Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

He shouted and pointed and Caxton followed his finger. There, a block ahead, the half-dead was moving fast. It was limping badly and one of its pant legs had been torn away. It had a nasty bloodless wound in its calf, where part of the muscle had been blown away. It must, she realized, be the one she had wounded with her wild shots on the stairs. Yet as crippled as it was, it forced itself along, forced itself to keep moving.

She had closed the distance to half a block when she realized they were about to run out of road. The street ahead curved southward to follow the creek, but the half-dead wasn’t turning with it. It hurried on forward in a straight line.

She tried to sprint after it and nearly fell on her face. “Glauer—grab it, quick,” she called, and the big cop shot past her, puffing mightily. She raced after them both and arrived at the built-up edge of the creek just in time to watch the half-dead jump awkwardly over the edge and split the dark water like a falling stone.

It disappeared with a gurgling whine and was immediately lost from view.

Glauer started to pull off his jacket as if he would jump in after it, but she grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, breath surging in and out of her chest. “You’d freeze to death in minutes.”

“But it’s getting away!” Glauer cried back.

“No it isn’t,” Caxton knew. She understood right away what Jameson had demanded of his creature.

She didn’t know if the icy water would have hurt it, but she knew half-deads didn’t breathe. She imagined they weren’t very buoyant. It must have sunk like a stone. Under the water its brain would freeze and that would be the end of its short un-life. “Back when we were working together—I mean, Jameson and me—it was standard practice to try to capture half-deads. That was our best source of information. He knew I would want to talk to this one, and he made damned sure I didn’t get the chance.”

Chapter 22.

Caxton and Glauer trudged back toward the house through the snow. It had grown significantly colder since they’d arrived in Bellefonte, and the sky had turned heavy and the color of lead. The snow flurry that had come just after dark had stopped, but it looked as if the clouds weren’t done for the night.

“What’s our next step?” Glauer asked, his voice nearly lost under the noise of their shoes crunching the powdery snow. It sounded like teeth grinding together to Caxton, teeth gnashing and tearing.

She shook her head. It was only seven o’clock, but it felt much later. “We secure the scene. Call in the necessary people and wait for them to arrive.”

“I meant—” Glauer began, but then he just shook his head.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Astarte’s house remained just as they’d left it. The cars out front had gained a thin skin of snow that diffused the light of the red and blue flashers so that instead of stabbing out at the night they just glowed fitfully, first one color, then the other. Glauer wanted to switch off the engines of the cars, but Caxton said no—it was important to maintain the integrity of the scene, down to the last detail.

She made the required phone calls. A lone officer of the local police department came quickly, but he did little beyond stringing up some yellow caution tape. He didn’t go inside the house at all. Ambulances arrived on scene next, but the paramedics had to wait for the local coroner’s office to officially pronounce everyone dead. A technician from the morgue arrived half an hour later, an annoyed-looking doctor in a fur-lined parka with the hood up. He went inside the house and came back out five minutes later. He just nodded to the paramedics and they went inside. Not that there was much for them to do.

Lights came on in other houses up and down the street. Anxious-looking people peered out of their windows, but none of them came down to have a look for themselves. Glauer offered to canvass the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen anything. “I doubt anybody did,” he said, “but it’ll calm them down if they have somebody to actually talk to.” Caxton cared very little what Astarte’s neighbors thought, but it was something for the big cop to do, and she let him go with a sigh of relief. He’d been pacing up and down the sidewalk, looking like he had something to say but never actually coming out and saying it.

Her own tension kept mounting, and she just wanted to get away. It was nighttime—it was going to be nighttime for another twelve hours—and she knew she wouldn’t relax until dawn came. There was work to be done, but she couldn’t leave, not until she could hand the scene over to someone officially capable of taking charge. Before she knew it she herself was pacing. The exercise kept her joints from freezing up if nothing else.

An unmarked late-model car drove up and she squinted through the headlights, trying to see who was inside. There were two occupants, a man and a woman. She was very surprised when she saw them get out of the car—it was Fetlock and Vesta Polder.

The deputy marshal nodded at her, then walked over to talk to the local cop, who was standing guard at the front of the house. Vesta came straight over to Caxton and took her hands.

The older woman looked over her shoulder, scanned the trees lining the street as if she expected to see ghosts there. “Astarte has passed,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t have come, especially not at this time of day. I don’t like to be away from my home at night, as you know. But I must see her.”

Caxton wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was against every protocol she knew to let a civilian into a crime scene that was still under investigation. Exceptions were made sometimes for direct family members, but Vesta Polder was no kin of the Arkeleys. Vesta wouldn’t explain why it was so important she see the body, either. She just stared into Caxton’s eyes as if trying to hypnotize her.

“Come on,” Caxton said, finally. It was still her scene, until a detective from the local PD showed up, so she was still in charge of who went into the house. She led Vesta inside, warning her not to touch anything, then took her up to the room where Astarte’s life had ended.

The widow lay exactly as Caxton had first seen her. The blood on the floor had started to dry in the warmth of the house, but Vesta walked around it with mincing little steps, careful not to get any on her black boots. Caxton knew Polder enough to understand she wasn’t just being squeamish.

Vesta moved to the foot of the bed and closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but Caxton couldn’t hear what she might be saying. A prayer, she supposed. When she had finished she remained there, eyes closed, hands held out slightly at her sides.

Caxton wondered how long this was going to take. After a minute or two she cleared her throat and Vesta opened her eyes.

“Judging from the size of that wound I’d say he didn’t hurt her much,” Caxton said, gesturing at Astarte’s arm. “When he killed Angus he was in a real hurry, but here he took his time.”

Vesta nodded in agreement.

“First his brother. Now his wife.”

“Do you know why he killed them?” Vesta asked, sounding as if she already knew but she just wanted to hear Caxton say it out loud.

That was pretty typical for Vesta Polder. She saw all, knew all—or so she wanted people to think.

Caxton was pretty sure it was mostly an act, a practiced technique to draw people out and make them give away what they knew. It still creeped her out.

“He made them both the same offer, I think. They could join him and become vampires or they could die on the spot. As to why, I don’t really get it yet.”

“He loved them,” Polder replied. “He loved them but they were human, and to a vampire human life is contemptible. He could not reconcile those two feelings. To resolve that tension he had to either make them like himself, to bring them up to his level, or extinguish them altogether.”

“I got that,” Caxton shrugged. “But vampires see us as prey. As livestock. He didn’t feed on either of them, just tore them up and let them bleed out.”

“Perhaps,” Vesta said, “to Jameson, now, that is affection. He put them to sleep, as one would a beloved pet, instead of making a meal of them like a cow or a pig.” She moved around the side of the bed and leaned over Astarte’s face, close enough that Caxton started to raise a hand in warning. Vesta passed one hand over Astarte’s mouth and then swept her ring-bedecked fingers together as if she were catching a fly. “She has moved on. Jameson will not be able to raise her as a half-dead. That’s what I came for.

May I close her eyes?”

Again, that was something you just didn’t do at a homicide scene, but Caxton just bit her lip and nodded.

Vesta lowered the dead woman’s eyelids gently, with two fingers of her left hand. Then she drew back.

She was clearly finished. Before she could go, however, Caxton had a few more questions for her.

“The night’s just begun. I’m worried he’ll strike again.”

“Not tonight,” Vesta said, shaking her head so her blond ringlets bounced on the shoulders of her severe black dress. “This moved him. It affected him, that portion of his heart that remains capable of love. He’ll return to his lair and sulk.”

Caxton couldn’t really imagine Jameson sulking, but she accepted what Polder said. She knew things, somehow, that other people didn’t. It was best not to question how she knew them. “You don’t happen to know where his lair is, do you?”

Polder shook her head again. “That is hidden from me, and from all human eyes. Good night, Astarte,”

she said.

She started to come around the side of the bed as if to leave the room, but Caxton stopped her. “You went out of your way to come here tonight.”

“Astarte was a friend. Someone needed to be here, to do what I have done.”

Caxton had thought otherwise. “Raleigh—back at the fake funeral—Raleigh told me about you and her.

She said you and Astarte had a falling-out or something. Care to tell me what that was about? She said you hadn’t spoken to each other in years.”

“You haven’t guessed already?” Polder asked. She looked away. “I had an affair with Jameson, of course.”

Caxton dropped her hand. If she couldn’t imagine Jameson sulking in his lair, she was completely incapable of seeing that in her mind’s eye.

Polder lifted her chin and stared at the ceiling. “It was in 1987. Jameson and Astarte had been married only a few years, but already they were drifting apart. It had been a sort of arranged marriage, of course.

Jameson was the dashing hero who had slain the great darkness—the man who had single-handedly driven vampires from the face of the earth. Or so we thought. He didn’t tell anyone that Justinia Malvern had survived, not at first. Astarte came from a very respectable, extremely old family. She could trace her lineage all the way back to the foundations of this country.”

“To Plymouth Rock, you mean?”

Vesta smiled. “To Salem. Still, it wasn’t a very good match. He was twenty years her senior, for one thing. They were never happy. He spent far too much time at his work and left her to keep house here, all but abandoned. He only seemed to drop by to impregnate her—that autumn, and then in the winter of the following year. She struggled with raising the children alone, virtually a single mother. I helped her as much as I could—back then I was less limited in my movements. She was my best friend, you see.

That’s how I met Jameson. I didn’t like him at all back then. He never beat her, of course, and every word from his mouth was loving, yet I thought he was a monster for the way he neglected her.”

“And yet,” Caxton said, “you somehow got involved with him.”

“There are those among us who find monsters quite attractive,” Vesta said. She had a knowing smirk on her face that made Caxton cringe. “Such a powerful man. Passionate, and driven. That kind of focus is very hard to resist when it is turned in your direction.”

Caxton scratched one of her eyebrows. “When I spoke with Astarte, um, recently, she—suggested that he and I might have been romantically connected.”

“That’s rather foolish. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that you’re a girl-lover.”

The conversation had taken a turn that wasn’t going to help her investigation, Caxton decided. She led Vesta out of the room and back down to the street. Fetlock waited there to talk to her. He looked impatient.

“You do know this woman, then,” he said, when Vesta Polder climbed back into the passenger seat of his car. “She came into the state police HQ a little after you left, demanding to be taken to you at once. I tried to get some ID out of her, but she said there was no time.”

“She probably doesn’t have any ID. She lives pretty far off the grid. But she’s one of the good guys.”

Fetlock nodded as if he was satisfied with her vouching for Polder. “We could use more of those.

Especially since we just lost seven of them.” He nodded his head in the direction of the house. “You know this doesn’t look good, right? You know this was kind of a disaster.”

Caxton admitted she could see how he might think that. “When people fight vampires, some of them die,”

she muttered. It was the kind of thing Jameson might have said.

“Tell me at least one good thing came out of this,” Fetlock insisted.

Caxton looked him right in the eye. “I know where he’s going to strike next.”

Chapter 23.

“Alright,” Fetlock said. “Tell me what you know. And how you know it.”

Caxton sat down on the hood of his car. Warmth from the engine seeped up through her clothes. “He approached Angus, his brother, with an offer—join him or die. Tonight he made the same offer to his wife. He’s going after his own family. He thinks he’s doing them a big favor, making them as immortal and as powerful as he is. They don’t see it that way, and the only other option as far as he’s concerned is to kill them painlessly. He can’t just let them lie in peace.”

“But why?” Fetlock asked. “What’s in it for him?”

“Reinforcements. He knows he isn’t invulnerable. He killed too many vampires himself to think that. No matter how tough he may be, there’s going to come a time when he just won’t be strong enough. When somebody is going to get him. I don’t think he’s all that worried about me. I’m just one person and he knows all my best tricks—because he taught them to me. Individually, nobody is tough enough to be a serious threat. But he’s smart, and he knows he’s outnumbered. If I can’t stop him, eventually he’ll be up against more than just me. If he wants to keep drinking blood—and he can’t stop now—he knows we’ll fight him over every drop. If he creates new vampires they can fight by his side.”

“So he’s a Vampire Zero now. Just like you warned about.”

She nodded. “At least he’s trying to become one. Angus and Astarte both turned him down.”

“You think he’ll try the same offer with someone else,” Fetlock offered.

“Yeah. I think he’s going to approach everybody he supposedly loved when he was alive. Jameson Arkeley was a lot of things, but a good family man was not one of them. He got as far as he could from his brother and then never looked back—they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. He cheated on and nearly deserted his wife. His kids barely knew him. His kids—”

“—are next on the list,” Fetlock finished. “Jesus.” He pressed his fingers against his temples and then ran them down his cheeks. “There are two of them, right? Raleigh, and Sam?”

“Simon,” Caxton corrected. “He’s twenty, she’s nineteen. Way too young to die. I don’t know which of them he’ll approach first, but I already have an appointment to talk to Raleigh tomorrow. She lives outside of Allentown. That’s up in coal country, near where I grew up, actually. It’s an area I know well, so it’s a good place to make a stand. If I can be there when Jameson arrives, I can set up an ambush and maybe that’s all it takes. As for Simon, I don’t know. I tried to talk to him recently, but he was adversarial to say the least. He won’t want to cooperate. He’s farther away, too. He’s a student up at Syracuse.”

“You’re not limited by state jurisdiction, now that you’re a Fed,” Fetlock said. “I can send some deputies up there to scoop him up. Put him in protective custody. The Marshals Service has all kinds of safe houses we can use. We administer the Witness Protection Program—we can definitely put the kid up for a couple of days.”

“But not against his will. Like I said, he’s not going to cooperate. Not happily.”

“No. But if we can convince him his life is really in danger, why would he refuse? How sure are you about this, about him going after his kids?”

“Ninety percent. On the phone he told me to stay away from his family. I think that’s a pretty clear indication of—”

“Excuse me?” Fetlock took a step toward her and leaned in close, as if he wanted to hear her better.

“Did you just say you spoke with Jameson Arkeley on the phone?”

There was no point in denying it. “Yeah. Earlier, he procured a cell phone from the lead unit in the assault here. I called that number hoping to speak with the trooper in charge, but that man was already dead.

Jameson answered in his place, and tried to warn me off. It’ll all go in my report, I swear.”

Fetlock straightened up and scratched under his nose. “That’s—that’s interesting.”

She bit her lip. “I’ve…heard from Malvern, too. Via text message.”

Fetlock went a little pale.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to get you a new phone. We’ll just switch out the SIM card, so you can keep the same number. But the phone I give you will let you record incoming calls. It’ll also allow me to listen in. If he calls you again, we’ll at least have a copy of anything he says.”

Caxton frowned. “I’m not sure I’m all that comfortable with you listening to my calls. That’s kind of intrusive, don’t you think?”

“Part of the job. Besides, it’s not like you’re using your phone for personal calls. It’s just a work phone, right? The government pays for those minutes, so they belong to the taxpayers, not you.”

Caxton forced herself to smile. “Alright, Deputy Marshal.”

“Looks like you have your work cut out for you. Tomorrow you can start securing the kids. What about tonight, though? Is Arkeley going to strike again, somewhere else?”

Caxton shrugged. She thought about what Vesta Polder had said—about Jameson sulking in his lair.

There was a better reason to believe he was done for the night, however. “Probably not. He’s fed enough to keep him full for a while, and he hasn’t reached the point yet where he’s killing for fun. Thank God.”

Fetlock nodded in agreement. “I want to know everything that happened here tonight. But I can see you’re exhausted. Get out of here and get some sleep. You can write up everything in your incident report and get it to me tomorrow.” With that he took his leave, taking Vesta Polder with him.

The chief of the Bellefonte Police Department showed up shortly thereafter. She shook his hand and gave him a very quick idea of what had happened. She didn’t want to go into the gory details—his own people could tell him about those. Having officially turned the scene over to him, she found herself more than ready to leave.

She found Glauer still going from door to door, telling Astarte’s neighbors there was nothing to worry about. She called him back down to the street and told him it was time to go home. “I’ll drive you back to HQ. We should both be in bed before midnight—there’s going to be a lot to do tomorrow.”

He didn’t say a word. She led him back to her car, but he just stood there, staring up at Astarte’s house.

A number of lights had been turned on inside and the front door stood wide open. Caxton could see local cops inside bent over the bodies of the three half-deads in the foyer. Flashes of light told her they’d brought a photographer to document the scene, which made her think of Clara. Clara, who would be waiting for her at home. Maybe there would even be hot food there for her.

“Come on, Glauer, I’m tired,” she said.

The big cop turned and looked at her with haunted eyes. He made no move to get into the car.

She knew what was under his skin. “It was us or them,” she said.

“They were police officers.”

“They were half-deads,” she said. “They weren’t themselves anymore.”

“They were police officers before they were half-deads,” he replied. “You sent them here. You sent them here knowing he was going to kill them.”

“No, you’re wrong,” she insisted. “I sent them here knowing there was a chance they could get killed.

Also knowing that was part of their job. Policemen put themselves in the line of danger all the time. It’s what they sign up for. It’s what we signed up for.”

He shook his head. “Sure,” he said, “cops go up against bad guys all the time and sometimes, occasionally, one of them gets shot. Sometimes one even gets killed. This was something more, something worse. I’m not necessarily blaming you for their deaths. But the bodies are starting to pile up real high.”

“That’s why we’re doing this, to keep Jameson from killing any more.”

“Really?” Glauer asked.

“Yeah, damn it!” Caxton scowled at the big cop. “Yeah. Everything I do. Every day of my life since October has been devoted to that. I put my own life at risk every night, and I never ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself. I have to make hard decisions sometimes. I have to make them fast.

Sometimes I make the wrong choice.”

“Tonight was one of those times. I’m just saying—”

“I’ve said all I’m going to. Get in the car before I freeze my ass off.”

“You need to be more careful with the people around you. Maybe you don’t care if you live or die, but the families of those men are—”

“Get in the damned car!”

“Yes, Deputy,” he growled, and yanked the passenger door open.

“It’s Special Deputy,” she shot back, and climbed in her own side.

She drove him back to Harrisburg without saying another word. When they arrived he jumped out and ran inside the building without even looking at her.

Chapter 24.

In the morning Caxton woke to pure white light streaming in through her window. It had snowed so much during the night that it had piled up against the windowpane. She couldn’t even see the backyard.

She could smell bacon and eggs cooking in the kitchen. Reluctantly she kicked off the electric blanket and went to the table in her pajamas. Clara beamed at her from the stove. “The way you looked when you came in last night, I figured you could use a hot meal.”

Caxton tried to smile back, but her face didn’t quite feel up to it. When Clara put a cup of coffee in front of her she sipped at it, grateful but unable to say so. She wanted to tell Clara everything that had happened. She wanted to just grab her around the legs and hug her. She couldn’t do that either.

“I’ve been thinking,” Clara said, when she had finished making her omelets and had placed them on the table. “About what you said yesterday. Obviously I can’t be your forensics specialist. But maybe I could do what you said. You know, coordinate with those guys. I could come work with you. If that would be helpful.”

Laura’s eyes went wide. “It would.”

Clara nodded and started to eat. “You can buy me lunch every day, too. If you want.”

“I do,” Laura replied.

