Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(71)

“But now she’s in touch with you again.”

“Yeah. About two months ago, when my father did—what he did.” Simon shrugged. “The connection came back on. There was a message waiting for me. It was different from before, though.”

“How?”


“Before, she would take a long time to write an email. Days and days—I would ask her the simplest question and have to wait a really long time to get a reply. When she started talking again she was emailing two or three times a day, really long messages about how much our contact had meant to her and how she wanted to meet with me in person now. Her spelling was better, too, and there was actual punctuation in the messages. I guess maybe when she went away with my dad she didn’t have to write in secret anymore and she had more free time to—”

“No,” Caxton said.

“No?”

Caxton frowned at him. “Her spelling and punctuation get better when she’s recently fed. It’s easier for her to type now because she’s stronger. Your father has been feeding her regularly, and it won’t be too long before she can call you on the phone. Until she can talk again.”

“Really? You can’t imagine how much there still is to learn from her.”

Caxton restrained herself from slapping his stupid face. “You should have told me all this when we first met. You should have told someone, someone in law enforcement, the second she got back in touch with you.”

He shook his head. “There was nothing in those messages that would help you. It was mostly personal stuff. And there’s no way to trace the connection and figure out where she is that way.”

“Are you so sure? You’re not a detective, Simon. You don’t know how we work. How we can figure things out even from seemingly meaningless clues. I could have used that information. If I’d had it,” she said, knowing she was about to drop a bomb, that what she was about to say might traumatize him for life, but not really caring, “maybe I could have found their lair by now. Maybe I could have saved your uncle. Or your mother.”

Simon’s face went blank suddenly. “But it was all harmless stuff! My mom—”

“You know she’s dead, right? I had to break the news to Raleigh.”

The boy’s mouth was a flat line across his face. “I…know. I guess I didn’t let myself think about it until now. She’s dead. She’s really dead.”

Silence filled up the room like fog. Simon sat very still, his hands on the table, and stared into space.

“And I had a part in that. Oh, shit,” he said, very softly. “Oh God. I didn’t…I didn’t think.”

In a moment her anger, her terrifying resolve, just broke. He wasn’t evil. He hadn’t withheld that information to thwart her. He just hadn’t realized how desperate the situation was. Until a few days before, he’d still thought his father was a good man.

The boy in front of her started crying. Not sobbing, not uncontrollable weeping. Tears were just rolling down his face. He didn’t look like he was even aware of them. She had pushed him too hard. Laid too much guilt on him. Some people weren’t as strong as she was, sometimes. Some people weren’t as practiced as she at handling the guilt of lives lost, of culpability. She had to remember that. Glauer was supposed to handle the emotional scenes. Glauer was the people person. She was the one who shot vampires. Even Caxton could see the grief that was about to crush the boy like a closing fist, though. She reached over and took his hand.

“Hey. We’ll never really know how things could have been different.” He lowered his forehead to the table. She tried to think of anything else she could say. “I lost my mom when I was fifteen,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Mothers are bigger than we are. They’re more durable. Or they’re supposed to be.”

He turned slowly to look at her. “Thanks. I think I might want to be alone for a while. Are we done?”

“Sure,” Caxton said. She got up and stepped out of the little room. She left him handcuffed to the wall. She was still a cop, after all.





Vampire Zero





Chapter 43.


Caxton woke up because her phone was ringing. She tried to ignore it, but it was set to vibrate as well, and it chattered painfully against her ribs. She sat up.

It had been a long night. She’d overseen a team of Feds who went to Simon’s apartment and seized his computers; she’d gotten them started downloading anything that remained of years of correspondence between the boy and the vampire. Something might come of it—it was true that sometimes innocent-?seeming clues could tip over an entire investigation. It would take time, though, before they learned anything. As the computer techs got to work she’d realized she wasn’t going to be any help, so she’d returned to the jail and stood guard, along with every Fed she could mobilize in the middle of the night.

And nothing had happened.

She had finally fallen asleep about five in the morning, sitting upright in a chair in a disused room near the holding cells in the basement. She’d pulled her winter coat over her shoulders in lieu of a blanket. The phone was in one of the pockets.

She tried to open her eyes, but they were bleary and glued shut with sleep. She struggled to sit up and her body complained. Every muscle was stiff, every joint ached. She beat at her coat with one hand until she found the pocket holding the phone, then drew it out and answered it.