the foundations of this country.”
“To Plymouth Rock, you mean?”
Vesta smiled. “To Salem. Still, it wasn’t a very good match. He was twenty years her senior, for one thing. They were never happy. He spent far too much time at his work and left her to keep house here, all but abandoned. He only seemed to drop by to impregnate her—that autumn, and then in the winter of the following year. She struggled with raising the children alone, virtually a single mother. I helped her as much as I could—back then I was less limited in my movements. She was my best friend, you see.
That’s how I met Jameson. I didn’t like him at all back then. He never beat her, of course, and every word from his mouth was loving, yet I thought he was a monster for the way he neglected her.”
“And yet,” Caxton said, “you somehow got involved with him.”
“There are those among us who find monsters quite attractive,” Vesta said. She had a knowing smirk on her face that made Caxton cringe. “Such a powerful man. Passionate, and driven. That kind of focus is very hard to resist when it is turned in your direction.”
Caxton scratched one of her eyebrows. “When I spoke with Astarte, um, recently, she—suggested that he and I might have been romantically connected.”
“That’s rather foolish. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that you’re a girl-lover.”
The conversation had taken a turn that wasn’t going to help her investigation, Caxton decided. She led Vesta out of the room and back down to the street. Fetlock waited there to talk to her. He looked impatient.
“You do know this woman, then,” he said, when Vesta Polder climbed back into the passenger seat of his car. “She came into the state police HQ a little after you left, demanding to be taken to you at once. I tried to get some ID out of her, but she said there was no time.”
“She probably doesn’t have any ID. She lives pretty far off the grid. But she’s one of the good guys.”
Fetlock nodded as if he was satisfied with her vouching for Polder. “We could use more of those.
Especially since we just lost seven of them.” He nodded his head in the direction of the house. “You know this doesn’t look good, right? You know this was kind of a disaster.”
Caxton admitted she could see how he might think that. “When people fight vampires, some of them die,”
she muttered. It was the kind of thing Jameson might have said.
“Tell me at least one good thing came out of this,” Fetlock insisted.
Caxton looked him right in the eye. “I know where he’s going to strike next.”
Chapter 23.
“Alright,” Fetlock said. “Tell me what you know. And how you know it.”
Caxton sat down on the hood of his car. Warmth from the engine seeped up through her clothes. “He approached Angus, his brother, with an offer—join him or die. Tonight he made the same offer to his wife. He’s going after his own family. He thinks he’s doing them a big favor, making them as immortal and as powerful as he is. They don’t see it that way, and the only other option as far as he’s concerned is to kill them painlessly. He can’t just let them lie in peace.”
“But why?” Fetlock asked. “What’s in it for him?”
“Reinforcements. He knows he isn’t invulnerable. He killed too many vampires himself to think that. No matter how tough he may be, there’s going to come a time when he just won’t be strong enough. When somebody is going to get him. I don’t think he’s all that worried about me. I’m just one person and he knows all my best tricks—because he taught them to me. Individually, nobody is tough enough to be a serious threat. But he’s smart, and he knows he’s outnumbered. If I can’t stop him, eventually he’ll be up against more than just me. If he wants to keep drinking blood—and he can’t stop now—he knows we’ll fight him over every drop. If he creates new vampires they can fight by his side.”
“So he’s a Vampire Zero now. Just like you warned about.”
She nodded. “At least he’s trying to become one. Angus and Astarte both turned him down.”
“You think he’ll try the same offer with someone else,” Fetlock offered.
“Yeah. I think he’s going to approach everybody he supposedly loved when he was alive. Jameson Arkeley was a lot of things, but a good family man was not one of them. He got as far as he could from his brother and then never looked back—they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. He cheated on and nearly deserted his wife. His kids barely knew him. His kids—”
“—are next on the list,” Fetlock finished. “Jesus.” He pressed his fingers against his temples and then ran them down his cheeks. “There are two of them, right? Raleigh, and Sam?”
“Simon,” Caxton corrected. “He’s twenty, she’s nineteen. Way too young to die. I don’t know which of them he’ll approach first, but I already have an appointment to talk to Raleigh tomorrow. She lives outside of Allentown. That’s up in coal country, near where I grew up, actually. It’s an area I know well, so it’s a good place to make a stand. If I can be there when Jameson arrives, I can set up an ambush and maybe that’s all it takes. As for Simon, I don’t know. I tried to talk to him recently, but he was adversarial to say the least. He won’t want to cooperate. He’s farther away, too. He’s a student up at Syracuse.”
“You’re not limited by state jurisdiction, now that you’re a Fed,” Fetlock said. “I can send some deputies up there to scoop him up. Put him in protective custody. The Marshals Service has all kinds of safe houses we can use. We administer the Witness Protection Program—we can definitely put the kid up for a couple of days.”
“But not against his will. Like I said, he’s not going to cooperate. Not happily.”
“No. But if we can convince him his life is really in danger, why would he refuse? How sure are you about this, about him going after his kids?”
“Ninety percent. On the phone he told me to stay away from his family. I think that’s a pretty clear indication of—”
“Excuse me?” Fetlock took a step toward her and leaned in close, as if he wanted to hear her better.
“Did you just say you spoke with Jameson Arkeley on the phone?”
There was no point in denying it. “Yeah. Earlier, he procured a cell phone from the lead unit in the assault here. I called that number hoping to speak with the trooper in charge, but that man was already dead.
Jameson answered in his place, and tried to warn me off. It’ll all go in my report, I swear.”
Fetlock straightened up and scratched under his nose. “That’s—that’s interesting.”
She bit her lip. “I’ve…heard from Malvern, too. Via text message.”
Fetlock went a little pale.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to get you a new phone. We’ll just switch out the SIM card, so you can keep the same number. But the phone I give you will let you record incoming calls. It’ll also allow me to listen in. If he calls you again, we’ll at least have a copy of anything he says.”
Caxton frowned. “I’m not sure I’m all that comfortable with you listening to my calls. That’s kind of intrusive, don’t you think?”
“Part of the job. Besides, it’s not like you’re using your phone for personal calls. It’s just a work phone, right? The government pays for those minutes, so they belong to the taxpayers, not you.”
Caxton forced herself to smile. “Alright, Deputy Marshal.”
“Looks like you have your work cut out for you. Tomorrow you can start securing the kids. What about tonight, though? Is Arkeley going to strike again, somewhere else?”
Caxton shrugged. She thought about what Vesta Polder had said—about Jameson sulking in his lair.
There was a better reason to believe he was done for the night, however. “Probably not. He’s fed enough to keep him full for a while, and he hasn’t reached the point yet where he’s killing for fun. Thank God.”
Fetlock nodded in agreement. “I want to know everything that happened here tonight. But I can see you’re exhausted. Get out of here and get some sleep. You can write up everything in your incident report and get it to me tomorrow.” With that he took his leave, taking Vesta Polder with him.
The chief of the Bellefonte Police Department showed up shortly thereafter. She shook his hand and gave him a very quick idea of what had happened. She didn’t want to go into the gory details—his own people could tell him about those. Having officially turned the scene over to him, she found herself more than ready to leave.
She found Glauer still going from door to door, telling Astarte’s neighbors there was nothing to worry about. She called him back down to the street and told him it was time to go home. “I’ll drive you back to HQ. We should