“Where should we go today, then?”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“There’s only one problem,” Caxton said. “Today I’m going out to Allentown. To talk to Jameson’s daughter, Raleigh. And I’ll probably have to spend the night there, too.”

“Of course,” Clara said, and turned back to the stove.

“Hey,” Laura said, as soothingly as she could, “you’ve been great about this so far. I know I have no right to ask for more understanding, but I need it.”

“Yeah,” Clara said. “Yeah, of course it’s okay. I suppose she’s in mortal danger, this girl.”

“Her own father is going to try to kill her.”

Clara turned around with a sad smile on her face. “I can’t compete with that. Go. Do what you do best.

I’ll be here when you get home.”

Laura kissed her. She ate her eggs and bacon, though she was too distracted to taste anything, and then she went to get dressed. In half an hour she was on the road, headed for her office. There were errands to complete there. She had to write her report on the previous night’s disaster, for one thing. She found her new phone waiting on her desk, still in its box—Fetlock must have delivered it during the night. The Fed travels fast, she thought. It was bigger and clunkier than her old one, with a tiny black-and-white screen. Sighing with pointless misgivings, she slipped the SIM card out of her old phone and into the new beast and then shoved it in her pocket. It started to ring almost instantly. It was Fetlock calling.

“You’re going to watch Raleigh?” Fetlock asked, once she’d said hello. “Good. Don’t let me stop you. I saw that you had activated the new phone, so I thought I’d test it out for you.”

“It seems to work fine,” she said.

“Yes, on this end too. Listen, I’ve just sent you an email—take a look now. I’ll wait.” While Caxton booted up her computer he explained, “I’ve had my best people working on the videotapes from our archives facility. I thought we might catch our intruder in the act. It looks like we might have something.”

Caxton opened her email and saw a picture start to load. “This is the guy who broke in and stole all of Jameson’s files?”

“I believe so, yes,” Fetlock confirmed. “We only caught him for a split second, but my digital analysis people cleaned up the image quite a bit. I thought you should see this.”

The picture on the screen showed a man in a light blue suit walking through a metal detector. The shot was blurry at best, and the face couldn’t be seen at all—just the back of the man’s head. His hair could have been brown or black—the image was too poorly lit to be sure. “He was using Jameson’s ID, right?

It’s not him, though.”

“You don’t think it could have been the vampire in disguise?” Fetlock asked.

Caxton frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. Vampires do alter their appearance sometimes. They put on wigs, throw on some makeup. I knew one, once, who tore off the tips of his own ears so they’d look more human.” She tapped at the screen of her computer. “This is different, though. Those vampires wouldn’t fool anybody except from at an extreme distance. It would take Hollywood-level makeup artists to make one look this human. No, I still think this is a human being pretending to be Jameson. He found someone human and sent him in his place. Besides. He’s got all his fingers. Jameson is missing all the fingers from one hand.”

“He could be wearing a prosthesis,” Fetlock suggested.

Caxton frowned at her screen. “A guy walks into your offices, wearing powder on his face, an obvious wig, and a fake hand. Even if the makeup job was good, don’t you think somebody would notice something?”

“So it definitely wasn’t Jameson. Which only begs more questions,” Fetlock said.

“Yeah. Now, if it’s alright, I have to get going—time’s wasting,” Caxton said. She didn’t particularly care about the archives theft. She was far more worried about losing another one of Jameson’s family members.

She wasn’t quite done, though. Before she left she stuck her head into the briefing room. She hoped to find Glauer there. She planned to apologize to him. It had been a bad night for everybody, but he hadn’t deserved the crap she’d given him. She found him just where she’d expected, and he’d been busy.

He had taken the liberty of updating the whiteboards. For VAMPIRE PATTERN #1 he had pasted up pictures of the Carboy family underneath the pictures of Rexroth/Carboy’s other victims. For VAMPIRE

PATTERN #1 he had found pictures of the state troopers and Bellefonte police they’d fought at Astarte’s house, as well as the anonymous half-dead from the motel where Angus died. Jameson’s brother and his widow both had their own memorials there, circled in red marker. The boards were getting crowded; there wasn’t much room left for future victims.

It was fine that he’d done all that—but when she saw what else he’d done she nearly lost it. He had taken one of Dylan Carboy’s notebooks—the one that had been gummed together with dried blood—and separated all the pages. They lay spread out on the desks like an enormous tarot card reading.

She had given him specific instructions to stop reading the notebooks. Clearly he’d decided he didn’t have to obey her orders. Before she could blow up at him, though, he held up his hands. “I can explain,”

he said. “I know you think this is all garbage. And the vast majority of it definitely is. There are whole sections where he just copied down the lyrics of his favorite songs, and there are pages where he pasted in printouts of websites, some of them pretty random. It looks like he was obsessed with the Columbine school shooting for a while. I think maybe he was planning something similar at his college—that might have been when he bought the shotgun.”

He tapped one of the desks. “But starting here things change. None of his journal entries are dated, but he talks about a TV show he watched and I looked it up. The episode he mentions ran the first week in October.”

“Right after Jameson accepted the curse,” Caxton suggested.

“Yeah.” Glauer picked up one of the sheets. “The show’s not important except that it gives us a time frame for the transition. Before that date most of his entries are long, rambling passages about how he feels like no one understands him and how he feels alienated even from his family. Then we have this one.

It stuck out at first only because it was so short: ‘I saw him outside my window tonight. He’s close now, and coming closer.’”

Caxton raised an eyebrow.

Glauer pushed his way between the desks, knocking them sideways in his excitement so their feet squeaked across the linoleum. “There’s more! Here, maybe a couple days later: ‘He told me the strong will always prey on the weak. That’s the laws of nature. He said if you were weak you had a duty to make yourself stronger, or to get out of the way. Nobody is as strong as him.’”

“Does he ever mention Jameson by name?” Caxton asked.

Glauer dropped his head. “No. At least not in the journal entries. There are newspaper articles about vampires all over this notebook. A lot of them about what happened at Gettysburg.”

Caxton leaned against the bookcase. “But you think this ‘he’ is Jameson. You think he was in contact with Carboy somehow. Presumably not through their MySpace pages.”

“We know they can communicate telepathically,” Glauer tried.

Caxton couldn’t deny it—she’d had her mind invaded by more vampires than she liked to remember.

“And after the second week in October he starts talking about a ‘she’ as well. Here: ‘She was beautiful once, and can be again. It would be an honor to feed her, to make her whole. It would be an act of love.’”

“So he was talking to Malvern, too. Okay. And this kid sounds about the right type to get a vampire’s interest. He was fucked up already, spiraling toward violence, ready to obliterate himself as long as he could take some other people with him. That would make him a perfect candidate to accept the curse.”

“Yeah,” Glauer said.

“But in the end they didn’t give it to him. He had to pretend he was a vampire. We know Jameson is recruiting. We know Malvern has recruited in the past, and I have no doubt she wants more vampires to come worship her. Neither of them gave Carboy what he wanted. That suggests to me he never met either of them face-to-face. Maybe he just imagined these conversations. Maybe he was just crazy.”

“Maybe, but there’s something here. Something…I need to read more.”

Caxton threw up her arms. “Alright. I don’t need you right now, actually. I’m going out to Allentown, to Raleigh’s place, but they don’t let men in there, you said. So spend the day on this if you need to. One day.”

He nodded gravely. “Thanks. This one is haunting me. If I can figure out what made him do it…I don’t know. I don’t know what that will achieve, in concrete terms, but it means something to me.”

“One day,” she repeated. “Wish me luck.” She left the basement and headed up to her car, finally ready to go to Allentown. She had her key in the ignition before she realized she hadn’t actually apologized to Glauer. Well, maybe, she thought, letting him dig through Carboy’s diseased brain was apology enough.

She hoped so.

It was a long ride to Allentown, and she needed her sunglasses the whole way. Snow lay deep and thick on the fields she passed through, but the sun was out. In the towns, as she drove through the quiet residential streets, the eaves and gutters glittered with ice melt and the streets were filled with dark slush.

The radio told her it was going up to fifty degrees by afternoon but that more snow was on the way. If there were blizzards coming, she thought, she would have to get Fetlock to give her a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The little Mazda wasn’t made for slippery conditions.

Eventually she started to recognize landmarks, old family restaurants that had been in business for decades, the main squares of little towns she’d visited a million times. Caxton had grown up in small towns all around the area, the old coal mining part of Pennsylvania, sometimes in the cities and sometimes in places that were nothing more than rows of cheap company housing built for coal miners in the previous century—places that didn’t even deserve the title of “town,” so instead they were called patches. She got to see one or two of them as she drove past, though very few of them lay near the main road. Almost all the old patches had been forgotten by time once the coal dried up or the mines were just shut down.

The directions she’d downloaded from MapQuest took her south of Allentown proper, through the borough of Emmaus. Emmaus was famous as the original home of the Moravian Church in Pennsylvania—an offshoot of Protestantism with its own unique customs, though not as severe as the Amish or the Mennonites. The one thing she remembered about the Moravians was that they had a special kind of cemetery called a God’s Acre. Instead of burying their dead in family groups, the Moravians filed them by age, gender, and marital status. She couldn’t remember why—maybe they wanted them filed appropriately for God when he came to get them again on Judgment Day.

There were a lot of religious groups living their own way in the area. There were monasteries and retreats tucked away in the hills she drove through, and plenty of churches. When she finally found the side road she wanted, she headed down through a long copse of dead trees that ended in a stone wall surrounding what she took for either a museum or a rest home. The building stood four stories high and as wide as a city block. It was made of redbrick dressed with carved stone and studded everywhere with windows, some of them with Gothic arches. Ivy covered most of the face of the building, brown and dead now, but she could imagine it bright green in summertime. The building sat on a broad lawn of yellow grass that peeked up sporadically from under the snow. A number of stone monuments, a fountain, and a rustic gazebo stuck out of the snow here and there. Behind and to one side a stripe of water cut through the lawn, a creek full of pale stones.

There was no parking lot. A few very old and very nondescript cars sat on the lawn near the main gate in the wall, and she pulled in beside them. She got out and went to the gate, a huge wrought-iron contraption surmounted by a simple cross. She started looking for a bell to ring, but before she found one someone came to let her in: a teenaged girl wearing a baggy dress and a parka two sizes too big for her.

“Hi, I’m Special Deputy Caxton,” she said to the girl.

The girl smiled broadly and nodded her head.

“I have an appointment. I mean, I’m supposed to speak with Raleigh Arkeley. She lives here, right?”

The girl smiled and nodded again. Apparently she didn’t speak much. Caxton looked up at the cross over the gate and wondered if she’d come to a convent or a nunnery and if everyone inside had taken a vow of silence. It would make it damned hard to interview Raleigh about her father.

“Can you take me to her?” Caxton asked.

The girl nodded again and then turned around and started trudging across the lawn. The hem of her dress dragged through the snow, but she didn’t seem to notice or mind. Caxton followed close behind.

Chapter 25.

Caxton was brought into the main hall of the huge building, an echoing cavern with marble floors and high columns. A spiral staircase in wrought iron rose from the rear of the hall while massive fireplaces on either side roared with heat and light. The only other illumination in the room came from standing candelabras. There didn’t seem to be any electric lights in the hall. Caxton wondered if the place was even on the power grid.

Her silent guide led her toward a door set in one side of the hall. The girl knocked once, hesitantly as if afraid of making too much noise, then stepped back quickly. She turned and smiled at Caxton again, with lots of teeth.

Someone beyond the door called, “Enter.” Caxton shrugged and pushed the door open, then walked into a small but pleasant little office. The walls were lined with crowded bookshelves, except where they were pierced by a broad window that looked out on the lawn and another, if much smaller, fireplace that crackled merrily. Behind a massive oak desk a young woman was seated, dressed in a severe black dress and with a white cloth over her hair.

“You’ll be Trooper Caxton, then,” the woman said, rising from where she sat to hold out one gloved hand. Caxton shook it. “Welcome to our little sanctuary. Raleigh has told us about you. I’m Sister Margot.”

“Sister?” Caxton asked. “I didn’t realize this was a convent. I guess I should have guessed from the—the clothes.”

“This place was a nunnery once, but it’s moved on with the times. The staff remain under holy orders but we’re purely nondenominational. As for this outfit I’m wearing…it’s commonly called a habit,” the woman said. “We like to say it’s the last habit we ever want to take up. Please, please sit down. Can I offer you something to drink?” She turned to where a plastic cooler sat next to the window. It looked distinctly wrong in the room, which otherwise might have been furnished in the previous century and never renovated.

“I’d love a Diet Coke,” Caxton said. It had been a long, thirsty ride.

“Sorry. We don’t take stimulants. How about apple juice?”

“Sure.” Caxton took the proffered bottle and twisted off its cap.

“It’s vital to stay hydrated.” She offered a bottle of water to the silent girl standing in the doorway.

“You’ve already met Violet, but of course she didn’t introduce herself.”

“Pleased to meet you both. I guess you know why I’m here.”

“Of course,” Sister Margot said. “Sister Raleigh will be down in a while. She’s currently engaged in a group therapy session that can’t be interrupted. In the meantime I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. We may look as if we’ve turned away from the world, and we have,” she giggled—behind Caxton Violet bubbled with mirth as well—“but we believe in hospitality as well, which includes cooperating with the authorities whenever we must. We also pay our taxes, quite regularly.”

“Good to hear it, though that’s not my department. Nice place you have here, by the way. All women, from what I hear. Must be very peaceful. So are you a Moravian? I never heard of Moravian nuns before.”

“Oh, no,” Sister Margot exclaimed. “There is no religion within these walls. When I want to pray, I actually step outside. We’re very careful not to exclude anyone.”

“Except men,” Caxton suggested.

Sister Margot shrugged. “They can be a distraction to the work we do here.”

“I see,” Caxton said, although honestly she was pretty confused. “What kind of work would that be? I’m afraid I don’t know as much about Raleigh as I thought I did.”

“This is a place of refuge. The girls who come here have all met the dark side of life, one way or the other. They need a place they can go far away from the temptations and stresses of modern life. We provide counseling and therapy, but mostly our work is to provide a different way of life. A simpler way.”

“So this is a halfway house?”

Sister Margot’s smile dimmed, but only by a fraction of a watt. “More like a retreat. A shelter from the storm. Trooper, we try to provide an oasis from all distractions, that’s all.”

“It’s, uh, Special Deputy. Not Trooper. So religion is one of those distractions. But you’re a believer yourself, aren’t you? I mean, you’re a Christian or something.”

Margot’s smile faded a few degrees. “I have taken certain vows, yes. I am required by those vows to wear this habit. The building we’re in was once consecrated to a holy order, as well. In the past it was a home for wayward girls—unwed mothers, to be exact. In recent years we’ve broadened our scope and also our outlook. The work we do here is vital and it must be completed in an atmosphere free of judgment and prejudice. The girls who come here have all made bad mistakes in their lives. The last thing they need is authority figures—like God—to remind them how they’ve failed.”

“Mistakes?” Caxton asked.

“Some became addicted to drugs or to less material pursuits. Some are just lost. What you would call mentally ill. I started out here myself, years ago. I suffered from schizophrenia and delusions of grandeur.

This place helped me immeasurably.”

“Oh,” Caxton said. She turned in her seat to look at the girl behind her. “What’s Violet in for?”

The mute girl grabbed her throat and simulated strangulation.

Sister Margot explained. “She attempted to commit suicide by drinking drain cleaner. It was only through an act of great blessing that she survived, though as a result she’ll never speak again or eat solid food.”

Violet shrugged, her smile returning as bright as before.

“I take it some people stay here longer than others,” Caxton suggested.

“As long as they need to. Some of our patients never leave.”

What on earth, Caxton wondered, had Raleigh done to get herself sent to a place like this? “It’s important I see Raleigh as soon as possible. Before dark, at the very least. How much longer is her session going to last?”

“Another fifteen minutes or so. She’ll be brought to you the second she’s done. I want you to know, Trooper, that you are perfectly welcome here, for as long as you must join us. I’d be less than honest, however, if I said that your prolonged presence here was desirable. I worry that you’ll make some of the girls uneasy. A number of them have histories with law enforcement that were less than…convivial.”

“I promise, I’ll be as quick as I can. Where can I talk with Raleigh?” she asked.

Sister Margot looked to Violet. “Please find a room where they may talk and prepare it with candles and fire.” The mute girl bowed her head and ran off without looking back. “In the meantime, can I offer you a quiet place to wait?”

Caxton checked her cell phone. She got lousy reception in the office, and she hadn’t checked in with Glauer in a long time. “Maybe some place with a phone?”

Sister Margot’s smile dropped for a moment. “There’s only one telephone in the building, and that’s here, in my office. If you’d like to use it, I’ll just go wait out in the hall.”

Caxton started to protest, but the nun didn’t give her a chance. She headed out the door and left Caxton all alone. Whatever, Caxton thought, and reached for the woman’s phone. She called in to HQ and got Glauer, who had some information for her.

“You asked the members of the SSU to start looking for potential lairs,” he said, and she got excited for a second. “They’ve turned up sixty-one possibles, from Erie all the way to Reading.”

“That’s good,” she said, though the number was surprisingly large. The cops who worked part time for the SSU must have tagged every abandoned farmhouse and disused factory in the state. There was no way she could investigate all those leads on her own, though. “Get Fetlock in on this. Tell him—scratch that, ask him politely, he’s a little sensitive—to get his people to run all these down. Get as many of them as possible checked out before nightfall. You know what we’re looking for. Places that haven’t been used for years, but have signs of recent activity. They can rule out the places the local teens go to drink, and anywhere clearly visible from a main road. That should narrow the search.”

How awesome would it be, she thought, if they turned up the lair in the next hour? Knowing Jameson, his lair would be well guarded and probably booby-trapped. There were ways to deal with that sort of thing, however. If she could get to the lair by daylight, if she could find Jameson and Malvern inside, still in their coffins—it would be the work of a few minutes to remove their hearts from their bodies. To destroy the hearts. To end this.

Then she could go home. Go to bed for a week.

Then she could be alone with Clara, for a long time. She could fix everything. Everything that was wrong with her life.

She knew with a depressing certainty it wasn’t going to happen that way.

“Jameson’s smart,” she said. She said it so often it had become a mantra. “He’s not going to be anyplace I think to look for him, is he?”

“We might get lucky,” Glauer said.

She snorted a response and ended the call.

In the silence that followed—she could hear nothing but the crackling of the fireplace—she sat back in her chair and sipped at her apple juice. She thought about what could have made Raleigh come to such a place, to cut herself off from the world altogether like this. It was not, she had to admit, without a certain attraction. Tell everyone to go to hell. Run and hide from all her problems. She’d love to.

But no.

The only reason a place like this repurposed convent could exist was that there were people out there in the real world, people who fought and bled to protect Sister Margot’s right to be safe and immune from danger and harm. Caxton knew a lot of old cops—her father had been one, and so had all his friends—and she remembered back in the seventies they’d had a certain way of thinking, a metaphor for what they did. The modern world with all its crime and drugs and violence and crazies was a trash can, a big, bulging trash can too small to hold everything inside of it, always threatening to burst, to run over and spill out onto the streets. As cops, they were paid to do nothing more than sit on the lid.

Now that was her job.

