When he spoke again everyone could hear him clearly. His voice didn’t sound amplified—not at all like he was speaking through a bullhorn—but his words were perfectly understandable. If a little crazy.
“She just wants Caxton,” he said. “She promised me, some of us could live. Patience.” He glanced back at Malvern again, but she didn’t even look at him. “Patience, she said specifically you and I could leave, and she wouldn’t follow us. I think she means it. Patience, we should get out of here. It’s not going to be safe.”
Patience used no charm to make her reply heard. She just shouted. “She has already cost us too much. I will not obey her commands.”
Simon scrubbed at his face with his hands. Was he, in fact, dead? Had she turned him into a half-dead, and he just hadn’t gotten a chance yet to scratch his own face off? No, Clara realized. He was just losing his grasp on reality. Not that he’d ever had a very firm grip on that.
“Remember what you said to me? How you and I were going to be … to be married? That I was going to be your husband?”
“I remember,” Patience said.
“But that means we live. I mean, we have to, right? You and I have to survive so we can make that come true. Your prophecy—”
Patience cut him off with a snarl. “Do not lecture me, Simon, on the proper usage of divination.” Clara hadn’t heard the girl get angry before—normally she was eerily calm. “I’d rather defy fate and suffer the consequences than give her the satisfaction of watching me crawl away. You come down here now and stand with us, or you are no man.”
Simon’s face went white as a sheet. White as a ghost. Not quite as white as Malvern’s skin, but close. “I can’t,” he said, a whining rejoinder that made Clara cringe. He shook his head and held up his hands as if to ward off a terrible fate.
It was not, of course, enough.
Malvern seized him with both her hands. For a moment her dress flickered wildly as if it was about to erupt in flames. Then she threw Simon at a tree and he collided so hard that no magical amplification was necessary to make the impact audible down in the clearing.
Darnell was standing right behind Clara. She hadn’t heard him moving up to that position, but now he spoke into a walkie-talkie, saying, “I got a clear shot, right about now.”
“Take it,” Fetlock replied over the radio.
Darnell’s hunting rifle fired with a fierce report. Clara jumped sideways as if to avoid being struck in a cross fire, though the bullet was already loosed. Judging by the noise, Darnell must have been firing a .50-caliber round—a lot bigger than most modern rifles could handle. The bullet struck Malvern just left of the center of her chest, exactly over her heart. Darnell was a hell of a shot, Clara decided.
When the round hit Malvern it exploded in a puff of fire and smoke. It didn’t look like a normal gunshot hit at all.
“What the hell are you loading?” Glauer asked.
“HEIAP,” Darnell replied, pronouncing it “hay-yup.” At first Clara thought it was a verbal tic, like the way Urie Polder always said, “Ahum.” But in fact it was an acronym for high explosive/incendiary armor piercing. The kind of bullet you’d use against a light tank. Serious military hardware.
Malvern looked down at her chest, and raised one hand to finger a small hole that had appeared in the front of her gown. Then her smile broadened.
“No effect,” Darnell said into his walkie-talkie.
But he was wrong. His shot had a definite effect. Once she’d finished enjoying the little joke, Malvern came down the ridge as fast as a freight train.
[ 2002 ]
Sometimes all it took was a single glance.
Malvern had known suicidal men before. She’d never known one so miserable as Efrain Zacapa Reyes. He had nothing, no family, no friends. No hopes for life, and no opportunity for death. Arthritis in his feet made every step he took a new exploration of agony, but lack of education meant he was forced to work every day on his feet. His strict Catholic upbringing had taught him that suicide was a mortal sin. Ending his own life would only make things worse for him—he would trade an unbearable but finite existence on earth for an eternity of suffering in hell.
When she met him, he was pondering which might be worse.
He had a job, of sorts, as a menial electrical engineer. He worked a variety of civil service positions—dismantling old and obsolete equipment on public property. Tracing wires through the walls of buildings that were going to be torn down anyway.
Replacing burned-out lightbulbs in crumbling sanatoria.
A great deal of luck conspired to put him in her way. Dr. Hazlitt— Dr. Armonk’s replacement—had left the lid of her coffin open, when it should have been closed. He had also ordered blue lights installed in the place where she slept, because blue lights were less damaging to her skin. Dear, sweet Dr. Hazlitt. Reyes suffered a minor accident himself, another stroke of luck for her. His ladder wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the high fixtures in her room. He had to balance on the top step, despite all regulations to the contrary. At one point he stumbled and nearly fell. He managed to catch himself in time, but in the process his gaze fell on her eye, where she was watching him from below.
He looked away quickly. They were not alone—a pair of armed guards stood watching her from the doorway. Had the look they shared lingered, if he had whispered something to her, the guards would have dragged him away at once.
Reyes understood, though, in that single moment of connection, that he had found what he’d been looking for. That his pain and suffering were at an end.
No one in Justinia’s experience had ever accepted the curse so willingly. No one had ever embraced it like that, without even a moment’s hesitation.
Within a week, Reyes found himself on a different job, dismantling an electrical substation halfway across the state. He stood before the guts of an ancient bank of capacitors. It was his job to safely drain them of any residual charge so they could be torn apart with sledgehammers and sold for scrap.
