Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(16)

Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark as she brought her weapon up again. She saw that the gray weeds around her ended about twenty feet away at the sharply defined edge of a field. A thin layer of white snow lay atop the furrowed earth, glowing slightly in the starlight. The flat plane of white screwed with her depth perception and made her eyes buzz. The hair on the backs of her arms started to stand up after a moment and she—


Wait, she thought. She knew that feeling. It was the barely perceptible sensation of wrongness, of something unnatural quite close by. It was the feeling she always got when vampires were near. Jameson. He hadn’t just run off. He was sticking around, waiting for her. Toying with her. The thinnest crinkling sound came from her left and she spun, nearly falling over on her hip. A shadow cleaved off from the dark back of the motel building and she fired without hesitation. The gunshot shattered the darkness all around her, made her ears ring. The shadow darted out toward the snowy field and she squeezed her trigger again. The shot hit home, knocking Jameson sideways. For a second she saw him, his white face lost amid the snowy field but his black shirt sharply defined against the light. She saw him raise his hands to his chest as if he were clutching at a wound. It was a chance—a break, an opening. She didn’t waste it. Rushing forward, toward the shadow, she fired a third round, but she knew it went wide of the mark. She had a lot of trouble telling just how far away he was, but she pressed on, watching his silhouette grow larger and larger before her until he was looming up over her, until she was so close she could feel the cold of his body, feel him colder than the night around him. He raised his good hand to stop her, but she kept coming, her head down so as not to make eye contact, so as not to give him another chance to hypnotize her.

“Trooper,” he said, and his voice was a low growl. “Laura. Let’s talk—”

Jameson Arkeley, in his vampire hunting days, would have known exactly what to do then. So did she. Caxton closed to point-?blank range, the barrel of her weapon only inches from his chest, pointed just left of his sternum. She fired before he could get another word out.

The bullet left the barrel of her weapon at well over the speed of sound. It struck him dead on and knocked him backward as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Sprawling on his back, his legs and arms pinwheeling, he landed in a heap.

It could have been enough. The bullet had plenty of energy—over 450 foot-?pounds—to cut right through his skin, his pectoral muscles, his bony ribs. It would have had plenty of force left over to cut right through his heart. Caxton knew what a bullet could do to a body at that range, even a vampire’s body. It had to be enough. She had killed vampires before. She knew they were tough, that sometimes they seemed bulletproof, but she also knew they weren’t invulnerable. Do enough damage to a vampire’s heart and he’ll stay down, permanently.

She had killed him. That was what it looked like. That was what it felt like. So why couldn’t she believe it?

In life Arkeley had been a tough bastard. In undeath he would be ten times as difficult to kill. She had killed vampires before, sure, but this one—this one was different. She had to be certain. Stepping forward, she kept her feet apart. Steadied her weapon with both hands. He lay at her feet, unmoving, apparently immobile. She couldn’t see the wound on his chest, not in the near-?utter darkness, but it had to be bad. She thought about firing into his heart again, just on principle. The idea sickened her. It felt like desecrating a dead body, she thought.

Jameson Arkeley, vampire hunter, would have done it anyway. She lined up her shot carefully, took her time, fired again. The body didn’t jump or twitch. If he hadn’t been dead already, she thought, that would do it. That was enough.

The second she lowered her weapon he was up on his feet, grabbing her up in a bear hug with one arm, slapping the pistol out of her hand with the other. Her wrist bones shrieked as her hand flew away from the blow. She didn’t see where the pistol went. She didn’t see anything but his teeth. They were huge, and jagged, and stained with clotted blood. They were inches from her eyes. His breath stank. His breath stank of his own brother’s blood.

“Kill me,” she said. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think—couldn’t even be afraid, her brain wouldn’t let her. She knew that small mercy wouldn’t last. “Just do it quickly. You owe me.”

He chuckled, the fetor of his breath filling her nose and throat and making her twist her head around, making her wriggle in his grasp. “I owe you a lot more than that,” he said. “And I intend to repay you in full.”

He yanked her head up, the fingers of his good hand digging into the flesh under her chin. He was so strong that she couldn’t resist. Their eyes met and every thought went flying from her head like bats from a cave at dusk.

Time stopped—and when it started again she was lying on her back in the snow, staring up at dark blue sky and silver stars. So many stars—

She sat up, clutching at her head, forcing herself to focus. Looked around, looked everywhere. There was no sign of him, not even footprints in the snow.

But—she had hit him! She had put a bullet right through his heart. How was it possible he had gotten up again and run away?





Vampire Zero





Chapter 12.


Hours later. In the east, a pale smudge of red stained the horizon. Just a few minutes before the dawn. She started to feel safe again, a little. Yet when Deputy Marshal Fetlock came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder she still jumped.