Part 18 (1/2)
”The night I took over this case,” he said, his face neutral. ”The night we met, a half-dead followed you home.”
She didn't understand what that had meant, either. ”I remember,” she said.
”You were on this case before I was. You're part of the case. The vampires know you and they want something from you. I'd be a fool to let you out of my sight.”
She remembered what he'd said about Hazlitt. If someone was determined to be your enemy you gave them exactly what they want. The vampires wanted her. They were out to consume her, one way or another. So he would dangle her before their toothy mouths just so he could get close enough to jump down their throats himself.
”That's... it?” she asked. Her heart sank in her chest. All the time she'd spent trying to prove herself, to impress him, was wasted. All that time and effort was wasted.
”That's it,” he told her. He opened the door of his car and climbed inside. She let him go.
She was vampire bait. And that was all that she was. She watched him drive away. She had no idea where he was headed. Perhaps he wanted to check out the substation near Kennett Square by himself, or maybe he wanted to exhume Efrain Reyes. Maybe he just didn't want to be around her, maybe he was afraid she would be angry.
She was, of course. And confused. And sad. And afraid. And just a little bit relieved.
Relieved because she had finally found how she fit into the vampire investigation. Because now she knew exactly where she stood with Arkeley.
She collected her own car and drove in the general direction of home, her over-worked brain a little a.s.suaged by the sound of her wheels hissing on the asphalt and the rising and falling roar of the engine. She rubbed at her eyes and blinked a lot as if she was going to cry, but she didn't. She didn't even know why she expected to. Of all the emotions struggling inside of her none stood out so strongly as to require such an over-reaction.
Hunger blossomed inside of her and she knew it had to be bad if it could compete with all her other concerns. She pulled over at a place in Reading where they made good cheese steaks and ordered one ”wit wiz,” which meant she wanted onions and Cheese Wiz, the traditional condiments. She sat down in a little booth with her steak and a diet c.o.ke and chewed resolutely on the sandwich. It was good but her mind kept wandering and her tongue stopped tasting anything. She was half done with her meal before she stopped to think about the real issue, the thing that should have consumed her with panic and really made her cry.
The vampires wanted her for something. Something specific, something specific to her life. The half-dead who followed her home the first night had been sent on a mission. But what mission? Just to scare her? In that case it had been successful. But she couldn't imagine the vampires would waste time just on giving her a shock.
Her mind cast backward, a little desperately, looking for anything in her life that might explain the vampiric interest. She thought of previous cases she'd worked on, but nothing stood out. She worked highway patrol-how could that mean anything to Malvern and her brood? She tried to remember the car wrecks she'd seen, tried to draw some kind of connection but nothing came to her. She'd sent some people to prison, in her time, for driving under the influence, for possession of drugs. She had caught them, arrested them, testified against them in court. The perpetrators had been sad, broken people, though, people who needed to drink or inject methamphetamines more than they needed to stay out of jail. None of them had really put up much of a fight and they could never look her in the eye when they went to trial. How could a few drunk businessmen and stoned teenagers possibly matter to Justinia Malvern?
Caxton thought it must be something personal, then. But what? She wasn't the kind of person who made a lot of enemies. She didn't have a lot of friends, either-and that made her think of Efrain Reyes. A non-ent.i.ty, Arkeley had called him. Someone with no real life. Someone no one would miss when he died. Caxton had a life, of sorts, but there were holes in it. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. She had a few friends in the Troop, but they rarely hung out together any more. The beer she'd shared with Clara Hsu had been the first time she'd been in a bar in months. Clara-Clara would wonder what had happened to her if she disappeared, but not for long. Deanna would be devastated, mentally destroyed, but the only real change in Deanna's life post-Caxton would be she would have to go back to living with her alcoholic mother. If the one person who defined your life you had no life herself, what did that say about you? She had the dogs, who would miss her very much, but Caxton didn't suppose dogs counted.
Malvern had been looking for a fourth candidate, someone she could add to her brood. Every cell in Caxton's body squirmed at the same time. She stared down at the mess of grease and gristle on her plate and felt bile frothing in her throat. Was Malvern-could Malvern-turn her into a vampire?
She got back in her car and rushed home. She needed to get inside and be safe for a while. She would definitely sleep in the next morning, she decided, and let other, more qualified people raid the substation.
She knew the road back to her house like the lines on her palm. She could drive the route half-asleep, and often did. Yet as she approached her own driveway she felt suddenly as if she'd never seen the place before. As if she were no longer welcome in her own house. Unnatural, Arkeley kept saying. Vampires were abominations against nature. Was this how that felt? To be around life and warmth and comfort and feel like you were visiting some alien world?
She started to pull into the driveway and stopped short because she'd heard something. A crash, a bright melody of gla.s.s breaking as if a window had been knocked in. She unholstered her weapon and slowly, taking every possible precaution, stepped down into the gra.s.s of her lawn. She couldn't see anything from the front of the house so she edged around the side, toward the kennels and Deanna's shed.
Shards of broken window pane littered the side yard, long triangular pieces leaning up against the side of the house. Someone wearing a hooded sweats.h.i.+rt, maybe a teenaged boy, was standing next to the shattered window, his hands resting on the empty frame. He looked as if he were talking to someone inside the house.
”Freeze,” she barked in her best cop voice. The boy turned to look at her. Flesh hung in tatters on his face. He was a half-dead. She discharged her weapon without even thinking too hard and the half-dead's fragile body split apart in pieces. The chunks slumped to the ground. The stink coming off of him made her eyes water. She stepped closer anyway, intending to search his pockets, when she finally had a chance to look in through the window.
Deanna stood there naked from the waist up, her outstretched hands, her lower face, her bare chest all covered in bright red blood.
”Jesus, Dee, Jesus, what did he do to you?” Caxton sobbed. She wiped at Deanna's face with a wet washcloth and found a three-inch-long wound along the edge of her chin. It was going to need st.i.tches but that a.s.sumed she could get Deanna to a hospital before she bled to death. Caxton picked the larger s.h.i.+vers of gla.s.s out of the cut but that just made it bleed more. She pulled open the drawer where they kept their scissors and their twine and found a roll of thick masking tape. Lacking any better ideas she stretched a length of it across the cut and pressed down.
Deanna howled with pain. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut and her knees were up against her chest where she lay on the kitchen floor. Her hands were wrapped up in an old t-s.h.i.+rt that was already soaking through with blood. She had wounds all over the front of her body as well, tiny cuts and big lacerations. Caxton had called 911 and they were sending an ambulance but the blood kept flowing and flowing.
”What did he do to you?” Caxton asked again, smearing blood on her own face as she tried to wipe away her tears. If the ambulance didn't come soon she would lose Deanna, just like she'd lost her mother. It was more than she could bear, especially with everything else that was happening. ”What did he do?”
”Who?” Deanna wailed. She had been hypnotized, or perhaps just in shock, when Caxton found her but now she was recovering herself and the pain came too. Caxton shushed her and stroked her red hair but the bleeding just wouldn't stop. She didn't know what to do, how to save Deanna. She didn't know what to do. She wanted to scream herself. ”Who?” Deanna asked again.