30.

Caxton raised her weapon and fired right at Jameson’s heart. The shot tore open his black shirt, just a few inches off. The vampire spun around and glared at her, but with her free hand she was already reaching for the amulet around her neck. It felt warm in her hand, which meant it was working.

On the stairs Violet writhed and pushed herself up a step. Her face was contorted by fear and her hands were clutching at nothing.

Caxton fired again, and this time hit her target. The bullet clanged off his chest and spun away into the darkness. How was it possible? Jameson’s body curled up like a caterpillar in a fire, but only for an instant. He straightened up quickly—and then he was on her. It was that fast. She felt a cold wind blowing toward her and then she was on the floor with the vampire on top of her, pinning down her gun hand, his teeth pressing against her cheek. He felt cold and wrong and he stank of death.

His weight pressed down on her wrist and the tendons there bent and twisted. Her fingers spasmed and then flew outward and her weapon fell away. He snatched it up and threw it into the darkness.

He held her there silently while she struggled. He outweighed her by a considerable margin, but it was his strength that truly held her—she might as well have fought off a stone statue. Clamping her eyes shut, she turned her face to the floor and tried to get her free arm up to protect her eyes, but he just grabbed her wrist and smashed it painfully against the flagstones. Her flashlight rolled away across the floor.

She could hear Violet gasping and choking on the stairs. She could hear her own breath pushing in and out of her chest. She could hear her heart beating in her throat. Jameson was as silent as a tomb.

Then he pulled back a fraction of an inch. Enough to let her roll over on her side. Not enough to get her legs underneath her. “I warned you off,” he said, “but you wouldn’t listen. There’s part of me that still doesn’t want to kill you. Do you believe that?”

She didn’t answer—couldn’t. But then he shook her violently.

“Yes,” she managed to exhale.

“That part,” he went on, “gets smaller every night. The other part of me, the curse, gets stronger. Right now it’s telling me to tear open your carotid artery. To lap at your blood. I can imagine how good that would feel. How good it would taste. It would solve some problems, too. It would make my task easier.”

He was trying to convince himself to kill her, she realized. He was psyching himself up. She had to think of something fast.

“You did this to save me,” she tried. “You took the curse to save my life. If you kill me now that sacrifice means nothing.”

“I spared your life once, at the motel. Maybe that makes us even.”

She shook her head from side to side. “And what about at your wife’s house? You left seven half-deads to kill me.”

“I knew you could handle those. They were only there to cover my escape. Now. Shh,” he whispered, and drew a finger down her cheek. He found her pulse point and tapped her skin in time with her heartbeat. His fingernail, she knew, was sharper than a wolf’s claw. He could cut her open right there and let the blood come rushing out. If he even scratched her, if even a drop of her blood was spilled, then nothing would hold him back. He would smell her blood fresh and warm on her skin and it would drive him into a frenzy. No moral compunction he’d ever had would be able to stop him then.

He knew it, too. He lifted his finger away from her throat and then brought the nail down to touch her skin. It felt cold and hard. He started to press, gently at first, but she knew in a moment he would cut right into her.

“Daddy,” Raleigh said then. Caxton’s eyes were still shut. She couldn’t see the girl. “Daddy, please, no. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt her.”

She wanted to scream No, wanted to tell Raleigh to run, to get away. She couldn’t seem to get the words out of her throat.

“Please, Daddy.”

Jameson’s finger lifted away from her neck. The mangled palm of his left hand still held her wrist against the floor. She could feel his body moving above her, moving away from her, but still he held her fast.

“Raleigh, I want to give you something,” he said. “Something wonderful. I was never a very good father.”

“No, Daddy, don’t say that.”

Caxton could feel his body shaking. “I was lousy. But I can make it up to you now. Come here. Come closer.”

“No,” Caxton managed to shriek, at the same time as she heard something hard and metallic smash into Jameson’s skull. Her eyes shot open and she saw Violet standing over them both, a massive wrought-iron candelabra in her hands. One of the candles remained in its socket, guttering wildly.

