Laura Caxton Vampire Series

The Final Reckoning

Laura Caxton’s battles against the ancient vampire Justinia Malvern have cost her nearly everything—her badge, her freedom, her friends and family . . . maybe even her humanity.

And as she hides out in the deepest backwoods of Pennsylvania, pursued by the cops who were once her colleagues, Laura certainly looks beaten. But as Laura sees it, what little is left of her soul is perfectly adapted to the job of ridding the world of its last vampire. And thanks to the terrible clarity she’s found, Laura’s come up with a plan—one that will finish Malvern once and for all.

But the ever-wily Malvern has a few last aces left to play and is quietly dealing a hand that will involve a terrible fate for the few friends Laura’s got left. When the two adversaries meet for the last time in their most epic battle, the vampires will force Laura to pay a price far beyond anything she’s sacrificed before.

In the next 23 hours, there will be no reprieve,
no mercy, and no time off for good behavior.

When vampire hunter Laura Caxton is locked up in a maximum-security prison, the cop-turned-con finds herself surrounded by countless murderers and death-row inmates with nothing to lose . . . and plenty of time to kill.

Caxton’s always been able to watch her own back–even when it’s against a cell-block wall–but soon she learns that an even greater threat has slithered behind the bars to join her. Justinia Malvern, the world’s oldest living vampire, has taken up residence, and her strength grows by the moment as she raids the inmate population like an open bar with an all-you-can-drink supply of fresh blood. The crafty old vampire knows just how to pull Caxton’s strings, too, and she’s issued an ultimatum that Laura can’t refuse.

Now Laura has just 23 hours to fight her way through a gauntlet of vampires, cons, and killers . . . 23 hours to make one last, desperate attempt at protecting the world from Justinia’s evil.

One man stood between them and us.

U.S. Marshal Jameson Arkeley—the country’s foremost authority on vampires—taught police investigator and vampire fighter Laura Caxton everything she knows about monsters. After a bloody war visited upon Gettysburg by an army of vampires, Arkeley gave up his own life to save others. Except he didn’t exactly die . . .

Arkeley accepted the curse and is now a vampire himself. What’s worse, he’s the savviest vampire ever—he knows all the tricks better than anyone. Caxton is now faced with the task of destroying him. But Arkeley knows all her tactics too; after all, he taught them to her. Caxton realizes she must finish Arkeley before he succeeds in his quest to exterminate his own family, one member at a time. But even more important, she has to prevent him from becoming a beast exponentially more dangerous—a Vampire Zero.

The author of 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins, David Wellington takes the Laura Caxton series to a whole new level in this action-packed third volume.

Laura Caxton vowed never to face them again. The horror of what the vampires did is too close, the wounds too fresh. But when Jameson Arkeley, broken and barely recognizable, comes to her with an unfathomable, unholy discovery, her resolve crumbles.

Arkeley leads Caxton to a tomb in Gettysburg recently excavated by a local archaeology professor. While the town, with its legendary role in the Civil War’s worst battle, is no stranger to cemeteries, this one is remarkably, eerily different. In it lie 100 coffins—99 of them occupied by vampires, who, luckily, are missing their hearts. But one of the coffins is empty and smashed to pieces.

Who is the missing vampire? Does he have access to the 99 hearts that, if placed back in the bodies of their owners, could reanimate an entire bloodthirsty army? How did the vampires end up there, undisturbed and undiscovered for 150 years? The answer lies in Civil War documents that contain sinister secrets about the newly found coffins—secrets that Laura Caxton is about to uncover as she is thrown into a deadly, gruesome mission of saving an entire town from a mass invasion of the undead. . . .

The first book in the Laura Caxton Vampire series from the author of the Monster Island trilogy.

All the official reports say that vampires are dead–extinct since the late ’80s, when FBI agent Arkeley defeated the last vampire in a fight that nearly killed him. But when state trooper Laura Caxton calls the FBI looking for help in the middle of the night, Arkeley is unsurprised to hear that it sounds like a vampire attack. He’s been expecting such a call to come eventually. Sure, it has been years since any signs of an attack, but Arkeley knows what most people don’t: there is one left. In an abandoned asylum she is rotting, plotting, and biding her time in a way that only the undead can.

Laura Caxton is out of her league on this case and more than a little afraid. Arkeley made it clear there is only one way out. The worst thing is the feeling that the vampires want more than just her blood. They want her for a reason, one she can’t guess; a reason her sphinxlike partner knows but won’t say; a reason she has to find out-or die trying.