No one was watching him that time.
He knew what he had to do. He knew what it meant. He would rise. He would not die, and not go to hell, and his pain would be gone. It was almost too good to be true.
Already by that point he had received his instructions. He was to create four more vampires once he had the strength to do so. He was to select them carefully, but he was not to waste any time. Once this small army of knight protectors was assembled, they were to gorge themselves on blood—stuff themselves full of the delicious stuff—and then bring it to her so she could be restored. It was an elegant plan, quite simple. It could all happen before Jameson Arkeley was aware of what Malvern was up to.
It all relied on Efrain Zacapa Reyes. He was going to be important. He was going to be loved. All he had to do was take off his rubber-soled shoes, strip off his insulated gloves, and reach forward to touch an exposed wire. After that it would all come naturally.
Justinia had been quite clear on that.
Back at Arabella Furnace, the place of her incarceration, Jameson was making one of his weekly visits. He watched as Hazlitt ran tests on her muscle tone, or rather her lack of it. He watched as she was fed. He watched her so closely that he saw the faint twitch of a smile cross her lips.
“What are you up to?” he asked.
But he didn’t truly suspect. He didn’t have any idea yet what lay in store for him. It had been almost twenty years since he’d dragged her out of the river. It had taken that long for Justinia’s latest plot to hatch. She would not ruin it now by letting him see her cards before all the wagers were in.
So like any good player, she wiped the smile from her face before it could give her away.
48.
Malvern tore through the crowd of witchbillies. She left a trail of death in her wake, her hands flashing like claws as she ripped through any human being foolish enough to be in her way.
“Go, go, get out of here,” Clara shouted, urging the remaining witchbillie
s to leave any way they could. Most of them got the hint.
One of the last remaining windbreaker cops managed to distract Malvern for all of a second or two, mostly by unloading an entire carbine clip into her face. She waited until he was finished, then impaled him on his own weapon.
Back near the vehicles, only a few dozen yards away, Clara could do nothing but ready her own weapon and prepare herself for the same fate.
Urie Polder had his own idea about what to do next. He lifted his human arm in the air and started droning something in German. But before he could cast whatever spell it was he had in mind, Darnell grabbed his arm and pushed it down. “Not yet, pops. You think we didn’t prepare for this?”
“You got somewhat more, boy?” Polder demanded. “You best spring it now.”
The door of Fetlock’s mobile command center opened and the Fed jumped out. “Way ahead of you,” he said. “Darnell, get her attention.”
The snake-eyed trooper nodded and lined up another shot with his rifle. He put a bullet right into Malvern’s pointed left ear. There was a puff of smoke and a bit of a flash, but no apparent damage.
“I’m penetrating her armor, that’s all,” Darnell said.
Armor? What armor? Was he talking about the wig Malvern was wearing? Clara was confused, but she was too busy being terrified to say anything.
“Fire again,” Fetlock said.
Darnell’s next shot struck Malvern in the throat. With the usual effect—meaning none whatsoever.
Except this time it did seem to annoy her enough to make her turn around. She faced Fetlock and Darnell, a quizzical smile on her lips.
“Miss Malvern,” Fetlock shouted. “I have what you want.” He lifted the walkie-talkie to his lips and issued a terse order Clara couldn’t make out. Then he turned to face Malvern again. “Caxton’s this way—if you can get to her.”
The vampire smiled broadly, showing all of her horrible teeth. Then she started floating toward Fetlock and the mobile command center—and the paddy wagon behind him. She took her time.
Fetlock’s surprise did not. Clara felt something huge sweep over her like a storm front. A moment later she heard the chopping noise of the helicopter as it came in for a pass of the clearing. Instead of buzzing the Hollow and flying off again, however, this time it settled in to hover directly above.
Malvern spared it a momentary glance, but she didn’t stop coming.
“Now,” Fetlock said into his walkie-talkie.
Malvern opened her mouth as if she would say something. She didn’t get the chance.
Clara had not gotten a good look at the helicopter before. She hadn’t noticed the rocket pod slung under its fuselage. There was an immense fizzing, whistling noise like a firework being set off. A rocket streaked through the air toward Malvern, so fast Clara couldn’t even follow.
A wave of pressure and flame burst through the clearing, rocking the trailers, setting dead bodies alight. The darkness was washed away by sudden light and then the noise hit, a boom loud enough to throw Clara to the ground if she hadn’t been headed that way already. “Jesus!” she screamed, but she couldn’t even hear the word herself.
When she dared to open her eyes again she saw people sprawled all around her, some of them still moving. Glauer lay next to her on the gravel, flecks of smoldering shrapnel cascading from his back and hair as he propped himself up. He grabbed Clara’s arm and pointed toward where Malvern had been.
She wasn’t there anymore. For a wonderful, glorious second Clara actually believed that the vampire had been struck by the rocket, that she’d been blown up—vaporized—by the weapon.
Then Glauer moved his finger an inch to the left.
Malvern floated above the ground a dozen feet away from where she’d been when the rocket was fired. Her gown and her wig were on fire, blazing away like they’d been soaked in gasoline. Her pale skin looked unharmed. Not so much as scorched.
