23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(20)

The CO didn’t lead her back to the anteroom, though. Instead he directed her down a long hallway that led deeper into the prison.

“What’s going on?” Clara asked. “I’m done here.”

The CO looked straight ahead. “The warden wants to see you for a second.”

Clara checked the name tag on his uniform. “What’s going on, Franklin? I’m not in any trouble here, am I?”

He straightened up a little. Making himself taller. “I’m sure you’ll want to cooperate with us.” There was something weird about his voice. It was a little too high-pitched for a man that size.

Regardless—he was starting to scare her. He had his stun gun in his hand. Held low, against his thigh. She glanced at it, then at his face, which was completely expressionless.

“I’m sure I do,” she said.





10.

Caxton was barely aware of her surroundings as she was taken back to her cell. There was too much going on in her head. It had been alright when she and Clara had been talking about Malvern—Caxton could always switch everything else off when vampires were involved—but now that she was left alone with her own thoughts, it all came crashing in.

Clara was going to break up with her.

Caxton had watched her girlfriend trying to get up the nerve to say it. She’d been able to read Clara like an open book—they’d been together long enough to know each other’s gestures, each other’s private body language. Clara hadn’t been able to get the words out, but Caxton knew that there would come a time when she could. Either next month, at her next visit, or maybe even just in a letter, it would come. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, she would say, and the time has come.

Caxton couldn’t even get angry about it. She understood perfectly. She had never been a very good girlfriend. Always, as long as she’d known Clara, her life had been about other things. Well, one other thing—vampires. There had never been enough time for romance, for intimacy, for just sitting around talking about nothing, for casual glances, for lingering touches. There had never been a week when her job hadn’t got in the way, and there had been far too many nights when she’d been out chasing bloodsuckers and Clara had been forced to sit home alone, worrying, waiting for her to come back, waiting to get a phone call saying she’d been killed.

Now, with Caxton in prison, the relationship must seem utterly doomed.

The honorable thing, Caxton knew, would be to make it easy on Clara. To just accept defeat and give her back her freedom. And yet that would destroy Caxton utterly. Without Clara, what would she have in the whole world? She was never going to be a cop again, even after she served her time and got her release. Fetlock would never let her hunt vampires. So without her work, and without the woman she loved, what remained?

She had rescued dogs in the past. That had given her some sense of satisfaction. But the idea that dogs could replace both Clara and her calling was laughable.

The cell door closed behind Caxton with a buzz and a double thunk of locks slamming shut. She looked up and realized she had walked inside and walled up without even thinking about it. She glanced sideways and saw Stimson standing next to her, but her celly might as well have been in a different city. She wasn’t looking at Caxton. She wasn’t acknowledging her in any way.

The urge to talk to anyone, even Stimson, the need to unburden herself of her troubles, was compelling, even maddening. And yet she’d blown that chance, too, hadn’t she? Because she could never reach out to another human being without screwing it up somehow. Stimson had offered her kindness, and companionship, even friendship of a warped kind. And she’d pushed it away.

Caxton climbed up on her bunk and lay back. She closed her eyes and tried not to sob. It took some work.

Dinner came and went. She ate, but without paying much attention to what was going in her mouth. When she was done she got back up on the bunk and stared at the light fixture again. Just as she had the day before. Just as she would, she imagined, for the nearly eighteen hundred days yet to come.

When she heard the screaming start it barely registered.

In the dorms used by the general population of the prison you heard screams at night, sometimes, and you quickly learned to block them out. Women in prison had nightmares. A lot of them were mentally ill, but not in dangerous ways, so they were just crammed in with the rest of the inmates and convicts. The screams didn’t mean anything, and there was nothing you could do about them, anyway.