Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

Vampire Zero

Laura Caxton Book 3

David Wellington

For my parents

Chapter 1.

A crystalline sweep of snow flashed across the road as her headlights gouged white tracks through the darkness. It wasn’t far to Mechanicsburg, to the address the special subjects unit dispatcher had given her. In the middle of the night there was no traffic, just white lines in the road to follow. She arrived still partially asleep, but that changed the instant she popped the door and stepped out into the freezing winter air.

It was just past Thanksgiving. Arkeley had been underground for two months and she’d been chasing him night and day, but maybe this was where that trail ended. Where her guilt, and her duty, ended.

Maybe.

“Support’s on the way, ETA ten. In thirty we can have this place buttoned up,” Glauer debriefed her, not even bothering with hello. He was a big guy, a head taller than her and far broader, and the epitome of a Pennsylvania police officer—bad haircut, thick but not bushy mustache, pasty white except where the sun got his ears and his neck. He wore the uniform of a Pennsylvania state trooper—the same as Caxton.

Once he’d been just a local cop, one who’d never even visited a murder scene. He’d seen a lot of terrible things since he met Laura Caxton, but now at least he’d reached a higher pay grade. After the massacre in Gettysburg—his hometown—she had him assigned directly to her SSU. He was a good man, and a great cop, but he still had visible fear lines etched into the crinkles around his eyes. “I figured maybe we could wait this one out.”

“That’s not how it works,” she told him. She followed him as he strung up caution tape around the entrance to the self-storage facility. He had a patrol rifle on a strap over his shoulder. “He taught me that.”

“He taught you to go running into an obvious trap?”

She tried to peer in through the glass doors of the storage center’s lobby, but she couldn’t see anything from the street. Glauer had already checked the place out and reported two bodies—dead, of course, very dead—but she needed to see for herself. She needed to see how far down Arkeley had fallen.

“Yes,” she said.

The lobby was a glaring space of white light in the night, all plaster and scuffed drywall. She could see a counter inside where the night watchman should have been sitting, a white countertop marred with dripping red splotches.

“I’m going to have to go in there,” she said. “How many exits does this building have?”

Glauer cleared his throat noisily. “Two. This one in front and a fire exit in the back. The one in the back has an alarm, but I haven’t heard any bells ringing so far.”

“Of course not. He’s waiting for me inside. He won’t wait forever, though. If we sit tight until the reinforcements arrive, he’ll come out that door so fast you’ll never get a bead on him.” She tried to give him an ingratiating smile, but he wasn’t buying it. Instead he turned away and spat on the frozen pavement.

She understood his reluctance. This was a bad situation, a real death trap. Not that she had any choice in the matter. She slumped a little inside her heavy coat. “Glauer, this is the best lead we’ve had. I can’t let it go.”

“Sure.” He finished up with the caution tape, then jogged around the side of the building without waiting for further orders. He knew exactly what to do. Stand by the fire exit and keep his eyes open. Blast anything that came through.

His concern—and the careful way he let it show—meant something to her. It really did. But not enough to stop her. She pushed through the glass doors and walked into the lobby, her Beretta already in her hand but with the safety still on, one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She approached the desk as if she wanted to rent a storage locker, then leaned over it to look at the floor behind the counter.

The carpet there was slick with coagulating blood. There were two bodies behind the counter, as advertised. One wore a uniform shirt and sat slumped forward over a security monitor, his neck torn open in a wide red gash. The other wore a janitor’s coveralls and his open eyes stared up at the acoustic ceiling tiles. His right arm was missing.

She backed up a step, then turned to look at the elevator bank at the left side of the lobby. One of the elevators stood partially open, the door kept from closing by something wedged in the jamb. She bent down and saw exactly what she expected. It was the janitor’s missing arm that held the door, the fingers pointed inward like a sign telling her where to go next.

That kind of thing passed for a joke among vampires. She’d learned not to let their sick humor get to her.

She picked up the arm—she had no worries about ruining fingerprints, since vampires lacked them—and placed it as reverently as she could to one side. Then she stepped into the elevator and let the door close behind her.

Someone had already pushed the button for the third floor.

Exactly twenty-seven minutes earlier, according to Caxton’s watch, someone had placed a call to the SSU’s tip line. That wasn’t so uncommon. Ever since the massacre at Gettysburg people were seeing vampires in their back gardens and going through their Dumpsters and loitering outside of shopping malls all the time. Caxton and Glauer had run down every one of those leads and found nothing worthy of note.

This call had been different, however. She’d heard a recording of the call and it had made her skin creep.

The caller’s voice had been inhuman, a rough growl, the words slurred as they were drooled out through a mouth full of vicious teeth. The caller hadn’t wasted any time, instead just reeling off a street address in Mechanicsburg and announcing, “Tell Laura Caxton I’m waiting for her there. I’ll wait until she comes.”

A trap, an obvious trap. Arkeley had loved it when the vampires would set traps—because then you actually knew where they were. The vampires loved traps because they were predators, and often lazy, and they loved it when their victims came to them. Now Arkeley was one of them, but she had somehow expected more of him.

The arm in the elevator door wasn’t his style either. But that didn’t mean anything. It had been two months since he’d changed, since he’d accepted the curse. He’d done it for all the right reasons, of course. He’d believed it was the only way to save Caxton’s life. He’d probably been right about that, as he was with most things.

There had been only one flaw in his reasoning. When a human being dies and returns as a vampire, he loses some of his humanity. With every night that passes he loses a little more. Arkeley had been a passionate crusader once, a killer of monsters. Now every time he crawled into his coffin a little less of him crawled out. In the end every vampire became the same creature. A junkie for blood. A sociopath with a sadistic streak. A pure and ruthless killer.

A bell chimed inside the elevator door and then the door slid open.

She stepped out onto the third floor with her handgun at the level of her shoulders, clutched in both hands. She kept her ears and her eyes open and she tried to be ready for anything. She tried to be ready to see him, to see Arkeley, and to be ready to shoot on sight.

Arkeley had never thought of himself as her mentor. She’d been useful to him in a very limited way and so he’d requisitioned her as a partner. Sometimes he’d used her to do his legwork, the way she used Glauer now. More often Arkeley had used her as bait. She’d had to learn not to take that personally—he hadn’t meant it to be personal. He was driven, obsessed, and he had found her useful. By letting him use her she had learned so much. Everything she knew about vampires had come from him, either from grudging answers to her incessant questions or by way of his example. She had worried often enough when he was alive—and far more often since he’d died and come back—that there were things he’d never bothered to tell her. Secrets he’d kept for himself.

Time to find out, she guessed.

A long corridor stretched out before her, metal walls painted a glaring white, studded with countless locker doors. Some were the size of closets and some were wide enough to drive a car into. She looked at their latches. Every door she saw had a hefty padlock, some of them combination locks with purple or yellow dials, others that required keys to open. Was Arkeley inside one of these lockers? she wondered.

Was it his lair? Maybe he hung from the ceiling by his feet like a giant bat.

The thought almost made her smile. Vampires and bats had nothing in common. Bats were animals, normal, natural organisms that deserved a lot more respect than they got. Vampires were…monsters.

Nothing else.

She studied the doors, looking for one that didn’t have a lock. Even a vampire couldn’t lock himself into a storage space from the inside. She looked down the row of doors, all the way to the end where another corridor crossed laterally. She counted off the locks in her head—lock, lock, lock. Lock.

Another lock. Then—there. Near the far end, one narrow door had no lock on its latch.

It probably wouldn’t be that easy. Still, she had to check. She moved slowly down the hall, her back to one wall, her weapon up and ready. Her shoes clicked on the unfinished cement floor, a noise anybody could have followed. When she reached the unlocked door she stood to one side and slid the latch open with her left hand. The door rattled noisily and then opened on creaky hinges. Nothing jumped out.

She pivoted on her heel until she was facing the locker. She slipped off her pistol’s safety lever. She glanced inside—and saw immediately that it was empty. There had been no lock because no one had rented this particular locker, that was all.

Caxton let herself exhale. Then she froze in midbreath as raucous laughter ran up and down the hallway, echoing off the row of doors and making them all shake on their hinges. She swung around quickly, unable to tell which direction the laughter came from, and—

At the end of the hall, back by the elevators, a pale figure stood in the shadow between two light fixtures.

It was tall and its head was round and hairless and flanked by long triangular ears. Its mouth was full of long and nasty teeth, row after row of them. Her heart stopped—then started up again twice as fast when she saw the vampire held a shotgun.

Chapter 2.

Caxton’s brain reeled, leaving her unable to react for a critical second. Vampires didn’t carry guns.

Ever. They didn’t need them—at Gettysburg she had seen a single vampire mow down squads of National Guardsmen carrying assault rifles. Their claws and especially their teeth were all the weapons they ever needed.

The Beretta in her hand forgotten, Caxton could only stare at the shotgun as the vampire brought it up and pointed it in her direction. She barely managed to duck as his white finger closed around the trigger.

Somehow she recovered her wits enough to roll to the side, behind the open door of the empty storage locker. Buckshot pranged off the door and dug hundreds of long tracks through the white paint on the walls. When her hearing recovered from the noise of the shot she heard his bare feet slapping on the cement floor, running toward her, as she ducked into the locker and closed the door shut behind her.

Stupid, she thought—she’d done something very stupid. There was no way out of the locker, and no way to lock the door from inside. The door itself would be little barrier to a vampire, especially one that had already fed on the two men down in the lobby. Vampires were strong enough at any time, and close to bulletproof, but they grew exponentially tougher after they drank blood.

She backed up, feeling behind her with one hand until she found the back of the unit, and raised her pistol in front of her. When he tore the door open to get at her she might have one chance—she could fire blindly through the door and hope that somehow she hit him squarely in the heart, his only vulnerable part. If she shot him anywhere else his wounds would heal almost instantly. All the bullets in her gun wouldn’t even slow him down.

She pointed the nose of the pistol at the door. She aimed for a spot at the level of her own heart, then raised her aim about six inches. Arkeley was taller than her, she remembered. Arkeley—

The image of the vampire in the hallway was seared into her mind’s eye. She couldn’t not see it standing there, leveling the shotgun at her. Holding the shotgun with both hands.

Vampires healed all wounds they took after their rebirth, but any old injuries left over from their human lives lasted forever. Arkeley the vampire would still be missing all the fingers from one hand. This vampire had ten fingers, all the better to hold a shotgun with. Crap, she thought.

It’s not him.

It wasn’t Arkeley. She hadn’t been able to process that fact while he was shooting at her, but as she waited for him to come and kill her she couldn’t deny it anymore. Whoever the vampire might have been, whatever he had become, he wasn’t her former mentor.

Which made things much worse.

There was only one way for a vampire to reproduce, and it involved direct eye contact. There were only two vampires at large in the world who could pass on the curse—Arkeley, and Justinia Malvern, a decrepit old corpse that Arkeley kept close to him at all times. If the two of them were creating new vampires, if Arkeley had become a Vampire Zero—

The door rattled in front of her. She steeled herself, adjusted her grip on the Beretta. She would shoot in just a second, when she thought her chances were best. She would let him start to tear the door open first.

The door rattled again. She heard a metallic click and knew instantly what had happened. The vampire wasn’t going to tear open the door at all. Instead he’d closed the latch with a padlock, sealing her inside.

He must have had one in his pocket, just for this eventuality.

Whoever he was, he was smart. Smarter than she, apparently. She cursed herself. You never ran into a place with only one exit—that was one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She should have remembered.

“Who are you?” she shouted. “Don’t you want to kill me?”

She didn’t really expect him to respond, and he didn’t. She listened closely as her voice echoed around the metal walls of the locker, listening for any sign that he might be standing directly outside the door. She heard nothing.

Then, a moment later, she heard his feet slapping on the floor. Moving away.

“Damn it,” she breathed. Was he running away? Maybe her backup had arrived and he was fleeing the scene. She couldn’t let that happen—she couldn’t let another vampire get away. Every one of them out there meant more sleepless nights, more searching. She had always pitied Arkeley for the way his hopeless crusade had devoured his life—he had spent more than twenty years trying to drive vampires to extinction, only to fail utterly at the last minute. She was beginning to understand what had pushed him so hard, though. She was beginning to understand that sometimes you had no choice, that events could drive you regardless of what you wanted. If she could get this guy, and Arkeley, and Malvern—all the vampires she believed to exist—if she could get them all she could stop. Until then she could only keep fighting.

There had to be something she could do. She looked at the walls around her, but they were made of reinforced sheet metal. She would never be able to kick her way through them. The door was fitted neatly into its frame. There was no way she could pry it open, no way to get her fingers around its edge and pull.

Then she looked up.

The lockers didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling—there was a foot and a half of open space up there.

The ceiling of the locker was nothing more than a thin sheet of chicken wire. The wire was higher up than she could reach, but maybe—maybe—she could jump up and grab it.

Shoving her Beretta in her holster—safety on, of course—she rubbed her hands together, then made a tentative leap. Her fingertips brushed the wire, but she couldn’t get a grip. She tried again and missed it altogether. Third time’s the charm, she promised herself, and bent deep from the knees.

The fingers of her left hand slipped through the wire. She closed her fist instantly as she fell back—and pulled the wire back down with her. The wire tore the skin of her fingers until they were slick with blood, and the noise was deafening as the wire shrieked and tore under her weight, but she was left with a hole directly above her that she could probably wriggle through. She grabbed the dangling wire with her other hand and started to pull herself up, a handful at a time. It felt like her fingers were being cut to ribbons, but she had no choice—she needed to get out.

She froze as she heard the vampire out in the hall. “What are you doing in there?” he asked, half of a chuckle in his voice. The voice confused her. It sounded different, somehow, from the voice on the recording that had lured her to the facility. Less guttural, less—inhuman.

She didn’t bother to answer. She pulled herself upward, hauling herself hand over hand until she was perched on the top of the locker’s side wall. She could look down the other side into the locker to her right. Cardboard boxes, a pair of skis, plastic milk crates full of old vinyl records filled the narrow space.

From where she was perched she could slip down into the corridor, though the vampire was waiting for her there, alerted by all the noise she’d made. Vampires had far better reaction time and reflexes than human beings. Trying to pounce on one from above was probably suicide.

Not that she had much choice. She leaned out just a little and looked down into the corridor. She saw the white bald head of the vampire below her. He was leaning up against the door of the empty locker, one triangular ear pressed up against it, one long pawlike hand splayed against the white metal.

She drew her weapon—and leapt. With as little thought as that. She landed hard on his shoulders and must have caught him off balance, because he went sprawling down on the floor on his back with her on top. She flipped off her safety and fired in one fluid motion, not even taking the time to aim. Her bullet blew open the skin of his shoulder and sent bone chips flying, and realizing her mistake, realizing she’d missed his heart, she brought her arm back and pistol-whipped him across the mouth.

His fangs snapped and shattered and flew away from the blow. He started gagging and coughing and then he spat out the broken fangs, revealing round white normal teeth below them. She stared wildly into his blue eyes, and saw the shiny gloss of stubble on the top of his head.

“Oh, shit,” she said. She grabbed one of his triangular ears and yanked it off. It was made of foam rubber.

Chapter 3.

Outside a SWAT team crouched in the snow, high-powered rifles leveled at the glass doors of the lobby. Blue and red lights flashed in Caxton’s eyes and she blinked them away. “Move, you idiot,” she said, and shoved the subject forward, out into the street. He whimpered as the broken bones in his shoulder rubbed against each other. The SWAT team relaxed visibly when they saw the handcuffs binding his arms together, but they didn’t stand down completely until she gave the order.

“Glauer,” she called, and the big cop came running around from the back, where he’d still been watching the fire exit. Good soldier, she thought. “Glauer, call an ambulance. This one’s wounded.”

He stared at her in total incomprehension. The job of the SSU wasn’t to arrest vampires, and it certainly wasn’t to get them medical attention. It was to exterminate them.

“He’s a wannabe,” she explained. She tore off the subject’s other rubber ear. Revealed beneath was a round, normal, flesh-colored human ear. She had to admit the subject had done a good job of faking it.

In poor light conditions even she hadn’t been able to tell the difference between this kid and a real vampire.

Of course, she should have been able to. Real vampires were unnatural creatures. If you got near them you felt how cold their bodies were. The hair on the backs of your arms stood up. They had a distinctive, bestial smell. There was no way for the wannabe to fake that, and if she had kept her wits about her she would have noticed. She had been so desperate to find Arkeley, to finish her job, that she had made a bad mistake. What if she had killed him? What if she had pumped three shots into his heart, just on principle?

The wannabe had killed two people and then discharged a firearm toward a police officer conducting a criminal investigation. Had she killed him, that would have been enough to keep her out of jail. It was close to the textbook definition of permissible use of force, but even if the state police’s internal investigation cleared her, it couldn’t shield her from a civil action if the kid’s family decided she’d acted excessively.

The special subjects unit was brand new. It couldn’t survive lawsuits—or dumb mistakes like this—and without the SSU the people of Pennsylvania would be at risk. People everywhere would be at risk. She couldn’t afford to screw up that way.

Glauer brought his car around, a marked patrol unit with the SSU acronym painted on its hood. It was their only official car. Caxton helped shove the wannabe into the back, pushing his head down so he didn’t smack it on the doorjamb. He could sit there until the ambulance arrived.

She’d already got a field dressing on his wounded shoulder. A bad bruise had lifted on his lower lip where she’d pistol-whipped him, but she couldn’t do much for that. “Take these,” she told Glauer. She handed him the wannabe’s shotgun and the bloody hunting knife she’d taken off his belt. She was willing to guess he’d used the knife on the two bodies in the lobby. It had a nasty serrated edge he could have used to saw off the janitor’s arm. She shook her head in disgust and stared down at her hands. They were covered in blood and white greasepaint. She didn’t want to wipe them on her pants—her best pair of work pants—so she grabbed up handfuls of snow off the ground and scrubbed them together.

“What’s your name?” Glauer asked. He was squatting next to the subject, talking through the open door of the cruiser. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Is there anybody you want us to call?”

Caxton stared at her officer as if he was crazy. Then she realized that he was just trying to calm the subject down. One reason Caxton needed Glauer on her team was for just this—for talking to people who were scared and in pain. Caxton had never been much of a people person herself.

“Rexroth,” the wannabe said.

“You have a first name? Or is that it?” Glauer asked.

