Laura Caxton wouldn’t just wait and watch this happen, Clara thought, because she was pretty sure what was going to come next. Laura would fight.
But she wasn’t Laura. She had never been as brave as her girlfriend, could never be as tough as the famous vampire hunter. She was a glorified police photographer, and there was a big man—or something worse—at her back, ready to beat her into submission if she made the slightest move. So she stood there, still as a statue, and watched.
The lid of the coffin slid a little further, then overbalanced and fell to the floor with a crash. Clara felt as if a puff of cold air blew out of the coffin, but she knew it wasn’t that. Vampires were unnatural creatures. Their very existence felt wrong—it made the hair on the back of your arms stand up. It made your skin prickle.
Taking her time, moving stiffly Justinia Malvern sat up and looked around the room.
She’d been born in 1695 in England, and had lived through every year of American history there was. Vampires lived forever if no one managed to kill them, but they didn’t age gracefully. Malvern’s skin was pale, paper-thin leather stretched tight over protruding bones. In some places it had worn away where it had rubbed night after night against the stained silk lining of her coffin. A patch on her forehead had eroded down to dull yellow bone. She wore nothing but a thin, almost transparent mauve nightdress that was nearly as tattered as her skin, but modesty hardly applied to something that had spent more time in a coffin than it had standing upright.
Her head was completely hairless. She didn’t even have eyelashes. She had long triangular ears, one of which looked like it had been chewed on by animals. She had one eye that was yellow and cloudy with cataracts. The other eye socket was empty except for a wisp of cobweb, a dark hole in her head surrounded by rotten skin.
Her mouth was full of broken fangs. Not just two sharp canines—Clara had been raised on that image of vampires, of suave counts with a pair of protruding but tiny fangs. Vampires in reality had teeth like sharks, their mouths packed full of row on row of wicked translucent blades. There were gaps in Malvern’s smile, a lot of them, but she still had plenty of teeth to chew with.
Her bony arms were folded across her chest. She opened them slowly, carefully, and placed a skeletal hand on either side of the coffin. With obvious pain but just as obvious determination, she levered herself up until she was standing on her own two feet. She swayed slightly, but she didn’t fall.
Clara gasped a little. She didn’t mean to. She’d read Laura’s notes, though. The first time Laura Caxton had seen Malvern, she’d been confined to a wheelchair, barely able to lift her arms to hold a beaker full of donated blood. Later on, when Malvern had assisted Caxton with her investigations at Gettysburg, the vampire had been too feeble to even raise her head. She’d been trapped in her own coffin, barely able to lick at blood dripped across her mouth. Clearly the blood she’d drunk at the Tupper-ware party, and at the roadhouse, had gone some way toward reviving her.
She had never spoken more than a few words, as long as Clara had been alive.
“I trust,” she said now, in a voice that was creaky and thick, but clear enough to be understood, “that my dinner is prepared.”