13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

Up above ground, leaning against the side of Clara's Volkswagen, Caxton rubbed at her face over and over, trying to make sense of things. She wanted to throw up but she kept thinking she would vomit up clotted blood, just as Reyes had. She wanted to sit down but she knew if she did she wouldn't ever want to stand up again.

"The only reason I'm alive," she said, muttering to herself, "is because I happened to fit into some vampire's kink. Not just any vampire. A depraved vampire." She tried to stop breathing. Her body freaked out, panicked, made her hyperventilate. What had made her think to stop breathing?

Vampires didn't breathe, of course. They were dead things and they didn't need to breathe. Living things, like state troopers, needed to breathe a lot.

"His curse is alive," she sighed. "His curse is alive in me."

Clara pushed a paper bag into her hands. Caxton realized that Clara must have been talking to her but she couldn't hear her. She couldn't hear anything. She breathed into the bag and slowly, slowly, she calmed down. She felt things slow down all around her. She felt the air on her skin and smelled fruit, maybe strawberries.

She took the bag away from her face. "Strawberries?" she asked. Clara's forehead wrinkled. "Strawberries and kiwi fruit, and a cup of unsweetened yogurt. How... how did you know what I had for breakfast?" The look on her face verged on fear.

Caxton waved it away. "I'm not psychic." She crinkled the bag in her fingers. "I just have a good nose." They laughed together. That helped. It helped an awful lot, actually.

"When you've stopped panicking, let me know," Arkeley said. "So we can go back down there."

With her eyes closed Caxton could pretend that Arkeley wasn't really there. That he was just in her head again. Then he had to talk again and ruin it.

"I can wait until tomorrow. I'm pretty sure that Scapegrace will still be too full to hunt tonight. I'd say, eighty per cent sure. Which means that there's only a twenty per cent chance he'll tear someone's throat out because you were too scared to help me."

She opened her eyes and saw Clara standing not two feet from the Fed.

"Hey, asshole," she said. She was a good foot and maybe three inches shorter than Arkeley. He outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds. "Yeah, you, asshole,"

she said. "I'm not going to let you do this to her, not twice. I don't care what the stakes are."

"Laura, call off your dog, will you? She's yipping obnoxiously."

Clara's entire body tightened. Her muscles curled and flexed and extended and she looked ready to punch Arkeley right in the gut. Even her hair bristled.

"Are you going to strike me, sheriff's deputy Hsu? Is that your intent? Because I have to say, the way you're telegraphing your punch, you'd be lucky to touch my coat tails before I had you on the ground with two broken arms."

Clara rolled her shoulders and tilted her head to one side, then the other. "You're not worth the paperwork," she said, and suddenly she was standing down. She hadn't moved an inch but her posture and the slump of her shoulders spoke volumes.

"If you're not going to hit me," Arkeley said, "then please leave us alone. The trooper and I have things to discuss."

Clara nodded and walked over to where Caxton leaned against her car. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do," she said.

"I wish it were that simple," Caxton breathed.

Clara reached across the space between them and cradled Caxton's chin in her hand. She gave it a gentle squeeze, then made herself scarce behind a tower of switching gears. She could probably still hear them but Arkeley didn't seem to mind.

"I want to help you," she told him. "I do."

He walked toward her as if he hadn't heard her at all. As if she hadn't said anything. She immediately felt guilty. She felt the way she had felt as a child when her father would give her the silent treatment. She tried to push that feeling out of her gut but it was no use. She braced herself, almost expecting him to slap her.

"I will do anything you ask. Except I won't go back down in that hole."

He nodded and came even closer. Close enough to touch her. He didn't.

"When I was down there he came swimming up to the surface, like he wanted to poke his nose out. Like he wanted to see his creation one last time. It was horrible. I felt the way he felt. I don't think my body can tell the difference between my emotions and his. I-I'm so sorry, but I can't help you like that."

"Alright," he said, a sigh coming out of him.

"No, no, it's not alright," she said, and she felt herself on the verge of breaking down. "Reyes spoke to me down there. He spoke right into my head. Maybe not with words but... but he was aware. Still alive in me, somehow."

He nodded. "Okay. I kind of expected that his ghost would plague you."

"You expected-you knew-how can you know? How can you know anything about what I'm going through?"

"I know," Arkeley told her.

"How?" Caxton said, squinting at him. "How do you know that?"

He picked up a stone and threw it hard at a transformer fifteen feet away. The metal box clanged accusingly. It was so sudden and so unexpected that it made Caxton jump a little.

"Piter Byron Lares dragged me down into his hiding place and stuck me there with a little hypnosis. He didn't hurt me. He didn't take my weapon away. And he never spoke a word to me."

Caxton thought back to when she'd read his report. She'd read about how violent and uncaring Lares had been, tearing apart an entire SWAT team, and she'd been more than a little surprised when the vampire had taken the Fed down through the river and onto his boat, still in one piece. But there had been an explanation. "He was saving you as a midnight snack," she said.

"No he wasn't." Arkeley leaned on the car next to her and folded his arms.

"You can't be saying-"

"He had only started the process with me when I killed him. He didn't get anywhere near as far as Reyes got with you. I didn't even know I was being raped by that pale son of a bitch. But a part of him broke off in my head, just like a part of Reyes got stuck in yours. Not so much that I could feel him in there, no. Just enough that every once in a while, maybe twice a year, I dream of blood."

"You don't need to-"

Arkeley turned to stare at her. "It tastes like copper pennies on your tongue. It's hot, hotter than you expect, and very wet at first, but it clots even as it fills your mouth. It sticks in your throat but you swallow it down, you can feel it stringy and dark in the back of your throat but you force it down so you can have some more, another mouthful, and another. I know it so well now. The dryness of it, the clots in your teeth. The need."

She had to look away. Because it didn't sound as disgusting as he made it out to be. It sounded almost... tempting. She couldn't stand for him to see the naked desire she knew was lighting up her face.

"He remembers the taste. He's been dead so long there's nothing else left of him, just the longing for that taste. And it's never going to go away. If I killed myself today I don't know if I would come back as a vampire or not."

"But you know I would," she said. "You know that I'm already one of them, whether I like it or not. And there's no way back."

"That I don't know at all. I'm truly hoping the Polders know a way to exorcize this curse from you, Laura. The first step, though, has to be that we kill Scapegrace and Malvern. So nobody else has to share our dreams. So I want you to go back down that hole and look at those bodies again and tell me what his next step was going to be."

He adjusted his weight with a grunt and was standing in front of her. He held out his hand to her but she wouldn't take it.

"No," she told him.

"I beg your pardon?" he asked.

"No. I won't go back down there. I don't know how to get rid of this curse but I know if I go down there it'll just make things worse. You find something else for me to do, some way to help you, and I will play along. But not if it means going down into that chamber of horrors again. Ever."