Caxton leaned against the side of the cruiser and closed her eyes. It would be a long wait until the ambulance arrived, and even then she wouldn’t be done with this guy. What a waste of time.

“Make sure he’s aware of his rights,” she said, just by reflex.

Glauer stayed focused on the subject, though. “What were you hoping would happen tonight?”

Rexroth—almost certainly an alias, she decided—started crying. He couldn’t wipe the tears and snot off his face with his hands cuffed behind him, so they gathered in oily beads on his painted face. “I was supposed to die. She was supposed to kill me.”

Caxton’s body stiffened. The guy had wanted to commit suicide—suicide by cop, they called it in the papers. He’d wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, and maybe take the famous vampire hunter Laura Caxton with him. Maybe he thought that would be enough to turn him into a real vampire. You had to commit suicide to join that club, one way or another. Of course, you also had to be exposed to the curse—which meant a face-to-face meeting with an actual vampire.

The closest this kid had probably ever got to a real vampire was seeing some bad movie on a Sunday afternoon. She stared into the darkness, willing the ambulance to hurry up. The sooner it could arrive the sooner she could get back home, and back into bed. She doubted she would sleep at all, but at least she could lie down and close her eyes and pretend.

Something in her chest loosened up and she sagged against the side of the car. Suddenly she cared very little about this idiot Rexroth, or anything else keeping her away from her bed. How long had it been since she’d had a true night’s sleep? Even a fitful six hours she could call her own? She couldn’t even remember. There was too much in her head these days to let her ever truly relax.

“Trooper?” Glauer asked.

Her eyes snapped open. How long had they been closed? She didn’t know.

“What do you want me to do?” the police officer asked.

“His rights,” she told Glauer. “Read him his rights now. Then take him to the hospital. When they discharge him, take him to a holding cell somewhere. Process him and book him with the two homicides.

With—Christ, whatever. With endangering a police officer. With whatever else you can think of.”

“A holding cell where?” he asked.

It was actually a good question. The SSU didn’t have any dedicated lockup facilities. She hadn’t considered they might ever need a cell of their own. “The local jail is fine. Coordinate with the locals—this can be their case, it’s outside our brief.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look satisfied.

“What?” she demanded.

“Don’t you want to interrogate him yourself?” he asked.

“Not right now.” She looked for her car, found it where she’d parked it when she arrived. Back when she thought she might be driving to her final showdown with Arkeley. What a joke. She started walking away.

“Hey,” he called, “aren’t you going to stick around?”

“No,” she said. “In four hours I need to get up and get dressed again. I’ve got a funeral to go to.”

Chapter 4.

The sun had turned the kitchen windows a shade of pale blue by the time she’d finished her breakfast and started getting dressed. Out back it touched the dark shape of the empty outbuildings behind the house. It lit up one wall of the shed where Deanna’s artwork used to hang, before she’d taken it down and folded it carefully and put it in a trunk in the crawl space, with the rest of Deanna’s things she hadn’t had the heart to throw out. It lit up the kennels, too—also empty. The last three dogs she’d boarded there, a trio of rescue greyhounds, had all moved on to better homes. She hadn’t had a chance to pick up any more dogs since, though there were plenty who needed her help.

The house felt cold and dark, even as the sun grew stronger. Laura knotted her tie on top of her white dress shirt and then pulled on her one pair of dress pants. She looked around for her black blazer and realized she’d left it in the bedroom closet.

She was about to go and get it when Clara came out of the bedroom already dressed in a modest black dress. Her silky black hair, cut just below the ears, was clean and shiny. Laura had worked hard at being quiet so she wouldn’t wake Clara up, but she must have been getting ready the whole time.

“Here,” Clara said, handing her the blazer. “We need to get moving. It’s at least an hour-and-a-half drive. Longer if we’re picking up the Polders.”

Laura took a deep breath. “I said you didn’t have to come. You always hated him.”

Clara smiled warmly. Far more warmly than Laura deserved. “I did, and still do. But funerals are one of the few times I actually get to spend time with you, these days.”

Laura stepped closer to take the blazer, then pulled Clara into a deep hug. She didn’t know what to say.

That she would try to change that, to spend more nights at home? She couldn’t make that promise.

Clara was the one spark of light left to her. The only thing that felt good. She was losing her, and she knew it.

“Okay. Do you want anything to eat?”

“I’m fine for now,” Clara told her. “Do you want me to drive?”

Laura did.

The two of them had gone to a lot of funerals together in the previous two months. Gettysburg had been a success from one point of view—from the point of view of the local tourism board. The civilian population of the town had survived, because Caxton had them evacuated the day before the fighting began. From a law enforcement perspective it had been a fiasco. Local cops, SWAT officers from Harrisburg, even kids from the National Guard, had died by the dozens. They had laid down their lives to keep the vampires from getting out into the general population. More than one family had sent Caxton hate mail after that, but she had made a point of going to every funeral she could.

This one was a little different. No, it was a lot different.

They didn’t talk much on the way to Centre County. Laura found herself nodding off and then jerking back to wakefulness every time she got near to real sleep. It was a familiar feeling, if not a welcome one.

Before they reached State College Clara pulled off of the highway and took them deep into a zone of high ridges and dead fields, brown and golden and slathered with snow. They passed weathered farmhouses and barns that looked like they’d been hit by bunker-busting bombs, some of them slumped over on their sides. They passed a herd of unhappy-looking cows, and then Clara turned off once again, onto a dirt path that was easy to miss if you didn’t know where to find it.

They pulled up in front of a farmhouse that looked in better shape than most, with a well-kept barn and a silo hung with hex signs. The Polders were waiting outside for them. Urie Polder, still wearing his Caterpillar baseball cap, had put a black parka over his stained white T-shirt. It hid most of his wooden arm, but not the three twiglike fingers that stuck out the end of the sleeve. He used them to scratch at his freshly shaven cheek and Laura saw them move, as prehensile as human fingers. That weird hand was actually stronger and more deft than his normal one. Vesta Polder was dressed in the same dress she always wore, a long-skirted black sheath that buttoned all the way up her neck and down her wrists. Her wild blond hair was pinned back, though, and she wore a black veil that completely obscured her face.

They were the strangest people Laura had ever met, but they had also proved themselves good friends.

When the car stopped, Urie gestured back at the house with his wooden hand and the door opened. A little girl, maybe twelve years old, came racing out. She wore a smaller version of Vesta’s dress but her blond hair was covered by a white lace bonnet. Her eyes were very wide.

Laura was a little shocked. She’d known for some time the Polders had a daughter, but she’d never actually been introduced to her. As the couple settled into the backseat of the car, the girl perching on her mother’s lap, Urie cleared his throat noisily and then said, “This here’s Patience, she’s a good girl, ahum.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, Patience,” Clara said, leaning over the back of the driver’s seat. “I’m Clara and this is Laura.”

“Yes’m, I know ye both,” the girl said. “The cards showed ye. You’re the lover, and she’s the killer.”

Laura’s lip curled back in a sneer. It wasn’t how she’d expected this meeting to go. She looked at Vesta, but the older woman didn’t correct or even tsk her daughter.

“I suppose that’s accurate,” Clara said, refusing to be taken aback. She looked at Urie. “Maybe this isn’t my place, but I’m not sure this is going to be appropriate for a little girl. Couldn’t you get a sitter?”

Urie Polder grinned broadly. “Little Patience ain’t been under the care of no one else, not since she was born. We don’t look to break that streak now.”

“Oh,” Clara replied. Without another word she put the car in gear and got them back in the road.

The funeral was to take place in a cemetery outside of Bellefonte—not much farther away. They passed the main campus of Penn State, then rolled into the quaint little Victorian town. The road took them along the shore of a frozen pond ringed with gazebos and houses decorated with gingerbread-like carvings.

Laura always thought the town looked like the kind of place where a parade might spontaneously break out, with a full brass section and prom queens in the backseats of open cars. It was a glimpse of Pennsylvania the way it had been decades earlier, back before the coal mines all dried up and the steel mills closed down, unable to compete with foreign production. The Pennsylvania her grandparents had grown up in.

Arkeley had once had a house in Bellefonte. It had been his base of operations for nearly twenty years.

Now he was going to be memorialized in the same town.

The cemetery, just outside town, was a vast expanse of rolling yellow hills, the dead grass sparkling with frost even so late in the morning. Most of the snow had melted or been removed from the plots. Clara had downloaded driving instructions from the cemetery’s website, and she steered them confidently through endless lanes lined with obelisks and family crypts. Smaller, more modest gravestones stuck up in neat rows. She drove them deeper into a less populated region. A freshly washed pickup truck with an extended cab stood parked in the road and Clara took her spot behind it. Then the five of them clambered out and walked over the crunching grass to where three other people already waited for them.

An older man, dressed in an outfit very similar to Urie Polder’s, but more threadworn around the knees of his jeans—and two young people, the age of college students. Arkeley’s children.

Chapter 5.

“I still think this is a lousy idea. Is this supposed to give comfort to the family, or to mock them?”

Laura asked Vesta Polder.

It was Urie who answered, though. “This is for you, ahum.”

“What?”

“So’s you can get used to the idea he ain’t human anymore. So you won’t think, when you meet him again, that he’s the same man.”

Laura shook her head in bewilderment. She didn’t have the mental energy left to work that one out for herself. She would have asked more questions, but suddenly they were within earshot of the trio at the headstone.

She took off her sunglasses, as calmly as she could, and studied the marker. It was a simple stone with no complicated inscription:

JAMESON ARKELEY

MAY 12 1941–OCTOBER 3 2004

She was pleased, she thought, to see it didn’t read “Rest in Peace” or give some description of how he had lived or died or been reborn. Just the name and dates had some kind of dignity, and as desperate as she was to find Arkeley and put him down, she couldn’t begrudge him that. The stone’s cold shape, its solid physicality, calmed her a little. Enough that she could look up and study the people who were patiently watching her. The oldest of the three—Arkeley’s brother, Angus—had the same wrinkled face she knew so well, though there was a merriness behind his eyes that Arkeley had never possessed. He shook her hand and mumbled a pleasantry she didn’t catch. The two children were dressed more conservatively than their uncle, but their faces shared a certain family resemblance to the man memorialized at their feet.

“Raleigh, right?” she asked, and held out a hand. Arkeley’s daughter nodded but kept her own hands at her sides. She wore a formless black dress and a heavy winter coat that hung on her like a tent. She wore no makeup and her eyebrows and lashes were nearly as colorless as her dress. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes, Trooper. Hi. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.” Laura turned to look at Arkeley’s son. “And you must be Simon. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

“My father isn’t dead,” he told her. “Can we get on with this sham? I have to get back to school tonight and it’s a long train ride.”

Simon Arkeley had sharp pale features, a long thin nose and eyes that were just narrow slits. His black hair was badly combed. He wore a powder blue suit that didn’t look thick enough for the weather.

She asked, “You’re a student at Syracuse, right? What’s your major?”

He stared hard into her eyes. “Biology.”

“We’re all here,” Urie Polder announced. Laura realized she was standing right in front of the stone. She would have been standing on top of the grave, if there had been one. Everyone else had formed a rough circle around her. She stepped back and stood between Clara and Patience. The little girl reached up to take hold of her hand.

Vesta Polder took a step inward and lifted her hands, her fingers decorated with dozens of identical rings. Slowly she reached up to take hold of her veil. Laura realized the woman hadn’t spoken a word since they’d picked her up. Everyone watched, even Simon, as she slowly lifted the veil up and away from her face. She smoothed it down on her shoulders, releasing her bushy blond hair so it bounced. Her eyes were closed.

When she opened them they looked wild—red and swollen, as if she’d been crying, but glinting with a feverish light. Her lips were pursed tight together. She turned to look at each of them, one at a time. She held their gazes until they looked away, even Urie and Patience. Then she began to speak.

“In the old days,” she said, in a loud, clear voice, “there were no winter funerals. When a man died in the winter his body was wrapped in a winding sheet and then put in the back of the larder where it was coldest, and left until the first buds appeared on the trees.”

Raleigh frowned. “Why was that? Was winter an unlucky time?”

Vesta Polder didn’t seem to mind the interruption. “No. The ground was just too hard to dig. Back then every grave was dug by a shovel. A man’s back could give out if he tried to upturn frozen soil. Now, of course, we have backhoes. Graves are dug all year round. There is no grave here, however. Just a stone—not even a gravestone, but a cenotaph.”

“What’s a cenotaph?” Patience asked.

Vesta did not smile at her daughter or even look at her. “It is a monument to a man whose bones lie elsewhere. This stone reminds us of a man who has died. A man well worth remembering. Jameson Arkeley devoted his life to our protection. To the protection of all mankind. We can memorialize his sacrifice here.”

His sacrifice. Laura bit her lip to keep from speaking. Arkeley had been crippled in life, unable to drive a car or tie his own tie. He’d received those wounds fighting vampires. He had made himself whole again, and strong, when he took the curse. At the time maybe he’d thought of that as a sacrifice, too. By now he was probably thinking of it as a gift. He’d had a chance to prove that his death had meaning. After he saved her life, he could have returned to her. He could have let her put a bullet through his heart. That would have been a real sacrifice.

Instead he’d run away, into hiding. Maybe he’d thought he could beat the curse, somehow. Maybe he’d thought he could stay human. The man she’d worked with would have known better, but the curse could be very persuasive. His sacrifice had been lost to greed, greed for blood.

“Further, we may read this stone as a warning. A warning that he is still at large.” Vesta turned to face Caxton. She held out her ringed hands and Caxton took them both. Vesta looked right into her eyes. “It is a warning, and an admonition to you, Trooper. We’ve made a place for him to rest. We’ve made a very nice grave for this man. Now it’s up to you to fill it.”

Caxton’s heart sank in her chest. She opened her mouth to reply, but what could she say? There was nothing, no words—“I’m working on it” would have been grossly inappropriate. “I’ll do my best”

sounded inadequate.

“No!” Simon said, and grabbed Vesta’s arm, pulling her away from Caxton. The older woman reeled as if she’d been smacked across the mouth. Caxton felt light-headed for a second, then came back to herself. She jumped between Simon and Vesta and dragged the boy away from the grave, away from the circle of mourners.

“What was that?” she hissed, marching him down a hill and out of earshot.

“How could you let that woman talk about my father like that?”

“She’s a friend of mine. And she was right.”

“I don’t want you to kill my father,” he said, as simple as that.

Caxton shook her head. “He’s not your father anymore. He’s a vampire. I don’t know if you understand what that really means—”

Simon let out a curt laugh that had no humor in it at all.

“—but it’s my job to hunt him down. And I’m going to do it. He’s a danger to the community. To everyone!”

Simon brooded for a moment before replying. “Tell me something. No opinions, just facts, alright? Do you have any evidence that my father has harmed a single human being? Have you found any bodies?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Then leave him the hell alone.” He turned to head back to the grave. She grabbed at his arm but he broke free easily. She half expected him to assault Vesta Polder on the spot, but instead he walked right past her, headed to the cars. “I have to go now,” he shouted, and folded his arms. It was all he had to say.

Chapter 6.

The mourners were already breaking their circle and heading for the cars—it seemed no one wanted to go on with the dubious service. Caxton hurried on to where Angus and Raleigh were climbing into the cab of the pickup. “I’d like to talk to all of you,” she said. “You might know something that could really help me find him.”

“Now, I doubt that highly,” Angus said. “Seeing as I hain’t visited with my brother in twenty years. Still,”

he said, and stopped in midthought. He looked Caxton up and down, from her legs to her chest, failing to look as far up as her eyes. “I was gonna go wash up and take myself a nap. You want to have a drink with me tonight, that I can accommodate. I’m staying at a motel near Hershey. Figured if I came all the way up here I might as well take in the theme park. What about you, honey? You want to talk to the policewoman?”

Raleigh looked down at her feet and blushed. “Please, Trooper. Don’t be offended. My uncle’s a good man, he just grew up poor. He’s not really as…” she scrunched up her shoulders and looked up at the sky, searching for the proper word and eventually coming up with “ignorant as he seems.”

“I grew up pretty poor myself,” Caxton said. “The daughter of the sheriff of a dead-end coal patch just north of here. It left me more than capable of handling a good old boy or two.”

Angus chuckled at that.

“But you didn’t answer the question. Do you mind speaking with me? I know it might be difficult to talk about your father right now.”

The girl pulled in her shoulders and rubbed her hands together. “No. No, it’ll be okay. Just maybe not here. Cemeteries kind of creep me out.”

“That’s fine,” Caxton said. “We can set up an appointment for later—you live in Emmaus, right?”

“Near there.”

With that Caxton was ready to go. It didn’t seem likely that Simon would consent to an interview, so she figured she would just leave him alone. He wasn’t done causing her grief, however. He spent a long time talking quietly but animatedly with Clara, who eventually sighed in exasperation and came over to Caxton with her arms folded across her chest. “He wants to be taken right to the train station,” she said.

“I’m sure we can do that,” Caxton said, looking at Angus. The older man lifted his arms and let them drop again.

“He wants me to take him. Because he doesn’t know me and that means he doesn’t hate me yet. He says he doesn’t want to ride with his family anymore. He says they’ve betrayed Arkeley. I mean Jameson Arkeley,” she said, glancing at Angus and Raleigh. “He says, just by agreeing to talk to you they’ve betrayed him. He also doesn’t want to ride with you, because you want to kill his dad.”

Caxton narrowed her eyes. She failed to see how any of this was her problem. She thought of Officer Glauer, though. He was constantly telling her she needed to be more sensitive to the public’s needs, and to the feelings of civilians.

“Okay. We can work this out. Does he have a problem with Vesta?”

“Yeah,” Clara said, “but not as much as with you. Or his family. He says.”

Caxton looked across at Angus. “Can you give me a ride as far as Harrisburg? If you can, Clara here can take your nephew to the station and drop off the Polders on her way.”

“You mind riding in the backseat, honey?” Angus asked Raleigh, who shook her head.

This was tedious, Caxton thought, just a waste of time. She had work to do—a meeting of the SSU that afternoon—and it would take her time to get ready. Simon’s temper tantrum was cutting into her work time. But this was what everyday life was made of for most people, these little negotiations and obligations and impositions. All the things Jameson Arkeley had brushed aside in his pursuit of the vampires. It had made him look like a jerk to everyone who met him—including Caxton. Maybe she should try to be a little more understanding. She said her good-byes to the Polders. Urie and Vesta gave her warm smiles, but their little girl, Patience, grabbed at her hand and wouldn’t let go until she made serious eye contact.

