The stench of cordite filled her nostrils and she wanted to retch, to stop breathing the fumes altogether, but her body knew better than her brain. It sucked deeply from the fresh oxygen coming in through the bullet hole.

For a long time nothing happened. The casket didn't move. She could hear her heart beating but it sounded strange, deeper and slower than she'd expected. Then she heard a sound at last, a faint, twittering sound, a bird calling somewhere out in the corn. Her eardrums were intact. It was the best thing that had happened since she fell into the casket and she wanted to cry sweet tears of relief.

Then the casket started moving again, bouncing and jumping over the rough ground, if anything faster than before. She held on as best she could, shoving her weapon in its holster and grabbing at handfuls of upholstery to keep from being thrown around so much. The slick silk kept slipping through her hands and soon they ached from the constant exertion of just holding on.

Minutes pa.s.sed, long minutes she could only measure by counting slowly to herself, onnnnne, twooooo, threeee... she was almost certainly counting too quickly or too slowly but she had no other way to mark time. After a while her legs began to twitch, either from the wounds on the backs of her calves or from being compressed in such a tiny s.p.a.ce.

The half-deads picked her up and carried her after a while. They moved slower than they had while dragging the casket through the corn field but Caxton didn't mind. The ride got a lot less b.u.mpy.

Darkness closed over the bullet hole in the lid. She thought they might have covered the opening with a cloth or something. She stuck her pinky finger through the hole, careful not to extend it too far, to not give the half-deads an excuse to grab it and do something horrible with it. She felt nothing out there but cool air. She tried again and again felt nothing.

The casket suddenly tilted forward at a very steep angle and she slid up into the top half, her head jammed painfully to one side. She struggled to push her arms up past her shoulders, to push against the top of the casket with her hands to take the pressure off of her neck.

The coffin lifted and fell. Again, it lifted and fell. Again, a moment's respite and then it lifted-to fall again. She realized what was happening. The bullet hole had gone dark because they were inside of a building. The lift and fall came from the motion of the casket as the half-deads carried it down a flight of stairs.

She tried to count the risers but she lost track every time the casket lurched and she was thrown back and forth. It was a long way down and she had lost track of how much time had pa.s.sed. She felt as if she were floating unbound in s.p.a.ce and then grasped tightly by enormous fingers, her body shaken violently by a giant spectral hand with each step down.

She didn't notice at first when the downward motion stopped. The half-deads set her down without any fanfare, the casket creaking a little on a stone or concrete floor. Then she heard their footfalls, and the echoes of their footfalls, getting softer as they walked away from her.

Then there was no sound at all.

She slapped the lid of the coffin again and again, but got no reply.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said, willing to hear their squeaking voices if that was the reply she got. "h.e.l.lo?" she shouted, wanting someone, anyone, to speak to her. Sure, she had shot at them, but wouldn't that make them want to taunt her even more? "Hey you f.u.c.kers!" she screamed. "Hey, calling all faceless geeks out there, somebody say something!"

She heard her own echoes but nothing more.

"You can't just leave me here!" she screamed, getting a little hysterical. She knew they could do, and had done, just that.

Caxton slept. Somehow her body had given out, somehow whole hours of panic had ebbed away, all force spent, and little bits of sleep had rushed in, dark breakers on the sh.o.r.es of a planet with no sun. Inside the casket her breathing had come more shallow, her eyes had rolled back in her head. She had slept.

If there were dreams in that dark slumber she could remember little of them afterward. She had a sense of rolling over in blackness, of tumbling, of falling free through infinite lightless s.p.a.ce. There was no fear in the dream, though when it ended she screamed, her body thundering around her, her pulse beating very hard. Her eyes fluttered open and she was awake, awake and lying silently on the upholstery of the casket. She cleared her throat and blinked her eyes and tried to reconcile where she was with waking life. It wasn't easy.

A tiny finger of light slipped in through the bullet hole in the casket lid. It was so pale and faint that she thought it might be a hallucination but it grew stronger as she watched it. It danced and shifted from side to side and soon a sound came to join it, a repet.i.tive slapping sound, a rasping two part sound, slip slap, slip slap.

Bare feet walking on stone. And the light-it possessed the guttering motion and the warm yellow light of a candle flame. "h.e.l.lo," she breathed, but her throat was dry, painfully dry so it felt like it was stuck shut. She tried to clear her esophagus but nothing would come loose. She coughed and coughed and the footfalls stopped and she held her breath, wanting them to come back, terrified they would leave her alone inside the casket, even though she knew that whatever made that sound, whatever horror was approaching her, would not be a friend, or a rescuer, but a monstrosity.

The feet came closer and the light brightened. It moved to one side and then stayed put, as if the owner of the feet had set the candle down beside the casket. Caxton tried to breathe as calmly as she could.

