"Did you see that?" someone warbled. It was the squeaky voice of a half-dead. After a moment she half-heard a muttered reply. It sounded negative. She cursed herself for lying down, for moving at all. In the darkness, if she'd been perfectly still, maybe they would have walked right past her.

She had one bullet left in her Beretta. The flesh of half-deads was rotten and soft and she could probably beat another one to pieces. If there were three of them, however, or if they were faster than she expected, it would all be over.

She tensed her body, ready to strike upward if anyone came close. She would try her best to destroy them, if there were two of them. If there were three, or more, she would shoot herself in the heart. It would prevent her from being raised as a vampire.

"There, what's that?" a half-dead asked.

There were two of them. There had to be two. She prayed there were two. Then she heard a third voice.

"You two, leave us alone," someone else said, someone who had to be standing right behind her. She rolled over and looked up into a pale silhouette with a round head. It wore a pair of tight jeans and a black t-shirt. Its ears were dark and ragged-looking.

Scapegrace.

Caxton brought her pistol up and fired her last round point blank into the vampire's chest. The bullet tore through his shirt, then pranged off into the trees. It didn't even scratch his white body. She hadn't really expected to kill him-even in the dark she could see the pinkish glow of fresh blood moving

beneath his skin-but at the least she'd expected to make him turn and snarl. He didn't even laugh at her. He just crouched down next to her and touched the grave marker she'd tripped over. He didn't look at her or touch her.

She tried to ask a question but her throat kept closing up. "What... what are you going to..."

"Don't talk to me," he said. "Don't say anything unless I speak to you first. I can kill you," he added. "I can kill you instantly. If you try to run away I can catch you. I'm much faster than I used to be. But I want to bring you in alive. I mean, those are my orders. I think you know what She wants. I've also been told that if I hurt you a little, that's okay. That it might even help."

He faced her, then, and she had a bad shock when she saw how young he looked. Scapegrace had been a child when he killed himself. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most. His body was still painfully skinny and hunched. Death hadn't made him a grownup overnight. He still looked like a little boy.

"Please don't look at me like that," he said to her. "I hate it." Caxton turned her face away hurriedly. She knew her own features had to be wracked by fear. Snot was running across her upper lip and cold sweat was breaking out on her forehead.

"I can see some things in the dark but I can't read this," he told her, running his fingers across the headstone. The lettering there had mostly worn away but here and there an angle or a fragment of a curved inscription could still be seen. "Maybe you can read it better. Read it to me."

Her throat shuddered and she thought she might throw up. She fought her body until it was back under her control. She couldn't quite read the letters but maybe it would help to feel them, she thought, to trace them with her fingertips. Trembling fear lanced up her forearm as she ran one finger across the face of the stone. She could make out a little: ST PH N DELANC JU 854 JULY 1854 She told him what she had discovered. "I think-I think it says Stephen Delancy, died July 1854. The date of birth is h-h-harder to m-m-make out," she chattered.

Caxton felt as if someone were pouring out cold water over her back. It had to be at least partially the weird feeling she always got around vampires, the cold sensation that she got standing next to Malvern's coffin or whenever Reyes had touched her. But most of that skin-crawling horror had to come from the fact that at any moment he could kill her. Tear her to pieces before she could even raise her arms to ward him off.

"Do you think he was born in June or July? Did he live for a full month or only a few days?" Scapegrace knelt down beside her and ran a hand across the gravestone as if he were caressing the face of the infant buried below. "I guess there's one way to find out."

"No," she screamed, as he dug his pale fingers into the soil and started tearing out clods of earth. She threw herself at his back and beat on his neck with her empty pistol. Finally she got a reaction out of him.

Turning from his kneeling posture he grabbed her around the waist and slung her away from him. The empty Beretta flew out of her hand and into the darkness. She couldn't see where it went because she was too busy reeling across the graveyard. She tumbled backwards, her feet kicking at the ground pointlessly. She came down hard across another gravestone, this one nothing more than a stub of rock sticking out of the ground like a decayed tooth. Her elbow collided with the stone and wild pain leapt up and down her arm. She didn't think she'd broken anything-just hit her funny bone.

Scapegrace had made a hole three feet deep by the time she could stand again. The bones and cartilage of her hand still thrummed with agony but she was going to be okay. She found herself crying, though, as he lifted a wooden box out of the ground. She couldn't stand it-between the fear and the horror of what he was doing she thought she was going to start screaming, that she would run away even though she consciously knew he would just chase her down.

The box was of some light-colored wood, maybe pine, riddled with worm casts. It was decayed so badly that she couldn't tell if it had originally been ornate or plainly made. The baby-sized coffin broke apart in Scapegrace's hands though he was clearly trying to be gentle with it. He brushed away the fragments of pulpy wood and the dirt and sediment that had collected around the body inside.

