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

She pointed the nose of the pistol at the door. She aimed for a spot at the level of her own heart, then raised her aim about six inches. Arkeley was taller than her, she remembered. Arkeley—

The image of the vampire in the hallway was seared into her mind’s eye. She couldn’t not see it standing there, leveling the shotgun at her. Holding the shotgun with both hands. Vampires healed all wounds they took after their rebirth, but any old injuries left over from their human lives lasted forever. Arkeley the vampire would still be missing all the fingers from one hand. This vampire had ten fingers, all the better to hold a shotgun with. Crap, she thought. It’s not him.

It wasn’t Arkeley. She hadn’t been able to process that fact while he was shooting at her, but as she waited for him to come and kill her she couldn’t deny it anymore. Whoever the vampire might have been, whatever he had become, he wasn’t her former mentor.

Which made things much worse.

There was only one way for a vampire to reproduce, and it involved direct eye contact. There were only two vampires at large in the world who could pass on the curse—Arkeley, and Justinia Malvern, a decrepit old corpse that Arkeley kept close to him at all times. If the two of them were creating new vampires, if Arkeley had become a Vampire Zero—

The door rattled in front of her. She steeled herself, adjusted her grip on the Beretta. She would shoot in just a second, when she thought her chances were best. She would let him start to tear the door open first.

The door rattled again. She heard a metallic click and knew instantly what had happened. The vampire wasn’t going to tear open the door at all. Instead he’d closed the latch with a padlock, sealing her inside. He must have had one in his pocket, just for this eventuality.

Whoever he was, he was smart. Smarter than she, apparently. She cursed herself. You never ran into a place with only one exit—that was one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She should have remembered.

“Who are you?” she shouted. “Don’t you want to kill me?”

She didn’t really expect him to respond, and he didn’t. She listened closely as her voice echoed around the metal walls of the locker, listening for any sign that he might be standing directly outside the door. She heard nothing.

Then, a moment later, she heard his feet slapping on the floor. Moving away.

“Damn it,” she breathed. Was he running away? Maybe her backup had arrived and he was fleeing the scene. She couldn’t let that happen—she couldn’t let another vampire get away. Every one of them out there meant more sleepless nights, more searching. She had always pitied Arkeley for the way his hopeless crusade had devoured his life—he had spent more than twenty years trying to drive vampires to extinction, only to fail utterly at the last minute. She was beginning to understand what had pushed him so hard, though. She was beginning to understand that sometimes you had no choice, that events could drive you regardless of what you wanted. If she could get this guy, and Arkeley, and Malvern—all the vampires she believed to exist—if she could get them all she could stop. Until then she could only keep fighting.

There had to be something she could do. She looked at the walls around her, but they were made of reinforced sheet metal. She would never be able to kick her way through them. The door was fitted neatly into its frame. There was no way she could pry it open, no way to get her fingers around its edge and pull.

Then she looked up.

The lockers didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling—there was a foot and a half of open space up there. The ceiling of the locker was nothing more than a thin sheet of chicken wire. The wire was higher up than she could reach, but maybe—maybe—she could jump up and grab it.

Shoving her Beretta in her holster—safety on, of course—she rubbed her hands together, then made a tentative leap. Her fingertips brushed the wire, but she couldn’t get a grip. She tried again and missed it altogether. Third time’s the charm, she promised herself, and bent deep from the knees. The fingers of her left hand slipped through the wire. She closed her fist instantly as she fell back—and pulled the wire back down with her. The wire tore the skin of her fingers until they were slick with blood, and the noise was deafening as the wire shrieked and tore under her weight, but she was left with a hole directly above her that she could probably wriggle through. She grabbed the dangling wire with her other hand and started to pull herself up, a handful at a time. It felt like her fingers were being cut to ribbons, but she had no choice—she needed to get out.

She froze as she heard the vampire out in the hall. “What are you doing in there?” he asked, half of a chuckle in his voice. The voice confused her. It sounded different, somehow, from the voice on the recording that had lured her to the facility. Less guttural, less—inhuman. She didn’t bother to answer. She pulled herself upward, hauling herself hand over hand until she was perched on the top of the locker’s side wall. She could look down the other side into the locker to her right. Cardboard boxes, a pair of skis, plastic milk crates full of old vinyl records filled the narrow space. From where she was perched she could slip down into the corridor, though the vampire was waiting for her there, alerted by all the noise she’d made. Vampires had far better reaction time and reflexes than human beings. Trying to pounce on one from above was probably suicide. Not that she had much choice. She leaned out just a little and looked down into the corridor. She saw the white bald head of the vampire below her. He was leaning up against the door of the empty locker, one triangular ear pressed up against it, one long pawlike hand splayed against the white metal. She drew her weapon—and leapt. With as little thought as that. She landed hard on his shoulders and must have caught him off balance, because he went sprawling down on the floor on his back with her on top. She flipped off her safety and fired in one fluid motion, not even taking the time to aim. Her bullet blew open the skin of his shoulder and sent bone chips flying, and realizing her mistake, realizing she’d missed his heart, she brought her arm back and pistol-?whipped him across the mouth. His fangs snapped and shattered and flew away from the blow. He started gagging and coughing and then he spat out the broken fangs, revealing round white normal teeth below them. She stared wildly into his blue eyes, and saw the shiny gloss of stubble on the top of his head.