It was hard for her to follow her own advice, however. Ducking behind a massive boulder, Jameson nearly got away from her as he threw one of his shoes to the left and the other to the right. She tried to keep her weapon pointed at him, but the double feint dragged her attention away for a split second. In that time Jameson managed to duckwalk all the way to a massive fountain in the middle of the lawn.
She could just make out the curve of his back behind the fountain. His body writhed like a snake and she wondered if maybe he’d been hit. That was probably too much to hope for, and anyway if he’d been hit anywhere but directly in the heart it would only take him seconds to regenerate. With Violet’s blood flowing through his veins he would be nearly impervious to harm.
“Come on,” she said, urging him to move again, to expose himself for just a second. Instead he seemed to relax, his body sagging to the snow. “Come on. You can’t stay there forever.”
He didn’t move at all. The rifles had fallen silent, as no target presented itself. She thought about telling the cops to move in, but she knew that would just put them at risk. Assaulting the fountain was up to her.
“Hold your fire,” she said into her phone. Then she shoved it in her pocket, the call still connected in case she needed to issue another order. Keeping low, trying not to expose herself too much, Caxton moved step by step closer to the fountain.
Jameson—what she could see of him—didn’t stir.
He could be lying in wait for her. He could be just waiting for her to get close enough, just inside a crucial range where he could jump out and attack her. She kept her weapon up and held on to it with both hands. Another step closer and she could see his shirt, the sleeves stretched out as if he were hugging the round lip of the fountain. When he did launch himself at her she would have only a fraction of a second to respond. Another step, and she could see his pants, his knees bent like coiled springs. Without his shoes his feet would be nearly invisible against the snow, she thought. His skin was as white as the ground cover, and—
His feet weren’t there. They weren’t just difficult to see. They were missing, as if they’d been cut off just at the level of his pant cuffs. She raised her weapon a fraction of an inch and saw that his hands were missing as well.
It was just his clothes, laid out to look as if he was still in them. A decoy.
She spun around, grabbing her phone out of her pocket even as she searched the snow. “He’s moving,”
she shouted. “He’s naked and moving! There, nine o’clock, somebody shoot him!”
She could barely see him, wriggling along the ground, already twenty yards away. Completely naked, and therefore almost perfectly camouflaged. She ran after him, no longer caring if she was running right into a free-fire zone, and discharged her weapon every time she thought she had a clear shot.
It was no use. Even down on all fours, scuttling like a crab, he was far faster than she was running at her top speed. In seconds he was up against the convent wall, a snowman glowing by starlight. Then he was up, his powerful legs carrying him over the wall in one spastic hop.
“No,” she howled, racing back toward the gate. There was no way she could get over that wall herself, not without wasting a lot of time. At the gate a line of cops stared at her with shock and disbelief, but she didn’t have time to explain. Dashing around the side of the wall, she headed down a narrow decline, dodging tree trunks. She came around the corner of the wall and pushed on, intent on reaching the place where he had come over the top. In the dark, with pine needles overhead soaking up all the starlight, she could barely see anything. A tree root snagged at her foot and she bounced sideways, intent on not twisting her ankle, not now, not when he was so close. She struck a tree trunk with her hand, scraping half the skin off her palm, and kept running. She could not let him get away—not again.
And yet that was exactly what happened. A rock shifted under her foot and she went sprawling, her hands down to collide with a frozen carpet of brown pine needles. She got slowly, painfully to her feet, knowing he’d already evaded her.
She found the wall, and pushed her back up against it. Closed her eyes, tried to listen for any sound of running feet. There was nothing. She heard snow sliding down through branches fifty feet over her head.
From far off, from inside the convent, she heard someone shouting. She heard the cops behind her climbing into their cars, slamming their doors. She heard the phone in her pocket chime. But no sound of a vampire anywhere.
She let her pulse rate wind down. Caught her breath.
Heading back toward the gate, she checked the phone and found she had a new text message:
Malvern again. Malvern—who had some way of knowing that Caxton had failed. Caxton considered throwing the phone away into the trees, getting it as far away from herself as possible. It was government property, though, and she knew Fetlock would disapprove. So she just switched it off and shoved it deep into the bottom of her pocket.
Chapter 32.
As usual, Jameson had left her quite a mess to clean up.
Her first concern was for Raleigh. Sister Margot and several of the girls were waiting in the front hall and they demanded answers to their questions. She just pushed past them and into the hallway where she’d last seen Jameson’s daughter. The girl was there, curled up in a massive wooden chair. Her face was white with fear and her hands were clenched. She said she could not release them.
“Just breathe,” Caxton said, kneeling in front of her. “Breathe.”
The girl shook her head wildly. Caxton fought down the urge to slap her. She had work to do, but first she needed to make sure Raleigh was alright. She tried to imagine what Glauer would do in this situation.
Glauer was much better at dealing with hysterical people. “Look,” she said. “It’s going to be alright.
Yeah. Your father wants to turn you into a vampire, but—”
“He wants what?” Raleigh gasped. She started breathing heavily. She was at risk of hyperventilating.
“You’re safe right now. He won’t come back tonight. I promise. That’s his MO so far, one attack per night.”
“Then what about tomorrow night?” the girl asked.
“I’ll protect you then, too,” Caxton said.
It wasn’t working. Raleigh’s fear level was ramping up and nothing Caxton said seemed to help. She headed back into the foyer, intending to ask Sister Margot for help. “Did Raleigh have any friends here she was especially close with?” Caxton asked. “I mean,” she said, after glancing at the corpse on the floor, “anyone other than Violet. Someone needs to sit with her. I don’t think she’s going to sleep tonight.
Also, I need some Styrofoam cups, or whatever you have.” There were shell casings all over the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and worse, probably dozens of bullets out on the lawn. She needed to start identifying their locations. Normally she could have left that to someone else, but with the girls milling about in the foyer it was going to be hard to secure the scene. She scanned the floor with her eyes, finding her brasses, until she realized Sister Margot wasn’t answering her. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“You,” Sister Margot said, “have brought death into this sacred place. You will leave at once!”
Caxton bit her lip.
Sister Margot stamped her foot on the flagstones. “At once!”
Caxton watched the young woman carefully. Sized her up. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” she said.
“This is a place of healing. Of peace! I’ve worked all my life to make it a quiet refuge and in one night you’ve ruined everything!”
Not shrugging was the best Caxton could do to mollify the girl. “I’m going to need to bring in some forensics people, get this crime scene cleared, that’s going to take most of the night, then I’ll need to bring in some people to question everyone who was out in the halls before, so we can establish when the vampire came in and what route he used. Lastly I’m going to—”
“Violet is lying there, dead!” Margot shrieked.
“Yeah. I need to contact her parents immediately.”
