23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(4)

Caxton didn’t need them. If she was tough enough and fast enough to fight vampires, one human woman shouldn’t pose a problem. She’d just proven she could handle a couple at a time.

Guilty Jen, however, was a little more than just the average gangbanger. She spread her feet, getting a good stance. Then she did something Caxton would never have expected. She leaned forward slightly. She bowed.

What that meant wasn’t lost on Caxton. She just had time for a brief spike of fear to go running through her veins before a roundhouse kick came at her face so fast she couldn’t avoid it.

Jen had martial arts training. That made her dangerous, even to someone like Caxton. Caxton threw up one arm in time to fend off the kick, but it connected with her wrist and made every nerve in her hand fire at once. Her fingers rattled around in her skin and she wondered if her arm was broken.

Caxton dropped to one knee and leaned over hard to the side as Jen followed up her kick with a sweeping arm attack that was aimed right at Caxton’s neck. The arm went instead over Caxton’s head, but Jen recovered and pulled back almost instantly, long before Caxton could bring her own hands down on the gangster’s knee. Jen’s leg flashed backward, out of Caxton’s reach, and Caxton knew she’d made a bad mistake. She had avoided the worst of Jen’s attacks, but only by putting herself in a vulnerable posture. The next attack was going to be a killing blow, and—

Jen cried out at the same time as something exploded behind her. She staggered forward, her stomach colliding with Caxton’s face, and they both went down in a heap. Caxton struggled to get free so she could see what was going on.

“You f*cking shot me!” Jen howled. “That’s unnecessary force!”

A team of COs stormed into the kitchen. The one at the front had a guard sergeant’s stripes. He also had a smoking shotgun in his hands. “Just a beanbag round, gal,” he growled. “You’ll have a nasty bruise for a week, but nothing permanent. Alright,” he said to the guards behind him. “Forced extraction on all of them. Don’t take any chances.”

Someone hit Caxton with a thick blanket—shoving it down over her face and body, pinning her to the ground. She knew better than to fight back. There was nothing to grab, no one to punch, just heavy fabric that stank of sweat and blood pushed down over her mouth and eyes. Plastic handcuffs wrapped around her wrists, and her arms were pulled painfully back behind her. Then her ankles were cuffed together, too, and she was hog-tied. She was lifted off the floor and carried out of the kitchen by a pair of COs wearing so much armor they looked like baseball umpires.

She never got a chance to look back at Guilty Jen, to see what they were doing to her, but she knew one thing without a doubt. They would meet again.





3.

Almost two hundred miles away, in Allentown, Clara Hsu was about to be sick. She was surrounded by bodies, corpses drained of their blood and then discarded like old ragged dolls.

The women around her ranged in age from thirty-five to fifty, but with some it was hard to tell—their arms and throats had been torn at, savaged by vicious teeth, by a vampire who needed their blood and didn’t care how much pain she had to cause to get it.

Clara felt her gorge rising and knew she had to do something, quickly. The smell and the colors—oh, God, the colors— were too much to take in, too much to bear. Luckily, she had a way of dealing with it. Taking a digital camera from the case around her neck, she started snapping pictures, creating a permanent record of the crime scene.

Clara had been just a police photographer once. Even a year ago that had been her whole job. She had worked for a rural county sheriff’s office, documenting methamphetamine busts and car accidents. Then she’d done something stupid. She’d fallen in love with Laura Caxton. Caxton’s life had been about vampires and nothing else. To stay a part of Caxton’s life Clara had agreed to go back to school for forensic criminology, where she’d learned all about latent fingerprints and hair follicle matching and the legal ins and outs of DNA testing. It had gotten her a place on the SSU, the special subjects unit—the Vampire Squad—and exposed her to parts of the human anatomy she had never guessed existed. Or wanted to.

She’d learned the trick of using her camera’s viewfinder to shield herself from the gore back in the old days, and luckily it still worked. You focused in on a flap of skin hanging loose over a ravaged jugular vein and you thought about composition, and lighting, and getting the color values right, and suddenly it was just a picture. Something created, something not quite real.