“Trooper, I would like to thank ye most sincerely for allowing me to come to thy service,” the girl said, rattling off the words as if she’d memorized them. “’Twas a great pleasure.”

“You’re—welcome,” Caxton said.

The girl offered her hand and Caxton shook it.

“It is my most avid hope,” Patience said, “that ye should slay the fiend, afore he slays ye. Even if the odds look bleak.” Then she went and climbed into the car.

Little girls shouldn’t be that honest, Caxton thought.

Clara leaned out of the driver’s window and blew her a kiss, and then they were off, Simon sitting in the front passenger seat and failing to look over his shoulder at her once.

She sighed and turned back to the two Arkeleys waiting for her. Angus already had a foot up on the running board of his pickup, while Raleigh waited patiently to climb in behind Caxton’s seat. As Caxton jumped up into the shotgun seat and pulled down her seat belt she tried to clear her mind of everything that had happened. It was time to get into interrogation mode, where she just asked questions and listened closely to the answers and tried not to make any judgments at all. She honestly doubted that the Arkeley family had anything serious to tell her, but you never knew—that was the first rule of police investigations. The last person you expected was the one who always had the best clue.

She got her first surprise when she settled down and looked around her. The pickup’s cab was immaculately clean—even the floor mats looked freshly shampooed, though the vehicle must have had upward of a hundred thousand miles on it. Angus was the kind of man who would show up to a funeral wearing a white T-shirt and jeans fraying at the knees—yet he clearly took immense pride in his truck.

The only thing that marred the interior was an open package of beef jerky shoved down into the area where the windshield met the dashboard.

“Hain’t finished that one yet,” he said, seeing her stare at it. He turned to look at her and smiled wide, showing off a pair of gums wholly devoid of teeth. “Nice thing about jerky is, it starts hard but if you keep it in your mouth long enough it loosens up. I bought about three packs for the ride up here and I hain’t had to eat one other thing the whole way.”

Caxton’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t seem to get any words to come out.

“I did try to warn you,” Raleigh said from the backseat.

Chapter 7.

For the rest of the ride to Harrisburg they made little more than small talk. Caxton was anxious to start interviewing the Arkeleys, but she needed to get them alone in controlled environments where she could record what they said and where she could think clearly enough to work out the questions that were worth asking. The pickup wasn’t built for a smooth ride—she felt every bump in the road and especially every pothole—and it was all she could do to ask the one question that bothered her the most.

“Raleigh,” she said, “your mother. She wasn’t at the funeral.”

The girl sighed deeply. “No. I begged and begged with her, but she wasn’t interested. She said she didn’t care to share any memories of Dad, not with strangers. Especially if Vesta Polder was there.”

Caxton frowned. “They know each other?”

“From way back. Mom introduced Dad to the Polders a very, very long time ago. That was back when we lived in State College. Then maybe ten years ago Mom and Vesta had some kind of falling-out. At least, they haven’t been in the same place together since and neither of them seems to want to change that. I don’t really know the details. Sorry.”

Caxton had always been possessed of a certain morbid curiosity concerning Arkeley’s wife, Astarte. She had never met the woman, nor seen so much as a picture of her. Arkeley had rarely mentioned her and never provided even cursory information about her background. Caxton believed she still resided in Bellefonte but didn’t know for sure.

“I’d really like to talk to her. Can you call her for me?”

Raleigh gave her a polite but negating smile. “I can…try.”

“Okay,” Caxton said, feeling a headache come on. “Can you give me her number, so I can call her?”

The girl nodded and recited the digits from memory. Caxton fed them into her cell phone and then pushed the call button. The phone on the other end rang again and again without going to voice mail or even an answering machine. Eventually Caxton ended the call.

It wasn’t very much farther to Harrisburg, to the state police headquarters. Caxton made an appointment to speak with Raleigh, then got out of the truck and headed into the building.

Her destination was a room in the basement. It had at one time been a classroom where rookie troopers had studied the finer points of interrogation and collar processing. There were no windows in the underground room, but it did have a pair of wall-length whiteboards and a couple dozen adult-sized desks, which Caxton had found useful. It also held a bookshelf that Caxton had bought for herself and installed near the door. The bookshelf held mostly three-ring binders full of photocopied documents—every police report on vampire activity, every news account they could find, and the very few scientific papers written on vampires. On top of the bookshelf sat a laptop that got spotty Wi-Fi reception down in the basement. They were still waiting for funding to get everything digitized and put into a searchable database. Most of the SSU’s funding went to keeping the tip line open and paying Caxton’s and Glauer’s meager salaries. Next to the bookshelf stood three enormous metal filing cabinets that were still mostly empty but were meant to hold transcripts from the tip line and Caxton’s own detailed reports.

At the far end of the room Glauer was there already, writing on the whiteboards.

He had bought a coffee box at Dunkin’ Donuts and had a sleeve of cups ready to go. He offered a cup to Caxton, but the trooper got her caffeine mostly from diet soda. There was a machine upstairs that sold it, but she didn’t have time to run up and get one. The meeting was just about to start.

She sat on the edge of a desk near the whiteboards and greeted each member of the SSU as they came in. Glauer was the only other full-time member of the unit, but there were a dozen or so other cops who attended the briefings and were always on call if she needed them. The SSU was a joint task force operation, encompassing multiple jurisdictions. Some of its members were state troopers like herself, members of the area response team (the PSP’s equivalent of a SWAT squad) or troopers from the Bureau of Investigation. They came in first—most likely they were in the headquarters building already, just killing time before lunch. Later came some local cops from various boroughs, a lot of them from Gettysburg. Some were survivors from the vampire massacre there. Other local cops came from as far afield as Pittsburgh, Philly, and even Erie. These were regular cops who were looking to log a little overtime and they served as her eyes and ears in those distant cities. They looked half distracted, as if they had better things to do elsewhere, but they came, and that was what mattered. The last person to enter the room was a man in a black suit with a red tie. He had a small badge affixed to his lapel—a star inside a circle. The first time she’d ever seen one of those had been the first night she met Arkeley.

“Deputy Marshal Fetlock,” he said, introducing himself to Glauer. He was maybe fifty years old, but he still had raven black hair swept back from a high forehead. His sideburns had gone gray, but they were cut so short that you could barely tell. “Just here for a backgrounder,” he said.

Caxton was not surprised to see him there, though she had not invited him. The man was a U.S. Marshal, just like Arkeley had once been. Long before he had become a vampire Arkeley had retired from that service, but she knew that Fetlock and his superiors were taking an active interest in her investigation. If Arkeley started tearing people up it would look bad for the Marshals, so they had good reason to help her if they could.

She got started once Fetlock sat down, a cup of lukewarm coffee untouched on the floor next to him.

She introduced herself to the new faces and thanked everyone for coming while they took out their PDAs and their spiral notebooks. Then she got right to business.

On the whiteboard Glauer had taped up a number of photographs and drawn lines connecting various actors in the investigation. “Those of you who have been here before will notice something new,” she said, using a dry erase marker to indicate a section of whiteboard labeled VAMPIRE PATTERN #2.

Underneath was a picture of Kenneth Rexroth. It looked like a mug shot. Next to his name Glauer had written IN CUSTODY. Below the picture were two crosses with names next to them that she didn’t recognize. She knew who they must be, though—the night watchman and the janitor that Rexroth had killed. She thought about the janitor’s severed arm for a second, then got control of herself and went on.

“Last night I investigated a report of vampire activity in a self-storage facility in Mechanicsburg. It turned out to be a waste of time. The subject, one Kenneth Rexroth, address unknown, other aliases unknown, turned out to be a normal human being made up to look like a vampire. A copycat. He’d had no exposure to vampires before except through the media. I took him in without much of a fight and I’m considering this pattern closed for now, but we wanted to make sure people were aware this sort of thing is happening. Dumb kids. Bored kids, who think vampires are cool. We’ve had reports of this before, but this one ended in two fatalities. I don’t want to see this anymore—frankly, I don’t have time for it.

Officer Glauer has suggested we get a task force together to hit the schools and try to educate these kids about what a dangerous game they’re playing. Not my department. I’ll let him talk on that idea later.”

She moved down the whiteboard to VAMPIRE PATTERN #1. The Arkeley investigation. “This is why we’re really here. It hasn’t gone away. For the benefit of the new faces in the crowd,” she said, looking specifically at Fetlock, “let me go over some of the details.”

Chapter 8.

Three photographs had been taped to the whiteboard. The first showed the face of what should have been a corpse. The skin was rotting away from the skull and one of the eyes was missing, leaving an empty socket. The mouth hung open, showing row after row of once-vicious teeth, some of which were missing, others of which had rotted down to black stumps. “This is Justinia Malvern,” Caxton said. “The oldest living vampire, though living is a relative term. Vampires do live forever, if they aren’t killed, but contrary to what you’ve heard they do age, and not very gracefully.” That got a few chuckles from the audience. At least they were awake. “With every night that passes they need more blood to stay strong and active than they did the night before. After three hundred years Malvern can’t even sit up in her coffin. That doesn’t mean she’s harmless. A year ago she made four new vampires and good people died putting them down. She was also responsible for the army of vampires we fought back in October, at Gettysburg—and you all know how badly that could have gone. The last vampire she made was this guy.”

She pointed out the second photograph on the whiteboard, and then the third. They showed Jameson Arkeley—as he had been in life, and as he had become, in death. The before photo showed an aging man with eyes so piercing she had trouble looking at them still. The after photo just showed one more vampire, as far as she was concerned. It was not an actual photograph but a computer-generated extrapolation of what Arkeley would look like as a vampire. She’d seen the real thing and knew the picture didn’t do him justice. It just wasn’t scary enough. “In the aftermath of Gettysburg, Arkeley here voluntarily accepted the curse. He did it to save lives, and I don’t know what would have happened without him being there.” She shook her head. “He promised me, at that time, that as soon as the last vampire was dead he would turn himself in. So I could kill him, and put an end to this. It’s been two months since then and so far he hasn’t shown himself.” Next to his vampire photo Glauer had written POI on the board. It stood for “person of interest,” meaning he was wanted for questioning but had so far not been named in direct connection with any crime. “We haven’t found any bodies we can link to him. We haven’t turned up any half-deads he’s made—”

At the back of the room Deputy Marshal Fetlock raised his hand.

She didn’t bother calling on him. “A half-dead is a vampire’s slave. Once a vampire drinks your blood, once they kill you, they have the ability to bring your corpse back to life. Your body doesn’t like it and your soul can’t stand it. You rot away at an accelerated rate, so most half-deads only last about a week before they just collapse in pieces. But while it lasts you do everything the vampire demands. Everything, including killing your best friend.”

Fetlock lowered his hand and nodded. She had answered his question.

“Jameson Arkeley was my partner,” she said, which was mostly true. That was how she’d thought of him, anyway, regardless of how he’d seen her. “He was a good friend. He asked me to kill him because he knew what happens to people who become vampires with the best of intentions. The first couple of nights they’re almost human. They can be noble, and good, and wise. But then they get thirsty. They start thinking about blood. They think about how it would taste, and how strong it could make them. How there are so many people out there just full of the stuff and how one or two of them could disappear and nobody would much mind. I’ve seen it again and again. No matter how strong their willpower might be—and Arkeley was one of the strongest men I’ve ever known—they always succumb. With each kill it becomes easier for them. It becomes more exciting. Their bodies start demanding more blood, always more…”

She turned and looked at the photos. At Arkeley’s eyes. She wondered, as she always did, about that last moment at Gettysburg, when he’d promised her he would come back. That he would let her shoot him right through the heart. He had believed, truly believed, that he could do that, that he could surrender to her like that. She’d believed it, too.

Yet somewhere between that moment and the dawn he’d changed his mind. He had run off into the shadows, to some place she couldn’t find him. What had he been thinking? Had he just been scared of dying? That wasn’t the man she’d known and respected. Had he thought he could control the bloodlust?

Yet he’d been the one who’d taught her that was impossible.

Off to one side of the room Glauer cleared his throat. She blinked rapidly and turned to face her audience again. “Arkeley is dangerous. He needs to be destroyed on sight,” she stressed. “The amount of damage he can do on his own is enormous. He’s much, much stronger than a human being and infinitely faster. He also knows every trick any human has ever used to kill a vampire. Worst of all, though, is that he could become a Vampire Zero at any time.”

She took a dry erase marker and drew a simple diagram on the whiteboard. Below Arkeley’s picture she drew two circles, each connected back to his picture with a short line. Below the two circles she drew four, then eight. She connected them all up. “That’s a term we invented for the SSU. We borrowed it, kind of, from epidemiology. When you’re tracing the progression of a killer virus you want to get as far back as you can, all the way back to the first person who was infected. That person is your Patient Zero.

You need to find that guy and get him out of the way as soon as possible, before he infects other people.

“It’s the same thing here.” She tapped Arkeley’s picture. “Vampires can make other vampires. They do it because they get lonely, or to have someone to feed them when they become too old and decrepit to look after themselves. If they think they’re in danger, they make more vampires because there’s safety in numbers. This is the biggest danger they represent, their ability to cooperate and to increase their numbers. With enough motivation one vampire can make a couple of others every night. Each of those others can make more. The number gets very large, very fast. We’re talking about a pathological organism that can reproduce a new generation every twenty-four hours. And each new vampire is just as deadly as the last, and just as hard to kill.

“The only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to find Arkeley and Malvern now. Find them and destroy them, without hesitation, without compunction.”

She stopped, then, and looked around the room. A lot of people had heard this speech before. The new people, though, had the expression she expected from them. Their mouths hung open. Their eyes were very wide.

They were scared.

Good. They needed to be.

Fetlock’s hand went up again. She pointed at him. “You say we need to find Malvern as well. I thought she was in custody.”

Caxton shook her head. “She was in Arkeley’s custody at the time he changed. I went looking for her afterward, but she was gone. Clearly he took her with him when he disappeared. He may have wanted a mentor, someone to teach him about his new existence. He may also have just wanted to protect her.

That’s something else we know about vampires. They stick together and look after their own. Now she’s out there, too, and in some ways she’s as dangerous as he is.”

“Wasn’t there a court order protecting her from execution?” Fetlock asked.

“Yes,” Caxton said. “After Gettysburg it was rescinded. The judicial system finally came through and figured out she’s a real threat. If I find her, I’m within my rights to kill her on the spot. That’s exactly what I intend to do.”

She pulled the cap off her dry erase marker, then shoved it back on with a popping noise.

“We have a plan on how to get them both. I’m interviewing subjects and following up on leads, with Trooper Glauer’s assistance. What I need from all of you is help with finding their lair. We’re hoping it’s somewhere in Pennsylvania, where we have jurisdiction. It could be just about anywhere, though vampires have very specific needs when it comes to their places of residence. It’ll be somewhere isolated, where nosy people don’t tend to go snooping during the daylight hours. It may be underground, or partially buried. In the past we’ve seen them use abandoned steel mills, hunting lodges, and disused electrical substations. Each of you probably knows a place like that in your community. I need you to check it out, but carefully. Only approach the place in the morning, when you have plenty of daylight. Be very careful even then—half-deads are active during the day, and they’ll lay traps for anyone who threatens their masters. If you find anything, any sign of recent occupation, anything out of place, just leave, immediately. Call me, and I’ll come and check it out myself. This is how we’ll get them, people.

This is how we’re going to make vampires extinct. Any questions?”

There were no questions. The cops and troopers got up and filed out of the room, some of them pausing to speak with her for a moment, most of them leaving without a word. Fetlock was one of the latter. She had expected him to stick around, but when she looked for him he was already gone.

Chapter 9.

Work filled up most of the rest of the day—paperwork, the kind she hated the most. She had to fill out a full report on what had happened the night before in Mechanicsburg. Then she had to sit through an interminable conference call with the district attorney and the Mechanicsburg police chief, going over evidence, presenting a clear case why Rexroth should be prosecuted. It should have been obvious, she thought. He had murdered and mutilated two people. The wheels of justice grind slowly, though, and by the time she signed out and got back on the road it was already four o’clock and the sun was setting. She needed to interview Angus and try to make contact with Arkeley’s wife again before she could call it a day.

The latter errand was easier said than done. She called the number Raleigh had given her and let the phone ring ten times before she hung up. She hadn’t actually expected an answer. She was going to have to meet the woman, and the sooner the better—most likely, Astarte was the last member of Arkeley’s family to see him before he accepted the curse. For the time being, however, she would have to settle for Angus, who had already told her he hadn’t seen his brother in twenty years.

Angus was staying at a very seedy motel on the road to Hershey, a single-story building with rooms that let out onto a shared porch, the whole construction stuck haphazardly in the middle of a black asphalt parking lot. The vacancy sign buzzed furiously out at Route 322—only two of the rooms had lights on.

Across the street lay an undeveloped field of dry, dead weeds streaked with snow that glowed eerily in the last purple-and-orange light. Caxton pulled into a parking space near the motel’s office and stepped out into the chill. The temperature had fallen considerably since the morning’s memorial service and she reached into the backseat of her car for her jacket. As she leaned over, out of the corner of her eye she saw an orange light glow and sputter in the shadows out front of one of the rooms. Just the ember at the tip of a cigar. Angus smiled at her out of the darkness and waved her over. He had dragged two chairs from his room and put them in front of his door. He had a bottle of Malibu rum and a two-liter bottle of Coke to mix it with. He handed her a motel glass as she sat down. “Figgered we could talk out here, if you’re amenable, and if you ain’t, that’s too bad,” he told her with a smile. “They won’t let me smoke in the room here.”

“That’s fine,” she said, drawing a digital audio recorder out of one pocket. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?”

“Naw,” he said.

She started the recorder and tried to clear her head. Tried to think of what to ask first. Glauer had always told her she should start with a joke, to ease the tension inherent in a police interview, but she didn’t know any jokes. She knew a little bit about small talk. “Angus and Jameson,” she said, to break the ice. “Are those old family names?”