Jameson leapt up off of Caxton and backward, away from the girl’s follow-up attack. He laughed as she swept the candelabra across his face like a rake, laughed again as she swung it over her head and down into his ear.

“Raleigh,” Caxton called, rolling over onto her stomach, “get the fuck out of here right now.”

Jameson’s daughter nodded and disappeared through the doorway again. Caxton got her feet underneath her and half-crawled, half-ran toward where she thought her handgun had landed when Jameson threw it. In the dark hall she couldn’t see it. She had to find it. She had only seconds, she knew, before Jameson stopped laughing at Violet’s attacks and decided to do something about them.

Where was the pistol? Where? She saw a shadow ahead of her on the floor and dove forward, her hands stretched out to grab it. Cool metal met her fingertips and she grabbed it up, ran her thumb across the safety, making sure it wasn’t on. She rolled over on her back and sat up, sighting on where she expected Jameson to be.

She was off by yards. The gun barrel pointed at nothing but darkness. She spat out a profanity and swept the gun left—just in time to see Jameson lift Violet off her feet and into the air. His mouth sank into her chest and red blood rushed down her baggy shirt. Her candelabra lay on the floor beneath her, forgotten.

“No,” Caxton moaned, and fired into Jameson’s back. The vampire cringed and then spun around, and she thought he might come at her again, might grab her again, and this time she knew he would kill her. Instead he tossed Violet’s body away like a doll and raced for the front door and out into the night.

She followed as fast as she could, her body twitching with adrenaline. Outside the stars burned in a deep blue sky and lit up the snow with an unearthly pale radiance. She couldn’t see Jameson at first, and she worried he might have tricked her, that maybe he had just run out the door and stopped, put his back up against the ivy-covered wall to wait for her to run past him. That he would reach out of the dark and grab her and kill her easily.

Then she saw him running ahead of her, his dark clothes a pillar of black against the snow, his legs and arms pumping. She dashed forward, her weapon raised, knowing it was pointless to shoot while they were both running. Worried it was pointless to shoot at all. How many times had she hit him? She’d barely slowed him down.

He was running for the front gate, the iron gate with the cross on top. She could never catch him, of course—he was far too fast, his new body capable of converting stolen blood into incredible speed. On foot she was no match for him, and he must have known that.

Luckily, she’d had time to prepare.

She grabbed up her cell phone out of her pocket. Running as fast as she was, she couldn’t check the screen to see if she had any bars or not. She flipped it open anyway and hit the send key. Hours earlier she’d typed in the appropriate number and now the phone dialed automatically.

Pressing it against her ear, she heard a single thready ring, the atmosphere tearing at her signal with invisible fingers. A second ring and then someone picked up on the other end.

“Now,” she said, and light blasted through the gateway, dozens of headlights on high beam coming on all at once. If everything had gone according to plan there would be as many as ten patrol cruisers sitting out there, all of them loaded with local cops. After the disaster at Bellefonte she’d been leery of actually bringing them into the convent, but they could serve her just fine out there beyond the gate.

The light hit Jameson like an artillery barrage. He threw his arms up across his face and dropped to his knees in the snow, hurt far worse by car headlights than by all the bullets she’d wasted on him. He was a nocturnal creature and his eyes were meant for night vision. They couldn’t handle all that light.

Slowly he rose to his feet again, turning away from the gate, his face clutched in his hands.

“There’s no escape that way,” Caxton shouted. “And I have guys waiting at the creek if you try to go that way.” She lined up a shot on his back. “I’m willing to give you a chance to surrender.”

Jameson rose to his full height, still rubbing at his eyes with his hands. Behind him she could see cops milling about, poking rifle barrels through the gate, lining up shots. She didn’t know if they would have any more luck than she had, but there was one way to find out.

He started to laugh then. Maybe it was the laughter of a man who knows there’s no way out, but she didn’t think so. She lifted the phone to her lips and said, “Fire at will.”