13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

The vampire stood at least six and a half feet tall. He was not as muscular as she had expected-perhaps she had thought every vampire would be as big as Piter Lares. This one had a thin, whip-like quality that made her think of a predatory cat-fast, vicious, over-designed. He was completely naked and completely hairless. His ears stuck up on either side of his head and came to sharp points.

Caxton studied him. She had plenty of time-he didn't seem to be in any kind of hurry, as if he would kill them when he felt like it, when he got around to it. They both knew she wasn't going anywhere. His eyes were reddish and bright. Seed pods from the maple tree had stuck to his skin here and there-a faint sheen of sweat covered him from head to toe. His skin, which had looked so white before, actually had a slight tinge of pink. He had just sucked the blood of the dead construction worker, after all. The poor dead man must have been the only one around the work site, perhaps a night watchman.

The vampire cleared his throat as if he wanted her to look at him some more. Was he vain? Did he want her to think him beautiful? She actually wondered. Did she find him beautiful? Like Malvern in the hospital he radiated no humanity at all. It was strange, she would never have said that Arkeley was particular human-seeming. Yet the Fed gave off some kind of aura, a human warmth or perhaps it was just a smell. The vampire had none of this. The only comparison she could make, and it really jumped out at her, was that the vampire was like a marble statue of a person. Its lines and contours could be perfectly carved, immaculately replicated, but you would never mistake him for something alive. He was like Michelangelo's statue of David. Perfect but hard and cold. His penis drooped flaccidly against his thighs and she wondered if he had any use for it. Did he find humans attractive? Did vampires have sex with their own kind?

He padded closer to the car and placed one hand on the frame of the open window. He bent down to look inside, his lower jaw falling open to show his frightening number of teeth. From behind her Caxton was aware of a certain sound, an irritating buzz like the droning wings of a mosquito. As the vampire's face came closer to her she heard the noise double in volume. It really was quite annoying. It was Arkeley, she realized. He was saying something but she couldn't make out the words. Well, he'd never said anything she particularly wanted to hear before, so she saw no reason to start paying attention to him now.

The vampire's hands came down around her, his powerful fingers clutching at her uniform shirt and her belt. She moved through space, dragged inexorably along by his power, in one slightly sickening, perfectly fluid motion she was outside of the car and dangling from his hands. She was floating, weightless, and she felt like a little girl again, she felt as she had when her father used to pick her up and carry her around. How wonderful it had been to surrender everything to that embrace. How much joy she had taken in being a doll in her father's arms.

She looked for the vampire's eyes again but his face was turned away from her. She frowned, wanting very much for him to look at her once more. A hole appeared in his forehead, a gaping, fluttering black hole that spat dark fluids and fragments of bone. A second hole appeared in his cheek and she saw the back of his head burst open and suddenly, quite suddenly, she was falling.

Bang-she hit the ground. And pain flashed like lightning in her arm. The pain smashed her lungs open. Breath gasped out of her. She hadn't realized she had been holding it in before. She could hear again-she hadn't know she was deaf a moment earlier. She looked down at her hands then up at the vampire. There was no marble statue up there. There was a beast, a thing of sharp teeth and bloody eyes and it was going to kill her. In fact it-he-had been in the process of killing her when Arkeley shot him twice in the face.

"Jesus," she shrieked, "Jesus," the vampire had been shot twice in the head and all he did was drop her. He was hit, hit bad, but she knew it wouldn't be enough. She raced away from him, scuttled away on hands and feet and panic erupted in her throat and she nearly threw up.

The fucker had hypnotized her. She grabbed for her gun and turned to shoot him in the heart, as many times as possible.

Before she could do more than free her weapon from its holster the vampire's hand closed on her neck. As fast as she had moved away from him, he had come at her even faster. He picked her up and threw her away, even as two more gunshots made the night air jump and shiver. She was flying and this time she knew she was going to hit hard, knew it was going to hurt. She collided with a sawhorse painted orange and white. It caught her right her navel, right at the top of her thighs and she kept going, twisting over it, agony jarring through her femurs as they flexed and twisted and nearly shattered. She slumped forward and her momentum carried her over the barrier and into the exposed pit beyond, the place where the road had been peeled away.

Caxton fell for six feet that felt like six miles, her hands clawing at naked air, her legs pinwheeling. She landed with a splash in a puddle of freezing cold mud that got in her eyes, her mouth, her nose, threatening to choke her, to drown her. She sputtered and clawed at her face and sucked in one painful breath that made her ribs ache.

She was still alive.

Up above, beyond the pitch dark wall of the trench, two more gunshots sounded. Then another one. She waited for a fourth shot but it didn't come. Was Arkeley dead? If he was she was all alone in the bottom of the hole. She sat up and looked around but couldn't see any way out-no ladder, no ramp, not even a rope she could climb. Given enough time she could probably find a way up to the top. She doubted she would be given enough time.

Even as she thought it the vampire appeared on top of the barricade. He looked down at her and his eyes were red mirrors that caught the starlight and shone it down on her. With a wave of nausea she tore her gaze away from his.

"You." His voice was thick, and low, and it had a raspy, rumbling growl in the back of it. "Are you Arkeley?"

He didn't know? He'd laid such an elaborate trap to catch the Fed but nobody had bothered to tell him if Arkeley was a man or a woman? Caxton didn't think before she answered. "Yeah, I'm Arkeley." He looked doubtful so she tried to convince him. "I'm the famous vampire killer, bloodmunch. I tore your daddy's heart out, that's right."

He stared down at her and she looked at her feet. She could feel his gaze on her like the laser sights of two sniper rifles painting her back. Finally she heard him laugh. It sounded a little like a dog choking on a half-swallowed bone.

"Little liar," the vampire said, still chuckling. "Lares was no kin of mine. You're the other one, the partner. I'll be back for you," he sang. And then he disappeared from view.

"Damn," she whined, not entirely sure why she'd wanted to pretend to be Arkeley. Surely if he'd believed her the vampire would have come down and snuffed out her life on the instant. Yet perhaps that would have given the real Arkeley a chance to get away, or at least to gather reinforcements. That idea was based on the presumption, with no basis in known fact, that the vampire hadn't already killed the Fed.

She pounded at the walls of the pit with her fists, scattering clods of dirt and pebbles and achieving nothing whatsoever else. "Fuck!" she shouted. As if in echo, she heard another gun shot, this time from a whole new direction.