Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

This is where I come when I want to smoke Salvia divinorum—the sage of the seers. Which isn’t illegal at all.”

“Not yet,” Caxton said. “The legislature is working on it.”

“But until a new law is passed—well,” Simon said, and smiled again.

Caxton knew about the drug. It was still legal in New York state. In Pennsylvania, too, though her state had a reputation for its very tough drug laws. Salvia was a plant from Mexico that had been used for thousands of years by the Indians there in their religious ceremonies. It was also a potent hallucinogen, and in recent years it had become quite popular with bored suburban kids who used to do LSD until the old suppliers of acid had all dried up. In small doses salvia produced a fifteen-minute high with visual effects. In very large doses it produced stupor and unconsciousness—which explained the behavior of the two boys downstairs.

“What do you see when you smoke it?” Caxton asked.

Simon shook his head. “I used to believe it would open me to other states of consciousness and I would learn something useful. It never really worked. I haven’t smoked any of it tonight.” He used a glass stick to stir the burning herbs in his bowl. The embers flared into new life, then died down to orange coals again as a new wave of smoke lifted into the air. “This,” he said, “is white sage, Salvia apiana. It’s used in purification rituals.”

“Done something you feel guilty about?” Caxton asked. “Need to clean up your aura?”

“I came here because it was a refuge away from prying eyes.”

“Those eyes were watching out for you,” Caxton said. “I’m only here to protect you. I’m not sure why you’re fighting me so hard. You must know what your father’s been up to. He killed your uncle, then your mother—”

“Yes, of course,” Simon said, smiling, though his voice had lost some of its ethereal quality.

Caxton thought of Dylan Carboy and the facial tic that had given him away when she mentioned his notebooks. It looked like Simon had a chink in his armor as well. “He tried to kill your sister.”

“I didn’t know that.” Simon cleared his throat. “You saved her, right?”

“He did kill one of her friends. Nice girl, a mute. Raleigh’s roommate, actually. He drank a little of her blood, but mostly she was just in the way.”

“Stop.”

“Tore her to pieces, so we had to get a leak-proof body bag—”

“Stop it!” Simon shouted, jumping to his feet.

Caxton just shook her head. “Getting a little sick to your stomach?” she asked. “I know the feeling, all too well. Help me, Simon. Help me stop him before he kills anybody else. Before he tries to kill you. Or is that the plan? Have you been in contact with him recently? Has he offered to make you a vampire like him? Did you say yes?”

Simon’s face twisted and darkened with rage. He opened his mouth to speak, but then a violent shudder wracked him from head to foot. It left him swaying slightly, but the blood had gone out of his cheeks. “I think,” he said, finally, “that I don’t want to talk to you any longer unless my lawyer is present.”

Caxton’s heart sagged in her chest. “That’s your right,” she said. She couldn’t resist adding, “Does that mean he has contacted you or—”

“Enough, Special Deputy,” the boy said. “I’m going home. I’m tired.”

“Okay,” she said. “Who’s your lawyer?”

The boy reached into his pocket and took out a nylon wallet on a chain. He opened it up and fished out a business card, which he handed to Caxton. Interesting, she thought. Not a lot of twenty-year-old college students have lawyers on retainer. She decided he must have gone to the lawyer recently, after finding out he was under surveillance. If he’d gone to that much trouble, she wondered what he had to hide. She went to the doorway and called Lu up to meet her there. She handed the card to the Fed without even looking at it. “Call this guy,” she said. “Tell him to meet us at Simon’s apartment, tonight. If he complains or says it’s after hours, tell him his client is being hounded by the police.”

Lu stepped out into the hall to comply.

“I’ll give you a ride,” Caxton said, “and wait for your lawyer there, alright?”

The boy lowered his head. She turned to Lu, who was on hold. “You stay here and keep an eye on this place. If we could find it this easily, a vampire probably can too. If Jameson shows up, you know what to do.”

Lu nodded. “Sure. Run like hell.” He stepped aside to let Caxton and Simon out of the room. They headed down the stairs together and outside into the cold of the parking lot. She half expected him to refuse her ride, but when she opened the door of the Mazda he climbed in without complaint. They drove back to his apartment in silence. At his front door he said, “I don’t want you to come in. You can’t come in unless I invite you in, not legally.”

“That’s an interesting legal question, since I’ve already been inside,” Caxton said. “Let’s ask your lawyer when he comes.”

Simon scowled at her but didn’t slam the door in her face when she came in, and at the top of the stairs he actually held his door open for her. Inside he shed his winter coat and sat down hard on the cot. Its springs squealed noisily. “Are you going to watch me undress?” he asked.

Caxton waved one hand at him. “Keep your clothes on. In fact, why don’t we pack a bag?” She went to his closet and took down a small black suitcase from the shelf at its top.

“Why, am I going somewhere?”

“Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, I think,” she said. “That way I can keep an eye on you and your sister at the same time.”

“I don’t think so.”

She shrugged and started packing, folding up shirts neatly and then laying them in the suitcase. She had very little time left, she knew. As soon as the lawyer showed up there would be no way on earth to compel Simon to come back to Pennsylvania with her. She needed to get him riled up again. Get him scared. She looked around inside the closet for pairs of pants.

“Leave my stuff alone,” Simon said, testily.

She shrugged again and sorted through the clothes he had on hangers. There wasn’t much, just a few nice shirts and a powder blue suit. The same suit he’d worn to Jameson’s mock funeral. It was probably the only suit he owned, she thought. She picked up one sleeve and let the linen material run through her fingers. That suit—

No. It couldn’t be the same. That was too—her brain flip-flopped in her skull. If she was right, if that suit matched the other one, the one in the picture, it made things a lot more complicated. But maybe it made one thing dead easy.

She turned around and looked at him, really studied his face for the first time. Then she walked toward him, reaching toward her belt.

“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked. His tone was trying for sarcasm, but it hit fear on the way there.

“Unh-uh,” Caxton said. Yeah. She was sure, she decided. That suit was the same color, the same light blue. She opened a pouch at her belt and took out her handcuffs. “I’m putting you under arrest.”

Chapter 41.

“What is this about?” Simon demanded, a few hours later. “What are you charging me with?”

He looked scared. She had hauled him down to the local police station and then handed him over to the officers there to be booked and processed. He’d been photographed, fingerprinted, strip-searched, and shoved in a cell with a bunch of drug offenders and petty thieves, then left there to stew for a while. He looked very scared.

This was the first she’d seen of him since they’d arrived. She’d spent the intervening time discussing her investigation with the local police chief and checking her email. She had to be sure.

When she was ready—or maybe, to be honest, a little while after she was fully ready—she had him brought up from cells and put in an interrogation room. As they went, it wasn’t the nicest interrogation room Caxton had ever seen. There was one table topped with Formica, brown and black with generations of cigarette burns and coffee stains. There were two chairs, which sat side by side—the room wasn’t big enough to allow the subject and the interviewer to sit across from each other. There was a reinforced staple in the wall, to which Simon had been attached by a pair of handcuffs. It was high up on the wall so that the video camera in the corner of the ceiling could see where Simon’s hands were at all times.

Caxton leaned back in her chair. She had a manila envelope containing a few pieces of paper. She drew one out and read:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you at interrogation time and at court. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

She looked up at him expectantly.

“Fuck you,” he howled. “Tell me what’s going on. I don’t have to take this. I can walk out of here right now if you don’t charge me.”

Caxton shook her head no, with a sad little smile. “Charges? Alright. Let’s pick one. How about trespassing in a government building? Or maybe the theft of evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation.

Then there’s impersonating a police officer. Shall I go on?”

“You don’t—you don’t have any evidence,” he said. His eyes were shiny with fear.

Good. If she scared him enough he might agree to enter her protection.

She sighed dramatically and said, “You have the right to remain silent. Any—”

“Fine,” he said, stopping her. “Yes, I understand. Just tell me what this is about, damn it.”

“Your suit. Your powder blue suit.”

He squinted at her. “I wore it to that stupid funeral. That’s the only time you’ve seen it.”

She shook her head again, then reached into her envelope and drew out a computer printout on glossy photo paper. It showed a man wearing a light blue suit, standing at the entrance of the USMS archives.

Simon’s eyes flicked down to the photo but didn’t linger there long enough for him to have taken a real look. “That’s not me. You can’t even see the face.”

“You think that’s all I have, this one picture?”

“I—I won’t talk until my lawyer arrives.”

“That’s fine,” Caxton said. “That’ll give me time to check your fingerprints against the ones we found on the crime scene.” It was a bluff, but an easy one. The man in the photograph wasn’t wearing gloves. He would almost certainly have touched some surface, maybe a doorknob or a countertop, while he was inside the archives.

“Hold on,” Simon said.

“Once we get a match, I really don’t think I’ll need to ask you any more questions. We can just drop you in a holding cell and wait for trial. You’ll be safe enough there while I go find and kill your father. Of course, there are a couple of things I’d really like to know, but fine, you want your lawyer, you get your lawyer. Lu finally got hold of him a little while ago, and he said he would be here in the morning.” She put her papers back in the envelope and started to get up. “You can spend the night back in the holding cell until he arrives.”

“Wait,” Simon said.

She looked at him expectantly.

“Wait. Am I—okay, I’m in trouble. I understand that. Now, I’m not confessing to anything. But if I answer your questions—”

She shook her head. “I can’t coerce you to talk to me. That means I can’t offer you any deals to get you to speak, either.”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “There has to be something we can do, though. If I agree, of my own free will, to answer your questions, maybe you won’t just dump me in a cell and let me rot.”

She shrugged. “It’s not my decision whether to press charges or not.” That was the truth. Fetlock would make that decision, when the time came, based on Caxton’s advice. “However, as a U.S. Marshal one of my duties is to transport prisoners from place to place. I can transport you to a different detention facility. Say, one in Pennsylvania, where you can be with your sister.”

He stared at her with wide eyes for quite a while. Then his chin bobbed up and down. It took her a second to decide that was a yes, and not just a muscular tremor.

“Okay,” she said. “First. Tell me exactly what happened at the USMS archives. I want to know who told you to do it, and who told you what to do. I want to know how you did it, and I want to know where the files are now.”

After that he opened like a can of peas.

His story began just after the massacre at Gettysburg, where Caxton and Glauer had faced down an army of vampires—and lost. Jameson had saved Caxton’s life there by finishing off the vampires who were too tough for her. “He truly believed he would be able to do that, then have the strength of will to turn himself in. Turn himself over to you, I guess. For disposal.”

“That’s an odd way of putting it,” Caxton said.

“But accurate, I think. It was supposed to be nice and tidy, he would just come back to you, let you put your gun up against his chest, and it would be over. He thought his life was over, anyway, before he made the change. He’d been crippled. He was a vampire hunter who could barely climb a flight of stairs, much less shoot straight. He felt like his only reason for living was gone. That’s why he made the choice he did. He told me about that first night as a vampire, though, and the strength he had, and the things he could see. They can see farther into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum than we can. Into the near infrared. I can’t even imagine it—the things he described, the way the sky glowed, the way trees pulsed with life and every animal—”

“Was full of blood,” Caxton interrupted. “I know they can see our blood, even in the dark.” She shook her head. “You’re making it sound pretty good.”

“Well, maybe it kind of was. I mean, at first. He swore he would never harm a living human. All he wanted was another night like that—and another after that. He realized that he hadn’t wanted to kill himself at all. That he’d just been feeling sorry for himself. I think he still believed he could do good. Kill more vampires—you know, working from the inside. When he first contacted me, that was the sense I got.”

“When was this?”

Simon rubbed his forehead. “October. Late October—I remember there was a paper jack-o’-lantern on my door that night.”

So Jameson had been active for nearly a month before he contacted his son. She wondered what he’d been doing before that—staying up late with Dylan Carboy, talking about how much Carboy hated school? Drinking blood out of a plastic bag and hoping it would be enough? She couldn’t imagine what he’d done, what he’d thought, in those early days. Not yet. “How did he contact you? Did he come to you in person?”

“No,” Simon said. “By telephone.”

“Do you remember what number he called you from?”

“This was on my home phone. I don’t have caller ID.”

Caxton nodded. She leaned back in her chair. “Did he tell you at any time where he was, or at least where he was calling from?”

“Of course not,” Simon said. “He only called me a couple of times. The first was to, well, to see how I was doing. You can imagine how I reacted to that, my dead father calling me on the phone to see how my grades were. I freaked out and hung up on him. The next time he called—I didn’t hang up.”

Caxton tried to channel Glauer with his people skills and guess why. “You missed him,” she suggested.

“Fuck, no,” Simon spat. “You have to understand, he had never called me at school before. I mean, when he was living. I barely saw him when I was in high school, he was always away at some seminar on vampires or some police training thing or running around some far corner of Pennsylvania because someone had seen an albino man with pointed ears going through their trash cans and it turned out it was a coyote. No, I didn’t miss him. I never really had a father. But after that first call, I kind of felt—this is so stupid, but—I felt like I did have somebody, for the first time. When he called again, I was happy to hear his voice, even as changed as it was. That’s when he told me about what it was like for him, and how much he wanted to stay alive, and how you were gunning for him. He told me there was something I could do to help him, to help keep him alive.”

“And you said yes?”

Simon shrugged. “I took some coaxing. But in the end he was still the same guy. The guy who, every time I saw him, knew exactly how to get a reaction out of me. He knew how to push my buttons. How to make me feel sorry for him. He told me how lonely he was, and how desperate. How everyone wanted to hurt him. That was all an act, wasn’t it? Don’t answer that, I know the answer. They can hypnotize you if you look into their eyes. I think, maybe, they can do it with their voices, too. Or maybe—maybe I was just an easy mark.”

He kept talking then, without any prompting, telling a story that had gained its own momentum. “A couple days later I got an envelope in the mail, with no return address. The postmark said Bellefonte. Inside was a security card on a nylon string. It was his old card from when he worked for the USMS. It was my job to go find all his old files and steal them. The hard part was getting down to Virginia. I had to take a train, then walk five miles from the station. At the door there was a bored guard who barely glanced at the card, then let me in. Same thing at the archives. I signed for the files, not using my own name, of course, and then I took them and walked back out the same way I’d come in. Just like that. I walked back to the train station, went in the bathroom, and changed my clothes and messed up my hair. If anybody had been looking for me they wouldn’t have recognized me after that. I took the next train back to Syracuse and I was in class that evening at five-thirty. Intensive French 206. I couldn’t miss it. I took it every weekday, for two hours and fifty minutes, and at the end of the semester I had nine credits and I’d completed my foreign-language requirement. If I missed one class I lost a letter grade.”

Caxton sighed. “Where are the files now?”

“He told me there were things in those papers that could hurt him. That could lead you right to him. A list of places he thought would make good vampire lairs. Personal stuff about his family. A lot of stuff about Malvern.” He held up his hands. “I burned them. You have to understand. I thought I was doing a good thing. I thought I was helping my dad. Then, at the fake funeral, when you were talking about how you were going to kill him—”

“Yeah,” Caxton said. “You thought he was still a good guy. Until…?”

“Right up until he killed my uncle.” He inhaled deeply. “That was when I got a lawyer. That was why I refused your protective custody. He kills people because they know something. He kills people because they get in his way now. He’s not the man I spoke to on the phone.”

“He’s not your father,” Caxton said.

“Actually—in some ways he’s more like my father than ever.”

Caxton thought maybe she could see that. “Okay. Next question. When was the last time you spoke with him?”

“That was the last time, when he asked me to get the files. I haven’t heard from him since.”

Caxton nodded, making a note on her pad.

“Although I spoke to Malvern like three days ago.”

She nearly lost control of her pen.

Chapter 42.

“Malvern—you’re in contact with Malvern.” Caxton caught her breath. “Is this a recent development?”

Simon shook his head. “It started years ago. Before you even came along. My freshman year in college, actually.”

Caxton bit her lip. “That was what, two years ago? At that time Malvern was being held in a half-abandoned hospital. She was the only patient there. I saw the place. I nearly died there. The security was pretty tight, since your father oversaw it. There’s no way you could have broken in there and spoken with her, and I know he would never have allowed you to go there unsupervised.”

“Well, yeah,” Simon said. “I never actually met her. We corresponded by email.” He smiled. “My father was good at a lot of things, but he never really mastered computers. For some reason Malvern had a laptop there—”

“Yes,” Caxton interrupted. “It was her only way to communicate with her keepers. She can’t talk, she’s too old and decayed for that. She talks by tapping out messages on the keyboard.”

Simon nodded. “Right. And obviously she wasn’t supposed to be able to get a line out. She was behind a firewall. I knew about her through my father—when he was home, on those rare occasions, he talked about vampires all the time. He talked about her a lot. As soon as I got to Syracuse I decided I wanted to talk to her. I had a friend who was majoring in computer science and he established a VPN

connection right through the firewall. She was pretty surprised, but she was desperate to talk to anybody and she was more than willing to keep our conversations secret. I talked to her a lot that semester. I had a million questions and she was happy to answer them.”

Caxton could guess why Malvern would have been happy to talk to the boy. She was always looking for some angle, some new way to improve her condition—to acquire blood, the only thing that could heal her ravaged body. Jameson had thwarted every one of her plans. It wasn’t a big logical jump to see how much she would enjoy getting her hooks into his only son. Maybe she had wanted to turn Simon into a vampire, to torture his father. Maybe she just liked the irony. She couldn’t see why Simon would take such a risk, though. “Weren’t you worried you would get caught?”

“Of course. If my father knew what I was doing he would have killed me.” The boy blanched. “I mean, he would have—he would have been angry. But it was so worth the risk. I told you when I met you that I was studying biology. That’s kind of true. Actually, my major is in teratology. The study of monsters.”

Of course it is, she thought. Growing up the son of Jameson Arkeley, America’s last vampire hunter, what else would the boy have chosen to study?

“You have to understand, it’s not much of a field. Most monsters were driven to extinction long before anybody bothered to study them in a proper scientific manner. There’s some fossil evidence, and a few so-called historical accounts. Firsthand data is nonexistent. There’s a stuffed werewolf in a museum in Moscow, but a lot of people think it’s a fake—and they don’t let first-year students from American universities just fly over to poke and prod at it. Yet there I was with access to a living, well, an undead vampire. The very last one, as far as anyone knew.”

Caxton closed her eyes. If only.

“Can you even imagine how tempting that was?” Simon looked at his hands, unable to meet her gaze.

“So of course I talked to her.”

“She taught you about vampires. Did she ever—did she ask you for anything in return?”

“I had a sense she was leading up to that. She kept sending me emails about how badly she needed blood and how my father was starving her. I said that was a shame but there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe she would have gone further, but then one day I emailed her and there was no response.

I didn’t hear from her again for a long time. I left the VPN connection in place, just, you know, in case she got in touch again. Later I heard the story of how she created those new vampires, and how you and my father met, and I realized the dates matched up. She stopped emailing me when she started making new vampires. I guess luring me into accepting the curse was just taking too long.”

“But now she’s in touch with you again.”

“Yeah. About two months ago, when my father did—what he did.” Simon shrugged. “The connection came back on. There was a message waiting for me. It was different from before, though.”

