Clara bit her tongue before she could say anything more.
She didn’t want to accidentally tell Malvern something she might find useful. Instead, she thought, she needed to steer the conversation around to where she was learning things she didn’t know before. “That’s the whole point of this? Of taking over the prison? Just to get Laura?”
Malvern shrugged happily. “How I wish life could be that simple. No, child. This dungeon vile can offer me so much more. Look, already, how I bloom like a flower in a hothouse.” She held up her arms, which were clearly plumping out.
“But it can’t last. You killed all those guards, and took their blood, but what about tomorrow night? You’re going to get hungry again. And just by being here you’ll draw attention to yourself. The police will be all over this prison by morning. They’ll surround it, set up kill zones around every exit. You may have gotten one good meal, but it’ll be your last.”
Malvern’s head drooped forward as if she were considering everything Clara had said. Then she lifted it again and stared out the window at the stars she could see over the curtain wall. “When I was a child of mortality, like yourself, I had taken a profession up, namely, I ran a gaming house. A pleasant enough suite of rooms in Manchester where gentlemen could come together and play pitch and faro—card games. I always forget no one plays faro anymore. They played whist, as well, following the rules that Hoyle wrote. Do men still play whist when they feel lucky?”
“Really, really, old men,” Clara said.
Malvern chuckled. “’Twas all the rage, whist, in the year of our Lord seventeen-and-twelve. It is a game played without speaking, where only the eyes may make strategy. It was considered thus a poor game for women, as we were believed unable to go so long without gossiping.” Malvern shot a sly glance at Clara. “But oh, how the discriminating gentlemen favored it— for hours they would sit and be still and the only true thing in the universe seemed the fall of the lead, and the dance that followed, as each played looking to take book, and then the odd tricks—”
“Excuse me,” Clara interrupted, “but I beg your fucking pardon. What has this got to do with anything?”
Malvern had been standing next to the window. A heartbeat later she was leaning over Clara’s shoulder, resting her bony chin on Clara’s clavicle. Clara had never seen a human move that fast. She’d never seen a vampire move that fast. “My point is only this, dear. The odds may shift and flow. The wagers may be steep or thin. Yet a result may never be called until the last card is turned o’er. Do not discount me yet, nor until you see my heart torn out and burnt by your lover’s hand. Like all good ladies who play at a game, I may just have a high trump down my sleeve.”
17.
The stun gun pressed hard against Caxton’s back. It was a flat plastic weapon, almost all grip, with just a pair of metal stubs sticking out from the business end. When they both connected with conductive material, like human flesh, they formed a circuit and an electric current passed between them.
The current wasn’t particularly strong. It had a high voltage, upward of fifty thousand volts, but extremely low amperage— it wasn’t designed to electrocute the victim, simply to send a pulsed charge through their nervous system that mimicked the body’s own neural signals, essentially sending a message to every muscle in the victim’s body telling it to activate at full strength and not release.
The amount of power that required was easily delivered by a standard nine-volt battery. To the victim, however, it felt like being hit by a truck.
Electricity surged through Caxton’s body. Her muscles spasmed, some contracting, some expanding, all of them fighting each other. Her eyeballs quivered in their sockets and she felt a pure white bolt of pain run up her spine to explode inside her head.
Darkness grabbed her up in its velvety arms and held her like a child.