The half-?deads inside the butler’s pantry hammered on the door and it shook wildly in its frame. It was constructed of thick oak, though, and Caxton thought it would hold awhile. She rushed to the head of the stairs, still shouting for Glauer. She hoped he could hear her, through the walls of the house. If he couldn’t she was in real trouble. She could hear more half-?deads moving around on the ground floor, but she couldn’t see anything. Sweeping her Mag-?Lite around the base of the steps revealed nothing but faded carpet and motes of dust that twirled in the light’s beam. She was going to have to run down there and hope for the best. She had her Beretta, and plenty of ammunition, but she knew better than to think she could shoot accurately in the dark house. Holding her light high and her handgun low, she started down the stairs. She took them carefully, one at a time. She was halfway down when a knife sailed past her cheek to clatter against the steps behind her. It passed so close to her skin that she could see the brass rivets in its wooden handle and the serrations on the blade—close enough that it made her weave over to one side and lose her balance. She stumbled down three stairs, her left hand lashing out for the banister. She caught it, but in the process her flashlight tumbled free and bounced down the steps. Its jumping, falling light caught the torn face of a half-?dead for just a moment, showing the gray, twitching muscles beneath the raveled skin. The creature was smiling broadly—but then the light bounced away again and rolled to the bottom of the stairs, where a pale hand grabbed it up and switched it off.
Caxton crouched low in case another knife came flying up at her and fired two rounds wildly down at the monsters who lay in wait for her. One of them screamed, a high-?pitched wail that made her nerves twist, a sound like a cat being thrown into an ice-?cold bathtub. It wasn’t a mortal scream, though. She must have just winged her target.
The flare of the gunshots was enough to dazzle her eyes and she was blind. Things had gone from bad to worse, and then they grew worse still. From above she heard the locked door splinter and crack and finally burst out of its frame. Hurried footsteps came rushing down the gallery toward her. Unable to see, surrounded on every side, she did the only thing she could think of. Caxton’s hand was still on the banister. She holstered her pistol, grabbed the banister with her other hand, and then vaulted over the side of the staircase into empty, lightless space.
Almost instantly her feet struck the top of the round séance table. Unable to see where she was going to land, she had braced herself to drop all the way to the carpet, maybe eight feet down. She hadn’t been prepared for the table to be in the way, and her feet went out from under her. Painfully she struck the table with her side and then half rolled, half dropped to the carpeted floor.
“Where’d she go?” one of the half-?deads demanded.
“I can’t see her!” another replied.
Caxton knew from past experience that the half-?deads could not see in the dark any better than she could. Unlike their vampiric masters, they were at as much of a disadvantage as she. Yet they benefited from the darkness anyway. Her only advantage had been the range of her Beretta, which would have allowed her to pick them off before they could reach her with their knives. In the blackness that advantage was lost—if she couldn’t see, she couldn’t aim. If she couldn’t aim, she might be better served just swinging the butt of her handgun back and forth and hope she pistol-?whipped them all to death. She could try to find a light switch—but in the process she would probably knock over an ottoman or a candelabra or something and give away her position.
Where the hell was Glauer? She had gotten out of one ambush but only ended up in a spot nearly as bad. The little flashes of red and blue light coming in the windows showed her nothing at all where she lay behind the table. She could hear the half-?deads moving through the foyer, spreading out to find her. Time for another silent profanity to climb across her lips. When a victim was raised as a half-?dead its soul died first, its personality wiped away and replaced with nothing but hatred and gleeful bloodlust. Yet it retained some part of his memory. These half-?deads had been cops once. They’d been trained in how to search a room and how to keep a subject from escaping. She had no doubt they would cover the three doors that led off from the foyer. She had moments—mere seconds before she was surrounded. Both ankles ached as she pushed herself up against the rear wall of the room and got her feet under her again. She didn’t think any of her bones were broken, but even if they were she needed to move fast. Thinking her best bet was to move toward the back of the house, she pushed her way along the wall, feeling for the tapestry she’d seen on her way in. There—her hand touched the cloth, grabbed a corner of it. The door was just on the far side. She reached forward for its knob—and then yanked her hand back when the door jumped and thudded as if someone behind it was hammering to get out.
“Over there!” a half-?dead squeaked. She heard them come toward her, running through the dark. One hit a chair and went sprawling to the ground with a pathetic yelp, but the others kept coming on. Caxton didn’t even know which way to run.
Then the door burst open and a powerful beam of light speared through into the foyer, lighting up two half-?deads with steak knives raised high. The barrel of a shotgun came through the door next and it discharged with a roar, blasting Caxton’s ears with its report and filling her nose and throat with the stink of gunpowder so that she coughed and gagged.
The two half-?deads fell out of the beam of light and thunked to the floor, not even having a chance to scream their last.
Glauer burst through the open door, pumping his weapon for a second shot. Evidently he didn’t see the third half-?dead, the one that had tripped over the chair, coming straight at him with a fireplace poker. Caxton reached out as fast as she could and grabbed the half-?dead’s arm. She twisted it back hard and the poker fell to clunk on the floor. She saw Glauer raise his shotgun and had time to shout for him to stop, but it was too late. The heavy wooden stock came down right between the half-?dead’s eyes and crushed in its skull.