13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

Reyes got up and grabbed her hair in one enormous hand. He pulled her up until she was standing, looking into her eyes.

"I thought the whole silence thing was mierda but I guess not. I want you to forget everything I said to you, okay? You forget everything and you sit right here and you don't move a muscle till I come for you again."

She nodded. She possessed no more willpower whatsoever. If he told her to stand on one foot and cluck like a chicken she would have.

"Alright. Fine, damn it! You have to be so stubborn, well I can outstubborn you, perra. We'll start all over again tonight." He rubbed at his eyes and mouth in frustration and turned away from her. She expected that he would take the candle and leave her in the dark, that he would climb the stairs and leave her all alone. His destination, however, was a lot closer at hand. He opened up the casket on the floor and climbed in, leaving her to watch by the flickering light of the candle. It must be dawning outside, she realized. The night must have been over. The first night, anyway. How many more times would she be subjected to the dreams of the burning mill? How many nights would it take before she did shoot herself, before she did, finally, accept his curse?

A burbling, liquid noise came from the casket. He was so certain that she was safe, that she couldn't harm him, that he would leave her right there next to his deliquescing body. And he was right. She couldn't so much as twitch a thumb. To prove it, she looked down at her hands, at her right thumb. She prepared to will it to move, to pour all of her remaining psychic energy into making it jump just a little bit. A futile task but one she felt she needed to perform before she just gave up. If she could prove to herself that even this, just twitching her thumb, was out of the question, then why should she fight even a moment longer? She would just do what Reyes asked of her. She started willing her thumb to move, but before she could really begin a voice out of nowhere startled her.

"What if it works?" Arkeley asked her. He was standing on the stairs, just out of sight. It was his voice, though.

What? she asked, unable to open her mouth. She could still think it.

"What if the thumb moves?" he asked. "What are you going to do then? Are you going to keep fighting?"

It was an absurd question. You're not real, she said, as she had said to him before. And just as before, it worked. He vanished. She felt a little bit pleased with her ability to at least control her own phantasms.

When he was gone she tried to return to the matter at hand, but it took her a long time to remember what she'd been doing. She couldn't seem to... to think right, every time she would try to hold something in her head it would just fly away from her again. She was going to do something, she remembered. Something important. Some vital, last step. Yes. She was going to move her thumb.

She looked down at the thumb and thought, okay, if you can twitch, then twitch. The thumb moved. Just a little jerky spasm, a trembling almost. But it moved. She looked up at the stairwell to see if Arkeley was there, ready to jeer, to ask her what happened next. He wasn't there, of course, because he'd never been there. He had not been real. But that didn't get her off the hook. What next? What did she do next?

Moving her whole hand seemed like a good idea. She tried to make a fist. Slowly, very slowly because she was so tired, the hand folded up into a weak fist. She felt a very weird kind of anger. She'd really wanted her hand to disobey her, frankly. She was far more comfortable sitting there, doing nothing, waiting for Reyes to climb out of the coffin. But if she could make a fist, then she could probably stand up. And that meant she had to stand up.

"You'll need to do more than that," Arkeley told her. He was back, hidden somewhere, somewhere very close by but not where she could see him. He was a presence in the room but she couldn't have said where he might be. "You're going to need to open the casket."

She rose to her feet, taking her time about it. Not in any kind of hurry at all. If Arkeley had insisted she move more quickly she would have banished him from her presence once again, maybe permanently. He didn't, though. He offered no encouragement nor any kind of derision. He was silent. But he was still there. She shuffled over to the casket until she was standing right over it. She looked down at the scorched hole in the lid where she'd shot through the wood. A curling white maggot clung to the edge of the hole.

Caxton bent at the knees and got her hands under the lid of the casket. With one quick motion she threw it open. She was expecting what she found inside, but not so much of it. She saw Reyes' bones, just as she'd seen Malvern's skeleton, but where Malvern's flesh had been reduced to a quart or two of pasty glop, Reyes' casket was half full of the viscous soup. Well, he had a lot more flesh to liquefy than Malvern did. Some of the long bones floated near the top, with whole colonies of maggots clinging to their knobby protrusions. The skull was at the bottom, fully submerged, staring up at her with its lower jaw hinged wide.

