necessary. He was very clear on that.”
“Reyes went through this same process, most likely,” Arkeley asked, voice neutral, just looking for data. “And Lares, and Malvern before him.”
Caxton shook her head. “No. Reyes didn’t require any of the dream magic bullshit. He already wanted to die. Malvern looked into his soul and he said ‘yes’, just like that. Congreve—that’s the vampire we killed together—took about three hours to convince. Reyes did him and the other one, the one with docked ears.
Congreve was a construction worker. That’s why he picked that site for his ambush.
He had a master’s degree in Renaissance music but he couldn’t find a job with his degree, so he ended up working construction on a highway project. He hated it, hated everything about his life. Reyes capitalized on that and convinced Congreve to blow his own brains out. It was too hard for her to make happy, healthy people into vampires, so she went looking for real losers. People with nothing to hold them to life.”
“Jesus,” Clara sighed. “I feel that way half the time.”
Arkeley ignored her. “The other one. With the mangled ears. Do you have a name?” he asked.
Caxton thought about it for a second. She bit her lip. It suddenly occurred to her for no reason at all that Clara trusted her and probably wouldn’t even try to stop her if she just reached forward and grabbed the steering wheel and give it a quick yank to the right. They were driving along the wooded bank of a dry streambed that ran maybe thirty feet down. The New Beetle would crumple like a soda can when it hit the rocks down there.
She sat back in her seat and pressed her knuckles against the sides of her head and pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her thought, though it had felt like any of the million other things in her head. It was Reyes, the part of Reyes that had colonized her brain. His curse was still trying to destroy her.
“Scapegrace,” she said, coughing out the name. She had to fight to make Reyes let it go but once she had the name she had the whole story. “Kevin Scapegrace. He was sixteen years old. Tall but skinny, too scared of his high school to get decent grades. The kids at school picked on him. One of them, an older boy, raped Kevin in the showers during gym class. Kevin was pretty sure that made him gay and he couldn’t live with himself anymore.” Caxton’s mouth hardened into a tight snarl.
“He’d swallowed a bottle of aspirin when Reyes found him. Reyes sat with him while the half-deads raided a drugstore. They brought back a bottle of Valium, and Kevin took that, too. Kevin didn’t really understand what he was being offered. He accused Reyes of raping him, too and now he hates what he’s become.”
She looked up and saw Arkeley staring at her. Clara kept glancing back over her shoulder and her eyes were tougher to meet. They were full of confusion and worry and a little fear.
“Reyes told you all that, before you killed him?” Arkeley asked, softly, as if he knew the answer already.
“No,” Caxton replied. She suddenly wished Clara wasn’t there. She licked her lips. “No. After.”
Arkeley nodded patiently. Damn him. He was going to make her say it out loud.
He was going to make her say it in front of Clara. “And how is that possible, Trooper?”
Caxton closed her eyes. “Because he’s still inside my head.”
44.
Clara drove them into the electrical substation, the same place they had originally thought Reyes was using as a lair. It might have been a completely different place the second time. For one thing she arrived in a car about half as big as the Granola Roller, with no armor and very few weapons. For another thing she knew the place was empty. Empty of everything except ghosts, anyway.
Clara stayed in the car while Arkeley lead her into the depths of the substation.
The day was starting to cloud up and the air had a bitter chill to it. It might snow soon, she thought. As they walked between the switch towers Arkeley gave her a moment to pull her coat tighter and then he started in with the questions.
“You can feel him in there? Even though he’s dead?”
She shrugged, pulling her collar close around her neck. “It’s difficult to describe.
There’s a chunk of him in my head. I get thoughts that I know belong to him, not to me. I can access his memories as if they were my own.”
“Does he tell you to do things? Do you hear his voice?”
She almost tripped over her own shadow. No, she didn’t hear Reyes’ voice. But she had heard Arkeley’s, even when he wasn’t there. She wasn’t sure if that made her crazy. “He’s... passive. It’s like he’s gone to sleep in there. Unless I want something from him he keeps to himself. If I do want something, like when you asked me about Kevin Scapegrace, then he wakes up and we fight. I’m winning, so far.”
Arkeley looked like he could have spat. He didn’t, he was far too cultured for that, he knew. “When Scapegrace and Malvern are dead we’ll take you back to the Polders. They’ll know how to get him out of there.”
“Seriously?” she asked. The offer was almost kind, something she didn’t expect from Arkeley.
“When Malvern is dead, yes.”
She frowned. “I thought you had a court ruling saying you couldn’t just kill her.
She can’t be executed.”
“Not unless she breaks the law. It’s hard to murder anyone when you can’t climb out of your own coffin. If I can get some evidence that she conspired with Reyes and Congreve and Scapegrace, though—if I can pin Bitumen Hollow on her, do you think any judge in this state will refuse me that pleasure?”
Caxton frowned. She felt a lot of clues fall into place, as if jigsaw puzzle pieces had fallen out of the box and landed perfectly aligned with each other, their tabs already intersecting. She had something. “That’s what this has all been about,” she said.
“Don’t oversimplify things.”
“Oh, I think that’s your job, and I wouldn’t dare to step on your toes. For twenty years you’ve kept this case perfectly black and white. No matter what it takes, no matter who says not to, you’ve always wanted to kill Malvern. To finish the job you started in Pittsburgh.” He didn’t stop her. She went on. “You can’t stand the fact that she survived. That you had a chance to destroy her but through simple chemistry she just didn’t burn as fast as the others. You can’t stand the fact that you failed. When the court ruled on her, when they said you couldn’t kill her— that ate you alive, didn’t it? You have a wife. Vesta Polder said you had a wife. Do you have kids?”
“Two. My son’s in college, up at Syracuse. My daughter’s an exchange student.
She’s in France.” His face fell. He wasn’t even looking at her—his eyes were turned up as if he were reading a note scribbled on the inside of his skull. “No,” he said,
“Belgium.”
“You really had to work for that.” She was being cruel but she figured Arkeley could take it. “This case is all you have. It’s your life’s work. That’s why you’re such a hardass about it. Why you don’t let anybody help you, because you won’t share the eventual glory.”
“I work mostly alone, that’s true. It keeps other people from being killed. If you had slept in yesterday the way you were supposed to—”
She stopped him. “What’s your son’s major? At Syracuse.”
He didn’t try to answer. He didn’t turn to upbraid her. He just trudged onward, toward the switch house.
“You’ll do just about anything to get the goods on Malvern, won’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Anything.” He pulled open the door of the switch house as if he wished he could tear it off its hinges. He turned on a flashlight and handed it to her.
He had one of his own. They stepped inside, into almost perfect darkness. Only a diffuse yellow glow came in through the mullioned windows, a dull radiance that illuminated nothing. Caxton played her flashlight beam over massive constructions of coiled copper wire and varnished wooden switches as long and thick as her arm.
They were as ornate as bedposts. They had to be the original circuit breakers from when the substation was opened a century earlier.
“What are we doing in here?” she asked. She shone her light on the floor and saw a trapdoor set in the cement. Just like the one at the steel mill. She didn’t want to go down through it. She really didn’t want to. “What’s down there?”
He pointed his flashlight at her face. “You tell me,” he said, his voice totally blank.
Maybe he was just being cruel to get back at her for questioning his private life.
Maybe he really wanted to know.
“We were right, weren’t we?” she asked. “Reyes did use this place as a lair.
