Part 10 (1/2)

Vesta sighed. She put down the cards and took another cigarette out of her box. It was her fifth so far. ”I see the portion of her that exists within you.” She scattered the cards on the table. ”This is hopeless. Some people grasp the technique in a moment, while others need additional help. Given enough time, enough sessions I might teach you some rudiments of psychic self defense. For now, this must do.” She opened her box again and took out a bra.s.s charm on a black cord. ”Wear it always, and try not to make eye contact with anyone who might harm you.”

Caxton took the pendant from Vesta and slipped it around her neck. The charm was a tightly-wound spiral that she could pa.s.s off as jewelry. Caxton was glad for it-she had half expected a pentacle or a gruesome crucifix.

”Those wouldn't work for you. Their power requires faith which you do not possess.” Caxton touched the cool metal at her throat. Deanna. Now that she was thinking about Deanna she couldn't stop. ”It's not just a question of not kicking her out. I don't want to lose her the way I lost my mother.”

Vesta stared at her and said nothing. It was as if she expected Caxton to tell her all about the sad, sorry tale of her mother's insanity, the depression that had struck her after her husband's death, her eventual suicide.

”She hanged herself,” Caxton said, finally, blus.h.i.+ng. ”In her bedroom. A neighbor found her and cut her down and tried to make her look presentable. My mother had always been very proud of her looks. When I got there she was laid out on the bed and her hair had been brushed and someone had even put some make-up on her. But they couldn't hide the rope burn all the way around her neck.”

Vesta nodded and exhaled a plume of smoke. ”You worry about losing Deanna, well, that's just natural. But when the time comes you'll be ready to let her go. You'll have to be. I see it as strongly as I see the waves in your mind's eye.”

That last bit confused Caxton-until she finally looked at the card in Vesta's hand. It showed three wavy lines.

”Now, come, let's collect the boys.” They rose and headed into the kitchen, where Arkeley and Urie sat around an enormous table that had once been a door and now was mounted on plain wooden trestles. They had between them a pile of small objects, triangular in shape and almost pearlescent in color. Caxton picked one up and saw it was a vampire's tooth. After killing the vampire the night before the Fed must have pulled out all his teeth with a pair of pliers.

Urie Polder swept the teeth into a satin bag and tied it closed with a thong. ”Now that'll do just fine, in way of payment, ahum.”

”What are you going to do with those?” Caxton asked. ”He'll find something they're useful for,” Vesta told her, ushering her toward the front door. ”Waste not, want not.”

As they drove away the little blonde girl watched them from the window. Caxton had never gotten to meet her, and didn't even know her name.

Caxton drove to State College, only a dozen or so miles away, just to get out of the suffocating atmosphere of Pennsyltucky. The tree-lined avenues of the university town were full of students in bright and colorful parkas and windbreakers. They walked in pairs or groups of four or more, laughing amongst themselves, shouldering backpacks, their faces red with the cold but their heads bare. They were alive, that was the main thing. Very much alive, and their concerns were for the simplest things-s.e.x, grades, beer-none of them wanted to skin a ghost or drain the blood of a living victim. They were young, too, unwrinkled, innocent in their own fas.h.i.+on. It did her good to see them.

She was losing it, and she knew it. That she would drive so far just to see young people made her realize just how dark her life had become in such a brief period of time. She pulled into a parking s.p.a.ce on College Avenue before a big stone gate that let her look all the way up the quadrangle. She undid her seat belt but didn't get out of the car.

Arkeley looked up. He'd been studying his Blackberry since she'd started driving. ”Good news,” he told her. ”The Investigative Unit has ruled out seventeen of the suspects. They decided to run down the medical personnel and corrections officers first-the ones who might have actually had physical contact with Malvern. They're about half done.”

Caxton nodded. That was good news. ”Malvern. It all comes back to Malvern. How did she get here?” she asked. ”She was in Pittsburgh when you found her, but she wasn't born there, right?”

”No,” he said. He put the Blackberry in his coat pocket. ”Vampires move around a lot-it's how they stay one step ahead of people like us. It took me years to trace her route and I'm not done Manchester, in England, around 1695. She sixty-five years before the bloodl.u.s.t got too much of her and she couldn't rise any more from her coffin. She lived for a while under the care of another vampire, a Thomas Easling, who was burned at the stake in Leeds in 1783. Malvern's body was found among Easling's property and it was a.s.sumed at the time that she was dead, just a mummified corpse. A curio. She was purchased for thirty five British pounds by a Virginian plantation owner, one Josiah Caryl Chess, who fancied himself a scholar of natural history. He had quite a collection of dinosaur and mammal fossils, so a moribund vampire must have been a prize find. He never bothered to remove her heart. She couldn't move, after all, and even though he must have known she was still alive in there in some fas.h.i.+on-he may have even fed her-he was certain she was beyond harming anyone. Most likely she had him under her spell, though his journals suggest just the opposite. He was physically intimate with her at least once.”

”s.h.i.+t, no,” Caxton said, her stomach squeezing down like a rubber ball. Caxton remembered then what Arkeley had said about Malvern and her current yet. I know she was born in terrorized that city for about attendant, Doctor Hazlitt. She had more to offer him, Arkeley had said, then her piercing gaze. ”But she would be all... look, I'm sorry if this is gross, but she'd be too dry.”

”Personal lubricants have been widely available throughout history. I know

the ancient Romans used olive oil. And if you let her, if you play along, she can

make herself look however you want. Your ideal woman. The illusion lasts as

long as she wants it to.”

Something in Arkeley's voice worried her. ”You've seen her do it?” Caxton

asked. She really wanted to ask if she'd changed her appearance for him-and if