13 Bullets Part 35

"This-this case-was all about me, at least, it was about me first. Because I stopped the half-dead at my sobriety checkpoint. That was how Reyes found out about me." That was the one thing she actually knew for sure, the one clue she'd

really had firm and solid in her mind the whole time. It was why Arkeley had drafted her into his crusade in the first place. It was why the half-dead had followed her home. Because the vampires wanted her as one of their own.

"Pumpkin," Deanna said, rising to her feet. Caxton followed. "Does it really matter who did what first?" "Of course it does." It meant everything. The vampires had come after her. They'd been obsessed with her. "This all began on the night of my sobriety check. When the half-dead followed me home."

Deanna shook her bald head, just a little. "No, Laura, no. It started weeks before that."

"Bulls.h.i.t," Caxton huffed. She wrapped her arms around herself. "Anyway, how could you know that?"

"Jesus, stop already. You're not this stupid!" Deanna stood up and Caxton followed, but it felt as if she got to her feet first. Deanna was still rising. Eventually she raised herself up to a considerable height. Had she grown after being dead? Or maybe her posture was just better. "That half-dead didn't just accidentally run across your sobriety check. He was coming to get you."

"No." No, no, no, she thought. "No."

"Yes." Deanna reached out and grabbed Caxton's shoulders. Hard enough to pinch. Maybe even to hurt a little. She really wanted to convince Caxton that she was telling the truth. "Congreve sent him to find you, and bring you to him, so you and I could do this together."

"No," Caxton said again.

"Yes. Because I was scared to do it alone. And because Reyes wanted a matching pair of us. I was so confused when you woke me up that night as if nothing had happened. Then you scared away the half-dead. The one a.s.signed to you."

No, Caxton thought, but she couldn't say it. If she said it she thought it might come out as a yes. Because she saw it could be exactly as Deanna said. It could be. But it wasn't. Because if it was, if Deanna had been cursed that whole time and Caxton hadn't even noticed, if she'd failed Deanna that badly- "This whole thing, all the pain and suffering, was about me. And if you had just tried to talk to me, if you had just stayed with me that night I hurt myself-we could have been-we could have done it together-"

"No!" Caxton shrieked. She just wanted it to stop. She wanted it all to stop. She pulled out the Glock 23 and fired her last three rounds into Deanna's chest, one two three.

The noise obliterated all words. If only for an instant. Then Caxton looked down at what she'd done. The white silk dress was scorched and torn but the skin underneath wasn't even singed. Deanna was completely unhurt.

"Oh G.o.d-you've fed tonight," Caxton wailed.

"You're my girlfriend. You're supposed to want to be with me forever, no matter what! We're supposed to want the same things. Why is this so hard for you?"

The fingers on Caxton's shoulder compressed like an industrial vise. Caxton could hear the bones in her shoulder creak and start to pop.

"Don't you love me anymore?" Deanna demanded.

Deanna's fingers dug into Caxton's flesh like iron knives. Deanna's fingernails were cut just as short as they'd been in life but still they tore through Caxton's jacket and shirt as if they were razor blades. In a moment they would break the

skin.

And what would happen then? Deanna was already enraged. If she saw fresh human blood would she even stop to consider what she and Caxton had once meant to each other? Caxton was pretty sure she wouldn't. She struggled to pull away, twisting her shoulders to the left and then the right. Deanna's face was a mask of anguish, her eyes wide, her jaw hanging open. All those teeth gleamed even in the minimal light of the invalid ward. Deanna's head was moving backwards, rearing to strike at Caxton's neck. The motion was painfully slow, perhaps unconscious. When it was complete Caxton would be dead. She'd watched Hazlitt die like that. She'd seen plenty of vampire victims.

Her arms and hands began to tremble. The death grip on her shoulders was cutting off her circulation. The empty Glock fell from her hand and banged noisily on an iron bedframe.