Angus chuckled. “You want to know about our family? Well, the only fancy thing we ever could afford was those names. I suppose when you’re poorer than dirt, you take the best you can get, and names are for free. Our father named us both. Now, he was a character. Longlegs Arkeley, they used to call my pop, ’cause he always ran away the police got too close. He was what you call a man who enjoyed life to the full. Which means he was a man who enjoyed his whiskey, fine cigars, and young women. Had us when he was in his seventies, and lived to be a hundred and one, and his last girlfriend came to the funeral. Now, our mother, Fae, she was from old North Carolina hill women for seven generations, what they call down there a witchbilly. She could curdle milk in the pan, if she wanted, and she had an evil eye that could take paint off the side of a Cadillac, but she died young. Most like from trying to keep up with Longlegs Arkeley’s two sons.”

“Your father didn’t like the police. Interesting. Was he a bootlegger?” Caxton asked. She thought Jameson might have mentioned that once.

Angus nodded. “Yes’m. For a while it looked like young Jameson was goin’ that way too, toward a life on the wrong side of the law. He and I were real hellions in our prime. Got up to some pretty creative mischief ’cause there was a solid lack of aught else to do where we were brought up.”

“Where was that?”

Angus shook his head. “Didn’t have a proper name. A length of North Carolina that didn’t get electricity till the sixties, if that tells you something. We called it Bald Hill, but you won’t find that on any map.”

Caxton smiled. “It’s funny. I never thought of him as a country boy.”

Angus scratched his chin. “That’s understandable, since he weren’t. He got out quick as he could. Tried learning his daddy’s trade, but then one time when the law did catch old Longlegs—it weren’t the first time, or the last—Jameson came to his ma and told her he wanted to move away. Said he had saw the light and he wanted to go be a copper himself, ’cause they always won in the end. Old Fae she just grinned ear to ear, and gave him forty dollars she kept in an old pomade tin, and sent him off to police school in Raleigh-Durham. Far as I know he never went back to Bald Hill again. He was a patrol cop in town for a while, but that didn’t suit him either, so he studied up for some big examination and got himself a job with the federales.”

“The U.S. Marshals,” Caxton said.

Angus nodded. “Longlegs didn’t care for that, not one bit. Disowned him and everything. Best thing Jameson could have done for himself, though, I always thought. I always wished I had the same idea.

Instead I spent another forty years knocking around the hills, working one angle or another. Old Fae taught me a mite of what she knew about magic, though not enough to get me in real trouble. I told fortunes for a while, telling people what they wanted to hear. In the eighties I had a good thing going selling voodoo supplies and the like to farmworkers, but that all fell through with the scare about Satanists stealing babies left and right. Turned out that was all a hoax, but I was ruined. After that I switched to religious articles—statues of Saint Joseph to bury in your front yard when you want to sell your house, scented prayer candles for getting money or love. You know.”

Caxton frowned. “After he joined the Marshals—after he came to Pennsylvania—did you see much of Jameson?”

“Like I told you, there ain’t much to tell. Jameson and I had a visit in 1984, when I saw him married.

Before that it must have been sometime in the seventies, ’cause I remember my hair was still black.”

Caxton’s heart slumped in her chest. This whole trip had been a waste of time, she thought. “That was the last time you saw him? Did you ever talk to him on the phone, or via email, or anything since then?”

“At Christmas, most years.”

“I see.”

“Of course, often as not he’d ask how I was doing, and I’d say fine, and I’d ask how he was doing, and he’d say he was busy, and then he’d pass the telephone over to Astarte or one of the kids.”

“Okay.”

Angus stubbed out his cigar on the plastic arm of his chair until it bubbled and hissed. “You’re clutching at straws, aren’t you, girl? You got no better lead to follow up than something he might have said to me at his wedding.” He was looking right at her, searching her face. “That must mean you don’t even know where to start looking for him.”

Caxton’s face burned, even in the cold. “I’m on his trail. I’ll find him. But if you must know, no, I don’t have a lot of leads.”

Angus shrugged expansively and drank from his frosty glass. “Well, if you don’t mind a little advice, especially since it’s free, I’ll tell you you’re barking up the wrong tree. Don’t go talking to his family.”

“I need to interview everyone who knew him, just in case.”

Angus shook his head. “You do what you need to. All I’m saying is this is one man who cared less about his loved ones than he did about what he was going to have for breakfast. You seen those kids of his?

They barely know him, and what they do know is hate. They hate him for not being there most of their lives because he was too busy off chasing vampires, and when he was there they hated him for not loving them enough. They’re rotten little brats, both of them, but maybe they got a reason to be. Jameson was my brother once, my little brother, and still I looked up to him. But since he worked that first vampire case, just before his wedding, he’s not been the same man I knew. He’s not been any kind of man at all.”

Caxton’s immediate reaction to Angus’ words shocked her. She felt her heart grow cold and heavy in her chest. She almost stood up out of her chair. She was, she realized, offended.

He was a great man, she thought. He was a hero.

But she guessed that was behind him, too.

“Ah, hell,” Angus said, suddenly. “What the hell’s he doing here? He ain’t supposed to arrive yet, not for hours.”

Caxton was still too busy being angry to get what he meant. Then she turned and saw that a late-model maroon sedan had pulled into the motel’s asphalt lot. Its headlights dazzled her eyes for a second and then cut out as it rolled to an uneasy stop. Maybe it had stalled out, or maybe the driver was drunk, she thought. Immediately her eyes went to the license plate and memorized the number, just in case.

“You’re meeting someone?” Caxton asked. “I have some more questions, but they can wait.” She turned back to face Angus, but he was still staring at the car.

Grumbling, swearing a couple of times, he levered himself up out of his chair. She could only stare in disbelief as he pulled a massive buck knife out of his pocket and snapped open the blade.

She turned around again then, and looked as the car’s door popped open and something sagged out onto the dark pavement. It was a body, a man’s body, and at first she thought the driver must be so drunk he couldn’t even stand up properly. Then she saw it was just a boy, a teenager in a hooded sweatshirt. He turned to face the two of them and she saw his face was torn and bloody, with pale strips of skin hanging from his cheeks and chin.

“Half-dead,” she breathed, and grabbed for her weapon. Angus was already halfway to the car, his knife out and low by his side.

Chapter 10.

“Angus, get back,” Caxton called, grabbing for her Beretta and jumping out of her chair. The old man was well ahead of her, closing quickly with the half-dead.

“Don’t you worry, young lady. I can handle this sort.” The half-dead knelt on the asphalt, down on all fours as if it was too weak to stand. Angus grabbed at the creature’s arm and yanked it painfully up until it was standing on its feet. “You said you’d call on me at midnight. It ain’t time yet!”

Caxton moved quickly, her weapon down and pointed at the ground next to her feet. The half-dead wasn’t armed and it seemed barely capable of standing—in fact, it was tottering back and forth as if it would fall as soon as Angus let it go. That didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. Half-deads were the victims of vampires, drained of their blood and then raised from the dead. They were nasty little creatures, spiteful and cruel and lacking all the human qualities they’d had in life. The curse that animated them corrupted their flesh as much as it did their souls; a half-dead’s body started to rot and fall apart almost instantly, and it was rare that one of them could last more than ten days before disintegrating completely.

This one looked at least a week old and smelled terrible, even in the cold night air. Weak as it might be, however, it could bite Angus and give him a nasty infection, if nothing worse.

“Let him go and stand back,” Caxton ordered, but Angus acted as if he hadn’t heard her.

“Twenty-four hours, you said,” he told the thing. “You’re early!”

She had another interest in the half-dead, beyond protecting Angus. It took a vampire to raise a half-dead—which meant Jameson Arkeley had done it. That meant all kinds of things, some of which were more pleasant to think of than others. It meant Arkeley had killed a human being, proof positive that he had gone over to the darkness. If Caxton could keep the half-dead from falling apart for a little while, though, it could also mean a real break in the case. The half-dead might know the location of Jameson’s lair.

She could interrogate it. She could intimidate it into telling her everything it knew. As long as Angus didn’t finish it off first. She started to raise her weapon, planning to point it at Angus if he didn’t start complying with her orders.

The half-dead spoke, though, and Caxton froze in her tracks.

“My master grows impatient,” it creaked. Its voice was high and unnatural, like the sound a nail makes when pulled out of a rotten piece of wood. “He has offered you a gift, and you have failed to accept.

You know what the alternative is. What say you, Angus Arkeley?”

“How about this?” the old man replied, and slashed the half-dead across the face with his hunting knife.

The half-dead screamed and dropped to the pavement. Angus kicked it viciously. “You like the sound of that? My answer is no, you son of a bitch. He can ask a million times and it’ll always be no.”

“Get back,” Caxton commanded. “Leave it alone!”

Already drawing his foot back for another vicious kick, Angus turned to glare at her, his eyes traveling down her arms to the pistol in her hands. “Shee-yit,” he said. White foaming spittle flecked his lips and chin. “I can take care of this. You weren’t supposed to get involved.”

“That thing is a vampire’s servant. That makes it my responsibility. Now get back,” she said, as calmly as she could. Her heart was thudding in her chest.

Angus raised his hands, holding up the knife. No blood marked the shiny blade, just some scaly bits of gray flesh. “You got me outgunned, I guess,” he said. “But this is my trouble.” His foot came down and slammed into the half-dead’s side, making it choke and sputter.

“Step back. You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you? You had some kind of contact with Jameson. Is that right?”

Angus grinned at her as he took a step backward. “I said I hain’t seen or talked to Jameson in twenty years, and that’s the truth. Still haven’t. I seen this fellow last night, said he was sent by my brother. Said he had a message for me, a kind of a deal, and I had twenty-four hours to think it over. He also knew you’d be around asking questions. Said if I told you anything it would be the death of me.”

“I can protect you. If I’d known—I could have taken you somewhere safe,” Caxton said, shaking her head. She glanced down at the half-dead and saw it wasn’t moving.

“A man takes care of his own. I didn’t expect you to understand. Jameson’s my brother, and that makes it my job to kill him—to—”

Angus’ eyes moved to stare at the half-dead’s car. Caxton thought it might be a trick—a ruse to break her concentration and let him get another kick in. Stepping backward slowly, she turned to glance at what he was looking at.

Inside the car a massive dark shape stirred. A pair of red eyes glared out of the darkened backseat.

Caxton started to swing her weapon around, to train it on the car, but she was just too slow. The far side rear door exploded outwards and a black-and-white blur bounced across the black pavement toward Angus. It slowed down enough to grab him around the waist, and in that moment she saw exactly what she expected to see.

It was Jameson Arkeley, the vampire. He wore a black shirt and pants, but his feet were bare. His skin had lost all pigmentation and all its hair, even his eyelashes. His triangular ears, his red eyes, and his mouth full of ugly teeth couldn’t hide the resemblance he still bore to his brother. Yet where Angus’ face showed the lines of age and care, Jameson’s features were smooth and unblemished. Only his left hand was less than perfect. It was missing all its fingers. He’d been maimed when he was still alive, and even his curse couldn’t grow them back.

His red eyes stared right at her. She felt like a cold breeze blew right through the chambers of her skull and she heard his voice—his very human voice—calling her name, though his mouth didn’t move. Her arms fell slack at her sides and her eyelids started to droop. Caxton knew exactly what was happening.

She’d felt like this before, far too many times for comfort. He was hypnotizing her. Freezing her in place.

She had a charm on a thong around her neck, a spiral of silver metal, a talisman Vesta Polder had given her to allow her to break that kind of spell. She tried to reach for it even as she felt it growing warm against her clavicle, but her hand felt resistance as if it were moving through gelatin. Jameson had plenty of time to kill her before she could grab the charm and regain control of her own body.

Yet that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. His eyes broke with hers and suddenly he was gone from her head. She reached up and grabbed the charm through her shirt, felt its heat scorch her fingers, but she was already free. Her other hand, her gun hand, came up and she aimed automatically at his heart.

Too slow, still too slow. He was moving again, moving faster than she could track. She dropped to one knee to improve her aim and tried to get a bead on his back, even knowing that the chances of shooting him through the heart like that were slim to none. Worse, he had Angus dangling over his shoulder and she couldn’t risk shooting the living brother, for many reasons.

“Freeze,” she shouted, but she could hear him laughing in her mind, a drawn-out evil chuckle that faded as his hypnotic hold on her dissipated altogether.

She jumped back up to her feet and gave chase but didn’t get very far. Jameson had run right into the motel, kicking open the door to Angus’ room. He ducked inside with his brother still in tow. The door swung shut behind him and cut him off from view.

Caxton raced to the door and threw herself against the wall just to the left of it. If Jameson came exploding back out the way he’d gone in she didn’t want to get in his way. She raised her weapon to shoulder height and tried to breathe, tried to work out what to do next.

Jameson Arkeley, vampire hunter, would have known without thinking. Did you rush in and hope for the best? Did you wait outside for the vampire to come back out? He wouldn’t have even had to ask himself the question. Yet Caxton couldn’t decide that quickly. If she rushed the door she could be running right into a trap. Vampires loved setting traps. Jameson could be waiting inside ready to grab her and tear her to pieces before she even saw him. Yet if she waited him out—who knew what he would do to Angus?

Her duty, she decided, was to the living brother. If she had any chance of saving him she needed to move fast. Already she’d wasted valuable seconds. Weapon at the ready, she launched herself at the door, then rolled into the room with her head down and scrambled behind the bed. Raising just her eyes and hands over the jungle print bedspread, she swung her Beretta back and forth, covering the room.

It was empty—but the door to the bathroom was open. No light burned inside and she could see nothing but shadows. She rolled across the bed and rushed, shoulder first, through the open doorway. She pivoted on her heel, covering the toilet, the plastic sink, the pebbled-glass shower door. When nothing tried to kill her instantly she reached out with her left hand and switched on the lights.

The shower door was painted with blood.

Chapter 11.

“Oh, God, no—not your own brother,” Caxton sighed. She hesitated a second, not really wanting to know, but then she slid back the shower door. It slid back all too easily, its track slick with wet blood.

More blood half-filled the tub, almost but not quite submerging the body of Angus Arkeley. The old man sprawled in an ungainly mess across the porcelain, one arm folded under his body, the other reaching up toward the soap dish. His eyes were very wide and blood still bubbled from a massive wound at his throat.

Protocol demanded she call 911, and she did—though she knew Angus would die before help could arrive. “I have a man down in room four,” she told the dispatcher, once she’d provided her credentials and her location. “I’m looking at massive blood loss from deep lacerations to the neck. I need an ambulance right away and every officer you can send.” Clicking her phone shut, she grabbed up a stiff white towel. She shoved it into the wound, but the blood surged out from under it, coming in thick gouts so fresh they hadn’t begun to clot.

Angus’ eyes rolled slowly down, trying to fasten on Caxton’s face. There was no emotion there. The old man lacked the strength to even beg for help. Caxton thought of questioning him but knew he couldn’t reply. He had told her enough already, she thought, even though he’d lied to her.

As bad as Angus’ condition might be, she had another Arkeley to worry about.

She looked up, around the bathroom. There was no sign of Jameson. She had read old folktales about vampires who could slip through the crack between a door and its frame, but she knew better. Jameson was a big guy and there was nowhere he could hide in the small room. She looked up and saw a window above the toilet. It was open, letting cold night air blast inside. It looked too small for Jameson to have wriggled out of—yet she knew he had. The metal frame of the window was buckled outward. With enough strength and determination and a complete disinterest in physical pain (all of which any vampire possessed), she figured he could have just made it through. She was tempted to jump up and follow him the same way, yet first she spared another glance down at Angus in the bathtub.

Protocol also required her to stay by the man until the paramedics showed up. Simple human decency required as much as well. Yet if she waited she would just be giving Jameson a chance to get away—and Angus was going to die regardless.

“I’ll get him,” she swore, looking down into his dimming eyes. It was as much comfort as she had to offer. She hoped he could understand her and know that he wasn’t going to die unavenged. Ignoring his eyes, she leaned over the toilet and peered out through the window.

She couldn’t see a damned thing. The lights of the motel and the highway out front didn’t reach to the back. She thought there was a field back there, maybe some farm acreage left fallow for the winter. She could just about make out a thick growth of weeds directly below the window. Jameson could be out there, close enough to reach out and touch, but she knew she would never see him. His black clothes would hide most of his body and shadows would do the rest.

Protocol had it she should go back, out through the front door, and circle round the back. Protocol also suggested she have a partner with her at all times, someone who could cover her movements. Screw protocol, she decided, and shoved her weapon in its holster. She climbed up onto the toilet tank and pushed herself head and shoulders first through the window. Getting her hands down to brace herself, she let her legs slither through the window and dropped to a tense crouch.

This was the moment, she knew. This was when Jameson would attack, if he planned to. When her handgun was still in its holster and she couldn’t fight back. She braced herself, expecting him to slam into her like a freight train before she could even get her bearings.

Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark as she brought her weapon up again. She saw that the gray weeds around her ended about twenty feet away at the sharply defined edge of a field. A thin layer of white snow lay atop the furrowed earth, glowing slightly in the starlight. The flat plane of white screwed with her depth perception and made her eyes buzz. The hair on the backs of her arms started to stand up after a moment and she—

Wait, she thought. She knew that feeling. It was the barely perceptible sensation of wrongness, of something unnatural quite close by. It was the feeling she always got when vampires were near. Jameson.

He hadn’t just run off. He was sticking around, waiting for her. Toying with her.

The thinnest crinkling sound came from her left and she spun, nearly falling over on her hip. A shadow cleaved off from the dark back of the motel building and she fired without hesitation. The gunshot shattered the darkness all around her, made her ears ring. The shadow darted out toward the snowy field and she squeezed her trigger again. The shot hit home, knocking Jameson sideways. For a second she saw him, his white face lost amid the snowy field but his black shirt sharply defined against the light. She saw him raise his hands to his chest as if he were clutching at a wound.

It was a chance—a break, an opening. She didn’t waste it. Rushing forward, toward the shadow, she fired a third round, but she knew it went wide of the mark. She had a lot of trouble telling just how far away he was, but she pressed on, watching his silhouette grow larger and larger before her until he was looming up over her, until she was so close she could feel the cold of his body, feel him colder than the night around him. He raised his good hand to stop her, but she kept coming, her head down so as not to make eye contact, so as not to give him another chance to hypnotize her.

“Trooper,” he said, and his voice was a low growl. “Laura. Let’s talk—”

Jameson Arkeley, in his vampire hunting days, would have known exactly what to do then. So did she.

Caxton closed to point-blank range, the barrel of her weapon only inches from his chest, pointed just left of his sternum. She fired before he could get another word out.