“How?”

“Before, she would take a long time to write an email. Days and days—I would ask her the simplest question and have to wait a really long time to get a reply. When she started talking again she was emailing two or three times a day, really long messages about how much our contact had meant to her and how she wanted to meet with me in person now. Her spelling was better, too, and there was actual punctuation in the messages. I guess maybe when she went away with my dad she didn’t have to write in secret anymore and she had more free time to—”

“No,” Caxton said.

“No?”

Caxton frowned at him. “Her spelling and punctuation get better when she’s recently fed. It’s easier for her to type now because she’s stronger. Your father has been feeding her regularly, and it won’t be too long before she can call you on the phone. Until she can talk again.”

“Really? You can’t imagine how much there still is to learn from her.”

Caxton restrained herself from slapping his stupid face. “You should have told me all this when we first met. You should have told someone, someone in law enforcement, the second she got back in touch with you.”

He shook his head. “There was nothing in those messages that would help you. It was mostly personal stuff. And there’s no way to trace the connection and figure out where she is that way.”

“Are you so sure? You’re not a detective, Simon. You don’t know how we work. How we can figure things out even from seemingly meaningless clues. I could have used that information. If I’d had it,” she said, knowing she was about to drop a bomb, that what she was about to say might traumatize him for life, but not really caring, “maybe I could have found their lair by now. Maybe I could have saved your uncle. Or your mother.”

Simon’s face went blank suddenly. “But it was all harmless stuff! My mom—”

“You know she’s dead, right? I had to break the news to Raleigh.”

The boy’s mouth was a flat line across his face. “I…know. I guess I didn’t let myself think about it until now. She’s dead. She’s really dead.”

Silence filled up the room like fog. Simon sat very still, his hands on the table, and stared into space.

“And I had a part in that. Oh, shit,” he said, very softly. “Oh God. I didn’t…I didn’t think.”

In a moment her anger, her terrifying resolve, just broke. He wasn’t evil. He hadn’t withheld that information to thwart her. He just hadn’t realized how desperate the situation was. Until a few days before, he’d still thought his father was a good man.

The boy in front of her started crying. Not sobbing, not uncontrollable weeping. Tears were just rolling down his face. He didn’t look like he was even aware of them. She had pushed him too hard. Laid too much guilt on him. Some people weren’t as strong as she was, sometimes. Some people weren’t as practiced as she at handling the guilt of lives lost, of culpability. She had to remember that.

Glauer was supposed to handle the emotional scenes. Glauer was the people person. She was the one who shot vampires. Even Caxton could see the grief that was about to crush the boy like a closing fist, though. She reached over and took his hand.

“Hey. We’ll never really know how things could have been different.” He lowered his forehead to the table. She tried to think of anything else she could say. “I lost my mom when I was fifteen,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Mothers are bigger than we are. They’re more durable. Or they’re supposed to be.”

He turned slowly to look at her. “Thanks. I think I might want to be alone for a while. Are we done?”

“Sure,” Caxton said. She got up and stepped out of the little room. She left him handcuffed to the wall.

She was still a cop, after all.

Chapter 43.

Caxton woke up because her phone was ringing. She tried to ignore it, but it was set to vibrate as well, and it chattered painfully against her ribs. She sat up.

It had been a long night. She’d overseen a team of Feds who went to Simon’s apartment and seized his computers; she’d gotten them started downloading anything that remained of years of correspondence between the boy and the vampire. Something might come of it—it was true that sometimes innocent-seeming clues could tip over an entire investigation. It would take time, though, before they learned anything. As the computer techs got to work she’d realized she wasn’t going to be any help, so she’d returned to the jail and stood guard, along with every Fed she could mobilize in the middle of the night.

And nothing had happened.

She had finally fallen asleep about five in the morning, sitting upright in a chair in a disused room near the holding cells in the basement. She’d pulled her winter coat over her shoulders in lieu of a blanket. The phone was in one of the pockets.

She tried to open her eyes, but they were bleary and glued shut with sleep. She struggled to sit up and her body complained. Every muscle was stiff, every joint ached. She beat at her coat with one hand until she found the pocket holding the phone, then drew it out and answered it.

“Hello? Who’s calling?” she said. That was about all she could manage.

“It’s Deputy Marshal Fetlock. Are you alright?”

Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. She sat up straighter in the chair, complaining muscles notwithstanding. “Yes, sir.” Putting her feet down on the floor, she started to think about standing up.

“I’ve had some very disturbing reports out of the field office in Syracuse. I wanted to discuss your conduct. Special Deputy Benicio tells me you illegally entered and searched Simon Arkeley’s apartment.

Is that true?”

“There were exigent circumstances,” she said. It wasn’t strictly a lie. Simon’s life had been at risk and she’d only forced the door in order to protect him.

“Benicio doesn’t corroborate that,” Fetlock told her.

She got her feet down, then stood up all in one go. It was easy then to stagger to the door and push it open. The holding cells were just down the hall—she needed to check. “Sir, Simon is now in my custody.” She considered telling him that the boy had confessed to stealing the files from the USMS

archives, but she worried he might insist she drag him down to Virginia and relinquish him to the authorities there. That was the last thing she wanted. She needed to keep him close, where she could watch him. “I do not believe he will be interested in pressing charges.”

“For your sake I hope so. We can’t have this kind of behavior, Caxton.”

There were eight cells, little bigger than closets, lining either side of a short corridor. Only a few of them were occupied. She counted down the cells. She’d put Simon in the third cell on the left side herself. She came up to the bars and looked in. There he was. Sleeping. She watched his chest rise and fall. He was still alive.

“Sir,” she said, “can I ask you what time it is?”

“It’s eight-oh-two, by my clock,” Fetlock told her. “Don’t try to evade the issue.”

She tried to remember, but couldn’t, what time sunrise was. “Please. Just tell me something. Is the sun up yet?” she asked.

“Yes, Special Deputy. It is. But—”

“Oh, thank God,” Caxton said. That meant she’d made it through the night. It meant she’d gone twenty-four hours without discharging her weapon. More important, it meant it had been more than twenty-four hours since anyone died. “Thank God,” she said again. “Thank God.”

Fetlock kept talking, but she barely heard him. She made apologetic noises where appropriate, but she didn’t bother explaining her actions—why should she? Raleigh and Simon were alive. Jameson’s plot to recruit new vampires had failed. She could keep his children safe while she hunted for him, for his lair.

And where she found him she would find Malvern as well. She wasn’t done yet. It would take more time, more work, more risk, to finish off the vampires, but she’d taken an important step.

Of course, the vampires wouldn’t let her have her moment of triumph without ruining it somehow.

When she finally got Fetlock off the phone, it chimed at her to tell her she had a voice mail message waiting. The call had come in during the early hours of the morning, shortly after she’d fallen asleep. She recognized the number it came from right away: it was from the phone Jameson had stolen from a dead cop in Bellefonte.

Steeling herself, she dialed her voice mail and waited to hear his growling voice again. Except when the message played it wasn’t a male voice.

It was a very short message. “Keep the boy from harm, Laura. I have plans for him.”

It was recognizably a woman’s voice, though so creaky and rough she could barely make out the words.

At first she didn’t understand, couldn’t think of who it might be. Then she remembered she had heard that voice before, just once, more than a year previously. It was the voice of Justinia Malvern.

She was talking again. Jameson had fed her enough blood to give her her voice back. That meant it was only a matter of time before she would start walking under her own power.

It didn’t matter. Caxton told herself that, over and over. The kids were both in protective custody. She was making progress. She signed the necessary papers and had Simon released into her recognizance.

The boy looked almost pathetically grateful as she led him out of the police station and into the parking lot. It had stopped snowing during the night, and all of Syracuse was buried under a thick layer of white that hurt her eyes to look at. She slipped on her sunglasses and eventually found her car. It was under six inches of snow, but the red paint showed through here and there. Together she and Simon dug it out and then climbed inside, their breath pluming across the windows and leaving them fogged.

Before they got on the highway she stopped at a fast-food restaurant for breakfast. Simon, it turned out, was a vegetarian. They had trouble finding him a salad, but eventually he settled for one with a few withered vegetables and some strips of fried chicken he could pick out. He laid them carefully on a napkin, which he then folded up and stuck inside the bag. This he crumpled up in his hands and put in his pocket for later disposal.

Caxton looked into the Mazda’s backseat and saw all the wrappers and bags she’d thrown back there.

Neither of them said anything.

The snowplows had cleared the highways and laid down a thick scurf of rock salt. The road surface was wet and shiny, but the chains on her tires held it just fine.

It was only a little after noon when she arrived back at Harrisburg and the state police headquarters. She brought Simon inside and went looking for Glauer. He was down in the SSU briefing room, pinning up a picture of Raleigh’s friend Violet under VAMPIRE PATTERN #1. In the picture the girl wore a black hooded sweatshirt, unzipped to show some generous cleavage, and piercings in her nose and ears. She looked unhappy. Nothing like the smiling girl in a baggy sweater Caxton had seen die at the convent.

“Where’d you get that?” Caxton asked.

“The girl’s parents. They agreed to the cremation, by the way. They did it last night, as a rush job.”

“Good,” Caxton said, “though it was probably unnecessary. Jameson would know I had a guard on her body. If he raised her I could have interrogated her.”

“Sure,” Glauer said. He wrote Violet’s name on the board with a dry erase marker. VIOLET HARMON.

Caxton hadn’t even known her last name before.

“I brought Simon back in one piece,” Caxton said, and introduced the boy to the big cop.

“I’m so sorry, for everything that’s happened,” Glauer said, his big hand folding around one of Simon’s.

“I promise, we did everything we could to help your mother.”

“I’m sure you did,” Simon said.

“Listen, your sister is here. Do you want to see her?”

The boy frowned. “Why?” he asked. Then he shook his head as if to clear it.

“You should talk about what’s happened.” Glauer patted Simon on the shoulder. “Your family needs to be together at a time like this. Love and support mean everything in the face of grief.”

Simon shrugged. “I’ve never really done the big brother thing before.”

“Just wait in the lounge, then,” Glauer said, and gestured toward the door. When Simon went out of the room the big cop turned to Caxton and rolled his eyes. “He’s about as bad as you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Caxton asked, but with a smile. Nothing could ruin her good mood.

When Glauer didn’t answer she followed him out into the hallway. “I take it,” she said, “from the fact that everybody here is still alive, that Jameson didn’t attack last night.”

“No, he didn’t,” Glauer told her. “And I’ll admit I was kind of relieved. You made it sound like one night alone with Raleigh was going to be the death of me. Instead it was kind of fun.”

“Really?” Caxton’s smile broadened. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?”

Glauer blushed but assured her nothing like what she was insinuating had happened. “She got bored pretty early, which didn’t surprise me. I mean, what’s a nineteen-year-old girl going to do spending the night in an office building? We played a game of Scrabble—”

“Who won?” Caxton asked.

“She did. With chasma on a triple word score. I challenged, because I’d never heard of it before, but it turns out it’s a medical term for excessive yawning. After that I gave her the grand tour of the place—the PCO room, the computer crimes unit, the evidence room, the garage…”

“Did you let her wear your Smokey Bear hat?”

Glauer blushed again, but didn’t comment on whether he had or not. They went up the stairs to the barracks wing of the headquarters, where off-duty troopers often slept between shifts. There were several semiprivate bedrooms there. “I kept her up kind of late—I didn’t sleep at all myself, of course, because I was on watch. She’s still sleeping, I think, or at least she hasn’t come out of there yet.” He indicated a particular door and raised his knuckles as if to knock on it. “I don’t know, maybe we should just let her sleep.”

“It’s almost one o’clock,” Caxton said. “If she sleeps any later she’ll never sleep tonight. Go on.”

Glauer knocked once, tentatively, and waited a second. When there was no answer he knocked again with more determination. By the time Caxton started frowning he had knocked three times and gotten no response at all.

“Open it,” she said.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open. The shades were drawn over the windows of the room beyond, so it was lit by the glow of a television with the sound turned off. It gave a bluish cast to everything, but instantly Caxton realized that it couldn’t explain why Raleigh’s lips were so purple, or why her face was so pale. She rushed inside and cupped her hand over the girl’s mouth and nose.

“She’s not breathing,” she said, looking up at the big cop in the doorway, who could only stare back with nothing on his face but surprise.

Chapter 44.

Caxton pulled the sheet off Raleigh’s body. She was naked underneath, but there was no time for modesty. She grabbed the girl’s wrists and rubbed them violently. Her skin was ice cold.

“No,” she moaned, then looked up at Glauer again. “Get in here and help me. Call 911, tell them we have an emergency.” She put her hands together over Raleigh’s sternum and pushed down rapidly.

Glauer put his mouth over Raleigh’s and blew air down into her lungs. They’d both had CPR training—in fact, the state police required them to get checked out on emergency first aid every year. They both also knew it was pointless. The girl was dead. She probably had been for hours.

Still they kept up chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth. Caxton kept at it until her arms grew sore and her own breath grew ragged. Eventually the paramedics came. One of them grabbed the girl’s wrist and asked how long she’d been unresponsive. Caxton didn’t know, and told him as much, while still pushing down on Raleigh’s chest. The paramedics tried giving her a shot of adrenaline, but it was just for form’s sake. Eventually they told Caxton to stop.

She stepped back, her own pulse thundering in her ears. She sagged into a chair and stared at the corpse. “How?” she asked. “How did this happen?”

Glauer only shook his head. He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at anything, just staring into space. It was one of the paramedics who answered.

“It would take an autopsy and a tox screen to say for sure. But this is what I’m guessing.” He picked up the girl’s arm and turned it outward to show Caxton. She saw a puckered little wound on the inside of Raleigh’s elbow. There were other marks there, long snaky furrows under her skin. Much older, mostly healed.

Caxton looked around the room, then dropped to her knees and looked under the bed. An empty syringe had fallen down there, and she thought she saw grains of brown powder. Caxton had been trained to recognize heroin when she saw it.

“Most likely she took a massive dose last night before going to bed,” the paramedic said. “She probably passed out and stopped breathing shortly thereafter. If it’s any consolation, she didn’t feel any pain. In fact, she probably felt pretty good before she lost consciousness.”

“That’s no consolation at all,” Caxton said. “Now get out.”

“We can take her away for you, but we’ll need you both to move back so we can get a gurney in here.

You’ll have to sign a receipt for the body and we’ll need to talk to the next of kin.”

“I told you to get out. You’re done here,” Caxton repeated.

“Hold on, I know this is a lot to take in right now, but there are rules about this sort of thing. There are laws—”

“You may not have noticed,” she said, “but I’m a cop. I’m the law here, and what I say goes. And what I say is you and your partner need to get the hell out of here.”

The paramedic frowned, but he did what he was told. That left her alone in the room with Glauer and the body.

“I don’t know how this happened,” Glauer said. Half of his mustache was in his mouth and he was sucking on it. “Special Deputy, I promise, I don’t—”

“You gave her the grand tour. You showed her the PCO room. And the computer crimes area. That’s what you said. You showed her the evidence room.”

“Oh, no,” Glauer moaned.

“You knew she was a heroin addict,” Caxton continued. “You should have looked out for drug-seeking behavior.”

“She was in recovery! You saw her, she didn’t look like a junkie at all!”

Caxton was ready to fire him on the spot. “We took her out of a stable environment. She was already under incredible stress—fear for her life, familial grief. Then we put her in a place where drugs were available. How many risk factors did she need before she broke down? She saw all the drugs in the evidence room. All the drugs we’ve confiscated over who knows how long. She must have done something to distract you, if only for a second.”

“Yeah,” Glauer admitted. “She kissed me.”

“Oh, fuck no,” Caxton said. She wanted to shoot something. Instead she picked up the remote control for the TV and stabbed the power button.

“It was—it was very sweet, I thought. I was showing her how we log in each piece of evidence. I was boring her, I thought. Then I turned around and she planted one right on me. Stood up on her tiptoes, threw her arms around my neck. The whole thing. I said—I don’t know what I said. I was so surprised I might have said anything. I probably said I was too old for her and she told me the kiss was just a thank-you. For taking care of her.”

Caxton knew Glauer well enough to understand how he must have reacted to that. The big cop lived for rescuing civilians from danger. It was why he’d become a cop in the first place. Had Raleigh seen through him that easily? Drug abusers could be devilishly cunning when it came to getting their next fix.

“I turned around and walked out of the room, unable to say anything at that point. I took my eyes off of her for maybe a couple seconds, that’s all.”

“Plenty of time.”

“Sure. She could have palmed her works and a bag of heroin and I wouldn’t have noticed.” Glauer stared down at his feet. “This is terrible.”

“Yep,” Caxton said. She was seeing stars, she was so angry. She thought about firing Glauer. When she wrote up her report on this incident, he would at the very least go before an administrative hearing. Even if she spoke up on his behalf—and she wasn’t sure she would—he would be suspended without pay for a long time. He might get fired without her lifting a finger. “I asked you to watch over her. I saved her from her father and all I wanted you to do was keep her alive.”

“Hey,” Glauer said. “There’s no need to get personal about this.”

“No?”

“No! This was a terrible accident, but—”

Caxton’s eyes went wide. “Are you so sure? Are you sure it was an accident? What if it was suicide?”

“No,” Glauer said, denying the possibility.

Caxton couldn’t afford to do the same. You had to commit suicide to become a vampire. It was one of the rules—true accidents didn’t count. “Her father could have given her his curse.”

“No,” Glauer said again.

“He could have. Tonight, in just a couple of hours, she could open her eyes, and they could be red. She could open her mouth, and it could be full of those teeth. Look at her. She’s already lost all her color.”

“That’s not—you’re making a mistake. This was just a dumb accident. She misjudged the dosage. That’s all!”

Caxton shook her head. “We have to cremate her body, before dark. I’ve made this mistake before.

And it cost me everything.”

Chapter 45.

Caxton had been worried about Simon. She had worried that Jameson would approach Simon, and make his offer, and that Simon would say yes. She had barely even considered the notion it would be Raleigh, poor timid little Raleigh, so fragile that Jameson had to rescue her and stick her somewhere quiet so very far from the real world.

She grabbed the yellow pages and started dialing. She needed an emergency cremation—before four-thirty. That was a little over two hours away. The first three places she tried didn’t even do cremation. It wasn’t listed as a category in the directory—she was just dialing funeral homes at random.

The fourth number connected her to a very polite, very understanding man who assured her that it was quite impossible.

“I’d need the approval of the next of kin.”

“I’m a U.S. Marshal,” she said. “Can I order a cremation even without permission?”

“Not unless you’re also a health official. Otherwise, you need family approval.”

“Her brother’s the only one left. I’ll make him say yes.”

“Make him? There are regulations that apply to this industry,” he said. “Even if he says yes, we would also need a death certificate.”

“I promise you, this body is dead.”

The polite man coughed, a sound she could have interpreted as a laugh if she liked. Apparently in the mortuary industry you learned how to be diplomatic. But Caxton knew she was already beaten. Without a death certificate there was no chance, and to get one she would have to wait for a coroner to come and pronounce the body. If she waited for that, then took the time to drive to the funeral home—it could already be too late.

