The disembodied finger wriggled in her hand like a centipede. She threw it away from her. Then she reached down and grabbed the middle finger of the same hand. She gave the half-dead a second to think about what was going to happen, and then, without a word, she tore the middle finger off, too.

His left hand had nothing but a thumb when he finally spoke. "He told us to come here and pick up whoever I found, that's all, lady, please, stop now!"

"Who told you? Efrain Reyes?"

"Yeah, that's who! He said to come get you, your tortillera girlfriend, your dogs, anybody who was here. He even told us how, with the hechizo." She

grabbed the thumb and asked what a hechizo was. "It's a spell, a magic spell, kind of! Hey, lady, I'm telling you what you want to know, be nice, okay?" "You hypnotized her? You hypnotized Deanna, is that it?" The half-dead struggled again but he was growing weaker by the minute. He had no blood to spill but the pain seemed to take the fight out of him. "Yeah, but it only works when she's asleep and dreaming."

"Why us? Why were you sent to this house?" "He doesn't tell us that. He doesn't fill us in on his big plans, he just says, vamos, and I go. Please, lady, please, I told you all I know."

A siren wailed through the walls of the house. Caxton heard doors slamming and people running up to the door. "Alright," she said. Then she grabbed her pistol and smashed in the back of the half-dead's skull. He stopped wriggling instantly. Slowly, stiffly, her clothes sticking together where the blood had dried in the folds, she rose from the floor and holstered her weapon. Then she walked into the kitchen and opened the door for the paramedics. On the floor Deanna was curled up in a tight ball, weeping piteously. Her blood was everywhere.

A stretcher rolled past Caxton's face, not three inches away. It was being pushed at high speed up the main ramp to the Emergency Room entrance but to her it seemed to float unattended through boundless s.p.a.ce, taking its time. The body on the stretcher was just a pile of blood-stained rags. She couldn't even see a face. But then the body reached out a hand to her. The skin was scorched and falling away in places. Thick clotted blood was smeared across the fingers. She couldn't even tell if it was a male or female hand.

Still. She reached out, touched it. The fingers curled around hers but then the hand was ripped away from her, the stretcher flying up the ramp. Somebody shouted for plasma and she squinted and tried to clear her head.

She'd been sitting in the hallway for hours and hours with no stimulation except the constant parade of mutilated bodies that flew by. She shouldn't have been in the hallway at all-there was a waiting room for people like her, complete with six TV sets and a couple hundred pounds of straight women's magazines-but being a cop had its privileges. Most of the EMTs and nurses who pa.s.sed by didn't even give her a second glance, they a.s.sumed she was just guarding the entrance. In fact it just let her be a couple hundred feet closer to Deanna. They wouldn't let her into the operating room or the recovery room. The hallway was as close as she was going to get.

That hand. It had been like something out of a dream but she knew it was real. It had touched her. She looked down and saw real blood on her fingers. Her hand smelled like gasoline and s.h.i.t, a smell she knew all too well. The smell of a really bad car accident. The hand had been real and warm and alive.

Unlike the half-dead she had tortured and executed on her bedroom floor. Unlike the vampires who were coming to destroy her life. Caxton sighed and crossed her arms and waited. She had tried reading a magazine but she was too distracted. Images and words jumped into her head unbidden. Not even things related to the investigation, not even memories of Deanna, just weird little sc.r.a.ps of thought. She kept wondering if the milk was sitting out on the kitchen counter, if it was going to go bad. The kitchen had to be as cold as the outside air since the window was completely gone. Pretty much anybody could climb in through the hole where the window had been-should she call someone, have them check the house, have them put cardboard, at least, over the window? If she did that should she ask them to go inside and put the milk back in the fridge?

She couldn't shut her mind down. It didn't work that way. Only sleep could turn off the brain and she was a long way from sleep. The ba.n.a.l thoughts, the endless, cycling inanities had their purpose, as excruciating as they were. They kept her from thinking the big thoughts, the real thoughts. The things that scared her.

Thoughts like, the fact that vampires wanted her dead. So badly they would send their minions to kill everyone in her house. Everyone. The half-deads would have killed her dogs, probably, just to be thorough about it.

Thoughts like, Arkeley had turned his back on her. She couldn't even count on him to defend her against the dark things that wanted her life. He wasn't done with her, he had some purpose for her, but she wasn't going to be an active part of his investigation.

Thoughts like, is there really any difference between someone being hypnotized into breaking a window and impaling themselves on broken gla.s.s... and someone whose brain chemistry stops working one day, and they hang themselves in their bedroom? Her mother had had a good job and plenty of money. She had a perfectly good daughter to live for, a nice house, partners for bridge, church socials, potluck dinners. Holidays. Family. Vacations. Retirement. Her suicide had been a complete mystery to everyone who knew her. It had been a mistake, really, it had to have been.

Deanna had nothing to keep her living. No job, family who loathed her for what she was. A partner who cared and who tried but just didn't have the time to be there for her. No future. Art that n.o.body understood.

Was it still suicide, if you had an excuse? If you were driven to it? "Officer," someone said, nearby. It was like the ghost that had called her in Urie Polder's barn, a directionless, bodiless voice. "Officer," the voice said again. Caxton frowned and turned her head. A nurse stood there in blood-stained scrubs, a middle-aged woman with white hair up in a bun on top of her head.

