Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

—”

“One more minute, please. Just one more minute, okay?”

“It’s illegal, you know, to desecrate a corpse. I could have you arrested right now,” Fetlock told her.

“I’m tired of this. Tell me something, does this building have a meat locker or anything? Someplace to hold the body until we can send for a hearse?”

Captain Suzie stepped forward to answer. “Yes, sir. We have an actual morgue, believe it or not. It’s where we keep highway accident victims if the bodies are felt to be of an evidentiary nature.”

Fetlock rolled his eyes. “I suppose that’ll do very well, then. You—Officer—go down to the infirmary and have them send up a stretcher. We’ll move her to the morgue right away.”

“Hold on!” Caxton demanded. “Jesus Christ, am I the only one who knows that you don’t take chances with vampires? Fetlock, Jameson taught me never to underestimate them. Give it just a few more minutes. I’m begging you.”

“I’m sure Jameson taught you a lot of bad habits, too,” Fetlock told her.

She grunted in frustration. “He taught me how to fight monsters. He wouldn’t have let you have the body.

He would have burned it in the parking lot, and if you had come and told him to stop he would have just ignored you and kept going. You could have shot him in the back and it wouldn’t have stopped him. He didn’t care if people thought his behavior was erratic, he just cared about doing things right.”

“And look where that got him,” Fetlock said, smiling. “Your loyalty would be commendable, if you weren’t honoring a vampire. Let’s go, you two—one of you take the shoulders, the other the feet.”

“No!” Caxton shouted. “Not yet!”

“Trooper,” Fetlock said. “Look.” He pointed at the window. Even Caxton had to admit that true dark had fallen. The window was a pane of unbroken blackness. She could see the reflection of her own stark raving face in it. “Night is upon us. If she was going to rise, she would have already.”

Caxton let her head drop. Maybe, she began to think, he was right. Maybe she had crossed some kind of line, into a sort of madness. Had she let Jameson’s tricks and mind games distort her own faculties?

She turned to go, to leave the room. Still, even then, she half-expected Raleigh to sit up behind her and hiss with bloodlust. Before Caxton could take a step she heard Fetlock cough. He had a hand out, palm up. He’d already taken her badge. Now he wanted her gun.

“Don’t even think about it,” she protested.

“I don’t want you hurting anyone. I’m going to insist you go home and get some rest. In the meantime, I’ll hold on to your sidearm.”

She shook her head—made a good show of it. Eventually she pretended to relent, and handed her gun over. That was fine. That was exactly what she’d meant to happen. Her new gun, the one with the cop-killers in it, was in the car. Fetlock could take her off the case, but she knew she wasn’t finished with Jameson yet.

Outside of the room she headed for the parking lot and her car. Halfway there she heard her phone ring, the old phone with its Pat Benatar ringtone. She thought it might be Clara. Clara! How could she explain to Clara everything that had happened? When she pulled out the phone and checked the screen, though, she saw it was in fact Vesta Polder who was calling her.

“Vesta,” she said. “This is kind of a weird time. What’s up?”

“It’s about Jameson,” the older woman said. Her voice sounded weird, as if it were a bad line or as if she’d been crying. “He came for me.”

Chapter 48.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit, Caxton thought. She grabbed at her forehead and squeezed it with her free hand. When Jameson hadn’t attacked in Syracuse she’d thought he was lying low. That she’d created too much trouble for him—or that he was waiting for her to make some stupid move, to take Raleigh and Simon someplace undefended, someplace they could be gotten at easily. She hadn’t even considered he might be busy with some other agenda. “I don’t understand—he visited you, he offered you the curse?

That doesn’t make sense. You’re not part of his family.”

“Does your last name have to be Arkeley to be part of that brood?” Polder asked. “He’s coming for everyone he loves, Laura. Everyone he ever loved.”

Of course.

Vesta had told Caxton how she and Jameson had once had an affair. She must still mean something to him, no matter how far he’d fallen into darkness. “Listen,” Caxton said. “He’s not still there, at your house?”

“No, he’s gone. I suppose I should have made some attempt to fight him, or at least track him when he left, but I was too scared. I know you understand that.”

Caxton did.

“He gave me the same deadline he gave the others. Twenty-four hours to consider his offer. A refusal is as good as a death sentence. You have to find him before sundown tomorrow!”

“I will,” Caxton promised, though she had no idea how. “Listen, I’ll come to you. Stay where you are and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m on my way to you right now. In fact, I can already see your headquarters building. Come out to the parking lot to meet me.” Polder ended the call. Caxton bit her lip and wondered what she was going to do next. She no longer had any authority to put Vesta in protective custody. She could send Vesta to Fetlock, to ask for his help, but she wondered if the older woman would even want that. Vesta was a borderline agoraphobic, rarely leaving her own house for more than a few hours and never at night—except of course for when she’d completed her final duty to Astarte. For Vesta to drive to Harrisburg after sunset she must truly be panicked.

I’ll do what I can for her, Caxton thought. I owe her. For advice, over the years, and for the spiral pendant she still wore around her neck, which was her only protection against vampiric powers. She headed out the front door of the headquarters building, out into the parking lot, and saw a pair of headlights coming toward her. The lights of an old truck, the kind of ancient pickup you saw on farms still in central Pennsylvania. A body of pure rust held together by duct tape and sheer desperation. She didn’t remember the Polders having such a vehicle—maybe Vesta had been forced to go to her neighbors and plead to borrow some transportation, anything. Caxton waved the truck toward a parking space near the door, but Vesta just pulled up short halfway into the lot, partially blocking the exit, and switched off her lights.

Well, Caxton thought, so she’s not a very good driver. In fact, she wondered if Polder even had a license. She waved again, and saw Vesta push open the truck’s creaking door and slide down onto the snowy pavement. She was dressed as she always had been, in her long, austere black dress. For some reason she’d pulled her hair back in a severe bun and wore the black veil she’d worn on the day of Jameson’s funeral.

Vesta called to her from ten yards away in a voice high and near breaking with grief and fear. “I am sorry, Laura, to have to come to you this way. I had no choice.”

“That’s alright, I’m just glad you’re safe,” Caxton replied. “Come inside, get out of the cold. I want to hear everything. Tell me what happened with Jameson.”

“He’s changed,” Vesta said, walking slowly toward Caxton. “Evil is consuming him. Once he seemed to think that the death of a loved one was a mercy.”

More cars were coming up the drive into the parking lot—several of them. They were running with no lights at all, coming fast, and she could see they were full of people. As one of them bounced up over the curb and slewed into the parking lot, Caxton just had time to wonder what was going on before Vesta spoke again.

“Now,” the older woman said, “he sees in it an opportunity.” Then she lifted her veil. Beneath it the skin of her face was torn and pink, hanging away from her features in grisly strips. She reached up into one sleeve of her dress and pulled out a long knife, honed and resharpened so many times that the blade was thin and crooked.

“Forgive me!” Vesta screamed, even as behind her the doors of the new cars flew open and more half-deads spilled out on the pavement. There were dozens of them—Caxton didn’t have time to get an accurate count. She was too busy dodging the knife that came whistling for her throat.