The casket rocked back and forth as the unseen monster tore at the lid. It made no sound, no grunt or gasp. The nails in the wood shrieked and tore. The wooden lid cracked down the middle, splinters brushing Caxton's lips and then it came away altogether, air rushing into the casket, her eyes narrowing in even the miniscule light of the candle. She saw the ceiling above her, perhaps fifteen feet away, a vaulted ma.s.s of bricks held up by stout square columns. On either side she saw the walls of the cellar room lined with shelves, the shelves heavy with jars and cardboard boxes and rolled-up blankets. She had no idea where she was.

A pale face slid into view. She'd been hoping for a half-dead but her hopes were dashed. She saw the round, hairless head, the triangular ears, the face of Efrain Reyes looking down at her. His eyes were dark slits, vaguely reddish in the flickering light. His mouth was heavy with all those teeth. She sensed that he had just woken himself, that he was still half asleep, as she was. Had night just fallen? Had she been in the casket for an entire day, alone with her dreams?

Reyes wore nothing but a pair of drawstring pants. His skin was a snowy white but with just a tinge of pink that made him look feverish instead of healthy. He leaned down closer until his face was eighteen inches from hers. She felt the same absence of humanity or warmth she remembered from when she'd stood next to Justinia Malvern. It didn't surprise her this time.

He stared down into her eyes and she tried to look away but he grabbed her chin and held her, as sure and steady as if her face was bolted to his hand. She would never have the strength to break that grip.

His eyes went wider and she saw red tears wash across his pupils, as if blood had replaced every fluid in his body. She saw his pupils grow larger and larger until they filled up half her vision. She had been hypnotized by a vampire before but this was nothing like the paralysis she had felt then. That had been a general deadening, an anesthetic effect. This time she was quite conscious, to an almost painful degree, of what was being done to her. Something pa.s.sed between them, from his mind, into hers. It moved silently, invisibly, but it was something very real. It was all in her mind, certainly, but it carried with it a physical sensation, a very real, very unpleasant feeling of being invaded.

Caxton had never been raped. There had been a boy in high school who didn't understand what she meant when she said she wanted to wait, to save it. She hadn't understood herself, really, and hadn't known how to stop him when he would shove his hands inside her clothing and grab her, physically grab handfuls of her flesh in a painful grip. One day after school when they'd gone back to her house to theoretically study he had taken out his p.e.n.i.s once and rubbed it up and down on the back of her hand, begging her to turn her hand over, to grasp him the way he was always grasping her. The boy's need, his absolute desperation, had sickened her and she had pulled away. He had stood up next to the bed and loomed over her then and she had been very much aware of the fact that they were alone together, that her father wouldn't get home until after six. "Suck it," he had said, his appendage dangling in front of her. "Suck it," and his voice had been something broken, and sharp, and potentially dangerous.

She had resorted to tears, big sobbing tears of panic, and the boy had been so shamed he went away and never spoke to her again. It was the closest she'd ever come to being s.e.xually violated.

What Reyes was doing to her, though, was far worse than any teenaged fumbling could ever be. He was forcing himself on her innermost thoughts, her secrets, the deepest, darkest parts of her. He read her like a book, picking at her memories. He found the memory of the boy and the tears and she could feel he was amused. She could feel him just as if he lay on top of her, the cold waxiness of his skin, the faint heat of blood, the smell of blood all over him. She was under his control, completely. She lacked even the will to fight him, or even to struggle, even to try to get away.

After a while the vampire closed his eyes but he didn't move away. The violation stopped instantly but she could still feel him, some remnant of his intrusion inside of her skull. It made her brain itch. Vesta Polder's amulet hadn't done a d.a.m.ned thing to help her. The vampire reached down into the casket, presumably to lift her up.

She wasn't going to get a better chance. She lifted the Beretta to the level of his heart and fired and fired and fired again, the noise splitting the silence wide open, the muzzle flashes so much brighter than the candle it was as if the sun had entered the room. Spent gas wreathed around Caxton's face like smoke and the stink was oppressive. Her already battered ears rang and the vampire snarled like a wild animal.

When she stopped firing he grabbed the smoking hot barrel of the gun in one of his hands and threw it into the corner of the room. Her shots hadn't even scratched his hairless white skin. She remembered what Arkeley had said: with so much blood in him a bazooka probably couldn't scratch his skin. She had succeeded in one thing, though. The part of him inside her head lit up with rage. She knew she'd p.i.s.sed him off, she could feel his anger burning inside of her. He reached down with both hands and picked her up and threw her against the nearest wall.

Her back collided with wooden shelves, dry and dusty, and they broke under her momentum. Gla.s.s jars bounced over her shoulders and head and shattered on the floor. The pain woke her up and bent her double at the same time, made her want to pa.s.s out even as it brought her fully to consciousness.

