When she knew what to look for it was obvious. The low stones were badly eroded, ground down by time's wheel until they were just tall enough to trip over. She could see where they made neat rows, however, and at the far end of the clearing she could see twisted bars of metal, the remains of a pair of wrought iron gates.
There were little graveyards like this all over the countryside of Pennsylvania, Caxton knew. Developers hated them because they were legally required to move the bodies if they wanted to tear up the land. More often than not they just left them in place. It was no great shock to find one in the woods behind her house. There must have been a church nearby in some past decade or century but it had been burned or pulled down since. Nor was there was anything to fear from the graves, she told herself-vampires slept in coffins, yes, but they didn't bury themselves in ancient churchyards just for the ambience.
Something snapped maybe ten yards from her head. A fallen branch or maybe a crust of frost on the ground. It could have just been a cat or a deer-or it could have just been a branch laden down with rain finally giving way.
Caxton froze anyway. Her entire body craned toward her ears, her whole brain tuned up in anticipation of the next sound.
It came in a series of tiny pops, like a string of firecrackers going off but much, much softer. Maybe something had trod on a carpet of pine needles. Caxton lowered herself inch by inch until she was lying flat on the ground, trying to make herself small, trying to make herself invisible.
"Did you see that?" someone warbled. It was the squeaky voice of a half-dead. After a moment she half-heard a muttered reply. It sounded negative. She cursed herself for lying down, for moving at all. In the darkness, if she'd been perfectly still, maybe they would have walked right past her.
She had one bullet left in her Beretta. The flesh of half-deads was rotten and soft and she could probably beat another one to pieces. If there were three of them, however, or if they were faster than she expected, it would all be over. She tensed her body, ready to strike upward if anyone came close. She would try her best to destroy them, if there were two of them. If there were three, or more, she would shoot herself in the heart. It would prevent her from being raised as a vampire.
"There, what's that?" a half-dead asked.
There were two of them. There had to be two. She prayed there were two. Then she heard a third voice.
"You two, leave us alone," someone else said, someone who had to be standing right behind her. She rolled over and looked up into a pale silhouette with a round head. It wore a pair of tight jeans and a black t-shirt. Its ears were dark and ragged-looking.
Scapegrace.
Caxton brought her pistol up and fired her last round point blank into the vampire's chest. The bullet tore through his shirt, then pranged off into the trees. It didn't even scratch his white body. She hadn't really expected to kill him-even in the dark she could see the pinkish glow of fresh blood moving beneath his skin-but at the least she'd expected to make him turn and snarl. He didn't even laugh at her. He just crouched down next to her and touched the grave marker she'd tripped over. He didn't look at her or touch her.
She tried to ask a question but her throat kept closing up. "What... what are you going to..."
"Don't talk to me," he said. "Don't say anything unless I speak to you first. I can kill you," he added. "I can kill you instantly. If you try to run away I can catch you. I'm much faster than I used to be. But I want to bring you in alive. I mean, those are my orders. I think you know what She wants. I've also been told that if I hurt you a little, that's okay. That it might even help."
He faced her, then, and she had a bad shock when she saw how young he looked. Scapegrace had been a child when he killed himself. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most. His body was still painfully skinny and hunched. Death hadn't made him a grownup overnight. He still looked like a little boy.
"Please don't look at me like that," he said to her. "I hate it."
Caxton turned her face away hurriedly. She knew her own features had to be wracked by fear. Snot was running across her upper lip and cold sweat was breaking out on her forehead.
"I can see some things in the dark but I can't read this," he told her, running his fingers across the headstone. The lettering there had mostly worn away but here and there an angle or a fragment of a curved inscription could still be seen. "Maybe you can read it better. Read it to me."
Her throat shuddered and she thought she might throw up. She fought her body until it was back under her control. She couldn't quite read the letters but maybe it would help to feel them, she thought, to trace them with her fingertips. Trembling fear lanced up her forearm as she ran one finger across the face of the stone. She could make out a little:
ST PH N DELANC
JU 854 - JULY 1854
She told him what she had discovered. "I think-I think it says Stephen Delancy, died July 1854. The date of birth is h-h-harder to m-m-make out," she chattered. Caxton felt as if someone were pouring out cold water over her back. It had to be at least partially the weird feeling she always got around vampires, the cold sensation that she got standing next to Malvern's coffin or whenever Reyes had touched her. But most of that skin-crawling horror had to come from the fact that at any moment he could kill her. Tear her to pieces before she could even raise her arms to ward him off.
