32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5

by David Wellington

  “Glauer!” Clara shouted. She started running toward him.

  Caxton grabbed her around the waist and twisted around, pushing her deeper inside the cave. It was all she could think to do.

  “Remember when we were partners?” Glauer asked.

  “Sure,” Caxton told him.

  “No. No.” He swallowed convulsively. His eyes kept drifting shut. Had he hit his head on the dashboard in the collision? He was in bad shape. “No. We were never partners. I worshipped you, Caxton. I thought you were the toughest lady I ever met.”

  “You took some hits yourself and never complained,” Caxton said. She wished she had better words for him. She knew exactly what was going to happen next.

  Glauer turned his head to the side to look at something outside of the cave, something Caxton couldn’t see. He nodded, once.

  “I can only pull this trick once,” he said. “Make it count.”

  Caxton took that as her cue. She grabbed Clara and dragged her back into the cave, back as far as she could get, away from the cave’s mouth.

  She did look back, just once, to see Glauer still struggling, trying to get up.

  And then Malvern roared through him, shredding him into several pieces as she erupted into the cave mouth in pure fury. His blood hit the ground like rain. She didn’t even bother to drink any of it.

  If the collision with the car had hurt her, Caxton couldn’t see the damage. She had her illusory shape again, her wig perfect without a stray hair, her gown glowing with infernal light. Her red eye burned like a malevolent star.

  She opened her mouth and showed her fangs, row after row of them. Caxton knew that was an illusion, too, one that came naturally to vampires. They had only thirty-two teeth in their heads, just like human beings. It just looked like they had a lot more because they were so cruel and sharp.

  Malvern took a step inside the mouth of the cave. “Enough delays, Laura. Ye cannot harm me now.”

  “Bullshit,” Caxton said, and pushed down the handle of her plunger.

  Clara just had time to shout “Gl—” before the ceiling came down.

  The explosion was mad, huge, a living, angry thing, a howling darkness. A noise that made Caxton’s flesh ripple like water. It blew over her, through her, and she felt rocks the size of her fist, the size of her head, go screaming past her into the dark, felt dust blast across her skin leaving a thousand tiny scratches. But she held her ground, because she knew she would survive. Knew she would not be hurt, really. Patience Polder had promised her as much.

  Urie Polder had found the dynamite in an abandoned construction shed near the old strip mine. A full crate of it, just sitting under a sagging roof, getting wet every time it rained and gnawed on by hungry rats. Caxton hadn’t believed it could possibly still be potent.

  It did a treat now, though. The ceiling came down exactly as promised, burying Malvern under a dozen tons of rock. The cave mouth was sealed off completely, walled off from the rest of the world—just as Patience had foretold it would be. Caxton felt like she’d been buffeted right out of existence, back into primordial void. Everything went black and she went deaf and there was dust in her mouth, dust in her nose and her eyes. She tried to scrub it away with her hands, then reached inside her nylon bag and pulled out a heavy-duty flashlight. When she switched it on its beam revealed nothing but billowing smoke and dust. She started to cough and choke, but she had a gas mask in the bag as well—again, a leftover from the mining days. She pulled it on over her face and swung her beam of light around, looking for any sign of Clara in the debris.

  What she found first, though, was Malvern’s hand.

  It stuck up out of a wall of fallen rocks, the fingers outstretched toward her. So pale and white. No illusions veiled it now. It looked like a human hand sculpted out of alabaster. There were a few age spots where the thumb met the palm. Dark veins ran like snakes beneath the skin, swollen with blood.

  “L-L-Lau—” Clara coughed from behind Caxton.

  The hand of a vampire. The hand of the enemy who had organized every event, every bad, fucked-up thing in her life for the last five years. She had trouble looking away from it. Especially when the fingers started to move.

  “Goddamn it,” she said. She turned away from the hand—not without effort—and cast about on the floor until she found Clara. She stripped the mask from her own face and pressed it against Clara’s mouth and nose until Clara started sucking in great gasping breaths.