Her smile hadn’t faded.
“Again!” Fetlock screamed.
Malvern dodged to one side just before the rocket launched. It streaked past her and demolished one of the bungalows on the far side of the clearing. She took a step to the right, as if anticipating the next attack, and a rocket flew straight as an arrow into the trees on the ridge behind her.
The helicopter loosed all its remaining rockets one after another in quick succession, firing in a wide spread to try to catch her as she moved. Malvern threw an arm across her face as they came for her, but otherwise held her ground.
When the shock waves passed, when Clara could see and hear again, she moaned in distress. Malvern’s gown and wig had become living garments of fire, but she hadn’t so much as been scratched. She closed her one red eye for a moment and the flames died out as an eerie wind twisted all around her. The wig and gown stopped burning almost instantly. They didn’t look like they’d even been scorched.
“No,” Fetlock said. “No, that’s not possible.”
Malvern brushed something from the front of her dress. Maybe a piece of ash. Then she turned her face to look upward, at the helicopter.
And then nothing happened.
At least—nothing that Clara could see.
“Damn it,” Glauer said. “Damn, damn—Fetlock! Get on that radio and tell your pilot to get out of here! Now, while he still has a chance!”
“She couldn’t survive that,” Fetlock said, ignoring Glauer. “Nothing can live through a hellfire missile strike. It’s impossible.”
“Sir,” the walkie-talkie said. “Sir, can you confirm? Repeat, can you confirm this new heading? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
That shook Fetlock out of his trance. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The new heading you gave me. It doesn’t seem—no, no sir. I’m not disobeying orders. I’ll do it, it just seems—yes, sir.”
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Fetlock demanded.
“No,” Clara said, because she understood, finally. “Darnell! Shoot her! Make her look away from the chopper!”
But it was too late.
The helicopter’s pilot had his new orders. They might have sounded like they came from Fetlock, but in fact, Malvern had simply put them in his head. A vampire could do that. A vampire like Malvern could do it as easily as making eye contact.
The helicopter swung away from its position, leaning over hard on one side as if it were trying to avoid a midair collision. It slid through the air as if the pilot had lost control, picking up speed as it headed straight for the side of the ridge.
It struck the trees with enough force to crumple its rotors instantly. The cockpit section deformed as it smashed through branches and trunks, then flattened as it hit the stony side of the ridge. A moment later its fuel tank ruptured and a new light blossomed over the clearing. For a moment it was bright as day, bright enough to even make Malvern squint.
“No,” Fetlock said, and dropped his walkie-talkie on the gravel.
Darnell raised his rifle.
Malvern moved so quickly that he didn’t have time to get a shot off. Suddenly she was standing next to him, looming over him as she floated just above the ground. He tried to bring his rifle around, to club at her with its stock, but she flicked it out of his hands with no effort at all.
Then she grasped Darnell’s head in both her hands and pulled it cleanly off his body. She tossed the head away from her like a child’s ball. Clara heard it roll away, bouncing wetly on the gravel.
His body remained upright for a fraction of a second. Then it slumped to the ground, spurting blood across Malvern’s feet.
[ 2003 ]
The only problem with Justinia’s strategy of employing knight protectors was that she had to listen to them whine.
“I want her,” Reyes said, his voice floating across the ether, across miles to reach Justinia in her coffin. Justinia closed her eye and focused on his words. “I want her to … to be like me. I want to fuck her.”
Justinia looked through hi
s eyes and saw this object of his lust. Human, of course. It had been a long time since Justinia could look on anything human and see its shape, see beauty in its features. When she beheld them now all she saw was their blood.
This one was not unattractive, she supposed. A human female with red hair—well, her own vanity made Justinia partial to gingers. And she was shapely enough, this creature Reyes had come to favor. She was hanging up a sheet inside a barn, pinning it to a long line so it fell down to divide the interior space. Her arms were long and slender. Reyes hid nearby in a stand of trees.
“Her name is Deanna,” he told Justinia. “She’s a lesbo.”
Justinia rolled her eye in distaste at his crude terminology. She’d known enough devotees of Sappho in her own time. It wasn’t like they hadn’t existed in the seventeenth century. Even then men had obsessed over them. Was it that they were forbidden? Was it the disdain they showed to the men who lusted over them?
“I can take on her shape,” Justinia insisted. “I can make myself look exactly as she does. Or I can take on a form even more comely, if it pleases thee.”
“You said—you said to find others, to find others ready to take the curse. She’s ready. I can feel it. She wants to die! If she’s like me, if she becomes like—like us, maybe she would—she would be lonely. Like me. And then—”
A little house lay beyond the barn. As Justinia watched through Reyes’s eyes, a light came on over the house’s back door and it slipped open. Another woman stepped out. Probably the redhead’s lover.
“What’s wrong with the dogs?” this newcomer asked. “They’re going crazy!”
Deanna lifted her head, looking surprised. She must have been lost in her own thoughts. She looked briefly toward a kennel on the other side of the yard. Then she turned and looked toward the trees where Reyes crouched. For a moment she looked straight at Reyes—and through him, at Justinia.
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 26
