“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.
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.
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.
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 27