Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(28)
Confirmation came back shortly that the troopers were leading an assault on the house, with the locals covering their backs. It would be long tense minutes before they heard anything more, but Caxton grabbed the phone out of Glauer’s hand and held it against the steering wheel, ready to answer the moment anyone called.
She tried to focus on her driving. The road conditions weren’t great—lots of thin crystalline snow blowing across the road, patches of black ice every time she crossed a bridge or a sketchy piece of highway. The Mazda wasn’t built for that kind of driving to begin with, and at her speed—eighty or better—it would slip and slide the second she let up a little on her grip on the wheel. She had to cut her speed drastically as she tore through State College. The road went right through the university town and she couldn’t risk hitting any students. Once she was past the Nittany Mall, though, she pushed the car back up to its limit.
The phone rang in her hand and she nearly lost control. No time for the hands-?free unit, she decided, and pushed it up against her ear, holding it there with her shoulder. “Go ahead,” she nearly screamed.
“Trooper?” the voice on the other end asked, sounding slightly surprised. “Is that you?” The voice was deep and rasping and she didn’t recognize it at first.
“Special Deputy, actually. What’s going on over there?”
“They made you a Special Deputy. That’s fascinating. I spent my adult life thinking I was unique, that no one else could fulfill my special purpose. Yet practically the moment I was gone, destiny just plugged someone else into the empty socket. Have we come full circle?”
“Oh, f*ck,” Caxton said. Her foot eased off the accelerator. She was suddenly too scared to drive as fast as she’d been going. “Jameson. It’s you, isn’t it?”
“That’s a question for the philosophers. My wife seemed to think not.”
Caxton swallowed thickly. If it was Jameson on the phone, if he had somehow acquired the phone belonging to the lead of the state trooper team, that meant a lot of very bad things were also true. “You came for Astarte. You offered her the same choice you gave Angus, didn’t you? Become like you, or die. And she also refused.”
“It’s probably best if you stay away from my family for a while, Special Deputy. You’re on your way here right now, I presume. It would be better if you just turned around and went home. Of course, we both know you won’t.”
“When I get there will you be waiting for me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be there or not. The last time they’d met she’d put two nine-?millimeter slugs in his heart and it hadn’t done the trick. Would three work? Would the whole clip of fifteen in her Beretta be enough?
“I’m going to do my level best not to kill you yet, Special Deputy. I have a reason to want to keep you alive. But if you put yourself in harm’s way I can’t be held responsible anymore for your safety.”
“Stay there. I’m very close now,” she said, her pulse pounding in her temples. “Stay there and we can finish what we started. You didn’t want to become this monster, Jameson. Do you remember that? You accepted the curse to do one last good deed. To be a hero one more time. You’ve undone all that now, but it doesn’t have to go any further. We can still salvage something of your reputation.”
She was talking to dead air. The phone beeped at her twice, telling her the connection had been terminated.
She dropped the phone and screamed, pounding against the steering wheel with her hands. Glauer reached over to take the wheel away from her, but she shook herself violently and said, “Don’t. I’m alright.”
She wasn’t, of course. Not in the slightest. But she could still drive.
Vampire Zero
Chapter 19.
The roads were nearly empty as they tore into Bellefonte, racing up Water Street where it followed Spring Creek. By moonlight, sprinkled with snow, the town was eerily beautiful. Caxton had driven past the built-?up section of riverbank at the western end of town a thousand times and admired the gazebo and the parks there, but never before had it looked so spectral, so haunting. Stop that, she told herself. She was letting the night’s events get to her. She yanked out the cord of the blue flasher as she turned down a side road, cutting her speed to a bare crawl. “There’s a shotgun in the trunk,” she told Glauer.
“I thought this was your personal car,” he said.
She shrugged. “The last two months have been all business. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells there too. You grab those the second I stop the car, then follow my lead. This is not going to be fun.”
“Got it,” he said.
She took them down a street lined with massive trees that sheltered Victorian houses topped with mansard roofs and elaborate gables. Astarte’s house wasn’t hard to find. She just looked for the one with all the police cars parked out front.
Caxton stopped the Mazda well back, parking in the middle of the street in case she needed to make a quick getaway—or in case anyone else tried the same thing. Her car would block the main route back to the highway. It was a trick she’d learned in a course on tactical parking at the academy. She killed her lights and wrestled her Beretta out of its holster before she set a foot on the pavement. She didn’t watch Glauer get out of the car—her eyes were fixed on the street before the house—but she could hear him moving to the trunk. She could count on him, she knew. It was why they worked so well together. He always did exactly what she wanted.