There was a knock on the door. It was Sister Margot. “Raleigh’s ready for you now,” she said.

Chapter 26.

Sister Margot led Caxton to a windowless square room on the second floor with a table and a few less-than-comfortable chairs. It was freezing cold inside, but a brazier had been set up in one corner to warm the place and tall candelabras flanked the table, giving some light. Raleigh already waited inside, sitting at the far side of the table. She greeted Caxton warmly, then sat back down and smiled.

Caxton pulled a digital audio recorder out of her pocket. “Is it alright if I use this? I noticed you don’t have electricity here.”

“Sister Margot says we don’t need it. That if we had it we’d be tempted to get radios, or even a television set, which would be a mistake. Sometimes I think she must have been Amish before she became a nun. I don’t think that little thing will be a problem, though.”

Caxton nodded her thanks and set up the recorder, putting a small microphone on the table where it could catch both their voices. She decided to get right to business. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about your father. Have you been in touch with him recently? I mean before he changed.”

The girl shook her head. “Not for about six months. The whole family is sort of estranged. Until two days ago I hadn’t seen Uncle Angus since I was a child. Mom I saw just a few weeks ago, but we didn’t speak for very long, we were—”

Caxton stopped her, not wanting to talk about Astarte. That would probably bring up a lot of emotional stuff she didn’t need. She needed to keep this interview on track. “When was the last time you spoke with your father?”

“I was in…Belgium,” Raleigh said. Her face clouded as if the memory was painful.

“You were in college at the time. Your father told me that. You were doing a semester abroad.”

Raleigh shrugged. “That was how it started. I wanted to study great art. They have a lot of amazing museums in Belgium. Have you ever been?”

Caxton smiled. “No.” She’d never been out of the country, except one quick visit to Canada when she was a kid. She’d rarely left her home state. “So you saw the museums,” she prompted.

“Yes. And they were wonderful. But you can’t just look at paintings all day, and write papers about them all night. I went with a friend of mine, Jane. She—”

Caxton took a notepad out of her pocket. “Last name?”

The girl frowned. “That’s not important to the story I’m telling.”

Caxton smiled through gritted teeth. “You never know what’s important. It’s often the little details that matter.”

“I suddenly feel like I’m being interrogated,” Raleigh said.

I don’t have time for this, Caxton thought. “I’m just trying to learn everything I can. This isn’t even an official conversation, just a backgrounder.”

“It’s just I don’t want to get Jane in any trouble. She’s—well. She’s living a certain lifestyle. Some people don’t approve of that lifestyle. It involves breaking some very silly laws.”

“You mean she’s a drug user,” Caxton said.

Raleigh looked startled. “Yes! How did you know that?”

“It’s not magic. Just experience.” She’d heard that kind of evasion before. “Is Jane currently within the borders of the United States?”

Raleigh shook her head.

“She’s still over in Europe?” That got a nod. “Then I couldn’t arrest her even if I wanted to. I don’t have any jurisdiction over there. But let’s forget about her last name. Just tell me what happened.”

Raleigh looked up at the ceiling. She exhaled a long and noisy breath and then launched into it. “I was young and very foolish at the time. I was also very bored. Jane and I were roommates in this tiny little place in Brussels. The rent was nothing, but we were always broke anyway. We ate a lot of French fries because they were cheap—they actually invented French fries in Belgium, did you know that? They aren’t really French at all. Living so cheaply was in some ways a very spiritual experience. There’s a liberation that comes with owning next to nothing. We would sit around talking about art, like, all night long. We didn’t get a lot of sleep, but we didn’t ever feel all that bad the next day. You know how it is when you’re young.”

Caxton smiled and nodded, though she didn’t know at all. Her own experience had been quite different.

“Jane really liked to party. You know what I mean? It was just drinking, at first. We had this really cheap wine that came in a blue bottle and it tasted awful, but you could buy cases of it for nothing. We would have people come over, other students, sometimes even Belgian kids, and we would just have so much fun. Laughing and singing until the people who lived downstairs would bang on their ceiling with a broom handle, which always just made us laugh more. Sometimes people would bring other things.”

“You mean drugs.”

Raleigh nodded and looked away. “That wasn’t my thing. I always said no. I mean at first. They would pass around a joint and it just looked nasty, with everybody’s spit on the end. Sometimes they had pills and then they wouldn’t sleep for days. Jane liked that. She loved doing her classwork at like four in the morning when it was quiet, she said. The guy who had the pills started coming around a lot more often.

His name was Piet and he had really beautiful eyes. One time we were in the kitchen and he kissed me.

Then he just stood there looking at me for so long, until I got embarrassed and ran out of the room. That same night he hooked up with Jane, and before long he moved in. He started bringing his own friends around and some of them weren’t so, well, nice.” Raleigh started to scratch at her arms as she spoke, digging her fingernails into the crooks of her elbows, through the sleeves of her shapeless dress. “They did heroin. Over there, it’s not like here. People don’t call you a junkie just because you tried something once. Jane started shooting up with Piet and then there were no more all-nighters. Then they would just collapse on the couch and they wouldn’t get up. She stopped going to classes.”

Caxton sighed. “When did you start taking heroin?” she asked.

That same startled look as before, as if Caxton had read the girl’s mind. “I didn’t say I did. I never said that.”

“You did try it, though,” Caxton said. “Didn’t you?”

Raleigh nodded in acceptance. “Yes. They said it was the best feeling in the world. They said you could do it a couple of times safely before you got addicted. That if you just did it a couple of times you would be okay. I figured—I mean, this was near the end of the semester. I thought I’d try it once. Maybe twice, if I liked it. Then I would have to fly home, since I already had booked my flight back, and I wouldn’t be tempted again.”

“What happened then?”

“I liked it. I liked it a lot.” Raleigh looked down at her hands. Under the table her feet were swinging back and forth. “I did it more than a couple of times. We didn’t have any money, I said that before. We couldn’t afford to buy drugs and pay the rent, so something had to happen. Jane convinced me we should cash in our plane tickets. We would explain to our parents that we needed the money for rent, and then they would send us new tickets. Except we didn’t want to go home anymore. The college called and said that if we didn’t come home we could get expelled. There was this funny thing that happened, it was like I knew that things were going bad. I knew it, but I couldn’t do anything about it. When I was high it didn’t matter, and when I came down I just felt like I couldn’t concentrate enough to do what I needed to do. We got kicked out of the apartment because we never did pay the rent, and we went to live with Piet. And his friends.”

“What did you do for money then?”

Raleigh looked up across the table and stared directly at Caxton. “I don’t want to say. Not when I’m being recorded.”

“Okay,” Caxton said. She didn’t think she wanted the sordid details anyway.

“You asked me about the last time I saw my dad. I’m sorry. I’ve been rambling. The answer is I saw him about six months ago. He knew something was up when I didn’t come home. He went to Vesta Polder and asked her to take a look, to see where I was. She can do that sort of thing. Anyway, she came back to him and said she’d found where my body was, but that she couldn’t see my soul anywhere.” The girl’s voice rose in pitch as she finished her story. “Daddy came for me. He showed up and he hurt some people. Some of Piet’s friends. I called him so many bad names, I said such mean things, but he didn’t even listen to me. He dragged me out of there and got me on a plane. We sat next to each other the whole way back. I got sick, really sick. I threw up a lot. He held my hair back but he wouldn’t talk to me. Not while I was like that. He told everybody I was just airsick. When we got home he brought me right here. He couldn’t come in through the gate, but Sister Margot took one look at me and just brought me inside. They locked me up for a couple of days, and when I finally came out of my room they were just waiting with this ugly set of clothes. They said if I wanted to stay here I had to dress like everybody else. I put the clothes on, because I needed something. I needed something to replace the heroin. I had no idea what I was getting into. I can’t tell you how scared I was. Now everything’s different.”

“How did your father know to bring you here?”

“Vesta recommended it as a place where I could get clean again. It’s really special here. You should spend some time with us.”

“I’d like that,” Caxton lied. “So this all happened six months ago.” The summer of 2004, then. Just a few months before the massacre at Gettysburg. He’d never told Caxton about what had happened, not even a hint. That wasn’t surprising, though, if you knew Jameson Arkeley at all.

“He saved me,” Raleigh said, sitting back in her chair. She looked spent, as if the effort of telling the story had taken something out of her. “He saved my life. And my soul.” She shook her head. “I heard what he did to Uncle Angus. So horrible. I’m doing a three-week fast in his honor.”

“That’s…nice of you,” Caxton said.

“He’s not my father anymore. He’s not the same person anymore, is he?”

“Your poor mother didn’t think so,” Caxton agreed.

“My poor mother? What do you mean?”

Caxton’s heart jumped in her chest. Raleigh didn’t know. “I’m so sorry. I assumed the Bellefonte police would have contacted you. I guess maybe they didn’t know where you were.” She wondered if she should reach a hand across the table, to comfort the girl, but she didn’t. “Last night your father killed her.

Exactly the same way he did your uncle. I’m—I’m sorry.”

Raleigh started to scream.

Chapter 27.

Sister Margot threw the door open and grabbed Caxton’s arm and pulled her bodily out of her chair.

Caxton didn’t fight back but let the nun drag her out into the hallway. She didn’t want to find out what Margot was capable of when excited.

Margot’s face was wracked with pure anger, her delicate features twisted around and darkened by congested blood. Her eyes were narrow slits pulsing with rage, and spit flecked her lips. She looked as if she was about to invoke some dread curse. Then she looked toward the open door, looked in at where Raleigh was crying with her head in her hands. Visibly struggling to regain her composure, Margot closed her eyes and then said, in a sweet, soft voice, “Is everything alright?”

Caxton frowned. “I had to give her some bad news. Her mother died last night.”

A vein in Margot’s left temple throbbed alarmingly. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“You do?” Caxton was confused.

“The police called me last night, and when I said they couldn’t talk to her, they told me what it was about. I decided, after long contemplation, that it would be best for Raleigh to not be exposed to such negative outside influences.”

“Do you think that’s fair to her?” Caxton asked.

Sister Margot lowered her eyes. “She’s undergoing extensive therapy for drug addiction, and that takes a great deal of time, rest, and peace. The first time, when they came to tell her about her uncle, I allowed her to go to the gate and hear the news herself. She came back quite disturbed. I would have told her about her mother eventually, of course, but I decided that two such shocks in such a short space of time would completely unhinge her.”

“I see,” Caxton said.

“I wasn’t sure whether to let you talk to her at all, but in the end I decided I did not wish to create trouble with the police. I’m beginning to wonder if that was a mistake. Is your business with us done now?”

“No,” Caxton said. “Believe me. I’d love to leave the whole bunch of you in peace. I’m afraid I’m going to have to spend the night, though.” She could see Margot’s face darkening again, so she added, “This is an emergency situation. Do you know about Raleigh’s father?”

“The vampire?”

“Yeah,” Caxton said. “I have reason to believe he’ll come here and try to harm her. It looks like he’s intent on destroying his own family. If I had any choice in the matter I’d take Raleigh out of here right now and get her somewhere safe.”

Margot didn’t seem impressed. “I can assure you there’s nowhere safer than here, especially from that sort. No such creature would ever dare cross the threshold of this place. It’s still holy ground. And as he is a man there is no chance of any of the sisters inviting him inside.”

“You mean, because a vampire can only enter a place where he’s been invited first? That’s a myth,”

Caxton said. “They don’t have to be invited into a place. They can go anywhere they want. Even on holy ground. Sorry.”

“Perhaps we’ll see,” Margot said, with a wry smile. “Very well, I’ll find a place for you to sleep—”

“I’ll need to sleep in the same room as Raleigh,” Caxton interrupted.

“You might find it a tad crowded. She shares a very small room with Violet,” Margot warned.

“I’ll make do.”

“So be it. Is there anything else you require, Special Deputy? If not, dinner will be served at five o’clock.

If you would be good enough to leave Raleigh alone until then, I would appreciate it. And please, would you do something for me? Don’t tell her you think her father wants to kill her. That would just be too much for her mental constitution to take.”

That sounded like a terrible idea—Caxton had always lived by the notion that forewarned was forearmed—but she just nodded her head.

When Sister Margot was gone she considered going back into the small room to comfort Raleigh, but then decided she wasn’t the one for that job. Instead Caxton found her way out of the dark building and into the fading light of afternoon. It was three-thirty and already the sun was low in the sky, casting long sharp shadows across the snow-crusted lawn. She spent a while just walking around, checking out the wall, looking for any place a vampire could sneak through. Of course, a determined enough intruder could climb over the wall anywhere, but she thought Jameson might try for a stealthy approach. The biggest weakness she found in the wall was a brick-lined arch at either end of the property where the creek flowed through. Neither arch was more than three feet high, but Jameson could easily crawl in through them.

It would be next to impossible to guard both arches unless she had some help. She had to make some phone calls.

Caxton took out her cell phone—she didn’t want to antagonize Sister Margot again by using her office phone—and was not surprised to find that she got terrible reception even outside the ex-convent, just a single bar that flickered in and out. She tramped around the grounds until her shoes were soaked through, hunting a clearer signal. She only found it as she approached the iron gate where she’d left her car.

Immediately the phone chirped, telling her she had a message waiting.

It was from Clara. “Hey, honey, I hope you’re having a good day. I dropped by your HQ earlier so I could meet with your forensics guys. I missed them, but they left a report for me to read. There were two things in it that sounded important. One was that they couldn’t get a positive ID on the half-dead, but that they were trying to rebuild its skull so they could build up a computer-enhanced facial reconstruction. I wouldn’t hold your breath, though—they said it could take a couple days to do the rendering. The other thing was that they were able to match the fibers taken from the motel bathroom window. They found three different kinds of thread: cotton, nylon, and an aromatic polyamide, um, which they said also goes by the trade name of Twaron. I hope that helps.”

Caxton bit her lip. It didn’t help at all, of course. It was just like she’d told Fetlock. Fiber analysis was no use on this case. She called Clara, intending to thank her for her help anyway, but the number went straight to voice mail. She left a short message and hung up, then dialed Fetlock.

“I’ve got the location secured, as much as possible,” Caxton told him when he asked how she was going about protecting Raleigh. “I’ve got some ideas on how to handle him if she shows up here. Though I have to say I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Understandable,” he told her.

“The big thing worrying me right now is that I know he’s going to go after Raleigh and Simon, but I don’t know which one he’ll try to hit first. I could be in the wrong place right now, just spinning my wheels.”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Yeah.” Caxton rubbed at her eyes. She needed sleep. Well, she’d needed sleep since Arkeley took the curse. Since Gettysburg. She was learning to live on just a couple hours a night. “Did Glauer call you about checking some possible lairs?”

“Yes. I have people on it.”

Caxton closed her eyes. “How many people? Do they know how dangerous this could be? How many places can they check out before dark?”

“Let me worry about that. You have enough on your hands.”

Caxton held the phone away from her face and tried not to scream. Of course she was going to worry about it. This was her case. She wanted to say a number of things in response. Then she rethought them and instead just said, “Okay, good. Did you send a deputy up to Syracuse to collect Simon?”

“I…did,” Fetlock acknowledged.

From his tone Caxton could guess what had happened. “He refused protective custody, I take it.” Shit, she thought. She had called that one.

“I’m told he refused to leave his current residence. Said he had an experiment going on he couldn’t let out of his sight. Is Simon some kind of scientist?”

“He’s a college student. Probably worried about getting a B in geology or something. Not the most levelheaded guy I’ve ever met.”

Fetlock tried to sound encouraging. “I’ve detailed three units to watch his place, in shifts. We’ve got round-the-clock coverage. If Jameson shows up there we’re ready for him.”

She thought of the cops she’d sent to protect Astarte. “No. We’re probably not. If he comes for Simon tonight I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“So what do you want to do, Special Deputy?”

“I can’t be in two places at once,” Caxton said. “And I’m already here. I’ll keep in touch, Deputy Marshal.”

“Please do,” Fetlock said, and hung up.

She made a couple more phone calls, preparing for the night to come, and then headed back to the convent building—it was time for dinner.

Chapter 28.

Dinner at the convent proved simple enough, a salad of mixed greens, vegetable barley soup, and some grainy bread that Caxton chewed and chewed until it was soft enough to swallow. She was seated at a long table with twenty girls, all dressed in oversized clothes that covered them from neck to ankle.

Apparently attractive clothing was a distraction, and therefore to be avoided in the retreat. None of the girls spoke a word as they ate, but they all kept looking up at Caxton with wide eyes, clearly wondering what she was doing there. Raleigh sat on the other side of the table but didn’t make eye contact during the meal.

Tall arched windows lined one long wall. Nothing showed beyond them but blackness. If Jameson came crashing through one of them, if he chose that moment to attack his daughter, there would be little Caxton could do to stop him. In the dark she would be at a distinct disadvantage. To Caxton the dining hall was a swaying cavern of guttering light. To a vampire it would be lit up like Christmas—they could see human blood glowing with its own light even in the thickest gloom. To make matters worse, if Jameson attacked the room would be full of panicked girls running every which way. Caxton couldn’t shoot through that crowd, not if she didn’t want to hit Raleigh or one of the other inmates by mistake.

She was relieved, then, as the sisters rose one by one from the long tables and left the dining hall without a word. They stacked their soup bowls and their plates in a tall metal rack by the door and filed out individually, presumably headed for their rooms. When only a few remained, struggling with their hard bread, Caxton bused her own bowl and plate and then made her way toward where Raleigh still sat.

The girl sat alone, her arms wrapped around her chest, staring down at the rough surface of the table. No food sat before her, just a glass half full of warm water. Caxton remembered that she was fasting in honor of her uncle Angus, and maybe in honor of her mother now as well. She supposed she had to respect that kind of reverence, though she doubted a doctor would agree—Raleigh couldn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, a fact even her baggy clothes couldn’t hide. Caxton touched the girl on the shoulder and she looked up and nodded, then stood and started walking toward the door. Caxton followed close behind, only turning around once when she noticed Violet following them at a discreet distance.

After dinner most of the girls headed for a common room, where they could read or talk quietly among themselves. There wasn’t a lot else they were allowed to do. They weren’t even allowed to play board games or cards; when Caxton asked why not, Raleigh pointed out a girl named Kelli, who sat alone on the opposite side of the room, just staring into space. “She’s here because she was addicted to Internet gambling. She went through a whole trust fund in six months and then she started borrowing money with no way to pay it back. If we had so much as a game of Go Fish in here, she’d be looking for somebody to bet with on who would win.”

One by one, or in small groups, the girls wandered off to bed. It was no later than eight o’clock when Raleigh announced she was tired enough to sleep, herself.

It was understood that Caxton would be sleeping in Raleigh’s room that night. Caxton had expected the girl to be suspicious when she’d heard about the arrangements—surely she must have guessed something was up. Yet Raleigh had asked no questions nor even given Caxton a quizzical look. She had simply accepted Caxton’s continued presence as a fact of life and moved on.

In the hallway Violet sat waiting for them in a massive carved wooden chair bigger than she was. The mute girl jumped up when she saw them and came racing to catch up.

“What’s her deal?” Caxton whispered to Raleigh, nodding in Violet’s direction.

