"The night I took over this case," he said, his face neutral. "The night we met, a half-dead followed you home."

She didn't understand what that had meant, either. "I remember," she said.

"You were on this case before I was. You're part of the case. The vampires know you and they want something from you. I'd be a fool to let you out of my sight."

She remembered what he'd said about Hazlitt. If someone was determined to be your enemy you gave them exactly what they want. The vampires wanted her. They were out to consume her, one way or another. So he would dangle her before their toothy mouths just so he could get close enough to jump down their throats himself.

"That's... it?" she asked. Her heart sank in her chest. All the time she'd spent trying to prove herself, to impress him, was wasted. All that time and effort was wasted.

"That's it," he told her. He opened the door of his car and climbed inside. She let him go.

She was vampire bait. And that was all that she was. She watched him drive away. She had no idea where he was headed. Perhaps he wanted to check out the substation near Kennett Square by himself, or maybe he wanted to exhume Efrain Reyes. Maybe he just didn't want to be around her, maybe he was afraid she would be angry.

She was, of course. And confused. And sad. And afraid. And just a little bit relieved.

Relieved because she had finally found how she fit into the vampire investigation. Because now she knew exactly where she stood with Arkeley.

She collected her own car and drove in the general direction of home, her over-worked brain a little a.s.suaged by the sound of her wheels hissing on the asphalt and the rising and falling roar of the engine. She rubbed at her eyes and blinked a lot as if she was going to cry, but she didn't. She didn't even know why she expected to. Of all the emotions struggling inside of her none stood out so strongly as to require such an over-reaction.

Hunger blossomed inside of her and she knew it had to be bad if it could compete with all her other concerns. She pulled over at a place in Reading where they made good cheese steaks and ordered one "wit wiz," which meant she wanted onions and Cheese Wiz, the traditional condiments. She sat down in a little booth with her steak and a diet c.o.ke and chewed resolutely on the sandwich. It was good but her mind kept wandering and her tongue stopped tasting anything. She was half done with her meal before she stopped to think about the real issue, the thing that should have consumed her with panic and really made her cry.

The vampires wanted her for something. Something specific, something specific to her life. The half-dead who followed her home the first night had been sent on a mission. But what mission? Just to scare her? In that case it had been successful. But she couldn't imagine the vampires would waste time just on giving her a shock.

Her mind cast backward, a little desperately, looking for anything in her life that might explain the vampiric interest. She thought of previous cases she'd worked on, but nothing stood out. She worked highway patrol-how could that mean anything to Malvern and her brood? She tried to remember the car wrecks she'd seen, tried to draw some kind of connection but nothing came to her. She'd sent some people to prison, in her time, for driving under the influence, for possession of drugs. She had caught them, arrested them, testified against them in court. The perpetrators had been sad, broken people, though, people who needed to drink or inject methamphetamines more than they needed to stay out of jail. None of them had really put up much of a fight and they could never look her in the eye when they went to trial. How could a few drunk businessmen and stoned teenagers possibly matter to Justinia Malvern?

Caxton thought it must be something personal, then. But what? She wasn't the kind of person who made a lot of enemies. She didn't have a lot of friends, either-and that made her think of Efrain Reyes. A non-ent.i.ty, Arkeley had called him. Someone with no real life. Someone no one would miss when he died. Caxton had a life, of sorts, but there were holes in it. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. She had a few friends in the Troop, but they rarely hung out together any more. The beer she'd shared with Clara Hsu had been the first time she'd been in a bar in months. Clara-Clara would wonder what had happened to her if she disappeared, but not for long. Deanna would be devastated, mentally destroyed, but the only real change in Deanna's life post-Caxton would be she would have to go back to living with her alcoholic mother. If the one person who defined your life you had no life herself, what did that say about you? She had the dogs, who would miss her very much, but Caxton didn't suppose dogs counted.

Malvern had been looking for a fourth candidate, someone she could add to her brood. Every cell in Caxton's body squirmed at the same time. She stared down at the mess of grease and gristle on her plate and felt bile frothing in her throat. Was Malvern-could Malvern-turn her into a vampire?

She got back in her car and rushed home. She needed to get inside and be safe for a while. She would definitely sleep in the next morning, she decided, and let other, more qualified people raid the substation.

She knew the road back to her house like the lines on her palm. She could drive the route half-asleep, and often did. Yet as she approached her own driveway she felt suddenly as if she'd never seen the place before. As if she were no longer welcome in her own house. Unnatural, Arkeley kept saying. Vampires were abominations against nature. Was this how that felt? To be around life and warmth and comfort and feel like you were visiting some alien world?

She started to pull into the driveway and stopped short because she'd heard something. A crash, a bright melody of gla.s.s breaking as if a window had been knocked in. She unholstered her weapon and slowly, taking every possible precaution, stepped down into the gra.s.s of her lawn. She couldn't see anything from the front of the house so she edged around the side, toward the kennels and Deanna's shed.

Shards of broken window pane littered the side yard, long triangular pieces leaning up against the side of the house. Someone wearing a hooded sweatshirt, maybe a teenaged boy, was standing next to the shattered window, his hands resting on the empty frame. He looked as if he were talking to someone inside the house.

"Freeze," she barked in her best cop voice. The boy turned to look at her. Flesh hung in tatters on his face. He was a half-dead. She discharged her weapon without even thinking too hard and the half-dead's fragile body split apart in pieces. The chunks slumped to the ground. The stink coming off of him made her eyes water. She stepped closer anyway, intending to search his pockets, when she finally had a chance to look in through the window.

Deanna stood there naked from the waist up, her outstretched hands, her lower face, her bare chest all covered in bright red blood.

