Part 34 (1/2)

A fear leapt on her then, not an emotion but a living, breathing thing that crawled around her shoulders and neck as if looking for some place to hide. Caxton wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She tried to turn around and found that her body was completely paralyzed by fear.

Caxton stopped in her tracks and flicked off the light. Slowly she tried to breathe again. It pretty much worked.

”Laura.” Wind in some trees, maybe, making branches rub together. Yeah, sure. Trees. Maybe the first time she could have believed that. Through sheer dint of repet.i.tion she knew what it had to be. It was a vampire and the vampire was playing with her like a cat playing with a wounded starling. The skin on her arms erupted in goose pimples.

It might be Malvern. The bath of blood might have given the moribund vampire enough strength to call out like that from the other side of the sanatorium. Or it could be the other vampire, the complete unknown.

A cold breeze brushed across Caxton's face, ruffling her hair. There had been no wind in the pa.s.sage before-either someone had opened a door somewhere or-or-

She couldn't help it. She had to know. She flicked on the flashlight just in time to see a pale hand flash away from her, dripping red. She gasped in horror and spun around, trying to find where the owner of the hand had gone. She couldn't see anything. She flicked the light off again and brought her weapon down to low ready. Three.

A second pa.s.sed and then another and nothing happened.

Caxton wanted to turn the light back on. She told herself she was only

handicapping herself by not having it on. Vampires could see living people in the dark. They could see their blood. She imagined the vampire at that very moment looking at her. Would the vampire see her frightened face or just the blood surging inside her veins? She imagined what that must look like: the branching network of her blood vessels as if they'd been carefully surgically removed and then hung from the ceiling by wires. A human-enough shape, but empty, a throbbing tracery, bright red jagged lines pulsing tremulously in the cold air.

The vampire had to be within striking distance. At any moment he or she could pounce and tear Caxton apart. What was the hold-up? Standing there waiting for her own destruction, imagining the pain to come, was almost worse than actually dying.

She flicked on the light and held it straight out, daring the vampire to show itself. And the vampire obliged, stepping right into the path of the beam.

Thirty feet away, or maybe farther, the light showed her little more than a pale human outline. The vampire wore a white lacy dress that looked oddly familiar to Caxton, as if she'd seen it in a magazine or something. The colorless hands were full of blood.

Caxton had seen this apparition before. In the car, when she had pa.s.sed out because she was so frightened. She had seen this vampire with b.l.o.o.d.y hands, beckoning, calling to her. Now the hands lifted, palms held out as if to catch Caxton's light. The red fell away through the fingers. It wasn't blood at all, Caxton saw. It was hair, clumps of short red hair.

”It all came out at once, Pumpkin,” the vampire said, moving closer. She moved so easily she might have been skating across the floor. ”I thought you might like to see it one last time before it's gone.”

Caxton's bones hardened in place. She felt as if she were being fossilized. The sound that creaked up out of her wasn't a name, it was the noise rocks make when they freeze in the winter and crack and split open. By the time it reached Caxton's lips, though, that noise sounded an awful lot like Deanna's name.

Deanna touched her mouth, her chin. Her fingers trailed down across Caxton's throat and then wove themselves around her belt. In the blue, uncertain light of the tiny flashlight Deanna didn't look half bad. Even if she was undead.

”It's good to see you,” she said, very softly.

”Dee,” she sighed. ”Dee. You can't be. You didn't-you didn't.” ”I didn't kill myself?” Deanna asked. Her voice had that growling quality

they got. Her skin was the color of skim milk. She could probably tie a steel bar in knots with her bare hands. But she was Deanna, alive again. Or almost.

”I broke that window with my own hands. I cut myself up.” Deanna's eyes wandered upward to Caxton's. ”I guess that counts,” Deanna said. Under the growl there was a breathy quality to the voice. A s.e.xy kind of flutter. It made Caxton's skin itch.

It would be technically incorrect to say that Caxton thought Deanna was actually alive. She knew better than that. Or rather, her brain knew better. Her body had its own ideas and its own memories. It remembered the shape of Deanna, the shape of Deanna when she was alive. It remembered her smell.