Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(86)

“Does that feel cold? It should. In a few minutes, though, you’ll stop feeling it. That’s bad,” she told him.

“That’s when frostbite sets in. You know about frostbite, right, Dylan? Your toes will turn black. The nerves and blood vessels in your toes will die one by one. Once that happens, if they want to save your life your toes will have to be cut off. Maybe they’ll take your feet, too, if gangrene sets in, and it usually does.” She pulled the passenger door shut and then rolled down the window so she could keep talking to him. “I’m going to drive away now, and leave you here. You can walk back.”

Carboy’s lips curled back. “When I receive the curse, I’ll track you down, Caxton. I’ll return this torment and visit a thousand more upon you—”

She interrupted him. “Do you know about Malvern’s eye? She’s only got one, of course. She lost the other before she became a vampire. Now no matter how much blood she drinks, no matter how long she spends rejuvenating in her coffin, she still only has one eye. Body parts don’t grow back.” She shrugged.

“Let’s say the impossible happens, and Jameson does give you the curse. You’ll be the vampire with no feet. You’ll spend the rest of your life unable to walk and unable to hunt for victims. And of course, vampires live forever.”

“You won’t, Caxton, and you’ll beg for death before—”

She started the car and rolled up the windows. It was freezing inside. She could only imagine how his feet must feel.

Don’t, she told herself. Don’t imagine it. Just don’t. She heard him shouting curses outside the car, but the engine noise muffled his words. She put the car in reverse and started to back up. He came running after her, of course, so she touched the accelerator and craned her head around to see where she was going.

She’d backed up a hundred yards before he started knocking on her window with his knuckles. She backed up another hundred before she rolled down her window. “Yes?” she asked. He was breathing very hard. His face was pale and the hairs inside his nostrils looked frozen together. “I don’t know. I don’t know where the lair is.”

She started to roll up her window again. He pounded on her window and she saw he was crying.

“I’m telling the truth,” he promised. “He never took me there. I begged him to, but he said it was like hell, and mortals couldn’t survive there. He said he would take me there when I received the curse.”

“Think hard,” she said. “You have to know something more. You must have seen or heard something. Do your feet still hurt?”

He nodded piteously. “Please—”

“Think hard,” she said again.

“Flowers,” he mumbled. “Malvern—”

“Make sense,” she told him, “or I’m leaving.”

“I never met Malvern, except in my dreams. There I saw her, and sometimes, I guess I saw what she saw. I saw her sitting up in her coffin, one night. Jameson had taken her out to get some air. I don’t know what this means, but there were flowers blooming in front of her. Flowers in a field, like in summer, though all around there was snow. I remember her thinking, there are flowers on his grave.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have?”

“Please,” he begged. “Just—please. It’s all. It’s all I have.”


She reached down into the leg well on the passenger side and picked up the slippers, intending on throwing them out to him and driving away. But no, she couldn’t do that. She knew what he was capable of—she couldn’t just let him go free.

“Get in,” she said, and pushed his door open.





Vampire Zero





Chapter 52.


Caxton drove in silence for a while, staring straight ahead. She’d thought this was going to work, that she was going to find out the lair’s location from Carboy. Instead he’d given her a very pretty, very useless image.

She was no closer to the solution than she’d ever been.

It was Carboy who started talking. Apparently once she’d broken the seal of his bravado, there was no controlling what came out. He started telling her about his childhood, about the frustrations and hardships of being a lonely teenage sociopath. He spoke freely of his desire to shoot up his school, and worse, about the night he’d killed his family. She didn’t want to hear it, not any of it. She almost hit him again, just to shut him up—but once he started talking about Jameson, she pricked up her ears.

“I found him, exhausted and starved. He was in my backyard. I was taking the trash out and he was leaning against the wall of our garage. I was scared at first. I mean, I knew what he was, right away. I thought he would kill me. But he didn’t. This was way back, in October, when he’d just accepted the curse. He’d been fighting his thirst for blood, but he’d gone as far as he could. He was sleeping in the woods, he said, in a tin bathtub in an abandoned house he’d found. The roof had caved in and there were broken beer bottles on the floor. I couldn’t imagine someone so beautiful living like that. I brought him into the house after my parents were asleep. I knew what he needed, so I cut my arm and dripped blood into his mouth.”

Caxton gripped the steering wheel harder and tried not to scream in frustration. If it had been anyone else’s house Jameson had crawled to—if Carboy’s parents had checked his room and seen what he had sleeping in his closet—everything could have been avoided. All the searching. All the false leads and dead ends. All the death.