Now. Which way?
There were exits leading out of the Hub in every direction, some of them darker than others, some of them behind heavy barred gates, some wide open. “Third exit on your right,” Clara said. C Dorm was behind a locked gate, but as Caxton approached a buzzer sounded and the gate clanked open on its hinges automatically. “I can open any door in the prison from here,” Clara said.
Caxton looked up at a camera and mimed turning a key.
“You’re asking—oh, you’re asking if I can lock them, too? No, unfortunately. The controls up here are just for emergency use, if there’s a fire or something. They have to be locked by hand with an actual key.”
“At least we can go wherever we want,” Gert said.
Caxton didn’t bother replying. She headed through the open gate and into a long hallway that led straight to the dorm.
It was lined on either side with checkpoints and defensive kiosks, but Caxton ignored those.
Except—there was a weird smell in the air. Caxton had learned a long time ago that when weird things happened around vampires it didn’t pay to ignore them. She sniffed around and found the smell was coming from one of the kiosks. It was a smell almost like roasted pork, though more sickly sweet. Like someone had been burning the hair off of a pig, perhaps.
“Smells like my daddy’s barbecue,” Gert whispered when Caxton asked if she smelled it too. “He had a half an oil drum full of coals, big enough to roast a horse if he wanted to, he always said. He used to do a whole suckling pig for Fourth of July.”
Caxton hadn’t eaten in a long time. She was pretty sure that what she found in the kiosk would not be a pig roast.
Except—in a way, it was. In a very sick, very darkly humorous way.
“I think that’s the warden,” Caxton said, when she popped open the door of the kiosk. Inside, lying on the floor, was a charred human corpse. “The clothes look right.”
Clara’s voice came very softly over the intercom. “That’s the warden!” she said.
“Yeah.” They had known already that Malvern had killed the warden. Now they knew how. The vampires must have doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. “I don’t get it. That’s not Malvern’s style. Sometimes vampires like to torture their victims— they get off on it—but she was never that kind. I think this is a message, except I don’t know how to read it, you know?”
Gert’s open face suggested she didn’t know. “You been after Malvern a long time, huh?”
“You could say that.” It had only been a couple of years, really. But in that time Malvern had cost Caxton a girlfriend, a mentor, half the police force of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and, least of all, her career.
“You really want her dead.”
“Oh, yes.” Caxton wanted nothing more in the entire world. She would let Fetlock take the other two. She didn’t know them, had no history with them. But Malvern had to die now. Once it was done, Caxton would be finished with vampires. She could go back to being a model prisoner, do her bit, and then restart her life.
Or she could die in the next thirty seconds.
She was pretty much okay with either scenario, as long as she got one shot in.
There was nothing they could do for the warden, even if they wanted to. They left her body where it lay and moved to the far end of the corridor, where another barred gate was all that stood between them and C Dorm. “The plan’s pretty simple. We rush in there. You distract the half-deads, however you can. I get as close as possible to Malvern and I shoot.”
“And then what?”
“Then we play it by ear. You ready?”