23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(107)

“Shit!” Caxton said. “Fetlock!”

Gert grabbed her good arm. “What is it?”

“The cops,” Caxton explained. “They’re here. They’re using tear gas. If we get caught in that we’re done.”

“So you just have to explain to them who you are and what you’re doing. Maybe they’ll even give us guns.”

Caxton shook her head. “They won’t ask questions, they’ll just scoop us up and drag us back inside. Come on, Clara! Find something!”

The intercom buzzed back into life. “There’s a way up to the wall,” Clara said, as if she’d heard Caxton. “It’s an underground tunnel. The entrance is at the side of the administrative wing. Go—go left, three hundred yards.” Caxton and Gert hurried to follow Clara’s instructions. As they passed each loudspeaker it came on and Clara gave them a new command. “You can’t just go straight there or you’ll run smack into a SWAT team,” Clara explained, as she sent them all the way around a row of baseball diamonds. When they finally reached the door they wanted it was standing open.

It led to a flight of stairs going down into the earth. At the bottom was a long tunnel with bundles of wiring and dripping pipes overhead. “Go left at the next junction, and you’ll come to a flight of stairs going up. It’ll take you all the way up to one of the towers.” The intercom was buzzing when they reached the tower stairs.

“Listen,” Clara said, and then couldn’t seem to find any more words.

Caxton looked at a camera mounted above a door and gave it her most patient look. She was running out of those.

“You don’t have to do this. Fetlock has the place buttoned up. She can’t get away. I know you think this is your responsibility—”

Caxton nodded emphatically. There was no way to tell Clara what she was really thinking. That Malvern was a sneaky monster, and that no matter how good Fetlock’s perimeter security might be, she would have some plan of escape. If Caxton waited for Fetlock to mop up the prison, there was no chance of catching Malvern. And then it would just go on. The nightmares. The long sleepless nights worrying who was going to be killed next. The blood. Always there would be more blood.

Clara was silent for a while. “Just. Just—I was going to say be careful. But that’s not your plan, is it? Okay. Just do it, then. Do what you do best.”

Caxton wasn’t sure how to reply. Blow a kiss at the camera? Salute? In the end she just patted her heart and then pointed at the lens. Clara would know what she meant.

Then she headed up the stairs, with Gert close behind her.





59.

Caxton grabbed Gert’s forearm and pointed into the darkness.

Something was moving there, right next to one of the towers. She pulled her celly back into the shelter of the stairwell door.

“What’s the plan?” Gert asked in a whisper.

As if it was as simple as that. Caxton was facing two well-fed, desperate vampires. Between her and Gert she had a can of pepper spray, a collapsible riot-control baton, and three working arms.

She had thought, of course, about what she would do when she found Malvern. She had thought about very little else since she had saved Clara. Most of her plans had involved heavy weaponry.

“We can’t take them ourselves,” Caxton said, thinking rapidly. “But we can keep them from getting away. If we can get them back down into the yard, the cops can take care of them.”

It wasn’t a plan she liked. It didn’t allow her to kill Malvern with her own two hands. But it had the advantage of being plausible, whereas taking on Malvern without guns was not.

“How do we do that?” Gert asked.

Caxton smiled to herself. “We use bait.”

The trick she’d used on Hauser—using her own blood to drive that vampire crazy—would work on Forbin, but not on Malvern. Caxton had seen Malvern turn away from readily available blood before when the cost was too high. Over her three centuries she’d learned some kind of self-restraint.

She had another idea, though. She explained it carefully to Gert, who started breathing heavily and blinking a lot. It scared Gert. It scared Caxton, too, but fear had stopped meaning much to her.

“Okay. We need to be together on this one. If you don’t think you can handle it—”

Gert nodded. “I can be useful to you. I can be your road bitch. That’s all I’ve wanted this whole time, right? So let me do it.”