“She drank drain cleaner and—”

“No, I heard that from Sister Margot. I mean, is she supposed to keep an eye on us or something? She creeps me out a little.”

Raleigh shrugged. “Sister Margot would never spy on us. She’s not like that.”

“Yeah, okay,” Caxton said, not convinced.

“Besides, Violet is harmless. She’s a little nutty, I suppose you could say.”

That Caxton could believe.

“I asked her once,” Raleigh went on, “why she tried to hurt herself. She can’t talk, of course, but she’s very good at mime. She rolled up her eyes and sighed dramatically, which I think means she did it just because she was bored. One of the other girls told me that Violet was the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Ohio. They sent her here to get the rest she needed.”

“Psychotherapy wouldn’t have been a better option?”

Raleigh shook her head. “She was seeing a therapist four times a week when she—when she self-harmed. But look how happy she is here.”

Behind them Violet stopped in midstep and beamed at Caxton, showing lots of big white round teeth.

“This place works miracles,” Raleigh said, her eyes slightly moist.

If I have to spend more than one night here, Caxton thought to herself, I am going to start praying for a vampire attack. Just to break the boredom.

They had reached the room that Raleigh and Violet shared, its door identical to dozens of others in the hallway. Inside it proved to be little bigger than a closet. There were two wooden pallets with thin mattresses and thinner sheets, one built into either side wall, and a tiny iron coal-burning stove bolted to the far wall. There were no windows, and definitely no room for a table or chairs or a third cot. Caxton frowned, realizing she would have to sleep either on the floor or outside in the hall. It was freezing cold in the hall—at least the stove would keep her warm during the night.

“I don’t see a private bathroom,” Caxton said, trying to smile at Raleigh. “Is there someplace I can wash up before we turn in? And do you have a spare toothbrush?” It had been a while, and she imagined her breath was getting pretty rank.

Raleigh gave her what she needed, including a washcloth and a bar of organic, cruelty-free soap. It all went in a cute little plastic bucket. Then she pointed her toward a communal bathroom, where half a dozen girls in various states of undress were getting ready for sleep. There was a single bathtub, which was in steady use. Not wanting to wait for hours for her turn, Caxton gave herself a disco bath—a good solid face wash and a scrub or two under the armpits with the washcloth—then headed back to the room. Raleigh and Violet were already lying on their pallets, curled up with their eyes closed. They had taken off their ugly clothes but wore flannel nightgowns instead.

“Good night,” Caxton said, but Raleigh didn’t answer—maybe she was already asleep. Violet opened one eye to look at her, winked mischievously, then closed her eyes again and started to snore.

Caxton closed the door, pitching the room into near-total darkness. Only a little orange light came around the edge of the iron stove’s door. She sat down on the floor between the two pallets and placed her Beretta between her knees. She had no intention of sleeping, at least not until she was sure Jameson wouldn’t attack that night. She leaned up against the far wall, careful not to touch the stove, and waited.

And then nothing happened.

Nothing at all. And then, more nothing.

At some point she noted that her chin was touching her chest. Her mouth was hanging slackly open and drool was rolling down the front of her shirt. She sat up suddenly, knocking her head against the wall behind her. Had she dozed off? If so, for how long?

She stared around the little room, desperately hoping Jameson hadn’t caught her napping. But no, both sisters were still lying on their pallets, fast asleep.

Wiping down her shirt with one hand, she forced herself upward until she was standing. Her head rang like a bell with interrupted sleep and she could feel the blood rushing down into her body, into her legs.

One of these nights, she told herself, she was going to have to actually get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Thinking she would splash some water on her face, she gently opened the door and stepped out into the hall. A single candle inside a hurricane lamp stood at the end of the hallway, providing just enough light for her to find her way to the bathroom.

Halfway there she heard someone cry out in the dark.

Chapter 29.

Caxton rushed forward with her weapon drawn, barely able to see in the dark corridor. The sound had come from far off, perhaps from a completely different part of the building. She had made a note, earlier, of the plan of each floor and she knew there were dormitory wings at both ends of the structure. Getting from one side to the other in the dark was going to be difficult, she thought, and unless the cry came again she might never know which room it had come from.

She stopped herself, tried not to breathe too hard, and listened.

There—she heard it again. Was it a cry of pain, or just terror? She couldn’t be sure. It seemed to come from a room closer by, this time. She tensed herself, closed her eyes, and—yes, there.

Sprinting down the hall, she turned a corner and found herself in another almost lightless hallway, this one, like the other, lined with the narrow doorways that led to the girls’ rooms.

What would she do if she found Jameson inside one of the rooms, tearing somebody to pieces? She would shoot, of course, but would it do any good? She had fired into his heart at point-blank range and achieved nothing. What made her think it would be different this time? Yet she had no idea what else to do.

It was no time to think of such things, she told herself. She forced herself to concentrate, to listen again for the cry. She had no choice. This was what she was pledged to do, to protect people from the vampires. Clamping her eyes shut, she put every ounce of her attention into her ears.

“Oh my God,” she heard—a sound of desperation.

She rushed forward, into the dark. Her rubber-soled shoes slapped on the flagstone floor and she wondered if Jameson could hear her coming. The cry was louder now, and it came repeatedly—“Oh my God” this time it was nearly a sigh, and then she heard it again, much louder—“No way!”

She stood outside the door she was certain was the source of the cries. Her weapon up and ready, she reached forward to touch the doorknob, to throw back the door and confront whatever was inside.

Something bugged her about the sound, though. It wasn’t a fearful shriek at all. It was more like—

“You’re so dead,” someone said from behind the door.

Caxton knocked the door in with her shoulder. It wasn’t locked.

Inside sat six girls with their knees up on the two pallets, looking terrified. One of them held a cheap flashlight that gave off less light than the coal stove.

On the floor between the pallets lay a pile of very old, very tattered magazines. They’d been glossy once, and were folded open to pictures of various movie stars. Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie. Tom Cruise.

One of the girls was holding a lit cigarette as if it were a joint.

“Please, no,” one of the girls whispered. She had a lipstick on her mouth and she hurriedly smeared the back of her hand across her lips, trying to rub it off. “Please don’t say anything. Oh, please. We’ll get in so much trouble—”

Caxton stepped back out into the hallway and pulled the door shut again. From inside she could hear desperate whispers shooting back and forth.

Shaking her head, taking her time, Caxton worked her way back toward Raleigh’s room. It had not been what she’d thought at all. She’d been so primed and ready for a vampire attack that any sound would have alerted her. Now she wondered if Jameson was nearby at all. He could be miles away. He could be up at Syracuse.

That thought gave her a shiver. Or maybe it was just the frigid air in the convent. She rubbed at her own arms, and then swung them back and forth rapidly, trying to get her circulation going. She headed around the corner and tried to remember which room belonged to Raleigh. They all looked alike.

Violet solved the problem for her by opening the door then and peeking her head out. Her eyes were very wide.

Caxton hurried toward the mute girl and asked her what was the matter. Violet’s answer was to open the door up all the way and step aside, letting Caxton look into the little room. The stove was glowing merrily and its light clearly showed that both pallets were empty.

“Where’s Raleigh?” Caxton asked. Maybe she had just gotten up to go to the bathroom, she thought.

Maybe she’d been unable to sleep and had gone for a little walk to clear her head. She wouldn’t let herself think of the other possibility, the more dreadful one.

Violet’s face clouded with anxiety for the first time since Caxton had met her. She shook her head from side to side, then raised her hands in a gesture of submission. Caxton frowned, which just made the girl more upset. She held up one hand with the index and ring fingers pointing down. Moving them deftly, she simulated someone sneaking away, walking carefully and softly so as not to be heard.

“Okay, thanks,” Caxton said. She started to run off, but then stopped herself. She had no reason to believe Raleigh was in danger, not really. She had no indication that Jameson was anywhere near the building. Yet she had an obligation to the inmates to keep them safe. That was far more important than her desire not to disturb their sleep. “Go wake up Sister Margot,” she said, staring into Violet’s eyes until the silent girl nodded in understanding. “Tell her—tell her we may have some trouble tonight.” Then she was off like a shot.

Raleigh could be anywhere. Caxton would search the entire building if she had to. Back around the corner. Down the hallway that led to the other dormitory wing—maybe Raleigh was just headed to a midnight magazine session in some other room, Caxton told herself.

Maybe she had gone to meet her father, to tell him that yes, please, she’d like to become a vampire.

No. That wasn’t possible. Caxton had seen enough of the girl to know she wasn’t capable of making that kind of choice for herself. Simon, on the other hand—but Simon was in another state, under police guard.

No time to worry about Simon.

Caxton grabbed a candle from where it burned at the top of the main stairway, studied it for a moment, then shook her head and put it back. She had a mini Mag-Lite in her pocket and wasn’t afraid to use it.

Hurrying up the stairs, she switched it on and played it across the long white plaster walls.

The third floor was empty, and silent, as it should be—it was all therapy rooms. All cold and deserted.

Caxton moved on. The second floor, which consisted of dormitories (which she’d already checked), a big unused library, and a couple of yoga studios, was deserted as well, though the central hallway resonated with the breath of all the sleeping girls, their snoring making Caxton’s candle flicker. She peered through the gloom, looking for half-open doors or stealthily broken windows, but there was nothing to be found.

Main floor next. The central foyer was empty. So were the offices—Sister Margot’s office door was wide open and Caxton glanced inside, found nothing. She hurried to the other wing and the big dining hall. The long wooden tables had been cleared off and the rolling carts full of bused bowls and tableware long since trundled away. Caxton studied the long, sharp shadows of the big room with her mini flashlight but found nothing, not so much as a mouse.

She turned to go, not sure where to check next, when a noise made her shoulders jump up around her ears. It was a sound that would have made her jump at any time, but at that particular moment it nearly made her squeal in terror.

It was the sound of a dropped spoon bouncing on a flagstone floor. A jangling, pealing sound, as loud as cannon fire in the still dining hall.

Caxton dashed across the big room and knocked open the door at the far end with her shoulder. Beyond lay the kitchen—a room full of big prep tables and wide sinks, with iron pots and skillets dangling from the ceiling on hooks. Caxton’s flashlight beam shattered as it passed through the hanging pans and griddles and showed her odd-shaped patches of the wall beyond. She moved quickly to the side of the room and hurried toward its back, where the food was stored in massive walk-in pantries.

Caxton licked her lips. They had suddenly gone very dry. She moved slowly, quietly, toward the open door—then threw it back all at once.

Her flashlight shone down like an accusing finger on Raleigh, who kneeled on the floor, her face upturned and wracked with terror. She held an open jar of honey in one hand. It was her spoon that had fallen to the floor.

“I thought you were fasting in your uncle’s memory,” Caxton said, suddenly very angry. She fought to control herself.

“Do you know how hard it is to eat nothing for three whole weeks?” Raleigh asked, in a very small voice.

“Come on,” Caxton said. She’d had enough of the girls’ after-hours hijinks. “We’re going back to your room. You’re going to sleep there all night if I have to sit on you.” She grabbed Raleigh’s arm, not too roughly, and dragged her up to her feet.

The girl didn’t pull away from her as Caxton marched the two of them through the dining hall and back toward the main stairwell. Just outside the entrance hall, however, Raleigh grabbbed Caxton’s arm very tightly and shook her head.

“Did you hear something?” Caxton asked. When she shut up and listened for a second, she heard it, too.

“What is that?” The sound changed to a kind of pathetic gagging and hissing that didn’t sound like an animal at all.

Caxton pushed open the door to the main hall and pointed her flashlight beam through, a narrow cone of light spearing through the darkness. It lit up Violet, who was slumped across the bottom steps of the stairway, her arms up in the air as if she were fending off a brutal attack. Caxton swiveled her light to the side a little—and saw Jameson Arkeley’s red eyes burn brighter than the room’s candles as he crouched over the silent girl.

Chapter 30.

Caxton raised her weapon and fired right at Jameson’s heart. The shot tore open his black shirt, just a few inches off. The vampire spun around and glared at her, but with her free hand she was already reaching for the amulet around her neck. It felt warm in her hand, which meant it was working.

On the stairs Violet writhed and pushed herself up a step. Her face was contorted by fear and her hands were clutching at nothing.

Caxton fired again, and this time hit her target. The bullet clanged off his chest and spun away into the darkness. How was it possible? Jameson’s body curled up like a caterpillar in a fire, but only for an instant. He straightened up quickly—and then he was on her. It was that fast. She felt a cold wind blowing toward her and then she was on the floor with the vampire on top of her, pinning down her gun hand, his teeth pressing against her cheek. He felt cold and wrong and he stank of death.

His weight pressed down on her wrist and the tendons there bent and twisted. Her fingers spasmed and then flew outward and her weapon fell away. He snatched it up and threw it into the darkness.

He held her there silently while she struggled. He outweighed her by a considerable margin, but it was his strength that truly held her—she might as well have fought off a stone statue. Clamping her eyes shut, she turned her face to the floor and tried to get her free arm up to protect her eyes, but he just grabbed her wrist and smashed it painfully against the flagstones. Her flashlight rolled away across the floor.

She could hear Violet gasping and choking on the stairs. She could hear her own breath pushing in and out of her chest. She could hear her heart beating in her throat. Jameson was as silent as a tomb.

Then he pulled back a fraction of an inch. Enough to let her roll over on her side. Not enough to get her legs underneath her. “I warned you off,” he said, “but you wouldn’t listen. There’s part of me that still doesn’t want to kill you. Do you believe that?”

She didn’t answer—couldn’t. But then he shook her violently.

“Yes,” she managed to exhale.

“That part,” he went on, “gets smaller every night. The other part of me, the curse, gets stronger. Right now it’s telling me to tear open your carotid artery. To lap at your blood. I can imagine how good that would feel. How good it would taste. It would solve some problems, too. It would make my task easier.”

He was trying to convince himself to kill her, she realized. He was psyching himself up. She had to think of something fast.

“You did this to save me,” she tried. “You took the curse to save my life. If you kill me now that sacrifice means nothing.”

“I spared your life once, at the motel. Maybe that makes us even.”

She shook her head from side to side. “And what about at your wife’s house? You left seven half-deads to kill me.”

“I knew you could handle those. They were only there to cover my escape. Now. Shh,” he whispered, and drew a finger down her cheek. He found her pulse point and tapped her skin in time with her heartbeat. His fingernail, she knew, was sharper than a wolf’s claw. He could cut her open right there and let the blood come rushing out. If he even scratched her, if even a drop of her blood was spilled, then nothing would hold him back. He would smell her blood fresh and warm on her skin and it would drive him into a frenzy. No moral compunction he’d ever had would be able to stop him then.

He knew it, too. He lifted his finger away from her throat and then brought the nail down to touch her skin. It felt cold and hard. He started to press, gently at first, but she knew in a moment he would cut right into her.

“Daddy,” Raleigh said then. Caxton’s eyes were still shut. She couldn’t see the girl. “Daddy, please, no.

I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt her.”

She wanted to scream No, wanted to tell Raleigh to run, to get away. She couldn’t seem to get the words out of her throat.

“Please, Daddy.”

Jameson’s finger lifted away from her neck. The mangled palm of his left hand still held her wrist against the floor. She could feel his body moving above her, moving away from her, but still he held her fast.

“Raleigh, I want to give you something,” he said. “Something wonderful. I was never a very good father.”

“No, Daddy, don’t say that.”

Caxton could feel his body shaking. “I was lousy. But I can make it up to you now. Come here. Come closer.”

“No,” Caxton managed to shriek, at the same time as she heard something hard and metallic smash into Jameson’s skull. Her eyes shot open and she saw Violet standing over them both, a massive wrought-iron candelabra in her hands. One of the candles remained in its socket, guttering wildly.

Jameson leapt up off of Caxton and backward, away from the girl’s follow-up attack. He laughed as she swept the candelabra across his face like a rake, laughed again as she swung it over her head and down into his ear.

“Raleigh,” Caxton called, rolling over onto her stomach, “get the fuck out of here right now.”

Jameson’s daughter nodded and disappeared through the doorway again. Caxton got her feet underneath her and half-crawled, half-ran toward where she thought her handgun had landed when Jameson threw it.

In the dark hall she couldn’t see it. She had to find it. She had only seconds, she knew, before Jameson stopped laughing at Violet’s attacks and decided to do something about them.

Where was the pistol? Where? She saw a shadow ahead of her on the floor and dove forward, her hands stretched out to grab it. Cool metal met her fingertips and she grabbed it up, ran her thumb across the safety, making sure it wasn’t on. She rolled over on her back and sat up, sighting on where she expected Jameson to be.

She was off by yards. The gun barrel pointed at nothing but darkness. She spat out a profanity and swept the gun left—just in time to see Jameson lift Violet off her feet and into the air. His mouth sank into her chest and red blood rushed down her baggy shirt. Her candelabra lay on the floor beneath her, forgotten.

“No,” Caxton moaned, and fired into Jameson’s back. The vampire cringed and then spun around, and she thought he might come at her again, might grab her again, and this time she knew he would kill her.

Instead he tossed Violet’s body away like a doll and raced for the front door and out into the night.

She followed as fast as she could, her body twitching with adrenaline. Outside the stars burned in a deep blue sky and lit up the snow with an unearthly pale radiance. She couldn’t see Jameson at first, and she worried he might have tricked her, that maybe he had just run out the door and stopped, put his back up against the ivy-covered wall to wait for her to run past him. That he would reach out of the dark and grab her and kill her easily.

Then she saw him running ahead of her, his dark clothes a pillar of black against the snow, his legs and arms pumping. She dashed forward, her weapon raised, knowing it was pointless to shoot while they were both running. Worried it was pointless to shoot at all. How many times had she hit him? She’d barely slowed him down.

He was running for the front gate, the iron gate with the cross on top. She could never catch him, of course—he was far too fast, his new body capable of converting stolen blood into incredible speed. On foot she was no match for him, and he must have known that.

Luckily, she’d had time to prepare.

She grabbed up her cell phone out of her pocket. Running as fast as she was, she couldn’t check the screen to see if she had any bars or not. She flipped it open anyway and hit the send key. Hours earlier she’d typed in the appropriate number and now the phone dialed automatically.

Pressing it against her ear, she heard a single thready ring, the atmosphere tearing at her signal with invisible fingers. A second ring and then someone picked up on the other end.

“Now,” she said, and light blasted through the gateway, dozens of headlights on high beam coming on all at once. If everything had gone according to plan there would be as many as ten patrol cruisers sitting out there, all of them loaded with local cops. After the disaster at Bellefonte she’d been leery of actually bringing them into the convent, but they could serve her just fine out there beyond the gate.

The light hit Jameson like an artillery barrage. He threw his arms up across his face and dropped to his knees in the snow, hurt far worse by car headlights than by all the bullets she’d wasted on him. He was a nocturnal creature and his eyes were meant for night vision. They couldn’t handle all that light.

Slowly he rose to his feet again, turning away from the gate, his face clutched in his hands.

“There’s no escape that way,” Caxton shouted. “And I have guys waiting at the creek if you try to go that way.” She lined up a shot on his back. “I’m willing to give you a chance to surrender.”