The bullet left the barrel of her weapon at well over the speed of sound. It struck him dead on and knocked him backward as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Sprawling on his back, his legs and arms pinwheeling, he landed in a heap.

It could have been enough. The bullet had plenty of energy—over 450 foot-pounds—to cut right through his skin, his pectoral muscles, his bony ribs. It would have had plenty of force left over to cut right through his heart. Caxton knew what a bullet could do to a body at that range, even a vampire’s body.

It had to be enough. She had killed vampires before. She knew they were tough, that sometimes they seemed bulletproof, but she also knew they weren’t invulnerable. Do enough damage to a vampire’s heart and he’ll stay down, permanently.

She had killed him. That was what it looked like. That was what it felt like.

So why couldn’t she believe it?

In life Arkeley had been a tough bastard. In undeath he would be ten times as difficult to kill. She had killed vampires before, sure, but this one—this one was different. She had to be certain.

Stepping forward, she kept her feet apart. Steadied her weapon with both hands. He lay at her feet, unmoving, apparently immobile. She couldn’t see the wound on his chest, not in the near-utter darkness, but it had to be bad. She thought about firing into his heart again, just on principle. The idea sickened her.

It felt like desecrating a dead body, she thought.

Jameson Arkeley, vampire hunter, would have done it anyway. She lined up her shot carefully, took her time, fired again. The body didn’t jump or twitch. If he hadn’t been dead already, she thought, that would do it. That was enough.

The second she lowered her weapon he was up on his feet, grabbing her up in a bear hug with one arm, slapping the pistol out of her hand with the other. Her wrist bones shrieked as her hand flew away from the blow. She didn’t see where the pistol went. She didn’t see anything but his teeth. They were huge, and jagged, and stained with clotted blood. They were inches from her eyes.

His breath stank. His breath stank of his own brother’s blood.

“Kill me,” she said. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think—couldn’t even be afraid, her brain wouldn’t let her. She knew that small mercy wouldn’t last. “Just do it quickly. You owe me.”

He chuckled, the fetor of his breath filling her nose and throat and making her twist her head around, making her wriggle in his grasp. “I owe you a lot more than that,” he said. “And I intend to repay you in full.”

He yanked her head up, the fingers of his good hand digging into the flesh under her chin. He was so strong that she couldn’t resist. Their eyes met and every thought went flying from her head like bats from a cave at dusk.

Time stopped—and when it started again she was lying on her back in the snow, staring up at dark blue sky and silver stars. So many stars—

She sat up, clutching at her head, forcing herself to focus. Looked around, looked everywhere. There was no sign of him, not even footprints in the snow.

But—she had hit him! She had put a bullet right through his heart. How was it possible he had gotten up again and run away?

Chapter 12.

Hours later. In the east, a pale smudge of red stained the horizon. Just a few minutes before the dawn.

She started to feel safe again, a little. Yet when Deputy Marshal Fetlock came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder she still jumped.

“I’m sorry, Trooper, I didn’t mean to—”

She held up one hand and looked at her shoes until her heart had stopped thudding in her chest. “It’s alright. They told me you were coming in. I should have been ready to greet you.” Slowly she uncoiled her arms. They had been wrapped tightly around her stomach. She held out one hand and the Fed shook it. “It’s just—it’s just been a very long night.”

“I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me,” he said, smiling patiently for her. “I’m sure you’re busy.”

She shrugged. She’d been busy an hour before, coordinating the police response, securing the motel, and leading a team of troopers who dragged the field looking for any sign of Jameson. When nothing turned up she’d eventually decided she could go home, that there was nothing more for her to do at the scene.

Then Fetlock had called and asked for access to the crime scene. The timing was lousy—it was six in the morning; she hadn’t slept all night and she just wanted to get home. She’d thought about making him wait until she’d had some rest, but he assured her it was important, that he really needed to see the crime scene while it was fresh. Caxton had been a cop long enough to know how the hierarchy worked.

Nothing good could ever come from saying no to a Fed. So she had been stuck at the motel while she waited for him to arrive. She had no idea what he wanted. He’d come to her briefing of the SSU but then left without saying anything, and now he was muscling in on her investigation. None of it made sense. “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you,” she said, “but maybe you could explain your imperative interest in this scene. Especially at this time in the morning.”

He smiled broadly. “I guess I’m just a morning person. As for my interest, it’s purely informal, I assure you. If you’d prefer not to meet with me now, I’ll be happy to get out of your way.”

She shook her head. She’d worked with Feds before and she knew that was likely all the explanation she would get—at least until he wanted something from her.

“No, no,” she said. “I’m just not sure how I can help you.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened here?”

“It started with a routine interview. I’d made an appointment with Angus Arkeley, who was Jameson’s brother, and we were chatting. Then the situation deteriorated.” She filled him in briefly on the night’s events, omitting only her mental state—the doubts she’d felt, the moments of panicked fear, the blank spots when Jameson had hypnotized her.

When he’d heard her narrative—he declined to comment on any of it—she started showing him what remained behind.

When Jameson had left her, when she’d recovered enough to stand, she had made her way back to the front of the motel. The ambulance she’d called for arrived first, but the paramedics hadn’t known where to start, and she had to explain that the corpse in the parking lot wasn’t their patient. It should have been clear, she thought. The remains of the half-dead stank like they’d been moldering in the ground for months and there was so little left of its musculature and internal organs that she could have easily picked it up in one hand. The paramedics had eventually put up caution tape around the body and then just thrown a blanket over him. Now, as yellow light crept across the parking lot, she twitched the blanket back so Fetlock could see what he looked like.

The Fed winced visibly. Maybe at the smell, maybe at what the half-dead looked like. “It’s going to be hard to make a positive ID on that,” he said.

“You’re not kidding. The skin’s too degraded to get prints and his teeth are all broken up, so matching dental records is out. There’s no wallet or any kind of identification on him or in the car. I already checked.” That had not been a lot of fun.

“So Angus kicked him to death?” Fetlock asked. “That wouldn’t explain the decomposition.”

Caxton shook her head. “Angus was pretty hard on him, but I think he would look like this anyway. No, he died of old age.” Fetlock frowned at that, but she just shrugged and went on. “Jameson must have raised him from the dead more than a week ago and he’s been rotting away ever since. This guy wasn’t a threat to anyone. He couldn’t even stand up, much less hold a weapon. I think that was intentional.”

“What do you mean?” Fetlock asked.

“Jameson must have known how little life his servant had left in him. He could have sent a fresher corpse to bring his message, but if he had, if the half-dead had lived just a few hours more, I could have interrogated him and learned where Jameson’s lair is. This guy won’t be telling me anything.”

She pulled the blanket back over the half-dead’s face. Supposedly a hair and fiber unit was coming from Harrisburg to take a look at him, but she doubted they would find anything. The body was still decaying at an accelerated rate, and by the time they arrived he would probably be nothing more than stinking goo and splintered bones.

“That might explain why Jameson came here so early. The half-dead was supposed to arrive at midnight to get Angus’ answer, but it was closer to six P.M. when they arrived. I think Jameson didn’t expect his servant to last until twelve.”

“You mentioned that before. That Jameson had approached his brother with some kind of offer and that Angus refused it. You didn’t say what the offer was.”

“Well, nobody got around to telling me, either.” Caxton led the Fed toward the motel room. A pair of state troopers stood outside the door, guarding it, while a team of photographers worked inside, documenting the place of Angus Arkeley’s last moments. “Angus intentionally lied to me and didn’t tell me anything about the deal. It sounded like Angus felt this was family business. That he thought he could take Jameson down himself. Come on in, I’ll show you what that got him.”

They squeezed into the small bathroom, ejecting a photographer and a corporal who was in charge of maintaining order on the scene. Caxton pulled back the shower door and let Fetlock look into the tub.

It was empty, or at least there was no body in it. The paramedics had taken Angus away, pumping him full of plasma and trying to keep his heart going until he could reach a hospital. It had been no use—he’d been pronounced dead en route, inside the ambulance. The body was in the hospital’s morgue now under careful supervision. Jameson had the power to bring his brother back from the dead—in the form of a half-dead like the one out in the parking lot. Caxton had no reason to think Jameson would do that—it would only give her a chance to question Angus again—but she wasn’t taking any chances.

“Jameson dragged him in here, mostly to get him away from me. He had about five seconds alone with his brother before I broke in and started shooting. What do you see here?” she asked.

Fetlock turned his head to one side. “I see strawberry jam. About a gallon of it.”

Caxton let herself smile a little. She was starting to dislike the Fed. He kept his cards too close to his vest when they were supposed to be helping each other out. “That’s coagulated blood, of course. Angus’

blood. What I see when I look at this is a vampire who had already fed last night.”

“That’s an interesting conclusion.”

She nodded. “A hungry vampire would have found a way to drink more of the blood. He would have seen every drop as precious. This is just thoughtless waste. Jameson didn’t bring his brother in here to feed off of him, he brought him in here to murder him. Plain and simple.”

“His own brother. Why?”

“Because he said no. You asked me what Jameson offered Angus and I told you I don’t know for sure, but I think I can guess. A vampire only has one thing he can give you, which is his curse. I think Jameson Arkeley offered to make his brother a vampire. He gave him twenty-four hours to think it over, and maybe Angus was even tempted—eternal life must sound pretty good to an old man, even if he knows what price he’s going to have to pay. When Angus said no, Jameson killed him before he could say one more word to me.”

For the first time Fetlock showed a little surprise. His face paled a shade and his eyes opened a little wider. “He wanted to make his brother like he was. If he couldn’t do that he wanted to keep him from talking to you. And he intentionally used a moldering servant so he couldn’t tell you anything.”

“Yeah, that theory looks good,” Caxton said.

“Then he’s afraid of you.”

She actually laughed at that. “Yeah. I’m his biggest threat.” She led Fetlock over to the toilet and showed him the window that both she and Jameson had crawled through. “Out there,” she said, “I put two nine-millimeter rounds in his heart at point-blank range. Then he stood up again, incapacitated me, and fled the scene completely unscathed. Sure, I’m a real threat.” Fear surged through her again and she couldn’t help but shiver. Fetlock must be able to see how terrified she was, she thought. She couldn’t hide it anymore.

Fetlock shrugged. “Of all the people in the world, you’re the one he has the most to fear from. You’re the one who knows him best. You know his strengths, that’s something. And you know more about killing vampires than anyone else alive.”

But not necessarily, she thought, anyone undead. Jameson had taught her everything she knew. Now he was proving he had some secrets he hadn’t shared. “Thanks,” she sneered. “It’s nice to hear that.”

And yet she realized she sort of meant what she’d said. It did help to know someone believed in her.

“Now. How about you tell me why you’re actually here?”

“Alright,” he said, sitting down on the toilet. “I’m here to offer you a star.”

Chapter 13.

“A star,” Caxton said, scowling. “You want to give me a star. What, like a teacher gives a good student a gold star?”

“This one’s silver, actually.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and brought out a lapel pin in the shape of a star inside a circle. She recognized it instantly, of course. Fetlock was wearing one himself. Jameson Arkeley used to wear one, too. Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley of the U.S. Marshals Service. “I’m authorized to temporarily deputize any law enforcement officer I choose into the Service, for as long as I see fit.”

“What, like a sheriff rounding up a posse of cowboys?”

“That’s about exactly right,” he said. “The Service is the oldest branch of the Justice Department. We were originally organized to clean up the frontier. A lot of cowboys were Marshals—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Hickock.”

She shook her head. “I’m not a big fan of Westerns,” she told him.

“Frederick Douglass was one of us, too. Later on President Kennedy had us on the front lines of the civil rights movement and desegregation. We’re the white hats,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

She stared at the pin in his hand but said nothing. What the hell was this about? she wondered.

When she didn’t take the pin immediately, he closed his hand around it but didn’t put it away. “You’ve asked why I came down here. You probably wondered what I was doing at your SSU briefing. I was sent by the director of the Service. He’s very concerned about your investigation and he wants us to help you any way we can. Maybe I should start by giving you some background information, tell you our side of this. Where I come in. At our headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 November, I was asked to gather all of Jameson Arkeley’s old files from our archives. I was supposed to make photocopies of everything we had and send the originals on to you. The online catalog showed there wasn’t much—a few notebooks, a couple of case jackets and his personal dossier. None of it was digital, which meant I had to go down to the stacks in person and find the paper documents by hand. When I attempted to do so I made an unnerving discovery. Every single folder I was looking for was missing.”

He studied her face, but she refused to give anything away. She wouldn’t even shrug, not until she’d heard more.

“My next step, of course, was to find the Service’s librarian and check the circulation records. The files I wanted had all been checked out at the same time and then never returned. They’d been signed for. I bet you can guess whose signature was on the sheet. Jameson Arkeley’s.”

Caxton let herself blink, maybe too rapidly.

“Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? This was all well after he became a vampire. More than a year after he retired from the Service. He would have needed a photo ID to check out those materials. He would have needed ID just to get into the building. I checked with the unit that issues those ID cards and they told me that they’re supposed to destroy the cards once a deputy leaves the Service, but that sometimes people don’t turn in the cards when they clean out their desks. Sometimes they want to keep them as souvenirs of their old jobs, and sometimes they just forget. The ID unit never bothers to check if a given card has been turned in and destroyed or not. Well, they will now, I am told. Somebody down there is probably going to get fired over this.”

“Videotapes,” Caxton said.

Fetlock watched her as if waiting for her to say more, but she figured he knew exactly what she meant.

“You mean, is the entrance to the archive under electronic surveillance? Of course. I watched the footage myself—it’s not actually on videotape, you understand. It’s all in compressed files on our servers. I watched the six hours before and after Arkeley supposedly signed out those files. If you’re wondering if I saw a tall albino with pointed ears and no facial hair, no. Nothing of the sort. He might have sent a half-dead in his place, of course, but the librarian would probably have noticed someone coming in with no skin on his face.”

“A human associate, then.”

Fetlock nodded. “Has to be. That person’s identity remains unknown at this time. When I presented the director with the story I just told you, he made a decision very quickly. We couldn’t take that kind of security failure lightly. Maybe you’re thinking that the theft of a few library materials is no big deal, but it demonstrates something much more frightening. It shows that he knows all our tricks—and how to get around them. Jameson Arkeley conspired to trespass on Service property, in addition to any other crimes he might have committed. He is now considered a rogue deputy of the U.S. Marshals Service.

That means he goes to the top of our Major Cases list—our version of the FBI’s most wanted, I suppose you could say.”

She wondered why the Service really wanted Jameson so badly. Maybe Fetlock was just gunning for promotion and wanted to take credit for closing up some unfinished business. Maybe it was just bad PR.

After all, an ex-deputy turned mass murderer would look very bad for the Service. Or maybe the director was just truly concerned about public safety. Based on her experience with federal cops she kind of doubted that.

Fetlock raised his closed fist and rattled the pin around the way a gambler rattles his dice before he throws them. “While he still hadn’t hurt anybody we kept his name off the website and out of the media, but after what happened here last night I doubt that remains an option. We’re committed to catching him.

We’re going to put every resource we have behind that. We want you to be one of those resources.”

She shook her head. “I already have a job.”

“And you would keep it,” he said. “This is strictly a temporary deputization. It’ll last just until you catch him. Then you’ll go right back to what you were doing before you started fighting vampires.”

She wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore, if she was honest. She’d been putting her life at stake for so long she’d never really considered what she would do if the vampires were driven to extinction.

Maybe she would retire and work as a dog trainer. That would be nice.

Not yet, though. For now, she was a cop.

“What’s in it for me?” she asked. She couldn’t see it. Did he expect her to just jump at the chance?

He leaned back and seemed to think about it before answering. “It would open a lot of doors for you. It would allow you to track a fugitive across state lines, for one thing. Right now if Jameson runs to West Virginia you can’t legally follow him.”

She would anyway, of course, legally or otherwise. But it could be useful to have police powers anywhere in the country. She had often considered what might happen if the vampire moved outside the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If she were him, she would have done it months ago.

“You’d also have access to the resources of our Major Case Fugitive Program.” He sighed and stood up. “Let me show you something you’ve probably already seen.” He took a pen from his pocket and pointed at the warped frame of the bathroom window. “Here.” He indicated a tiny scrap of black cloth stuck in a corner. “Fiber evidence. Maybe something useful, maybe something that could take you to Jameson Arkeley.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I went through there, too. It could have come from my pants. Anyway, I already have our Forensic Services on the way. They do hair and fiber and DNA matches all the time. I’ve yet to see anything useful out of that kind of evidence.”

“And why would you? Your unit operates in a strictly prosecutorial role. They make the case after the subject is in custody. How long does it take them to do a thorough search? Six weeks?”

“About that,” she admitted.

“A lot of bodies could pile up in six weeks. My guys can take those fibers and run them against every national database and have something for you in twenty-four hours. All it takes is a phone call and I can have them here by lunchtime.”

“Vampires don’t have any hair and they don’t wear a lot of clothes. If they even have DNA, nobody’s ever found it.”

Fetlock sighed. “Alright, then what about manpower? You have two full-time people in your SSU, including yourself. You can’t afford to hire anyone else, so you rely on part-time volunteers. With federal money you could hire anyone you want for as long as your investigation lasts.”

She had to admit it was tempting. “What’s the catch?”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “You’ll have to follow Justice Department guidelines. The paperwork is a bear. But you can hire somebody to fill out forms for you.” He turned slightly away from her and looked down into the bathtub again. “Also, you’d be working for me.”

“But I’d still be lead on the investigation,” she said, needing to make it clear.

He smiled. “Of course. Like I said before—you’re the one who’s going to bring him down. I’ll just be there in the background to provide help when you need it. I’m not even a field agent, just a desk jockey.

This is not my kind of thing, to be honest.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

She reached into his cupped hand and took the pin. “Yeah, I’m in. Anything that helps me get him. What do I have to do? Swear an oath on a Bible?”

He beamed at her. “I think we can skip the formalities. I think this is going to be a very profitable relationship, for both of us.” He shook her hand and the two of them walked out of the bathroom and back out to the parking lot. The sun was an orange disk on the horizon, carved into pieces by the black branches of dead trees.

Caxton scratched at her head—her hair felt greasy and thick—and started walking toward her car.

“Alright, Fetlock. Get your fiber people down here as soon as possible,” she said, while pinning the star to the lapel of her jacket. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll turn something up. I’m going back to headquarters to tell my Commissioner about this. He ought to know.”

