99.

Dawn came up and found her sitting outside the town hall, alone. Half an hour later the National Guard arrived, hundreds of men and women in full combat gear, trucks, helicopters. Even a small tank tied down on a flatbed trailer.

They brought plenty of medical personnel and equipment. They erected a field hospital in Lincoln Square with beds for two dozen patients. One by one the patients showed up, men with patrol rifles slung across their backs and sheepish looks on their faces. Some of them had gone to ground when the plan fell apart. Some had locked themselves in supply closets or public restrooms and waited out the night. Others had just gotten separated from the main group and had wandered out onto the battlefield, looking for vampires to fight and finding only ghosts. She counted twenty-three survivors—nearly a third of the men she’d brought to the fight. It wasn’t the kind of number that would help her sleep, but it was honestly more than she’d expected.

Every one of the twenty-three was injured. Most of them had lost blood. All of them had lacerations and contusions to treat. By midmorning most of them were cleared to go home. Then the dead started to arrive. Guardsmen carrying stretchers brought them up from the charnel pits of the Cyclorama and the visitor center, from the bloody patch of earth where the battle had begun. There were far too many of them for the field hospital’s limited beds.

By that time Caxton was the only patient still being treated. She was going to have her arm in a sling for a while, they told her, and she would need orthopedic surgery on her shoulder. There would be all kinds of drugs to take and physical therapy they promised her she would hate. But she would live.

Once she’d heard that, she got up and walked right out of the tent. There were a lot of things she still needed to do.

Teams of guardsmen combed the town looking for evidence. When they found some they brought it to her. By noon she had counted seventy-nine hearts, matched up with seventy-nine skeletons. The hearts looked charred or smashed or cut in half by rifle fire. She had each one put in a heavy-duty biohazard bag, which she planned to throw into an incinerator herself. She planned to watch each one burn until it was nothing but ash. Skeletons were notorious for not burning completely, so the bones went into a wood chipper. It was grisly work, but she did most of it herself, feeding femur after pelvis after phalange into the machine until dry yellow dust coated the legs of her pants. Someone was kind enough to give her a surgical mask and safety goggles.

She wanted to sleep. She wanted to see Clara. She wanted a lot of things she was not going to get until she had accounted for exactly one hundred hearts and one hundred skeletons.

Occasionally someone would call her cell phone. The Commissioner of the state police called and congratulated her on her amazing success. She wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He said her job in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation was secure, that he should never have doubted her. She thanked him and hung up.

Most of the calls she screened out. She felt she needed to answer when the governor called, though she kept the call short and told him she’d write up an official report for him. When Clara called she just said she would be home soon.

About four o’clock in the afternoon two guardsmen came toward her carrying a stretcher that didn’t have any bones on it. Instead there was a man, a living human, lying on the canvas. She frowned, annoyed at this interruption, until she realized it was Glauer. He looked pale and his face was streaked with dirt, but he was alive.

“I don’t know what happened—I don’t remember much,” he told her. “I woke up lying on somebody’s desk, bleeding all over their paperwork.”

She smiled then, though she didn’t have the strength to laugh. “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “You were a big help back there.”

“Listen,” he said, reaching out one weak hand to grab her good arm. “I know this looks pretty grim right now. But you saved my town. You saved seventy-five hundred people. Can I buy you a beer?”

Another smile. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. I have to wait here until nightfall, at least.”

She could see the doors of the town hall from where she stood. Arkeley hadn’t come back, even though she’d waited until the sun rose. She promised herself that he was just caught out by the sun, that he had been unable to make it back in time.

She knew she was wrong.

All vampires are the same, he had taught her. They could start out as noble and compassionate people or total scumbags. Once they got their first taste of blood it didn’t matter—it made them wrong. Unnatural. Once they tasted blood they wanted to live, just to get some more. They wanted to live forever.

The sun set at seven o’clock that night. She had destroyed exactly one hundred hearts by that time. She’d found them all, just as she’d known she would. Arkeley had always been thorough. When the last pink light of dusk left the sky over Gettysburg, she was waiting by the town hall doors once again, her Beretta reloaded and in her hand. If he didn’t show up she would have to hunt him down. She figured she would give him one more night before she got started.