Jameson rose to his full height, still rubbing at his eyes with his hands. Behind him she could see cops milling about, poking rifle barrels through the gate, lining up shots. She didn’t know if they would have any more luck than she had, but there was one way to find out.

He started to laugh then. Maybe it was the laughter of a man who knows there’s no way out, but she didn’t think so. She lifted the phone to her lips and said, “Fire at will.”

Chapter 31.

The rifles cracked and spat fire and filled the air with whizzing bullets, but Jameson was already on the move. He leapt out of the light and landed on all fours like a cat on the shadowy snow, then swiveled around and jumped again as the rifles tracked him. Caxton ran out of the field of fire, terrified that she might be hit by a stray shot from one of the police guns.

She could still hear the vampire laughing, a cold chuckle that rattled around inside her head like a dried pea in a cup. She jammed her fingers in her ears, which helped with the noise from the rifles but didn’t quiet the laughter at all.

Moving faster than she’d ever seen a vampire move before, Jameson crouched low and dashed behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. A rifle shot took off part of her wimple in a puff of obliterated masonry, but already Jameson was moving on. A row of weathered headstones was his next cover, and she could just see his dark clothes in reverse silhouette against the faintly glowing snow as he pressed his back against one of the stones. For a moment he didn’t move at all, or no—his good hand was moving, working at his belt. Had he brought some weapon, a firearm, with which to fight back? She’d never seen a real vampire with a gun before. They didn’t need them. Maybe that was just hubris on their part, however. Maybe Jameson had decided to buck the trend.

It wasn’t a gun he pulled out, though, as she watched. It was the belt of his pants. He whirled it around for a moment, then flung it into the air. The rifles tracked it and one or two of the cops took a shot—but already Jameson was moving in the other direction.

“Keep it together,” she shouted into her phone. “Don’t get distracted.”

It was hard for her to follow her own advice, however. Ducking behind a massive boulder, Jameson nearly got away from her as he threw one of his shoes to the left and the other to the right. She tried to keep her weapon pointed at him, but the double feint dragged her attention away for a split second. In that time Jameson managed to duckwalk all the way to a massive fountain in the middle of the lawn.

She could just make out the curve of his back behind the fountain. His body writhed like a snake and she wondered if maybe he’d been hit. That was probably too much to hope for, and anyway if he’d been hit anywhere but directly in the heart it would only take him seconds to regenerate. With Violet’s blood flowing through his veins he would be nearly impervious to harm.

“Come on,” she said, urging him to move again, to expose himself for just a second. Instead he seemed to relax, his body sagging to the snow. “Come on. You can’t stay there forever.”

He didn’t move at all. The rifles had fallen silent, as no target presented itself. She thought about telling the cops to move in, but she knew that would just put them at risk. Assaulting the fountain was up to her.

“Hold your fire,” she said into her phone. Then she shoved it in her pocket, the call still connected in case she needed to issue another order. Keeping low, trying not to expose herself too much, Caxton moved step by step closer to the fountain.

Jameson—what she could see of him—didn’t stir.

He could be lying in wait for her. He could be just waiting for her to get close enough, just inside a crucial range where he could jump out and attack her. She kept her weapon up and held on to it with both hands. Another step closer and she could see his shirt, the sleeves stretched out as if he were hugging the round lip of the fountain. When he did launch himself at her she would have only a fraction of a second to respond. Another step, and she could see his pants, his knees bent like coiled springs. Without his shoes his feet would be nearly invisible against the snow, she thought. His skin was as white as the ground cover, and—

His feet weren’t there. They weren’t just difficult to see. They were missing, as if they’d been cut off just at the level of his pant cuffs. She raised her weapon a fraction of an inch and saw that his hands were missing as well. What the hell, she had time to think, before she understood exactly what had happened.

It was just his clothes, laid out to look as if he was still in them. A decoy.

She spun around, grabbing her phone out of her pocket even as she searched the snow. “He’s moving,”

she shouted. “He’s naked and moving! There, nine o’clock, somebody shoot him!”

She could barely see him, wriggling along the ground, already twenty yards away. Completely naked, and therefore almost perfectly camouflaged. She ran after him, no longer caring if she was running right into a free-fire zone, and discharged her weapon every time she thought she had a clear shot.

It was no use. Even down on all fours, scuttling like a crab, he was far faster than she was running at her top speed. In seconds he was up against the convent wall, a snowman glowing by starlight. Then he was up, his powerful legs carrying him over the wall in one spastic hop.

“No,” she howled, racing back toward the gate. There was no way she could get over that wall herself, not without wasting a lot of time. At the gate a line of cops stared at her with shock and disbelief, but she didn’t have time to explain. Dashing around the side of the wall, she headed down a narrow decline, dodging tree trunks. She came around the corner of the wall and pushed on, intent on reaching the place where he had come over the top. In the dark, with pine needles overhead soaking up all the starlight, she could barely see anything. A tree root snagged at her foot and she bounced sideways, intent on not twisting her ankle, not now, not when he was so close. She struck a tree trunk with her hand, scraping half the skin off her palm, and kept running. She could not let him get away—not again.

And yet that was exactly what happened. A rock shifted under her foot and she went sprawling, her hands down to collide with a frozen carpet of brown pine needles. She got slowly, painfully to her feet, knowing he’d already evaded her.

She found the wall, and pushed her back up against it. Closed her eyes, tried to listen for any sound of running feet. There was nothing. She heard snow sliding down through branches fifty feet over her head.

From far off, from inside the convent, she heard someone shouting. She heard the cops behind her climbing into their cars, slamming their doors. She heard the phone in her pocket chime. But no sound of a vampire anywhere.

She let her pulse rate wind down. Caught her breath.

Heading back toward the gate, she checked the phone and found she had a new text message:

You almost had him tonight, didn’t you?

Mayhaps the FOURTH time’s the charm.

Malvern again. Malvern—who had some way of knowing that Caxton had failed. Caxton considered throwing the phone away into the trees, getting it as far away from herself as possible. It was government property, though, and she knew Fetlock would disapprove. So she just switched it off and shoved it deep into the bottom of her pocket.

Chapter 32.

As usual, Jameson had left her quite a mess to clean up.

Her first concern was for Raleigh. Sister Margot and several of the girls were waiting in the front hall and they demanded answers to their questions. She just pushed past them and into the hallway where she’d last seen Jameson’s daughter. The girl was there, curled up in a massive wooden chair. Her face was white with fear and her hands were clenched. She said she could not release them.

“Just breathe,” Caxton said, kneeling in front of her. “Breathe.”

The girl shook her head wildly. Caxton fought down the urge to slap her. She had work to do, but first she needed to make sure Raleigh was alright. She tried to imagine what Glauer would do in this situation.

Glauer was much better at dealing with hysterical people. “Look,” she said. “It’s going to be alright.

Yeah. Your father wants to turn you into a vampire, but—”

“He wants what?” Raleigh gasped. She started breathing heavily. She was at risk of hyperventilating.

“You’re safe right now. He won’t come back tonight. I promise. That’s his MO so far, one attack per night.”

“Then what about tomorrow night?” the girl asked.

“I’ll protect you then, too,” Caxton said.

It wasn’t working. Raleigh’s fear level was ramping up and nothing Caxton said seemed to help. She headed back into the foyer, intending to ask Sister Margot for help. “Did Raleigh have any friends here she was especially close with?” Caxton asked. “I mean,” she said, after glancing at the corpse on the floor, “anyone other than Violet. Someone needs to sit with her. I don’t think she’s going to sleep tonight.

Also, I need some Styrofoam cups, or whatever you have.” There were shell casings all over the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and worse, probably dozens of bullets out on the lawn. She needed to start identifying their locations. Normally she could have left that to someone else, but with the girls milling about in the foyer it was going to be hard to secure the scene. She scanned the floor with her eyes, finding her brasses, until she realized Sister Margot wasn’t answering her. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“You,” Sister Margot said, “have brought death into this sacred place. You will leave at once!”

Caxton bit her lip.

Sister Margot stamped her foot on the flagstones. “At once!”

Caxton watched the young woman carefully. Sized her up. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” she said.

“This is a place of healing. Of peace! I’ve worked all my life to make it a quiet refuge and in one night you’ve ruined everything!”

Not shrugging was the best Caxton could do to mollify the girl. “I’m going to need to bring in some forensics people, get this crime scene cleared, that’s going to take most of the night, then I’ll need to bring in some people to question everyone who was out in the halls before, so we can establish when the vampire came in and what route he used. Lastly I’m going to—”

“Violet is lying there, dead!” Margot shrieked.

“Yeah. I need to contact her parents immediately.”

“I should hope you would. When they hear what happened I imagine—”

“I’ll need to convince them into an emergency cremation. Whenever he wants, the vampire can bring her back from the dead. Meanwhile, I’ll get an armed guard in here to watch her for signs of reanimation.” It would be much easier, of course, to just cut off the dead girl’s head. Decapitated corpses didn’t come back as half-deads. But she supposed the family had a right to make that kind of decision. “Meanwhile, why don’t you get everyone back to bed, alright? My people will come and go and hopefully be done by the time you get up in the morning. Thanks, Margot.”

The nun’s face was bright red. Caxton turned away to head back toward the gate, where she could make some phone calls.

First things first—she called in an APB on a naked vampire, to be considered extremely dangerous. She called the local police chief and reported Violet’s homicide so he could get a file going. Not that it was going to require much in the way of investigation, but you had to keep the paperwork straight. Finally she called Fetlock—or rather, she started dialing his number. Before she had half the digits into the phone he called her instead.

“Um, hello,” she said, answering his call.

“Is she dead?” Fetlock asked.

Caxton rubbed the bridge of her nose. “No. Raleigh—Raleigh’s alright. A little shaken up. How did you—?”

“But Jameson got away. I just saw your APB.”

Everybody knew about the mess she’d made. Malvern, Fetlock—when would Vesta Polder chime in?

she wondered. “Yeah. Yeah, he got away. I’ll explain how later. Listen, Deputy Marshal, how do you know all this? It only just happened.”

“I’ve been monitoring your phone,” he told her. “You made it sound as if you expected Jameson to attack tonight, so I’ve been up waiting to hear what happened. I hope you don’t mind me listening in to your phone calls.”

“No…of course not,” Caxton said.

“It’s crucial we stay together on this case. You should have called me earlier, when you were setting up your ambush. I could have had a SWAT team mobilized or something. Why didn’t you call me?”

“I figured I could handle it myself,” Caxton replied. To be honest, she hadn’t thought of Fetlock at all.

“Alright, next time. Now tell me what you need right now. I can be there in less than an hour.”

Caxton thought about it for a moment. She thought about Margot—and the girls. Violet’s murder would upset them more than she wanted to accept. She should try to be more sensitive, she decided. That was what Glauer would have told her. “There are no men allowed down here. Maybe you should stay clear—though I do need some officers to guard the scene, and the body. Female officers. Also,” she said, looking around the snowy lawn, “I have some material evidence here. Jameson left his clothes behind.”

“His clothes?”

So she had to explain how he’d gotten away after all. Fetlock said he would see what he could do about getting some female officers down to the convent and Caxton hung up. Then she went to send home the cops who had made up her ambush. She thanked them profusely and was glad to see them leave unscathed—but then one turned back. He was an earnest-looking young cop from the local borough’s PD. His uniform was spotless and his eyes were bright, even though the hour was growing late. He waited patiently for her to wave at the departing cars, then stepped closer, coughed discreetly into his hand, and then stood at attention until she met his eye.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.

“At ease,” she replied. “You have something to say?”

He nodded and relaxed a little. “I hit him,” he said.

Caxton shrugged. “So did I. Several times.”

The cop frowned. “Ma’am, begging your pardon—you didn’t so much as slow him down. We were all talking before, wondering if maybe he was bulletproof. Maybe through some magical means. But I’ve been hunting since I was a boy, and I know when I’ve hit an animal or a paper target. I saw his blood. I just wanted you to know that. He isn’t impervious to bullets, at least not totally.”

She stared at him with wide eyes. “You saw his blood?”

“I saw him turn to his left, and his arm went up, like so,” he demonstrated. “Then blood came out of the wound. Not much. But I know when I hit somebody.”

“Thank you very much, Officer. That’s actually good to hear.” And it was. She sent him home. He’d given her a lot to think about. So far she’d been unable to scratch his skin with her best shots. If the young officer had actually drawn blood—then maybe there was hope.

She secured the scene in the foyer as best she could, then went to sit in her own car and wait for Fetlock’s fiber unit to arrive. The sun was just starting to color the tops of the trees when the unit showed up—or rather, when the forensics expert arrived, since it was just one woman. She was about fifty, with frosted blond hair and bags under her eyes. She was not happy about being dragged out of bed to look at some cast-off clothes. “There’s a body inside?” she asked, pulling on some latex gloves. “Can I have that as well?”

“No word yet from the local coroner, so we can’t remove her yet. I’m waiting on word from her family so I can cremate her.”

The forensics expert grunted. “Tough to get anything useful from ashes. Though cremation’s not as complete as some people think. Your typical flame job leaves small material, some of it recognizable.

You can get teeth out of ashes, and sometimes the fillings don’t melt, so you can match dental records.

Titanium surgical pins, Teflon knee replacements, those survive.”

“We already have a positive ID on the body.”

The older woman shrugged.

“You want to take a look?” Caxton asked. She led the woman inside the foyer to where Violet still lay as she’d fallen.

“Vampire attack,” the expert said, after studying the body for a while. “More violent than the previous ones we’ve seen. This wasn’t premeditated.”

“No,” Caxton said. “Listen, I was here. I know all this already. Do you think you could tell me something I could use?”

The expert grunted again. “Maybe. This is not an exact science, Trooper.”

“Special Deputy. Let’s go look at the clothes.” She led the expert back out to the lawn and the shirt and pair of pants Arkeley had left behind. “Nobody has touched them. I made sure of it.”

“Good. Honestly, fiber’s my specialty,” the expert said.

Caxton sighed in relief. Fetlock had sent the right person for the job, then. There would be no fingerprints on the scene, or any DNA evidence. Vampires didn’t leave those behind, ever. Fibers were another matter. Anybody who wore clothes left fibers behind, somewhere.

The expert took one quick look at the clothes, then examined a few loose threads with a jeweler’s loupe.

“I think I can confirm this is a match with what we saw at the hotel. Three kinds of fibers. We left a report for your liaison.”

“I got it,” Caxton agreed.

“Yeah. She wasn’t there at your HQ when we arrived. We had to leave the report with a desk sergeant.

She never even followed up to let me know she got it. That’s just not professional. You want some free advice? Fire this twit. You’ve got real forensic pathologists in Harrisburg. Any of them would do a better job.”

The woman was talking about Clara. Caxton held her tongue.

“Anyway, I’ll do an actual comparison, but for now, I’ll provisionally say we’re looking at the same three fibers. Cotton, nylon, Twaron.”

“What the hell is Twaron?” Caxton asked. She’d been wondering all day.

The expert picked at the shirt and unbuttoned it. Beneath was another layer of cloth, some kind of vest.

She picked up the vest and threw it at Caxton, who caught it—but it was much heavier than she’d expected and she nearly dropped it. Squishing it in her hand, she knew what it was instantly.

“Twaron,” the expert explained, “is a competing product with Kevlar. It’s used in the construction of police body armor, mostly. Your vampire was wearing a ballistic vest.”

Chapter 33.

Caxton slapped the vest down on one of the desks in the briefing room a few hours later. Glauer stared at it as if there was some hidden message written on it, something he could read if he just looked hard enough.

“It’s a type IIIA ballistic vest,” Caxton said. “Standard police issue. Twaron fibers woven just right to reduce the impact of a bullet.” She rapped her knuckles on a spot just above where the wearer’s heart would be. “Then there’s a steel trauma plate here, just in case something gets through the fibers. It’ll stop pretty much any handgun bullet—.38 special, .44 Magnum, and just about any 9-millimeter round you can name, including the Parabellum rounds I load.”

Glauer tilted his head to one side. “So when you shot him, even at point-blank range—”

“He probably felt it, but it probably didn’t hurt.” She shook her head. “If you add this to how tough a vampire is anyway—I’m not exactly sure what would kill him.”

“Jesus,” Glauer swore. The man rarely ever swore. “But I’m confused. In the middle of a firefight he just threw it away. Why?”

“We weren’t shooting at him with handgun bullets anymore. This time we were using rifles. A rifle bullet would go through this like tissue paper,” she said, poking her index finger through a hole low on the left side, about where the wearer’s kidney might be. The cop who had spoken with her after the ambush had been right—he had hit Jameson, just not in his one vital spot.

“Jameson’s smart. We knew that already. He’s smart enough to understand his limitations. Most vampires don’t. They’re tougher than us, a hell of a lot faster, but they’re arrogant. They think they’re invincible, and that makes them cocky. Jameson is the least vain vampire I’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe, but then again he did leave this behind, right? So now he’s unprotected. You can’t just buy these off the Internet. You need to be in law enforcement to get one, and nobody is going to sell a vest to a vampire.”

Caxton punched the vest, and not lightly. “That would be great, wouldn’t it? Fetlock’s forensics expert said pretty much the same thing. For about an hour I was happy. Then I got a call. A peace officer out of Lenhartsville had radioed in saying he had a subject that matched the description on my APB. Tall, vampire, naked, running along the side of I-78. He said he was going to investigate. Then he never radioed back.”

“Oh, no.”

Caxton nodded. “A second unit was dispatched to the scene. The peace officer was found drained of blood. The engine of his cruiser was still running, but the trunk had been torn open, as if with a pry bar.

You want to guess what was missing from the trunk?”

“A type IIIA ballistic vest?” Glauer asked.

Caxton touched the tip of her nose. “He doesn’t mind running around without any pants on, but Jameson feels naked without a trauma plate over his heart. He didn’t waste any time getting another one.”

Glauer stood back and rubbed at his mouth with his hands. “Another cop.”

“Another funeral,” Caxton agreed.

For a while they were both silent. The Glauer said, in a very soft voice: “At least it wasn’t magic.”

Caxton sat down at one of the other desks. “Yeah. I was beginning to think he had some kind of spell to protect him against bullets. Now I know better. Fat lot of good it does me. I can’t carry a rifle around with me every time I go out. Against what I’m carrying, he’s fucking bulletproof!”

“Hey,” Glauer said, stepping toward her. For a second she flinched backward, thinking he was going to give her a supportive hug. “Let’s not lose focus here. You did accomplish something last night.”

Caxton frowned. “What? I managed to not get myself killed? I scared a bunch of girls who seriously did not need more trauma?”

“You saved her life.”

They both turned and looked then at Raleigh, who sat in a far corner of the room, on the floor, with her arms around her knees. She had been offered a chair but refused it. She hadn’t said a word since Caxton led her out of the convent, except “yes” and “no” when she’d been asked if she was willing to come to Harrisburg, and then when she was asked if she was okay, respectively.

She was scared. Terrified. Caxton could understand that. She should be scared, frankly. It was only a matter of time before her father came after her again.

Caxton turned back to Glauer. “Yeah,” she said. “I saved her. She isn’t going to be safe, though, until I take Jameson down.”

“Okay. How do you want to proceed?”

