Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(87)

“He talked to me all night long. Just for companionship, I think. I told him how much I respected him. His strength of will—to be in a house full of people, to smell our blood, and still he didn’t hurt any of us. Even though we all deserved it.”

That was the Jameson Caxton remembered. She felt her gorge rising. She knew what must have come next.

“You could have called me,” Caxton snapped. “You could have stopped this.”

“But—I didn’t want to. He was—he was my friend. He understood me, understood my, my anger. Nobody else ever did. Nobody tried. They wanted me to go into therapy. As if I was the sick one. Not society, not everybody else, who only ever thought about money and, and sex, and being popular.”

So of course the object of that anger had become the one person who could take away his friend. Caxton. He had begun filling his notebooks then with her name, and his vows to destroy her. Carboy had more to tell. “With my blood in him he recovered fast. After just one night he was standing again, he was strong again. The second night, he went out. He went out to hunt. When he came back he told me he hadn’t killed anyone. I think he just followed some people around and thought about it. Thought about what he’d become, and what that made us. It made us his food.

“He told me about you. About how you were hunting for him. He said he couldn’t stay there, in my house. So we found him a new place.”

“A disused grain elevator,” she prompted.

“Yes! It was perfect. He brought Malvern’s coffin there. He said he would lock himself in with her. That maybe he would bury them both alive. He wanted to rot away down there, until he couldn’t dig his way out again. He didn’t want to die, but he was willing to spend the rest of time buried under the ground, unable to move or see or feel anything. But the blood—he wanted one last taste of blood. By then he’d started to change. To get more—aggressive. We talked about his taking my blood, but he knew that if I opened my veins again he wouldn’t be able to stop. He would kill me. So I suggested another way.”

“You robbed a blood bank.”

Carboy was weeping noisily. “It didn’t work. The blood was cold. It didn’t work. It only made him hungrier. If I hadn’t—if I hadn’t told Cady about him—”

“Cady Rourke,” Caxton said. “Your girlfriend.”


The boy’s voice broke as he continued. “She wanted to see him. She—she wasn’t my girlfriend, by the way. We were just friends, and yeah, sometimes we fooled around. But we saw other people, too. At least, Cady did. I couldn’t handle that. It used to tear me up, but I could never get up the courage to break it off with her. I was so afraid of being alone. When I brought Cady to see Jameson he got angry, I mean, really angry. He said I was putting him at risk. That he couldn’t trust Cady. He—he—”

“He killed her. Drank her blood.”

“I don’t think he meant to, he just didn’t see any other way,” Carboy said. His words came fast and thick, soggy with tears. “Then he left me, and I never saw him again. Just in my dreams. It was Malvern who sent me those, I think. She could tell what I was feeling. She saw my weakness. I felt her contempt for me—I thought, if I could just—just be strong, as strong as Jameson—I wouldn’t have to feel like that anymore.”

And so he had crept into his sister’s room, and put his hands around her throat, and squeezed. When that hadn’t been enough, when the feelings didn’t just go away, he had grabbed his shotgun and killed his parents as well.

It hadn’t been a long walk from there to dressing like a vampire. To make himself feel like a vampire. To make himself feel strong. The better his costume got, the closer he got to feeling like the real thing. Like a predator. Then suddenly he was in a storage facility with two dead bodies and the cops on the way. Now he was talking to her. Looking at her. Looking at her like she was the strong one. The one he wanted to be like. The one he thought could understand him.

In a very unsettling way, she did.

Caxton dropped him off at the closest police station, just a few miles away. She didn’t go in herself, just watched him as he ran up the icy steps, his feet red and yellow with the cold. She saw faces in the windows watching her and knew someone would write down her license plate number, but it didn’t matter much. Once Carboy’s identity was established and he told his story, Fetlock and as many cops as he could round up would come howling for her blood.

She already knew she was tight for time. It had been three hours since Raleigh walked out of the Harrisburg HQ with Simon under her arm. Twenty-?one to go. If she kept moving she could evade Fetlock at least that long. Of course, when you were on the run, it helped to know where you were going.

She picked up her phone, then realized she didn’t know whom to call. In the olden days Jameson could have advised her on her next step. If not him, then Vesta Polder, who was gone now, too. She could have called Glauer, but she knew he worked for Fetlock now. Glauer was a nice guy, but he knew enough to cover his ass. If he helped Caxton now, he would be putting his own job in danger. In the end she called Clara, because Clara would at least be on her side.

“Honey, it’s me,” she sighed when Clara picked up her phone. “I’m in pretty bad shape and I need somebody to talk me through this—”

“Laura, I can’t talk right now,” Clara said in response.