Glauer and Simon took turns attempting to talk her out of the cremation altogether. The big cop said it wasn’t necessary, that Raleigh’s death had been an accident. He said that Jameson had never had a chance to pass on his curse. “You were there, the whole time,” he said. “You heard what they said to each other.”

“You can pass the curse on with a look. That’s all it takes,” she insisted.

“But don’t you remember, the curse has to be passed on in silence? Justinia Malvern even called it ‘The Silent Rite.’ If they were talking, they couldn’t do it.”

Caxton considered that a good point, but largely immaterial. “He could have passed her the curse any time. Long before I got there. I was going on her word that she hadn’t had contact with him in six months, but what if she was lying?”

It was Simon’s turn. “She would never do such a thing,” he told her. “She was terrified of the sight of blood. Whenever she would scrape a knee, back when we were kids, she would go run and hide under the sofa.”

“She didn’t seem to mind needles. And where there are needles, there’s blood,” Caxton told him. “She got over it.”

No one could convince her. She couldn’t afford to let anyone convince her. She stormed out of the room and down the hall, into a wardroom where a number of troopers were gathered around some snack machines. “You four, come with me,” she said, and headed out through the main doors of the building. It was cold out in the parking lot and snow was falling—not the blizzardlike torrent she’d seen at Syracuse, just a few scattered flakes, but it made her turn up her collar. “Come on,” she said, and led them behind the building. There were domes back there to hold road salt, and a long low shed that held emergency road barriers. She opened up the wide doors of the shed and ushered in her four draftees. Inside stood hundreds of wooden sawhorses painted in reflective white and yellow. She told each of the men to grab one, and picked one up herself. It was heavy. She didn’t care.

In the parking lot she had the men dump the sawhorses in an untidy heap. She piled her own on top. It didn’t look like enough. “More,” she said, and they went back. One of the troopers asked her what they were doing. She told him to shut up and grab a sawhorse, and he did. They brought their loads back to the parking lot and dropped them on top of the pile with a clattering, clonking noise. The legs of the sawhorses kept them from piling up the way she might like. While she sent the men back for one more round she climbed on top of the pile, then jumped up and down on it, coming down hard on the legs with her boots. Some of them snapped off. The men brought more sawhorses—and she had them dump them and go back again.

Glauer and Simon stood by the doors, watching her. She figured they understood what she was doing, but she wasn’t particularly concerned. They weren’t actively trying to stop her. When the troopers came, grumbling among themselves, with one more load of wood, she nodded in acceptance and rearranged some of the timber to make the pile more symmetrical.

“Now,” she said, “you. Go down to the motor pool and get the biggest jerry can of gasoline they can give you. You two—go inside, into the barracks. There’s a body on one of the beds. Wrap it up in a sheet and bring it out here.”

If the crematorium wouldn’t do it, she’d burn up Raleigh’s remains herself. She climbed on top of the pile and started kicking at the legs again, trying to make a more solid heap of fuel.

“Caxton,” Glauer finally said. He was standing right behind her. “Caxton, this is insane.”

“Is it? There’s a girl in there who could very well wake up at four-thirty as a vampire, thirsty for blood.

You’ve seen what they can do, and you know as well as I do that they’re never stronger than the moment they rise.”

“You’re assuming—”

“I’m assuming nothing,” she demanded. “I’m preparing for an eventuality. Given the risks involved, it would be colossally stupid not to do this. When you’re faced with two choices, one that makes everybody happy, and one that isn’t dangerously stupid, you pick the second one. That’s something Jameson taught me.”

“Look, there’s a chance that she’ll rise. There’s also a chance that you’re about to traumatize Simon for life. Why don’t—”

“You admit, then, that there’s a chance. I don’t gamble, Glauer. Now, either help them bring the body out here or get out of my face.”

He reached to take her arm. She swung around, very fast, and punched him in the wrist. He backed away quickly, shaking his arm in pain. It was his fault Raleigh was dead. He had let her commit suicide. If he spoke to her again she planned on hitting him someplace else, like the face or the stomach.

The body was brought out. The troopers had wrapped it in a white sheet, then strung duct tape around the feet and neck to keep the sheet in place. Two troopers lowered it carefully on top of her pile of wood, and a third doused body and wood in gasoline at her instruction. She thought maybe someone should say some words, but the HQ’s chaplain refused to get involved when she called him. She had no idea what to say, herself.

In a trash can she found a crumpled newspaper and she bunched it in her hands. She turned to look at the troopers who had helped her. “Which one of you smokes? I need a lighter.”

They just stared at her.

“Now you’re growing balls? You soaked her with gasoline! What did you think I was going to do?”

A hand descended on her shoulder. She spun around, intending to push Glauer off, but it wasn’t him.

Deputy Marshal Fetlock stood there with a look of absolute horror on his face.

“Stop,” he said.

She considered hitting him.

She did not. But it took some effort.

“Who the fuck called him?” she demanded, turning to look at the troopers who stood around her. They were all staring at her, some of them looking more uncomfortable than others. “Glauer? Was it you? So help me—”

“Stop,” Fetlock said again.

“Deputy Marshal,” she said, trying to cool her voice down, make it sound reasonable, “this girl may be infected with the vampire curse. If we don’t destroy her body before sundown, she might come back.

I’ve never actually seen it happen. I can only rely on what Jameson taught me. But they come back fast, and they come back very strong. They come back ready to hunt.”

“Stop,” Fetlock said. “Back up.”

He meant physically. She took a step away from the pyre. Then another one. He held up his hand, palm forward, and she took a third step. She dropped her newspaper fire starter on the ground.

He turned to look at Simon, but kept glancing back at her as if he expected her to rush at the pyre and set it alight. The thought had occurred to her. “Simon Arkeley,” he said. “That’s your sister there? We’re not going to burn her today.”

“You’re Caxton’s boss, right?” he asked.

“That’s right, son.” Fetlock turned to face her again, though he continued to address Simon. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah. Well. I haven’t really had time to process—”

“But maybe,” Fetlock interrupted, “you could go inside and let the police handle police business, alright?

Glauer, you keep an eye on him.”

Glauer took the boy inside.

“Now,” Fetlock said, walking toward Caxton. “That’s better.” He came up to her until he was close enough to box her ears. He didn’t. Instead he said: “Give me your star.”

Chapter 46.

“You can’t do this,” Caxton said. “Not now.”

Fetlock held out his hand.

“Look. She has to be destroyed. If I don’t do it—”

“I’m not a fool, Caxton. I’ll take care of it. But I won’t burn her in the parking lot like this. It’s illegal, for one thing. And it’s the wrong thing to do.”

“You trusted me!” she said. “You said this was going to be my investigation and I could run it as I saw fit.

You said you would keep your hands off it.”

“That was back when I thought you were a competent officer. I don’t doubt you know what you’re doing, or that this is important. But your behavior is increasingly erratic and your methods are not acceptable. I’ll take it from here.”

You’ll never find Jameson, she thought. And if you do, he’ll tear you apart. She pressed her lips together until they burned so she wouldn’t say anything. Then she raised her hands to her lapel and unpinned her star. She put it in his hand and watched him shove it into the pocket of his coat.

He moved quickly then. He pointed at the troopers, who were just standing around watching her disgrace. “You and you—get that body off of there. Move it inside, get it in a room with only one door.

You—go tell your Commissioner that Laura Caxton is no longer an employee of the federal government.

If he wants to take her back as a state trooper that’s his business. Trooper Glauer.”

“Sir,” the big cop said, standing to attention.

“You work directly for me now. Go down to the SSU room and be ready to brief me when I arrive. I want to know everything she’s been doing while I wasn’t here.”

Suddenly the two of them were alone in the parking lot. She stared at him with a growing horror. This was real. She was being removed from the case. Her authority to hunt down Jameson and Malvern was gone.

“Damn it, Fetlock! At least let me cut her heart out!”

His stare, as he looked down his nose at her, was nothing short of reptilian. He held her gaze, pinning her like a vampire hypnotizing his victim, for far too long. Then, finally, his face fell. “Tell you what. We do owe you for getting us this far. I’ll let you watch.”

He went off to give more orders, leaving Caxton alone. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was already standing on the horizon, ready to sink.

There were things she needed to do before it did. She ran out to her car and squatted next to its driver’s-side door. Careful not to make too much noise, she unstrapped the Velcro that held her holster around her thigh and waist. She looked at the 90-Two with its clip full of Teflon bullets and its flashlight/laser attachment, checking twice to make sure the safety was on and there was no round in the chamber. Opening the door, she shoved her weapon and its holster under the driver’s seat. Opening the glove compartment, she took out her spare pistol—an old-fashioned Beretta 92, the kind she had always carried before Jameson started wearing ballistic vests, and shoved it in her pocket. There was no spare holster for it, but she would just have to make do.

Heading back into the building, she went looking for Glauer, intending to give him a piece of her mind.

She found him down in the SSU room obeying orders. “I shouldn’t even let you in here,” he said, looking up from a file cabinet.

“You sold me out,” she said. “You can at least let me check a few things.” She went to the laptop where it sat on the bookshelf and powered it up. She’d never seen a vampire rise on its first night, but she had a bunch of first-person accounts from previous vampire hunters, and maybe she could find something to confirm her fears. She wanted to be forewarned as best as possible about what was going to happen when Raleigh woke up.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when Glauer touched her on the shoulder. She spun around, ready to curse him, or maybe hit him, but he gave her a look of such hurt feelings she couldn’t follow through.

Then he lifted one finger to touch his lips and mustache. She narrowed her eyes—what was he trying to tell her? To be quiet?

He looked down and pointed to her belt. To the cell phone she carried there. She took it out and held it up for him. She’d never liked it, it was too big and clunky, and she would be glad to give it back to Fetlock, if that was what Glauer was after. He did take it from her, but instead of putting it in his pocket he fiddled with it for a second and then shoved his thumbnail into a narrow depression on the back of the case. The battery popped out with a nasty clunk that sounded like plastic breaking. He put the battery and the phone down on a desk next to him.

“You can be a real jerk sometimes, do you know that?” he asked her. “I didn’t call him in. I didn’t need to.”

She stared at the phone. “He was monitoring my calls,” she said. She had known that much. “You aren’t suggesting—”

“He said he’s going to get me one of these phones, too. He told me he could hear everything you said when you had it on you, and most of what was going on around you. There’s a microphone built into the mouthpiece that’s active even when you’re not making a call. He could hear you whenever he wanted to.”

“He was listening to me all the time?” Caxton asked, horrified. “You mean the federal government was spying on me?”

Glauer shrugged. “It’s what they’re good at.”

“Jesus. So much for his hands-off management style.”

“He’s making me the lead on the investigation,” Glauer told her. “But I’m not ready.”

She did something then that was very unlike her. She lurched forward and hugged him, hard. He was so big that her arms barely fit around him. “Just be careful,” she said. “Don’t take chances the way I did. If you think you’re in danger at any time, just run away.” That wasn’t what Jameson had taught her. It was no way to catch a vampire, either. It might keep him from getting killed, though. “I’m sorry I said those things before. About you and Raleigh. I know you did your best—nobody would have thought, looking at her, that she had a sneaky bone in her body.”

“No, you were right. I screwed up. And now I’ve gotten promoted for it.” He hugged her back, hard enough to make her feel like her eyeballs were bugging out, then they both let go. “Listen. The Commissioner isn’t going to like any of this. He’ll probably bust you back down to highway patrol. If there’s anything you need around here, get it now, and put it somewhere safe.”

She nodded her thanks and bent over the remains of the phone. Opening another compartment, she slipped out the SIM card. Before she headed out of the briefing room she took one last look at the whiteboards. Dylan Carboy, Jameson Arkeley, and Justinia Malvern looked back at her. “Good luck,”

she said to Glauer, and then headed for her office.

There she copied all of her email to her home account and took down the few personal effects she’d used to ornament the walls—a picture of Clara at the annual auto show, a picture of Wilbur, one of the dogs she’d rescued, her certificates from the Academy. She shoved them in a manila envelope and tucked it under her arm. From her desk drawer she took her old phone and put the SIM card back in, then tucked the phone in her pocket. She had no doubt Fetlock would know what she’d done, but she didn’t care.

Leaving the office, she started toward the Coke machine. All this humiliation and public chastisement was making her thirsty, but she stopped before she could get there. Suzie Jesu-roga, the captain of the area response team, was standing in the hall in front of her. Captain Suzie, as Caxton knew her, was wearing a full suit of riot armor, including helmet, and carrying a patrol rifle, a big semiautomatic assault rifle.

“Hi,” Caxton said. She knew Captain Suzie relatively well, had worked with her on occasion. She had no idea what the other woman was doing there. “Something I can help you with?”

“Vice versa, it sounds like,” the Captain said. “Come on, this Fetlock guy said I should come and fetch you.”

“Jesus, what time is it?” Caxton asked. She looked down at her own watch—it was four-fifteen. She whirled around to look out the windows and saw the sun was just a smear of orange on the horizon. It was going to set in a matter of minutes.

Chapter 47.

They’d chosen a room with a west-facing window, so they could see the sun. It washed Fetlock’s face with a dull red glow and made his eyes gleam. He stood stock-still before a wide wooden desk where they’d laid Raleigh’s body, still wrapped and taped up in a sheet.

Behind Fetlock, their backs up against the wall, the members of Captain Suzie’s ART stood at attention, their patrol rifles at low ready. Caxton required no explanation. If Raleigh did rise when the sun went down, they would open fire instantly.

It was more than she’d hoped for. More than she’d expected. Maybe it would be enough. She stepped up to the doorway and ran one hand along the jamb. Fetlock heard her come and turned his head a fraction of an inch. He nodded at her, and she nodded back. No matter what had happened between them, or what was to happen to Caxton now, they were together on this one thing. Raleigh would not be allowed to come back.

The sun widened on the horizon and lost its shape. The snow on the ground outside glowed almost bloodred, and the clouds in the sky were streaked with purple and orange. It was 4:29, and sunset that day would take place at exactly 4:31.

Caxton kept track of such things. She had to know every day when the night began.

The room filled with fumes from the gasoline that soaked Raleigh’s sheet. The liquid rolled across the top of the desk and dripped to the floor. Caxton found she was holding her breath and she let it go, then breathed in the sharp tang of the gas.

The sun fluttered in the hills. Caxton drew her weapon, her old 92, and held it tight against her thigh.

Ready to shoot at the first sign. What would it be? she wondered. A twitch of the sheet, down near its middle where Raleigh’s hands must be? Would Raleigh open her mouth, surprised by her brand-new teeth, and would the sheet deform over her face in response? Maybe she would sit up slowly, deliberately. Or maybe she would scream to find herself trapped inside the stinking shroud.

Fetlock’s digital watch beeped once, and everyone in the room shifted or jumped a little. The beep meant only that it was 4:30 exactly: it was only signaling the half hour. One of the ART members laughed, a dry chuckle that didn’t go anywhere and didn’t catch on.

It had been all Caxton could do to not lift her weapon, to not start firing blindly into the sheet-covered corpse. She tried to force herself to relax, to at least ease her fierce grip on the gun. She tried to breathe calmly, deeply. Outside the sun was just a fragment of its former self. She could look right at it without pain. Breathe, she told herself again. Breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

Fetlock gestured with one hand. Caxton wasn’t sure what it meant. Had he seen something? Was he telling her to stand down? She started to take a step closer to the body, but just then Captain Suzie turned and moved toward her. Caxton studied the other woman’s face. It was calm. Emotionless. With a steady hand Captain Suzie reached across Caxton’s body—and switched on the room’s lights.

The sudden change in illumination sent shadows flickering across the sheet, and it almost looked as if it had moved. But no. It hadn’t shifted at all—even the pattern of wrinkles in the sheet was the same.

The sun was gone, leaving a greenish twilight blurred across the sky.

It was 4:31 in the afternoon.

The body hadn’t moved.

“There,” Fetlock said. “Are you—”

“Hold on,” Caxton said. She realized she’d never seen a vampire rise before and that meant she had no idea if they were active during the dusk. “There’s still some light left.” She had no idea what mechanism of timing pertained to vampires. Did they need total darkness to rise, or was it enough that the sun was below the horizon? In mountainous places the sun would set earlier than on the plains. Heavy cloud cover could alter the time of true dark—there were so many variables. “We’ve waited this long, another few minutes won’t hurt us.”

One of the ART members—the one who had laughed before, perhaps—sighed. She scowled and ignored him.

“This is important,” she insisted. “This is life or death.”

Fetlock shrugged, but he didn’t say anything more. Caxton moved closer to the corpse, her weapon low but ready. She brought her free hand up and stretched it toward the sheet, looking for the telltale cold feeling that radiated from a vampire’s body. That was enough to make Fetlock react—he came up behind her and pulled her gently away.

“I’ll talk to Simon Arkeley and see if he’ll allow a cremation anyway,” Fetlock said. “But really, Trooper—”

“One more minute, please. Just one more minute, okay?”

“It’s illegal, you know, to desecrate a corpse. I could have you arrested right now,” Fetlock told her.

“I’m tired of this. Tell me something, does this building have a meat locker or anything? Someplace to hold the body until we can send for a hearse?”

Captain Suzie stepped forward to answer. “Yes, sir. We have an actual morgue, believe it or not. It’s where we keep highway accident victims if the bodies are felt to be of an evidentiary nature.”

Fetlock rolled his eyes. “I suppose that’ll do very well, then. You—Officer—go down to the infirmary and have them send up a stretcher. We’ll move her to the morgue right away.”

“Hold on!” Caxton demanded. “Jesus Christ, am I the only one who knows that you don’t take chances with vampires? Fetlock, Jameson taught me never to underestimate them. Give it just a few more minutes. I’m begging you.”

“I’m sure Jameson taught you a lot of bad habits, too,” Fetlock told her.

She grunted in frustration. “He taught me how to fight monsters. He wouldn’t have let you have the body.

He would have burned it in the parking lot, and if you had come and told him to stop he would have just ignored you and kept going. You could have shot him in the back and it wouldn’t have stopped him. He didn’t care if people thought his behavior was erratic, he just cared about doing things right.”

“And look where that got him,” Fetlock said, smiling. “Your loyalty would be commendable, if you weren’t honoring a vampire. Let’s go, you two—one of you take the shoulders, the other the feet.”

“No!” Caxton shouted. “Not yet!”

“Trooper,” Fetlock said. “Look.” He pointed at the window. Even Caxton had to admit that true dark had fallen. The window was a pane of unbroken blackness. She could see the reflection of her own stark raving face in it. “Night is upon us. If she was going to rise, she would have already.”

Caxton let her head drop. Maybe, she began to think, he was right. Maybe she had crossed some kind of line, into a sort of madness. Had she let Jameson’s tricks and mind games distort her own faculties?

She turned to go, to leave the room. Still, even then, she half-expected Raleigh to sit up behind her and hiss with bloodlust. Before Caxton could take a step she heard Fetlock cough. He had a hand out, palm up. He’d already taken her badge. Now he wanted her gun.