  “We have to get out of this mess—it’ll take hours for the dust to settle,” Caxton said, trying not to breathe too much of it in. “And long before then she’ll get free.”

  “She’s not dead?” Clara asked, her voice muffled by the gas mask.

  Caxton grabbed the mask back from her and put it over her own face again before she started coughing. “Not even close. Come on, get to your feet.”

  “I think—I—koff—I got hit by some—debris—”

  “I can’t carry you. Either you walk or you stay here,” Caxton told her.

  Clara stared at her with questioning eyes. Caxton refused to respond.

  “I guess I’ll walk,” Clara said, finally.

  “Thought so. Come on.”

  [ 2005 ]

  Caxton’s gun clicked noisily in the throne chamber. She was out of bullets. Jameson threw one arm across his face anyway to protect himself from the death that did not come.

  When he realized he’d been tricked, he howled in rage. But Caxton was already gone, headed back up the tunnel of the burning mine. The half-deads raced after her, with Jameson following more slowly behind them.

  Justinia had taught Jameson that. He had always been impetuous, ready to race into any trap. She had taught him to send his lackeys first, to let them take the brunt of the danger. Not that it would make any difference.

  In her coffin she waited quietly until one of the half-deads returned.

  It scrubbed at its face, not tearing at the skin this time but trying to get pepper spray out of its eyes. It looked miserable. Good. The pathetic little failure deserved to hurt. “She got the rest of us—I’m the only one left,” the creature squeaked.

  It had been human once. Now it was so much less. It was beneath Malvern’s contempt.

  “I’m sure that the master will prevail,” the creature piped. Trying for a confidence that neither of them believed. The half-dead would have made a terrible cardplayer.

  “No. It is over,” Malvern said. She knew Caxton—and Jameson—well enough to predict how their final confrontation would end. Jameson was a hundred times stronger than Caxton, a dozen times faster. It didn’t matter. Caxton would win, somehow. The odds against her didn’t matter—she was that most dangerous of players, because she had luck on her side. “Help me up.”

  The creature put one shoulder under her armpit. She was still so weak. So frail—Jameson had promised her blood, so much blood. In this he had failed her. In many other ways he had done good service for her.

  She had always had a healthy respect—and even fear—for witches. Now the two greatest witches in America were dead—Astarte Arkeley and Vesta Polder, laid low by Jameson’s own hands. The greatest threat to Justinia’s existence, Caxton, still lived, but Justinia wasn’t so sure how she felt about that. She had begun to feel a sort of grudging affection for the girl.

  And oh, how fun it would be to make her suffer.

  There were plans to be made. Quiet times ahead when she would lie low, and think, and scheme.

  “What about the master’s son?” the half-dead asked. He pointed at the boy chained to a nearby pillar, unconscious with the fumes of this place. “You should take his blood now. You’ll need your strength.”

  “No,” Justinia said, after thinking on it for a moment. “No. He and I are old friends. He taught me how to use e-mail. And so many more things.”

  She bent low over Simon Arkeley’s body. Pried open his eyelids with her fingers, stared deep into his slumbering brain. Planted a little of her se
lf in there. Not the curse, not the gift of vampirism. Just a simple orison. From now on she would see everything he saw, hear every word spoken to him, and he would never know it. He would be a perfect spy for her.

  “Now get me out of here,” she told the half-dead.

  “But the master—”

  “I do not discuss my orders with the likes of thee,” Justinia said, and bared her fangs. After that the little wretch was most compliant.

  “Soon, Laura,” Justinia said, as they walked together out of the coal mine. “Soon enough.”

  53.

  “We’re trapped in here,” Clara said, staring at the walls of rock all around her. “We’re trapped in here—with her.”