“Special Deputy,” Fetlock called as she yanked open her door.

At first she didn’t recognize her new title. “What?” she asked.

“Maybe—since I am your boss now—you could refer to me not as ‘Fetlock’ but as ‘Deputy Marshal.’”

Caxton bit her tongue before she could say what she thought of that. She had no great love for the Marshals Service. She’d been a state cop too long to ever really trust the Feds. If all he wanted was a little respect, though, she figured she could give him that much. “Of course,” she said. “Please get your fiber people here as soon as you can, Deputy Marshal. Is that better?”

“It’s good enough for now,” he said.

She was already climbing in her car and driving away.

Chapter 14.

The silver star felt weird on her jacket. She’d never worn a badge before—Pennsylvania state troopers never did. It was part of their oath that their good conduct was all the badge they needed. Well, she supposed she would get used to it.

There were a million things to do. The first order of business was to go take a nap. Her house was too far away, so instead she headed to the state police barracks on Cocoa Avenue in Hershey, the closest place she could think of. The academy was there—the place where she’d taken countless training classes—and she knew the place well enough to feel safe there. The trooper on early-morning desk duty showed her to a ward room with a narrow little cot and a buzzing Coke machine. It wasn’t uncommon for troopers to show up and use the spare bed. Troop T, the turnpike patrol, worked weird hours and very long shifts and were encouraged to keep themselves sharp by taking occasional naps. The desk trooper asked no questions as he sorted out a blanket and foam pillow for her, though he stared openly at her new star. When she refused to follow his gaze he eventually just told her to sleep tight and left her alone.

She switched off the lights, but the Coke machine filled the room with a baleful red glow. She ignored it, lay down on the cot with the pillow still in her arms, and was asleep before she could even think of covering herself with the sheet.

Four hours later her eyelids popped open and she was awake. Her body creaked and moaned when she sat up, protesting that it needed more sleep, but her brain knew better. She glanced down at her watch and saw it was just after noon. Half the day gone and she had accomplished nothing. Well, she’d been upgraded to an honorary Fed, but that didn’t feel real yet, not at all.

She turned in her pillow and her neatly folded sheet and headed back to her car.

There were a lot of people she needed to notify of her new employment status—including the Commissioner of State Police and, more important, Clara. As she drove toward Harrisburg, fighting with herself to stop yawning so much, she reached for her cell phone, only to find that its battery had died sometime during the night. Worrying that she might have missed some important call, she plugged it into her car charger. Instantly the phone chimed at her. She had new messages—a text message and at least one new voice mail message. Exactly as she’d feared.

Caxton looked at the text message first—and dropped the phone. When she picked it up again and stared at the words on the screen, she felt her blood run cold.

’Twas a nice service, Laura.

He was brought to tears.

Caxton bit through a hangnail on the side of her thumb. There was no signature on the message. The phone said it came from an unknown number. She knew exactly who had sent it, though, based just on the archaic phrasing. Justinia Malvern. The ancient vampire couldn’t speak, at least not the last time Caxton had seen her. She was too decrepit to even sit up in her coffin. She had been able to communicate only by tapping out cryptic messages on a computer keyboard. It looked like she had learned how to text as well.

It also looked like she had been watching the ceremony over Jameson’s empty grave. No, Caxton thought, that was impossible. The ceremony had taken place during the day, when Malvern would be dead to the world inside her coffin. Which meant that she must have sent a half-dead to observe it. The whole time she was arguing with Jameson’s kids, some undead freak must have been standing close by, keeping an eye on her.

She wondered how long Jameson and Malvern had been watching her. The idea made her skin crawl. If only to clear her head, she decided to listen to her voice mail. She held down the one key until it automatically dialed her voice mail, then put it on speaker mode. “You have six new messages,” the phone told her. “First new message.”

“Trooper, it’s Glauer. Just checking in. I took Raleigh home, just like you said. Except it’s not exactly what I would call a typical residence. Some kind of weird hospital or halfway house or something. A big old mansion, red brick with ivy all over the front. Really big lawn, and the whole place is surrounded by a ten-foot wall. She said I couldn’t go inside, that it’s for women only. I figured that was okay, so I just dropped her at the gate and confirmed your appointment to come talk to her. I’m headed back to HQ

now. I’m probably going to go home in an hour or two, but I’m on my cell if you need me.”

“Next new message,” the phone said.

“Hey, cutie! It’s me, the much-neglected but still wonderful Clara. I’m at work right now and I can’t really talk. The sheriff and his boys have knocked over another drug lab. No shots fired, thank God, everybody went quietly. I’m taking pictures of all these bags of heroin and stacks of money. I’ll bring you home something nice. Just kidding! Actually I’m calling because I miss you, like, a lot, and I’m going to be done here by one or two and I thought we could have lunch. That way at least I’ll know you’re eating.

I miss you. Did I mention that? I really do. Call me.”

“Next new message.”

“Trooper, this is Glauer. I just got into work and I heard—well, I heard what happened last night. It’s all anyone wants to talk about here at HQ. I was glad to hear you’re alright, and sorry to hear about Angus Arkeley. This is—I guess this is what we’ve been bracing ourselves for the last two months. It’s funny, I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. Between you and me I’m kind of relieved. Listen, I’m sitting here with no direct orders, so unless you need me for something I’m going to get to work. Kenneth Rexroth has been talking to the local police in Mechanicsburg. They left me a message last night saying he had all but confessed to the two homicides—they said he was gloating about those kills. I want to get out there and talk to him myself. I know what you said, that he’s just a wannabe and that he’s not worth our time.

But, Trooper, this is a real bad guy. You did a real good thing putting him away. I’ll talk to you later—I’m on my cell phone if you need me.”

“Next new message.”

“It’s Clara. Again. Call me. Please, call me as soon as you can. I love you.”

“Next new message.”

“Trooper, it’s Glauer again. Things have gone from weird to worse. I arrived in Mechanicsburg about an hour ago. I met with the cops there and asked to talk to Rexroth. They said he was sleeping—he sleeps all day, because he’s supposed to be a vampire. They asked me if I wanted them to wake him up, but I decided I’d get more information out of him if I waited. I thought maybe I’d made the trip for nothing, but the locals had some information for me themselves. It turns out that Kenneth Rexroth is an alias, that the kid’s name is actually Dylan Carboy. He’s nineteen years old and lives with his parents up in Northumberland County, in Mount Carmel. Lives—lived, I guess. The Mount Carmel cops sent a car out there to try to contact the Carboy family and got no response at the door. They popped the lock and went inside and found three dead bodies, all in states of advanced decomposition. The victims were, let’s see, Mark Carboy, father, forty-three years old, Ellen Carboy, mother, thirty-nine, and Jenny Carboy, sister, seventeen. The two parents were killed with shotgun blasts, the same gauge as the shotgun you took off Dylan at the storage facility. The sister was strangled in her bed, and had…Jesus. She had bite marks on her neck. Made by human teeth, not vampire. I don’t think he woke her up first. I really don’t think he did. I don’t want to think he did. They recovered a bunch of stuff from Dylan’s room.

Notebooks full of handwritten journal entries and newspaper clippings. They sent them on to Mechanicsburg, where I got to take a look at them. I asked if I could borrow the notebooks to show you and the locals said that would be fine, as long as I left a receipt in case they need them for the trial.

The kid had plenty to live for, Trooper. He had one prior, for possession of marijuana, but the judge threw it out as long as he promised to go back to school. He was in community college studying to be a chef. You need to see these notebooks, Trooper. I think you should see them. They have your name all over them. I’m going back to Harrisburg now. I have my cell phone if you need me.”

“Next new message.”

“Laura, it’s Clara. I heard about—I heard—the guys here are talking about it, they’re talking about you, just call me. I’m scared. I’m scared for you, so just call me, alright? Call me, damn it.”

“End of new messages. You have forty-five saved messages.”

Caxton flipped the phone shut. Thought about whom to call first. Glauer shouldn’t be working the Rexroth angle. It wasn’t even an angle! Finding and killing Jameson Arkeley was the only thing that mattered. She called his number, but it went straight to voice mail. Typical. For two months while they’d had nothing real to do he was always at her heels, always waiting for his next order. Now that she actually had an order to give him he was out of cell phone range.

“Officer Glauer, this is Caxton. I want you to stop playing around. You’ve heard what happened last night. Well, you’re right, this is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is what we’ve been studying for and working toward, and it’s happening now. I have no doubt that Arkeley will want to kill again, and we need to get him before that happens. So when you get this, start putting together an action item list we can send around to everyone in the SSU.” She glanced down at the star on her lapel. “There are going to be some changes to how we work, but I’ll tell you about them when I see you next. Stay focused, Glauer. Stay with me.”

She snapped the phone shut. Centered herself. The next call required her to be calm and collected. She scrolled down to Clara’s cell number, then pressed SEND.

She got Clara’s voice mail. The phone didn’t even ring once.

“Hi, baby. I got your messages,” she said. “Listen, I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.” He didn’t even want to hurt me, she started to say, then stopped herself. Clara was no idiot. She knew that if a vampire didn’t kill you one night it only meant he was saving you for the next time he got hungry. “Let’s do lunch, okay? Get to Harrisburg, to the HQ, whenever you can and we’ll eat and talk and I’ll tell you everything.

I miss you too.”

She ended the call—and then immediately wanted to call back, to say that she loved Clara, that she wanted nothing more than to go home and be with her alone and quiet and not talk or think about anything, just be in each other’s arms for a while with nothing to do, nowhere she had to be.

She should just call back, she told herself. She really should. She even started reaching for the phone again.

Then it rang on its own. Thinking it might be Glauer or Clara calling her back, she responded immediately. “Trooper Caxton,” she said.

“Good afternoon, Officer,” a woman’s voice said. She didn’t recognize the caller.

“I’m not an officer. I’m a state trooper.” She thought of her new star. “As of today I’m also a special deputy of the U.S. Marshals Service.”

“Really? How very wonderful for you. Why, that’s the same title Jameson had.”

Caxton’s blood went cold hearing the name of the vampire. “Who is this?” she demanded, then regained control of herself. “I’m sorry. May I ask who’s calling?”

“Of course. This is Astarte Arkeley. The widow. I believe you’ve been trying to get my attention.”

Chapter 15.

“Yes! Yes, I have,” Caxton said. “Thank you so much for calling me. Can I ask who gave you my number?” It seemed like everyone had it these days—even Malvern.

“You may,” Astarte told her. “It was my son, Simon. He was quite intent on my contacting you. He seemed to think I could appeal to your mercy and convince you to stop your desperate pursuit of the vampire. I told him I would do no such thing.”

Caxton pulled over on the side of the road. This was important—she needed to focus on the call. “I’m kind of glad to hear that. I need to tell you something, Mrs. Arkeley. It’s sort of upsetting.”

“Then I’m very glad that I am sitting down. Please proceed.”

Caxton rubbed at her forehead. “Last night Jameson killed his own brother. He killed Angus. I was there.”

“How sad. I suppose the vampire attempted to kill you as well. That’s what they do, of course.”

“Actually—” Caxton stopped herself. She knew almost nothing about Astarte. She had no idea how far she could trust her. Deciding to err on the side of full disclosure, she said, “Actually he didn’t. I tried to kill him.”

“Which is what you’re supposed to do.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. I tried to kill him, but I couldn’t. He was stronger than I expected. Stronger than any vampire I’ve ever seen. He could have killed me easily, with just his bad hand, but he didn’t. He said he owed me something. You don’t have any idea what that might be, do you?”

“I couldn’t begin to imagine.”

“Okay. Alright. Listen. I’d really like to come meet you. Today if possible. I’d like to sit down and ask you some questions about Jameson and the last time you saw him. Is that something we can do?”

“I think not,” Astarte told her.

“This is very important, ma’am. A man has already been killed and others are sure to follow. I wouldn’t ask, not in your time of grief, if I didn’t think it would help keep people safe.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Yet I find I don’t have any compelling interest in speaking with you further. I only called today out of a sense of courtesy.”

“Your husband is killing people,” Caxton said, trying not to shout.

“Allow me to correct you on that misapprehension. I doubt very much that you are initiated into the secret doctrine of theosophy, so I will attempt to explain what I mean. The murderous creature you are attempting to apprehend is not my husband. When he took his own life, my husband ceased to exist in this plane. His soul was lost. As a result he’s certain to regress in his path and be reincarnated as an insect or, if he is lucky, some variety of plant. It’s a shame, as I was hoping the two of us could evolve together, but that’s impossible now. His body may continue to move and to operate after a manner, but it is not Jameson, nor any part of the true being once called Jameson. Do you understand this?”

Caxton slapped the steering wheel. “No!”

“I was afraid you would not. In time perhaps you will learn to look within. Now I’m afraid I must go. As we will not be talking again, I wish to thank you.”

“Thank me? For what?”

“For making the last year of Jameson’s life more comfortable. The physical pleasure you gave him must have been some kind of solace. I’m sure you received something from your couplings as well, of course.

He was an experienced and passionate lover, as I remember.”

Caxton put a hand over her mouth to stifle an abrupt laugh. “You think I was sleeping with him? Oh, come on.”

“It’s an age-old story, Officer. When you put a man and a woman together in a perilous situation they will be drawn together, as irresistibly as magnets. There’s really no need to pretend that it was otherwise, dear. Honestly, I forgive you both. Good day.”

The phone rattled, an old-fashioned sound as if an antique handset were being placed on its receiver.

“Magnets! Yeah, maybe, except this magnet is a fucking lesbian,” Caxton howled, as if Astarte could still hear her. She slammed the steering wheel with the palm of her hand again and then, when she was finished fuming, got the car back on the road.

Astarte wouldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t help her. Well, she thought, at least she and Clara would have something to laugh about over lunch. She couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had shared a real laugh.

She hurried back to Harrisburg, to the PSP headquarters, and parked in the lot behind the building. A couple of troopers were having lunch at a picnic table by the rear door—men with close-shaved heads wearing fleece-collared standard-issue jackets, their Smokey Bear hats sitting next to them on the benches. They were eating big hoagies full of ham and provolone cheese, and Caxton’s mouth started watering when she saw them. She hadn’t eaten anything all day, and though her morning nap had thrown off her sense of time it couldn’t convince her stomach she wasn’t hungry.

“Trooper,” one of the men said when they caught sight of her. He stood up, though he didn’t salute. “We heard about last night, and we just wanted to—”

“I’m okay, thanks,” Caxton said, barely slowing down. She pushed open the swinging doors and went inside, into a wave of furnace-heated air. She hadn’t realized how cold it was outside until she came in.

Her hands suddenly felt like icy, bony claws, so she rubbed them together until they started to hurt.

Down in the basement she saw Glauer organizing the library in the briefing room—he was probably desperate for something to do. She waved at him, then headed into her own office at the end of the hall.

It was a cramped little space, its cinder-block walls painted glaring white, but the paint had chipped, revealing a sickly beige underneath. They had the same color and texture as rice crackers. Heavily insulated pipes ran across the ceiling and down one wall. Ever since autumn had turned to winter sometimes they dripped on her desk and even, alarmingly, on the monitor of her computer. The only thing on the walls was the certificate she’d received when she graduated from the academy, making her an official state trooper. Maybe the Feds would give her one for her ascension to special deputy, she thought.

She had just sat down at her desk and started paging through her email when a knock came on the door.

She stared at the screen, at a very long email from the U.S. Marshals Service describing what kind of health insurance she was now eligible for, and called out, “Come in, Glauer.”

The hands that grasped her shoulders from behind were female, though, with small, thin fingers. They dug into the muscles there, gouging away at the tight knots of her neck.

Caxton let her head fall forward and tried to enjoy the massage. “You’re fantastic,” she said. “Nothing has ever felt this good.”

Clara laughed, then grabbed her chin and lifted her head for a deep, soulful kiss. “Invite me to lunch more often and maybe you’ll feel something even better.” The smaller woman’s face clouded then. “If you called me every day at a specific time, just to let me know you were alright—”

“—then you would just worry more than you do now if I was late making the call,” Laura replied, pulling her partner down onto her lap. She frowned. “It was pretty bad. I’m sure you heard all the gory details.

But I know what I’m doing.”

“What’s this?” Clara asked.

Laura looked down and saw her running one thumb over the badge on her lapel.

“I’m a special deputy now,” she said. “I’m working for the Marshals Service. Apparently that makes me an honorary cowgirl.”

“A special deputy. Just like he was.”

Laura shook her head. “It’s just a formality, really. It gives me federal jurisdiction and apparently I can spend taxpayer money on the investigation. It’s a tool. Something to help me do this job.”

“First he put you in danger. He made you his vampire bait. Then he made you a badass, a real vampire killer. Now you’re turning into him for real. Maybe you’ll end up just like he did. Willing to do anything to keep fighting. Willing to do horrible things.”

“No, no, no,” Laura said, pulling Clara into a tight hug, burying her face in her girlfriend’s neck. “It’s not like that.” But it was, of course. She had to become more like Jameson every day. She had to—the alternative was getting killed in some stupid way or, worse, far worse, letting the vampires get away.

“Let’s just go to lunch. It’s already two o’clock.” Clara pulled away and stood up. She leaned against the door of the office, not even looking at Laura. “Is there someplace you want to go to? What about that Greek place?”

Laura bit her lower lip. She got the message that Clara was sending—the conversation was over. They would talk about nothing but gossip and trivia at lunch and not address any of their real problems. She could play that game, too. “That place is so expensive, though.”

“Considering how often you take me to lunch, we can afford it.”

Laura stood up and started putting her more lethal gear away in a cupboard by her desk—her handgun, her pepper spray, her collapsible ASP baton. All she needed for lunch was her wallet and her cell phone.

“Actually,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. About a way we could have lunch together almost every day.”

She followed Clara out into the hallway. Clara turned to look at her with mistrusting eyes but half a smile.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Laura began, but just then Glauer came running up the hall. “You need to see these,” he insisted, and shoved a heavy plastic bag into her arms, so forcefully that he nearly shoved her backwards. She looked down at the bag and saw it contained three spiral-bound notebooks, the top one stained with a bloom of dried blood.

Chapter 16.

