39.

Caxton thundered down the stairs, her feet blurring on the steps, her weapon held high and ready, pointed at the ceiling. The vampire could be waiting for her at the bottom, in the shadows there. She could feel his teeth tearing into her flesh, ripping through her skin. He could be lying in ambush and she could be running right into his maw.

At the bottom of the stairs she turned and extended her arms, weapon in firing position. She looked around for pale humanoid shapes—and suddenly realized there were far too many of them. The skeletons in their cases all looked like vampires in the dark. The vampire she was chasing, while he no longer looked like a famine victim, was still rail thin, and would pass for a skeleton if he stood very still in a corner of the room.

Caxton pivoted slowly, trying to cover the entire room. This was madness. The vampire could see her just fine. Their night vision wasn’t supernatural by any means, but they could see blood—her blood—as if it glowed with its own red light. She was a walking neon sign as far as the vampire was concerned. At any moment he could spring on her, and he was fast, so fast she wouldn’t have time to get her gun around to fire at him.

The only sensible thing to do in her situation was run. Get out, get to a safe distance. Try to seal off the museum’s exits, then wait for dawn. Arkeley had taught her a long time ago, however, that whenever you tried to fight vampires in a sensible fashion they would just slip through your net. In the time it took her to lock the museum’s doors the vampire would be long gone—or he would already have killed her.

The only effective way to hunt vampires, Arkeley had shown her, was to walk right into their traps. To give them exactly what they wanted. It confused them, made them think you had more up your sleeve than you actually did.

There—she rushed forward, thinking she’d seen something move. She jabbed her handgun out, lined up its sights on center mass, started to squeeze the trigger.

Then she stopped. The shape she’d almost shot was the skeleton of a man who had suffered from crippling spina bifida. His bones looked as twisted and worn as driftwood.

The vampire laughed at her. Then she heard a chuckling, echoing sound that made her skin crawl. The sound seemed to come from all around her, from nowhere in particular. Had it come from directly above? She looked up with a fright, but saw nothing over her except for the ceiling. She didn’t feel much relieved, though. That laugh had crawled right in her ear and laid eggs in her brain. A dry, nasty, grating laugh that spun off into distorted echoes had chased off into the shadows.

She had no time to decide what that meant, if anything. She had a subject to collar. Caxton pressed backward, up against a display of pickled fetuses, some with heads, some without, some with more than the requisite number. Slowly, inching her way, covering the whole room before her, she headed back for the stairs. She was pretty sure the vampire wasn’t on the lower level.

She was wrong.

A white blur leaped over the top of Malvern’s coffin and barreled right at her. She brought her weapon around just fast enough to blast a hole in his face before he collided with her bodily, knocking her to the floor. He reared up, clutching his eyes, and she rolled to the side before he could strike downward with his fists. They connected with the floor hard enough to crack the wooden parquet.

“Shit,” she said, the word just leaping out of her mouth. He turned to follow her voice and she saw she’d ruined the bridge of his nose. Most of the middle of his face was hanging down by a flap of skin and she saw splintered bone in the wound. Even as she watched, however, white vapor filled in the hole with snaky tendrils that knitted together. In the time it took him to stand upright again, his face was completely restored.

He glanced at the coffin in the middle of the room, his face dropping in regret, and then he was moving again.

Caxton barely had time to dodge before the vampire swept past and up the stairs. Cursing—silently this time—she lifted her weapon again and dashed up after him, though he had already disappeared into the gallery. At the top of the stairs she swung around, covering the corners of the room. She didn’t see him. There were two exits from the gallery—back through the maze of pasteboard walls and the exhibits, or out through a clearly marked exit door that returned visitors to the lobby. She dashed through the latter, knowing she was falling behind, that he was getting away. The velvet rope across the staircase had been torn from its mountings and she knew he had gone up.

Where was Arkeley, she wondered? Hopefully he’d run for safety. As far as she knew he didn’t have another weapon, and she didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to try to stop the vampire with his bare hands. It was up to her.

She took the stairs two and three at a time, breath pounding out of her mouth, sighing back in. Her body felt tight and constricted and she knew her adrenaline was starting to wear off. That was alright—she could replace it with raw, cold fear.

At the top of the stairs she dashed into a library, which must have been a beautiful room by daylight. In the orange streetlight that streamed through its tall windows, the rows of books and leather-upholstered armchairs looked rotten and decayed, as if the room had been abandoned to the elements for hundreds of years. To her left a door still swung on its hinges and she raced through. Beyond was a corridor that ran the length of the building, windows lining one side, the other lined with doors. Small marble tables stood between the doors. A pair of black leather driving gloves lay forgotten on the table nearest to her.

Four doors, she counted, and another staircase at the far end, leading down. The vampire could have used any of them.

She kept her back to the windows as she crab-walked slowly down the length of the hall. If he had taken the far stairs he was already gone, she knew. He would have fled through a back exit and she would never catch him. If he had taken one of the doors he might still be in the building, might in fact have trapped himself in a dead end. At the first door she reached out, touched the polished wood, tapped the doorknob with trembling fingers. If the vampire had been there recently she thought the knob might feel cold to the touch or perhaps the fine downy hairs on her hand would stand up. She felt no sense of unnatural presence there, however.

The next door led into an office, with the word DIRECTOR in gold letters painted on the wood. Caxton touched the knob. Nothing; no sense of unease or disgust. She turned it slowly. It let out a sharp metallic creak and she stopped immediately. Had she felt something move nearby, something hidden in the dark? She held herself as perfectly still as she knew how, tried to not even breathe.

What was it? There, she thought, a puff of breeze had caressed her cheek. She whirled around, ready to fire instantly, only to see that one of the windows was open a crack. A very delicate draft was coming through, nothing more.

Caxton bit her lip and moved to the third doorway. Her feet made only very soft sounds on the carpet. She reached out her hand toward the knob, fear making her arm shake, and let her fingertips graze the brass knob ever so gently.

Nothing.

She breathed out, let go a little of her muscular tension. One more door to check. If there was nothing there then at least she would know she was safe, that the vampire was gone and that she wasn’t going to die that night. She moved quickly toward the fourth door, reaching for its knob.

Behind her the window crashed open, glass cracking with a jarring sound. A white mass shot through like a giant cannonball and blasted down the hall right toward her. Before she could even think the vampire had one hand at her throat. He smashed her backward against one of the marble tables, its edge digging painfully into her left kidney. He lifted her up again and then smashed her against the floor until her bones rattled inside her flesh. Only the thick carpeting kept her leg and arm from snapping on impact. He picked her up again and held her in the air, crushing her neck muscles with his powerful fingers. It felt like she’d had a handful of knives jabbed down her throat. She couldn’t talk—couldn’t breathe. If he closed his hand even a fraction of an inch more, she would die. Blackness swam through her vision as if big blobs of oil were dancing on the surface of her eyes.

He had spared her life once because she was a woman. He’d let her live a second time because she was useful to him, because she could drive a car. Clearly his patience was all used up.

Laura Caxton would have died then and there if it hadn’t been for the Mütter’s night watchman. He stepped out of the fourth door just then, perhaps alerted by the gasping, choking noises Caxton was making, and shone his flashlight right into the vampire’s eyes.

The vampire screamed in pain. He was a nocturnal creature, and that much light hurt him far more than bullets. He dropped her, his arms flying up to protect his sensitive eyes from the bright light. In another second he was gone, down the back stairs and away.