13 Bullets Part 37

"That's right. Come here," Arkeley said. He was propped up on one arm. The other waved Malvern closer. "Come on, you old hag. You want it. You can have it."

He had cut his hand somehow. There was fresh blood on his palm. Maybe he had never stopped bleeding-that was the hand with no fingers, the hand Scapegrace had bitten in half. When flashlight beams converged on the hand it gleamed wetly.

Caxton could feel the need, the desire, radiating from Malvern's body. Every fiber of her newly reconst.i.tuted self wanted that blood. It would be all she could see, all she could think about.

She knew exactly what Arkeley was doing. A judge had determined a long time ago that Malvern was a human being, that she enjoyed protection under the law against physical attacks by the police. If Malvern made the slightest move to harm or injure a human being that changed. No court in the state would convict the state trooper who shot a vampire while she was attacking Arkeley. As soon as she touched him she was fair game.

She wanted to yell at Arkeley, to order her escort to drag him out of there. She wanted to save his life. She knew what he would say about that, however. His whole life, twenty years of it anyway, had been devoted to getting this one chance. He didn't want anyone to blow it for him now.

Caxton stood her ground. She could feel the troopers behind her bristling. They wanted to attack. She held up her hands to stop them.

"Come on. Come on and take it," Arkeley rasped. Malvern glided toward him across the floor. Her hands, which lung loose at her sides, clenched and relaxed, clenched into tight fists and then released again. She had to know. She had had plenty of time to lie back in her coffin and imagine what it would be like to take a bite out of the Fed who had imprisoned her-what dreams of vengeance would she have had? Yet she also had to know what would happen to her. What that mouthful of blood would cost her.

"You can't resist," Arkeley taunted. "If you were human, maybe, you could handle this. But you're a vampire and you can't resist the smell of blood, can you?"

He scuttled toward her, his hand always outstretched, wagging in her face. He was verging on committing entrapment but Caxton decided that if they asked her in a court of law she would lie for him. Anything to give him this win.

A thin, translucent eyelid came down over Malvern's eye. It shuddered gently as if she were about to faint.

"Come on," Arkeley shouted. His body was shaking too. He had to be running on fumes. "Come on!"

Her mouth closed slowly. Painfully. Then it opened and a creaking sound like a paper bag being folded up leaked out of her. "d.a.m.n ye," she said. Then she turned around, slinked back to her coffin, and crawled over the lip. She lay back and let her wrinkled head rest on the silk lining.

"No," Arkeley yelled, and slapped his injured hand against the floor. "I've spent too long on this. I've lost everything. Not again!"

With hesitant, weak little motions Malvern reached up and grasped the lid of her coffin. Then she pulled it shut with her skeletal hands.

end.