"You have to take the heart," Arkeley told her.

She turned around, looking for the Fed. He was so close she could feel his body heat. Just like she felt the cold absence of Reyes' humanity. She couldn't see Arkeley, though. He was just in her head. She was careful not to say as much, though. Saying anything like that seemed to make him disappear, and she knew she could use his advice.

"Take the heart," he told her again.

She looked for the heart but couldn't see it. It wasn't floating near Reye's spine, nor had it bobbed up out of the bottom of the rib cage. There was something shadowy at the bottom, resting on the silk upholstery of the casket. Something dark that wasn't a bone. She started to reach for it, then stopped. She didn't know if she could reach through the liquefied flesh.

"You twitched your thumb," Arkeley told her. "You promised yourself that if you twitched your thumb, you would keep fighting. This is the only way."

She closed her eyes and plunged her arm into the casket. The liquid clung to her, sticking to the hair on her wrist and forearm. She felt a bone bump against her skin, rough and terrifying. Maggots crawled on her skin, inching their way up her arm. She wanted to scream but she was still too foggy to make a sound. If she hadn't been half-hypnotized she knew she would not have been able to take the heart. In her semi-lucid state, though, she felt her fingers close around the shadowy organ and lift it free. The organic broth that was Reyes' daytime body dripped from the heart. It splattered her shoes. The heart itself was writhing with maggots. She tried to shake them off but it didn't work-they clung tight to it. The muscle in her hand pulsed gently against her palm, an almost imperceptible ticking rhythm. It told her she wasn't finished.

She looked around at the shelves. Reyes had said the vaulted cellar had once been used to store lime and borax, and now that she was half-awake she could, in fact, smell them, a sort of alkaline bite in the air. At some point the cellar had been converted into a general storehouse, however, and the shelves were full of all manner of things. There were jars full of nails, bolts and other hardware. There were camping supplies and spare candles and box after box of Material Safety Data Sheets, government-required forms that explained what chemicals were present in the mill and how toxic they all were.

She took the biggest jar she could find and emptied it into the mess in the casket. She crumpled a dozen or so sheets of paper and pushed them into the jar, careful to leave room for air to circulate. She'd been a Brownie once and she'd been camping enough times to know how to make a fire.

The candle Reyes had used to illuminate the cellar was guttering low when she was ready but it only took a moment to light her makeshift firestarter. Bright orange flames dripped down the sides of the jar. The paper blackened and crumpled quickly but she had plenty to work with and kept stuffing more and more inside. Then she dropped the heart into the jar.

She'd expected to have to feed the fire for hours as the wet heart dried out. Muscle tissue, especially hearts, were notorious for being hard to burn. This was not true of a vampire's heart. It might as well have been made of paraffin-it burst into flames instantly, blue flames so hot they shattered the glass jar and spat flaming refuse all over the cellar.

In the casket Reyes's skull floated to the surface, the jaw wide in a scream Caxton heard just fine, a drawn-out, horrified scream. The scream of a creature being burned alive but unable to roll or run or get away from the flames. And that was it. She had expected-or hoped for-something more dramatic. After a few moments, though, the skull sank back down into the goo and was still once more. The scream in her head faded but remained, a distant sort of musical tone. It never quite disappeared but it was swallowed up in the background noise of her own head.

"Don't feel bad for him," Arkeley told her.

She coughed to find her voice. "I don't. This son of a bitch raped me. Even now he's inside of me. I'm glad he can feel this."

She knelt down next to the burning heart and watched it shrivel and fall to pieces. When it was nothing but orange embers, when the screaming had stopped, she picked up a smoldering piece of the heart with a rolled-up piece of paper and tossed it into the casket. The liquefied flesh inside went up like a fireball and cheerful little lines of fire ran across the wooden molding on the casket's lip.

"What are you going to do next?" Arkeley asked her.

"I'm going upstairs," she told him, because it was just that simple. But first she paused to find her Beretta. It felt very good, and very important, in her hand.