23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(5)

It was the only way she could handle this mess.

“They were having a Tupperware party,” Special Deputy Glauer said, squatting down next to her. Even if he’d sat on the floor he would have been a head taller than Clara. Big and muscular and with the kind of stiff mustache Clara always thought of as police issue. He’d been just a local patrol cop in Gettysburg when he met Laura Caxton, a good, solid peace officer from a town that went most years without seeing a single homicide. Now he and Clara were partners, in charge of tracking down and killing the last known vampire in Pennsylvania.

They were both in way over their heads.

“The hostess—she’s over there, most of her,” Glauer went on, pointing at a body he’d partially covered with a sheet, “—is one of the top advertising executives in town.”

Clara squinted through her camera. “That seems wrong.” She’d noticed, of course, when she came in that this wasn’t their typical crime scene. Usually the bodies turned up under bridges, in abandoned buildings. This apartment was in an old warehouse, but one that had been converted to expensive loft space. It was in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Allentown. “It doesn’t fit the profile.”

Glauer nodded. Together they’d been following the trail of Justinia Malvern, the last living vampire, through one murder scene after another. Vampires needed blood to fuel their unholy existence. The older the vampire got, the more blood it needed every night, or it weakened. Eventually it would lose the strength to crawl out of its own coffin at night and had to lie there rotting away in a body that couldn’t die. Justinia Malvern was the oldest vampire on record, well into her fourth century. Most of that time she’d spent trapped in her own coffin, too weak even to rise to feed. That had changed in recent years. She had been feeding a lot recently. Bodies had been turning up all over Pennsylvania. Always before, though, they’d belonged to homeless women or illegal immigrants, migrant workers or housekeepers, the kinds of people who didn’t get reported as missing when they failed to turn up for work one day. Malvern was smart. On bad days Clara was sure Malvern was smarter than she was. She’d known that the police would be after her, that she had to keep a low profile if she wanted to keep hunting.

And now—this. “If she’s taking this kind of risk,” Clara said, “it must mean one of two things. Either she’s desperate, she needed blood and she didn’t have time to find a safe supply. Or—”

“Or,” Glauer said, nodding, “she’s not worried about us anymore. We’ve been following her around, cleaning up her messes. Not giving her any reason to worry. Not since Caxton was arrested. Yeah.” He stood up slowly, the joints in his knees popping. “We don’t scare her enough to make her hide anymore.”

They both froze in place at the same time. They’d both been trained by Laura Caxton, the world’s last living vampire hunter, and they knew better than to jump, even when a shadow loomed over them from behind.

“Interesting theory,” their boss said. Deputy Marshal Fetlock of the U.S. Marshals Service was a thin man with jet black hair that had turned dramatically white at his temples. Clara sometimes thought it looked dashing, and sometimes thought it made him look like a skunk. “Write it up and send it to my email.”

Clara gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir,” she said.

The deputy marshal had come in through the main door of the loft and walked right through the one splash of blood in the entire place. Malvern had been careful not to spill a drop from most of the victims, but when she forced her way in she had attacked whoever came to the door first and there had been a short struggle. Clara was 100 percent certain that the blood’s type would only match one of the corpses in the room— Malvern had no blood of her own to spill, even if an unarmed human opponent could somehow injure her—and therefore the blood evidence was probably useless. There was no such thing as a forensic specialist, however, who could watch someone walking all over a clue and not wince.

“A change in her modus operandi,” Fetlock said, putting his hands on his hips. He looked very pleased with himself. “That could be good. It could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

Laura Caxton had fought vampires successfully by doing things most people considered suicidal. She had gone into their lairs at night. She had sprung their traps just to see what would happen. Somehow she had survived and the vampires hadn’t, because she was a warrior, a throwback to the time when vampire hunters had tracked their prey with swords and crossbows. Fetlock, on the other hand, was a very modern bureaucrat. He believed in doing every last thing by the book—which included disciplining anyone who broke protocol.