Caxton gritted her teeth and focused every ounce of strength she had into pulling away, tore herself out of the grip. Her jacket came off in long flopping pieces and she tumbled backward, tripping on the bedframe, her arms flying wide to try to catch herself. Deanna seemed to loom up over her as if she were getting even taller or as if she could fly up over Caxton's head. She was going to strike from above so Caxton rolled to the side.

The vampire's weight came down on the bedframe with a grinding, screaming noise of metal being twisted out of shape. Caxton was already rolling to a crouch and then up to her feet. Adrenaline made her feel like she weighed nothing at all, as if she'd been hollowed out and filled full of air.

She didn't turn to look at Deanna. She just ran. She ran without even bothering to turn on her flashlight. Her foot grazed a bedframe and she might have fallen down but fear lifted her back up. She slammed painfully into the double doors at the far side of the invalid ward, her hip connecting with the push bar. The doors grated open and she rushed through.

Deanna was behind her, one hand reaching to grab the door almost before she reached the hallway beyond. Caxton swiveled around sideways and ran down the hall with her mouth open, with breath bursting in and out of her body. Before she could even find a doorway Deanna smashed into her back, spilling her across the floor. Caxton got back up by sheer willpower and kept running.

Another door. The room beyond was lined with moldy tiles. She couldn't see more than three feet in front of her face. She sensed something wrong with the room, as if it didn't have enough walls or as if the floor was sloping downwards, something, yes, it was the floor, there was something about the floor. She stopped short and fell back to hug the wall.

Deanna came bursting through the door like a pale comet blazing through limitless s.p.a.ce. Her face was wide open, her mouth craned back to swallow Caxton whole. She looked in the gloom as if she were flying, truly flying-and then abruptly she disappeared from view.

Caxton tried to get some breath back into her body but there didn't seem to be enough air in the world to fill the demand. The beginning of a splitting headache lit up the back of her skull as her brain shouted for more oxygen, more adrenaline, more endorphins, more anything. She pushed herself harder and harder against the wall as if it could absorb her, as if the tiles could part and let her inside, into a hiding place.

Deanna screamed in thwarted rage. The noise rolled around the room, reverberating strangely.

Caxton lifted her Mag-lite and switched it on. She played it across the grimy tiles, trying to understand what was going on. Five feet ahead of her the floor stopped short. Had she kept running forward when she entered the room she would have fallen into that pit. She looked at the door she'd come through and her light picked out faded black letters painted there: POOL ROOM.

The pool room-she'd heard Tucker mention it, once. She carefully folded up the twinge of guilt she felt for Tucker's death and scanned the room, looking to see where Deanna might have gone. She sniffed the air. Any scent of chlorine was long gone, and she was pretty sure the pool had dried up. She did smell something nasty and unnatural, though, something that made her nose wrinkle. It was the smell of a vampire. Wherever Deanna had gone she was still nearby. Close enough to strike at any second. Was she playing some kind of game? Caxton didn't think so.

She had to know more. But she didn't want to move away from the wall. It felt as if her body had adhered to the tiles. She took one cautious step closer to the edge of the pool and pointed her light down over the concrete lip.

There was a sheer ten foot drop to the bottom of the pool. Down there she saw tiles, more tiles, endless rows of them. They had been white and smooth once but the black mold that had devoured the grout between them had spread across the crazed surface. Time and water had shattered some of the tiles and left the floor of the pool littered with tiny sharp fragments. A standing pool of dark sc.u.m filled one corner of the pool. A little to the left she saw a ma.s.sive bronze drain, completely black with tarnish. Caxton moved her light slowly across the bottom of the pool. She had to know, she couldn't just- Deanna leapt up and nearly s.n.a.t.c.hed the light out of her hand. Her jaws snapped at empty air and she fell back to land on her feet like a predatory cat. She stared up at Caxton with a look of pure and utterly simplistic hatred. There was a smudge of dark muck down the front of her white dress. She had run right through the door, ready to grab Caxton and kill her and feed on her blood. She hadn't looked where she was going and she'd fallen into the pool. That was the solution to the big mystery.

Caxton stepped back, away from the edge.

