23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(85)

Queenie said, “Fuckin’ yeah.” The others seemed to agree with the sentiment.

Clara glanced over at Marty the former CO again, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. She had bought herself a little time, it was true. By convincing Jen to hand her over only to Malvern herself, she had kept herself alive a little longer.

Now it seemed like it wasn’t going to make any difference. Fetlock had to be out there somewhere. He’d had half the day to gather SWAT teams and get in place. And yet she’d heard nothing from him on the BlackBerry, nor had she or any of the others noticed if the prison was being noisily surrounded by cops. What was holding him up?

Maybe she’d been a fool to put her faith in her boss. She knew how slow he was to take action. He thought of it as being cautious. She also knew what Laura thought about people who were overly cautious when dealing with vampires. They might, it was true, survive through the night. But other people just died in their place.

Fetlock had been willing to bide his time when Malvern was at large, murdering people every night. He had wanted to let her have time to make a mistake, to give herself away. Instead he’d just given her time to work the kinks out of her master plan, to make sure of every little detail in her bid to take over the prison. Now—how many lives would he waste, waiting for the perfect time to strike? He had to be out there. He knew what was going on. But he wanted to make sure he, too, had every little thing just in place before he made his move.

Clara knew that the second the sun went beneath the horizon, her life was effectively over. She had long since given up hope that Laura would rescue her. Or maybe… maybe there was one tiny shred of hope left, but it was undernourished and rapidly fading away.

She looked up at the table as the BlackBerry rang once more. She stared at it, then at Guilty Jen. Maybe it was Fetlock, saying he was on his way—

“Hello?” Jen asked, pressing the button to set the handheld to speaker mode.

“Hello, Jen. Your friendly neighborhood warden again, just checking in.”

Guilty Jen slapped the table so hard the phone jumped. “I told you, bitch, we’re not negotiating with you. I want to talk to the cunt in charge, and I’m more than willing to wait until she wakes up.”

The warden chuckled. “Oh, I heard you the first time. I just wanted to bring you up to speed with the latest news. I know you and Laura Caxton are old friends, and I thought you’d like to know I just ran into her.”

Clara’s heart sped up. She made a point of not staring at the phone with wide eyes, not wanting to give away her excitement.

“She didn’t kill you, I see,” Guilty Jen replied. “I knew she was weak.”

“She might have, but I’m more slick than you give me credit for. Anyway, I left her heading down to the Hub. You know where the Hub is, don’t you, Jen? It can be reached easily from anywhere in the prison. Wherever you’re holed up, for instance, can’t be more than a few minutes away from there. All the doors between you and the Hub are open, by the way. Not that you have any reason to go down there, of course.”

“That’s right,” Jen said. “You’re not going to catch me out like a sucker. I’m not going down there just so you can ambush us and get your hostage back. What do you take me for, an idiot? Anyway, Caxton’ll be dead in an hour. When the vampire wakes up, she’ll suck her blood.”

“Are you so sure of that, Jen? You’ve never actually met Miss Malvern, have you? I have. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with her, actually. Enough to know she appreciates a nice ironic turn of events. She doesn’t want to kill Caxton. She wants to turn her out. You know, make her a vampire.”

“Bullshit.”

The warden was silent for a moment. “You can believe what you want. But I want to remind you of something. The first time you met Caxton, when you jumped her in the kitchens— she didn’t kill any of your set in that fight. She didn’t want a murder rap on her jacket. Even pulling her punches, though, she managed to make mincemeat out of every one of your girls.”

“If your hogs hadn’t come in before I had a chance, I would have—”

“You might have taken her, I know. You’re a real hard case, I get it. But when she’s a vampire, she’ll be ten times as strong and tougher than you can imagine. And she won’t have a single compunction left when it comes to killing worthless scum like you and yours. Just a thought I wanted to share.”

Every pair of eyes in the room was staring at the phone. Slowly, as each brain worked through what had just happened, the eyes turned toward Guilty Jen.