“Don’t even think about it,” she protested.

“I don’t want you hurting anyone. I’m going to insist you go home and get some rest. In the meantime, I’ll hold on to your sidearm.”

She shook her head—made a good show of it. Eventually she pretended to relent, and handed her gun over. That was fine. That was exactly what she’d meant to happen. Her new gun, the one with the cop-killers in it, was in the car. Fetlock could take her off the case, but she knew she wasn’t finished with Jameson yet.

Outside of the room she headed for the parking lot and her car. Halfway there she heard her phone ring, the old phone with its Pat Benatar ringtone. She thought it might be Clara. Clara! How could she explain to Clara everything that had happened? When she pulled out the phone and checked the screen, though, she saw it was in fact Vesta Polder who was calling her.

“Vesta,” she said. “This is kind of a weird time. What’s up?”

“It’s about Jameson,” the older woman said. Her voice sounded weird, as if it were a bad line or as if she’d been crying. “He came for me.”

Chapter 48.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit, Caxton thought. She grabbed at her forehead and squeezed it with her free hand. When Jameson hadn’t attacked in Syracuse she’d thought he was lying low. That she’d created too much trouble for him—or that he was waiting for her to make some stupid move, to take Raleigh and Simon someplace undefended, someplace they could be gotten at easily. She hadn’t even considered he might be busy with some other agenda. “I don’t understand—he visited you, he offered you the curse?

That doesn’t make sense. You’re not part of his family.”

“Does your last name have to be Arkeley to be part of that brood?” Polder asked. “He’s coming for everyone he loves, Laura. Everyone he ever loved.”

Of course.

Vesta had told Caxton how she and Jameson had once had an affair. She must still mean something to him, no matter how far he’d fallen into darkness. “Listen,” Caxton said. “He’s not still there, at your house?”

“No, he’s gone. I suppose I should have made some attempt to fight him, or at least track him when he left, but I was too scared. I know you understand that.”

Caxton did.

“He gave me the same deadline he gave the others. Twenty-four hours to consider his offer. A refusal is as good as a death sentence. You have to find him before sundown tomorrow!”

“I will,” Caxton promised, though she had no idea how. “Listen, I’ll come to you. Stay where you are and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m on my way to you right now. In fact, I can already see your headquarters building. Come out to the parking lot to meet me.” Polder ended the call. Caxton bit her lip and wondered what she was going to do next. She no longer had any authority to put Vesta in protective custody. She could send Vesta to Fetlock, to ask for his help, but she wondered if the older woman would even want that. Vesta was a borderline agoraphobic, rarely leaving her own house for more than a few hours and never at night—except of course for when she’d completed her final duty to Astarte. For Vesta to drive to Harrisburg after sunset she must truly be panicked.

I’ll do what I can for her, Caxton thought. I owe her. For advice, over the years, and for the spiral pendant she still wore around her neck, which was her only protection against vampiric powers. She headed out the front door of the headquarters building, out into the parking lot, and saw a pair of headlights coming toward her. The lights of an old truck, the kind of ancient pickup you saw on farms still in central Pennsylvania. A body of pure rust held together by duct tape and sheer desperation. She didn’t remember the Polders having such a vehicle—maybe Vesta had been forced to go to her neighbors and plead to borrow some transportation, anything. Caxton waved the truck toward a parking space near the door, but Vesta just pulled up short halfway into the lot, partially blocking the exit, and switched off her lights.

Well, Caxton thought, so she’s not a very good driver. In fact, she wondered if Polder even had a license. She waved again, and saw Vesta push open the truck’s creaking door and slide down onto the snowy pavement. She was dressed as she always had been, in her long, austere black dress. For some reason she’d pulled her hair back in a severe bun and wore the black veil she’d worn on the day of Jameson’s funeral.

Vesta called to her from ten yards away in a voice high and near breaking with grief and fear. “I am sorry, Laura, to have to come to you this way. I had no choice.”

“That’s alright, I’m just glad you’re safe,” Caxton replied. “Come inside, get out of the cold. I want to hear everything. Tell me what happened with Jameson.”

“He’s changed,” Vesta said, walking slowly toward Caxton. “Evil is consuming him. Once he seemed to think that the death of a loved one was a mercy.”

More cars were coming up the drive into the parking lot—several of them. They were running with no lights at all, coming fast, and she could see they were full of people. As one of them bounced up over the curb and slewed into the parking lot, Caxton just had time to wonder what was going on before Vesta spoke again.

“Now,” the older woman said, “he sees in it an opportunity.” Then she lifted her veil. Beneath it the skin of her face was torn and pink, hanging away from her features in grisly strips. She reached up into one sleeve of her dress and pulled out a long knife, honed and resharpened so many times that the blade was thin and crooked.

“Forgive me!” Vesta screamed, even as behind her the doors of the new cars flew open and more half-deads spilled out on the pavement. There were dozens of them—Caxton didn’t have time to get an accurate count. She was too busy dodging the knife that came whistling for her throat.

Vesta was a tall woman with a long reach. Caxton had to roll away from the swing, going down on one knee and throwing her head back. It was a lousy position from which to counterattack, and she didn’t get the chance. Her brain, running purely on reflex, sent a signal down her arm, a signal it had sent a thousand times before. Always before the signal had instructed her hand to slap a certain place on her hip and close its fingers around the grip of her pistol.

The pistol wasn’t there. Caxton knew that consciously, but her conscious mind was still trying to work out what was happening. Her hand closed pointlessly around the place where the gun should have been, and she wasted another fraction of a second.

“Protect my daughter and my man! Please!” Vesta screamed, and the knife thrust deep into the fabric of Caxton’s winter coat. The edge hissed along Caxton’s skin and she felt hot wet blood roll down her arm.

Behind Vesta the other half-deads were streaming up toward the building. They were all armed, with knives and sickles. What had Jameson done? It looked like he’d slaughtered half the population of the state and drafted them to his service.

Caxton had to get away. She had a few weapons on her belt, but none of them would let her get control of this mob. Maybe, though, they could give her a chance to get back on her feet. Vesta raised her knife high, flipped it in her hand and brought it down blade first, clearly intending to skewer Caxton with it.

Caxton twisted away from the blow—then came up fast, her arm swinging around, her canister of pepper spray clutched in her fist.

She pushed down on the button on top of the can and foaming spray splashed across Vesta’s eyes.

Vesta threw up her knife arm across her ravaged face, exactly as Caxton had known she would—it was the inevitable reaction to being sprayed. They taught you that at the academy. It seemed even death couldn’t break that primitive instinct.

Caxton didn’t waste time following through on her attack. She dropped the can of spray and shoved both of her hands down onto the cold concrete, shoved herself bodily upward until she was half upright, half bent over. It got her feet underneath her enough that she could run. She did not look back as she dashed through the doors of the HQ building, screaming for help.

Simon, she thought. Vesta had come for Simon—the last remaining member of the Arkeley family, the last one alive. The last one Jameson could hope to recruit. She had to find Simon, she had to get him out of the building, get him to safety.

“Somebody,” she shouted, “anybody—lock those doors!”

But it was too late. The half-deads were already inside.

Chapter 49.

Caxton raced down the hallway, looking for help. She couldn’t find any. The wardroom was empty—she took one look inside and hurried past. Where had everybody gone? For a bad, breathless moment she thought maybe all the troopers who normally hung around the HQ were dead—or worse, that she had been betrayed somehow, and they had left her to her fate once Fetlock had dismissed her in their presence.

But no. That was just paranoia. When she considered things for a second she realized exactly what had happened. It was just after five o’clock, which meant it was rush hour. The vast majority of the troopers were out on duty, mostly on patrol around the capital. They had all left shortly after the sun set and Raleigh failed to rise. Those troopers who remained in the building were tasked with administrative roles, and they would not be armed. Vesta couldn’t have planned her attack for a better time—Jameson had ordered her to attack just when he knew the HQ would be at its most vulnerable.

That meant Vesta would know everything Jameson knew about the building and its layout. She wouldn’t waste time searching for Simon. She would know exactly where he would be, and the quickest route to reach him. Caxton knew it too, if she gave herself a second to think about it.

She hurried around a corner and put her back up against a wall. She could hear the half-deads coming down the corridor toward her, moving fast. Caxton reached down to her belt and undid the clasp that held in her ASP baton. It was the only weapon she had on her, an eight-inch length of steel painted black. She pressed down on a catch at its base and flicked it out with her wrist and three telescoping segments slid out, extending the baton to its full length. The tip, the thinnest of the segments, was solid steel, and wielded correctly it could deal an agonizing blow to anyone it struck. Unlike the riot-control batons most troopers carried, Caxton’s baton was capable of breaking bones—if she hit the right spot, and with enough force.

The half-deads were just down the hall, nearly on top of her. She could hear them giggling to themselves, anticipating the slaughter to come. Caxton made herself wait until the last possible second, then whirled out around the corner, swinging the baton two-handed like a baseball bat.

The half-dead in the lead, a sexless creature with a torn face wearing a black overcoat, just had time to look surprised before the baton crunched through its rotten cheek. It dropped the meat cleaver it was carrying and spun around, its hands jumping up to its face as it gurgled in pain.

Caxton didn’t have time to feel sympathy. She brought the baton around in a circle, her body swerving through the air to give it leverage, and split the back of the half-dead’s skull. It dropped in a heap.

Behind it stood more of them, plenty more. At the back of the group she could see Vesta Polder, watching her carefully.

Caxton ran. She turned on her heel and dashed down the corridor, her knees jumping high as she sprinted for dear life. She thought Simon would be in the off-duty break room, a lounge on the far side of the building with a television set and vending machines. Glauer would have taken him there to wait while Caxton stood vigil over Raleigh’s body. It was a safe place, a place where Simon couldn’t get into any trouble. Behind her she heard running footsteps and a skritching sound like a knife being dragged through the wallpaper, and she knew the half-deads were following her. She was leading them right to Simon, but she didn’t have a choice.

Up ahead the hallway widened where it was crossed by a side corridor. There was a receptionist’s desk up there—this was where the bureau chiefs had their offices—and a couch and some chairs. The receptionist was standing behind his desk next to some potted plants. He had a watering can in his hand, but he was staring in horror at the half-deads coming down the hall.

“Get out of here,” Caxton shouted at him. He reached up to straighten his tie and she realized he must be in shock. He could never have expected this, that the HQ would be invaded by a horde of freaks with no faces. But if he didn’t move he was going to get killed. Caxton rushed up and nearly collided with him, grabbed his arm hard and twisted. “Run away!” she screamed in his ear. Finally he got the point and bolted, the watering can still in his hands.

If the receptionist had never considered this possibility, whoever designed the building, thankfully, had.

There was a panic button mounted under the edge of the reception desk, connected to an alarm in the duty room, where troopers waiting assignment would be preparing for their night’s work. Caxton stabbed the button, barely breaking her stride. She heard the alarm ringing off to one side, but couldn’t afford to give it any of her attention.

Ahead of her the hall was lined with glass doors. This was where the bulk of the HQ’s staff worked.

Some of them were troopers, but most were civilians hired to do clerical work, IT management, and as PCOs—police communications officers, the dispatchers who sent patrol cruisers where they needed to go. Most of them would still be working, and none of them would be armed. If they poked their heads out to see what the commotion was, they would all get killed, end of story.

Caxton considered knocking on all the doors, warning the workers of the danger, but she knew that even a second’s delay now could mean certain death—or worse—for Simon. With what breath she could spare she shouted for the workers to lock themselves in their offices, and she didn’t stop moving.

Past the offices she finally could see the door of the break room straight ahead. It was open and through it she could see Simon. He was curled up on a couch, maybe taking a nap or just lost in his own thoughts. She hurtled through the door at full speed. Once inside she slammed the door shut, then locked it.

“Jesus, what now?” Simon asked, stirring from his fetal position on the couch.

Caxton kicked the couch hard and he jumped up to his feet. He stared at her with wild eyes, but she just shook her head, breathing too hard to talk. She grabbed one end of the couch and nodded for him to take the other end, and together they pushed it up against the door.

It was only after she’d sealed herself inside that Caxton thought to look around for other exits. There were none. A row of windows lined the far side of the room, but they were not made to open, and Caxton knew they, like all of the HQ’s ground-floor windows, were built of bullet-resistant glass half an inch thick. She couldn’t just throw a chair through one of them and escape that way.

Jameson had taught her never to barricade herself in a room with no other exit. She’d forgotten that lesson in her panic. She cursed herself as she heard knives and sickles thudding against the wooden door, gouging away at it.

“Your father,” Caxton gasped, watching the door jump and shake, “wants you something fierce.”

“But you’re not going to let him take me, are you?” Simon demanded.

Caxton shook her head and just breathed for a second. “Kid, I can’t promise you anything. But I’ll do my best to protect you.”

Outside, in the hallway, she heard someone screaming. Not the high-pitched squeal of a half-dead, either.

The scream cut off abruptly with the sound of gunshots and Caxton flinched. Troopers—good people, all—were fighting out there, maybe some of them were dying, and she couldn’t help them. She didn’t even have a sidearm, just a glorified nightstick.

The half-deads outside slammed against the door with their weapons, their shoulders, the whole weight of their bodies. She could hear them out there urging each other on. She thought she could hear Vesta shouting orders. The door wasn’t going to last forever. “There are troopers out there, but I think they’re outnumbered. I don’t think we can just assume they’ll come rescue us.”

“We have to get out,” Simon said. His eyes were wide when he stared at her. “We have to get out of here. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me!” There were more gunshots, and he yelped as if he’d been hit himself.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. I’m going to die, I’m going to die! I’m going to—”

Caxton slapped him hard across his face. She was a strong woman and she knocked him down, sent him sprawling across a ratty old armchair. He grabbed at his cheek and looked up at her, suddenly much calmer. “Thanks,” he said.

“You were getting really annoying,” Caxton said.

The hammering and gouging at the door stopped suddenly and Caxton heard a half-dead outside whisper, “Get back, she’s coming.” Maybe Vesta Polder knew some kind of door-opening spell, she thought, though in her experience Vesta’s talents had never before lent themselves to such mundane uses.

Caxton moved away from the door in any case, her ASP baton up and ready.

She glanced at Simon, who was quick to get behind her. The boy started to say something, but then the door twisted in its frame with a horrible groaning sound as its hinges were strained and finally snapped.

The door disappeared, and the couch they’d shoved in front of it went flying into the room and slammed into a vending machine hard enough to make its lighted front crack and go dim.

A moment later a vampire walked into the room.

Chapter 50.

Caxton swung her baton, but before it could connect it was wrenched painfully from her hand and thrown across the room. She could feel a blow coming—she could feel the cold, unnatural aura of the vampire moving toward her at high speed, and she tried to roll away from it, but her spine twisted in such a way to make her scream and suddenly she was on her back on the linoleum tiles, looking up at the fluorescent light fixtures.

The vampire had one slender foot on her throat. The pressure on her trachea made it impossible to cry out, but she could still breathe a little, a shallow whistling breath that left her with stars in her vision. She tried to look up at the vampire, tried to see who it could be. Not Urie Polder, she thought, please.

Losing Vesta had been bad enough. Caxton didn’t have enough friends that she could afford to lose one more.

The vampire holding her down, however, was female. Thin, smaller than the usual blood-sucker, with refined features that would have been beautiful if not for the jagged teeth deforming her lips. Caxton looked lower and saw she was dressed in some kind of sack or a loose-fitting sheath dress made of white cotton and duct tape, stained down the front with a streak of clotted blood.

It wasn’t a dress at all, she realized. It was the remains of a shroud.

“Raleigh?” Simon asked, cowering near where Caxton lay.

“Hello, Simon,” the vampire growled. “Long time no see.” Then she reached over and punched her brother in the side of the head. His eyes rolled up and he fell over, twitching and drooling a little.

“I didn’t kill him,” Raleigh said, looking down with red eyes into Caxton’s face. “I’m not evil. I just gave him a little concussion. I’m supposed to bring him to Daddy. He’ll be given the same choice we all were, and hopefully he’ll take the smart option. He’ll be easier to transport this way.”

Caxton tried to creak out some words, though she wasn’t sure what she meant to say.

“Sorry,” Raleigh said, and lifted her foot away from Caxton’s neck.

“You’ve fed,” Caxton gurgled. She nodded at the blood down the front of Raleigh’s makeshift dress.

“Yes,” Raleigh agreed. “One of your colleagues got in my way. I was hungry. It wasn’t something I planned.”

“Do you regret it?” Caxton asked.

“Not much.”

“That’s what makes you evil,” Caxton told her.

The vampire’s eyes narrowed.

“I waited for you to come back to life. I waited until the sun was completely down. Were you faking it?”

“Uh-huh,” Raleigh said, with a smile. “Daddy and I have been talking about it for days. He could speak into my mind, when I was living, but it was like someone whispering in another room. Now he’s with me all the time.” The smile broadened. “It’s nice.”

“How long did you have this planned out? Faking your death—I mean, faking your continued death? The attack on this building?”

“Daddy came to me a couple weeks ago. Even before I met you. Everything since then has been an act.

Lying there under that sheet was tough. It was so hard not moving, not even stretching, but I did it.

Daddy knew you would never let me out of your sight—this was the only way.”

“You accepted the curse that long ago? Then you lied to me, when I reached out to you for help. You told me you hadn’t spoken with your father in six months. That’s evil, too.”

The girl’s face fell. It was a dangerous game, but Caxton had to try to reason with her. “Listen, it’s not too late. After a certain time every vampire is the same, they lose their respect for human life and they become sociopaths. But I know you’re not one of them yet. There’s still plenty of humanity in you. Turn yourself in. Or if not that, at least help me destroy your father.”

The vampire had been standing up. Instantly she dropped to the floor, propping herself up on her arms until her face was hovering over Caxton’s. Close enough that Caxton’s whole body shivered with the creeping horror of almost being touched.

“At the convent, they used to ask me why I ever tried heroin in the first place. Why would I try something so addictive and dangerous, when I knew the risks? I told them, the world hurts, but drugs feel good. It’s a no-brainer. The only downside was that every time I shot up I got weaker. Now I’ve got blood. Blood feels good. And it makes me stronger. I think I’ll stick with the plan.”

She jumped back up to her feet, then reached down and picked Simon up easily in her arms.

“When you begged him not to kill me—was that an act?”

The vampire looked up at the ceiling. “No,” she sighed. “No. You’d been nice to me. Nicer than most people in my life. You wanted to protect me. You thought I was worth saving. Just like Daddy.”

“I still think so. I can’t give you your life back, but I can preserve what’s left of your soul,” Caxton pleaded.

“Don’t you remember?” Raleigh asked. “Vesta Polder looked for that once, and she couldn’t find it. It’s already gone.”

She picked up Caxton effortlessly and threw her down on the couch. “Don’t try to follow me. I have instructions not to kill you. Daddy wants you to live for now. But if you come after me, I can hurt you. A lot.”

She swept out into the hall then, Simon tucked under her arm like a bag full of dirty laundry.