She wore heavy gloves, the kind you wear when you wash dishes. "Officer, she's awake," the nurse said. Caxton followed her through halls, around corners, up stairs. She could not have found her way back if she was called upon to do so. They came to a room, a semi-private room with two beds. One held a morbidly obese woman whose entire lower body and thighs were wrapped up in plaster. A surgical gown had been draped over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The other bed held something that had been st.i.tched together out of spare parts.

Jesus, Caxton realized, it was Deanna. "You look like Frankenstein's monster," Caxton said. Deanna tried to smile but the st.i.tches in her jaw line kept her from moving her mouth too much. "Pumpkin... you left me," she mumbled. Caxton took off her hat and leaned down to kiss Deanna's puffy lips. The obese woman in the other bed let out a half-gasp, half-cluck of disdain but Caxton had learned to ignore that sound a long time before. She stood back up and took a better look at Deanna. The view didn't improve the second time around. Glinting staples held the side of Deanna's face together. The sharp ends of st.i.tches, black and coa.r.s.e like horsehair, stuck up out of the flesh of her chest and shoulders while bandages wrapped her hands until she looked like she was wearing b.l.o.o.d.y mittens. "You left me all alone," Deanna said.

"Don't talk, Dee. Just rest." Caxton reached down and gently brushed the staples in Deanna's face. They were real, solid, and the flesh underneath was red and inflamed.

A doctor came into the room. Caxton didn't even look at him. She held Deanna's eyes with her own and refused to let go. "I'd like to bring in someone to talk with her. I know you probably don't want to hear that but I'm not sure you have the right to stop me, either-do you have a civil union?"

They didn't. They'd never bothered, since it wouldn't be legally recognized anyway. It didn't matter.

"I don't object," Caxton said. She started to reach for Deanna's hands but they were so badly damaged she didn't want to touch them. She held onto the railing on the side of the bed instead.

Deanna started to protest but Caxton just moved her chin back and forth a little and said, "Shh, it's just to talk."

"She's pretty lucky, all things considered. She could easily have died. She lost a lot of blood and some of the fragments of gla.s.s went pretty deep. We'll wait and see if there's any nerve damage to her hands. The cut in her face is going to require reconstructive surgery and even then there will be scarring."

Caxton held onto the railing as if she would be swept away on a dark sea if she lost her grip. It didn't matter, she told herself. Deanna was going to live. At least, she would live until the next time someone tried to kill her. Maybe the next time Reyes would come for her himself. "I'm going to call in for a guard to stand watch outside this room, Doctor. This was an attempted murder." The words sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth, like something she'd made up. It was real, though, she needed to convince herself it was real. "I'll stay with her until the first shift arrives."

"Very well." The doctor moved to check on the obese woman in the next bed over. "It's almost two o'clock now but I'll call down to the desk and have them set something up."

"Two o'clock?" Caxton asked, surprised. She glanced down at her watch and saw he was correct. "s.h.i.t. Dee, honey," she said, "I have to go."

"Whuh?" Deanna asked.

"There's some place I have to be." It was something she'd figured out in those long hours in the hallway. It was her next move.

Caxton couldn't figure out how to strap the vest around her stomach. One of the guys from the Area Response Team had to pull it tight behind her back and

buckle it there. He also helped her with the knee, shin, and shoulder guards. She

figured out the helmet for herself. "Larry Reynolds," he told her, and stuck out a gloved hand. She shook it and introduced herself. "I'm sorry I'm so unfamiliar with this stuff. This is my first time in riot

gear." She squirmed for a moment, embarra.s.sed, then admitted, "normally I'm

highway patrol."

"You were in on that vampire kill a couple of nights ago, right? That's what

they told us when we got a.s.signed to this detail." Reynolds had black paint

under his eyes and it made it hard to read his expression. She couldn't tell if he was annoyed to be saddled with such an untrained whelp as herself and was hiding it well or if he was honestly trying to be friendly. "Stick with us, keep your head down, and you'll be alright."

Another ART Detective came up and slapped Reynolds on the top of his helmet. "Keeping his head down is about ninety per cent of Larry's job." Reynolds faked punching the new guy in the kidney and they broke away, laughing, dancing around each other like Caxton's greyhounds. "I'm DeForrest, and I'll be your stewardess this morning," the new guy told her. He had Reynolds in a headlock. "We hope you enjoy your trip with Granola Roller airlines."

Caxton had no idea what he was talking about but she smiled anyway. It had taken a lot of pleading to get a.s.signed to this detail and she didn't want the ART guys to resent her presence. When a woman in riot gear came and offered her coffee from a thermos she took it as graciously as she could.

Truth be told, she needed the caffeine as much as she needed to be accepted. She hadn't slept, even for a moment, not since she'd woken up the day before and realized why the vampires had decimated Bitumen Hollow. Her hands were shaking and if she looked at anything too closely or for too long its outlines grew fuzzy and indistinct.

"They're infantile, I know, but they're good men," the woman with the coffee said. "DeForrest was a firefighter before he took this job. He was bored, he said. I a.s.sumed the first time I met him that he just wanted to play with guns, like a lot of people who sign up for the ART. He's never discharged his weapon, not once, since he came to work with us, even when bad guys have fired on him. Reynolds dislocated his shoulder last year getting a five-year-old out of a trailer knocked over in a tornado."

"Wow," Caxton said.

"I'm Suzie Jesuroga. Captain Suzie," the woman said, and shook Caxton's hand.