Caxton scratched her chin. “Well, as I see it, there are two things I need to do. I need to go up to Syracuse and stop Jameson from killing Simon. Then I have to find Jameson’s lair. Shooting him doesn’t seem to work. So I have to catch him when he’s defenseless. If I can get to him during the daytime, if I can find his coffin, I can pluck his heart right out of his chest.”

“How’s the search for the lair coming?” Glauer asked.

She nodded appreciatively. She might be uncomfortable working with Fetlock, but he got results. “We had a list of sixty-odd places to check yesterday. The Feds were able to eliminate twenty of them yesterday, by actually going there and checking them in person. No sign of a vampire in any of them.

They’ll probably finish off the list today. I’d love to be able to go and check them out myself, but this’ll have to do—I’m going up to Syracuse as soon as I can, to secure Simon personally. We know Jameson is headed there next. It’s his last stop. If we don’t get him there—I have no idea where he’ll strike next, and everything gets a lot harder.”

“How far away is Syracuse?” Glauer asked.

“A little over four hours, if you’re driving. I don’t know how he travels.”

Glauer nodded. “That’s a long drive. Are you sure you’re up to it? You look like you need sleep.”

Caxton shrugged. “I used to work highway patrol. I would do twelve-hour shifts in a car back then. This I can handle. I have a couple of errands to run before I go, but I should be on the road before noon—which means I can arrive before nightfall. I might even have time to talk to Simon before his father tries to kill him.”

“Okay. I assume, from the way you’re talking, that I’m not going with you up there. I’ll keep working on the Carboy notebooks.”

“You haven’t turned up anything more from them, have you?” she asked.

Glauer’s face lit up, just a little. He gestured at the whiteboards and she saw, under Jameson’s portrait, a new picture. A picture of a slightly pudgy teenaged girl with spiky black hair (bright blue at the temples) and soft, very kindly-looking brown eyes.

“Who’s that? I’ve never seen her before.”

“Yes, you have,” Glauer told her. “Fetlock’s people came through with a partial facial reconstruction while you were gone. She was the half-dead that approached Angus.”

“Seriously?” Caxton looked closer at the picture. “I thought that one was male. She didn’t look anything like that.” Of course, if she’d been dead for a week, and she’d scratched off her own face—maybe.

“I took the partial face sketch they gave me and had some troopers run it by the missing persons database. She came up pretty fast. Cady Rourke, aged eighteen. Former resident of Mount Carmel.”

Caxton squinted. “That’s Carboy’s hometown.”

“Yes. And Cady Rourke was his first girlfriend. At least, that’s what he writes in the notebooks. I called her family and they said she and Dylan were just friends. Either way, what was Jameson doing with her?

Besides drinking her blood?”

“It’s a connection,” Caxton had to admit. “Tenuous, but it’s something.”

“I’d like to keep working on this lead. Unless you have something better for me to do.”

“Actually, I do. I need you to watch her.” Caxton didn’t so much as glance at Raleigh, but they both knew whom she was talking about.

“Oh. Okay,” Glauer said, nodding.

“Don’t just accept it like that. This is a pretty serious assignment. Jameson isn’t done with her, not yet.

He’ll try again to give her the curse. Normally when we work vampire sightings, I send you around to the back door. I put you on guard duty. This time you’ll be in the line of fire. You’re allowed to say no if you want to.”

“I can handle it,” the big cop said.

“You should keep her somewhere with lots of cops. Like right here. It’s possible that he’s tough enough to take on an entire barracks of troopers, but he’s too smart to try to find out. You should be okay as long as you don’t make any stupid mistakes.”

“I said I could handle it,” he grunted. “There’s nothing magic about you, either.”

Caxton watched his face. Had she hurt his feelings? “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“It means you aren’t the only person in the world who can fight vampires. I know we’ve watched a lot of cops get killed trying. But that was because they weren’t trained for this kind of work. I’ve been learning from you for two months now.”

She tried to stare him down, with her best cop look. He didn’t break eye contact with her. After a minute or so, she blinked.

She had learned how to fight vampires by watching Jameson. He’d never thought she was ready to do it on her own. She’d been about to say the same thing about Glauer—but then, Jameson had been wrong about her. Maybe she was wrong about Glauer. “Fair enough.” Then she turned to look at Raleigh.

“Officer Glauer’s going to see to your needs,” she said. The girl looked up with wide eyes. “He’ll protect you. Just do everything he says and you’ll be alright.”

Raleigh’s mouth fell open. “What about you? Aren’t you going to stay with me? You said you would keep me safe. You said that!”

“I have to go collect your brother,” Caxton said, going over to kneel next to the frightened girl. “I’ll bring him back here and you’ll both be safe.”

“You’re worried my father will attack Simon?”

What I’m worried most about, Caxton thought, is that Jameson will make his offer to Simon, and that Simon will accept it. “Nobody else is going to die,” she said. “Not if I can help it.”

Chapter 34.

The state police armorer broke into a very wide grin when she told him what she needed. He disappeared into a Quonset hut at the side of the target range and when he came back his arms were full of cardboard boxes. Some contained ammunition—bullets fatter and heavier than any Caxton had seen before. Others held a variety of pistols.

“So you don’t want to carry around a high-powered rifle,” he said, twirling the ends of his mustache.

“That’s the best way to defeat body armor.”

She shook her head. “I do a lot of close-quarters fighting inside of buildings. I’ll keep a rifle in the trunk of my car, but for most situations I need a handgun.”

“Now, if this were some normal bad guy,” he told her, “I’d say don’t bother with toys. I’d tell you to put more time in on the range until you could reliably take him down with a head shot.”

Caxton shook her head. “A vampire’s only vulnerable point is his heart. He’s got a IIIA ballistic vest and over that a steel trauma plate.”

The armorer rubbed his chin. “Vests aren’t perfect. They don’t do anything against knives or, say, wooden stakes.” Before she could even react the man waved one hand in the air. “Just a little joke. And anyway, you don’t want to go into this with a knife. By the time you got close enough to stab him you’d already be dead. Okay. Next thought. The ballistic fabric loses its effectiveness when it gets wet.”

“So you’re saying I should only shoot him if it’s raining? I don’t have that option.” She shook her head. “I need firepower.”

“And I am most happy to oblige. I don’t get to bring these out near as often as I’d like.” The armorer’s small eyes burned with glee as he opened the first box. Inside lay a revolver with a ten-and-a-half-inch barrel—twice as long as the barrel on her Beretta. It was made of stainless steel and had a thick rubberized grip designed to help cut down on recoil. She lifted it with both hands and almost gasped. It must have weighed five pounds. It felt like she was holding some massive machine part, and she wondered if she would be able to even draw it comfortably.

“What’s this one?” she asked.

“Smith & Wesson Model 500. 500H, to be precise. It loads .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum rounds, some of the most powerful in the world. The gun-control lobby calls that round the vest-buster.”

“What do other people call it?”

The armorer shrugged. “The NRA claims it can’t actually penetrate a trauma plate. They say they have ballistic tests to prove it. You can choose who you believe. What I do know is that this round is recommended for stopping a charging grizzly bear before it can gets its claws in you.”

Caxton’s eyes went wide. She reached for a pair of earplugs. The armorer handed her a pair of cup-style ear protectors as well. “You’ll want both,” he told her.

She lined up a shot on a paper target at twenty yards, adjusted her stance, leaned into the shot.

Squeezed the trigger. A jet of flame burst from the gun as it squirmed and pushed—her arm leaped up and the gun nearly hit her in the face. It felt like someone had kicked her in the shoulder. “Jesus,” she squeaked. Her ears were still ringing when she put the weapon down and removed her ear protectors.

“You didn’t flinch,” the armorer said, admiringly. “Most women when they take their first shot with that kind of power, they close their eyes and turn away from the blast.”

She picked up the handgun again and studied it. “Double action, at least. But this looks wrong.” Most revolvers carried six shots in a cylinder behind the barrel. “There are only five chambers.”

“The bullets were too big to fit six,” the armorer explained. He pressed a button to bring in the target.

The round she’d fired had made a sizable hole near the shoulder of the silhouette on the target, and she hated to think what that bullet could have done to a human body. Still—it hadn’t even come close to the target’s heart, and Caxton was a good shot. She practiced religiously and she had been trained by her father, who had been a sheriff up in coal country and who had been an excellent shot. That meant she knew her limits. She knew that the first round she fired from a new gun was never going to be a bull’s-eye. She also knew she’d had a lot of trouble controlling the weapon.

“I’m not strong enough for that,” she said. “I think maybe if I was Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I’m not.”

“With enough time and practice you’d be fine,” the armorer said.

“Time is something I’m short on.”

The armorer frowned sympathetically and put it back in its box. He had another gun for her to try, one she recognized right away. She’d seen it in plenty of movies and TV shows—a Mark XIX Desert Eagle, an Israeli-made gun that she’d always thought was perfect for men with especially small penises. It had a thick triangular barrel and a massive grip she could barely get her hand around. Its barrel was almost comically long—fourteen inches, even longer than the Model 500, and when she held it she felt like she had picked up some kind of movie prop. It made her Beretta look like a cap gun.

She checked the safety, then ejected the magazine. It held seven rounds. Better than the five in the revolver, but her Beretta held fifteen.

The armorer fingered one of the bullets. “That’s your .50AE round. Pretty nasty. Very powerful.”

“Okay.”

He took the weapon from her and reloaded it. “Usually, with ammo this big you’d use a revolver. The Desert Eagle’s a little different. It’s built more like a rifle than a handgun, especially with this barrel. Gas operated. Polygonal rifling. The rotating bolt is pretty close to what you’d find on an M16.”

“Cool.” Caxton replaced her ear protection, called to clear the range, then sighted and fired. The recoil wasn’t as bad as with the Model 500, but still she nearly lost control of the gun after it discharged. When the target fluttered up to her she saw she’d gotten a little closer to the heart, but not much. “Not so cool.”

She sighed and put the weapon down. “Bigger bullets isn’t going to do the trick. What about a different kind of bullet—hollow-points or something.”

“Hollow-point bullets actually decrease penetration,” the armorer told her. “They’re designed for maximum tissue damage inside your target, but they’ll never get through a trauma plate. If you’re looking for a magic bullet what you’d really want is depleted uranium rounds.”

“Really?” Caxton asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Sure. Much denser than lead, so they hit harder. DU rounds are just about perfect for armor piercing.

Plus they’re pyrophoric, so when they deform on impact they tend to catch on fire and explode. They’re also a little bit radioactive, so if you don’t blow up your target you still give him cancer. Just one problem, though.”

“What’s that?”

“You’d have to be in the Army even to see a DU round, and even the Army doesn’t make small-arms ammunition out of the stuff anymore. They did back in the nineties, but then somebody realized that we were shooting radioactive slugs into every bunker, hut, and hospital in the Middle East. The political blowback on that could have been enormous, so they stopped producing them. The UN is trying to get people to stop using DU of any kind.”

“So you don’t have a box of it lying around,” Caxton inferred.

“No.” He ran his fingers along his mustache for a while and then opened an unmarked cardboard box and set it before her. “I do have these. Highly illegal, of course. We took them in evidence during a big drug raid a couple years back.”

Caxton drew one of the bullets out of the box. It was the same size and shape as the rounds she loaded in her Beretta 92. The only apparent difference was that it had a smooth green coating on the tip. She ran her finger over it and wondered why it felt so familiar. Then she looked up at the armorer. “What are they?”

He wasn’t meeting her gaze. Instead he was looking at the box of bullets. He was looking at it as if the box were full of poisonous snakes. Eventually he shifted his weight to a different foot and told her what she was looking at. “Cop-killers.”

“No shit?” she asked. She examined the bullet again. It was lighter than a normal bullet, strangely enough.

“These are Teflon bullets?”

He shrugged. “That name’s misleading. The Teflon coating is just to protect your gun. It doesn’t make them any more deadly. The real improvement comes from using a brass slug instead of a lead one. Brass is a lot harder than lead, so when it hits the target—say, your trauma plate—it doesn’t squish or melt. It keeps going in one piece, with all of its energy intact. Theoretically that bullet can punch through any police vest.”

“Does it work?”

The armorer shrugged again. “Depends on who you ask. Again, I’ve seen ballistics reports from both sides. No one has ever been shot with one of these—they were made illegal about ten minutes after they were invented—so we just don’t know. Even I’ve never seen any, other than what’s in that box.

Theoretically law enforcement can buy them, but you should see the paperwork the ATF requires.

Personally I’ve only fired a couple of rounds of that stuff. I can tell you those will penetrate a steel car door without any trouble. One thing I do know, which is that once that box is gone, I won’t be able to get any more for a long time. So use them carefully.”

Caxton nodded. She scooped the box up and put it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said.

He nodded, still not looking at her. “I’ve got something else for you, too. You carry a Beretta 92, right?

There’s an upgrade for that model.”

“Yeah?” She drew her sidearm and laid it on the bench in front of her. “This one’s been pretty good to me.”

“Here, try this,” he said, and opened another of his boxes. Inside was a gun almost identical to hers—except it might have come out of the future. The grips were more ergonomic, the entire pistol was slightly lighter, and it had a small flashlight slung under the barrel. “This is the Beretta 90-Two.” He spelled it out for her, and showed her the name embossed on the receiver. “It’s improved in a whole bunch of ways, but let me show you my favorite parts. Here,” he said, indicating three pale green dots,

“are your glow-in-the-dark sights. So you can shoot at night. There’s a red tab here that pops up when there’s a round in the chamber, so you never have to retract the slide to find out. Then there’s this attachment, which might come in handy, considering the places you end up.” He flicked two switches on the flashlight. The beam was bright enough to see even in winter daylight. That would be useful when she was hunting vampires on moonless nights. Even better, just below the flashlight lens was a tiny red lens that projected a sighting laser. “With the flashlight and laser on at the same time, you’ve got about an hour of battery time. Keep that in mind. Also, you’ll need to sight the laser in manually. With the flashlight it won’t fit in your current holster, but I have a new one you can have that’ll work.” He watched her point the gun downrange, then lower it and whip it up again. “Best part: the magazine holds seventeen rounds.

Two more than you’re used to. Do you like it?”

It felt just about perfect in her hand. “I’ll take it,” Caxton said. “Wrap it up.”

Chapter 35.

Caxton had two more stops to make before she could leave for Syracuse. The first was going to be the hardest: she had to go home.

It wasn’t a long commute to the house she shared with Clara. When she arrived she pulled into the drive and switched off the Mazda and just sat there for a while, staring at her own kitchen window. When she’d decided she’d put it off long enough, she got out of the car and walked up to the door. It was unlocked, which meant Clara was there. Caxton was not surprised to find her lover sitting at the kitchen table reading a book.

“Hey,” Clara said, barely looking up. “Long time no see.”

Caxton stiffened. Then she forced herself to relax and pull up a chair opposite Clara so they could talk.

Eventually Clara looked up again. She put her finger in her book to hold her place and closed the cover.

“So,” she said. “Did you ever find out what a Twaron fiber was good for?”

“Yes,” Caxton said. She placed both hands on the table and started picking at the laminate on the edge.

“It’s used in ballistic vests. Arkeley was wearing one.”

Clara’s eyes went wide. “That would protect his heart and—”

“Make it next to impossible for me to kill him. That’s…that’s something it would really have helped me to know, before he came after Raleigh last night.” Clara started to react, but Caxton held up one hand.

“Raleigh’s fine. Another girl didn’t make it, though. If I’d known what I was facing maybe it could have been—different.”

Clara’s mouth trembled. “I’d never heard of Twaron before. I’ve only ever heard of Kevlar. If the report had said it was Kevlar, I could have made that connection. Hey! Come on, you can’t blame me for some girl’s death just because I didn’t know what Twaron was. Come on!”

“I don’t blame you. I blame myself. You told me you weren’t trained for forensics work. I should have listened to you.”

Clara jumped up and wrapped her arms around her chest. Her face was a neutral mask. Caxton had been with her long enough to know what that meant—she felt like she was being attacked.

“All I’m saying, Clara, is that you could have Googled it. What I needed from you, when I put you in charge of this stuff, was information. Fetlock’s experts are smart people and they do a certain job very well, but all they can give you is raw data. They were going to send me their report anyway, but I needed somebody to actually read it and give me the key points. You could have gone that extra distance. Next time—”

“Next time? So you’re not firing me? Oh, thank you so much.” Clara stomped over to the window and stared out at the snow. “I can’t believe this, Laura. You really got me this time, didn’t you? It used to just be guilt you held over my head. Now you need to make me feel stupid, too.”

“What are you talking about? Guilt?”

“Jesus! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Our relationship is falling apart. I should have dumped you a long time ago. But how could I? I keep asking for more time together, for more intimacy. But no, you’re too busy saving the world. I can’t exactly compete with that, and I feel guilty about wanting to. So I hang in there, I keep being patient and loving and making your fucking breakfast every morning. Then you come along with this job offer and I think hey, maybe you actually do care.

Maybe you understand. So I jump into something I have no training for, something I’d never even considered. Now you’re laying some girl’s death on me, too? Jesus!”

“It’s not like that,” Caxton said, but Clara was already storming out of the room. She hurried to the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

For a time Caxton just sat at the table, hoping her girlfriend would come back. She didn’t. There was too much to do, too many lives at stake to wait for very much longer, she decided. She would try to patch things up later. Before she left, though, she picked up the book Clara had been reading. It was a thick hardcover with the title on the cover in big block letters: FUNDAMENTALS OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, SEVENTH EDITION.

She laid it gently back on the table and returned to her car.

Her next stop was Mechanicsburg, and the local jail there. The cops and corrections officers that ran the place were surprised to see her, but when she flashed her silver star they fell into line. One grabbed up a heavy key ring and led her down into the basement, to the secure cells.

“He screamed every time we tried to put him in a cell with a window,” the CO explained, sorting through his keys. “These are our solitary confinement units, which we save for the worst kind. Padded walls, no furniture but a suicide-proof toilet. Electric lights we keep on twenty-four/seven so we can see what they’re up to.”

“What has he been doing?” Caxton asked.

The CO shrugged. “At night he sits staring into space, or sometimes he’ll pace back and forth. The cell’s only three paces wide, but he’ll do that for hours. During the day—from dawn until sundown, every time—he just sleeps. It’s funny.”

“What is?” Caxton asked.

“Down here,” the CO said, “there’s really no way for him to see whether the sun is up or down. But somehow, he knows. He’ll be sleeping now, of course, but I can wake him up if you want.”

“I do,” Caxton said.

The CO unlocked a heavy reinforced door and opened it wide. Inside Dylan Carboy lay stretched out on the floor, his head turned to one side, looking like nothing so much as a lifeless corpse. His hands were secured behind his back with nylon restraints and his feet were bare.

“Come on, kid. Come on. You got a visitor.”

The boy didn’t move.

“This might take a while,” the CO said, then grabbed Carboy under the arms and grunted and strained to get him sitting upright. “You’re a U.S. Marshal, huh? You come to transfer him?”

She understood why he would think that—prisoner transport across state lines was one of the primary functions of the USMS. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk to him. It’s pertinent to an open investigation.”

The CO shrugged. “Hell, I was hoping we were going to get rid of him. Little bastard creeps me out.