Caxton lay where she was for a second. Just a second to catch her breath. And to let Raleigh get enough of a head start. Then she jumped to her feet and raced down the hallway. It was her belief that Raleigh was taking Simon straight to their father—straight back to the lair.

She pushed through the front doors and hurried toward the Mazda, only stopping when she heard the doors burst open again behind her. She whirled around, ready to kill the first evil bastard she saw. Vesta Polder was there, shrieking wildly, her veil hanging by one pin like a broken wing on the side of her head.

She must have been pushed through the doors, because she was rolling on the ground, one arm underneath her, the other up as if fending off a blow. Fetlock came after her, Caxton’s old Beretta 92 in his hand. There was a cut on his face and his hair was in disarray. He was breathing hard and sweating profusely. He looked up at Caxton, his mouth open to try to catch his breath. Then he pointed the Beretta at Vesta’s skinless left temple and blew her brains all over the asphalt.

For a second Caxton held his gaze. Then she slipped into the driver’s seat of her car and started up the ignition. All the car tracks leading out of the parking lot headed in the same direction—east, toward the highway. That was the way Raleigh and the half-deads had gone.

Simon had twenty-four hours to live. When the deadline came, if Jameson offered him the curse, knowing what the alternative was—Caxton did not believe the son would say no.

Caxton threw the car into gear, intending to chase after Raleigh and the half-deads whether they liked it or not. The car surged under her—then died. The engine stalled out and she felt every muscle in her body tense up. She switched the car off, then back on. Put it in drive. The car shuddered and lurched forward, then stopped as the engine sputtered to a halt.

It took her too long to figure it out. It took her ten long minutes to get the hood open and see that the half-deads had monkeyed with her engine, and even longer to fix what they’d done. By the time she got back on the road heading east they were long gone, and there were no tracks to follow.

She didn’t waste any more time by getting frustrated. Instead she pulled a U-turn and headed west.

There was one more lead she could follow, she knew. One last chance to find out where the lair was.

She knew she would take that chance—even if it meant throwing away her entire career.

Chapter 51.

She had to drive through the downtown section of Harrisburg to get where she was going. She passed through streets full of little stores, boutiques selling pricey clothes. In one window she saw a pair of young women laughing together as they dressed a mannequin in a bright red minidress with white fur trimming.

At another store the proprietor was stringing up red and green lights. They were getting ready for Christmas.

Christmas. Caxton hadn’t celebrated the holiday much since her parents died. But the year before, when it had just been her and Clara, they’d exchanged presents, and drank eggnog, and even strung up mistletoe. She’d gotten Clara a special lens for her camera, one she’d been looking at online for months.

Clara’s present to her had been a box of bath salts, scented candles, and a wooden massage roller.

Things to help her relax. Most of them were still in the box, which sat underneath the bathroom sink in the back of the cabinet, where she saw it every time she reached for a new disposable razor.

She could use that box now, she thought. She needed to relax, to get frosty, if she was going to pull this off.

She pulled into the parking lot of the jail in Mechanicsburg and switched off the car. She wanted to just sit there for a while and collect her thoughts, but she knew if she did she would never get up and out of the car, so she reached over and pushed the door open and let the cold winter air belly inside, the icy breeze pressing her coat against her body and stinging her cheek. She popped open her seat belt and then climbed out of the car and shut the door behind her.

Inside the jail only a few corrections officers were still at work. The cells were quiet, the prisoners inside either sleeping or contemplating their fates. As one corrections officer—one, thankfully, she had not met before—led her down a flight of stairs to the basement, she started to hear someone yelling, not saying anything, just making inarticulate noises. She was not surprised to learn it was Dylan Carboy making that racket.

“He’s not quite all there, you know that, right?” the CO asked. “He does this all night. It’s weird. It’s like he’s praying, but not to any God I ever heard of. You’ll have to keep an eye on him.”

Caxton nodded. She handed the CO a clipboard on which she’d filled out the appropriate forms. She had lied many times while checking the various boxes and writing in the numbers and authorizations required. She had put down Fetlock’s name as authorizing the transfer, then put her own phone number below it. If anyone called to confirm her authority her phone would ring and she would at least know they were onto her.

She doubted they would, however. Transfers like this happened all the time and cops tended to trust each other. She was counting on that.

“You’re with the Marshals Service,” the CO said, leafing through her paperwork. “This guy commit some kind of federal crime? We have him down for a couple local homicides.”

“He broke into the USMS archives and stole some files,” she lied. “I’m taking him to the field office up in Harrisburg, where we can ask him what was in those documents that he wanted.”

“Huh. Do you guys do a lot of interrogations at night?”

“When the subject sleeps all day, we do. We figure he’ll be more talkative now than tomorrow morning.”

The CO smiled. “You know about him, then.”

“I’m the one who originally brought him in. Listen, I’ll make it as quick as I can. I’ll probably have him back to you before breakfast.”

“You can have him as long as you want,” the CO said.

The door of the padded cell opened up and she stared inside. The gibbering and wailing stopped instantly. Carboy was up against the far wall, his hands lifted high above his head, the fingers splayed as if he were reaching for something on the ceiling. There was nothing there. Caxton didn’t know what that was about. She told herself she didn’t care.

“Come on, Carboy,” the CO said. “Don’t make this difficult, alright? This lady’s from the U.S. Marshals and she wants to talk to you.”

Carboy’s eyes focused on her slowly. “Caxton,” he muttered. “I knew you’d come back.”

The CO said, “You want me to get a straitjacket? He can be violent.”

“I know what he’s capable of. Come on, Dylan. We’re going for a ride.”

Carboy shuffled out of the cell as quickly as he could. The CO bound his hands behind his back. His ankles were shackled together with a length of soft plastic. His feet were bare. The CO had some slippers for him to wear and a blanket to wrap around his shoulders to protect him from the cold. He let Caxton go first up the stairs, then Carboy, and finally he came up from behind with a Taser in his hand, just in case.

The prisoner didn’t attack Caxton, though, or even say anything as she led him out to the jail’s lobby.

She had to sign a couple more release forms, and then she was done—except that the CO reached out and tapped her shoulder.

“Your badge,” he said, nodding at her lapel.

She’d completely forgotten about the star. State troopers didn’t wear badges, and she’d never really gotten used to the star while she had it. She touched her lapel, then looked up at him with her heart thundering in her ears. She forced a smile. “It fell off in the car. It’s always doing that—you want me to go out and get it?”

He gave her an appraising stare, then glanced at Carboy.

“Nah,” he said. “Just get this guy out of here. At least we’ll have one night’s peace, right?”

Caxton thanked him and led her prisoner out into the cold. Carboy climbed into the Mazda without making a fuss and she climbed into the driver’s seat, then took her handcuffs out of her belt and locked him to the door handle on the passenger’s side. Doing that gave him a chance to bite her on the neck, but he didn’t act on it.

“You’re being cooperative,” Caxton said, surprised.

“Because I know my time is about to come. The time when I kill you.”

“Sure,” Caxton said.

“Maybe you think I can’t do it. Maybe you think you have me right where you want me. But that’s your mistake—thinking you’re smarter than us. I couldn’t get at you in that cell. I had no weapons, and you were far away. Now, though, you’ve taken away that disadvantage. Now we’re all alone. You may have me handcuffed, but in time I’ll get free. I’ll break out of this bondage and then you’ll see. You’ll see exactly how stupid you’ve been.”

Caxton shook her head wearily. “Shut up,” she said.

“You don’t want to hear this? That’s understandable. Who wants to know that they’re about to die? I want you to hear it, though. I want you to be afraid. Because then you’ll make more mistakes. Desperate people don’t think clearly. They rush through things and don’t consider all their options.”

Caxton switched on the radio, but he just shouted over the music.

“Once I kill you, he’ll have no choice. Jameson will have to respect me. He’ll see what I’ve done, what he could not do himself, and he’ll know I’m worthy. He’ll give me the curse, then, and I won’t wait.

Some people fight it, I know. Jameson fought it for a long time before he realized what he’d been given.

But I will welcome it. I’ll turn a gun on myself, or maybe I’ll slit my own throat with a knife, so I can take my place among them that much faster. So I can achieve my dest—”

She reached across with her right fist and smashed him across the face. It was hard to get leverage like that, but she hit him hard enough to split his lip open and grind his cheek painfully against his teeth. His head flew to the side and bounced off his window.

“That was for your sister,” she said.

But it wasn’t. It was for her, for Caxton herself. Because the longer he prattled on like that the more she realized that he was just a kid, just a human being. His voice was human, not the rough growl of a vampire. She could hear him breathing, and trying not to whimper, even after she hit him. At least he stopped talking.

She hoped when the time came she could get him started again.

She didn’t take him very far. Just to the edge of the town, where the last few houses and roadside bars petered out and the dead trees grew thick and shielded the snow-covered fields from view. She pulled off on a narrow road she knew that led for miles back to an abandoned industrial park. There were no homes down that road and it was the wrong season to catch teenagers there parking. When she switched off the car’s lights nothing but the stars and the night glare off the snow let them see each other’s face.

She slipped her new gun out of its holster, then flipped on the flashlight and laser attachments. His eyes squeezed closed and he pushed up against his door when she shone the light in his face.

“You know something I need to know,” she said. “You know where Jameson is. Before, when I asked you, there was a corrections officer present. He restrained me from using excessive force. He’s not here now.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Carboy told her.

So she hit him again. Pistol-whipped him, in fact, with the butt of her gun. She raised a two-inch gash in his cheek that turned purple even before she got the light back in his eyes.

Kidnapping, she thought to herself. Aggravated assault. Battery. Improper use of force by a police officer.

Torture.

She had tortured half-deads before. She’d pulled the fingers off one of them, one by one, until it told her what she needed to know. Half-deads were monsters. Their bodies were falling apart the moment they came back from the dead. Their brains were curdled, and they bore very little relationship to the human being they’d once been.

Dylan Carboy was a murderer. The worst kind, a parricide with depraved indifference—he’d killed his family just to make himself feel tough. He’d killed the two employees of the storage facility just to get her attention. He’d repeatedly threatened her own life.

He was still human.

“I don’t have time to beat it out of you,” she said. She leaned over him and uncuffed him from the door.

His hands were still bound behind his back with the plastic restraints he’d worn in his jail cell. She pushed open the passenger door and felt cold air rush in and cleanse her face. It felt good. “Get out,” she said.

He stared at her wide-eyed.

“Get out. Go no more than ten steps from the car. If you run, I’ll shoot you in the legs.”

He climbed out of the car carefully, unable to use his hands. He stood waiting for her, staring through the car window at her.

“Take off your slippers and throw them in the car,” she said.

He complied. He was standing in an inch of snow, and he shuffled quietly from foot to foot.

“Does that feel cold? It should. In a few minutes, though, you’ll stop feeling it. That’s bad,” she told him.

“That’s when frostbite sets in. You know about frostbite, right, Dylan? Your toes will turn black. The nerves and blood vessels in your toes will die one by one. Once that happens, if they want to save your life your toes will have to be cut off. Maybe they’ll take your feet, too, if gangrene sets in, and it usually does.” She pulled the passenger door shut and then rolled down the window so she could keep talking to him. “I’m going to drive away now, and leave you here. You can walk back.”

Carboy’s lips curled back. “When I receive the curse, I’ll track you down, Caxton. I’ll return this torment and visit a thousand more upon you—”

She interrupted him. “Do you know about Malvern’s eye? She’s only got one, of course. She lost the other before she became a vampire. Now no matter how much blood she drinks, no matter how long she spends rejuvenating in her coffin, she still only has one eye. Body parts don’t grow back.” She shrugged.

“Let’s say the impossible happens, and Jameson does give you the curse. You’ll be the vampire with no feet. You’ll spend the rest of your life unable to walk and unable to hunt for victims. And of course, vampires live forever.”

“You won’t, Caxton, and you’ll beg for death before—”

She started the car and rolled up the windows. It was freezing inside. She could only imagine how his feet must feel.

Don’t, she told herself. Don’t imagine it. Just don’t.

She heard him shouting curses outside the car, but the engine noise muffled his words. She put the car in reverse and started to back up. He came running after her, of course, so she touched the accelerator and craned her head around to see where she was going.

She’d backed up a hundred yards before he started knocking on her window with his knuckles. She backed up another hundred before she rolled down her window. “Yes?” she asked.

He was breathing very hard. His face was pale and the hairs inside his nostrils looked frozen together. “I don’t know. I don’t know where the lair is.”

She started to roll up her window again. He pounded on her window and she saw he was crying.

“I’m telling the truth,” he promised. “He never took me there. I begged him to, but he said it was like hell, and mortals couldn’t survive there. He said he would take me there when I received the curse.”

“Think hard,” she said. “You have to know something more. You must have seen or heard something.

Do your feet still hurt?”

He nodded piteously. “Please—”

“Think hard,” she said again.

“Flowers,” he mumbled. “Malvern—”

“Make sense,” she told him, “or I’m leaving.”

“I never met Malvern, except in my dreams. There I saw her, and sometimes, I guess I saw what she saw. I saw her sitting up in her coffin, one night. Jameson had taken her out to get some air. I don’t know what this means, but there were flowers blooming in front of her. Flowers in a field, like in summer, though all around there was snow. I remember her thinking, there are flowers on his grave.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have?”

“Please,” he begged. “Just—please. It’s all. It’s all I have.”

She reached down into the leg well on the passenger side and picked up the slippers, intending on throwing them out to him and driving away. But no, she couldn’t do that. She knew what he was capable of—she couldn’t just let him go free.

“Get in,” she said, and pushed his door open.

Chapter 52.

Caxton drove in silence for a while, staring straight ahead. She’d thought this was going to work, that she was going to find out the lair’s location from Carboy. Instead he’d given her a very pretty, very useless image.

She was no closer to the solution than she’d ever been.

It was Carboy who started talking. Apparently once she’d broken the seal of his bravado, there was no controlling what came out. He started telling her about his childhood, about the frustrations and hardships of being a lonely teenage sociopath. He spoke freely of his desire to shoot up his school, and worse, about the night he’d killed his family. She didn’t want to hear it, not any of it. She almost hit him again, just to shut him up—but once he started talking about Jameson, she pricked up her ears.

“I found him, exhausted and starved. He was in my backyard. I was taking the trash out and he was leaning against the wall of our garage. I was scared at first. I mean, I knew what he was, right away. I thought he would kill me. But he didn’t. This was way back, in October, when he’d just accepted the curse. He’d been fighting his thirst for blood, but he’d gone as far as he could. He was sleeping in the woods, he said, in a tin bathtub in an abandoned house he’d found. The roof had caved in and there were broken beer bottles on the floor. I couldn’t imagine someone so beautiful living like that. I brought him into the house after my parents were asleep. I knew what he needed, so I cut my arm and dripped blood into his mouth.”

Caxton gripped the steering wheel harder and tried not to scream in frustration. If it had been anyone else’s house Jameson had crawled to—if Carboy’s parents had checked his room and seen what he had sleeping in his closet—everything could have been avoided. All the searching. All the false leads and dead ends. All the death.

“He talked to me all night long. Just for companionship, I think. I told him how much I respected him. His strength of will—to be in a house full of people, to smell our blood, and still he didn’t hurt any of us. Even though we all deserved it.”

That was the Jameson Caxton remembered. She felt her gorge rising. She knew what must have come next.

“You could have called me,” Caxton snapped. “You could have stopped this.”

“But—I didn’t want to. He was—he was my friend. He understood me, understood my, my anger.

Nobody else ever did. Nobody tried. They wanted me to go into therapy. As if I was the sick one. Not society, not everybody else, who only ever thought about money and, and sex, and being popular.”

So of course the object of that anger had become the one person who could take away his friend.

Caxton. He had begun filling his notebooks then with her name, and his vows to destroy her.

Carboy had more to tell. “With my blood in him he recovered fast. After just one night he was standing again, he was strong again. The second night, he went out. He went out to hunt. When he came back he told me he hadn’t killed anyone. I think he just followed some people around and thought about it.

Thought about what he’d become, and what that made us. It made us his food.

“He told me about you. About how you were hunting for him. He said he couldn’t stay there, in my house. So we found him a new place.”

“A disused grain elevator,” she prompted.

“Yes! It was perfect. He brought Malvern’s coffin there. He said he would lock himself in with her. That maybe he would bury them both alive. He wanted to rot away down there, until he couldn’t dig his way out again. He didn’t want to die, but he was willing to spend the rest of time buried under the ground, unable to move or see or feel anything. But the blood—he wanted one last taste of blood. By then he’d started to change. To get more—aggressive. We talked about his taking my blood, but he knew that if I opened my veins again he wouldn’t be able to stop. He would kill me. So I suggested another way.”

“You robbed a blood bank.”

Carboy was weeping noisily. “It didn’t work. The blood was cold. It didn’t work. It only made him hungrier. If I hadn’t—if I hadn’t told Cady about him—”

“Cady Rourke,” Caxton said. “Your girlfriend.”

The boy’s voice broke as he continued. “She wanted to see him. She—she wasn’t my girlfriend, by the way. We were just friends, and yeah, sometimes we fooled around. But we saw other people, too. At least, Cady did. I couldn’t handle that. It used to tear me up, but I could never get up the courage to break it off with her. I was so afraid of being alone. When I brought Cady to see Jameson he got angry, I mean, really angry. He said I was putting him at risk. That he couldn’t trust Cady. He—he—”

“He killed her. Drank her blood.”

“I don’t think he meant to, he just didn’t see any other way,” Carboy said. His words came fast and thick, soggy with tears. “Then he left me, and I never saw him again. Just in my dreams. It was Malvern who sent me those, I think. She could tell what I was feeling. She saw my weakness. I felt her contempt for me—I thought, if I could just—just be strong, as strong as Jameson—I wouldn’t have to feel like that anymore.”

And so he had crept into his sister’s room, and put his hands around her throat, and squeezed. When that hadn’t been enough, when the feelings didn’t just go away, he had grabbed his shotgun and killed his parents as well.

It hadn’t been a long walk from there to dressing like a vampire. To make himself feel like a vampire. To make himself feel strong. The better his costume got, the closer he got to feeling like the real thing. Like a predator. Then suddenly he was in a storage facility with two dead bodies and the cops on the way.

Now he was talking to her. Looking at her. Looking at her like she was the strong one. The one he wanted to be like. The one he thought could understand him.

In a very unsettling way, she did.

Caxton dropped him off at the closest police station, just a few miles away. She didn’t go in herself, just watched him as he ran up the icy steps, his feet red and yellow with the cold. She saw faces in the windows watching her and knew someone would write down her license plate number, but it didn’t matter much. Once Carboy’s identity was established and he told his story, Fetlock and as many cops as he could round up would come howling for her blood.

She already knew she was tight for time. It had been three hours since Raleigh walked out of the Harrisburg HQ with Simon under her arm. Twenty-one to go. If she kept moving she could evade Fetlock at least that long. Of course, when you were on the run, it helped to know where you were going.