"My family had a big funeral for me," he told her. "I could kind of see what was happening, like I was a ghost floating around the ceiling of the church. Everybody from my school was there and they walked past and looked down at my face and some of them cried, and some of them said things. Sometimes it was people I didn't even know. Girls who would never have talked to me in the hall, not even if they needed a pen and I had a spare one. Some of them were really upset, like they finally understood what it was like, what they had done to me. That was kind of awesome. n.o.body would touch me, though." Gently, with his thumb, he brushed debris away from the tiny body.

"Please," Caxton said, the word strained and stretched as it came out of her. "Please. Please." He didn't strike her but he didn't stop what he was doing, either. He shook the coffin a little and debris and dirt and other matter fell away. Vomit surged up her throat and she turned to the side, ashamed to show such disrespect but unable to stop herself from throwing up right then and there.

"When you're on the other side of it, death just isn't scary anymore. Actually, it becomes kind of fascinating. A lot of being a vampire is like that. It totally changes your perspective." He held something round in his left hand, something about the size of an apple. With a half twist he removed it from the coffin. The rest of the infant's remains went back in the hole and he kicked dirt over them. Then he turned around and showed her what he'd found.

It was the skull, of course. Stephen Delancy's skull, which had been buried for a hundred and fifty years. "Look," he told her. "He was only a few days old when he died." He showed her the skull. It was packed full of dirt and smeared with dried fluids. It was horrible to behold, sickening. "Maybe he was never really born." He considered the baby-sized cranium at length. "This will work," he said. He rubbed at the skull with his thumbs and then stared deeply into its eyesockets as he chanted softly. She didn't understand the words-she wasn't even sure they were words he was speaking.

When he finished he closed his eyes and then held out one hand, the skull balanced on his white palm. After a moment the skull began to vibrate. She could see it blur with motion. A sound leaked out of it, a kind of wailing moan it couldn't possibly make on its own-it didn't even have a lower jaw. The scream grew louder and louder until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. Instead Scapegrace pressed it against her hands. "Take it," he said, and she could hear him just fine over the shrieking. "Go on-my ears are more sensitive than yours. Take it!"

She took it in her hands and the screaming stopped instantly. "I'm going to take you with me, back to Her lair. I need you to behave, though. So we're going to play a little game. You're going to hold Stephen in both of your hands, because that's the only way to keep him quiet. Nod for me so I know you understand."

She shuddered. It made her head bob on her neck as if it weren't fully attached. She wrapped both hands around the skull. Something moved and chittered inside, some insect hidden in the dirt that filled the baby's sinus cavity. She moaned a little but she didn't drop the skull.

"Now you keep good care of that. If you take your hands away from it or if you drop it or if you crush it because you're holding it too hard, I'll hear it scream. Then I'll have to hurt you. Really, really badly." He squinted his red eyes and stared shrewdly into her face. "I'll break your back. You know I can do that, right?"

She nodded again. Her whole body trembled.

"Okay, Laura," he said. "Now move."

Scapegrace lead her out of the woods and back to the parking lot of the elementary school. She scanned the surrounding area with her eyes, desperately hoping someone would see them and call the police. No luck, though. She and Deanna had picked the place because it was out in the middle of the woods. Plenty of s.p.a.ce for the shed and the kennels. n.o.body around to complain about the sometimes bizarre noises greyhounds made. At night there was n.o.body around at all. Their nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away.

A car, a late model white sedan, sat waiting for them in the lot, its engine idling, its lights on. Doctor Hazlitt sat in the driver's seat, looking nervous.

"She promised Hazlitt could be one of us," Scapegrace told her. He was standing behind her so close she could feel his cold breath on her neck. "She promised him lots of things." The vampire held open the pa.s.senger door for her. She could hardly open it herself while she held the baby's cursed skull in her hands. She climbed in and realized she couldn't fasten her seatbelt, either. She guessed that didn't matter.

"h.e.l.lo, Officer," Hazlitt said. She didn't look at him. He sighed and tried again. "I know you have no reason to like me just now," he went on. "In a few hours, though, we will be allies. That's how this is going to work out. Can't we be civil to one another now?" When she didn't answer he started up the car and turned onto the highway headed southeast. Toward the tuberculosis sanatorium where Justinia Malvern waited so patiently.

They were going to make her kill herself. She'd understood that before but she hadn't considered how it might happen. Reyes had wanted it to be her own choice, and he had nearly succeeded in talking her into shooting herself. He'd wasted time trying to convince her-and before he could finish with her the sun had come up. Scapegrace wasn't going to make the same mistake. He would force her hand. Judging by the methods of persuasion he'd used so far she imagined he would torture her until she begged for death. Then he would give her the means to do herself in.

Arkeley couldn't stop them this time. Arkeley was dead. Tonight I'm going to die, she thought, and then tomorrow night I will rise as a vampire. She wanted to fight them. She wanted it so badly-her body was wracked with the urge to attack, the need to kill the vampire and the doctor. Little whitecaps of adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, beckoning her on. But how? She had no weapons. She didn't know any martial arts.

