse things included rotting away, alone and forgotten, in a wooden box in a room full of dinosaur bones. That, it emerged, had been his passion before he found her. He’d been energized by this new theory of evolution and the stony fossils that were dug up out of the ground to prove it. He was a creature of wild imagination, Josiah Chess, able to look at the skeleton of some titanic beast and imagine what it must have been in life, all scales and teeth and flashing eyes.
It was not so great a leap to show him the woman he wanted to see, with red hair and creamy flesh and round, full breasts.
She watched him grow old, while she stayed young. If only in imagination. Sometimes in a game the cards ran hot for quite a while before luck eventually had to change.
There came a time, though, when a new man came along. A younger, stronger man. Josiah’s blood had grown thin with time. He’d lost his ruddy complexion, and anemia is a terrible thing for the old to have to bear. But his son Zachariah grew stronger with time, his shoulders broader. His heart beat so strongly in his chest, until she saw it shining like a light in the dark.
Josiah didn’t know about his son’s visits to the parlor. After the master of the house had gone to sleep, weakened by his exertions, she would receive another gentleman caller. Sometimes. At first he was as frightened of her as the slaves. But with time, and familiarity, all things can change.
She did not know what year it was when he started asking her for his heart’s desire. When they started plotting together. But it was not so long after that, the night when Josiah came to her and she saw how wrinkled and feeble he’d become. The night he lifted one emaciated finger to her lips and she cooed for him the last time.
In the morning they found him, dry as a husk, his flesh torn in a hundred places, his eyes staring in horror at nothing at all. Zachariah gave him a proper burial and had some of his slaves tried and convicted for the murder.
“Now you’re mine,” he said, the night after it was done, crawling into the casket with her, curling against her naked bones. “Mine, forever.”
“Oh, yes,” she promised. Thinking that she would have to drive off Zachariah’s wife just as she’d done for his mother. But not quite yet. Not until she bore him a son. A good strong son with a heart like a lamp.
Sometimes the cards just keep getting hotter.
If she kept this up, if she played it right, she might be able to walk again someday. Walk under her own power—and hunt again.
33.
“Crap!” Caxton shouted. She turned and looked at Clara, for a moment thinking to blame her former lover for this. But she knew better. As angry as she might be at Clara for coming to the ridge and upsetting her carefully laid plans, she couldn’t truly believe that Clara would lead the cops right to her door.
“Who are they? Local? State police?” Clara asked, craning her neck to see better through the tree branches.
“Get your head down,” Caxton whispered, and pushed Clara down into the undergrowth. She moved forward herself to get a better view, but didn’t much like what she saw.
Eight unmarked police cars had wheeled into the Hollow, forming a protective ring around the main clearing at the center of the little town. The same open space where the community took its meals on warm nights. Now it was obscured by a cloud of dust as men in blue ballistic vests and windbreakers poured out of the cars, their weapons out and held at a high ready. Behind them four more vehicles pulled into the ring the cars had made. Two of them were armored cars, one crowned by the antennas and radio dishes of a mobile command center, one a reinforced paddy wagon, a prisoner transport. The other two vehicles were Jeeps full of cops in full SWAT gear, armored and masked and carrying heavy carbines.
“Jesus, they must be expecting another Waco here,” Caxton breathed. She ducked down as the helicopter made another pass over the Hollow, shredding her thoughts with its noise and the waves of air pressure it beat down all around her.
From her position Caxton could see the people of the Hollow taking up defensive positions of their own, as if preparing for a firefight. They hid behind the trailers, their backs up against the metal walls. Some of the men had guns—hunting rifles, mostly, but she counted four handguns she hadn’t known about. She’d done more than one census on the firearms in the Hollow, but apparently some of the men had been holding out on her.
The women, dressed in their plain and simple clothes, bonnets on their heads, were unarmed. They could be far more dangerous, though. Two of them were busy drawing an elaborate hex sign in the gravel behind one of the bungalows. Caxton had spent years with them, but she still didn’t know exactly what they hoped to accomplish. Heather, the single mother who had flirted with Simon, sat in full lotus on top of one of the trailers, her hands pressed together in an attitude of prayer. She was highly exposed up there and would probably be the first one to get shot if things went wrong.
No—Caxton had to revise that impression. The first one to get shot would be Glynnis. Because Glynnis, she of the shaved head and full-body tattoos, was about to unleash hell on the clearing.
The woman’s eyes were closed as she strode deliberately toward the ring of policemen
. She kept her hands down at her sides like a gunslinger walking into a shoot-out. Across her back a ripple of light spread through her tattoos, as if they were coming to life while Caxton watched. The air around Glynnis rippled as if she were generating an enormous amount of heat.
“What the hell do they think they’re going to accomplish?” Clara asked. At least she kept her voice down.
“What I trained them for. Except—”
“You trained them to fight a police raid on this level?”
Caxton frowned. “Except, I trained them to fight vampires. Not cops.” She shook her head. “These are not the world’s most stable people. They’re defending their way of life, Clara. They might not see a big difference there.”
“You’ve got to stop them!”
Caxton might have answered, but just then a bullhorn wailed and she winced at the feedback. She recognized the amplified voice that spoke next.
“Federal agents!” Fetlock called. “Everyone will surrender now or my men will open fire. We have authorization to use lethal force!”
“That son of a bitch!” Caxton barked. “Goddamn it. He followed you right here.” She couldn’t resist. Rage bubbled up in her chest and she said, “Thanks so much for your lovely visit, Clara.”
“No,” Clara insisted. “He couldn’t have followed us. We were really careful!”
“Really? How careful? Because that guy is a U.S. Marshal who has spent years searching for me. I’m the one who got away. Did you think he wouldn’t try very hard? He has access to satellites, Clara. He has some of the best trackers in the world on his payroll—he has experts on wiretapping, on computer surveillance, on covert ops. He’s got packs of bloodhounds. He’s got the entire U.S. government on his side. But you—you and Glauer—were really, really careful.”
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 17
