Yet he’d been the one who’d taught her that was impossible.
Off to one side of the room Glauer cleared his throat. She blinked rapidly and turned to face her audience again. “Arkeley is dangerous. He needs to be destroyed on sight,” she stressed. “The amount of damage he can do on his own is enormous. He’s much, much stronger than a human being and infinitely faster. He also knows every trick any human has ever used to kill a vampire. Worst of all, though, is that he could become a Vampire Zero at any time.”
She took a dry erase marker and drew a simple diagram on the whiteboard. Below Arkeley’s picture she drew two circles, each connected back to his picture with a short line. Below the two circles she drew four, then eight. She connected them all up. “That’s a term we invented for the SSU. We borrowed it, kind of, from epidemiology. When you’re tracing the progression of a killer virus you want to get as far back as you can, all the way back to the first person who was infected. That person is your Patient Zero.
You need to find that guy and get him out of the way as soon as possible, before he infects other people.
“It’s the same thing here.” She tapped Arkeley’s picture. “Vampires can make other vampires. They do it because they get lonely, or to have someone to feed them when they become too old and decrepit to look after themselves. If they think they’re in danger, they make more vampires because there’s safety in numbers. This is the biggest danger they represent, their ability to cooperate and to increase their numbers. With enough motivation one vampire can make a couple of others every night. Each of those others can make more. The number gets very large, very fast. We’re talking about a pathological organism that can reproduce a new generation every twenty-four hours. And each new vampire is just as deadly as the last, and just as hard to kill.
“The only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to find Arkeley and Malvern now. Find them and destroy them, without hesitation, without compunction.”
She stopped, then, and looked around the room. A lot of people had heard this speech before. The new people, though, had the expression she expected from them. Their mouths hung open. Their eyes were very wide.
They were scared.
Good. They needed to be.
Fetlock’s hand went up again. She pointed at him. “You say we need to find Malvern as well. I thought she was in custody.”
Caxton shook her head. “She was in Arkeley’s custody at the time he changed. I went looking for her afterward, but she was gone. Clearly he took her with him when he disappeared. He may have wanted a mentor, someone to teach him about his new existence. He may also have just wanted to protect her.
That’s something else we know about vampires. They stick together and look after their own. Now she’s out there, too, and in some ways she’s as dangerous as he is.”
“Wasn’t there a court order protecting her from execution?” Fetlock asked.
“Yes,” Caxton said. “After Gettysburg it was rescinded. The judicial system finally came through and figured out she’s a real threat. If I find her, I’m within my rights to kill her on the spot. That’s exactly what I intend to do.”
She pulled the cap off her dry erase marker, then shoved it back on with a popping noise.
“We have a plan on how to get them both. I’m interviewing subjects and following up on leads, with Trooper Glauer’s assistance. What I need from all of you is help with finding their lair. We’re hoping it’s somewhere in Pennsylvania, where we have jurisdiction. It could be just about anywhere, though vampires have very specific needs when it comes to their places of residence. It’ll be somewhere isolated, where nosy people don’t tend to go snooping during the daylight hours. It may be underground, or partially buried. In the past we’ve seen them use abandoned steel mills, hunting lodges, and disused electrical substations. Each of you probably knows a place like that in your community. I need you to check it out, but carefully. Only approach the place in the morning, when you have plenty of daylight. Be very careful even then—half-deads are active during the day, and they’ll lay traps for anyone who threatens their masters. If you find anything, any sign of recent occupation, anything out of place, just leave, immediately. Call me, and I’ll come and check it out myself. This is how we’ll get them, people.
This is how we’re going to make vampires extinct. Any questions?”
There were no questions. The cops and troopers got up and filed out of the room, some of them pausing to speak with her for a moment, most of them leaving without a word. Fetlock was one of the latter. She had expected him to stick around, but when she looked for him he was already gone.
Chapter 9.
Work filled up most of the rest of the day—paperwork, the kind she hated the most. She had to fill out a full report on what had happened the night before in Mechanicsburg. Then she had to sit through an interminable conference call with the district attorney and the Mechanicsburg police chief, going over evidence, presenting a clear case why Rexroth should be prosecuted. It should have been obvious, she thought. He had murdered and mutilated two people. The wheels of justice grind slowly, though, and by the time she signed out and got back on the road it was already four o’clock and the sun was setting. She needed to interview Angus and try to make contact with Arkeley’s wife again before she could call it a day.
The latter errand was easier said than done. She called the number Raleigh had given her and let the phone ring ten times before she hung up. She hadn’t actually expected an answer. She was going to have to meet the woman, and the sooner the better—most likely, Astarte was the last member of Arkeley’s family to see him before he accepted the curse. For the time being, however, she would have to settle for Angus, who had already told her he hadn’t seen his brother in twenty years.
Angus was staying at a very seedy motel on the road to Hershey, a single-story building with rooms that let out onto a shared porch, the whole construction stuck haphazardly in the middle of a black asphalt parking lot. The vacancy sign buzzed furiously out at Route 322—only two of the rooms had lights on.
Across the street lay an undeveloped field of dry, dead weeds streaked with snow that glowed eerily in the last purple-and-orange light. Caxton pulled into a parking space near the motel’s office and stepped out into the chill. The temperature had fallen considerably since the morning’s memorial service and she reached into the backseat of her car for her jacket. As she leaned over, out of the corner of her eye she saw an orange light glow and sputter in the shadows out front of one of the rooms. Just the ember at the tip of a cigar. Angus smiled at her out of the darkness and waved her over. He had dragged two chairs from his room and put them in front of his door. He had a bottle of Malibu rum and a two-liter bottle of Coke to mix it with. He handed her a motel glass as she sat down. “Figgered we could talk out here, if you’re amenable, and if you ain’t, that’s too bad,” he told her with a smile. “They won’t let me smoke in the room here.”
“That’s fine,” she said, drawing a digital audio recorder out of one pocket. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?”
“Naw,” he said.
She started the recorder and tried to clear her head. Tried to think of what to ask first. Glauer had always told her she should start with a joke, to ease the tension inherent in a police interview, but she didn’t know any jokes. She knew a little bit about small talk. “Angus and Jameson,” she said, to break the ice. “Are those old family names?”
Angus chuckled. “You want to know about our family? Well, the only fancy thing we ever could afford was those names. I suppose when you’re poorer than dirt, you take the best you can get, and names are for free. Our father named us both. Now, he was a character. Longlegs Arkeley, they used to call my pop, ’cause he always ran away the police got too close. He was what you call a man who enjoyed life to the full. Which means he was a man who enjoyed his whiskey, fine cigars, and young women. Had us when he was in his seventies, and lived to be a hundred and one, and his last girlfriend came to the funeral. Now, our mother, Fae, she was from old North Carolina hill women for seven generations, what they call down there a witchbilly. She could curdle milk in the pan, if she wanted, and she had an evil eye that could take paint off the side of a Cadillac, but she died young. Most like from trying to keep up with Longlegs Arkeley’s two sons.”
“Your father didn’t like the police. Interesting. Was he a bootlegger?” Caxton asked. She thought Jameson might have mentioned that once.
Angus nodded. “Yes’m. For a while it looked like young Jameson was goin’ that way too, toward a life on the wrong side of the law. He and I were real hellions in our prime. Got up to some pretty creative mischief ’cause there
