Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(30)

Caxton closed her eyes and lowered her weapon. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to make it here in time.”

Foolish, she knew, talking to a corpse. Yet the feeling that she had failed here, that the woman’s death was her fault, could not be shaken.

She turned to go. There were plenty of other rooms to be searched, and maybe some actual evidence to be turned up. She took a step out of the room and then another toward the stairs. Below her, in the foyer, the single burning lamp was smashed just then and darkness closed on the first floor like a curtain being drawn. Caxton heard someone moving down there, clumsily bouncing off the furniture, and someone else hiss in disgust. Two people, at least—and she didn’t think either of them was Glauer.





Vampire Zero





Chapter 20.


Caxton stepped backward into the room where she’d found Astarte’s body. She thought about closing the door behind her, but the only light in the house was coming from the doorway. If she closed it, anyone downstairs would know she was there when the light was cut off. Instead she crouched on the far side of the bed, where anyone passing by the open door wouldn’t be able to see her. There was one problem with that, of course. There was no other way out of the room. She had got herself stuck in a corner with nowhere to go. Assuming the people downstairs intended her harm—a safe assumption, if there ever was one—they could come for her any time they liked and she would be hard-?pressed to defend herself with her back up against the wall.

Jameson had taught her better than that. He’d taught her more than once not to get herself into exactly that situation. She needed to move. She needed to think straight. Fear was clogging up her brain. She needed to shake it out, to start being smart again.

What did she know? There were multiple persons inside the house with her. She was pretty sure none of them were vampires. The hair on her arms was lying flat and she had no sense at all of vampiric corruption nearby. That meant the intruders were probably half-?deads. She could handle a couple of them without too much trouble. She’d learned a lot from Jameson about how to fight dirty and keep her opponents guessing. This wasn’t going to be an easy fight, though. The intruders had darkened the house and presumably they were lying in wait for her, ready to ambush her as soon as she showed herself. She had no idea how many of them there were, either. A lone half-?dead was weak and slow, but in groups the murderous bastards could be dangerous.

She thought about her options. She could rush down the stairs, make a break for the front door. Once through she could get to her car and escape. That was assuming they weren’t waiting by the door, and that they hadn’t left any traps for her along the way. It would be very stupid to make that assumption. A far better plan would be to signal Glauer and have him come rushing in with a shotgun blast to scare the hell out of the intruders. Jameson had always maintained that half-?deads were cowards at heart. If Glauer surprised them enough they might just scatter, allowing her to escape without actually having to fight them at all.

Caxton reached into her pocket for her cell phone, so she could call Glauer and set up a surprise attack. Her hand found the bottom of her pocket but didn’t find the phone. She cursed silently when she realized she’d left it back in the car. She could still signal him by shouting for his help (screaming seemed undignified, even if that was the signal they’d agreed upon). Doing so would of course alert every half-?dead in the area to her presence and give them a bead on her location. They could be on her like a plague of locusts before Glauer could get through the door.

If the room she was in had possessed a window she could have opened it and looked down at the back of the house. From there she could have signaled Glauer somehow. The room did not possess a window. But maybe one of the other rooms on the second floor did.

It was worth a try, she decided. Moving slowly, keeping very low, she crept around the bed and past Astarte’s dangling arm. She crouch-?walked through the pool of blood on the floor—it made her a little queasy to think that she was walking through someone’s spilt-?out life, but she’d been through worse before—and out through the door.

She could hear the half-?deads moving about below her on the ground floor. She heard drawers yanked open and what sounded like someone rummaging through a pile of cutlery. The half-?deads were arming themselves, she thought, divvying up the steak knives in the kitchen. Their beady little eyes were probably shining with glee. Half-?deads never used guns, because their decaying bodies lacked the coordination necessary for aiming a firearm. They loved knives, though. Passionately. Keeping her back against the wall, Caxton slid to her right, toward the nearest door on the gallery. She passed across its width, then reached back to turn the cut-?glass knob. The door opened with the barest of creaking noises, but she stopped and stood perfectly still, listening. The half-?deads were still about their business in the kitchen—they must not have heard her. She pulled the door open further and peered inside.

Neat stacks of folded white blankets and tablecloths sat on shelves inside, smelling of old, clean cotton. She had found the linen closet.

No time to curse her luck, she thought. She glanced over the gallery railing into the darkness below, looking for any sign of movement. The only light came from the flashers on the cruisers inside, which occasionally stabbed a blue or red beam through the first-?floor windows. Anything could have been down there and she wouldn’t have seen them, even if they were moving around; the strobelike effect of the flashers ruined her dark-?adapted vision every time they cycled through. Moving as silently as she could, she pushed onward to the next door down. Neither the light of the flashers nor the softer light from Astarte’s room reached up that far. She had her Mag-?Lite still, but she didn’t dare use it. In the deep gloom she ran a hand over the door’s polished surface, then found a brass plate with a keyhole in it. She lifted her hand a few inches and found a cracked porcelain knob that turned with a barely audible squeal. Slowly she opened the door, an inch or two at a time, ready to stop the instant the hinges creaked. Just a little more. Once she had it open wide enough she would slip in and close it just as carefully behind her.