Malvern howled in joy. She bent at her knees, getting ready to pounce.
Caxton switched on the searchlight and hauled it around by its handle. A light as intense as a million candles hit Malvern right in the face.
Vampires are creatures of the night. They do not do well in bright light.
Malvern’s single eye burst and ran down her cheek as white goo. She screamed in pain and rage and her arms lashed out, smashing again and again at the lens of the searchlight, shattering the bulb inside and warping the metal reflector out of shape. It didn’t matter—the light’s work was done. Malvern was blind.
“Do ye think this matters? Ye’ve bought ye—yourself a second’s grace, that’s all,” Malvern growled.
“All I need,” Caxton said.
Malvern’s eyeball was already growing back, white smoke filling in the cavern of her eye socket. She didn’t even need the eye to track her prey, Caxton knew. She could smell Caxton, could hear her as she stepped backward.
Caxton raised her pistol and fired three times into Malvern’s rib cage. Right into her heart.
She had expected the pistol to fail. That its firing pin had been filed down or that there would be no bullets in the magazine. When she’d found it on the belt of the dead CO, she had been unable to believe her luck. A gun. Right where she needed it. Right when she needed it. It was too much to ask for. It had to be a trick.
The bullets tore through Malvern’s undead lungs, her sternum, and her heart. She screamed and thrashed and howled, crawled across the floor toward Caxton, her fingers reaching for Caxton’s ankles, her monstrous jaws snapping at thin air. But the red light in her fully healed eye was already going out.
The vampire dropped to the floor, suddenly very small. Very compact. Caxton thought she could pick Malvern up with her one good hand. Strange to think a creature that could do so much damage would ever come to look like that. She was dead. Caxton fired the rest of her bullets at point-blank range into the monster’s chest, into her heart, just to be sure. “Finally,” she breathed. It wasn’t the most profound thing she could say, she knew, but it was all she had strength for.
Then she closed her eyes and wept.
But not for long.
Another puzzle piece clicked into place. A gun, loaded with real bullets, exactly when it was needed the most. The half-dead who killed the CO hadn’t bothered to take it away. Even though every other gun in the prison had been carefully, methodically ruined.
There had been a package of sticky foam in the SHU, when Caxton needed it. Even though sticky foam was experimental and was banned from use in prisons until the kinks could be worked out.
Doors had been left open in the prison, doors that should have been locked. Oh, not the doors she had hoped would be open. But enough that she’d been able to move around relatively freely.
It hadn’t been easy, not at all. But then—if it had been easy, she would have seen through the game right away, wouldn’t she?
She bent down over Malvern’s corpse and studied its face, ran the fabric of the mauve nightdress through her fingers. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But something felt wrong. Something was wrong.
Then she got it. All at once, the puzzle put itself together in her head.
“Smart,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Always so smart.”
She saw the whole game now, from beginning to end.
And she knew Malvern had won.
60.
By five o’clock in the morning the fires had all been put out.