Time to run again. She pushed through the door and back out into the hall. She estimated she had ten or maybe fifteen seconds breathing room before Deanna found a ladder or climbed up out of the shallow end of the pool or figured some other way out. She couldn't count on any more time than that. With her light on this time she retraced her steps. She had no intention of going back to the invalid ward, though.

It took her three or four seconds to find the door she wanted, the one marked CONSERVATORY. She pushed it open and went through into moonlight so bright it dazzled her eyes.

Behind her she heard Deanna screaming in frustrated rage once more. It wouldn't be long, now, she told herself. She had better be ready.

The first thing she had to do was make a choice. It wasn't an easy one. She had to decide she was going to kill Deanna. It didn't matter what they'd been. It didn't matter who had failed who. She asked herself what Arkeley would say and she knew, he would say that Deanna was unnatural. A monster.

That didn't help nearly as much as she wanted it to. She could still love a monster, she knew, if she let herself. She could learn to love Deanna again, she could forgive her for what she'd done, and it wouldn't even be that hard. But it looked like she wasn't going to get the chance. Deanna would kill her-unless she killed Deanna first. Her decision was made. She would kill Deanna if she could.

The second thing she had to do was figure out how.

The conservatory greenhouse she'd finally found had once been a long, two-story s.p.a.ce where brick walkways wound between tables and espaliers and giant flower pots. The walls and the sloped roof had been constructed of wide panels of plate gla.s.s, held in place by a framework of steel girders. It must have been a lovely place once, she thought, a refuge for the dying patients. A place

for them to get out of their beds and get some sun. Time and weather had changed the greenhouse, however. The plants had either died or flourished far beyond what the inmates might have ever hoped for. Vines crawled up the gla.s.s walls, choking off the grimy panes, littering the brick floor with curled brown debris. The perhaps by Pennsylvania from time to time. Yellow caution tape had been strung back there, tied from one girder to another to keep the staff out. She could see why-long spears of broken gla.s.s stood back there, lined up and stood on end, maybe by the same workers who had abandoned all that plaster compound and far end of the conservatory had been smashed in all together, one of the violent storms that swept through the ridges of lumber outside the invalid ward.

Caxton needed a weapon. She waved her light around and found a piece of steel stanchion that had once secured a trellis in place. It looked half rusted and like it might come loose with a couple of kicks. With a rage born of fear and desperation she knocked it loose with her boot. She grabbed it up and immediately felt a little better, even though she knew the sense of security was an illusion. She had a steel bar the length of a riot control baton with one jagged, wicked-looking end. Against a well-fed vampire it might as well have been a piece of rope.

Next she needed to secure the door. She saw a terra cotta pot the size of a refrigerator that she thought she might be able to use as a barricade. She went to grab it, knowing it would take every ounce of her strength to move it, when the door slapped open and Deanna came roaring through.

She was twenty feet away-and then she was right next to Caxton and her pale arm lashed out like a camera flash bulb going off. Caxton's face went hot with pain and her ears rang as if her head were a bell that had just been struck. She felt herself falling, tumbling backwards. Her nose ached almost immediately-it might be broken. She struggled not to fall over and then, when that became a hopeless endeavor, she struggled to catch herself on her hands.

Deanna reached down and even before she'd struck the ground Caxton was jerked back up into the air. Deanna punched her in the stomach and her breath flew out of her. Nausea wracked her body and she felt like she was going to throw up. Deanna's hand came down on her forearm and she felt the bones there creak and rub together unnaturally. She lost control of her hand and her pathetic metal bar went flying, skittering across the rough brick floor.

Caxton couldn't have kept standing if she'd been propped up. She dropped to her knees, knocking them badly, and grabbed at her stomach because she felt as if she'd been disemboweled and her guts were about to flop out. Deanna hadn't cut her at all, though. There wasn't a drop of blood on her, not even from her nose, which was hotly numb and sprained at the very least. She was in horrible pain and she felt like she would never stand up again but she wasn't bleeding.

Deanna had thought through her attack. She'd been careful to keep Caxton in one piece. "What do you want from me?" Caxton sputtered.