He had spared her life once because she was a woman. He’d let her live a second time because she was useful to him, because she could drive a car. Clearly his patience was all used up.
Laura Caxton would have died then and there if it hadn’t been for the Mütter’s night watchman. He stepped out of the fourth door just then, perhaps alerted by the gasping, choking noises Caxton was making, and shone his flashlight right into the vampire’s eyes.
The vampire screamed in pain. He was a nocturnal creature, and that much light hurt him far more than bullets. He dropped her, his arms flying up to protect his sensitive eyes from the bright light. In another second he was gone, down the back stairs and away.
40.
I dropped to my knees & peered through the keyhole. The eye that looked back on me from the other side was shot with blood, & quite yellow where it should have been white. But I recognized the brown iris, the color of the rocks on Cadillac Mountain. It was Bill, indeed.
“Wait there, Bill, I have some others with me. We’ll bring you out of this captivity,” I swore.
“Alva, no, you have to leave. You can’t be here.”
“I won’t leave without you,” I told him. “I’m going to force this door, & the noise of it be damned.”
“No.” The high-pitched voice turned hard as flint. “I…can’t let you come in. I’d have to stop you, Alva. I would hurt you if you tried. Don’t make me do that.”
“What nonsense you speak!” Yet I felt my heart jump. I knew what Bill had become. My neck still ached, my side still bled with the wounds the fiends had given me, & now Bill was one & the same.
But it was Bill, my Bill! The only true friend I’ve ever had. A man I slept next to for two years in a tent too small for dogs to use. A man whose life & mine were wound together as tight as the strands of a little girl’s braided hair.
& yet I knew. I understood. “We can help, Bill. We can get you to a surgeon.”
“There’s nothing you can do for me now, Alva. It’s too late. You must forget our friendship, & leave me as I am. I beg you just to go! This is all I can do for you. Even as I speak my soul is writhing, my hands are reaching for a knife to stab through this keyhole!”
I fell back on my haunches, my brains reeling. “Oh, Bill, say it isn’t so.” But it was. He spoke no more, & a moment later, his eye disappeared from the keyhole.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
41.
The night watchman—his name tag readHAROLD —helped her sit up and lean back against the wall.
Caxton rubbed at her throat, trying to get circulation back into the crushed muscles there. “You okay?”
he asked her over and over, as if through sheer repetition he could make it so. “That guy coulda killed us both, and easy!”
That was true. The light had hurt the vampire, but only momentarily. He could have smashed it and then returned to his slaughter. He’d been too smart to take the chance, though. He couldn’t have known if Harold was armed, or if a platoon of police were behind him. She tried to explain that to the night watchman, and found she couldn’t. It felt as if her larynx were being rubbed against a cheese grater. She could breathe, though. Her lungs were heaving up and down just fine. So she nodded. She slipped the safety of Arkeley’s Glock back on and shoved the heavy pistol into her empty holster. It didn’t quite fit—the leather holster wasn’t designed for that particular model of handgun. After trying to force it, she finally just let it hang out a little.
Caxton rubbed at her eyes, her mouth. She let her body calm down on its own, let it take its time in doing so. She’d been very, very close to death. Well, it wasn’t the first time. She knew what to do, which was to try to take it as easy as possible. If there was any real damage to her throat, then running around and chasing vampires would probably just make it worse.
Besides, the vampire was already gone. Once again he’d escaped her. Once again she’d failed.
Harold disappeared for a while, but finally came back with a paper cone full of cold water. It felt very good going down and she thanked him, even managing to squeak out her appreciation in words that only felt like butter knives as they came out of her. “I’m,” she said, and paused for a second. “I’m Trooper Laura Cax—”
“Oh, yeah, I know who you are,” he said, a big goofy smile on his face. He was a short guy, maybe fifty years old with curly scraps of pale hair sticking out of the bottom of a navy blue baseball cap. He wore gray overalls and yellow Timberland boots.
“Did Ark—” she stopped. Trying to pronounce hard k sounds made her feel as if a nail was lodged in her esophagus. “Did the other officer tell you I was here?” she finally managed to ask. She glanced down at the paper cone in her hand. A single drop of water remained lodged in the fold at its bottom. She licked it out eagerly and wished she had more.
“What, Jameson? Aw, no. He didn’t tell me about you. I just recognized you, is all. From that movie Teeth . That was awesome.”
She wanted to roll her eyes. Instead she said, “Thanks.” Then she grimaced. Another hard k .
“That one scene, where Clara kisses you for the first time? That was so fucking hot. I must’ve watched that like a hundred times.”
Caxton rolled her eyes. That scene always embarrassed her when she watched it. Had she really been that easy? “I have to see something,” she said. Slowly she rose to her feet, bracing herself against the wall behind her. When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t fall over again, she made her way down the stairs at the end of the hall. At the bottom a fire door stood half open, cool air from outside billowing in.
She pushed it open and stepped outside, the night feeling good on her face for once. She breathed in a deep lungful that soothed her throat, then looked around. She stood on the edge of the parking lot. The Buick stood just where she’d left it. She saw the Dumpsters as well, one of which held the dead body of Professor Geistdoerfer. “Harold,” she called back over her shoulder, “I need your help.”
It was not easy getting the corpse out of the Dumpster. It took real work to lift Geistdoerfer over the lip of the container. Harold took the weight from her so she didn’t have to just dump the dead man on the asphalt. Once that was done they carried him inside the Mütter building, Harold holding his feet, Caxton carrying him with her hands laced under his armpits. Geistdoerfer’s wounded hand dragged on the ground, but it didn’t leave a trail of blood. Every drop had been drained from his body and none of it had gone to waste.
Caxton knew that the body was a possible threat. The vampire had killed him and by so doing had established a magical link between the two of them. It was within the vampire’s power to call Geistdoerfer back from death, to literally raise him as a servant who could not fail to do the vampire’s bidding. It could happen at any time, over enormous distances, so they had to watch the corpse every second. She needed a place to keep it while she decided what to do next.