The worst change to his appearance, though, didn’t stem from his injuries or his scars. It came from time, and distance. She remembered him, whenever she did think of him, as a giant of a man. He’d been considerably taller than her and much broader through the shoulders. Or at least she remembered him that way. The man standing before her was a little old man, a badly, horribly injured little old man who couldn’t have fought off a teenaged delinquent, much less a rapacious vampire. It seemed impossible that this was the same man she’d once known. Then he opened his mouth and proved her wrong.
“Too long, Trooper,” he said. “You took too damned long getting here. It might already be too late.”
“I was busy,” she said, almost reflexively. She softened a little and tried greeting him again. “Nice to see you, too, Jameson,” she said, and followed him into the hotel room.
6.
It was uneasy work to cross those fields. There was but little moon, & yet starlight was enough to see by. All of us had the fear, for this was the land of partisans and rangers, who would shoot a man’s back should he step away from his fellows & only long enough to heed the call of nature. At the least we could see something. Away from the line & the endless dust of marching the air was almost preternaturally clear. Perhaps that is how Eben Nudd spotted the white demon so easily, though it took pains to hide itself.
Nudd grabbed my arm, without warning, & I nearly jumped. In the darkness every motion was an enemy, & every sound the hoofbeats of a regiment of Reb cavalry. Nudd did not call out, though, or make any sign. He lifted one finger & pointed toward a stand of trees at perhaps twenty-five yards.
For myself I saw but a certain pallor in those woods, at least at first, like a snake of mist coiled up. I squatted down & squinted & thought maybe I saw a pair of eyes there, like the last embers of a campfire. I did not care for their expression. “Is that man watching us?” I asked Eben Nudd, my voice a barest exhalation of air.
“Ayup,” he said, which I sometimes think is half of his vocabulary. Eben Nudd is the very type of a downeaster, formerly a lobsterman, with a craggy face like leather & eyes as pale & clear as morning dew, & he was born, it sometimes seems, with no passion in his breast at all. Many times on many battlefields his coldness had served us well & I trusted him now, even when I liked not what he had to say. “Longer than we seen him, I figger.”
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
7.
Arkeley moved slowly, one leg dragging behind the other. Caxton shuffled along behind him as respectfully as she could. Once he turned to glare back at her, but he said nothing. With a deep grunt he dropped to sit on the edge of a single bed and then ran his good hand over his face as if he were wiping away sweat.
“How have you been?” she asked. “How’s your family? Have you seen them much lately?” He had a wife and two children, she knew, though she’d never met them. She believed he was estranged from his family, though not in any kind of dramatic way. He had just become so obsessed with his work that they had fallen by the wayside, immaterial to what he considered important.
“Everyone’s fine.” She expected him to say something more but he didn’t.
She glanced around the room. She’d been trained to always make a note of her surroundings when she entered a new place, and though she didn’t expect to find any criminals lurking in the corners, she did get a big surprise. The room was nice enough, a small double furnished tastefully though cheaply. There was a big television in a cabinet on one wall, an open closet with a pair of suits hanging from its rack. A door at the far end of the room led to a darkened bathroom. A thin muslin curtain had been drawn across the windows, leaving the room in semidarkness. Arkeley’s suitcase stood open and mostly packed on the other bed. Beyond that bed, near the windows, two metal luggage stands had been erected. Balanced on top of them stood a simple wooden coffin.
Caxton’s guts clenched at the sight of it. She had no doubt that it was occupied.
The coffin could belong only to one creature, the vampire who had destroyed Caxton’s life and turned every one of her nights into a parade of nightmares. Justinia Malvern, a three-hundred-year-old monster with a pedigree of cunning and deceit.
Even a year later Caxton felt the urge to go over to the coffin, throw back the lid, and tear out Malvern’s heart. It was daytime, and she knew that if she did open the casket she would find little but bones and maggots in there. Even by night the vampire was a decrepit wreck, a rotten body with one eye and little else but a diabolical will to continue her blighted existence. Like all vampires she was immortal, but she required blood to maintain her bodily health. The older a vampire got the more blood they needed every night just to be able to walk. A long, long time ago Malvern had passed the point where she could hunt for herself, and now she was doomed to an eternity in her coffin, barely able to move at all. If she could get enough blood—and she would need gallons of it every night—she could have revivified, but Arkeley had made sure that never happened.
Caxton walked over and set her hand on the coffin. The wood was cold as ice, and her skin prickled when it got too close. Malvern, like all vampires, was an unnatural freak, something that shouldn’t exist.
She warped reality around herself, and every living thing recognized the wrongness, the unclean nature of her. Maggots didn’t seem to mind, but dogs and horses would go crazy if she came close to them.
Caxton’s urge to destroy her was a perfectly rational reaction. Yet if she did it, if she ended so much trouble then and there, she knew she would go to jail. Malvern was a mastermind of vampires, a schemer and conspirator, but she had never harmed an American citizen as far as anyone could prove. The courts had decided after long deliberation that she was still human and still deserving of the protection of the law. Arkeley had spent much of his adult life fighting that ruling and trying to get a warrant for her execution. He had so far failed at every turn.
“Jesus,” Caxton said. “You’re traveling with her?”
“After the debacle at Arabella Furnace I decided I didn’t trust her with anyone else.” Arkeley nodded at the coffin and then at a laptop computer set on the nightstand next to it.
Caxton opened the lid of the laptop and watched the screen flicker to life. A mostly blank window opened, a document created by a word processor. Malvern was too far decayed to be able to talk or even gesture much, but she could hunt and peck on a computer keyboard, sometimes taking hours to tap out a few characters. If left alone all night with the computer sometimes she tried to communicate with the world outside her coffin. It was rare that she had anything worthwhile to say—mostly she wasted her time on idle threats and dark imprecations. The message Caxton found on the screen was a little more cryptic than usuaclass="underline"
comformeh
“Any idea what this means?” Caxton asked Arkeley.
He shook his head. “It’s not any language I recognize. I think she may have reached the point where she can’t even form words anymore and she’s just stabbing at random keys.”
Caxton shoved her hands back in her pockets. She felt vaguely ill, as if the air in the room had been tainted.
She turned to look at him with sad eyes. She expected to find him combative and scolding, but instead he took her glance as a spur to action. He straightened up and his eyes positively glowed. He fastened the top button of his shirt with one hand and struggled into a jacket. Then he scuttled up off the bed and took a pair of black leather gloves from out of his suitcase. With his good hand and then with his teeth he pulled them on. One glove covered the lump of flesh at the end of his left arm. The fingers of that glove splayed out pointlessly, but at least they looked somewhat normal.