"Jesus, Dee, Jesus, what did he do to you?" Caxton sobbed. She wiped at Deanna's face with a wet washcloth and found a three-inch-long wound along the edge of her chin. It was going to need st.i.tches but that a.s.sumed she could get Deanna to a hospital before she bled to death. Caxton picked the larger shivers of gla.s.s out of the cut but that just made it bleed more. She pulled open the drawer where they kept their scissors and their twine and found a roll of thick masking tape. Lacking any better ideas she stretched a length of it across the cut and pressed down.

Deanna howled with pain. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut and her knees were up against her chest where she lay on the kitchen floor. Her hands were wrapped up in an old t-shirt that was already soaking through with blood. She had wounds all over the front of her body as well, tiny cuts and big lacerations. Caxton had called 911 and they were sending an ambulance but the blood kept flowing and flowing.

"What did he do to you?" Caxton asked again, smearing blood on her own face as she tried to wipe away her tears. If the ambulance didn't come soon she would lose Deanna, just like she'd lost her mother. It was more than she could bear, especially with everything else that was happening. "What did he do?"

"Who?" Deanna wailed. She had been hypnotized, or perhaps just in shock, when Caxton found her but now she was recovering herself and the pain came too. Caxton shushed her and stroked her red hair but the bleeding just wouldn't stop. She didn't know what to do, how to save Deanna. She didn't know what to do. She wanted to scream herself. "Who?" Deanna asked again.

"The half-dead, the thing in the window," Caxton gasped.

"There was n.o.body-" Deanna paused to scream for a while. "n.o.body here. n.o.body but me and I-I couldn't seem to wake up, I was having a dream and I couldn't, I couldn't-" She screamed again and Caxton picked her up and held her close. She was crying so hard she couldn't see where the blood was and what was clean. "I dreamt you were being crushed under this, this, this heavy stone and your insides were squirting out, all of your blood. I woke up but only half way, I kept seeing your body torn apart, in pieces, I kept seeing it when I closed my eyes."

"Shhh," Caxton said, and held Deanna closer. Then she worried that if she put pressure on Deanna's wounds they might re-open. She loosened her grip.

"I came in here," Deanna whined, "into the kitchen because I heard something cracking, some gla.s.s, some gla.s.s was cracking. I went to the window and there was a crack running from the top to the side and there was a drop of blood rolling down from the crack. I couldn't stand to see that so I tried to mop up the blood with my hand, but then more blood came and when I pressed, when I pressed on the crack it just split open and there was gla.s.s everywhere." She buried her face in Caxton's shirt. "There was blood everywhere. It was beautiful, Laura, it was so pretty."

In the bedroom something crashed to the floor. Caxton looked up, alert again with a suddenness that surprised her. A soft voice swore in Spanish, a voice that wasn't human.

There was another half-dead, inside the house.

"Dee, I have to let go for a second," she whispered. "I have to do something but you'll be okay."

"No," Deanna begged.

"You'll be okay. The ambulance will be here any minute. Just do whatever the paramedics say and I'll be right back."

"No, please, please don't leave me," Deanna mewled. But there was nothing for it. Caxton gently lowered her back onto the kitchen floor. She checked the tape on Deanna's cheek and saw that it was starting to peel away. She pushed it back down and it stayed, mostly. She drew her weapon again and glided down the hallway, toward the bedroom.

"Pumpkin, come back!" Deanna shrieked. "It really hurts!" Caxton knew what had to be done, though. She stepped into the bedroom. A half-dead wearing a baseball cap and a football jersey stood next to the closet door. He had knocked over her nightstand and her clock radio lay in pieces on the hardwood floor.

"Hostia puta," he squeaked. He looked from side to side, his flayed arms spread against the wall. It was pretty clear what he planned to do next. He was all the way across the room from the open window. If he could run faster than she could, he could easily get away.

Before he'd taken three steps Caxton knocked his legs out from under him, smashing his upper body down to the floor. He called out but she sat down hard on his pelvis and lower spine and he could do no more than move his arms and legs along the floor as if he were trying to swim away.

"What did you do to her?" she asked, as cold as she could manage. If she lost control now she would just crack his skull and that would be the end of it. Not that she would mind but she needed information more than she desired revenge. "Tell me and I'll let you go."

"La concha de tu hermana," the half-dead shouted, wriggling underneath her, trying to break free. She was stronger and it must have known that. It wasn't going to get away without tearing itself to pieces.

"You came here looking for me, didn't you? You wanted me but you tried to kill Deanna. Why? Why?" She bounced up and down on top of the half-dead until it screamed.

"I don't know who you are, lady," it cried out in English. "I got no idea!" "You came here for me. Tell me why."

The half-dead shook violently. "If I say something he'll rip me up." "He who? The vampire, Reyes?" she demanded.

"I ain't talking about President Bush, lady!" The half-dead underneath her

grunted and groaned and rose a fraction of an inch off the floor, lifting her weight at the same time in a supernal act of will. With a gasp of frustration he collapsed again. "Me cago en Jesus y la Virgen, you might as well kill me now and get it over with, huh?"

Caxton thought about Arkeley and what the Fed would do to get the information. She knew he would torture the half-dead. He would do exactly what the half-dead feared to receive at the hands of the vampire. The half-dead was less afraid of oblivion than of pain. She had said at the time that she would not be able to stand by while Arkeley did that. She couldn't countenance torture, she'd told him.

Of course at that point no one had tried to kill Deanna. She reached down and grabbed the index finger of the half-dead's left hand. It felt wrong in her grip, not at all like a human finger. There was no skin on it and very little flesh-it was more like holding an uncooked spare-rib. She twisted it with all her strength and it came right off the half-dead's hand.

"Cono!" the half-dead screamed, a pure, horrible noise, a sound of perfect pain.