The old woman leaned forward in her armchair. “I’m not sure I heard that right.”
Caxton sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m after a vampire. I know he’s holed up in the mine, but I don’t know how he gets in or out. I thought—”
The old woman held up her hands. “That’s what I thought you said.” She tapped at a cage on top of her television set, which set the birds inside fluttering and chirping. Picking it up by one handle, she walked toward her front door. “You’d better follow me.”
Caxton got up and pulled on her backpack, not wanting to leave it behind. They went out into the dark and cold night, the old woman not even bothering to put on a jacket. They didn’t have far to go. Caxton followed her down a road cracked and overgrown with weeds, then into the weathered foundation of an old house that had long since been torn down. A pile of old rags and plastic bags had gathered where a bit of the foundation stuck up in the air higher than the ground around it. It looked just like a heap of trash. The old woman put down her cage, though, and brushed the refuse away, revealing a wooden trapdoor.
“He came here about two months gone, your fella. We all saw him out our windows—he didn’t make a pretense of hiding. Why should he? We hid from him. Every time he comes in or out we hunker down.”
“And you never called the police,” Caxton said.
“If we did, we knew what would happen to us. There’s just a handful of us left in Centralia, and we can’t afford people coming ’round asking lots of questions. Not if we’re going to preserve the claim on what’s ours. Nobody wants the police crawling over this ground, looking for evidence and getting in our business. Your kind aren’t welcome here.”
Caxton sighed. “I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”
Someone was standing behind her.
Caxton whirled around, her weapon out of its holster and pointing before she even saw what she was aiming at. The laser sight made a bright spot on the chest of a massive young man in a red plaid hunter’s coat. He raised his hands slowly and looked from Caxton to the old woman and back.
“What’s going on, Maisie?” he asked. “I saw you come out your house just now and I saw where you were going.”
“That’s just my cousin Wally. Don’t you shoot him,” the old woman insisted.
“Why don’t you both just back up, okay?” Caxton said, in her cop voice.
“You don’t want to go down there,” Wally said. “There’s something down there you don’t want to see.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Caxton slowly rose to her feet and holstered her weapon. “Anyway, I don’t intend on going down there, not tonight. It’s barely eleven-?thirty. I’m going to wait until dawn.” The only sane time to enter a vampire’s lair was when you had plenty of daylight to burn. “I know you think the vampire might hurt you if he sees me here. You’ve got to trust me, though. I’m going down there tomorrow and I’m going to kill him. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”
“That’s fine,” Wally said. “But what about her?”
Caxton spun around again, but she was far too slow. The trap had lifted at an angle and a white shadow was snaking out of it, reaching for her. Raleigh’s hands fastened around her ankles like a pair of vise grips and pulled her roughly down into the darkness before she could even start to scream. She saw the old woman’s face recede above her as she was carried downward. “Like I said,” the old woman said, “you aren’t welcome here, lady.”
Vampire Zero
Chapter 55.
Caxton’s face collided hard with a wall of solid rock and bright flecks shot through her vision. Then everything went dark. She thought maybe she had a concussion or even that she was dead, but in fact the trapdoor had just closed over her, and she was faced with the most profound darkness she’d ever experienced: midnight in a coal mine.