“Despite what Caxton might have led you to believe, I’m no fool,” Fetlock told her. “The evidence you recovered last night is good. It’s solid. I’m convinced.”
“But—then—you need me. You need me on this case. You really need Caxton, but since you can’t have her, you need me to—”
“I need you to stay as far away from this as possible,” he said. “For one very good reason. Where Malvern shows up, Caxton can’t be far away. And I can’t trust you, Clara, not for a second, where Caxton is involved. The romantic relationship the two of you once shared is enough to cloud your judgment. So my decision stands. Do you want to turn over your phone now, or do you still need to make some official calls? At any rate, I’ll take your laminate while I’m thinking about it.”
23.
Clara stormed out of the U.S. Marshals Service field office feeling like she couldn’t breathe, like she might die at any moment without the slightest warning. Everything gone—her job, her whole reason for getting out of bed in the morning, her phone, goddamn it, he was going to take her phone away. She would have to get a new one, and how would she afford it? How would she pay the rent, or put gas in the car, or—or—
She started crying, tried to stop herself and failed. She shoved the ball of her thumb into her eye socket, grinding away the tears. If Fetlock saw her crying now, if he was watching her from the window of his office, she would never forgive herself.
Fired. Really? Yes. She’d been fired.
She pushed the tears down inside her, shoved all the worries and fears down hard. In their place anger bubbled up. Anger like a hot wind blowing across the top of her brain, anger that made her skin prickle.
Anger at Laura.
You had to go away and leave me with this. You had to go chasing the vampires.
And the vampires are still here!
You should have loved me more. You should have loved me more than you loved fighting Malvern. You should have said no when Arkeley drafted you into his insane crusade. You should have never been a cop. You could have worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, and made my coffee for me every morning, and then one day you would have put the sugar in for me before I asked you to, and we would have made eye contact, and you would have said something nice about my hair, and then … and then …
And then we would have been normal. We would have been happy and boring and none of this would have happened, and I would be heading home now and you would be lying in my bed, waiting for me. Waiting to hear about my nice, normal, boring day as a nice, normal, boring police photographer.
We would have been happy like that.
And when the vampires showed up, when they started killing people, then. Then what? Then it wouldn’t have been our problem. It would have been something we read about in the newspaper, something we made jokes about. You would have worried about me, at all those late-night crime scenes, but I would have told you it was fine, that I only ever saw what happened after it was over and it didn’t touch me, that it couldn’t touch me.
But you had to be a cop. And a fearless vampire hunter. And I had to think that was sexy. I should have walked away back then. I should have run away.
Glauer grabbed her arm and she nearly screamed.
“Come on,” he said.
She started to protest, but he wasn’t even looking at her face. He pulled her through the parking lot. Past his car. Past the rental car she had parked near the entrance to the lot, as if she’d known she would want to get out in a hurry. He looked both ways across the highway, then dragged her across four empty lanes at a run. On the far side of the street lay an office park, a collection of dentist’s and chiropractor’s offices. The front of the building was lined with ornamental trees, gray on one side with dust from the road. He took her around the side of the building and through a door into an air-conditioned waiting room full of ancient magazines and bad modern art in cheap frames.
For the first time she found her voice. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“It’s safe. We can talk. I come here for my back once a week and the nurses all know me,” he told her.
Clara looked over at the reception desk. A nurse wearing scrubs decorated with teddy bears glanced up at her for a second, then pulled a frosted glass partition closed so they were completely alone.
“Your phone?” she asked.
“In my car. Trust me, this is safe.”
She dropped, hard, onto a sofa facing the door. She wanted to curl up and just sleep for a long time. Instead she kept her feet on the floor and her hands in her lap. “He fired me,” she said, eventually.
“I know,” Glauer told her. “He told me he was going to do it.”
Clara nodded. There were no secrets in Fetlock’s office. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. Fetlock felt gossip was damaging to the team culture he wanted to create, so to prevent gossip he made sure everything got said in the open. She had hated that. She had, however, liked getting a paycheck. And getting to keep tabs on the manhunt for Laura Caxton. Those things were gone now.
Something occurred to her. “Your back? You have problems with your back?”
He sighed. “Yeah. Ever since Gettysburg. I got pretty beat up by the vampires there. We all did. Caxton worse than everybody, though she never let it stop her.”
Clara nodded. “I’m—sorry. About your back.”
“You had to think about that. About what to say,” he told her. He was smiling, a little. He didn’t often. He was letting her know he didn’t take offense. “Caxton used to rely on me for that. To know what to say.”
“I remember.”
“Funny, huh? A big guy like me. And I was the nice guy. The good cop. But you fight vampires too long and it starts rubbing off on you. They don’t think of human beings as people. They’re just food. For Caxton, most people fit into two categories. Those people who were going to get in her way and make it hard to fight vampires, and those people who were useful as bait.”
Clara winced at the idea, but she couldn’t deny it was true.