  “Which is exactly what I wanted,” Caxton told her. She swept her light along the wall in front of her, a massive beetling brow of limestone. A crack ran along its length, in most places so narrow it would have been difficult to get the point of a knife inside. To the left, however, the crack widened out until it became a low passageway. Caxton grabbed Clara’s arm and pulled her inside. They had to bend over nearly double, but the light showed that the passage led to a wider space ahead. Grunting and grimacing, Caxton ducked under a lip of rock and into a tiny room in the rock, a bare chamber with curving walls. It looked like a bubble had been trapped in the stone when it formed. On its far side a slightly more forgiving tunnel opened up.

  The cave wasn’t part of the strip mine. It had existed long before anyone came to the ridges looking for coal. The original surveyors had explored it extensively—one could still see their blazes chiseled into the walls, if one knew where to look—but had evidently found nothing of value and had left it alone. No one had found a use for it since. There were caves like it all over Pennsylvania—Penn Caverns and Lincoln Caverns were the most famous, flooded labyrinths that had become tourist traps, with legions of suburbanites showing up every year to take boat rides through the weird and otherworldly rock formations. Most were much smaller, with only a few chambers connected by passages too tight to comfortably squeeze through.

  Caxton’s cave wasn’t an enormous system, but it went deep beneath the ridge and it had its sights. It was also exactly the kind of place that a Pow-Wow like Urie Polder knew what to do with.

  As Caxton dragged Clara deeper into the caverns, lighting up walls of stalactites and organ pipes with her flashlight, she saw the effect of Polder’s spell right away. Clara stumbled forward like a blind woman, even when Caxton pointed out exactly where she should put her feet. She kept reaching out as if to fend off stalactites that weren’t there, and tripping over stalagmites she couldn’t seem to see.

  “Fuck, this is going to be a problem,” Caxton said.

  “What’s going on? I feel like I’m on drugs,” Clara said.

  “Not drugs. It’s a spell. You ran across that spell that kept people from finding the Hollow, right? On your way in—Simon knew the way, or you never would have gotten this far and screwed up all my plans.”

  “Thanks for that,” Clara pouted.

  “Oh, give it a rest.”

  Clara lowered her head. “Alright, so, anyway. Yes. I saw the spell that hides the Hollow. I saw how it doesn’t show up on GPS.”

  “This is basically the same spell. Designed to mislead anyone who comes down here, other than me or Urie Polder. Only it works even better down here. Caves are disorienting at the best of times—there are weird acoustics, you can barely see anything, and they almost, but don’t quite, make sense. Passages and rooms, right? Just like a building human beings built. Except these passages double back on each other and go nowhere, or the rooms have ceilings that are twenty feet high on one side but only six inches high on the other. It’s damned easy to get lost in a cave, which is why the government seals them off as fast as they can find them. You add a little magic to the mix and you’ve got a real maze. A perfect death trap.”

  “You knew you would bring Malvern down here,” Clara said.

  “Yes. All along. I spent two years hanging up the ghost cordon and the ring of bird skulls, training the witchbillies, hiding the Hollow from prying eyes. All to make Malvern think I wasn’t ready for her, that I wanted to keep her out. Which of course made her want to get in. I wanted her in here, right here, where I could control things. Just her and me, and a fight to the death.”

  “And now—me.”

  “Right. Which ruins everything.”

  Clara’s lips pursed as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “I was only trying to help. You don’t need to be such a bitch about it.”

  Caxton spun around and stared at her former lover. “If Glauer hadn’t sacrificed his life you and I would both be dead, right now. You fucked up, and it took his death—his death, Clara—to save us. He was a soldier. He knew how to take orders. What are you bringing to the table? A machine gun?”

  Clara looked down at the carbine that was slung at her waist.

  Caxton fumed. “You see what she’s capable of right now? Did you? She’s never been stronger. What did you possibly think you could do here?”

  Clara bit her lip, but her eyes stayed sharp. She was probably fighting back an emotional reaction, but she didn’t let it reach her face. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Caxton turned away with a grunt of annoyance and headed farther into the cave. The killing floor was deeper inside, past a long traverse where they would have to crawl. Caxton knew the path well enough she could negotiate the squeeze without feeling like she was about to be trapped at any second. Getting Clara through it, when she was confused by Urie Polder’s spell, would take a lot longer. It might take more time than they had.

