Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(4)

“Oh, shit,” she said. She grabbed one of his triangular ears and yanked it off. It was made of foam rubber.





Vampire Zero





Chapter 3.


Outside a SWAT team crouched in the snow, high-?powered rifles leveled at the glass doors of the lobby. Blue and red lights flashed in Caxton’s eyes and she blinked them away. “Move, you idiot,” she said, and shoved the subject forward, out into the street. He whimpered as the broken bones in his shoulder rubbed against each other. The SWAT team relaxed visibly when they saw the handcuffs binding his arms together, but they didn’t stand down completely until she gave the order.

“Glauer,” she called, and the big cop came running around from the back, where he’d still been watching the fire exit. Good soldier, she thought. “Glauer, call an ambulance. This one’s wounded.”

He stared at her in total incomprehension. The job of the SSU wasn’t to arrest vampires, and it certainly wasn’t to get them medical attention. It was to exterminate them.

“He’s a wannabe,” she explained. She tore off the subject’s other rubber ear. Revealed beneath was a round, normal, flesh-?colored human ear. She had to admit the subject had done a good job of faking it. In poor light conditions even she hadn’t been able to tell the difference between this kid and a real vampire.

Of course, she should have been able to. Real vampires were unnatural creatures. If you got near them you felt how cold their bodies were. The hair on the backs of your arms stood up. They had a distinctive, bestial smell. There was no way for the wannabe to fake that, and if she had kept her wits about her she would have noticed. She had been so desperate to find Arkeley, to finish her job, that she had made a bad mistake. What if she had killed him? What if she had pumped three shots into his heart, just on principle?

The wannabe had killed two people and then discharged a firearm toward a police officer conducting a criminal investigation. Had she killed him, that would have been enough to keep her out of jail. It was close to the textbook definition of permissible use of force, but even if the state police’s internal investigation cleared her, it couldn’t shield her from a civil action if the kid’s family decided she’d acted excessively.

The special subjects unit was brand new. It couldn’t survive lawsuits—or dumb mistakes like this—and without the SSU the people of Pennsylvania would be at risk. People everywhere would be at risk. She couldn’t afford to screw up that way.

Glauer brought his car around, a marked patrol unit with the SSU acronym painted on its hood. It was their only official car. Caxton helped shove the wannabe into the back, pushing his head down so he didn’t smack it on the doorjamb. He could sit there until the ambulance arrived. She’d already got a field dressing on his wounded shoulder. A bad bruise had lifted on his lower lip where she’d pistol-?whipped him, but she couldn’t do much for that. “Take these,” she told Glauer. She handed him the wannabe’s shotgun and the bloody hunting knife she’d taken off his belt. She was willing to guess he’d used the knife on the two bodies in the lobby. It had a nasty serrated edge he could have used to saw off the janitor’s arm. She shook her head in disgust and stared down at her hands. They were covered in blood and white greasepaint. She didn’t want to wipe them on her pants—her best pair of work pants—so she grabbed up handfuls of snow off the ground and scrubbed them together.

“What’s your name?” Glauer asked. He was squatting next to the subject, talking through the open door of the cruiser. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Is there anybody you want us to call?”

Caxton stared at her officer as if he was crazy. Then she realized that he was just trying to calm the subject down. One reason Caxton needed Glauer on her team was for just this—for talking to people who were scared and in pain. Caxton had never been much of a people person herself.

“Rexroth,” the wannabe said.

“You have a first name? Or is that it?” Glauer asked.

Caxton leaned against the side of the cruiser and closed her eyes. It would be a long wait until the ambulance arrived, and even then she wouldn’t be done with this guy. What a waste of time.

“Make sure he’s aware of his rights,” she said, just by reflex.

Glauer stayed focused on the subject, though. “What were you hoping would happen tonight?”

Rexroth—almost certainly an alias, she decided—started crying. He couldn’t wipe the tears and snot off his face with his hands cuffed behind him, so they gathered in oily beads on his painted face. “I was supposed to die. She was supposed to kill me.”

Caxton’s body stiffened. The guy had wanted to commit suicide—suicide by cop, they called it in the papers. He’d wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, and maybe take the famous vampire hunter Laura Caxton with him. Maybe he thought that would be enough to turn him into a real vampire. You had to commit suicide to join that club, one way or another. Of course, you also had to be exposed to the curse—which meant a face-?to-?face meeting with an actual vampire.

The closest this kid had probably ever got to a real vampire was seeing some bad movie on a Sunday afternoon. She stared into the darkness, willing the ambulance to hurry up. The sooner it could arrive the sooner she could get back home, and back into bed. She doubted she would sleep at all, but at least she could lie down and close her eyes and pretend.