“Caxton had no time for anything but fighting them. She accepted she was going to get hurt, accepted that some people were going to die. She accepted that her relationship with you was going to fall apart. Those were all necessities.”
Clara had no idea what he was driving at, but she didn’t care. His voice was so calm and soothing it helped bank the fires of anger and outrage burning in her chest. If he just kept talking for hours, she would be okay with that.
Though—there was something strange there. Glauer, talking so much? He was the strong silent type.
He must be trying to make a point, she realized. And she was too upset to figure out what it might be.
“Of course, she didn’t start out that way. I didn’t meet her until she came to Gettysburg, and by then she was already wound up pretty tight. But there was still a human being underneath the tough-girl act. You knew her even before then. You must have seen something soft inside her. Something you could hold on to.”
So much, Clara thought. She had been—Laura had been kind, and, and, she had cared about people, she’d wanted to save them all. She’d wanted to protect them. Somewhere along the road that had changed. She went from wanting to save people to wanting to kill vampires, period.
“It was Jameson Arkeley who made her tough as nails. He taught her how to put everything else aside and focus. Really focus on kicking ass. She became like him a little more every day.”
“She had to,” Clara said, finally.
“Did she?” Glauer shrugged. He didn’t seem interested in debating the point. “You still have a chance,” he said. “I think Fetlock was right to fire you.”
She sat up very straight and stared at his face. He looked back with no expression at all. She wanted to slap him.
“Arkeley fought vampires until he became a monster himself. Caxton fought them until she was a criminal. Now you’re shrugging off injuries. Now you’re chasing half-deads across half the state, intendin
g to beat answers out of them any way you can. Now it’s your turn, and you’re turning into something you might end up hating.”
“Maybe I think she’ll—maybe Laura will love me again if I’m more like her.”
“No. That won’t make her love you. It might, after a very long time, get you some grudging respect out of her. The way she got just a little out of Arkeley. But he never loved her for becoming like he was. He never loved anybody. He was just glad there would be somebody to keep fighting after he was gone.”
Clara nodded. He was right, of course. She’d seen the way Laura and Arkeley had been around each other. She’d been jealous of it, God help her.
Glauer took a pad of paper out of one pocket and a pen from another. He scrawled something on the paper, then tore off the sheet and laid it down on the seat beside him.
“What is that?” Clara asked.
“Simon Arkeley’s home address. You walk out of here now, and if you want, you can pick it up on the way. Or you can leave it lying there and go have a decent life. I’m going to regret even giving you this choice, I know. But you need to decide for yourself. Stop, now. Let the cops handle the vampires, and go do whatever you want. Whatever you enjoy. Be a forensic expert if you want, just do it somewhere else.”
“Or?”
“Or pick up this piece of paper.”
She stood up. Pushed her bangs out of her face. “This isn’t fair. You can’t make me decide just like that.”
“I’m not making you do anything,” he told her.
She walked out of the office then without looking him in the eye at all. She didn’t say good-bye or tell him to go fuck himself, though she kind of wanted to. She didn’t do anything on her way out.
Except pick up the sheet of paper.
[ 1779 ]
His name was Thomas Easling, and he was the slave of a shrew of a wife.
To Justinia he looked like the future. Like life itself.
He was not a pretty man. He tended to fat, and as she watched him age—for this was a very long game she was playing, and it took years to be sure she had the right man—his jowls hung low, giving him the air of a melancholy bulldog.
Had he been just a sad sack, a gentleman loser, she might have rejected him and chosen another. But in that sighing face there were two eyes that burned with something else. The fires of hell—a banked and glowing hatred. A longing to rend and destroy.
One night she perched on the roof of his house and closed her eye and listened to the disputation going on inside.
It was about money, of course. Money. How the living obsessed over it, as if it could buy anything of value. Apparently Thomas Easling had spent too much money on a gift for a colleague at the merchant house where he toiled. He’d intended to grease his way to a promotion, but instead the colleague had simply returned the gift in the form of a bottle of wine. And Easling’s wife, a devout Methodist, didn’t even drink.
What followed was less of an argument than an enumeration of all the ways he had failed her. He made not so much as a reply, other than to agree with her points, one and another.
Eventually it came to an end. The wife stormed out of the house, intent on going to the local wineshop. She intended to sell the bottle for whatever she could get.
It was what Justinia had been waiting for.
She slipped in through the window of the second floor of the house. She found herself, as she’d expected, in Easling’s bedchamber. Like many married couples of that time the two of them had separate rooms. Probably if they’d been forced to share a bed they would have slaughtered each other long since.
Justinia could hear Easling coming up the stairs. She must move quickly. Slipping out of her gown, she chanted the words of an orison that Vincombe had taught her. In her own shape she could hardly tempt a man, even one so hateful of women as Easling. Yet as the spell took effect she felt herself changing. Her skin filled out, her breasts inflating on her chest like biscuits rising in an oven. A pinkish tone colored in her white flesh. Hair sprouted from her head, long, luxurious red hair that tickled her shoulders.