  “What about you?” Clara demanded. “What are you going to do? How are you going to fight her?”

  “I’ve still got an ace up my sleeve,” Caxton said, unwilling to waste breath explaining herself. “Come on. Down on your hands and knees. Try to stay low so you don’t scrape your back on the ceiling. There are a couple of places where you’ll cut yourself if you’re not careful.

  Clara did as she was told, though she clearly saw something other than what Caxton described to her. “Is this low enough?” she asked.

  “Toward the end you have to scoot forward on your belly,” Caxton said, as she crammed herself into the low-hanging fissure. “Just keep moving. We don’t have much time.”

  Clara pushed forward, keeping her eyes on her hands as she moved forward, watching nothing but where her next move would take her. It was probably the best she could manage. Did she think she was in a huge cavern, crawling around for no good reason? Or maybe she saw the walls around her on every side just fine, but couldn’t tell which direction she was heading. Caxton had no experience of what it was like to be under the power of the spell, but she imagined it must be terrifying. Yet Clara didn’t give in to the natural urge to panic.

  Caxton had almost started to respect the other woman. But then Clara spoke again.

  “You planned all along to come in here, to face Malvern in this cave,” Clara said. “Jesus Christ. You’re a fucking monster.”

  “Why? It’s not that I like this cave any more than you do, I just—”

  “You let all those people die.”

  Caxton nearly bashed her head on the roof of the fissure as she turned to glare at Clara. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “The witchbillies—the cops—even Fetlock. I hated Fetlock. The man was just slime. But he did not deserve to die like that.”

  Caxton steeled herself before responding. “I didn’t ask him to come here. I didn’t ask him to try to take Malvern on when there was no chance of his succeeding. I definitely didn’t ask him to lock me up in that paddy wagon and nearly get me killed. I had to sacrifice some people, yeah. But this isn’t about playing nice. It’s about killing a goddamned vampire. It’s about Justinia Malvern.”

  “Bullshit,” Clara said.

  “What? How dare you tell me what this is—”

  “This is about you. It needs to be you who finishes her of
f. You, Laura Caxton, the famous vampire hunter. They made a TV movie about you. They write magazine articles about you—just last month there was one in Newsweek, about how you were still evading the law. About how you were still out there somewhere, planning, waiting.”

  “I don’t do this to be famous!”

  “No, I don’t think you do. I think it’s because you need to prove something. You needed to prove something to Jameson Arkeley, that you were tough enough that he could count on you. Then he turned, and you got a chance to prove you were even tougher than him. You destroyed my life because you needed to be tough. So tough nobody could love you. So tough you aren’t even human anymore.”

  “Duck your head or you’re going to lose it,” Caxton growled.

  “That’s not a denial.”

  Caxton turned herself around in the tunnel until she was facing Clara. It wasn’t easy, and she scraped skin off her palms in the process, leaving microscopic trails of blood on the stone. Trails Malvern would spot as if they glowed in the dark.

  “I do this because nobody else will do it right,” she insisted. “Every time I try to train somebody else, every time I try to ask for help—from the State Police, from the U.S. Marshals Service, from the witchbillies—hell, from you—they just fuck it up. They do it wrong and lots of people get killed and then I have to go through ten miles of shit to clean up after them. How many times have I paid for Fetlock’s mistakes? How many times have I had to rescue your skinny ass?”

  “A lot,” Clara had to admit. With Caxton’s light in her face she looked a lot less confrontational.

  “I do this,” Caxton said, intending it to be the last word on the matter, “because somebody has to. And if nobody else does it, it doesn’t end. I do this because Malvern is fucking evil and the world can’t handle evil things. It always underestimates them. It always thinks that if it just pretends the bad things don’t exist, then they’ll just go away. The world functions by denial and wishful thinking, and that’s why the world runs red with blood. I do it so people can keep being stupid and not have to pay for it. So people can be weak and it’s not a death sentence. I do it,” she said, “because nobody else can.”