You want to talk, feel free. I don’t know if he’ll answer.”

Caxton squatted down next to Carboy and studied his face. He was just a kid, even younger-looking than she remembered from when she’d hauled him in. At the time, of course, he’d been made up like a vampire. He was still pale, but not deathly pale, and his ears were round and normal. A thin fuzz of stubble coated the top of his head where his hair had started to grow back in. His eyes were open, but they didn’t track, just stared vacantly forward.

“I can get him on his feet, if you want,” the CO said. “We can drag him down to an interrogation room.”

“No need,” Caxton said. “Tell me—has he asked for a lawyer?”

The CO shook his head. “We offered, a bunch of times. After dark, when he was talking, even. He wants vengeance, he says. He wants blood. He says that a lot. But lawyers he can do without.”

“Okay, then. I’ll speak with him awhile and then get out of your hair,” she said. The CO nodded and moved to stand by the door, hands held behind him, waiting for her to do what she needed to do. Caxton knew better than to ask to be left alone with the prisoner. That would never be allowed, not with someone as violent and unstable as Carboy.

“Do you remember me?” she asked. The boy’s face didn’t change. He was supposed to be a vampire, and of course vampires didn’t talk during daylight hours. It seemed he was going to prolong the ruse even when no one else believed in it. “I’m Laura Caxton. You wanted to kill me. Remember?” Caxton frowned. “It was all over your notebooks.”

The corner of Carboy’s upper lip twitched. Just a tic, but enough that Caxton caught it. Maybe that was what she needed: an in. The secret to police interrogations wasn’t knowing when someone was lying to you. You had to assume everything a subject said was a lie. No, the secret was finding the button you could push, the one thing that bothered the subject so much it threw him off his game enough to get his carefully prepared facts tangled up. In this case it was finding something that would get Carboy to talk at all.

“We found your notebooks in your house. You remember, the house where you strangled your sister.”

The tic came again when she mentioned finding the notebooks but didn’t recur when she mentioned his sister. Yeah, she had him. Those notebooks were important to him. “I didn’t bother reading them all,”

she said. “They were kind of repetitive, and not very well written. So I gave them to one of my officers.

He had to pull one of them apart because blood had stuck all the pages together. Completely ruined them.”

The boy’s lip had curled up so far that she could see his teeth.

“What I did read was kind of funny. ‘Laura Caxton will die by Halloween.’ But look, it’s almost Christmas, and here we are. I’m running around perfectly healthy, and you’re stuck in here, where you can’t even write bad poetry to entertain yourself.”

His mouth opened and she thought words might spill out. Instead he carefully brought his teeth together and closed his lips. They were white with the strain.

“I think,” she said, “that I’m going to make photocopies of some of the funnier pages, and share them with all my cop friends.”

“I’d like to see those,” the CO behind her said, playing along. Good man, she thought. “I think all of us here would enjoy that.”

Caxton nodded eagerly. “Sure. I’ll get your address before I leave so I can send them along. There’s one part that’s just hilarious. He talks about Jameson Arkeley—you know, the real vampire? Dylan here claims he actually spoke with him. Please!”

The boy lunged forward, his teeth clacking together on the lapel of her coat. The CO rushed forward, but Caxton waved him back. Carboy growled and his feet kicked at the floor, but she easily held him down, pinning him by pressing his shoulders against the floor. The boy was as weak as a starved dog, and she wondered if he’d been eating in the jail—if he wanted everyone to think he was a vampire, he couldn’t very well eat solid food.

Down on the floor Carboy writhed and moaned. “He came to me. He came to me! He knew I was worthy. He knew I could do whatever he asked, that I wouldn’t fail! I proved it to him. I proved I could kill anyone, anyone I loved. Just like him.”

“And Malvern?” Caxton asked. “Did she come to you, too?”

“Only in dreams,” the boy said.

“Where are they, Rexroth?” Caxton asked. She thought appealing to his adopted vampire persona might get a better result. “Tell me where they are.”

Carboy shook himself violently, trying to get free. The CO coughed, his way of telling her she was on the verge of being abusive. She didn’t ease up.

“Tell me. If you know so much. If they really came to you, then tell me. Or I’ll never believe you. Where is their lair?”

“I am still worthy! He’ll come for me again! He will free me!” the boy shrieked.

“You’re lying. You’re a worthless lying sack of shit,” Caxton barked. “He never came for you. Why would he? You’re nothing. You’re nobody.”

“I will never betray him! He warned me you would come. He told me to say nothing. Nothing! I am still worthy, Jameson! I am still worthy!”

The CO coughed again, much louder this time. Caxton forced herself to let the boy go. She jumped up and back so he couldn’t bite her again, considered kicking him in the ribs, but finally she just walked out the door of the cell and into the corridor. The CO came out a few moments later and asked her if there was anything else she needed, but she didn’t even look at him. She was already heading for her car—and for Syracuse.

Chapter 36.

Caxton was well onto the highway—I-81, which would take her all the way to Syracuse—when she realized her face was wet with sweat. She wiped at it with one hand and steered with the other. That could have gone better, she thought.

She had wanted to hurt the boy. She had wanted to grind him into the floor of his cell until he told her what she wanted to know. Only the presence of the CO had stopped her. And yet she doubted that he even knew anything useful—Jameson was too careful, too good at covering his tracks, to let some crazy kid in on his biggest secret, the location of his lair. For all she knew, despite any evidence suggesting the contrary, Carboy had never even met Jameson. Glauer had her half convinced otherwise, but there was still part of her that thought Carboy had made it all up, that his stories of talking to vampires had been some deluded fantasy. The boy was, without a doubt, mentally ill. Sane people didn’t murder their families, then dress up like vampires and go gunning for state troopers. But was he lying, or not?

She had gone to see him because she couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned. Because she was running out of ideas. That made her scared—and her fear had made her violent. She had to get control of her fear.

She tried to focus on her driving. She let the lines on the road occupy her full attention so she didn’t have to think about anything else. Two hours into her drive it started to work—mostly because the driving became a lot harder the farther north she went. The road turned white with snow, first as broad fan-shaped sweeps of powder that rolled across the asphalt, then as a thin sheet of slush embossed with the chevron-shaped tire marks of a snow plow that had gone before her. North of Binghamton, just across the state line into New York, the snow turned into a thick carpet of pure white and she started losing traction. She had to stop and put chains on her tires at a rest stop. She worked quickly, both because she didn’t want to lose any more time and because it was cold out, colder than she’d expected, and her hands stung every time she touched the metal chains. She cursed herself, wishing she’d bothered to check the weather report. Her Mazda wasn’t suited to extreme-weather driving—if she’d thought this through better she could have requisitioned a patrol cruiser or even something with four-wheel drive.

She had to keep her speed down when she got back on the highway. The chains gave her a better grip on the road, but it was still slick enough to be dangerous. Up past Cortland she caught up with the storm and suddenly the sky was as white as the road, full of big puffy flakes that splattered on her windshield.

Headlights speared through the falling snow, dazzling her, while the brake lights of the cars ahead made pink roses bloom across her windshield. A flashing warning light like a strobe made her blink and nearly go off the side of the road. Up ahead a snow plow was thundering north, a fountain of wet snow blasting out from either side of its blade. It couldn’t be going more than thirty miles per hour, but she had to fight her instinct to pass. As bad as the snow was behind the plow, it would be impassable in front. She kept both hands on the wheel and tried to stay in the plow’s tracks, two dark gullies full of slush. The tracks were the only way she had of knowing where the road curved—in the torrent of snow she couldn’t even see the guardrails.

It took another three hours before she reached Syracuse, and even longer to weave her way through the maze of the city’s surface streets. Some of them had been plowed, leaving one narrow lane open and mounds of snow on either side six feet high, with here and there a car buried so deeply in the drifts that she wondered how they would ever be dug out. The Victorian houses she passed were half snowed-in, their roofs weighted down with thick layers of snow like frosting on a cake. Even the street signs were often obscured by clumps of snow that clung to them, and more than once she had to stop in the middle of a street and study her map. It was four forty-five when she reached the university campus, already after dark, though it was hard to tell. The sky had taken on an uncanny blue-gray color, a haze of light from the city’s buildings trapped under the heavily laden clouds. The streetlights looked like showerheads gushing down diamond-bright snowflakes, and trails of mist wandered the streets like freezing ghosts looking for some warm place to haunt.

The main campus of the university loomed up out of the storm as she rumbled past. She saw brick dormitories with fogged-up windows, libraries and classroom buildings made of big flat slabs of concrete stained dark by melting snow. She saw a massive gray building with a black mansard roof, just dripping with gables and dormer windows. It reminded her of the Addams family house from TV. Following the directions Fetlock had given her, she took a left turn and drove past a massive park, the rolling hills of which looked like an ocean of heaving white waves, then another left on Westscott Street, where little shops and businesses spilled yellow light across the submerged road. She passed a big New Age bookstore and finally arrived at her destination, the corner of Westscott and Hawthorne. On every side of her, two-story houses from the turn of the century hunkered down in the snow. They were painted in bright colors turned pastel by the snow, and all of them, for some reason, had balconies on their second level. She wondered what this place would look like in summer, but couldn’t really paint the picture in her mind. It was so encrusted with snow that she couldn’t imagine winter ever ending.

She pulled up behind an unmarked white van, a Ford E-150 with tinted windows. It was buried in snow up to its wheel wells, but the windshield had been scraped clear, and recently. It was so obviously a police surveillance van that she winced when she saw it. Apparently the local Feds had never heard of discretion. Maybe, she thought, Simon would have been so busy with his studies that he wouldn’t have noticed it was parked outside his house for two days in a row. Of course, she’d never been that lucky before.

Fetlock had tasked his own men, U.S. Marshals, with this stakeout, thinking they might do better than local cops. It wasn’t Caxton’s job to second-guess that decision.

When she killed her engine and switched off her lights the van’s rear doors popped open and a gloved hand waved her over. Popping her own door, she jumped out and hurried up into the back of the van, yanking the door closed behind her as a wraith of snow whirled and howled in through the gap.

Inside, three men with silver stars on their lapels just like her own sat in swiveling captain’s chairs, passing around a thermos of coffee. They all wore parkas, gloves, and hats, and massive boots. One of them half rose from his place to shake her hand. “Deputy Marshal Fetlock told us you’d be coming. Caxton, right?

I’m Young, this is Miller, and that fellow over there is Benicio.”

“Call me Lu,” Benicio said, waving at her. “Short for Luis, but nobody can pronounce that right. Even though it’s a common name where I come from.”

“Where’s that?” she asked.

He smiled. “Utica.”

Her feet squelched on the carpeted floor, which was flooded by half an inch of murky water. Plastic water bottles floated in the muck, each filled with a yellow liquid she did not care to identify. They competed for space with the soggy wrappers of microwave burritos and fast-food cartons. It was cold enough inside the van to see her breath, though not so bad as it had been outside. She plopped down in a fourth chair and nodded at the introductions. “You guys have been here awhile, huh? You picked a great day for it.”

Young laughed. “What, you mean the weather? This is nothing. We’re all from the local Syracuse office of the USMS, so we’re used to it. Syracuse is the snowiest city in the contiguous forty-eight. We get what, a hundred and fifteen inches a year?” Miller nodded animatedly. “Lake effect snow, mostly. It hits pretty hard, then melts after a couple of days. Wait till January, if you want to see some snow. When it gets so deep you can’t open your front door, that’s when we start to worry.”

Caxton shook her head. Pennsylvania was like the Tropics compared to that. “How’s our person of interest?” she asked, leaning forward to look through the windshield. The van had a good view of the house across the street that was Simon Arkeley’s last known address. It was a two-level Victorian just like all the rest, painted white, so it blended in with the sky and its yellow-lit windows seemed to hang in the air. She could see into its porch, which was crammed with patio furniture and unrecognizable junk, and also into its balcony, which was mostly clear.

Lu came to squat next to her and hand her a pair of field glasses. Only two of the windows were lit.

“He’s got the one up there on the second floor. He’s been in there reading a book all afternoon.”

She looked where he pointed and saw someone sitting in the window, though she could only make out a rough silhouette in the bad light. It had to be Simon Arkeley. As advertised, he had a book in his hands and his head was bent over it. She watched him turn a couple of pages, then sank back in her chair.

“Who’s on the ground floor?” she asked. She couldn’t see anybody through that window, just the occasional blue flicker of a television set.

“Building manager,” Lu said. “Old guy, drunk most of the time. He hasn’t been out all day, except once to get beer down at the liquor store.”

Caxton sighed and looked out the van windows. She doubted Simon would be going out that night, not with the heavy snowfall. It looked like she was going to be sitting in the cold van for a long time.

“What’s your plan?” Lu asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t come all the way up here to make a fourth for bridge.”

She smiled, remembering the casual camaraderie of stakeouts. She’d done her share of them on the highway patrol. “Well,” she said, trying to think of her next move by talking it out, “I’m going to—”

She didn’t get any further, though. Her phone rang. It was Fetlock.

“We found a lair,” he told her.

Chapter 37.

“Is he there? Is Malvern there?” Caxton demanded.

“No, neither of them,” Fetlock said, sounding almost apologetic. “And it looks like they haven’t been for a while. Let me just give you the details, alright?”

Caxton closed her eyes and sank back into her chair. “Alright,” she said, holding the phone against her shoulder. She reached into her pocket and took out a small notebook, then snapped her fingers at the three Feds in the van and mimed writing something down. Lu handed her a pen.

“We eliminated all the other possible lairs from your list,” Fetlock told her, “by about two o’clock this afternoon. Some of my men out of Reading were about to eliminate the last one, but they knew it was getting late and they didn’t want to be there after sundown.”

“Good,” Caxton said, “smart.”

“Well, you did warn us. They approached the site and made a quick reconnaissance. The site was an abandoned grain elevator just outside Mount Carmel. They saw definite signs of recent occupation—someone had forced their way into an outbuilding, tearing the chains off the door and not bothering to replace them. They assumed it was probably some petty criminal looking for anything they could steal. After making sure there were no half-deads lying in wait, a three-man team entered the building and found some empty plastic bags. IV bags, like from a hospital. The kind of bags that whole blood is stored in.”

“What about human remains? Furniture made out of bones, bodies wired into lifelike postures, that sort of thing?” That was what you expected to find in a vampire lair. It was the kind of thing she’d seen in vampire lairs before.

“Nothing of the sort, but if the blood bags were enough to pique their interest, there was also a coffin in there. A very old, very cheap coffin that had fallen to pieces. They did what they’d been told to do and called in reinforcements. Lots of them. When no vampires showed up they sent in heavily armed units to secure the site and retrieve all the evidence. They did so, then immediately departed the scene, at approximately four-thirty, just as the sun was going down.”

Caxton sighed almost happily. Fetlock seemed to get how this worked, if nobody else did. You didn’t stick around a vampire’s lair at twilight, no matter how abandoned it might look. That was asking for trouble.

“The evidence was taken back to your HQ building in Harrisburg. I brought in my forensics people and also your team lead—Clara Hsu—to supervise.”

“Clara was part of this investigation?” Caxton asked, a little surprised. “How was she at—I mean, did she prove useful?”

“Yes,” Fetlock said, and Caxton’s eyes opened wide as he added, “She’s clearly not trained for forensics work, but she asked a lot of interesting questions and she even cleared up one mystery for us.

There were some skin samples in the coffin. Just a few flakes, like dandruff, but when we tried to run a DNA test nothing whatsoever came up.”

“There was no match in the database?”

“No,” Fetlock said, “I mean there was no DNA. Which confused the hell out of my forensics team. Then Clara pointed out that vampires don’t have human DNA.”

Wow, Caxton thought. Clara had been paying attention. She’d made the connection. Caxton would have felt gushingly proud of her girlfriend if she didn’t feel so guilty for not believing in Clara before.

“They were able to carbon-date the skin samples,” Fetlock went on. “They look to be a couple hundred years old, at least.”

“So they came from Malvern,” Caxton said. “Malvern was in this lair. She can’t go anywhere without Jameson’s help, so they must both have been there.”

“Not just them. We also found some fingerprints on the blood bags. When we ran those through the database a match came up right away. The prints belong to Dylan Carboy, aka Kenneth Rexroth.”

“Seriously?” Caxton asked. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead.

So Glauer had been right. Carboy did have some tangible connection with Jameson. It seemed she was going to have to make some apologies.

“That’s all we have so far, all the hard evidence,” Fetlock went on. “My people were willing to make one more conjecture, though. Judging by the amount of dust on the coffin and the blood bags, they say nobody had been in that lair for weeks. They won’t testify to that in court, but they sounded pretty sure.”

“That’s great,” Caxton said. “That’s a lot of information we didn’t have before. That really helps flesh out the narrative. Blood bags—it sounds like Jameson used this lair before he went rogue, before he killed anybody. He would have been hungry, though. Desperate for blood. He must have had Carboy steal blood from a local hospital or blood bank—but that wouldn’t work. Vampires can’t drink cold blood. It has to be fresh or warm for them to get any benefit from it.”

“Okay,” Fetlock said. “Not my area. I’ve got the site under constant surveillance—from a distance. If anyone tries to go in or out during the night, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Caxton said, and ended the call. She was almost certain the old lair was abandoned, that Jameson had moved on to somewhere else, but it was good that Fetlock didn’t take chances.

For a while she was buzzing with excitement, putting together jigsaw pieces in her head, adding the new stuff to what she already knew. Eventually, though, as the night wore on, that excitement faded.

The new information was useful. But it didn’t change anything. Jameson was still at large. The evidence might help her catch him, eventually, but for now she still needed to focus on Simon. On keeping Simon alive.

The adrenaline rush she’d gotten from the phone call turned to nervous tension all too quickly.

She tried to relax, tried to listen to the conversation of the three Feds in the van. They were talking about the Orangemen, Syracuse’s basketball team. Apparently one of the star players had been caught smoking crack cocaine in the locker room. There was some discussion as to whether he would be allowed to finish out the season before he was prosecuted. “It’s not like he was dealing,” Miller asserted.

“Just holding.”

“With or without intent to distribute?” Young asked. He opened a fresh bag of corn chips and pushed a bunch of them into his mouth.

Caxton looked out the side windows at the street, at the cross streets on either side. Something felt wrong. Maybe she was just too keyed up, too paranoid. That was probably it. Still. She hadn’t survived as long as she had by assuming things were okay. “You guys know this neighborhood?” she asked.

“What’s behind this house?”

Miller grunted. “Bunch of backyards, divided up by fences.”

“Could someone have gone out a back door of the house and slipped away without you noticing?

Hopped over the fence and got away by a side street?”

Young sat up very straight in his chair. “Sure. If there was anybody unaccounted for. We thought of that, too, and we made damned sure to keep track of where Simon and the building manager were at all times. If your POI had left that window, one of us would have gone to cover the back of the house. But he hasn’t moved, not since lunchtime.”

“Not even to go to the bathroom?” she asked.

Miller shrugged. “Maybe once a couple hours ago, but he was back in a couple of seconds. Not long enough to do anything.”

Caxton lifted the glasses to look at Simon again. The figure there was hard to make out, just a rough silhouette of a young man reading a book. A young man—

“Shit!” she said, and slapped the armrest of her chair hard enough to make the men around her jump.

