Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(69)

“Okay,” she said. “First. Tell me exactly what happened at the USMS archives. I want to know who told you to do it, and who told you what to do. I want to know how you did it, and I want to know where the files are now.”

After that he opened like a can of peas.

His story began just after the massacre at Gettysburg, where Caxton and Glauer had faced down an army of vampires—and lost. Jameson had saved Caxton’s life there by finishing off the vampires who were too tough for her. “He truly believed he would be able to do that, then have the strength of will to turn himself in. Turn himself over to you, I guess. For disposal.”

“That’s an odd way of putting it,” Caxton said.

“But accurate, I think. It was supposed to be nice and tidy, he would just come back to you, let you put your gun up against his chest, and it would be over. He thought his life was over, anyway, before he made the change. He’d been crippled. He was a vampire hunter who could barely climb a flight of stairs, much less shoot straight. He felt like his only reason for living was gone. That’s why he made the choice he did. He told me about that first night as a vampire, though, and the strength he had, and the things he could see. They can see farther into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum than we can. Into the near infrared. I can’t even imagine it—the things he described, the way the sky glowed, the way trees pulsed with life and every animal—”

“Was full of blood,” Caxton interrupted. “I know they can see our blood, even in the dark.” She shook her head. “You’re making it sound pretty good.”

“Well, maybe it kind of was. I mean, at first. He swore he would never harm a living human. All he wanted was another night like that—and another after that. He realized that he hadn’t wanted to kill himself at all. That he’d just been feeling sorry for himself. I think he still believed he could do good. Kill more vampires—you know, working from the inside. When he first contacted me, that was the sense I got.”

“When was this?”

Simon rubbed his forehead. “October. Late October—I remember there was a paper jack-?o’-lantern on my door that night.”


So Jameson had been active for nearly a month before he contacted his son. She wondered what he’d been doing before that—staying up late with Dylan Carboy, talking about how much Carboy hated school? Drinking blood out of a plastic bag and hoping it would be enough? She couldn’t imagine what he’d done, what he’d thought, in those early days. Not yet. “How did he contact you? Did he come to you in person?”

“No,” Simon said. “By telephone.”

“Do you remember what number he called you from?”

“This was on my home phone. I don’t have caller ID.”

Caxton nodded. She leaned back in her chair. “Did he tell you at any time where he was, or at least where he was calling from?”

“Of course not,” Simon said. “He only called me a couple of times. The first was to, well, to see how I was doing. You can imagine how I reacted to that, my dead father calling me on the phone to see how my grades were. I freaked out and hung up on him. The next time he called—I didn’t hang up.”

Caxton tried to channel Glauer with his people skills and guess why. “You missed him,” she suggested.

“Fuck, no,” Simon spat. “You have to understand, he had never called me at school before. I mean, when he was living. I barely saw him when I was in high school, he was always away at some seminar on vampires or some police training thing or running around some far corner of Pennsylvania because someone had seen an albino man with pointed ears going through their trash cans and it turned out it was a coyote. No, I didn’t miss him. I never really had a father. But after that first call, I kind of felt—this is so stupid, but—I felt like I did have somebody, for the first time. When he called again, I was happy to hear his voice, even as changed as it was. That’s when he told me about what it was like for him, and how much he wanted to stay alive, and how you were gunning for him. He told me there was something I could do to help him, to help keep him alive.”

“And you said yes?”

Simon shrugged. “I took some coaxing. But in the end he was still the same guy. The guy who, every time I saw him, knew exactly how to get a reaction out of me. He knew how to push my buttons. How to make me feel sorry for him. He told me how lonely he was, and how desperate. How everyone wanted to hurt him. That was all an act, wasn’t it? Don’t answer that, I know the answer. They can hypnotize you if you look into their eyes. I think, maybe, they can do it with their voices, too. Or maybe—maybe I was just an easy mark.”

He kept talking then, without any prompting, telling a story that had gained its own momentum. “A couple days later I got an envelope in the mail, with no return address. The postmark said Bellefonte. Inside was a security card on a nylon string. It was his old card from when he worked for the USMS. It was my job to go find all his old files and steal them. The hard part was getting down to Virginia. I had to take a train, then walk five miles from the station. At the door there was a bored guard who barely glanced at the card, then let me in. Same thing at the archives. I signed for the files, not using my own name, of course, and then I took them and walked back out the same way I’d come in. Just like that. I walked back to the train station, went in the bathroom, and changed my clothes and messed up my hair. If anybody had been looking for me they wouldn’t have recognized me after that. I took the next train back to Syracuse and I was in class that evening at five-?thirty. Intensive French 206. I couldn’t miss it. I took it every weekday, for two hours and fifty minutes, and at the end of the semester I had nine credits and I’d completed my foreign-?language requirement. If I missed one class I lost a letter grade.”