23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(109)

Caxton had chased Malvern long enough to know that what happened next would not be a game. Some vampires liked to play with their food. They would tease and scare and startle their victims until their eyes were bugging out of their heads, until they were gibbering in panic, and only then would the vampire move in to feed.

Malvern didn’t have a sadistic bone in her body. Not out of any nobility or morality, though. It was because sadism was inefficient. It didn’t help her meet her goals. She would circle around Caxton and strike from behind, and she would do it quickly. Caxton had maybe a second or two to get ready.

She ran toward the tower. It was the last direction she would be expected to go—straight toward where she’d last seen Malvern. Right into danger. It was, however, the best move defensively. The tower had walls she could hide behind.

The door to the tower was open. Caxton pushed her way inside and closed it behind her. Locked it, for all the good that would do her. Inside the tower was a small circular room containing a mounted machine gun and a searchlight that could be moved around by hand. There was also a chair, an unfinished thermos of coffee, and a dead CO.

Caxton nearly stepped on him in her haste. She pulled her foot back just in time and crouched over the body. Judging by the smell, he must have been killed back when Malvern’s half-deads took over the prison, more than a day before. Killed and then just left to rot. She apologized to him, then grabbed his stun gun and his stab-proof vest. As she clicked open its quick-release buckles, something heavy thunked against the floor. She couldn’t see very well in the gloom, so she reached down to see what had made that sound, but—

Malvern hit the door like an enraged sledgehammer. It shattered in its frame, chunks of wood and broken glass bursting through the tower room like a vicious rain. Caxton sat down hard, the stun gun held up in front of her as if it would do any good at all, and braced herself for an impact. But it didn’t come.

The doorway was empty.

“Oh shit oh shit,” Caxton breathed, because she knew what that meant. Malvern had destroyed the door just as a distraction. In point of fact, she would be behind Caxton, sizing up the back of her neck.

Caxton scrabbled upward as cold fingers brushed her spine. She swung around and threw herself behind the searchlight.

Malvern howled in joy. She bent at her knees, getting ready to pounce.

Caxton switched on the searchlight and hauled it around by its handle. A light as intense as a million candles hit Malvern right in the face.

Vampires are creatures of the night. They do not do well in bright light.

Malvern’s single eye burst and ran down her cheek as white goo. She screamed in pain and rage and her arms lashed out, smashing again and again at the lens of the searchlight, shattering the bulb inside and warping the metal reflector out of shape. It didn’t matter—the light’s work was done. Malvern was blind.

“Do ye think this matters? Ye’ve bought ye—yourself a second’s grace, that’s all,” Malvern growled.

“All I need,” Caxton said.

Malvern’s eyeball was already growing back, white smoke filling in the cavern of her eye socket. She didn’t even need the eye to track her prey, Caxton knew. She could smell Caxton, could hear her as she stepped backward.

Caxton raised her pistol and fired three times into Malvern’s rib cage. Right into her heart.

She had expected the pistol to fail. That its firing pin had been filed down or that there would be no bullets in the magazine. When she’d found it on the belt of the dead CO, she had been unable to believe her luck. A gun. Right where she needed it. Right when she needed it. It was too much to ask for. It had to be a trick.

The bullets tore through Malvern’s undead lungs, her sternum, and her heart. She screamed and thrashed and howled, crawled across the floor toward Caxton, her fingers reaching for Caxton’s ankles, her monstrous jaws snapping at thin air. But the red light in her fully healed eye was already going out.

The vampire dropped to the floor, suddenly very small. Very compact. Caxton thought she could pick Malvern up with her one good hand. Strange to think a creature that could do so much damage would ever come to look like that. She was dead. Caxton fired the rest of her bullets at point-blank range into the monster’s chest, into her heart, just to be sure. “Finally,” she breathed. It wasn’t the most profound thing she could say, she knew, but it was all she had strength for.

Then she closed her eyes and wept.

But not for long.

Another puzzle piece clicked into place. A gun, loaded with real bullets, exactly when it was needed the most. The half-dead who killed the CO hadn’t bothered to take it away. Even though every other gun in the prison had been carefully, methodically ruined.