“Jesus, Glauer. I thought I told you to drop this.” Caxton had humored him enough to take the bag into the briefing room and spread its contents over some of the desks. One of the notebooks literally came apart in her hands and turned into a pile of random sheets of paper. The bloodstained one proved hard to open—the blood had soaked right through the pages, and each time she turned to a new leaf the notebook would creak and rip and spill shiny maroon powder down her pantleg. She quickly put that notebook down and took up the one that was in the best shape. Rexroth—or Carboy, that was his real name—had decorated its cover with a crude picture showing a jack-o’-lantern with vicious fangs, much like a vampire’s. “I guess this was the Halloween issue,” Caxton said, flipping open the cover.

The next page contained only six words, but they were inscribed in giant jagged letters, outlined and embellished liberally. They’d been written in ballpoint pen, and Carboy had pressed down so hard that he’d torn the paper in places. The message was simple enough: Caxton grunted. She didn’t know how to react to that. So she turned to the next page. This proved to be some kind of journal entry, written in a cramped, sloping hand she could barely make out. The corners of the page were decorated with crude line drawings of vampires. One of them had baby-sized legs sticking out of its mouth. She studied the text and quickly found her name, repeated several times, usually in the middle of an elaborate threat. “Laura Caxton is going to, to,” she read. “What’s this? Oh, I’m going to pay. I’m also, apparently, going to bleed—it’s repeated three times—and then he’s going to dance in my blood wearing his favorite pair of boots. He’s going to chop me into tiny bits, and when the kids come by on Halloween he’s going to give pieces of me away as treats. Apparently I deserve this because of what I did to Kevin Scapegrace. Interesting.”

“You remember that name?” Glauer asked. “Scapegrace?”

“Yeah. Of course I do. Teenaged vampire.” She shrugged. “He went down as quick as the rest of them.”

Her bravado couldn’t quite keep her from drawing her shoulders in closer to her body and wrapping her arms around her chest. Scapegrace had captured her and tortured her before he died. She didn’t like to think about it.

“I think you should read the rest,” Glauer insisted. “I haven’t had a chance to go through it all myself, but—”

“No,” she said.

“What do you mean? This doesn’t worry you?” he asked, turning the page to show her a picture of a state trooper hanging from a noose, her Smokey Bear hat still perched on her head even though her face had turned blue and her tongue hung out of her mouth. “This doesn’t bother you?”

“It would bother me a lot more if Carboy wasn’t already in custody,” she admitted. “But he is. So—so what? According to this I was supposed to die by Halloween, and that was over a month ago. He was late even by his own schedule.” She grabbed the cop’s arm. “Listen. I appreciate your concern. But Dylan Carboy was just a lonely kid with nothing better to do than scribble threats in a journal and fantasize about being a vampire. He probably got my name out of the newspaper and just fixated on it.

It’s truly sad that nobody stopped him before he got as far as he did, but now he’s going to jail, probably for the rest of his life, and I’m safe.” She dropped the notebook on one of the desks. “Now put this all back together and take it back to Mechanicsburg.”

Glauer shook his head. “I think that would be a mistake. There’s something here. I can feel it. Just let me take one more look,” he pleaded.

Caxton rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you don’t have a lot of time to waste here. After last night things are going to get very busy, very fast. In fact, you’d better come to lunch with us—we have a lot to talk about.”

Clara had been waiting outside the briefing room the whole time. She looked slightly confused when she heard that Glauer was going to join them, but she said she didn’t mind at all. She and the giant cop had always gotten along, though they rarely saw each other.

Caxton and Glauer took her Mazda—Clara had come in her own car—and drove out to the Greek place, which was only a few minutes away. Over dolmades and feta she told the two of them about Fetlock and her battlefield promotion.

“They can just do that? Wave a wand and, poof, you’re a Fed?” Glauer asked. “I thought you had to take all kinds of tests and then go through their academy and everything.” Back when Caxton had formed the SSU she had tried to get Glauer made into an instant state trooper and been told the process was much more complicated. Technically he was still on the payroll of the Gettysburg Borough Police Department, though the PSP reimbursed Gettysburg for his salary and he hadn’t checked in with his chief in weeks.

“Apparently the Marshals do it differently. It’s just like a sheriff riding into town and deputizing the local gunslingers to take down the black hats. It’s just as temporary, too. For now, though, it makes me the national go-to person for all vampire cases, and it gives me some police powers I never thought I’d have.”

“Okay,” Glauer said, “but what does it mean for us?”

“Well, first things first. We’re both getting a big raise.” The three of them smiled at that. “It also means I can finally, officially hire you on.” She reached across the table and shook his hand. “Welcome aboard.

Fetlock tells me I can hire anyone I want, including somebody to do all our paperwork.”

“That’ll be a relief,” Glauer laughed. He picked up his large Diet Coke and sipped thirstily at it. “You’re probably going to want to bring in some other people, too, right? I can recommend some guys we should have with us. Johnson, from Erie—he used to be a linebacker in high school, he’s one tough son of a gun.” Glauer shifted his own massive bulk around on the chair—he barely fit in it. “Then there’s Eddie Davis, from Troop K. I’ve never seen anybody who could drive like that guy, he could be your automobile specialist, and—”

“Actually,” Caxton said, “I kind of like having most of our people just be on call. I want to build a core team of just a few people. I was thinking three of us. You, me, and her,” she said, grabbing Clara’s wrist.

Clara had been tearing her paper napkin into a pile of tiny pieces. “Bullshit,” she said.

Caxton frowned. “What do you mean?”

Clara looked to Glauer for support. “You’re spouting bullshit. What do you mean, me? I’m not part of your team.”

“I’d like you to be, though,” Caxton said.

“To do what? Every time I see a vampire I can scream, so you know it’s nearby? Or maybe I can startle them with the flashbulb of my camera. That’s what I do, Laura. I take pictures of crime scenes and dead bodies and gross stuff. I’m very good at it, but I don’t think you need a photographer in your core team.”

“You could be my forensics guy. Like on CSI: Miami, ” Caxton said. “You could do all my hair and fiber and DNA research.” The idea had come to her when Fetlock had mentioned his own forensics team.

Clara just laughed. “Huh? You do realize those guys go to school for that. They’re scientists. They train for years and years and read scientific journals and go to conferences to talk to other eggheads about just how many legs a certain species of cockroach has. I went to Slippery Rock for art photography, and I don’t even use anything I learned.”

Caxton shook her head. “I don’t expect you to just pick it all up by reading a couple of websites about forensics. But you can coordinate with the people the Marshals Service uses. You can manage them—you know a lot more about vampires than they do, by now, so you can tell them what to look for, or how to interpret what they find.”

“There are so many people better qualified than me,” Clara protested. “Why on earth would you pick me for this?”

“You said we weren’t spending enough time together,” Caxton admitted. “You said I spent all my time at work and never got to see you at home. Well, this way we’d both be at work all the time. We could see each other a lot.”

Clara shook her head in disbelief.

“Well?” Caxton asked. “Are you going to give me an answer?”

“No!” Clara said. “At least—not right away.”

Chapter 17.

They polished off a good-sized moussaka without saying much more. Clara excused herself before the baklava arrived, saying she had to get back to work. “That goes for us, too,” Caxton told Glauer. “Come on. We can take dessert to go.”

The two of them headed back to HQ together, Caxton enumerating the things they had to get done as she drove. “We have to try to make some kind of ID on the half-dead from the motel. There’s not a lot to work with, but maybe we can get some idea of what he looked like and run it against the missing persons list. Who knows, maybe we’ll turn up a match. Then there’s the field out behind the motel—I had it searched once, but maybe we missed something in the dark. Get some people over there to have a look around. When you get a chance we need to contact the Feds and see if they have a file on Angus Arkeley—he said he had some trouble with the law a while back. He wasn’t clear on whether he’d actually been processed or convicted, but there might be something there. Oh, and I put a guard on his body, but they need to be relieved, so find somebody who can go over to the morgue and take care of that. I’m going to try to get in touch with his family and get permission to have him cremated as soon as he’s been autopsied.” It was standard practice to cremate the remains of vampire victims. Otherwise the vampire could call them up as half-deads whenever he chose.

By the time they got back to the HQ building it was already four o’clock. The sun was starting to set and pink clouds streaked the sky. Stepping out of her car, Caxton studied the horizon as if there were some clue there. Night was falling, which meant Jameson Arkeley would be active again. He had killed at least twice so far. Would he kill again tonight? she wondered.

All vampires started as people with individual personalities, with moral codes all their own. Eventually they ended up all the same. How long had Jameson lasted before he killed his first victim? Probably longer than most. He had fought it, she was sure, with every fiber of his being. He must have spent night after night curled around himself in his lair, desperate to go outside, to hunt, but knowing what it would make him.

Then again—maybe he had given in early. Maybe he had known it was inevitable, and decided it wasn’t worth torturing himself just so a few humans could live another day. Vampires saw death—human death—through a very different lens than she did. For vampires, human beings were simply prey. Game animals to be culled as needed. Angus had been given the option of becoming one of the predators.

When he refused that gift, Jameson must have seen death as the next best thing for his brother.

She shivered uncontrollably.

“You okay, Caxton?” Glauer asked.

She blinked her eyes and looked away from the sunset. Phosphor afterimages glared behind her eyelids.

“I’m fine. Let’s get inside.”

Down in the basement she booted up her computer and started composing her report of the previous night’s events. When she’d worked with Arkeley, when they took down Malvern’s brood, and later when she’d defended Gettysburg during the massacre, she had never worried so much about paperwork.

Maybe Jameson had filed reports every night, but she’d been mostly concerned with staying alive. Now that she was head of the SSU she wasn’t able to avoid it anymore. The Commissioner of State Police demanded constant updates on her investigation and forms filled out every time she discharged her weapon. Every time she discovered a body she had to fill out a Non-Traffic Death Investigation Report, a much more complicated form than the traffic fatality reports she’d filled out as a highway patrol officer.

It took her hours every day to type up all the necessary official files, and hours more to create files for the SSU database. She’d actually taken a touch-typing course at the academy in Hershey just to speed things up, but still much of her day was filled up with bureaucratic nonsense.

At five o’clock, when people with normal jobs finished their days (or so she believed, having never held a normal job herself), she sat back in her chair and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She was just getting started.

When Fetlock came up behind her and cleared his throat she jumped and banged her knees against the underside of her desk.

“Deputy Marshal,” she said, remembering how she was supposed to greet him. “I was just writing up a report.”

He nodded and came to lean against the edge of her desk. “I’ll want a copy, of course. Send it to my email.” He stuck a business card between two rows of keys on her keyboard. “In fact, send me every document you create from now on. Just so the Marshals Service has a record.”

“Yeah, of course,” she said. “So I have Officer Glauer—I think you met him at the SSU

briefing—Officer Glauer is organizing the mopping up at the motel crime scene. He’ll head over there tomorrow and see what we missed in the dark. I haven’t heard yet from your forensics people—”

“They’ve come and gone already, Special Deputy,” Fetlock said. “They’ll have something for you tomorrow.”

Caxton nodded. “In the meantime I have a guard on Angus’ body and—”

“Fine,” he said.

She frowned, not understanding. “You don’t want to hear this?”

“Not particularly. Like we said, it’s your investigation. I didn’t come by to check up on you, if that’s what you think.” He smiled warmly down at her. “I may do things a little differently than other people you’ve worked for. A little more hands-off. Actually, I just came down to give you this.”

He handed her a manila envelope with her name on it. She opened it, hoping he might have brought her something useful—a description, perhaps, of the man who had stolen all of Jameson’s files from the USMS archives. Instead she found a thick brochure, printed cheaply on newsprint. It was a federal government employee manual, laying out among other things the nature of her employment as an independent contractor and information on civil servant pay grades.

“Oh. Thanks,” she said.

“You need to sign the last page and fax it to me as soon as you get a chance.”

She nodded. Then she started to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. He smiled at her as if he didn’t understand. “I’m sorry,” she said, clutching her lips. “It’s just that…” She shook her head, unable to go on. “Less than twenty-four hours ago I was fighting for my life. Now I’m supposed to be thinking about pension plans.”

He stood up from the desk and shot the cuffs of his suit. He looked mildly annoyed.

“I am sorry,” she said, getting control of herself. “I’ll make this a priority. Now, was there anything else—” She stopped as her cell phone started ringing. She looked up at him and he shrugged.

She took the phone out of her pocket and saw the incoming call was from Astarte Arkeley. This ought to be good, she thought. Maybe the old bat wanted to accuse her of adultery again.

She flipped the phone open. “Hello, ma’am.”

Astarte’s voice on the other end was very tinny and distorted by heavy static. She caught very little of what the woman said. “—Deputy, I—assistance—most serious—”

Caxton swore under her breath. She’d forgotten what lousy reception she got down in the basement.

“Hold on, ma’am. I can’t really hear you. Give me a second and I’ll try to move to a better location.”

Mouthing I’m sorry at Fetlock, she stepped out of her office and headed for the stairs. Astarte kept talking. Maybe she hadn’t heard what Caxton said.

“—really quite—wouldn’t have, if not—”

In the stairwell she lost another bar of the signal, so she rushed up the stairs two at a time. At the top she pushed open the door and stepped into the main lobby of the headquarters building. Troopers in various states of uniform were congregating there around the duty sergeant’s desk, probably receiving their orders for the night.

Caxton pushed through them and out the front door into a flurry of snow and darkness. Four bars. Good.

“Ma’am, can you repeat all that?” Caxton said. “I’m very sorry about the bad connection.”

“There’s no time,” Astarte said. Her voice sounded strained, but it wasn’t the phone. “I told you already—he’s here!”

Chapter 18.

“Mrs. Arkeley, please, stay on the line,” Caxton said, then took the phone away from her face. She rushed back inside the HQ building and pointed at the first trooper she saw. “You—get Officer Glauer up here. He’s in the basement.” She pointed at another and said, “You, call the local cop shop in Bellefonte and tell them there’s an emergency.” She checked her phone and gave them Astarte’s number so they could do a reverse look-up and get the address. She hated to send local cops into a vampire scene—they wouldn’t be ready for what they found—but she had no choice. It would take her more than an hour to get there herself, even if she sped recklessly the whole way. Astarte’s life might hang on a balance of minutes.

“Ma’am, Astarte, are you still there?” she asked, lifting the phone to her face again.

“Yes, dear. Momentarily. He’s outside the house right now.” Caxton heard a distant chiming sound. “Ah!

He just broke a window in the kitchen, I believe. You’re not going to make it in time, are you?”

“I have people on the way. If he sees the police coming he’ll probably scare off out of there,” Caxton said, trying to make herself sound as if she believed it. “I’m coming as fast as I can. Lock yourself in somewhere, if you can—anything to slow him down.”

“Then you think he was serious, when he said my only other option was death? Yes, Laura, I can hear it in your voice. It’s odd. I’d always assumed that when my time came I would greet the Reaper with arms wide open.”

“Get somewhere safe, as safe as you can,” Caxton said. “I’m coming!”

Glauer came thumping up the stairs and rushed out into the lobby. He didn’t need to be told what was going on—when Caxton beckoned him and ran out into the parking lot he just followed.

A thin layer of powdery snow had covered her Mazda when she reached it. She didn’t have time to brush it off. Climbing inside, she grabbed the blue flasher she kept for emergencies and clamped it on the roof of the car, then plugged it into the cigarette lighter. She didn’t have a siren built into the car, but the light would at least keep them from getting pulled over on the way. She waited for Glauer to cram himself into the small passenger seat, then slammed on the accelerator and tore out of the parking lot and shot out toward the highway. The windshield wipers made short work of the snow in front of her, but new drifts kept piling up on the hood. At the on ramp she fought her way through the midst of the rush-hour traffic—for once people actually got out of the way when they saw the flasher—and raced up the fast lane, heading northeast.

“It’s Jameson’s wife. His widow. His whatever,” Caxton explained. Glauer hadn’t asked, but she figured he must be wondering where they were going in such an all-fired hurry. “She’s under attack.” She risked a glance over at him. He sat patiently looking straight ahead, his hands on the dashboard to brace himself every time she stepped on the brake. “From what I heard she hasn’t got a lot of time.”

Glauer took a look at the speedometer. “We’ll make it,” he promised, though he must know as well as she did that he was just being optimistic.

She tossed her cell phone to him. “Coordinate with the locals. Bellefonte can’t have much of a police force; it’s a tiny little place. Isn’t there a state police barracks out there, though?”

He flipped open the phone. “Yeah. At Rockview Station. That’s just a couple miles from town.” He made the calls, got people moving. Before she was halfway to Bellefonte he had three patrol cars headed for the scene, and two more cars with a pair of local cops each already parked out front. “There’s no answer at the door. They want authorization to force entry. Do I send them in?” he asked.

They’ll probably get killed if they do, she thought. Astarte would definitely get killed if they didn’t.

“Yeah,” she said. “But tell them—tell them to be careful. Tell them to treat this like they’re breaching a survivalist compound full of gun nuts. Tell them not to get themselves killed if they can help it.”

Confirmation came back shortly that the troopers were leading an assault on the house, with the locals covering their backs. It would be long tense minutes before they heard anything more, but Caxton grabbed the phone out of Glauer’s hand and held it against the steering wheel, ready to answer the moment anyone called.

She tried to focus on her driving. The road conditions weren’t great—lots of thin crystalline snow blowing across the road, patches of black ice every time she crossed a bridge or a sketchy piece of highway. The Mazda wasn’t built for that kind of driving to begin with, and at her speed—eighty or better—it would slip and slide the second she let up a little on her grip on the wheel. She had to cut her speed drastically as she tore through State College. The road went right through the university town and she couldn’t risk hitting any students. Once she was past the Nittany Mall, though, she pushed the car back up to its limit.

The phone rang in her hand and she nearly lost control. No time for the hands-free unit, she decided, and pushed it up against her ear, holding it there with her shoulder. “Go ahead,” she nearly screamed.

“Trooper?” the voice on the other end asked, sounding slightly surprised. “Is that you?” The voice was deep and rasping and she didn’t recognize it at first.

“Special Deputy, actually. What’s going on over there?”

“They made you a Special Deputy. That’s fascinating. I spent my adult life thinking I was unique, that no one else could fulfill my special purpose. Yet practically the moment I was gone, destiny just plugged someone else into the empty socket. Have we come full circle?”

“Oh, fuck,” Caxton said. Her foot eased off the accelerator. She was suddenly too scared to drive as fast as she’d been going. “Jameson. It’s you, isn’t it?”