She picked up her phone, then realized she didn’t know whom to call. In the olden days Jameson could have advised her on her next step. If not him, then Vesta Polder, who was gone now, too. She could have called Glauer, but she knew he worked for Fetlock now. Glauer was a nice guy, but he knew enough to cover his ass. If he helped Caxton now, he would be putting his own job in danger.

In the end she called Clara, because Clara would at least be on her side.

“Honey, it’s me,” she sighed when Clara picked up her phone. “I’m in pretty bad shape and I need somebody to talk me through this—”

“Laura, I can’t talk right now,” Clara said in response.

Caxton felt as if she’d been slapped across the face.

“I’ve been called in to work,” Clara said. “Fetlock called me into the HQ. It’s a slaughterhouse in here.”

“He took my badge,” Caxton blurted.

“Laura, listen to me. Very carefully.”

Tears swirled in Caxton’s vision. She pulled over on the side of the road because she couldn’t see well enough to drive. “I need to talk to you. For real.”

“I can’t right now. Fetlock’s coming down here any second and if he hears me talking to you we’re both in serious trouble. But first you need to know something. We’ve already started going over Vesta Polder’s body. Fetlock has me supervising his forensics team and taking pictures. They trust me now.

Treat me like one of them. They didn’t find much yet, except some black powder on her clothes. I’m pretty sure it’s coal dust.”

“Okay,” Caxton said, clutching at her forehead. “I don’t know why that’s—”

“Coal dust. Vesta didn’t live anywhere near a coal mine. I suggested we go back and look at some of the old fibers. The Twaron and nylon from the motel, and the clothes he left at the convent. There were traces of coal dust on all of them. We think Jameson had coal dust on his hands when he killed Vesta Polder.”

Caxton tried to speak, but her throat was too thick with emotion. She choked down her tears, then said,

“I’m going to make things right between us. Right now I have to—you know what I have to do. But when I get back,” she said, thinking, if I come back, “I will make everything right. I love you.”

“I have to go now,” Clara said. “I’ll give you a call when I can talk.” She paused for a moment, then said,

“Same here,” and hung up.

Caxton put her phone down, then laid her forehead gently against the steering wheel. Her body convulsed with sobs that she fought back, sobs of grief for what she’d thrown away and the people she’d lost. Sobs of fear, too. True fear. Fear of what was still to come.

Because as soon as Clara told her about the coal dust, she’d already put two and two together.

She knew where the lair was.

Chapter 53.

A coal mine. That made sense. Vampires liked their lairs dark and quiet, and far away from human interference. A coal mine, an abandoned coal mine, would make the perfect spot. There were thousands of coal mines in Pennsylvania, however, and hundreds of them were abandoned. Caxton could never have checked them all even if she’d had unlimited time.

When she added what Carboy had told her, however, she could only think of one abandoned coal mine where flowers grew in the middle of winter.

She wanted to go right there, but it wouldn’t be that easy. She needed special equipment. Jameson had said humans couldn’t survive inside his lair, and he hadn’t been kidding. Getting that equipment was going to be a problem. What she needed was in ready supply at the HQ building, but she wouldn’t be welcome there—and Fetlock would watch her every move if she showed up, even if he didn’t already know what she’d done with Carboy. She thought about approaching a firehouse and trying to bluff her way into getting what she needed, but she knew there would be too many questions, and probably too many phone calls made.

In the end she was reduced to going shopping. There was a place in Harrisburg she knew, an army surplus store that stayed open late. She arrived just as they were closing, but she flashed her state police ID and the night manager nodded and let her in, locking the door behind her.

She stared at the racks of camouflage clothing, let her gaze run across glass display cases full of butterfly knives and night-vision goggles. She could use a pair of the latter, but she knew she couldn’t afford them.

She was willing to go into debt—she’d lost so much already her credit rating didn’t feel terribly important—but there was a pretty tight limit on her Visa card.

The manager was a young guy in a plaid shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He sighed with impatience and asked her what he could help her with.

Caxton cleared her mind by rubbing at her face with both hands. Was she really going to do this? The lair was underground, probably full of carbon monoxide gas, and the temperatures down there could reach a thousand degrees. Nothing in the store could keep her alive through that.

If she could just get close, though—close enough—

“I need a Nomex flash-resistant suit,” she said. “Gloves, booties, the whole package. I need a face mask, too, and a hard hat. And a portable air supply, the longest-lasting one you’ve got.”

The manager stared at her openmouthed. “You fighting a brush fire, ma’am?” he asked.

“Worse. I’m going into a coal mine fire.”

“Like the one in Centralia?”

Caxton gave him a weak smile. “Exactly like the one in Centralia. You have what I need?”

He shrugged and walked down an aisle, calling over his shoulder, “Is this going to be cash or credit?”

Fifteen minutes later she was back in the car, headed northeast. Toward the closest thing to hell you could find in Pennsylvania.

Centralia. Every kid in the Commonwealth knew about Centralia, about the fire under the town that had been burning since the sixties and still had enough fuel to continue to burn long after they, and their grandchildren, were dead. It was a place where the ground opened up and swallowed people and houses whole. It was a place where the earth was so hot underneath that flowers bloomed on the surface, even in the middle of winter.

Caxton drove through the night, staying off the highways. Taking the back roads took longer but lowered the probability that she would be spotted by a highway patrol cruiser and pulled over. She had little doubt that by now her license plate number had been memorized by every state trooper on the road.

Just as Jameson had learned all the tricks of being a vampire long before he even considered becoming one himself, Caxton knew how to move around the state without being spotted. She had, after all, spent years in the highway patrol. She knew the location of every radar trap and sobriety checkpoint in Pennsylvania, and she knew what roads were never watched. She drove carefully, as tired as she was, taking pains not to weave across lanes, to drive at just the right speed. If you drove too slow, you drew attention to yourself. If you kept exactly to the speed limit, you drew attention. She stayed just over the limit, but no more than five miles an hour over, in case she wandered past a local cop looking to make his quota of speeding tickets for the month. She signaled every turn and every lane change well in advance.

Centralia. Once it had been a thriving town. Caxton herself had grown up in a series of mining patches, little company towns too small to have their own police. Her father had been the only law some of those places had ever seen. Centralia had a population in the thousands once, but by the time Caxton was born it was a ghost town, too small to even be called a patch. The fire had started as an accident. The local mining company had taken to burning its garbage in a played-out pit mine just southeast of the town. It must have seemed more economical than hauling the trash to a landfill. It turned out the pit hadn’t been as empty as they thought. There must have been some coal still down there, because in 1962, it ignited, and started a fire that couldn’t be stopped. Coal is a fossil fuel and it combusts well, even in low-oxygen conditions. The burning coal in the pit had in turn ignited a coal seam connected to the underground mines near the town. Once that seam caught, the fire just grew and grew. The mines had to be abandoned, but for twenty years nobody had considered it a serious problem. There were mine fires all over the world, and most of the time it was more cost-efficient to just let them burn themselves out. They’d figured Centralia would do just that in a couple of years.

They were wrong.

She pulled over to get her bearings. Centralia wasn’t on her road map. Nobody was supposed to go there anymore. She knew where it was, though, and when she put her finger on Route 61 she saw that it was less than two miles from Mount Carmel, Dylan Carboy’s hometown. Less than a mile from the location of the abandoned grain elevator lair. “Son of a bitch,” she murmured. Jameson had been right under her nose the whole time.

She knew she was getting close when she saw reefs of pale smoke winding between the trees on either side of the road. The coal company had drilled holes down into the inferno to release the buildup of smoke and toxic gases. It hadn’t been enough. In the eighties the surface of Route 61 had started to crack and buckle. A whole new highway had been constructed that went around the affected area. Then sinkholes started collapsing all around town. One had nearly swallowed up a small boy. About that time the government bought up as much of the town as it could and relocated all the citizens to nearby boroughs. A very few stubborn holdouts had stayed, and survived the best they could, even knowing the risks. As of the last census, the population of Centralia had sunk as low as twelve.

It was the most desolate, the most hazardous, the most environmentally toxic place in the entire state.

Temperatures underground could reach a thousand degrees in the heart of the fire. That heat seeped up through the soil and melted snow before it could even collect on the ground.

Caxton saw the wintertime flowers, even in the dark. Wild-flowers, tiny blossoms on thin stalks that fluttered in the night breezes. In the moonlight, surrounded by the dead trees, they were eerily beautiful.

She parked her car near where the center of town had been once. There were roads crisscrossing a grassy field, but the houses were all gone. Here and there she could see an overgrown foundation, the crumbled remains of a brick chimney, but that was all. A couple of small houses remained on the edge of where the town had been, but only one had any lights on.

She had arrived. She was armed. She was ready.

The government had tried a few schemes for putting out the fire, but none had been successful. The coal continued to burn. Caxton had heard there was enough coal down there to keep burning for another two hundred and fifty years.

One thing the government had done was to close off every entrance to the underground mine. They hadn’t just strung up fencing or boarded over the entrances, either—they’d been blasted shut, in the hopes of cutting off the fire’s oxygen supply. The pit mines nearby had all been filled in with sterile fill, crushed rock, and nonflammable soil. That was good, from one perspective. The lair was down in the mine, and the fewer exits the mine had, the harder it would be for Jameson to escape when she came for him.

It did present one dilemma for her, however—knowing exactly where the lair was didn’t help if she couldn’t find her way in.

She had an idea about how to fix that. She started walking toward the house with the burning lights, intent on seeing who was still awake.

Chapter 54.

The house was filled with birds. The birds would drive Caxton crazy, she thought, if she had to live here.

“You say you’re not with the government,” the old woman said, and brushed her thinning white hair back over a bald spot. She was wearing a shapeless polyester housecoat. A chipped enamel tea mug sat by her elbow, untouched.

Caxton had its twin—the only other one the woman owned—on a coffee table in front of her. On the floor by her feet she had the Nomex flash-resistant suit and her other equipment folded neatly into a special backpack. Not that she intended to use it that night, but she wanted to be prepared in case she had a chance to do some impromptu spelunking. “Not anymore. I know they’ve approached you about buying your land—”

“And I told them, no.” A sharp fluttering of wings nearly drowned out the softly spoken words. The old woman frowned and peered through heavy eyelids at Caxton, sizing her up. “One day that fire’s goin’

out. Then they’ll have to come to me if they want the coal down there. I own mineral rights on half this town, and I’m not giving that up without a fight.”

A canary chirped next to Caxton’s shoulder. The bright yellow birds were everywhere, dozens or maybe as many as a hundred crowded into wire cages lined with ancient, brittle newspaper. The cages hung from the ceiling of every room, or sat on end tables. Some were even tucked away on the floor, behind the furniture.

It was quite possible the old woman loved the birds, but they weren’t pets.

“You keep these,” Caxton said, “to test for carbon monoxide, right?” The gas was constantly rising from the mine fire in tendrils of pale smoke. It gathered in basements and lingered outside windows like insubstantial tentacles tapping for entry. Even in very mild concentrations, as little as five parts per million, it was toxic, and a sudden puff of vapor could suffocate the old woman in her sleep at any time. Canaries were famous for their sensitivity to carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases. If they started keeling over, the old woman would have a few seconds’ warning to pull a gas mask over her face and avoid breathing in her own death. Gas masks were almost as common in the house as canaries—there was one in every room, at least.

“I treat ’em well, feed ’em twice a day and keep ’em clean,” the old woman insisted. “You from the ASPCA?”

“Maybe I used the wrong term. Perhaps,” Caxton said, “I should have said they were to test for white damp.”

Miners referred to poisonous gas outbreaks as varieties of damp, probably from dampf, the German word for steam. There were fire damps, black damps, choke damps, and stink damps. The most common and the most deadly kind was white damp, but any of them could kill you before you smelled them.

The old woman sat up and scratched at her wrist. It was as if Caxton had spoken a code word the old woman had been waiting to hear. Still her eyes were suspicious. “You’re no miner, lady,” she said.

Caxton smiled. “No. But I grew up around coal mines. I was born in Iselin, and I went to school near Whiskey Run. I don’t want to run you off your ground, ma’am. All I want to know is whether there are any bootleg mines around here.”

“If you’re who you say you are you’ll know that bootleg mining’s a thing of the past.” The old woman shook her head. “There’s no man alive who could dig enough coal in a day with his own hands to make a living.”

Caxton had heard that before—and knew it was like an Italian-American claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia. “He might dig enough to warm his house in winter, and cut down on his heating bills.”

Caxton picked up her tea mug and rolled it back and forth in her hands. She was getting frustrated and she wondered if there was a quicker way to find the information she needed. She supposed she could pull her gun on this old woman—but no, that was beyond even her level of desperation. “Anyway, the one I’m looking for isn’t currently in use. At least, not by the living.”

The old woman leaned forward in her armchair. “I’m not sure I heard that right.”

Caxton sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m after a vampire. I know he’s holed up in the mine, but I don’t know how he gets in or out. I thought—”

The old woman held up her hands. “That’s what I thought you said.” She tapped at a cage on top of her television set, which set the birds inside fluttering and chirping. Picking it up by one handle, she walked toward her front door. “You’d better follow me.”

Caxton got up and pulled on her backpack, not wanting to leave it behind. They went out into the dark and cold night, the old woman not even bothering to put on a jacket. They didn’t have far to go. Caxton followed her down a road cracked and overgrown with weeds, then into the weathered foundation of an old house that had long since been torn down. A pile of old rags and plastic bags had gathered where a bit of the foundation stuck up in the air higher than the ground around it. It looked just like a heap of trash. The old woman put down her cage, though, and brushed the refuse away, revealing a wooden trapdoor.

“He came here about two months gone, your fella. We all saw him out our windows—he didn’t make a pretense of hiding. Why should he? We hid from him. Every time he comes in or out we hunker down.”

“And you never called the police,” Caxton said.

“If we did, we knew what would happen to us. There’s just a handful of us left in Centralia, and we can’t afford people coming ’round asking lots of questions. Not if we’re going to preserve the claim on what’s ours. Nobody wants the police crawling over this ground, looking for evidence and getting in our business. Your kind aren’t welcome here.”

Caxton sighed. “I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”

Someone was standing behind her.

Caxton whirled around, her weapon out of its holster and pointing before she even saw what she was aiming at. The laser sight made a bright spot on the chest of a massive young man in a red plaid hunter’s coat. He raised his hands slowly and looked from Caxton to the old woman and back.

“What’s going on, Maisie?” he asked. “I saw you come out your house just now and I saw where you were going.”

“That’s just my cousin Wally. Don’t you shoot him,” the old woman insisted.

“Why don’t you both just back up, okay?” Caxton said, in her cop voice.

“You don’t want to go down there,” Wally said. “There’s something down there you don’t want to see.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Caxton slowly rose to her feet and holstered her weapon. “Anyway, I don’t intend on going down there, not tonight. It’s barely eleven-thirty. I’m going to wait until dawn.” The only sane time to enter a vampire’s lair was when you had plenty of daylight to burn. “I know you think the vampire might hurt you if he sees me here. You’ve got to trust me, though. I’m going down there tomorrow and I’m going to kill him. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”

“That’s fine,” Wally said. “But what about her?”

Caxton spun around again, but she was far too slow. The trap had lifted at an angle and a white shadow was snaking out of it, reaching for her. Raleigh’s hands fastened around her ankles like a pair of vise grips and pulled her roughly down into the darkness before she could even start to scream.

She saw the old woman’s face recede above her as she was carried downward. “Like I said,” the old woman said, “you aren’t welcome here, lady.”

Chapter 55.

Caxton’s face collided hard with a wall of solid rock and bright flecks shot through her vision. Then everything went dark. She thought maybe she had a concussion or even that she was dead, but in fact the trapdoor had just closed over her, and she was faced with the most profound darkness she’d ever experienced: midnight in a coal mine.

A thin hand grasped one of her ankles. She was dragged across the stone floor, rough still with the marks of where some old miner had cut this chute with a shovel and a pickaxe and maybe a few sticks of stolen dynamite. The entrance to the lair was through a bootleg mine—a narrow passage cut by night down toward a coal seam the miner didn’t own. Maybe just one man, maybe an entire family, had worked for years chopping through the soil and rock looking for the black glint of coal. The ceiling, Caxton knew, would be held up only here and there by rotten timbers. The passage would be no wider than a man’s broad shoulders. She pushed out her arms and felt the uneven wall on either side. She tried to grab on, but Raleigh was much stronger than Caxton now, and Caxton couldn’t get enough grip on the rock to even slow the vampire down.

For a long time she was carried along like that, her face bouncing on the floor, the skin of her ankle crying out in pain where Raleigh held her. Then the forward progress stopped, and Caxton’s leg was dropped to the floor. Still she couldn’t see a thing, though she knew that Raleigh would be able to see her just fine—at least, she could see Caxton’s blood, her arteries and veins and capillaries lit up in the pitch darkness like an inward-curling maze of neon tubes.

Caxton fully expected to die in that darkness, unable to see when the vampire descended on her and tore out her throat. Maybe she would have a fraction of a second’s warning. Maybe she would feel the cold and sickly aura that emanated from Raleigh’s being before the bite came. Or maybe not.

Then there was a clicking sound, and lights sputtered to life all around Caxton, glaring down at her from a ceiling high above. Caxton rolled onto her back, the backpack squishing uncomfortably beneath her, and tried to sit up. A white hand pressed down on her throat and she lay back down—she had no choice.

Raleigh easily overpowered her, and there was no point in fighting.

Caxton still had her pistol in its holster at her belt. She darted her hand downward and tried to grab at it, but Raleigh was ready for that, too. She got to the gun first and drew it neatly, then twirled it on her finger.

The vampire was still dressed in the remains of her winding sheet, with duct tape bunching it around her hips and throat. Over top of that she had put on a ballistic vest. A type IIIA, of course, with a steel trauma plate over her heart. “This,” she said, lifting the gun in her hand, “is useless. How many times did you shoot Daddy with it? And he barely felt it.”

Raleigh threw the weapon into a corner of the room. Caxton watched it, trying to see where it landed. In the process she finally saw where she was: a chamber about twenty feet square. This wasn’t part of the bootleg mine, but a chamber of the original company mine, and it contained supplies abandoned when the mine was shut down. There were boxes that would have held dynamite and blasting caps, as well as enormous pieces of mining equipment, roof bolters and rod chargers. In one corner, leaning up against the wall, stood a pair of six-foot-long handheld drills that would have done wonders at boring through that trauma plate and impaling Raleigh’s heart—if there had been anyplace to plug them in. The equipment was falling to pieces, eaten at by rust or just general decay. It must have been sitting down here for decades after the mine was abandoned. If there was any dynamite in those boxes it would have gone bad before Raleigh was even born, most likely.

Raleigh followed her gaze. “It’s not much, but it’s home,” she said.

Caxton had just one chance. Raleigh didn’t know that she’d upgraded her weapon—she couldn’t know that Caxton was loading Teflon bullets that might, just might, penetrate the trauma plate. If Caxton could get closer to the gun, if she could just reach it—

She started crawling toward the gun with infinitesimal slowness, using her hands and her legs to scoot along the floor.

