13 Bullets

The previous night, when she was being kissed by a pretty girl in a bar, Arkeley had been fighting for his life. He laid out the story for her quite calmly and without a lot of recrimination. He never once said he wished she'd been there to help. Arkeley had taken one look at the corpses in Bitumen Hollow and knew that trouble was brewing. He had seen the number of bodies and he knew how many vampires were responsible. He did the math in his head. Remembering the way Lares had fed his ancestors-"Not that I'd ever forgotten it," he said, with a shudder of distaste-he had realized the vampires were through waiting. The two of them couldn't hold enough blood to fully revivify her but they could at least get her up and walking under her own power. They would strike that very night-he was certain of it. So he had taken the patrol car and proceeded immediately to Arabella Furnace.



"Without me," she said, in a partial huff.



"Shall I finish my story, or should we argue?" he asked.



He arrived at the hospital at approximately nine o'clock. He warned the corrections officers on duty about what was coming and then he went into Malvern's private ward. He found her there significantly decayed from when he'd last seen her, when he cut off her blood supply. She was unable to sit up and was reclining in her coffin. Most of the skin on her skull had worn away and her single eye was dry and irritated. One arm was crossed over her chest. The other hung limply out of the coffin, its talon-like fingers draped across the keyboard of a laptop computer. Arkeley had thought she had simply flung it out in despair but while he watched her index finger trembled and then stabbed down at the "E" key, then fell back as if that slight effort had completely exhausted her.



Hazlitt appeared, his manner suggesting he was unhappy about something. He explained that Malvern was averaging four keystrokes a minute. The doctor allowed Arkeley to view what she had written so far:



a drop lad it is ye sole remedie a drop a drop one onlie



"You're killing her, Arkeley," the doctor told the Fed. "I don't care if she's already dead. I don't care if this can go on forever. To me it's death, or worse."



"If she wants to live so badly she should stop typing to conserve her energy,"



Arkeley told him. "Maybe you should take that computer away from her."



Hazlitt looked as if he'd been struck. "It's the only connection she has to the outside world," he insisted.



Arkeley dismissed the argument with a shrug. He sent the doctor home at ten o'clock PM, although Hazlitt had indicated he wished to stay with his patient. Arkeley assured the him that he would keep her safe through the night. Alone with her, the only distraction the very sporadic click of her withered nail on the keyboard, Arkeley drew his weapon and placed it on a heart monitor outside of Malvern's reach. He did not, in fact, get a chance to use it.



The vampires, the remaining two members of Malvern's brood, came to him around two in the morning. Their cheeks were pink and their bodies radiated palpable heat. They appeared without a sound, one from the main entry to the ward, the other rising up out of the blue-edged shadows of the room. Arkeley had not seen him come in, even though he'd been expecting them.



One of them tried to hypnotize the Special Deputy. The other moved fast as lightning across the room, his hands out to grab Arkeley's shoulders, his mouth wide to bite off his head. Both of them stopped in mid-attack when they saw what Arkeley held in his hand.



This was, after all, the man who always wore a seatbelt and never kept a spare round in the chamber. He was prepared for them. Before they arrived he had taken certain precautions using surgical instruments that were readily available in the ward. With a bonesaw and a pair of pliers he had removed part of Malvern's ribcage. A young healthy vampire could repair that kind of damage almost instantly but Malvern was starved of blood and far too old to even feel what he was doing. His amateur surgery had revealed Malvern's heart, a cold lump of black muscle that felt like a charcoal briquette in his hand.



When the two male vampires came at him, he gave her heart a little squeeze. It started to crumble under the slightest pressure. As weak as she was she found the energy to crane her head back, her toothy mouth yawning open in a voiceless scream.



The vampires froze in place. They could see what was happening. They looked at each other as if communing silently about what to do next.



"I'm going to present you with a few options," Arkeley told them. He refused to make eye contact with either one-though he believed himself to be able to resist their wills he didn't want to find out the hard away. "You can kill me. Either of you could do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, my last spasm of life would travel down my arm and I would crush this heart into oblivion. You can stand there all night waiting for my arm to get tired, but you only have four hours before the sun comes up. How far are you from your coffins?"



They didn't answer. They stood there, their red eyes watching him, and waited to hear a third option.



"You can just leave now," he said, trying to sound reasonable. "That way everybody survives."



"And why should we trust you, who have already harmed us?" one of them asked. His voice was rough and thick with the blood that surged in his throat.



"You who slaughtered our brother," the other said, biting his words into the air.



"You could destroy her the moment we step away."



"If I kill her I'll have to face trial as a murderer. I know, it doesn't make any sense to me, either." Arkeley started to shrug but the gesture would have moved his hand and pulled Malvern's heart right out of her chest. The moment that happened there would be no reason in the world for the vampires to let him live. "If I'm going to die tonight, though, I'm going to take her with me."



The vampires disappeared without another word, leaving as quickly as they had come. They must have believed him.



When he was sure they were gone Arkeley had made the rounds of the guards in the hospital. They had done as he had told them. The vampires had no need for blood-they were replete with it-and when the corrections officers gave them no resistance they had walked right past. Nobody in the abandoned hospital had been harmed in the slightest.



When Arkeley returned to the private ward he found that Malvern had typed a new line on her computer:



boys my boys take him



Luckily for Arkeley her brood hadn't gotten the command until it was too late.



"You," Caxton said, when he'd finished his story, "haven't got any blood in your whole body. Just ice water."



"I'm glad you think so. While they were standing there I was sure my hand was going to cramp up." He smiled, not his condescending smile, not the smile he showed his partner's girlfriends. Just a normal human smile. It looked out of place on him but not entirely repellent. "Eventually the sun came up. She pulled in her arm and I put the lid on her coffin. And now here we are."



"You should have brought me along. We could have fought them together,"



Caxton insisted.



"Not like that. They were so full of blood a bazooka couldn't have made a dent in them. There's a reason they always feed before they fight. There's an upside to this, however. They were bringing that blood for her, to regurgitate it all over her just like Lares did that night on the boat. Now they'll have to digest it on their own. It'll make them strong but it'll slow them down, too. Tonight, and maybe tomorrow night as well, they won't want to feed at all."



"So you didn't invite me along because you thought I would be a liability. You thought I would screw up your plan."



"I thought," he told her, "that you would get hurt. Do we have to do this now? I haven't slept all night. Do we have to do it at all?"



Caxton seethed but she knew better than to argue with him at that moment. "Fine. You're done with me, that's fine. I'll go home to my dogs, then."



He shook his head. "No. We're changing your duties but you're still on the team. You can coordinate the detective work, find me some names and street addresses for Malvern's boys. There will always be something for you to do."



"Gee, thanks," she spat.



"Don't be like that. Almost nobody has what it takes to fight vampires, Caxton. You gave it your best. Just because that wasn't enough is no reason to feel bad about yourself. Hey." He glanced away from her, instead looking down at the coffin. He looked back at her and raised his eyebrows. "Want a peek?"