"Do you think he was born in June or July? Did he live for a full month or only a few days?" Scapegrace knelt down beside her and ran a hand across the gravestone as if he were caressing the face of the infant buried below. "I guess there's one way to find out."
"No," she screamed, as he dug his pale fingers into the soil and started tearing out clods of earth. She threw herself at his back and beat on his neck with her empty pistol. Finally she got a reaction out of him.
Turning from his kneeling posture he grabbed her around the waist and slung her away from him. The empty Beretta flew out of her hand and into the darkness. She couldn't see where it went because she was too busy reeling across the graveyard. She tumbled backwards, her feet kicking at the ground pointlessly. She came down hard across another gravestone, this one nothing more than a stub of rock sticking out of the ground like a decayed tooth. Her elbow collided with the stone and wild pain leapt up and down her arm. She didn't think she'd broken anything-just hit her funny bone.
Scapegrace had made a hole three feet deep by the time she could stand again. The bones and cartilage of her hand still thrummed with agony but she was going to be okay. She found herself crying, though, as he lifted a wooden box out of the ground. She couldn't stand it-between the fear and the horror of what he was doing she thought she was going to start screaming, that she would run away even though she consciously knew he would just chase her down.
The box was of some light-colored wood, maybe pine, riddled with worm casts. It was decayed so badly that she couldn't tell if it had originally been ornate or plainly made. The baby-sized coffin broke apart in Scapegrace's hands though he was clearly trying to be gentle with it. He brushed away the fragments of pulpy wood and the dirt and sediment that had collected around the body inside.
"My family had a big funeral for me," he told her. "I could kind of see what was happening, like I was a ghost floating around the ceiling of the church. Everybody from my school was there and they walked past and looked down at my face and some of them cried, and some of them said things. Sometimes it was people I didn't even know. Girls who would never have talked to me in the hall, not even if they needed a pen and I had a spare one. Some of them were really upset, like they finally understood what it was like, what they had done to me. That was kind of awesome. Nobody would touch me, though." Gently, with his thumb, he brushed debris away from the tiny body.
"Please," Caxton said, the word strained and stretched as it came out of her.
"Please. Please." He didn't strike her but he didn't stop what he was doing, either. He shook the coffin a little and debris and dirt and other matter fell away. Vomit surged up her throat and she turned to the side, ashamed to show such disrespect but unable to stop herself from throwing up right then and there.
"When you're on the other side of it, death just isn't scary anymore. Actually, it becomes kind of fascinating. A lot of being a vampire is like that. It totally changes your perspective." He held something round in his left hand, something about the size of an apple. With a half twist he removed it from the coffin. The rest of the infant's remains went back in the hole and he kicked dirt over them. Then he turned around and showed her what he'd found.
It was the skull, of course. Stephen Delancy's skull, which had been buried for a hundred and fifty years. "Look," he told her. "He was only a few days old when he died." He showed her the skull. It was packed full of dirt and smeared with dried fluids. It was horrible to behold, sickening. "Maybe he was never really born." He considered the baby-sized cranium at length. "This will work," he said. He rubbed at the skull with his thumbs and then stared deeply into its eyesockets as he chanted softly. She didn't understand the words-she wasn't even sure they were words he was speaking.
When he finished he closed his eyes and then held out one hand, the skull balanced on his white palm. After a moment the skull began to vibrate. She could see it blur with motion. A sound leaked out of it, a kind of wailing moan it couldn't possibly make on its own-it didn't even have a lower jaw. The scream grew louder and louder until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. Instead Scapegrace pressed it against her hands. "Take it," he said, and she could hear him just fine over the shrieking. "Go on-my ears are more sensitive than yours. Take it!"
She took it in her hands and the screaming stopped instantly.
"I'm going to take you with me, back to Her lair. I need you to behave, though. So we're going to play a little game. You're going to hold Stephen in both of your hands, because that's the only way to keep him quiet. Nod for me so I know you understand."
She shuddered. It made her head bob on her neck as if it weren't fully attached. She wrapped both hands around the skull. Something moved and chittered inside, some insect hidden in the dirt that filled the baby's sinus cavity. She moaned a little but she didn't drop the skull.
"Now you keep good care of that. If you take your hands away from it or if you drop it or if you crush it because you're holding it too hard, I'll hear it scream. Then I'll have to hurt you. Really, really badly." He squinted his red eyes and stared shrewdly into her face. "I'll break your back. You know I can do that, right?"
She nodded again. Her whole body trembled.
"Okay, Laura," he said. "Now move."