On the verge of panic she started breathing fast and shallow. Hyperventilating. She knew it was happening but she didn't know how to make it stop. Hazlitt glanced over at her, concern wrinkling his face.

In the back seat Scapegrace seemed bigger than he actually was. He was like some enormous growth, white and flabby like a cancer, filling half the car. "She's just afraid. Her pulse is elevated. She might pa.s.s out."

"Yes, thank you," Hazlitt shot back, "I know the symptoms of an anxiety attack. Do you think we should sedate her? She could hurt herself or someone else."

"She might hurt you," Scapegrace said, laughing a little. "Don't worry. I'll grab her if she has a seizure or something."

Tiny sparks of light flashed inside Caxton's eyes. They swam across her vision and were gone as quickly as they'd come. Her throat felt dry and thick and very cold with the air howling in and out of her body. She could hear her own heart beat and she could feel it pulling in her chest. Then bars of darkness appeared at the top and bottom of her vision like when they played old movies on television. The bars thickened and she heard a high pitched whining that filled up her head with its tone and then everything went all soft and fuzzy and out of focus.

She could hear Hazlitt and Scapegrace talking but only as if they were shouting through thick layers of wool. They were drowned out by the ringing in her ears. She could feel her body around her but it was completely numb, rubbery and dead. She could move if she really wanted to but just then she didn't really want to.

The fear was gone altogether. That was the best part. She knew things were still bad and that they wouldn't end well, but her fear was gone and she could think clearly again. She didn't want to sit up-that might break the spell-but she looked forward, through the windshield, and tried to see where they were going. There was something out there but it wasn't the highway. It was pale and big and it had long triangular ears. It was a vampire, maybe Malvern. The vampire raised its hands to her and they were full of red blood. It was offering that redness to her, like a gift.

Scapegrace slapped her across the back of the head and her eyes whirled around in her head and she was back, the ringing gone from her ears. "I said, are you okay?" Hazlitt yelled. He had one hand on her neck, maybe feeling for her pulse.

She wanted to bat him away but then she looked down and saw she was still holding the baby skull. Whatever had happened she'd managed not to let it fall out of her hands. She remembered she wasn't allowed to let go of it. She pulled away from Hazlitt as best she could with her shoulders. "I'm fine," she managed to say. Her voice sounded weaker than she felt. "What happened?"

"You swooned," the doctor told her, his voice thick with gloating. She scowled. She wasn't the kind of woman who swooned. She thought about it, though. Once, when she and Ashley (Deanna's predecessor) had been in Hershey on vacation, she had drunk chocolate martinis until she had literally pa.s.sed out. She had woken up on the floor of the ladies' room with a crowd of scared-looking c.o.c.ktail waitresses looking down at her. It had felt a lot like what had just happened-but even that hadn't made her feel so much shame.

Wow, she thought. If Arkeley could have seen her just then he would have had concrete proof of all the horrible things he'd ever said about her. Thank G.o.d he wasn't in the car. Because he was dead.

She worked her face muscles, stretching out her jaw, puffing out her cheeks, trying to revive herself. By the time they reached the hospital she felt pretty much recovered. Hazlitt drove up onto the main lawn next to the statue of Hygiene and they piled out of the car, Caxton very careful not to drop the skull even though her palms were clammy with sweat.

Twelve or thirteen other cars were already parked haphazardly on the gra.s.s. They were all empty. A bonfire burned close to the front doors of the hospital. Caxton was pretty sure that the Corrections Officers who ran the place weren't just having a weenie roast. She was right. As they walked up toward the entrance she saw the COs lined up on the ground near the fire, their hands tied behind their backs, their faces down in the gra.s.s.

She thought they must be dead. It was almost a relief to think that. When one of them moved her body sagged with brand new horror.

Tucker, the guard who had helped Arkeley find out Reyes' personal information, strained his neck trying to look up and see who had arrived. Caxton did everything she could to look away, to not be seen, but it didn't work. His eyes met hers for a moment and it was like they had a little conversation, it was like they had some of the magic of the vampires and they could communicate with just the firelight that shook in their eyes.

I'm so sorry, she tried to say with her eyes. But there's nothing I can do. His eyes were easy to read, even from twenty feet away. Help me, they said. Please. Please help me.

That was her job, of course. Helping people. At the moment she was indisposed, however. Tucker was going to die because she hadn't been strong enough. Just like everybody else. There was blood on her hands-the metaphorical kind, anyway.

"That guy means something to you?" Scapegrace asked. He didn't give her a chance to deny it. He stormed over to where Tucker lay on the gra.s.s and scooped up the big CO in one arm. Tucker outweighed the vampire by probably a hundred pounds but it didn't seem to matter. Scapegrace fastened his big toothy mouth around Tucker's neck and bit down, almost gently. Like he was biting into an apple and didn't want to spurt any of the juice. Then he began to suck.