She had been a whore long enough to know what a man like Easling truly wanted. When the door opened and he stepped inside, he was greeted not with a succubus or an angel, but a damsel in distress. With stout ropes—as illusory as her hair—she lay bound spread-eagled on the bed. A thick cloth had been tied around her mouth as a gag.
She looked up at Easling with two eyes that pleaded silently for him to remember his best morals, to recall every sermon he’d ever sat through in church.
The look on his face was worth it. Surprise gave way to a moment of horror. And then his face changed once more. His lips curled up at the corners. His eyes narrowed. His brows drew together as if he could not believe his luck.
Then he closed the door behind him and removed his belt. Doubling it in his hand, he approached her. There were so many questions in his eyes, but he was not the kind of man to look a gift horse in the mouth.
24.
Clara hadn’t been there the night Simon Arkeley’s mother died. Glauer and Laura had. They’d been just a little too late to stop it. Instead they had walked into an ambush and nearly been killed. A lot of cops had died that night, and for nothing.
It happened in Bellefonte, a little town just outside the main campus of Penn State. A place that Clara had always associated with well-preserved Victorian houses, with parades and gazebos and quaint small-town charm. Astarte Arkeley had lived in one of the darker and creepier houses in Bellefonte, a place the local kids probably shunned as the house of a witch.
They wouldn’t have been far off. Astarte had made her living as a medium, holding séances for people so desperate to talk to their dead loved ones that they were willing to believe it was possible. From what Laura had told Clara, maybe it was.
Standing in the front yard of the house, Clara felt the hair standing up on the back of her neck like it was trying to run away.
It was an abandoned place. A place where nobody should live. The grass out front was unmowed and studded with weeds. The paint on the front of the house had started to peel in the summer sun. A couple of windows on the side of the house had been broken by thrown rocks. Maybe junkies would crash inside, maybe bums would sleep in there on rotten floorboards, but no self-respecting adult would call it home.
Simon Arkeley’s car was sitting in the driveway. This was the address Glauer had dug up. Simon’s LKA, his last known address.
When Clara knocked on the door, she still had no idea what she was going to say or do if he actually answered. Fortunately she didn’t have to figure it out. She knocked and knocked and pushed the doorbell button over and over, even though she couldn’t hear any bells ringing inside. She went to a window overlooking the porch and peered through the rain-streaked glass, trying to see if anyone was inside. She saw no signs of life. Maybe Simon was out—maybe he had gone for a walk, or to the store, or who knew where. Maybe she should sit on one of the moldy rattan chairs on the porch and wait for him to come home. Or maybe she should just leave.
Then she heard a crash from inside. The sound of glass breaking. She had enough of a cop’s instincts to reach for her weapon at that sound. Of course, there was no gun at her hip now. Fetlock had taken it from her.
She heard a whispered curse from inside, from just beyond the window, and then running footsteps, headed away from her. Whoever was inside clearly meant to escape out the back. If Glauer had been with her, he would already be back there, waiting to catch whoever it was. Of course, Glauer wasn’t with her. He’d washed his hands of her.
She ran around the side of the house, keeping her head down below the level of the windows. There was a small garden in back with a sundial and a trellis for climbing roses. Right now all it held was a few strands of ivy, the leaves dry and dusty in the summer heat. It wasn’t great cover, but it would do. Clara crouched behind the trellis and waited, watching the back door.
It opened with the merest creak, an i
nch at a time. Simon poked his head out and took a good look around. She remembered him—just barely—from Laura’s trial. He had given testimony against her, though he kept telling the judge over and over that Laura had saved him, that she had saved his life. The judge had been unimpressed.
Simon stepped out through the door and headed down through the garden, walking in the stiff-legged exaggerated way of somebody who doesn’t know how to move silently but really, really wants to try. The garden ended in a high fence of wooden pickets that separated Astarte’s lot from the garden of the house on the other side. It wasn’t the kind of fence that was easily climbed, and Simon didn’t look like the kind of kid who had enjoyed gym class in school. Clara watched him grunt and try to heave himself over it for a while before she finally took pity on him.
“Freeze,” she said, and stepped out from behind the trellis.
He took one long, confused look at her, and ran back into the house. The door flapped all the way open and then started swinging back behind him. Clara rushed forward and hauled it open, then ran inside.
Which was pretty stupid, of course. She would tell herself that later.
Simon was waiting for her inside, just to one side of the door. He was holding an old cast-iron skillet over his head, gripping its handle with both hands. He brought it down on her head as she came rushing in. He could have cracked her skull open, but he wasn’t committed to actually killing her. So instead he hit her just hard enough to make everything go white with pain.
She dropped to one knee on the floor of the house’s kitchen, staring very intently at the grimy linoleum tile that covered the floor. She forced herself to breathe, to deal with the pain. She couldn’t hear much over her own heartbeat, but she got a sense that he was running away from her again.
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 12