Raleigh had a radio on her belt that she lifted to her mouth. “Daddy, she’s here. She came just like you said she would.” Raleigh stared down at Caxton with a disdainful smile, then went on, “I got her inside just fine, and I’ve disarmed her. Just like we talked about.”

The radio spat and popped with static, but Caxton could hear Jameson calling from someplace else in the mine. “Don’t take any chances. Empty her weapon and then bring her to me.” There was a pause, then Jameson said, “There will be fifteen bullets in the gun, and maybe one in the chamber. Get them all.”

Raleigh took two long steps across the room and picked up the weapon. Caxton stopped moving.

The vampire turned the gun over and over in her hands. She found the safety and slipped it off. Then, holding the gun straight out from her shoulder, she pointed it down at Caxton’s face. It was a lousy firing stance, but at that range it wouldn’t matter. “Bang bang,” Raleigh said, with a little laugh.

“You could have killed me before this,” Caxton said, trying not to look down the dark barrel in front of her. “You’re saving me for some reason.”

“For Simon. When he accepts the curse, when he’s one of us, you’re going to be his first victim. Daddy and I have already fed.” Raleigh lifted the weapon a few inches and fired a shot straight over Caxton’s head. The noise of the shot made them both cringe as it echoed around and around the room, amplified by the close, hard walls. Raleigh made a face, her wicked teeth protruding from her pale lips, but then she fired again, and again, aiming just shy of hitting Caxton each time. The precious bullets pranged off the rock floor and ricocheted around the room, bouncing and clattering wildly, but unfortunately none of them went so far astray as to bounce back up and hit Raleigh. One did cut through the sleeve of Caxton’s shirt. She didn’t dare look, but she thought it had just missed breaking her skin. She pulled her arms in close to her body and tried not to flinch too much.

As Raleigh fired she counted out loud, but the words were lost until she stopped and said, “Sixteen.”

Caxton’s ears were still ringing as the vampire blew on the gun’s hot barrel, then shoved it, the safety still off, into one of the straps of her vest. “Now get up, and let’s go.”

Chapter 56.

Caxton went first, prodded on occasionally by Raleigh, who kept close behind, walking forward down a corridor lined with electric lights. Jameson must have strung up those lights himself—normally coal mines were left dark except for the lights on the miners’ helmets and their equipment. Here and there side galleries led away from the main hall, and these had been left dark—silent, empty channels carved through the rock where the only sound was made by dust falling and rocks settling. Once those halls would have echoed with clamor and activity as miners pushed a giant longwall cutter down the face, grinding out coal by the ton. Now it was as silent as the tomb it had become.

Or perhaps not quite silent. Caxton had little to do as she walked but look around her and strain her ears to pick up subtle sounds. It didn’t take long to notice a faint but deep roaring sound coming from deeper in the mine. Somewhere down these passages, through a series of left and right turns, the fire lay, blazing and raging as it had for so many years.

The sound was not the only evidence. She started to see wisps of smoke playing about the ceiling, braids of pale vapor that grew thicker and more agitated as she progressed. The peculiar smell of carbon monoxide came to her at first just slightly, but with increasing intensity. She’d smelled it plenty of times as a kid. She tried to think what it smelled like, but as always before she drew a blank. It wasn’t the smell of a campfire, thick with resin and wood smells. It wasn’t the smell of a candle flame, either; there was no tang of paraffin there. It was more like an un-smell, an absence of smells. It smelled like a blanket covering her face, preventing her from breathing. It smelled like suffocation.

They’d been walking maybe a quarter of a mile when she started to cough. Involuntary little spasms of her throat at first, tiny eruptions that soon graduated to full-scale convulsions. She pressed her balled-up fist against her mouth to try to hold them in, but that just made her chest heave all the harder.

Last she noticed the heat, and in many ways that was the worst of it. It had been a crisp winter night above the surface. Down here a dry heat warmed her body, making her sweat down the collar of her winter coat. Her armpits grew moist, and then her chest. Rivulets of sweat coursed down her body. A crystal droplet formed at the end of her nose and she had to keep wiping it away. The heat pressed against her face as if she’d opened the door of a furnace to peer inside.

She started to take off her coat—and then Raleigh was on her, one arm wrapped around her neck and crushing her windpipe. Caxton tried to go limp, but the vampire held her rigid and lifted her slightly until only the toes of her boots touched the floor. Then Raleigh threw her down, a discarded doll, and Caxton fell hard against her side. She couldn’t breathe; she sucked at the air, but it choked her before it got halfway down her throat. She tried to talk, to explain, but the words couldn’t form. Her hands reached up and tore at the collar of her shirt, trying desperately to loosen it. Weakness overcame her, though—her body refused to move the way she wanted it to, as every fiber of her strength was directed toward her lungs, her body’s need for air paramount.

Down on the floor the air was a little cleaner. Slowly, with painful jagged inhalations, she fed her cells the oxygen they needed. The sweat that bathed her face caught a puff of breeze and cooled her down. “I just,” she said, the words like switchblades opening in her throat, “just want—to take off my coat.”

Raleigh stared down at her sharply, then nodded.

Caxton struggled out of the garment, slipping off her backpack in the process. She had a portable air supply in the pack, as well as clothing to protect her from the heat. She started to open it up, but Raleigh kicked it out of her hands and back down the hall, the way they’d come.

“I’ve heard how tricky you can be,” the vampire said, her eyes narrowing. “Maybe you have another gun in there.”

If only. Caxton bent her head and started to ball up her coat, intending to carry it under her arm. Raleigh grabbed it away from her and threw it after the pack.

“You won’t need that anymore,” Raleigh said.

Caxton understood what Raleigh meant. She wouldn’t be leaving the mine, at least not alive. She would never feel cold again.

Slowly Caxton rose to her feet. She kept her hands where Raleigh could see them, and when she was standing she lifted them above her head. Raleigh nodded her acceptance and then spun Caxton around and sent her down the hallway again, toward their destination.

Ahead the corridor widened and grew more regular, as if it had been more carefully carved. Caxton thought they’d come maybe half a mile from the bootleg mine entrance, though it was next to impossible to accurately judge distances in a long, almost featureless hallway. It wasn’t much farther on that the corridor ended in a broad junction where many corridors intersected, creating a room considerably larger than the one where Raleigh had discharged the Beretta. The same style of lights illuminated the room, but they were set farther apart and the chamber was gloomy and dim. Wherever the lights blazed they shed cones of pale yellow light down toward the floor, cones that were sharply defined by the swirling smoke in the air.

There was not a lot of furniture in the room. There were four coffins set up along one wall like a miniature crypt. One coffin had to be for Jameson, a second for Raleigh. The third must hold the remains of Justinia Malvern, though why it was closed Caxton didn’t know. Maybe Jameson didn’t like looking at her all night, considering her condition. She would be a constant reminder of his own vulnerabilities, of the fact that while he might live forever, he wouldn’t stop aging. Caxton wondered how Malvern felt about being stored there like a broom in a closet.

The fourth coffin’s lid stood wide open and Caxton saw that it was empty. That one was probably meant for Simon, she decided. The boy himself was chained to a timber that held up the ceiling. He did not look conscious. Near him, where he could keep an eye on his son, Jameson sat on a weird-looking chair.

Jameson was wearing his ballistic vest and a pair of black jeans, but no shoes. His feet were dark with coal dust, but his face was glaring white. He rose as Caxton walked into the room and she saw that his chair was made of human bones held together with thick twists of baling wire. Mostly pelvises and skulls, with femurs for its legs. Classic vampire design.

Five half-deads stood in poses of attention around the edges of the room, as if they guarded the corridors leading away from it. Their torn faces were lowered and their hands were folded in front of them. Caxton had never seen half-deads who looked so disciplined or orderly—normally they formed cackling anarchic mobs. The only thing that motivated half-deads to behave themselves was fear. Jameson must have taught them some pretty strong lessons.

Caxton stumbled forward into the room, choking. The smoke was thick in her mouth and in her lungs, and the heat had gone from tropical to infernal. She felt like she was made of molten, sagging lead. It was all she could do not to fall down on her knees and give up.

“Nothing to say, Trooper?” Jameson asked, smiling down at her. He moved closer to her, almost close enough to touch. But not quite. Even at her strongest Caxton would have been no match for him physically—and bare-handed she couldn’t even scratch his skin, especially after he’d fed. He wasn’t taking any chances, though. He never had while he was alive. Now he seemed downright paranoid.

She shook her head and just tried to breathe. This is it, she thought. She had faced death so many times since she’d first met Jameson that she had thought she’d grown immune to the fear. It was suddenly back, more intense than she’d ever felt it before. She was about to die and there was nothing she could do about it.

Something in her refused to give up, though. A part of her brain that kept looking for angles, for opportunities. It came up with very little, but it kept trying. It suggested something to her and she considered the option carefully. Then she took in a long, shallow breath and spoke.

“You win,” she said.

Jameson studied her with his eyes. “This isn’t a competition,” he said. “It’s the natural order. My daughter and I are predators. You and your kind are prey, that’s all. To survive, we must feed on your blood. I know from your perspective that must look dreadful, but if you could see beyond your own mortality, you would understand. Just as I have come to understand.”

Caxton smiled despite herself. “Natural order,” she said. “That’s interesting.” She broke down in a coughing fit, but he waited patiently for her to finish. “You were the one who taught me that vampires are anything but natural. That they’re evil, true evil. I think those were your exact words.”

“I’ve had time to broaden my view,” he said. “Alright.” He turned to face one of the half-deads. “You, get some more chain. The rest of you, help him secure her to a timber.” He turned to Caxton again.

“You’re about to pass out, Trooper. There’s not enough oxygen down here to keep you awake. I’ll try to make your death painless—I owe you that much. After all, if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have ever come this far.”

Caxton’s eyes went wide. He was right, of course. He had accepted the curse as a way to save her life.

If she hadn’t needed his help so badly, he would never have become a vampire. Everything he’d done, everyone he’d killed, all that blood was on her hands. It was what had driven her to desperate tactics, and what had drawn her to Centralia—to find forgiveness for what she’d created. Now that drive for absolution was going to be her death. She thought carefully about what to say next. “You owe me—you said that before. That you owe me a great deal and you intend to pay me in full.”

“And so I have. I had plenty of chances to kill you before now, and plenty of reasons to do so. I held back for your sake. Honestly, if you hadn’t come here tonight, if you’d been smart enough to know when you were beaten, you could have lived. But now you’ve found my lair. You’ve threatened my family with violence. I think that wipes the slate clean. I’m going to save you just long enough to give my son a good meal. You’ll have a last chance to be useful. It’s the most noble death I can think of.”

She didn’t look him in the eye when she asked, “How about a last request?”

“Fair enough,” he answered after a long pause. “I’m not unreasonable,” he told her. “I’m not, no matter how many times your girlfriend said it, an asshole.”

She looked at him squarely. “You killed your own wife and your brother because you had to, to stay alive. You knew you couldn’t survive on your own. So you went after everyone you ever loved, maybe everyone you thought you could stand being around for eternity. You got Raleigh, and I don’t doubt you’ll convince Simon.”

“Yes,” Jameson said.

“I never asked you to like me,” Caxton said. “I don’t think you ever did. Maybe you respected me, just a little. Grudgingly. But Jameson, I don’t want to die.” She closed her eyes and let her body sag. All this talking was making her dizzy and light-headed. She really should be conserving her oxygen. What she was about to say was almost certainly a waste of breath.

“I want to live,” she said, her eyes flashing open. “I want to live forever.”

Chapter 57.

Jameson stared at her, his red eyes wide. Then he opened his mouth, showing his rows of razor-sharp teeth, and started to laugh.

Caxton couldn’t remember ever hearing him laugh while he was alive. Undead, his laughter was a harsh dry rasping sound that echoed off the stone walls.

She expected him to bat her down to the ground with one quick swipe, or maybe tear her apart and drink her blood on the spot. He didn’t. Instead he took a step back and looked her up and down, as if appraising her worthiness. She tried to think of something to add, some compelling argument why she would make a great vampire. She couldn’t think of any.

“No, Daddy,” Raleigh said, rushing past Caxton and nearly knocking her down. The girl tried to embrace Jameson, but he held her off, at arm’s distance. “No,” she said again. “It’s bad enough I have to spend eternity with Simon, but—her?”

Jameson looked down at his daughter. He hadn’t noticed what had happened when Raleigh ran past Caxton. Raleigh had been too upset to notice, herself. If the half-deads saw, they were too disciplined to say anything.

Caxton’s Beretta had still been sticking out of the side of Raleigh’s ballistic vest, where she’d shoved it after firing off sixteen rounds. Caxton was a little surprised it hadn’t fallen out on the walk to the crypt. As weak and breathless as Caxton was, it had been easy enough to grab the pistol’s grip as Raleigh moved past her and draw it from its makeshift holster.

“It can just be you and me,” Raleigh sighed. “Forever. Why share our blood with her? Why—when she’s tried to kill you so many times? She would have burned me alive back there, at the police station.”

Caxton wasted a fraction of a second checking the safety. It was already off, because Raleigh had thought the gun was useless. It almost was. Caxton lifted the pistol two-handed and drew a bead on Jameson’s trauma plate. She hesitated for another fraction of a second. She wasn’t sure if the bullets would actually penetrate the steel plate, and she would get only one chance.

Raleigh, on the other hand, had her back turned to Caxton. There was no trauma plate on the back of her vest.

Caxton’s life was going to last just as long as it took one vampire or another to notice what she was doing. She didn’t have time to consider her next move, other than to think that leaving the world with one less vampire in it would be a good legacy. She steadied herself, held her breath, and squeezed the trigger.

Jameson and Raleigh both screamed in surprise and rage. Raleigh’s arms went around her father’s neck and she slumped across his chest in the same instant that a hole blew open in the back of her vest, just between her spine and her left scapula. White vapor hissed out of the wound, spraying tiny fragments of Twaron fiber and splinters of bone.

She slid down her father’s body, collapsing in a heap on the floor. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were clawing at the air. Her whole body started to shake so badly that it was difficult for Caxton to see that her trauma plate was bowed out from the inside. The Teflon bullet had passed right through her body and nearly made it through the plate as well.

Jameson stared down at his own chest. His own vest had a dent in its nylon cover—but on the right side, where it could do him no harm. He lifted his eyes to meet Caxton’s, his mouth already opening in a hiss of anger. She felt his mind rushing at her, through her own eyes, like a runaway train hurtling into a tunnel, but she had already reached for the amulet around her neck. It grew scorching hot in her hand and then he was gone, receding from her, his psychic attack thwarted before it could begin.

He reeled back as if he’d been slapped.

Caxton took the moment of surprise and horror to move back, toward the mouth of the corridor behind her, stumbling backward, unwilling to look away from Jameson’s face. She stopped suddenly when he drew himself back up to his full height and stomped toward her. She raised the Beretta and pointed it at his heart.

“She unloaded that gun,” he howled. “I heard her discharge it!”

“New model,” she said, trying to stay calm. “Larger magazine capacity.”

The Beretta 92 she’d carried since her first day as a state trooper had a magazine that held fifteen rounds. Jameson had seen that gun a thousand times while they’d worked together. He had assumed that she would still be using the same weapon. But the new gun held seventeen bullets.

Jameson nodded sagely, as if she had finally impressed him. Maybe for the first time. “But I think you’re empty now.”

“Unless I loaded a round in the chamber before I came down here,” Caxton agreed, keeping the gun pointed at his chest. “That would have been the smart thing to do, don’t you think?”

Before Caxton had met Jameson, before she’d ever worked on a vampire case, she used to keep a bullet in her chamber all the time. It meant she was ready to shoot as soon as she drew the gun from her holster, rather than having to fully cock the weapon to load the first round.

Jameson, on the other hand, had never walked around with a cocked gun. He had equated doing so with driving while not wearing a seat belt. He had entered law enforcement many years before she had, back when small arms occasionally discharged by accident. That almost never happened these days, but Jameson had always been pathologically cautious.

What he didn’t know—what he didn’t have to know, as far as Caxton was concerned—was that she had looked up to him so much, had copied him in every form and move so well, that she had trained herself not to load a round in her chamber anymore. She had broken herself of the habit.

Her weapon was completely empty.

“The smart thing,” he said, taking a step sideways. He was so light on his feet that it looked more as if he was sliding across the floor, as graceful as an ice-skater. “You’re doing the smart thing these days?

Because the smart thing would have been to shoot me already, instead of standing here talking about it.”

He leapt then, his whole body bounding effortlessly into the air, huge and powerful and coming right for her. Jumping away herself would have been useless—he was too fast. Instead she jabbed the gun at him as if it were a knife and squeezed the trigger again, even as she leaned back. He threw his arms up to protect his face and his leap fell short by inches. Her gun didn’t fire—the trigger didn’t even move—but he had doubted himself for just long enough that she survived the attack.

If she wanted to stay alive, she needed to run.

She ran.

Chapter 58.

Caxton knew she’d bought at most a second or two of time. Jameson wouldn’t stop to mourn his daughter, not until Caxton was dead—and he wasn’t going to give her another chance to be tricky.

She also knew he wouldn’t come after her himself, at least not right away. He would send his half-deads after her first. It was an age-old tactic of the vampires, one of the many he’d studied back when he was alive and fighting them. Disarmed, barely able to breathe, weak and alone, Caxton had all the same proved that she was dangerous when cornered. The half-deads would harass her, tire her out, maybe even wound her—and then he would swoop in and finish her off.

She was not wholly defenseless, even without bullets in her gun. As she ran she grabbed the ASP baton off her belt and flicked it open, letting its weighted end bob along beside her as she hurried down the corridor. She had all her other cop toys as well, some of which were more useful than others.

Numerous side galleries flashed by her as she ran, all of them dark, some breathing hot vapors at her, some cool and empty. All of them were tempting. In the well-lit main corridor she felt vulnerable and exposed. Before she could turn off the main passage, though, she needed to catch her breath. In the smoky tunnels that meant just one thing—she had to recover her backpack.

It lay just where Raleigh had thrown it, about halfway up the tunnel that led back to the bootleg mine entrance. As she scooped it up she looked up the passage toward the room where Raleigh had almost emptied her weapon. It was tempting to think she could just run up there, climb up through the trap door, and run for her car. There were more bullets in the trunk, a handful of Teflon rounds and a full box of conventional ammo. That would be more than useful right then. There was only one problem—the half-deads had almost caught up with her. She could hear them behind her, their footfalls echoing around a bend in the tunnel that just hid them from view. There was no way she could reach the entrance and make her way to the surface before they caught up with her.

Which left just one option. She ducked down a dark side gallery, one that looked empty and less smoky than the rest, and pressed her back up against the wall of rock. As quietly as she could she opened her backpack and pulled out the emergency respirator. It came in two parts, a mask she could strap over her face and an oxygen bottle she could clip to her belt. She slipped it on and twisted the nozzle, then sucked at the mask until clean oxygen hit her mouth and throat, so pure and sweet it made her dizzy. She closed her eyes and just breathed for a moment. The backpack fell out of her hands and clunked to the floor.

“Did you hear that?” someone whispered, in a high-pitched, almost cackling voice she knew all too well.