“He made you. Goddamn it, he must have made you hours ago. Lu, you’re with me. Miller, Young, you stay here and cover us.”

“What the hell?” Young asked. “What are you talking about? He hasn’t moved—”

Caxton snarled her reply at him. “Look at his fingers. His fingers. Simon Arkeley doesn’t wear nail polish.”

Lu already had the van’s back door open. He jumped down into the snow and she followed close on his heels. They slogged through the drifts that covered the sidewalk and up to the porch of the house, Caxton surging forward to pound on the door.

“Open up,” she shouted. “Open up! Federal agents!”

It seemed to take forever for the building manager to come thumping through the house to answer the door. When he cracked it open Caxton lifted her lapel to show him her star.

“Jeez, what do you want?” the man asked. He was in his late fifties, about average height. Grizzly stubble coated the bottom half of his face, and his eyes were wet and red. Maybe he’d been sleeping. His breath was yeasty with beer. He looked from Caxton to Lu and back again.

“Federal agents,” Caxton repeated. “We need to come inside. Can you step back, sir?”

He was in his rights to demand to see a search warrant. Caxton wasn’t sure what she would do if he asked. After a moment, though, he lifted his shoulders and moved back so she and Lu could push inside the house. It was warm inside, almost stiflingly hot. The front hall was full of very old furniture—a sideboard, a cheval mirror, a sofa that might have been an antique if the upholstery wasn’t split and oozing stuffing.

“It’s that kid upstairs, right? Arkeley? He do something bad? I always kind of figured he would get in trouble,” the building manager whispered. “He’s the only one here, anyway. Comes in all hours of the night, never seems to sleep, and I seen some of the books he brings in here, scandalous stuff—”

“Which room is his?” Caxton asked, cutting him off.

“Top of the stairs, on the left.” The building manager raised his shoulders again, a kind of lazy shrug. “I’ll be down here, you need me.” He shambled back toward his own room, where the television was blaring something about lingerie models competing to see who could eat the most bloodworms.

Caxton was already hurrying up the stairwell. The banister was slick under her hand but marred by countless deep scratches and places where the varnish had been scuffed down to bare wood, probably from countless generations of students moving in and out. At the top of the stairs she turned left and found the door she wanted. She rapped twice on it with her knuckles, then drew her weapon.

Behind her Lu’s eyes were wide, but he took out his own handgun.

Caxton rapped again. It sounded like a hollow-core door, the kind you could just kick your way through.

When no answer came, she started to do just that.

“Whoa, whoa,” Lu said, grabbing her arm. She stared wildly into his face. “You can’t do that. It’s not kosher.”

She knew perfectly well what he meant. Unless she had a search warrant or evidence of a crime being committed inside, she couldn’t just bust the door down, not legally.

She didn’t have time to be legal. “The vampire is coming. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but soon.

You want this kid to get killed by his own father? Have his throat torn out and his blood splattered everywhere?”

“No,” Lu confessed.

She lifted her foot again, but once more he grabbed her arm.

“I also don’t want to get put up against administrative review,” he told her. “Listen, I’ve only been on this job about a month. I was walking a beat in Tipp Hill before that, and I don’t want to go back. Young can be a real hard case when it comes to protocol.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t need to know,” Caxton said. “Maybe the door was open when we got here and we have no idea how the lock got broken. Or maybe we thought we heard someone shouting for help from inside, but in the end it turned out just to be the old man’s TV.”

Lu stared at her, goggle-eyed.

“There’s nobody here to say whether it happened like that or not,” she said, “except you and me.” Then she kicked open the door. It flew open effortlessly, the lock’s bolt clacking in its receptacle.

“Aw, hell,” Lu breathed. “You’re nuts, lady!”

“I’m desperate,” Caxton said, and stepped inside the room.

Chapter 38.

The room beyond seemed filled with books. They were heaped on the floor in enormous tottering stacks, they covered one of the room’s two tables, and more than a few had been laid out, evidently with some care, on the bed. There were hardcovers and leather-bound tomes and dog-eared paperbacks, quite a lot of pamphlets, some photocopied facsimiles of books, spiral bound and with clear acetate covers. There were textbooks so new they were still inside their shrink-wrap, and some books so old their spines were curling off and spilling red dust across the covers of other books. Caxton picked up a few at random. She found a paperback called Secret Societies, by Arkon Daraul, and a battered old text in Latin with a picture of a demon in its frontispiece, called the Lemegeton Clavicula Salmonis. She somehow doubted it had anything to do with the collarbones of fish.

Caxton swung her weapon around, covering all the corners. She saw no kitchen at all, just a hot plate, which of course was covered in two neat stacks of books. She saw the bed was little more than a cot, the sheets made and unslept-in, and ducked to see dusty books shoved beneath the bed frame. The closet was full of books, but also clothes—though there was no winter jacket inside. By the window she saw a chair, unoccupied, with a book resting open-faced on its seat.

At the far end of the room stood another door, open, which revealed a bathroom also filled with books—they stood like makeshift walls on either side of the toilet and on top of its tank, and some even had been piled under the sink, where a dripping pipe had left them spotted with mold.

A very frightened-looking girl with short dark hair wearing a tattered sweater sat on the edge of the tub, her hands up to protect her face. Her fingernails were painted black, just like the nails Caxton had seen through her binoculars.

“Who the hell are you?” Caxton said, raising her pistol to point at the ceiling.

“Linda,” the girl squeaked. “I’m a friend of Simon’s. He asked me to come up here and sit in the window.”

“Why?”

Linda shrugged. “He said the cops were watching him. He said he wasn’t in any trouble, though. He said he didn’t do anything. Is he okay?”

Lu started to ask the girl a lot of questions, but Caxton didn’t bother to listen to them. Rushing back into the hall, she found what she expected to see—a broad window, propped open with a short piece of dowel. Beyond in the flurry of snow she saw a wooden scaffolding with steps leading down to the backyard of the house. A fire escape, a way for the inhabitants of the second floor to get out in case they couldn’t use the front stairs.

On the steps of the fire escape she could just make out the round shapes of footprints sunk through the deep snow, mostly filled in again by the storm. She grabbed for the windowsill, intending to yank it upward and climb out, to follow Simon’s trail, but then realized that would be pointless. The boy would have made as quickly as he could for the street and out there his tracks would be lost altogether, churned over by passing cars or lost to the blizzard by the time she arrived.

This was bad, very bad. Very, very bad. If she had lost him, if he’d gotten away from her, then she had no way of knowing whether he’d made contact with Jameson or not. She had to find him—more lives than just his own were at stake—but how?

She had to think. If he had run out in the middle of the storm, Young and his crew would never have seen him. He had noticed their van and known he was under surveillance, then had gone to the trouble of calling in his friend to fool them into thinking he was still in his room, reading quietly. Either he just didn’t like being watched or he’d decided he had something he had to do and didn’t want the cops to see him doing it. He’d taken his winter coat—she had noticed its absence up in the room—but surely he couldn’t walk very far, not with the snow up to his knees in some places. She already knew from Fetlock that Simon didn’t own a vehicle; that was one of the first things you checked when you staked out a POI. He could have caught a bus, but she doubted it. Who would want to wait for a bus in this weather? She decided he must have arranged to have someone pick him up in a car. Which meant that someone would know where he had gone.

The walkie-talkie in her hand kept chirping for attention. She ignored it. She headed down the stairs and burst in on the building manager just as he was cracking open a new beer can. His apartment had all of the house’s best furniture in it—a massive oak breakfront, a kitchen table with four matching chairs—but dust dulled all the colors and there were bags of trash stacked in the kitchen. No books anywhere.

“Hell’s bells, what now?” the old man asked when he saw her.

“I need some information, and I don’t have a lot of time, so forgive me if I sound impolite,” she said.

“How long has Simon lived here?”

“That Arkeley kid? Just this semester. Signed a one-year lease.”

“Does he have a girlfriend?” she asked.

The building manager laughed. “You mean that Linda? She comes sniffing around a lot, but you ask me, the guy’s gay. Never gives her a second look.”

“Does he ever have any other visitors?”

The old man scowled. “Hah! Yes, yes he does. The kind that stay all night and you have to listen to them talking and laughing while you’re trying to sleep. They put a towel under the door, too, but don’t think I’m so old I don’t recognize the smell of what they smoke up there, I was alive in the sixties and—”

Caxton shook her head. “Just answer my questions, alright? As simply and as clearly as you can. Do you remember the names of any of his visitors? Did he ever introduce them to you?”

“We’re not exactly on friendly terms, him and me,” the manager replied. He scratched at his stubble for a second, though, and said, “I guess there was one guy. Simon called him ‘Murph.’ Ugly little pothead with freckles and red hair. Comes around a lot, actually. Don’t know his last name.”

“Do you know where he lives? Please, think hard.”

The building manager shrugged. “South Campus, somewhere.” She must have looked confused. “There’s a secondary campus, called South Campus, about two miles from here down Comstock Avenue. It’s almost all residential buildings. Crappy little cinder-block shacks they rent out for next to nothing.”

“That’s all you can tell me?” Caxton asked, desperate.

“Maybe it’s enough,” Lu said from behind her. He took the walkie-talkie out of her hand. “Deputy Marshal Young, do you read me?”

“Yeah, go ahead, Lu.”

“Special Deputy Caxton would like you to call up the registrar’s office. We need to track down a student, partial name Murph, maybe Murphy. Not sure if that’s a last or first name. Last known address is South Campus and he may have a record for drug offenses. You think that might turn something up?”

“We’ll get on it, maybe we’ll get lucky. Over.”

Caxton nodded with excitement. “Good thinking,” she said to Lu. “Sir,” she said, turning to face the building manager, “thanks for your assistance.”

“Simon’s not going to jail, is he?” the man asked.

“I don’t have a warrant for his arrest,” she told him.

“Good, ’cause he’s still got six months on that lease.”

Caxton led Lu back down to the street and climbed into her Mazda, indicating he should take shotgun. “I need you to navigate,” she said. “We’ll head down to South Campus now and hope we have an address by the time we arrive.”

“You got it,” Lu replied. “But what makes you so sure he went to hang out with this friend of his?”

“Because I don’t have any other ideas,” she told him.

Chapter 39.

Caxton left Young and Miller to watch the house, in case she was wrong. If Simon came back while she was gone they were under orders to sit on him—to watch his every move, and to follow him if he left the house. There was no point in being discreet anymore. If the kid was going to sneak out from under their noses and run around in the dark, she would do everything she could to keep him away from his father.

If she didn’t, she was beginning to think she would have a second vampire on her hands, just as dangerous as the first.

Simon’s reticence to talk to her, his obvious distrust of law enforcement: those she could have chalked up to youthful rebellion or just general stupidity. The trick with getting his friend to sit in his window for him suggested something more. Maybe he had something to hide.

“When we get to this place,” she told Lu, “just back my play. I’ll do the talking.”

“Right,” he said, sounding unconvinced. She’d pushed him to his limit when she broke down Simon’s door, and she wasn’t sure how much more he would let her get away with. Well, she would just have to find out.

She kept her speed down on the way to South Campus. It wasn’t all that far away and the snow on the road made any kind of driving hazardous. Big trucks full of rock salt were carving out channels through the snowdrifts, but she didn’t want to take any chances. If she went off the road and disabled the Mazda, she would lose crucial time and mobility.

“You’re from here, right? From Syracuse? If we knock on the door of a drug scene, should we expect to be met with guns?”

Lu’s eyes went wide. “Hell, no. The drug users here are just students—teenagers. They smoke pot, maybe drop acid sometimes. This is a college town, you have to expect that, a little. They rarely get violent. It’s too cold up here for that kind of stupidity.”

“Good,” she said, and shifted in her seat, trying to relax.

It wasn’t easy. This place they were going to—this apartment. Jameson could be there waiting for her. It could be a trap. He could have already passed the curse to Simon. The place could be crawling with half-deads.

She could find anything there, anything at all.

She turned off on a road called Skytop and got her first look at South Campus. The building manager’s description hadn’t been far off. The residential units were simple two-story dwellings built of cheap materials. They had few windows and they all looked exactly alike. They lay like scattered Monopoly pieces in a vast sea of salted gravel parking lots. Caxton could imagine few places more depressing to live—but she supposed, if they were cheap enough, students could put up with them.

They pulled into a parking lot big enough for a shopping mall and then they sat. And waited. And waited some more. Caxton got impatient and punched the steering wheel a few times, but that didn’t help anybody, so eventually she stopped. Finally Young called her with an address. He’d turned up over a hundred students with the last name Murphy, and had gone through them all and ruled them out—either they were female, or they didn’t live in South Campus, or they didn’t have red hair—before trying it as a first name. There was only one student in the entire university with the first name of Murphy, and he both was male and lived in South Campus. If this wasn’t the guy they were looking for, he said, if Murph was just a nickname, then they were plain out of luck. He gave her the exact address and she got the car moving before she’d even thanked him.

She pulled into a spot directly in front of the unit she wanted. It was rented, according to Young, to a junior named Murphy Frissell. Frissell was an environmental science and forestry major—what Lu said was locally known as a Stumpy. Frissell was believed to have one roommate, named Scott Cohen, who was studying music. Both of them had been arrested the previous year for possession of marijuana, but their sentences had been suspended. Frissell sounded exactly like the boy the building manager had described—Young had even downloaded a picture from the registrar’s office and confirmed that Frisssell had red hair.

Caxton and Lu got out of the car and approached the housing unit. She could hear thumping music coming through the drawn curtains and thought she could even smell pot smoke. She waved at Lu to cover her, then stepped up to the door and pounded on it. “Open up,” she shouted. “Federal agents.”

There was no answer. She hadn’t really expected one—the music inside must be playing at an ear-shattering volume, if she could hear it so clearly through the building’s insulated walls. She hammered again and again at the door, and stabbed at the bell over and over. Finally she heard someone moving around inside. She stepped over to the nearest window and tapped on the glass with her collapsible baton.

“Shit!” someone said inside. “Did you hear that?”

“Come on,” Caxton shouted. “Open this door!”

The music stopped abruptly. Caxton pounded on the door again. Finally someone came to the door and peaked out. It was a young man, just about Simon’s age, with a mop of black curls falling to his shoulders. His eyes were deeply bloodshot and they had trouble finding Caxton’s face. “What?” the boy asked.

Caxton sighed. “Scott Cohen? I’m Special Deputy Caxton, and this is Special Deputy Benicio. We’re here to talk to Simon Arkeley. Can we come in, please?”

The boy licked his lips. He appeared deep in thought. Caxton tried to remain patient and calm, but she knew if Cohen didn’t step aside in a second she would physically remove him from the doorway.

“Um, okay,” the boy finally said. “Wait. Are you cops?”

Caxton shoved past him through the door. “Federal agents,” she said, gesturing for Lu to follow her.

“I’m not sure if I should let you in,” Cohen said, but it was already too late. Caxton was inside.

The room beyond the door was a kitchen, with a dented and scorched countertop and badly painted cabinets. The refrigerator was decorated with a poster for an organization called NORML, which showed an oversized hemp leaf. She came around the side of the counter and saw a framed M. C.

Escher print on the wall. The rest of the lower floor was taken up by a spacious living room with a tan shag carpet. Numerous spots on the carpet had been burned down to round, black-edged holes, perhaps by dropped cigarettes. There was a gigantic sofa, on which a boy who had to be Murphy Frissell lay passed out or sleeping. There was a forty-inch flat-screen television, switched off. On a coffee table sat a collection of glass and plastic bongs, as well as numerous butane lighters and mini blowtorches of the kind used to make crème brûlée—or to keep a crack pipe lit.

Caxton scanned the corners of the room looking for shotguns or pistols or, for that matter, swords—she’d seen enough residences exactly like this one to expect the bizarre. There was no sign of any weapons, however.

Cohen had followed after her like a puppy, his hands up in front of him as if he were surrendering before she’d even charged him with anything. “Where is he?” she demanded. Before Cohen could ask who she meant, she said, “Arkeley. Simon Arkeley.”

The boy looked around the room, his face scrunched up. “He’s not here,” he said, and Caxton’s heart fell. Then his eyes opened wider. “He must be upstairs, then. Is he upstairs?”

“Let’s go see,” Caxton said, and nodded at Lu. “Scott, you stay here.”

The boy looked at her very hard. “Okay,” he said.

Caxton wondered what on earth Simon could be doing with these losers. He hadn’t struck her as a serious drug user when she met him. Still, that encounter had been very brief and she supposed she could have been mistaken.

The stairs were at the far end of the room. She mounted them slowly, unsure what to expect at the top.

She could see a wisp of smoke curling around the light fixtures up there and she drew her weapon. If Simon was up there smoking pot he might react badly to sight of law enforcement.

He solved that problem for her by coming out of the door at the top of the stairs and glaring down at her.

Simon was alive, she saw at once. Alive and unhurt.

It wasn’t too late.

“Mr. Arkeley,” Lu said, “I hope we’re not disturbing you, sir.”

“Not at all,” Simon told him. “Hello, Trooper.”

Caxton gritted her teeth. “It’s Special Deputy now.”

Simon nodded. “I suppose we have to talk. Come on up.”

Chapter 40.

Caxton turned to Lu at the top of the stairs. “Keep an eye on the two down there. They’re probably out of commission, but I don’t want them leaving until I say it’s okay.”

Lu nodded, but he grabbed her arm before he went back down. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said, frowning.

Did he expect her to beat information out of Simon? Or maybe just violate his civil rights some other way? For the moment she didn’t feel the need to break any laws. Not as long as Simon was still okay.

She followed the boy down a short hallway to a bedroom.

Two mattresses lay in opposite corners, lying on the floor with no frames to support them. The walls were covered in posters for jam bands and deceased rock stars. Clothes were strewn around the floor and a pile of pornographic magazines was stacked neatly in one corner. Blue, slow-moving smoke filled the ceiling and made all the objects in the room indistinct. It came from a silver mixing bowl full of smoldering herbs on the floor.

Simon sat down on the carpet next to the bowl in an easy lotus position and gestured for her to do the same.

She preferred to stay standing. “We figured out the trick you pulled with Linda, obviously,” she said.

“I figured you would, given your reputation. I just wanted enough time to escape. Of course, that was hours ago,” Simon said. His eyes were closed and his head tilted slightly back.

“I got a late start this morning and just got into town. So you’re not going to help me out, are you?”

His shoulders rose a fraction of an inch. “I’ve done some research. Law isn’t my thing, normally, but when your underlings showed up to harass me I looked into my options. I can’t actively interfere with your investigation. Beyond that you have no power over me—I don’t even have to answer your questions if I don’t want to.” He opened his eyes. “And I don’t want to.”

Caxton smiled. “Why not?”

He only smiled in return.

“I could bust you. I could drag you down to the local station house and have them book you,” she threatened.

“Really? On what charge?”

She waved a hand through the smoke that filled the room. “Drugs.”

Simon turned his head from side to side. “Actually, no, you can’t. No one in this house has broken any kind of drug law. I see by your face you don’t believe me, but if you search this place from top to bottom—and I don’t doubt you would—you won’t find so much as a stem or a seed of any illegal drug.