Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(2)
A trap, an obvious trap. Arkeley had loved it when the vampires would set traps—because then you actually knew where they were. The vampires loved traps because they were predators, and often lazy, and they loved it when their victims came to them. Now Arkeley was one of them, but she had somehow expected more of him.
The arm in the elevator door wasn’t his style either. But that didn’t mean anything. It had been two months since he’d changed, since he’d accepted the curse. He’d done it for all the right reasons, of course. He’d believed it was the only way to save Caxton’s life. He’d probably been right about that, as he was with most things.
There had been only one flaw in his reasoning. When a human being dies and returns as a vampire, he loses some of his humanity. With every night that passes he loses a little more. Arkeley had been a passionate crusader once, a killer of monsters. Now every time he crawled into his coffin a little less of him crawled out. In the end every vampire became the same creature. A junkie for blood. A sociopath with a sadistic streak. A pure and ruthless killer.
A bell chimed inside the elevator door and then the door slid open. She stepped out onto the third floor with her handgun at the level of her shoulders, clutched in both hands. She kept her ears and her eyes open and she tried to be ready for anything. She tried to be ready to see him, to see Arkeley, and to be ready to shoot on sight.
Arkeley had never thought of himself as her mentor. She’d been useful to him in a very limited way and so he’d requisitioned her as a partner. Sometimes he’d used her to do his legwork, the way she used Glauer now. More often Arkeley had used her as bait. She’d had to learn not to take that personally—he hadn’t meant it to be personal. He was driven, obsessed, and he had found her useful. By letting him use her she had learned so much. Everything she knew about vampires had come from him, either from grudging answers to her incessant questions or by way of his example. She had worried often enough when he was alive—and far more often since he’d died and come back—that there were things he’d never bothered to tell her. Secrets he’d kept for himself.
Time to find out, she guessed.
A long corridor stretched out before her, metal walls painted a glaring white, studded with countless locker doors. Some were the size of closets and some were wide enough to drive a car into. She looked at their latches. Every door she saw had a hefty padlock, some of them combination locks with purple or yellow dials, others that required keys to open. Was Arkeley inside one of these lockers? she wondered. Was it his lair? Maybe he hung from the ceiling by his feet like a giant bat. The thought almost made her smile. Vampires and bats had nothing in common. Bats were animals, normal, natural organisms that deserved a lot more respect than they got. Vampires were…monsters. Nothing else.
She studied the doors, looking for one that didn’t have a lock. Even a vampire couldn’t lock himself into a storage space from the inside. She looked down the row of doors, all the way to the end where another corridor crossed laterally. She counted off the locks in her head—lock, lock, lock. Lock. Another lock. Then—there. Near the far end, one narrow door had no lock on its latch. It probably wouldn’t be that easy. Still, she had to check. She moved slowly down the hall, her back to one wall, her weapon up and ready. Her shoes clicked on the unfinished cement floor, a noise anybody could have followed. When she reached the unlocked door she stood to one side and slid the latch open with her left hand. The door rattled noisily and then opened on creaky hinges. Nothing jumped out. She pivoted on her heel until she was facing the locker. She slipped off her pistol’s safety lever. She glanced inside—and saw immediately that it was empty. There had been no lock because no one had rented this particular locker, that was all.
Caxton let herself exhale. Then she froze in midbreath as raucous laughter ran up and down the hallway, echoing off the row of doors and making them all shake on their hinges. She swung around quickly, unable to tell which direction the laughter came from, and—
At the end of the hall, back by the elevators, a pale figure stood in the shadow between two light fixtures. It was tall and its head was round and hairless and flanked by long triangular ears. Its mouth was full of long and nasty teeth, row after row of them. Her heart stopped—then started up again twice as fast when she saw the vampire held a shotgun.
Vampire Zero
Chapter 2.
Caxton’s brain reeled, leaving her unable to react for a critical second. Vampires didn’t carry guns. Ever. They didn’t need them—at Gettysburg she had seen a single vampire mow down squads of National Guardsmen carrying assault rifles. Their claws and especially their teeth were all the weapons they ever needed.
The Beretta in her hand forgotten, Caxton could only stare at the shotgun as the vampire brought it up and pointed it in her direction. She barely managed to duck as his white finger closed around the trigger. Somehow she recovered her wits enough to roll to the side, behind the open door of the empty storage locker. Buckshot pranged off the door and dug hundreds of long tracks through the white paint on the walls. When her hearing recovered from the noise of the shot she heard his bare feet slapping on the cement floor, running toward her, as she ducked into the locker and closed the door shut behind her. Stupid, she thought—she’d done something very stupid. There was no way out of the locker, and no way to lock the door from inside. The door itself would be little barrier to a vampire, especially one that had already fed on the two men down in the lobby. Vampires were strong enough at any time, and close to bulletproof, but they grew exponentially tougher after they drank blood. She backed up, feeling behind her with one hand until she found the back of the unit, and raised her pistol in front of her. When he tore the door open to get at her she might have one chance—she could fire blindly through the door and hope that somehow she hit him squarely in the heart, his only vulnerable part. If she shot him anywhere else his wounds would heal almost instantly. All the bullets in her gun wouldn’t even slow him down.