Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(33)
She raced down the street, her eyes bleary with the light from the streetlamps and the glare off the snow after the darkness in the house. She had no trouble following the trail, however—the footprints were dark against the snowy street and they headed due west, never weaving back and forth, never turning as if the half-?dead had looked over his shoulder to see if he were being pursued. She had a bad feeling she knew what that meant. Half-?deads for all their wicked humor and spite were bound to the whims of vampires. They could no more resist the commands of their masters than they could make themselves alive and whole again. This one wasn’t just escaping a hopeless fight—no, it would have stayed until the bitter end if Jameson had so desired. It was carrying out some other order. She ran as fast as she could, her work shoes slipping constantly in the wet slush. She hadn’t had a chance to put on proper boots. Glauer came chugging along behind her, more sure-?footed but not as quick. Yet it was he who first caught sight of the half-?dead ahead of them.
He shouted and pointed and Caxton followed his finger. There, a block ahead, the half-?dead was moving fast. It was limping badly and one of its pant legs had been torn away. It had a nasty bloodless wound in its calf, where part of the muscle had been blown away. It must, she realized, be the one she had wounded with her wild shots on the stairs. Yet as crippled as it was, it forced itself along, forced itself to keep moving.
She had closed the distance to half a block when she realized they were about to run out of road. The street ahead curved southward to follow the creek, but the half-?dead wasn’t turning with it. It hurried on forward in a straight line.
She tried to sprint after it and nearly fell on her face. “Glauer—grab it, quick,” she called, and the big cop shot past her, puffing mightily. She raced after them both and arrived at the built-?up edge of the creek just in time to watch the half-?dead jump awkwardly over the edge and split the dark water like a falling stone. It disappeared with a gurgling whine and was immediately lost from view. Glauer started to pull off his jacket as if he would jump in after it, but she grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, breath surging in and out of her chest. “You’d freeze to death in minutes.”
“But it’s getting away!” Glauer cried back.
“No it isn’t,” Caxton knew. She understood right away what Jameson had demanded of his creature. She didn’t know if the icy water would have hurt it, but she knew half-?deads didn’t breathe. She imagined they weren’t very buoyant. It must have sunk like a stone. Under the water its brain would freeze and that would be the end of its short un-?life. “Back when we were working together—I mean, Jameson and me—it was standard practice to try to capture half-?deads. That was our best source of information. He knew I would want to talk to this one, and he made damned sure I didn’t get the chance.”
Vampire Zero
Chapter 22.
Caxton and Glauer trudged back toward the house through the snow. It had grown significantly colder since they’d arrived in Bellefonte, and the sky had turned heavy and the color of lead. The snow flurry that had come just after dark had stopped, but it looked as if the clouds weren’t done for the night.
“What’s our next step?” Glauer asked, his voice nearly lost under the noise of their shoes crunching the powdery snow. It sounded like teeth grinding together to Caxton, teeth gnashing and tearing. She shook her head. It was only seven o’clock, but it felt much later. “We secure the scene. Call in the necessary people and wait for them to arrive.”
“I meant—” Glauer began, but then he just shook his head.
They walked the rest of the way in silence. Astarte’s house remained just as they’d left it. The cars out front had gained a thin skin of snow that diffused the light of the red and blue flashers so that instead of stabbing out at the night they just glowed fitfully, first one color, then the other. Glauer wanted to switch off the engines of the cars, but Caxton said no—it was important to maintain the integrity of the scene, down to the last detail.
She made the required phone calls. A lone officer of the local police department came quickly, but he did little beyond stringing up some yellow caution tape. He didn’t go inside the house at all. Ambulances arrived on scene next, but the paramedics had to wait for the local coroner’s office to officially pronounce everyone dead. A technician from the morgue arrived half an hour later, an annoyed-?looking doctor in a fur-?lined parka with the hood up. He went inside the house and came back out five minutes later. He just nodded to the paramedics and they went inside. Not that there was much for them to do. Lights came on in other houses up and down the street. Anxious-?looking people peered out of their windows, but none of them came down to have a look for themselves. Glauer offered to canvass the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen anything. “I doubt anybody did,” he said, “but it’ll calm them down if they have somebody to actually talk to.” Caxton cared very little what Astarte’s neighbors thought, but it was something for the big cop to do, and she let him go with a sigh of relief. He’d been pacing up and down the sidewalk, looking like he had something to say but never actually coming out and saying it.
Her own tension kept mounting, and she just wanted to get away. It was nighttime—it was going to be nighttime for another twelve hours—and she knew she wouldn’t relax until dawn came. There was work to be done, but she couldn’t leave, not until she could hand the scene over to someone officially capable of taking charge. Before she knew it she herself was pacing. The exercise kept her joints from freezing up if nothing else.