places he thought would make good vampire lairs. Personal stuff about his family. A lot of stuff about Malvern.” He held up his hands. “I burned them. You have to understand. I thought I was doing a good thing. I thought I was helping my dad. Then, at the fake funeral, when you were talking about how you were going to kill him—”
“Yeah,” Caxton said. “You thought he was still a good guy. Until…?”
“Right up until he killed my uncle.” He inhaled deeply. “That was when I got a lawyer. That was why I refused your protective custody. He kills people because they know something. He kills people because they get in his way now. He’s not the man I spoke to on the phone.”
“He’s not your father,” Caxton said.
“Actually—in some ways he’s more like my father than ever.”
Caxton thought maybe she could see that. “Okay. Next question. When was the last time you spoke with him?”
“That was the last time, when he asked me to get the files. I haven’t heard from him since.”
Caxton nodded, making a note on her pad.
“Although I spoke to Malvern like three days ago.”
She nearly lost control of her pen.
Chapter 42.
“Malvern—you’re in contact with Malvern.” Caxton caught her breath. “Is this a recent development?”
Simon shook his head. “It started years ago. Before you even came along. My freshman year in college, actually.”
Caxton bit her lip. “That was what, two years ago? At that time Malvern was being held in a half-abandoned hospital. She was the only patient there. I saw the place. I nearly died there. The security was pretty tight, since your father oversaw it. There’s no way you could have broken in there and spoken with her, and I know he would never have allowed you to go there unsupervised.”
“Well, yeah,” Simon said. “I never actually met her. We corresponded by email.” He smiled. “My father was good at a lot of things, but he never really mastered computers. For some reason Malvern had a laptop there —”
“Yes,” Caxton interrupted. “It was her only way to communicate with her keepers. She can’t talk, she’s too old and decayed for that. She talks by tapping out messages on the keyboard.”
Simon nodded. “Right. And obviously she wasn’t supposed to be able to get a line out. She was behind a firewall. I knew about her through my father—when he was home, on those rare occasions, he talked about vampires all the time. He talked about her a lot. As soon as I got to Syracuse I decided I wanted to talk to her. I had a friend who was majoring in computer science and he established a VPN
connection right through the firewall. She was pretty surprised, but she was desperate to talk to anybody and she was more than willing to keep our conversations secret. I talked to her a lot that semester. I had a million questions and she was happy to answer them.”
Caxton could guess why Malvern would have been happy to talk to the boy. She was always looking for some angle, some new way to improve her condition—to acquire blood, the only thing that could heal her ravaged body. Jameson had thwarted every one of her plans. It wasn’t a big logical jump to see how much she would enjoy getting her hooks into his only son. Maybe she had wanted to turn Simon into a vampire, to torture his father. Maybe she just liked the irony. She couldn’t see why Simon would take such a risk, though. “Weren’t you worried you would get caught?”
“Of course. If my father knew what I was doing he would have killed me.” The boy blanched. “I mean, he would have—he would have been angry. But it was so worth the risk. I told you when I met you that I was studying biology. That’s kind of true. Actually, my major is in teratology. The study of monsters.”
“You have to understand, it’s not much of a field. Most monsters were driven to extinction long before anybody bothered to study them in a proper scientific manner. There’s some fossil evidence, and a few so-called historical accounts. Firsthand data is nonexistent. There’s a stuffed werewolf in a museum in Moscow, but a lot of people think it’s a fake—and they don’t let first-year students from American universities just fly over to poke and prod at it. Yet there I was with access to a living, well, an undead vampire. The very last one, as far as anyone knew.”
Caxton closed her eyes.
“Can you even imagine how tempting that was?” Simon looked at his hands, unable to meet her gaze.
“So of course I talked to her.”
“She taught you about vampires. Did she ever—did she ask you for anything in return?”
“I had a sense she was leading up to that. She kept sending me emails about how badly she needed blood and how my father was starving her. I said that was a shame but there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe she would have gone further, but then one day I emailed her and there was no response.
I didn’t hear from her again for a long time. I left the VPN connection in place, just, you know, in case she got in touch again. Later I heard the story of how she created those new vampires, and how you and my father met, and I realized the dates matched up. She stopped emailing me when she started making new vampires. I guess luring me into accepting the curse was just taking too long.”
“But now she’s in touch with you again.”
“Yeah. About two months ago, when my father did—what he did.” Simon shrugged. “The connection came back on. There was a message waiting for me. It was different from before, though.”
“How?”
“Before, she would take a long time to write an email. Days and days—I would ask her the simplest question and have to wait a really long time to get a reply. When she started talking again she was emailing two or three times a day, really long messages about how much our contact had meant to her and how she wanted to meet with me in person now. Her spelling was better, too, and there was actual punctuation in the messages. I guess maybe when she went away with my dad she didn’t have to write in secret anymore and she had more free time to —”
“No,” Caxton said.
“No?”
Caxton frowned at him. “Her spelling and punctuation get better when she’s recently fed. It’s easier for her to type now because she’s stronger. Your father has been feeding her regularly, and it won’t be too long before she can call you on the phone. Until she can talk again.”
“Really? You can’t imagine how much there still is to learn from her.”
Caxton restrained herself from slapping his stupid face. “You should have told me all this when we first met. You should have told someone, someone in law enforcement, the second she got back in touch with you.”
He shook his head. “There was nothing in those messages that would help you. It was mostly personal stuff. And there’s no way to trace the connection and figure out where she is that way.”
“Are you so sure? You’re not a detective, Simon. You don’t know how we work. How we can figure things out even from seemingly meaningless clues. I could have used that information. If I’d had it,” she said, knowing she was about to drop a bomb, that what she was about to say might traumatize him for life, but not really caring, “maybe I could have found their lair by now. Maybe I could have saved your uncle. Or your mother.”
Simon’s face went blank suddenly. “But it was all harmless stuff! My mom—”
“You know she’s dead, right? I had to break the news to Raleigh.”
The boy’s mouth was a flat line across his face. “I…know. I guess I didn’t let myself think about it until now. She’s dead. She’s really dead.”
Silence filled up the room like fog. Simon sat very still, his hands on the table, and stared into space.
“And I had a part in that. Oh, shit,” he said, very softly. “Oh God. I didn’t…I didn’t think.”
In a moment her anger, her terrifying resolve, just broke. He wasn’t evil. He hadn’t withheld that information to thwart her. He just hadn’t realized how desperate the situation was. Until a few days before, he’d still thought his father was a good man.
