13 Bullets

Deanna's fingers dug into Caxton's flesh like iron knives. Deanna's fingernails were cut just as short as they'd been in life but still they tore through Caxton's jacket and shirt as if they were razor blades. In a moment they would break the skin. And what would happen then? Deanna was already enraged. If she saw fresh human blood would she even stop to consider what she and Caxton had once meant to each other? Caxton was pretty sure she wouldn't.

She struggled to pull away, twisting her shoulders to the left and then the right. Deanna's face was a mask of anguish, her eyes wide, her jaw hanging open. All those teeth gleamed even in the minimal light of the invalid ward. Deanna's head was moving backwards, rearing to strike at Caxton's neck. The motion was painfully slow, perhaps unconscious. When it was complete Caxton would be dead. She'd watched Hazlitt die like that. She'd seen plenty of vampire victims. Her arms and hands began to tremble. The death grip on her shoulders was cutting off her circulation. The empty Glock fell from her hand and banged noisily on an iron bedframe.

Caxton gritted her teeth and focused every ounce of strength she had into pulling away, tore herself out of the grip. Her jacket came off in long flopping pieces and she tumbled backward, tripping on the bedframe, her arms flying wide to try to catch herself. Deanna seemed to loom up over her as if she were getting even taller or as if she could fly up over Caxton's head. She was going to strike from above so Caxton rolled to the side.

The vampire's weight came down on the bedframe with a grinding, screaming noise of metal being twisted out of shape. Caxton was already rolling to a crouch and then up to her feet. Adrenaline made her feel like she weighed nothing at all, as if she'd been hollowed out and filled full of air.

She didn't turn to look at Deanna. She just ran.

She ran without even bothering to turn on her flashlight. Her foot grazed a bedframe and she might have fallen down but fear lifted her back up. She slammed painfully into the double doors at the far side of the invalid ward, her hip connecting with the push bar. The doors grated open and she rushed through. Deanna was behind her, one hand reaching to grab the door almost before she reached the hallway beyond. Caxton swiveled around sideways and ran down the hall with her mouth open, with breath bursting in and out of her body. Before she could even find a doorway Deanna smashed into her back, spilling her across the floor. Caxton got back up by sheer willpower and kept running. Another door. The room beyond was lined with moldy tiles. She couldn't see more than three feet in front of her face. She sensed something wrong with the room, as if it didn't have enough walls or as if the floor was sloping downwards, something, yes, it was the floor, there was something about the floor. She stopped short and fell back to hug the wall.

Deanna came bursting through the door like a pale comet blazing through limitless space. Her face was wide open, her mouth craned back to swallow Caxton whole. She looked in the gloom as if she were flying, truly flying-and then abruptly she disappeared from view.

Caxton tried to get some breath back into her body but there didn't seem to be enough air in the world to fill the demand. The beginning of a splitting headache lit up the back of her skull as her brain shouted for more oxygen, more adrenaline, more endorphins, more anything. She pushed herself harder and harder against the wall as if it could absorb her, as if the tiles could part and let her inside, into a hiding place.

Deanna screamed in thwarted rage. The noise rolled around the room, reverberating strangely.

Caxton lifted her Mag-lite and switched it on. She played it across the grimy tiles, trying to understand what was going on. Five feet ahead of her the floor stopped short. Had she kept running forward when she entered the room she would have fallen into that pit. She looked at the door she'd come through and her light picked out faded black letters painted there: POOL ROOM.

The pool room-she'd heard Tucker mention it, once. She carefully folded up the twinge of guilt she felt for Tucker's death and scanned the room, looking to see where Deanna might have gone. She sniffed the air. Any scent of chlorine was long gone, and she was pretty sure the pool had dried up. She did smell something nasty and unnatural, though, something that made her nose wrinkle. It was the smell of a vampire. Wherever Deanna had gone she was still nearby. Close enough to strike at any second. Was she playing some kind of game? Caxton didn't think so. She had to know more. But she didn't want to move away from the wall. It felt as if her body had adhered to the tiles. She took one cautious step closer to the edge of the pool and pointed her light down over the concrete lip.

There was a sheer ten foot drop to the bottom of the pool. Down there she saw tiles, more tiles, endless rows of them. They had been white and smooth once but the black mold that had devoured the grout between them had spread across the crazed surface. Time and water had shattered some of the tiles and left the floor of the pool littered with tiny sharp fragments. A standing pool of dark scum filled one corner of the pool. A little to the left she saw a massive bronze drain, completely black with tarnish. Caxton moved her light slowly across the bottom of the pool. She had to know, she couldn't just-

Deanna leapt up and nearly snatched the light out of her hand. Her jaws snapped at empty air and she fell back to land on her feet like a predatory cat. She stared up at Caxton with a look of pure and utterly simplistic hatred. There was a smudge of dark muck down the front of her white dress. She had run right through the door, ready to grab Caxton and kill her and feed on her blood. She hadn't looked where she was going and she'd fallen into the pool. That was the solution to the big mystery.

Caxton stepped back, away from the edge.

Time to run again.

She pushed through the door and back out into the hall. She estimated she had ten or maybe fifteen seconds breathing room before Deanna found a ladder or climbed up out of the shallow end of the pool or figured some other way out. She couldn't count on any more time than that. With her light on this time she retraced her steps. She had no intention of going back to the invalid ward, though. It took her three or four seconds to find the door she wanted, the one marked CONSERVATORY. She pushed it open and went through into moonlight so bright it dazzled her eyes.

Behind her she heard Deanna screaming in frustrated rage once more. It wouldn't be long, now, she told herself. She had better be ready.