She was rocking back and forth slowly, her arms wrapped around Caxton’s limp body, when the door opened again.
“Ahem,” Arkeley said.
Caxton didn’t move. Clara sat up just enough to tell him to go away.
The old crippled Fed didn’t obey her. Instead he came farther into the room to stand at the foot of the bed.
“Get out!” Clara said, louder this time. There was bad blood between her and Arkeley—she’d even threatened to hit him, once, though she’d backed down when she realized it would have cost her her job just to punch a U.S. Marshal.
Caxton closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to see Arkeley. At the very least, though, she owed him an apology. She swallowed heavily and shifted herself upright in the bed.
“My girlfriend and I,” Clara said, “are kind of busy at the moment.”
Arkeley’s face contorted gruesomely, his scars bunching up and turning white. His eyes were shining.
Was he smiling? It looked like it hurt him to do so. “Officer Hsu, why don’t you go wait out in the hall?”
he asked.
“Why don’t you sit and spin?” Clara asked, throwing him the finger.
His smile didn’t shift.
Caxton cleared her throat noisily. The two of them looked at her as if waiting for her to settle the differences between them. She didn’t think she could do that, but at least she could try to take charge of the situation.
“You were right and I was wrong,” she said, finally, looking into Arkeley’s eyes. They didn’t change; he hadn’t come to gloat. “There was, in fact, a vampire in that last coffin. An active one.”
“Yes. I’ve read the report filed by the survivor of last night’s attack.” He looked her up and down as if searching her for wounds. “The other survivor. His prose style was a little too emotional for proper police work, but I got the gist.”
“How are you going to proceed?” she asked.
“Who? Me?” Arkeley’s face went wide with surprise. It again made all his scars turn white. “I can’t fight this vampire.”
“Why not?”
The old man grimaced and looked away from her. “Are you really going to make me say it? I’m a cripple.” His shoulders tensed. How much did it hurt him to admit his weakness, she wondered? How much had it humiliated him when he’d asked her to tie his tie for him? “My body doesn’t work well enough anymore. I can advise you. That’s all. This case is yours.”
Caxton’s mouth opened as if she were about to laugh. But she knew he was quite serious. “I can’t,” she tried.
“If you don’t,” he said, slowly, deliberately, “someone else will have to take your place. Most likely a local cop who has never dealt with a worse villain than a drunk driver. You know exactly what will happen to said cop. He’ll die. He won’t know what he’s up against, he will underestimate the vampire, and he’ll be ripped to shreds the first time he draws down on this monster.”
Caxton thought of a hundred arguments against what Arkeley was saying. There was only one problem with them: He was right. She’d had horrible, perfect proof of that the night before. Arkeley was right—this was going to be her case.
22.
He proved as good an oracle of future events as he was a crack shot. Within moments of my concealing myself I began to hear hoofbeats approach. Within the space of a minute a horde of Secesh cavalry reined in before the house. Their leader, an officer of some distinction by the look of his insignia, wore leather gauntlets & a dusty slouch hat & good gray cotton tailored to his frame. Many of his men were in butternut though, which is to say, uniforms made at home & undyed. We’d seen plenty like them at Chancellorsville, where some men fought with no shoes on their feet, & some without even rifles of their own.
We were defeated at Chancellorsville, as we have been defeated every time we strove against Robbie Lee. I took this fact to heart & tried not to breathe too loudly. “Marse Obediah,” the cavalry commander shouted, as if he were hallooing an old friend. “Can you hear me in there?
I’ve come from Richmond thirty miles. Can you hear me? The Cause requires your services once more. The Yanks are all over this part of creation & we must drive them back. General Lee commands it!”
The officer wheeled his horse as if expecting an attack to come from any direction.
An answer came at last, however, in a voice that chilled my blood. There was very little human in that voice though the words were good English. It sounded more like a violin had been scraped with the neck of a broken bottle, & words had somehow come out.
“You have been heard,” the voice announced.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
23.
Caxton got out of the bed feeling like she’d been beaten up the night before. Her joints ached and there was a truly foul taste in her mouth. It couldn’t be helped. Clara had brought her a change of clothes, which she got into painfully. It felt good to have a crisp new shirt on her back, though. She slipped on her coat and shoved her notebook and her cell phone in the pockets. The local police had been kind enough to return the latter after she dropped it in the street outside the mortuary.
“You’re on the case,” Arkeley said. It wasn’t a question.
It had been, the day before, and the answer had been no. Now everything had changed. She had watched a fellow cop die because of a moment’s hesitation. She had gone chasing after a vampire she had no chance of killing. It had all been so crystal clear. It had all made sense—the way nothing much had since the last time. Since the last vampire she’d fought.
“Yes,” she said. Clara turned to look up at her, but Caxton didn’t even meet her lover’s eyes. What choice did she have? Arkeley couldn’t fight active vampires anymore. Not when he couldn’t tie his own tie. There were plenty of other cops in the world, but none of them had her experience. In fact, none of them had any experience with vampires. If she left this job to other cops, they would almost certainly get themselves killed.
Of course there was no guarantee Caxton would survive, either. But that was part of who she was. Her father had been the only cop in a coal mining patch up north. His father had been a Pinkerton. What would her father say now, she wondered, if he were still alive? She knew exactly what he would say. He would tell her it was about damn time.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes already,” she said, and Arkeley just nodded. He’d never been big on reassurance. Still, the fact that he’d come to her for help—that he thought of her as the one best to find and destroy the vampire—meant something. She just hoped she could convince her superiors in Harrisburg. “We should start doing things right, then. We should start now.”
He nodded again.
“That starts with getting some idea of what we’re fighting. Vampires don’t age well—that’s been a constant so far. The older they get the more blood they need just to maintain, and after fifty or sixty years they can’t even climb out of their coffins. This guy’s different. I wish we knew how that was even possible. I saw him last night. He looked like he’d been starved of blood for a very long time. He looked terrible. Still, he almost outran a car.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about this one,” Arkeley concurred. “I might be able to do something about that.”
Caxton grunted in encouragement.
“It might be nothing. But I have a lead of sorts. I have a contact at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia—”
Clara laughed. “You mean at the Mütter Museum? Why am I not surprised an old fossil like you has an in with that place?”