He was going to kill her, she thought. He would tear off her head and drink from the stump. Or maybe he would just punch her face in. There were so many ways he could destroy her body. Tears squirted from her eyes and she could do nothing but be afraid, she couldn't even call out Deanna's name, she didn't even have time to worry what Arkeley would think about the mess she'd made. She had no mental energy to spend on anything but fear.

He strode toward her on his muscular legs, his eyes wide with hatred. Then he stopped, right in the middle of the cellar room, and stared at her. She had no idea what he was doing but she could sense how much it hurt. His body shook for a moment, a single, awful heave, and then his mouth opened and a thick scurf of clotted blood slid out of his mouth and dripped down his jaw.

Reyes dropped to his knees, the impact with the stone floor sounding like a thunderclap in the vaulted chamber. He coughed and choked and spat old blood out on the flagstones. He clutched at his chest and tore at the skin there with his vicious fingernails, leaving long pink trails across his pectoral muscles. He shook violently until he collapsed totally on the floor and lay there in his own sick.

Caxton could do no more than take a few breaths while she watched him curl around himself in pain. In her head the relic of him howled and she clapped her hands over her ears but the sound was inside of her. There was no shutting it out.

Eventually he recovered from his fit. She hadn't moved an inch. He got to his feet and grabbed her around the waist and threw her over his shoulder and started climbing up the stairs.

Reyes wasn't going to kill her-at least not right away. He was still too full of undigested blood from the devastation of Bitumen Hollow. Whenever he even thought of drinking her blood his reaction was pure nausea.

She could feel these things in her own head. He had violated her brain and left something of himself behind when he withdrew, a relic, an image of himself. Now she could feel his thoughts. No words came across that channel, nor even images. She could feel his unnatural heart pounding, though, pounding hard to move all that sluggish blood around, and she knew how sick he was. She got little bits of him, little inklings and fragments of thoughts. It was a link, and it was enough for her to know his moods and some of his motivations.

He wasn't going to kill her because it would be a waste of blood. She remembered when Hazlitt fed Malvern he had said the blood had to be warm, and fresh. If Reyes killed her now her blood would go to waste. He couldn't drink it and he couldn't store it.

There was more to it, though. He wasn't going to kill her-because he wanted something from her. Or to do something to her. That scared her, but she was getting used to being scared. Caxton's fear reaction was becoming so familiar to her that she felt strange when she wasn't scared. She felt, when she was unafraid, that she must be missing something.

Reyes carried her up the stairs, climbing no more than twenty-five feet. On the way down, in the dark of the casket, those stairs had seemed to descend forever. They emerged at the top of the staircase into a vast open s.p.a.ce surrounded on every side by thick walls. The everywhere and green weeds sprang up from emptiness of the place made her think of an abandoned factory but then her eyes adjusted to the moonlight slanting in through the long windows and she began to make out details. Chains hung from the ceiling in great profusion. Molds and casting equipment littered the floor like the playthings of a giant who has outgrown the need for toys. The tall windows were broken in places, panes of frosted gla.s.s having been replaced by plywood or filled in with ventilating fans. In the distance, at the far end of the concrete floor stood an enormous c.o.ke-powered blast furnace that must have gone cold decades earlier. A thirtyfoot-wide crucible, an enormous reinforced cup that had once held hundreds of tons of molten steel at a time, hung before the furnace on one thick chain, the other having given way. The crucible's lip dragged on the floor, mired in a vast wash of hardened slag. Reyes' hideout was a defunct steel mill, she realized. There were a lot of them in Pennsylvania, mostly around Pittsburgh but she concrete floor was cracked below. The scale and the didn't think she'd been carried that far. There were plenty of them around Philadelphia as well. She could be miles from the corn field where they'd caught her, or only hundreds of yards away. In the sensory failure of the casket ride she'd had no way to accurately measure distances. Her mind spun wildly, trying to figure out how far they'd taken her, to no avail.

At least she was somewhere, somewhere with light and sound so that her mind wasn't adrift in darkness. She studied her surroundings as best she could while being bounced around on the vampire's back. Reyes and his half-deads were using only one small corner of the vast cracked floor. The faceless minions had a good campfire going and had set up some furniture, old chairs and couches with springs sticking up through rotting cushions. Fifteen or so of them were gathered around the fire, watching the flames leap and dance, giggling amongst themselves at some no doubt unspeakable joke. They fell quite silent as Reyes approached. He tossed Caxton onto a mildew-stained easy chair and then squatted next to the fire. He made no attempt to tie her up or otherwise constrain her.

"If you're not-" Caxton started, but she stopped instantly as they all turned to look at her at once. All those mutilated faces unnerved her and made her think of her own mortality. "If you're not going to kill me then I need to go to the bathroom," she said.

She was expecting the half-deads to mock her, and they did. Their whining, high-pitched taunts made her cheeks red but she really did need to urinate.

