She didn’t look him in the eye when she asked, “How about a last request?”
“Fair enough,” he answered after a long pause. “I’m not unreasonable,” he told her. “I’m not, no matter how many times your girlfriend said it, an asshole.”
She looked at him squarely. “You killed your own wife and your brother because you had to, to stay alive. You knew you couldn’t survive on your own. So you went after everyone you ever loved, maybe everyone you thought you could stand being around for eternity. You got Raleigh, and I don’t doubt you’ll convince Simon.”
“Yes,” Jameson said.
“I never asked you to like me,” Caxton said. “I don’t think you ever did. Maybe you respected me, just a little. Grudgingly. But Jameson, I don’t want to die.” She closed her eyes and let her body sag. All this talking was making her dizzy and light-headed. She really should be conserving her oxygen. What she was about to say was almost certainly a waste of breath.
“I want to live,” she said, her eyes flashing open. “I want to live forever.”
Chapter 57.
Jameson stared at her, his red eyes wide. Then he opened his mouth, showing his rows of razor-sharp teeth, and started to laugh.
Caxton couldn’t remember ever hearing him laugh while he was alive. Undead, his laughter was a harsh dry rasping sound that echoed off the stone walls.
She expected him to bat her down to the ground with one quick swipe, or maybe tear her apart and drink her blood on the spot. He didn’t. Instead he took a step back and looked her up and down, as if appraising her worthiness. She tried to think of something to add, some compelling argument why she would make a great vampire. She couldn’t think of any.
“No, Daddy,” Raleigh said, rushing past Caxton and nearly knocking her down. The girl tried to embrace Jameson, but he held her off, at arm’s distance. “No,” she said again. “It’s bad enough I have to spend eternity with Simon, but—her?”
Jameson looked down at his daughter. He hadn’t noticed what had happened when Raleigh ran past Caxton. Raleigh had been too upset to notice, herself. If the half-deads saw, they were too disciplined to say anything.
Caxton’s Beretta had still been sticking out of the side of Raleigh’s ballistic vest, where she’d shoved it after firing off sixteen rounds. Caxton was a little surprised it hadn’t fallen out on the walk to the crypt. As weak and breathless as Caxton was, it had been easy enough to grab the pistol’s grip as Raleigh moved past her and draw it from its makeshift holster.
“It can just be you and me,” Raleigh sighed. “Forever. Why share our blood with her? Why—when she’s tried to kill you so many times? She would have burned me alive back there, at the police station.”
Caxton wasted a fraction of a second checking the safety. It was already off, because Raleigh had thought the gun was useless. It almost was. Caxton lifted the pistol two-handed and drew a bead on Jameson’s trauma plate. She hesitated for another fraction of a second. She wasn’t sure if the bullets would actually penetrate the steel plate, and she would get only one chance.
Raleigh, on the other hand, had her back turned to Caxton. There was no trauma plate on the back of her vest.
Caxton’s life was going to last just as long as it took one vampire or another to notice what she was doing. She didn’t have time to consider her next move, other than to think that leaving the world with one less vampire in it would be a good legacy. She steadied herself, held her breath, and squeezed the trigger.
Jameson and Raleigh both screamed in surprise and rage. Raleigh’s arms went around her father’s neck and she slumped across his chest in the same instant that a hole blew open in the back of her vest, just between her spine and her left scapula. White vapor hissed out of the wound, spraying tiny fragments of Twaron fiber and splinters of bone.
She slid down her father’s body, collapsing in a heap on the floor. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were clawing at the air. Her whole body started to shake so badly that it was difficult for Caxton to see that her trauma plate was bowed out from the inside. The Teflon bullet had passed right through her body and nearly made it through the plate as well.
Jameson stared down at his own chest. His own vest had a dent in its nylon cover—but on the right side, where it could do him no harm. He lifted his eyes to meet Caxton’s, his mouth already opening in a hiss of anger. She felt his mind rushing at her, through her own eyes, like a runaway train hurtling into a tunnel, but she had already reached for the amulet around her neck. It grew scorching hot in her hand and then he was gone, receding from her, his psychic attack thwarted before it could begin.
He reeled back as if he’d been slapped.
Caxton took the moment of surprise and horror to move back, toward the mouth of the corridor behind her, stumbling backward, unwilling to look away from Jameson’s face. She stopped suddenly when he drew himself back up to his full height and stomped toward her. She raised the Beretta and pointed it at his heart.
“She unloaded that gun,” he howled. “I heard her discharge it!”
“New model,” she said, trying to stay calm. “Larger magazine capacity.”
The Beretta 92 she’d carried since her first day as a state trooper had a magazine that held fifteen rounds. Jameson had seen that gun a thousand times while they’d worked together. He had assumed that she would still be using the same weapon. But the new gun held seventeen bullets.
Jameson nodded sagely, as if she had finally impressed him. Maybe for the first time. “But I think you’re empty now.”
“Unless I loaded a round in the chamber before I came down here,” Caxton agreed, keeping the gun pointed at his chest. “That would have been the smart thing to do, don’t you think?”
Before Caxton had met Jameson, before she’d ever worked on a vampire case, she used to keep a bullet in her chamber all the time. It meant she was ready to shoot as soon as she drew the gun from her holster, rather than having to fully cock the weapon to load the first round.
Jameson, on the other hand, had never walked around with a cocked gun. He had equated doing so with driving while not wearing a seat belt. He had entered law enforcement many years before she had, back when small arms occasionally discharged by accident. That almost never happened these days, but Jameson had always been pathologically cautious.
What he didn’t know—what he didn’t have to know, as far as Caxton was concerned—was that she had looked up to him so much, had copied him in every form and move so well, that she had trained herself not to load a round in her chamber anymore. She had broken herself of the habit.
Her weapon was completely empty.
“The smart thing,” he said, taking a step sideways. He was so light on his feet that it looked more as if he was sliding across the floor, as graceful as an ice-skater. “You’re doing the smart thing these days?
Because the smart thing would have been to shoot me already, instead of standing here talking about it.”
He leapt then, his whole body bounding effortlessly into the air, huge and powerful and coming right for her. Jumping away herself would have been useless—he was too fast. Instead she jabbed the gun at him as if it were a knife and squeezed the trigger again, even as she leaned back. He threw his arms up to protect his face and his leap fell short by inches. Her gun didn’t fire—the trigger didn’t even move—but he had doubted himself for just long enough that she survived the attack.
If she wanted to stay alive, she needed to run.
She ran.
Chapter 58.
Caxton knew she’d bought at most a second or two of time. Jameson wouldn’t stop to mourn his daughter, not until Caxton was dead—and he wasn’t going to give her another chance to be tricky.
She also knew he wouldn’t come after her himself, at least not right away. He would send his half-deads after her first. It was an age-old tactic of the vampires, one of the many he’d studied back when he was alive and fighting them. Disarmed, barely able to breathe, weak and alone, Caxton had all the same proved that she was dangerous when cornered. The half-deads would harass her, tire her out, maybe even wound her—and then he would swoop in
