Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(14)
“Let him go and stand back,” Caxton ordered, but Angus acted as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Twenty-?four hours, you said,” he told the thing. “You’re early!”
She had another interest in the half-?dead, beyond protecting Angus. It took a vampire to raise a half-?dead—which meant Jameson Arkeley had done it. That meant all kinds of things, some of which were more pleasant to think of than others. It meant Arkeley had killed a human being, proof positive that he had gone over to the darkness. If Caxton could keep the half-?dead from falling apart for a little while, though, it could also mean a real break in the case. The half-?dead might know the location of Jameson’s lair.
She could interrogate it. She could intimidate it into telling her everything it knew. As long as Angus didn’t finish it off first. She started to raise her weapon, planning to point it at Angus if he didn’t start complying with her orders.
The half-?dead spoke, though, and Caxton froze in her tracks.
“My master grows impatient,” it creaked. Its voice was high and unnatural, like the sound a nail makes when pulled out of a rotten piece of wood. “He has offered you a gift, and you have failed to accept. You know what the alternative is. What say you, Angus Arkeley?”
“How about this?” the old man replied, and slashed the half-?dead across the face with his hunting knife. The half-?dead screamed and dropped to the pavement. Angus kicked it viciously. “You like the sound of that? My answer is no, you son of a bitch. He can ask a million times and it’ll always be no.”
“Get back,” Caxton commanded. “Leave it alone!”
Already drawing his foot back for another vicious kick, Angus turned to glare at her, his eyes traveling down her arms to the pistol in her hands. “Shee-?yit,” he said. White foaming spittle flecked his lips and chin. “I can take care of this. You weren’t supposed to get involved.”
“That thing is a vampire’s servant. That makes it my responsibility. Now get back,” she said, as calmly as she could. Her heart was thudding in her chest.
Angus raised his hands, holding up the knife. No blood marked the shiny blade, just some scaly bits of gray flesh. “You got me outgunned, I guess,” he said. “But this is my trouble.” His foot came down and slammed into the half-?dead’s side, making it choke and sputter.
“Step back. You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you? You had some kind of contact with Jameson. Is that right?”
Angus grinned at her as he took a step backward. “I said I hain’t seen or talked to Jameson in twenty years, and that’s the truth. Still haven’t. I seen this fellow last night, said he was sent by my brother. Said he had a message for me, a kind of a deal, and I had twenty-?four hours to think it over. He also knew you’d be around asking questions. Said if I told you anything it would be the death of me.”
“I can protect you. If I’d known—I could have taken you somewhere safe,” Caxton said, shaking her head. She glanced down at the half-?dead and saw it wasn’t moving.
“A man takes care of his own. I didn’t expect you to understand. Jameson’s my brother, and that makes it my job to kill him—to—”
Angus’ eyes moved to stare at the half-?dead’s car. Caxton thought it might be a trick—a ruse to break her concentration and let him get another kick in. Stepping backward slowly, she turned to glance at what he was looking at.
Inside the car a massive dark shape stirred. A pair of red eyes glared out of the darkened backseat. Caxton started to swing her weapon around, to train it on the car, but she was just too slow. The far side rear door exploded outwards and a black-?and-?white blur bounced across the black pavement toward Angus. It slowed down enough to grab him around the waist, and in that moment she saw exactly what she expected to see.
It was Jameson Arkeley, the vampire. He wore a black shirt and pants, but his feet were bare. His skin had lost all pigmentation and all its hair, even his eyelashes. His triangular ears, his red eyes, and his mouth full of ugly teeth couldn’t hide the resemblance he still bore to his brother. Yet where Angus’ face showed the lines of age and care, Jameson’s features were smooth and unblemished. Only his left hand was less than perfect. It was missing all its fingers. He’d been maimed when he was still alive, and even his curse couldn’t grow them back.
His red eyes stared right at her. She felt like a cold breeze blew right through the chambers of her skull and she heard his voice—his very human voice—calling her name, though his mouth didn’t move. Her arms fell slack at her sides and her eyelids started to droop. Caxton knew exactly what was happening. She’d felt like this before, far too many times for comfort. He was hypnotizing her. Freezing her in place. She had a charm on a thong around her neck, a spiral of silver metal, a talisman Vesta Polder had given her to allow her to break that kind of spell. She tried to reach for it even as she felt it growing warm against her clavicle, but her hand felt resistance as if it were moving through gelatin. Jameson had plenty of time to kill her before she could grab the charm and regain control of her own body. Yet that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. His eyes broke with hers and suddenly he was gone from her head. She reached up and grabbed the charm through her shirt, felt its heat scorch her fingers, but she was already free. Her other hand, her gun hand, came up and she aimed automatically at his heart. Too slow, still too slow. He was moving again, moving faster than she could track. She dropped to one knee to improve her aim and tried to get a bead on his back, even knowing that the chances of shooting him through the heart like that were slim to none. Worse, he had Angus dangling over his shoulder and she couldn’t risk shooting the living brother, for many reasons.