The half-dead was whispering, but the mine gallery had weird acoustics. She couldn’t tell what direction the voice came from, but she could hear it plain as day.

There was no response. Normally half-deads gave themselves away by talking too much—they were cowardly creatures and they needed constant reassurance to keep them focused on their tasks. This bunch were too well trained for that, however. She tried to listen for their footsteps, for the sound of their clothing rustling as they moved. Instead she heard only her own breath hissing in the mask.

They had to be close. They’d been only a few seconds behind her before she turned down the gallery.

She readied herself, then waited for ten heartbeats, then forced herself to wait for ten more. Her pulse was racing so fast that it was no longer a reliable measure of time.

She thought she heard a rubber shoe sole squeak on the rock just around the corner. That was the best sign she was going to get. She swung out, into the lighted corridor, her baton whirling around in a deadly one-handed blow. The half-dead was there—and about six inches from where she’d expected it to be.

Her baton hit the rock wall with a thud that jarred the bones of her arm.

The half-dead grinned wickedly, its torn face literally splitting. It was carrying a shovel and it drew back for a counterattack that she would not have been able to dodge. She grabbed for her pepper spray with her free hand. She brought it up and squirted pure capsicum into what was left of the half-dead’s face. It started screaming instantly.

She didn’t bother looking to see if there were any more behind it. She spun back around and hurried down the dark tunnel.

The light from the corridor behind her touched the walls on either side, the sheared-off faces left over when the longwall plow carved away all the coal it could reach. Miners called those faces ribs, and they knew to watch out for them—the ribs were not solid rock, but conglomerations of many different kinds of rocks pressed together by their own weight. Chunks or slabs of the rib, some weighing tons, could fall away at any time. Loose rock and tailings strewed the floor, and she had to be careful or she would stumble and break a leg. The sides of the tunnel were littered with old sacks of supplies, cast-off equipment, and tangled snakes of hoses and cables. The light caught an abandoned glove, striped with reflective tape, now smeared with coal and rock dust. It had probably lain undisturbed there for decades.

The passage curled away from the main corridor, following a long played-out coal seam. The light from the corridor couldn’t reach around that curve. Soon she was in utter darkness, so thick it made her eyes hurt. There was nothing for it but to take her pistol off her belt and turn on the flashlight slung under the barrel.

The batteries would last for an hour. The oxygen tank at her belt that slapped against her leg with every step wouldn’t even last that long. If she ran out of light deep in the stygian tunnels—well, if she was alive in an hour, she decided, she could worry about that then.

The half-deads were still behind her, picking their way down the tunnel. One of them must have seen her light come on. She could hear them crowing in jubilation. She knew what her next move had to be.

When they caught up with her—three of them, moving slowly, their hands filthy where they ran them along the wall to find their way—they probably expected her to shine her light in their faces. Instead she had flicked it off, and lay in wait behind a rock twice her size. When they had just passed her—she could hear every step they took—she jumped up from behind and flicked the light back on. Barely able to see, she crushed one half-dead’s head with a fist-sized rock from the floor, then, before it even collapsed, she threw the rock like a softball and hit another one in the stomach. It dropped the short-handled pickaxe it had been carrying. The third one came running at her and she smashed its left kneecap with her baton.

Another half-dead had been following the three of them at a distance. She nearly missed it, but when it heard the screams of its fellows it came hurrying toward them. It had a breaker bar, a three-foot-long iron rod with a sharp pointed end, which it swung at her like a sword.

Caxton barely got her baton up in time. The half-dead’s bar weighed a lot more than the baton, and its momentum carried it through hard enough to smack her shoulder and leave it tingling and numb. At least she had partially deflected the blow—it had been aimed for her head. The half-dead pressed its ruined face close to hers, its broken teeth glinting in the light of her flashlight. It pushed her back toward the wall, sliding its bar down across her baton, trying to get the weapon free. She smashed at the side of its head with the butt of her pistol, sending long shadows and fragments of light flashing around the walls, lighting up the streaky coal beds that shone like diamond dust. Eventually its grip on the breaker bar let up and the half-dead fell away from her, its skull fractured and its eyes rolling up into their sockets.

She shoved it away in disgust, then grabbed at her shoulder and squeezed. There wasn’t much pain there, which was a bad sign. She was sure if she took the time to look under her sleeve she would see nasty bruises already forming. She didn’t have the time for that. She picked up the breaker bar with her good hand and walked over to where the other half-deads lay. One had its face caved in and wasn’t moving. The other two were whimpering and trying to crawl away.

She smashed in their heads with the bar until they stopped moving.

Her baton was badly crimped in the middle where the bar had struck it. It wouldn’t collapse and she knew if she tried to use it again it might just bend at exactly the wrong moment. She threw it away. She liked the breaker bar for its weight and its pointed end, but it was too heavy and her left arm was barely obeying her commands. She couldn’t really close that hand. Her shoulder might be dislocated, she decided, or even broken. The numbness meant possible nerve damage.

Nothing fatal. She picked up the short-handled pickaxe in her right hand and tested its weight. It would do, she decided. She could carry the pistol—and its all-important flashlight—in her left hand and hope she didn’t drop it. She had to get moving again, had to press on. Maybe she could find another exit from the mine, though she doubted it. Maybe if she moved fast enough she could shake off any pursuit until dawn, still hours away. Maybe she could get lost in the lightless tunnels and eventually die of asphyxiation or thirst.

She pressed on. The corridor started to descend ahead, following the coal seam. The temperature rose as she went down until she felt as if she were walking into a very large oven. She was afraid she knew what that meant. Taking a few precious seconds, she opened the backpack again and pulled out the Nomex suit. She could just get it on and close the Velcro storm flaps with her one and a half working hands. She could not—and didn’t have time for it anyway—get the face mask or the booties on, and when she tried to pull on the gloves she found that they just made her left hand useless, so she left them behind. She moved on, and started to sweat inside the suit instantly. She didn’t regret putting it on, though, because after another hundred yards the light of her flashlight seemed to change color, growing redder with each step. She experimented by flicking it off. A very faint, very dull orange glow filled the mine ahead of her. It lit up the swirling dust that filled the passage and made it sparkle. Another few steps and she started to hear the roaring.

Ahead a wooden sawhorse stood in the middle of the passage. A signal light had been mounted atop it, but the batteries had died years ago. Beyond the sawhorse the corridor was neatly cut across by a fissure in the rock, a nine-foot-wide gap in the floor she couldn’t cross. Black smoke shot through with brilliant orange flecks billowed up from the crack to disappear again through a matching crack in the ceiling.

Her eyebrows curled and singed as she peered over the side, exposing as little of herself as possible. In the momentary glimpse she allowed herself, she looked straight down into the fire that possessed the Centralia mine. Through the smoke she could make out nothing but an orange glow that pulsed and shimmered, popped and spat as the coal down there succumbed to hellish flame.

There was no way she could jump across that gap. Even if she could, she would have been fried in midair as she leapt. The hallway she’d chosen was a dead end.

Chapter 59.

Caxton had no choice. She backed away from the fissure, the sweat on her face drying instantly to a crusty mask of salt. The Nomex suit protected the rest of her body from the heat, but still she felt sluggish and tired, and her shoulder had started to really hurt.

She wasn’t sure what more she could do. The possibilities that offered themselves up to her were limited in appeal. She could head back toward the main corridor, and if she was lucky enough to get there unmolested she could try to slip down another of the dark galleries. She could find some place in the rib where the rock had parted from the coal seam and maybe made a crack big enough to hide in. She could—

She heard light footfalls coming up the gallery, and instantly she flicked off her light and crouched low along the rib. She could almost see by the orange light that splashed along the ceiling, she could make out the lines of shadows that crept and slouched along the walls—yes. There.

Four of the half-deads were destroyed, she’d made sure of that. The fifth had to be the one she’d hit with her pepper spray. A human being with that much pepper spray in his eyes would still be rolling around on the floor in agony. Maybe, she thought, half-deads were more resistant than humans were. Maybe it was just afraid enough of its master to press on even in the midst of unrelenting, incapacitating pain.

Caxton bent low, and changed her grip on the pickaxe. She was already hurt—her left arm was twitching with pain—and she couldn’t afford another wound, not if she was eventually going to have to face Jameson. She watched the shadows, and listened to the echoes, and timed her attack perfectly. She would swing up and through, and catch the half-dead in its stomach, a blow that would knock it down so she could finish it off safely.

The footfalls came closer. There. She leapt up with a shout and swung.

The pickaxe connected with flesh, and sank deep through muscles and dead, motionless internal organs.

The blade of the axe grated on bone deep inside the half-dead’s body and she thought maybe she could kill it with one stroke.

There was only one problem.

It wasn’t a half-dead she’d hit. It was Jameson.

The vampire roared in pain and stared down at his abdomen. The point of the pickaxe had gone right through the waistband of his pants and continued through his flesh, but his sinews and muscles were already knitting themselves back together, his skin growing back over the blade. It was all Caxton could do to tear it free again before the healing wound grabbed the axe right out of her hands.

Jameson stared down at her with glowing eyes. He started to reach for her and she swung again: this time the point went through his vest, right below his trauma plate. Twaron provided very little protection against knives or, say, wooden stakes, the armorer had told her. The axe parted the bullet-resistant fibers easily, and split right through Jameson’s rib cage. It missed his heart by a few inches.

She yanked the weapon back and staggered backward as fast as she could. Jameson closed the gap effortlessly. She swung a third time—and his mangled, fingerless hand came out of the air and the pickaxe cut right into his palm and passed through. Jameson made a little grunt of annoyance.

She yanked at the axe to free it again, to make another swing, but she couldn’t get it loose. Jameson brought up his good hand and grabbed the shaft away from her. Then he tore the pickaxe out of his own hand. Instead of pulling it out the way it had gone in, he dragged it forward, through bones and muscles and the round stumps of his missing fingers. His hand flopped nervelessly, bisected nearly as far as his wrist. He shook the hand vigorously and when he stopped the wound had healed up completely. Then he turned and threw the pickaxe at the far wall. It clanged deep into a soft coal seam, burying its head so far in that she knew she would never be able to pull it out again.

Then he reached down, picked her up easily, and threw her against the rib.

She went limp in the air and took the pain of the impact across most of her body. If she hadn’t, she would have collided with the rock hard enough to break her spine. She’d been thrown around like this before and she’d learned how to take a fall. Collapsing to the floor like a boneless rag doll, she tensed the muscles in her legs and got ready to roll away when Jameson followed up with an attack.

Of course, he knew she would be expecting that. So instead of attacking, he took a step back.

She scrambled upward—not nearly as fast or as gracefully as she would have liked—and rose, tottering, to her feet. Her breathing mask had skewed around on her face and she reached up to push it back into place. Jameson allowed her to do so.

Her left arm screamed with agony and refused every command she gave it. Her legs still worked. She aimed a vicious roundhouse kick at Jameson’s face, but he pulled his head back at the last moment and grabbed her extended ankle with his good hand. He yanked upward and she collapsed to the floor again.

Again, she braced for his attack, and when it didn’t come she carefully, slowly, climbed back up to her feet, bracing herself on the wall.

He had no eyebrows to raise, but his eyes opened wider, not in surprise, but in expectation. He wanted to see what she would do next.

When he was alive he had watched her like that all the time. Studying her. Testing her. It had always pissed her off. Now it scared her witless.

She didn’t waste a breath thinking. She just acted, grabbing her pepper spray can off her belt. She had no idea if it would cause a vampire the slightest discomfort, but she whipped her arm forward and pressed her thumb down hard on the trigger button.

Before the spray could emerge from the can his two hands cupped around her right hand and squeezed, crushing her fingers against the metal can, squeezing her own bones against each other.

The pressurized can ruptured in her hand, exploding in a sudden cloud of pepper spray. She squeezed her eyes shut and threw her head to the side to avoid getting a face full of the irritant. The pain in her hand was astonishing—her head filled with light and her stomach instantly flipped gears, vomit flashing up from her stomach to touch the back of her throat. If she threw up in the breathing mask she knew she would choke and suffocate and die. Somehow she mastered the pain and choked her bile back down.

When she opened her eyes again she was kneeling on the stone floor, her head down, her arms draped before her across the rock as useless as two fronds of seaweed. Her right hand was an agony of blood and broken skin. Jagged shards of metal—all that was left of the can—stuck out of her palm like petals of an alien and cruel flower.

Jameson crouched behind her. The fingers of his good hand gently pushed away the hair on the back of her neck. He bent low and she felt his teeth touch the sensitive skin there. It was an absurdly sexual feeling—how many millions of times had Clara kissed her there, breathed softly on her spine?

She had no more time, certainly no more time for idle thoughts, but she thought of Astarte accusing her of sleeping with Jameson, of the two of them having an affair. Was that something Jameson had wanted? A desire he’d never spoken of?

Was that why he had let her live for so long?

This wasn’t a lover’s caress, though. This was a killing blow, a gentle coup de grâce. He was about to sink his teeth into her neck and tear out her brainstem.

She did the only thing she could think of, which was the stupidest thing she could think of. She whirled around under him and shoved her broken hand in his face. Maybe she’d thought the broken bits of can would cut him, but more likely her subconscious knew that even the most self-conscious, most in-control vampire cannot resist the smell of fresh human blood.

Jameson tried to jump back, perhaps sensing that she wasn’t beaten yet. He got far enough away from her that she could scuttle backward on all fours like a crab, so that she could push her back against the wall and get halfway up to a standing posture.

It hurt her to do it. It made her cry to do it, but she closed her right hand in a fist until blood welled up out of her wounds. Then she flicked her hand at him until dark drops of blood splashed across his face.

His head reeled back as if the blood drops had been bullets. His mouth yawned open, revealing all of his sharp teeth, while his eyes looked like they might burst from their sockets. He roared in need, in pure bloodlust, and his body craned upward, his arms flying wide, his fingers curling like talons. Whatever had been left of Jameson Arkeley in that brain, in that heart, was drowned utterly in the river of blood that roared through his soul.

He had taught her, a very long time ago, that while many different people became vampires, once they tasted blood there was only one of them. One being, one personality. Everything that makes a human being special and unique—the personality, the compassion, the passions, and the hates—are lost and only the pure, bottomless need of the vampire remains.

In that instant he stopped being her mentor or her partner or even her reluctant friend. He stopped being the hero who had killed so many killers, he stopped being the ex-cop who couldn’t let go of his case, he stopped being a father or a brother or a husband. He had tasted her blood and now she meant nothing to him, nothing but food, but sustenance. This was how he’d been able to kill his brother and his wife and Cady Rourke and Violet and all the others, so many others. He wasn’t a person anymore. He was a predator.

And in that moment, he lost. Jameson Arkeley had been a brilliant strategist and a cunning investigator.

Now he was just a beast, a ravenous, bloodthirsty monster. He looked down at her, and she knew he would grab her up in a moment and tear her to pieces.

She was almost ready for him. She had her pistol cradled between her two nonfunctional hands. She had no more bullets, but she had the flashlight attachment, and she flicked it on.

His eyes had been adapted to the total gloom of the coal mine. They were extremely sensitive to light even at the best of times. He roared and threw an arm across his eyes, but the flashlight was just an annoyance to him—it couldn’t really hurt him. He blinked a few times and then looked back at her, better adapted now to handle the light.

With her right thumb, though it cost her pain, she turned a dial on the flashlight attachment, then flicked another switch. The red dot of the laser sight jumped across the black fabric of his vest. She had turned it up to its full intensity, to a power level where it could cut through fog or smoke and light up a target hundreds of yards away.

She brought the gun up and raked the laser across his eyes like a knife.

He howled and screamed and tore at his eye sockets with his claws. His eyes bubbled and smoked and white jelly ran down his cheeks.

It was far more than she’d hoped for. Even at full strength the laser would have barely dazzled a human’s eyes—at most it might have temporarily blinded a human being and left bright afterimages swirling in his vision.

Vampires, however, were creatures of the night, cursed never to see the bright strong light of the sun as long as they lived. Their eyes were not meant for that kind of abuse.

Jameson swung out with his left arm and his fingerless hand knocked the gun right out of her weak grip.

That was fine—it had served its purpose. Caxton got up on her feet and wobbled into the middle of the gallery, facing him as he clawed the air looking for her.

She wasn’t sure if he could still see her blood or not. He could have seen it in total darkness, and she thought maybe he didn’t need eyes to see the blood surging through her veins. To help him find his way, she threw her right hand toward him again and let her blood splatter on the ground, forming a trail of droplets he could certainly smell.

Then she turned and ran up the gallery, the way she’d come, moving as fast as she could.

He came after her, of course. He wanted nothing now but to drink her blood. His son was forgotten, the goal of recruiting new vampires was forgotten, everything but the blood was gone. He came sniffing after it, his hands out in front of him, his eyes already healing in his skull, white smoke writhing in his eye sockets, taking on the shape of new eyeballs to see her with.

They didn’t have far to go. She danced backward until she felt the sawhorse smack the back of her thighs, and then she looked over her shoulder and saw the fissure gaping open behind her. The fissure that led straight down into the mine fire that burned at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

“Come and get me,” Caxton grunted.

The vampire complied. He ran at her as fast as a charging horse. She dashed aside at the last moment, and he went flying, shattering the sawhorse into fragments as he passed right through it. One second he was running past her and the next he was gone.

She staggered to the edge of the fissure. It would hurt to look down there, but she had to know. Sparks fluttered against her face, caught and smoldered in her hair as she stared down into the crack.

He was hanging by the fingers of his good hand to the side of the fissure, his bare feet dangling over the burning coal. His fingerless left hand slapped at the wall impotently, unable to get a grip. How far down was it—thirty feet? A hundred? She couldn’t tell. His red eyes stared up at her and in them she saw naked desire. Not for her soul, but for her blood. He wanted her blood so badly that he couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t realize what he was doing. He reached for her, forgetting his other hand couldn’t hold him—

—and then he fell, straight downward, into the coal fire. He did not scream. When he hit the flames they parted to swallow him like the waters of a river of fire, and then he disappeared from view.

It was hot enough down there to burn him to cinders in moments, she knew. Hot enough to burn even the tough muscle of his heart. He was dead. Jameson was dead, she thought, but no—he hadn’t been Jameson at the end. She hadn’t killed Jameson. She’d just killed one more vampire.

It was over.

Chapter 60.

Nothing was over.

She followed the passage back by the reflected light of the fissure, as far as it would take her. Then she got down on her hands and knees and crawled around in the dust until she found her gun. She tried turning on the flashlight, but the lens had cracked when Jameson batted it out of her hands.

Jameson—whose grave would remain forever empty.

Caxton let herself cry for a while. Then she started to actually think about how she would get back to the lighted corridor. It wasn’t going to be easy, she thought. She couldn’t remember how many turns the gallery went through. She couldn’t remember if there were side passages she might accidentally enter and got lost within. She started to really worry. Her oxygen supply was low. If she couldn’t find the lighted corridor before it ran out, if she just wandered until she couldn’t breathe, until she had to lie down and go to sleep—