“That’s a question for the philosophers. My wife seemed to think not.”

Caxton swallowed thickly. If it was Jameson on the phone, if he had somehow acquired the phone belonging to the lead of the state trooper team, that meant a lot of very bad things were also true. “You came for Astarte. You offered her the same choice you gave Angus, didn’t you? Become like you, or die. And she also refused.”

“It’s probably best if you stay away from my family for a while, Special Deputy. You’re on your way here right now, I presume. It would be better if you just turned around and went home. Of course, we both know you won’t.”

“When I get there will you be waiting for me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be there or not. The last time they’d met she’d put two nine-millimeter slugs in his heart and it hadn’t done the trick. Would three work? Would the whole clip of fifteen in her Beretta be enough?

“I’m going to do my level best not to kill you yet, Special Deputy. I have a reason to want to keep you alive. But if you put yourself in harm’s way I can’t be held responsible anymore for your safety.”

“Stay there. I’m very close now,” she said, her pulse pounding in her temples. “Stay there and we can finish what we started. You didn’t want to become this monster, Jameson. Do you remember that? You accepted the curse to do one last good deed. To be a hero one more time. You’ve undone all that now, but it doesn’t have to go any further. We can still salvage something of your reputation.”

She was talking to dead air. The phone beeped at her twice, telling her the connection had been terminated.

She dropped the phone and screamed, pounding against the steering wheel with her hands. Glauer reached over to take the wheel away from her, but she shook herself violently and said, “Don’t. I’m alright.”

She wasn’t, of course. Not in the slightest. But she could still drive.

Chapter 19.

The roads were nearly empty as they tore into Bellefonte, racing up Water Street where it followed Spring Creek. By moonlight, sprinkled with snow, the town was eerily beautiful. Caxton had driven past the built-up section of riverbank at the western end of town a thousand times and admired the gazebo and the parks there, but never before had it looked so spectral, so haunting.

Stop that, she told herself. She was letting the night’s events get to her. She yanked out the cord of the blue flasher as she turned down a side road, cutting her speed to a bare crawl. “There’s a shotgun in the trunk,” she told Glauer.

“I thought this was your personal car,” he said.

She shrugged. “The last two months have been all business. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells there too. You grab those the second I stop the car, then follow my lead. This is not going to be fun.”

“Got it,” he said.

She took them down a street lined with massive trees that sheltered Victorian houses topped with mansard roofs and elaborate gables. Astarte’s house wasn’t hard to find. She just looked for the one with all the police cars parked out front.

Caxton stopped the Mazda well back, parking in the middle of the street in case she needed to make a quick getaway—or in case anyone else tried the same thing. Her car would block the main route back to the highway. It was a trick she’d learned in a course on tactical parking at the academy. She killed her lights and wrestled her Beretta out of its holster before she set a foot on the pavement. She didn’t watch Glauer get out of the car—her eyes were fixed on the street before the house—but she could hear him moving to the trunk. She could count on him, she knew. It was why they worked so well together. He always did exactly what she wanted.

Keeping her weapon low but ready, she moved quickly to the nearest cop car—one of the local units. Its flashers cycled wildly on its roof and its radio crackled with occasional calls from the Bellefonte dispatcher, but the seats were all empty, front and back. She moved to the next car, the other local patrol cruiser, and heard that its engine was still running. It was as empty as the first one, but there was blood on the windshield. The inside of the windshield.

The Bellefonte cops hadn’t even had a chance to get out of their car before Jameson was on them like a cat on a flock of pigeons. She bit her lip and tried not to think about the fact that she had authorized their approach. She was directly responsible for whatever had happened to them, but she could worry about that later.

Farther up the street the three state police cars made a roadblock across the eastern end of the street.

Their flashers and engines were off, but she could see right away they were empty too. She didn’t see any bodies anywhere, nor any pieces of bodies. There was some more blood on the snow that covered Astarte’s lawn, but not enough of it to account for all the cops. There had been three state troopers and four local cops on the assault—seven men and no sign of any of them.

It wasn’t like a vampire to clean up his own mess. She considered the fact that some of them might still be alive. If so she had to move fast. Beckoning to Glauer with a hand signal, she rushed up the steps of Astarte’s porch and threw herself against the green clapboard wall just to the left side of the door. There was a plaque there of polished brass, showing the outline of a hand crisscrossed with curving lines.

Underneath was written:

MADAME ASTARTE

READINGS AND ADVICE

BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

Glauer came thundering up the steps to take up position on the right side of the door. He had the shotgun cradled in his arms, his pockets stuffed full of extra shells.

“There’s probably a back door. We do this just like in Mechanicsburg, okay?” she whispered. His shotgun would be little use against Jameson, but she doubted the vampire would rush right into its firing cone either. “You take the back, and don’t let anybody out. If I give the signal you come inside fast, loaded for bear.”

“What’s the signal?” he asked.

“If I start screaming, that’s the signal,” she told him.

He nodded and ducked around the side of the porch, his boots clomping on the boards. When she couldn’t hear his footfalls anymore she kicked open the door.

It was unlocked—the state troopers had already breached it for her—and she was inside in less time than it took for her heart to beat twice.

A single lamp at the far end of the room bathed the front hall in an orange light. It dazzled her eyes for a moment and she turned away to let her pupils adjust. It was warm inside, warm enough to make her uncomfortable in her winter coat. When she could see clearly again she looked around and saw a Persian carpet on the floor and overstuffed armchairs around a round wooden table. It looked like the perfect setup for a séance. To her left a grand staircase curled up toward a second-floor gallery. On the wall before her hung a huge tapestry, black with gold embroidery showing a snake swallowing its own tail.

Inscribed in the circle the snake made were the words WE SHALL ALL RETURN.

Caxton looked up the stairs. She could almost imagine Astarte making a stately entrance down the wooden steps, wearing a dowdy old dress, her hair up in a loose bun. It was how she had imagined the woman when they spoke on the phone, though honestly, she had no idea what Jameson’s widow actually looked like.

Doors led off the foyer in three directions, but they were all closed. Jameson could be hiding behind any of them, she knew. Forcing herself to breathe calmly, she tried to pay attention to the hairs on the back of her arms, to the sensitive skin behind her ears. If he was close she would feel him, feel the aura of wrongness that vampires exuded. She made herself wait for five seconds before she decided she couldn’t feel a thing.

Then she heard something and nearly jumped out of her skin. It was a very soft sound, a faint pattering, reminding her of the sound snow made when it fell. It came from the base of the stairs. Caxton moved closer, but the shadows cast by the single lamp made it impossible for her to see anything there. She reached into her pocket and took out her Mag-Lite. Switching it on, she played its beam across the bottom three steps.

The sound came again. She twitched her light to the left and saw where it was coming from. A thin trickle of blood was dripping down the steps, dropping gently on each riser. She lifted the light higher and followed the trail of blood all the way up to the landing above.

Trying to move quietly, trying not to breathe too raggedly, she started up the stairs, keeping her feet on the woven runner that lined each step. Keeping her flashlight handy, she brought her gun up to the level of her shoulders, ready to shoot anything that popped its head over the banister. When she reached the landing she turned left, then right, covering both ends of the gallery, but nothing showed itself.

The blood trail started under a doorway directly ahead of her. It gleamed in electric light that shone around the edge of the door, which stood slightly ajar. Caxton tapped the door gently with the back end of her Mag-Lite and it swung easily back and away from her, revealing the room beyond.

The light inside wasn’t much brighter than the single lamp down in the foyer. It showed her enough, though: A narrow room almost filled by a large four-poster bed and a chest of drawers. A tall stand that looked like a perch for a parrot or some other kind of bird, currently unoccupied. Framed black-and-white photographs hung on the walls, but Caxton didn’t bother to examine their subjects.

Lying on the bed was a woman about forty-five years old. She was dressed smartly in a maroon mid-length skirt and a black silk blouse. Her chin-length hair was almost pure silver, save for a single streak of coal black that curled around her very pale cheek. Her eyes stared at the ceiling, but they didn’t see anything. The blood that pooled on the floor and ran out onto the landing came from her right arm, which hung down from the side of the bed so the curled fingers almost brushed the rug.

Her wrist had been torn open right to the artery. As bad as the wound was, considering what vampiric teeth were capable of the wound looked almost gentle, as if Jameson had retained enough humanity to want to make his wife’s passing as painless as he could. Caxton checked the woman for a pulse and found none, as she had expected. He had always been thorough. There was no doubt in Caxton’s mind that this was Astarte, and that her husband had been her murderer.

Caxton closed her eyes and lowered her weapon. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to make it here in time.”

Foolish, she knew, talking to a corpse. Yet the feeling that she had failed here, that the woman’s death was her fault, could not be shaken.

She turned to go. There were plenty of other rooms to be searched, and maybe some actual evidence to be turned up. She took a step out of the room and then another toward the stairs. Below her, in the foyer, the single burning lamp was smashed just then and darkness closed on the first floor like a curtain being drawn. Caxton heard someone moving down there, clumsily bouncing off the furniture, and someone else hiss in disgust. Two people, at least—and she didn’t think either of them was Glauer.

Chapter 20.

Caxton stepped backward into the room where she’d found Astarte’s body. She thought about closing the door behind her, but the only light in the house was coming from the doorway. If she closed it, anyone downstairs would know she was there when the light was cut off. Instead she crouched on the far side of the bed, where anyone passing by the open door wouldn’t be able to see her.

There was one problem with that, of course. There was no other way out of the room. She had got herself stuck in a corner with nowhere to go. Assuming the people downstairs intended her harm—a safe assumption, if there ever was one—they could come for her any time they liked and she would be hard-pressed to defend herself with her back up against the wall.

Jameson had taught her better than that. He’d taught her more than once not to get herself into exactly that situation. She needed to move. She needed to think straight. Fear was clogging up her brain. She needed to shake it out, to start being smart again.

What did she know? There were multiple persons inside the house with her. She was pretty sure none of them were vampires. The hair on her arms was lying flat and she had no sense at all of vampiric corruption nearby. That meant the intruders were probably half-deads. She could handle a couple of them without too much trouble. She’d learned a lot from Jameson about how to fight dirty and keep her opponents guessing. This wasn’t going to be an easy fight, though. The intruders had darkened the house and presumably they were lying in wait for her, ready to ambush her as soon as she showed herself. She had no idea how many of them there were, either. A lone half-dead was weak and slow, but in groups the murderous bastards could be dangerous.

She thought about her options. She could rush down the stairs, make a break for the front door. Once through she could get to her car and escape. That was assuming they weren’t waiting by the door, and that they hadn’t left any traps for her along the way. It would be very stupid to make that assumption.

A far better plan would be to signal Glauer and have him come rushing in with a shotgun blast to scare the hell out of the intruders. Jameson had always maintained that half-deads were cowards at heart. If Glauer surprised them enough they might just scatter, allowing her to escape without actually having to fight them at all.

Caxton reached into her pocket for her cell phone, so she could call Glauer and set up a surprise attack.

Her hand found the bottom of her pocket but didn’t find the phone. She cursed silently when she realized she’d left it back in the car. She could still signal him by shouting for his help (screaming seemed undignified, even if that was the signal they’d agreed upon). Doing so would of course alert every half-dead in the area to her presence and give them a bead on her location. They could be on her like a plague of locusts before Glauer could get through the door.

If the room she was in had possessed a window she could have opened it and looked down at the back of the house. From there she could have signaled Glauer somehow. The room did not possess a window.

But maybe one of the other rooms on the second floor did.

It was worth a try, she decided. Moving slowly, keeping very low, she crept around the bed and past Astarte’s dangling arm. She crouch-walked through the pool of blood on the floor—it made her a little queasy to think that she was walking through someone’s spilt-out life, but she’d been through worse before—and out through the door.

She could hear the half-deads moving about below her on the ground floor. She heard drawers yanked open and what sounded like someone rummaging through a pile of cutlery. The half-deads were arming themselves, she thought, divvying up the steak knives in the kitchen. Their beady little eyes were probably shining with glee. Half-deads never used guns, because their decaying bodies lacked the coordination necessary for aiming a firearm. They loved knives, though. Passionately.

Keeping her back against the wall, Caxton slid to her right, toward the nearest door on the gallery. She passed across its width, then reached back to turn the cut-glass knob. The door opened with the barest of creaking noises, but she stopped and stood perfectly still, listening. The half-deads were still about their business in the kitchen—they must not have heard her. She pulled the door open further and peered inside.

Neat stacks of folded white blankets and tablecloths sat on shelves inside, smelling of old, clean cotton.

She had found the linen closet.

No time to curse her luck, she thought. She glanced over the gallery railing into the darkness below, looking for any sign of movement. The only light came from the flashers on the cruisers inside, which occasionally stabbed a blue or red beam through the first-floor windows. Anything could have been down there and she wouldn’t have seen them, even if they were moving around; the strobelike effect of the flashers ruined her dark-adapted vision every time they cycled through.

Moving as silently as she could, she pushed onward to the next door down. Neither the light of the flashers nor the softer light from Astarte’s room reached up that far. She had her Mag-Lite still, but she didn’t dare use it. In the deep gloom she ran a hand over the door’s polished surface, then found a brass plate with a keyhole in it. She lifted her hand a few inches and found a cracked porcelain knob that turned with a barely audible squeal. Slowly she opened the door, an inch or two at a time, ready to stop the instant the hinges creaked. Just a little more. Once she had it open wide enough she would slip in and close it just as carefully behind her.

A high-pitched scream tore through her consciousness and a once-human body slammed into her, knocking her down. She could only register that its breath was horrible as he pushed her down to the carpet. She saw a long weapon glint as it was raised high—a meat fork, it looked like, a foot long and with four wicked barbed tines—and then it was all she could do to throw her head to one side as the fork came down right where her left eye had been. The half-dead on top of her screamed again and she saw the tattered skin of its face jiggle, felt spittle fleck her cheeks and upper lip. It tried raising its fork for another attack but couldn’t. The tines had gotten stuck in the wooden floor.

Caxton had been trained in some very basic martial arts, so she knew what to do next. She got one knee between her attacker’s legs and pushed up with all her strength. Whether half-deads had sensitive testicles or not was a moot point; the maneuver was intended to roll the thing off of her body, and it worked. She could have followed up by rolling on top of it and pinning its arms down, but she didn’t bother taking the move that far. Instead she yanked her Beretta out of its holster and shoved the barrel up under the half-dead’s chin. Its eyes went wide just before she squeezed the trigger, but afterward what was left of its face went slack.

She took a second to study the dead thing, trying to figure out who it had been and what it was doing in the house. One look at its clothes told her the whole story.

It was dressed in the gray shirt and navy blue pants of a Pennsylvania state trooper. One of her own.

Jameson must have been waiting in the house when the troopers broke in. He would have made short work of them. Though she had tried to warn them what dangers awaited inside, she had known when she sent the troopers in that they weren’t prepared or trained in how to fight a bloodthirsty monster. Once he killed them they had become his to play with, and he must have raised them from the dead even before Caxton arrived on the scene. That was why there had been no bodies in the cars out front—because the bodies had already been inside the house.

There could be as many as six more half-deads inside the house, then. She didn’t have time to feel guilty.

As fast as she could, she rolled over and jumped to her feet. She peered through the door her attacker had come through and saw the room beyond, a kind of butler’s pantry lined with cupboards. The room also contained a simple table, a few chairs, and at the far end a very narrow staircase leading down. She figured it had to go down to the kitchen. She could already hear more half-deads clattering up those steps.

She thought fast. A brass key stood in the keyhole on the inside of the door. She yanked it out, slammed the door shut, and locked it from the outside. When the mechanism clicked she hit the key with the butt of her weapon, breaking it off inside the lock.

Her next move was easy to figure out. There was no more point in subterfuge. “Glauer!” she shouted, as loud as she could, just in case he hadn’t heard the gunshot. “Glauer! Now!”

Chapter 21.

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.

“What do you mean, stop?” he asked when the creature dropped to the floor. He shone his heavy-duty flashlight in her face.

“I wanted to keep it alive for questioning,” she answered. She pushed the flashlight away. It was hurting her eyes. “What took you so long?”

He shrugged amiably. “There’s about fifty doors in this place and they were all locked.”

It didn’t matter. He was here now. Caxton did a quick calculation in her head. “There were seven of them originally, assuming Jameson raised them all.”

“Seven? There were seven cops called to this scene—”

Apparently he was just figuring out whom he’d been fighting. She raised a hand for silence. “I got one upstairs.” She grabbed the light out of his hands and pointed it at the two on the floor, their bodies twisted around by the shotgun blast and completely lifeless. She pointed it again at the one with the knocked-in skull. “That’s four.”

“Two more of them tried to get me back in the kitchen,” Glauer said. “Check this out.” He tried to show her a bad cut on his arm. “Went right through my jacket and my shirt. Just a little paring knife, but that guy wanted me bad.”

“Six, then, all dead—and one left,” Caxton counted, too busy to worry about his arm. She spun around with a sudden intuition and pointed the light at the front door. It hung open to the night. “Come on, hurry,” she said, and sprinted out across the porch and down into the street.

At first she saw nothing, just the cars piled up in the road. She had expected the last half-dead to steal one and make a break for it, and had just hoped it wouldn’t be the Mazda the monster chose. All the cars were in their proper places, though.

“There,” Glauer said, and pointed at the road. A thin layer of new powdery snow had coated the street since they’d arrived. A trail of boot prints curved away from the house and off to the west, toward the highway. Glauer started for the passenger side of her car, but she shook her head. “No time for that. We can catch him on foot.”

She raced down the street, her eyes bleary with the light from the streetlamps and the glare off the snow after the darkness in the house. She had no trouble following the trail, however—the footprints were dark against the snowy street and they headed due west, never weaving back and forth, never turning as if the half-dead had looked over his shoulder to see if he were being pursued.

She had a bad feeling she knew what that meant. Half-deads for all their wicked humor and spite were bound to the whims of vampires. They could no more resist the commands of their masters than they could make themselves alive and whole again. This one wasn’t just escaping a hopeless fight—no, it would have stayed until the bitter end if Jameson had so desired. It was carrying out some other order.

She ran as fast as she could, her work shoes slipping constantly in the wet slush. She hadn’t had a chance to put on proper boots. Glauer came chugging along behind her, more sure-footed but not as quick. Yet it was he who first caught sight of the half-dead ahead of them.