"Pee in your f.u.c.king pants, b.i.t.c.h," one of the half-deads screamed at her. His skinned jaw flapped open in amus.e.m.e.nt. "Yeah, come on, do it, I want to see this. Pee in your pants!" He started chanting it over and over and some of the others joined in.

Reyes stood up and grasped the half-dead's head in one long-fingered hand, his shoulder in the other. The vampire twisted his hands and the half-dead came apart in two pieces. Reyes threw them both into the fire. The flames leapt dangerously high as the broken body was consumed and a stink of unwashed horror rolled over them all.

There was no more chanting after that. Reyes searched about in a pile of junk for a moment and came up with a rusted tin bucket. He tossed it to her and she caught it.

"Gee, thanks," she said, but she got up to walk away from the fire. The vampire didn't even look at her as she walked far out onto the mill's floor, well away from the half-deads. He didn't need to. She could feel him inside her head and she knew she would never get away from him again, not really. He was with her even as she squatted over the bucket. She closed her eyes and tried to block him out but it wasn't possible.

She left the bucket there and walked back toward the fire. It was brutally cold in the unheated mill and she figured that it was better to get over her squeamishness about her captor than it was to die of hypothermia.

A half-dead waited for her, a bag of fast food in his bony hand. She took it and realized just how hungry she was. She hadn't eaten in well over a day and while adrenaline had confused her body into ignoring food for a while it couldn't last forever. She opened the bag and found a cold hamburger and a flat, watery soft drink inside. The hamburger already had a bite taken out of it. She wasn't sure whether the half-deads had gotten the food out of a dumpster or if one of them had taken the bite. It didn't matter. She devoured the burger and washed it down with the syrupy clear soda. Her lips were chapped, she'd been so thirsty.

With her needs essentially met she climbed back onto the easy chair and wrapped her arms around herself. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do next.

Fatigue sapped her energy for a moment and she had to blink rapidly to clear her head. She wasn't tired, not really-she'd slept all day. The feeling came back, a wash of listlessness that made her arms so heavy she had to let them fall at her sides. Her neck ached with the weight of holding up her head.

It was Reyes, she realized. The vampire was playing tricks with her mind. Maybe he was just showing off the power he had over her-or maybe he really wanted her to sleep for some reason.

She thought of the half-dead she had tortured and killed on her bedroom floor. He had told her of thehechizo they used to make Deanna break the window. It only worked in dreams, he had said. Dreams. You had to be asleep to dream. Whatever he wanted her for he would use magic to get it, and his magic only worked if she wasn't conscious enough to fight it off. She scowled at the vampire. "I don't feel the least bit sleepy. I feel like staying up till dawn," she told him, "so I can watch you melt into a puddle of goo."

His reaction made her feel as if the force of gravity had been doubled. Her limbs dragged her down into the cushions of the chair, her body curling over on itself, her eyelids squeezing shut. She fought it and had just enough will power to push it back, to stay conscious. It took everything she had. She knew that the next time he tried to pull that trick she wouldn't have the strength to resist.

He still hadn't said a word to her. Piter Lares hadn't spoken to Arkeley, either, when he dragged him back to his lair. Caxton wished she knew what that meant. She wished she knew what the h.e.l.l was going on.

Reyes didn't look at her. Instead he knelt on the floor and pushed one of his hands deep into the fire. Immediate pain rushed through him and Caxton's body curled up in response. She felt only a fraction of what he must but it was enough to make her gasp in agony.

When he pulled his hand out of the blaze it was dark with soot and some flesh had burned off of his fingers, revealing narrow bones beneath. The flesh grew back over the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds but the soot remained, darkening his white fingers. Reyes came stomping over to her and dragged his fingers across her cheeks and forehead. She tried to turn her face away but his strength was beyond her measure. He could hold her perfectly still, so still she couldn't even wriggle like a worm.

His hands smelled like woodsmoke and burnt meat. She sensed his impatience as he drew complex symbols on her face with the soot under his fingernails. He was writing a word on her face, she realized, a single word: SUEnO.

It should not take so much work to make her accept the curse. A glance had sufficed in his own case, a chance meeting of the eyes. She was fighting too hard and it was taking too long.

"What curse?" she asked. Reyes' eyes went wide. Apparently she wasn't supposed to have heard so much of his thoughts. He frowned and grasped her head in both of his hands. She tried to close her eyes but he pried them open with his thumbs and she couldn't look away.

His red eyes bored down into hers like drills biting into soft wood. He tore her consciousness away from her as if he were ripping off her clothes. She couldn't fight, she could barely utter a meek protest, a hissing "No..." under her breath.

In a moment she was asleep.

Darkness claimed her, darkness far more profound and complete than the darkness she'd experienced inside the casket. There was no ground below her, nothing on either side of her, nothing above her. She lay motionless, unaware, inert.

Then something changed.