“Ye shall not defy me,” Malvern rasped, getting to her feet again. “Ye may be strong, but I am stronger.”
Every single red glowing eye in the room was fixed on the heart in Malvern’s hand. It was dark, almost black in color, and it was still beating, though without any kind of human rhythm. It slowed down as they watched, and eventually stopped.
Clara didn’t think about what she did while they were distracted. It wasn’t as if she had any kind of plan. Her hands crept across the control board behind her, the one that monitored and administered the prison’s communication systems. She turned a knob here, flipped a switch there. And leaned toward a microphone that stuck out from the top of the board on a flexible wand.
They weren’t going to kill her. Not right away. She could get away with this, and still they wouldn’t kill her. She just hoped they didn’t know spinal anatomy the way Guilty Jen did, or some even more horrible way of letting her live but making her wish she was dead.
“Fetlock,” she shouted at the microphone, “if you’re waiting for the right time to attack—this is it!”
Every intercom speaker in the prison picked up the message and relayed it at ear-shattering volume. Clara could hear her words echoing around the prison yard and bouncing upward into the darkening night sky.
The vampires looked around the room as if they expected federal agents to come storming out of closets and crawl spaces, machine guns blazing.
That didn’t happen.
Clara begged, silently, for some sign. Some signal, of any kind, that meant Fetlock had heard her. That he was out there, ready to save her. Maybe he could have shot a flare over the prison. Maybe he could have called in on the prison’s multiband radio system.
But he didn’t.
Malvern took a step toward Clara, and suddenly she was right there, so close that every hair on Clara’s body stood up at once. Then Malvern hit her, and—
52.
Jesus,” Clara said, “that hurt.”
She was conscious again. She kind of wished she wasn’t. Her whole jaw felt like it had been dislocated, knocked backward off its joints and into the fleshy part of her neck. It hurt to talk. It hurt to sit up. It hurt a little every time she breathed, a twinge that went all the way up to the top of her sinuses and deep into her chest. She touched, carefully, the skin of her neck and throat and felt it swollen and tender. It hurt to touch her face, so she stopped doing that.
It hurt to open her eyes, but she had to know where she was. She was still alive, and she presumed she was still a prisoner of the vampires, but beyond that what her eyes told her didn’t help explain very much.
She was in some kind of cage, just tall enough for her to stand up in if she ducked her head, and just long enough that she could lie down in it. It was made of crisscrossing bars, spaced about six inches apart. All the bars were wrapped with yellow spongy foam rubber, which was patched here and there with duct tape. The cage had a rubber sheet on its floor that smelled like someone had peed on it, then hosed it off with harsh detergents but not very thoroughly.
Similar cages filled the room around her. Two of them were occupied but the people in them were either asleep, unconscious, or dead. Both of them wore orange jumpsuits.
There was also a desk in the room, with a portable generator sitting next to it. The generator was switched off. Sitting at the desk was a vampire. The one wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit. The vampire was reading a magazine.