She still wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The warden had seemed to think it was something bad, something that would make Caxton regret partnering with Gert even if the option was going it alone.
“They wouldn’t stop crying,” Gert said. She wiped at her nose with one sleeve and it came away slick with snot. “I couldn’t seem to fix them. I would feed them, I would change their fucking diapers, and they never… they never stopped. And then my mom said I had to move out, and I was packing up but still, still they were crying…”
“Gert, stop,” Caxton said. “Please don’t say any more.”
“Little Charity, she was sick, she had colic, and it made her crazy, and Blaine, her brother—he would hear her crying, and it would wake him up, and nothing would make him go back to sleep. I just needed Charity to be quiet, just for a little while, so I could think. Think about where we were going to go. And she wouldn’t. She just… wouldn’t. I’m a good person. I know I did something horrible, but in my heart, where it counts, I’m still good…”
“Enough!” Caxton said. She didn’t want to know any of this. She didn’t want to think about what came next in this stupid, sordid little story. She didn’t want to remember why Gert’s name had been familiar the first time she’d heard it. Why Gert had said she was a little famous, and why she’d told Caxton not to believe everything she’d heard.
Half the women in the prison were mothers, mothers of children they got to see for an hour a week at most. Children they couldn’t play with, or help with their homework, or feed, or put to bed—children being raised now by other people. Those prisoners would do just about anything to prove they weren’t bad mothers. And for a certain kind of person, a person prone already to violence, to not thinking things through carefully, it made sense, that to prove you were a good mother, you had to hurt someone who’d already proved she was the worst kind of mother of all.
A baby killer.
Gert had been locked up for her own safety. Because half the women in the prison wanted to see her dead.
“Enough,” Caxton said again. “I don’t care,” she told Gert. “I don’t care what you did, that doesn’t matter—I mean, of course it matters, but—but you helped me, you were there for me when I needed you, maybe not in the ways I wanted you to be there, but—but—”
Gert started to snore then.
Caxton closed her eyes. She saw Clara, in her head, as plain as if she was standing right in front of her. She knew what she needed to do.
Leaving Gert to sleep it off, she headed down the stairs toward the Hub.
She took the hunting knife with her. And Gert’s shoes, as well.
44.
There was another votive candle waiting on the landing of the stairs leading down to the Hub. Its flickering light illuminated the doorway that led out into the bottom floor of the central tower, a very simple door painted white with a brushed aluminum knob. All Caxton had to do was turn that knob and walk through.
She didn’t like walking into a bad situation without knowing what she was about to face. That wasn’t how you lived through moments like this. She had no choice, however. Not if she wanted to save Clara. Not if she wanted to finally kill Malvern, and be done with vampires forever. She checked her shotgun one more time, making sure it was ready to fire, making sure she had one of her few remaining plastic bullets loaded in the chamber. Then she reached out and touched the knob.
She hesitated.
The bulk of the warden’s half-deads were in there, she knew. So far she’d been very lucky. She’d only faced a few at a time, she’d been able to surprise them, mostly, and she’d had Gert watching her back.
Laura Caxton wasn’t immortal, and she certainly wasn’t invulnerable. She’d been wounded many times in fights with vampires and half-deads. She knew it only took one knife wound to kill a human being, and she knew that if she marched out into the Hub, into a small army of the faceless abominations, she would be asking to die. She had her limits, and she’d finally reached them.