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.

“Hello? Who’s calling?” she said. That was about all she could manage.

“It’s Deputy Marshal Fetlock. Are you alright?”

Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. She sat up straighter in the chair, complaining muscles notwithstanding. “Yes, sir.” Putting her feet down on the floor, she started to think about standing up.

“I’ve had some very disturbing reports out of the field office in Syracuse. I wanted to discuss your conduct. Special Deputy Benicio tells me you illegally entered and searched Simon Arkeley’s apartment. Is that true?”

“There were exigent circumstances,” she said. It wasn’t strictly a lie. Simon’s life had been at risk and she’d only forced the door in order to protect him.

“Benicio doesn’t corroborate that,” Fetlock told her.

She got her feet down, then stood up all in one go. It was easy then to stagger to the door and push it open. The holding cells were just down the hall—she needed to check. “Sir, Simon is now in my custody.” She considered telling him that the boy had confessed to stealing the files from the USMS archives, but she worried he might insist she drag him down to Virginia and relinquish him to the authorities there. That was the last thing she wanted. She needed to keep him close, where she could watch him. “I do not believe he will be interested in pressing charges.”

“For your sake I hope so. We can’t have this kind of behavior, Caxton.”

There were eight cells, little bigger than closets, lining either side of a short corridor. Only a few of them were occupied. She counted down the cells. She’d put Simon in the third cell on the left side herself. She came up to the bars and looked in. There he was. Sleeping. She watched his chest rise and fall. He was still alive.

“Sir,” she said, “can I ask you what time it is?”

“It’s eight-oh-two, by my clock,” Fetlock told her. “Don’t try to evade the issue.”

She tried to remember, but couldn’t, what time sunrise was. “Please. Just tell me something. Is the sun up yet?” she asked.

“Yes, Special Deputy. It is. But—”

“Oh, thank God,” Caxton said. That meant she’d made it through the night. It meant she’d gone twenty-four hours without discharging her weapon. More important, it meant it had been more than twenty-four hours since anyone died. “Thank God,” she said again. “Thank God.”

Fetlock kept talking, but she barely heard him. She made apologetic noises where appropriate, but she didn’t bother explaining her actions—why should she? Raleigh and Simon were alive. Jameson’s plot to recruit new vampires had failed. She could keep his children safe while she hunted for him, for his lair. And where she found him she would find Malvern as well. She wasn’t done yet. It would take more time, more work, more risk, to finish off the vampires, but she’d taken an important step.

Of course, the vampires wouldn’t let her have her moment of triumph without ruining it somehow.

When she finally got Fetlock off the phone, it chimed at her to tell her she had a voice mail message waiting. The call had come in during the early hours of the morning, shortly after she’d fallen asleep. She recognized the number it came from right away: it was from the phone Jameson had stolen from a dead cop in Bellefonte.

Steeling herself, she dialed her voice mail and waited to hear his growling voice again. Except when the message played it wasn’t a male voice.

It was a very short message. “Keep the boy from harm, Laura. I have plans for him.”

It was recognizably a woman’s voice, though so creaky and rough she could barely make out the words. At first she didn’t understand, couldn’t think of who it might be. Then she remembered she had heard that voice before, just once, more than a year previously. It was the voice of Justinia Malvern.

She was talking again. Jameson had fed her enough blood to give her her voice back. That meant it was only a matter of time before she would start walking under her own power.

It didn’t matter. Caxton told herself that, over and over. The kids were both in protective custody. She was making progress. She signed the necessary papers and had Simon released into her recognizance. The boy looked almost pathetically grateful as she led him out of the police station and into the parking lot. It had stopped snowing during the night, and all of Syracuse was buried under a thick layer of white that hurt her eyes to look at. She slipped on her sunglasses and eventually found her car. It was under six inches of snow, but the red paint showed through here and there. Together she and Simon dug it out and then climbed inside, their breath pluming across the windows and leaving them fogged.

Before they got on the highway she stopped at a fast-food restaurant for breakfast. Simon, it turned out, was a vegetarian. They had trouble finding him a salad, but eventually he settled for one with a few withered vegetables and some strips of fried chicken he could pick out. He laid them carefully on a napkin, which he then folded up and stuck inside the bag. This he crumpled up in his hands and put in his pocket for later disposal.

Caxton looked into the Mazda’s backseat and saw all the wrappers and bags she’d thrown back there. Neither of them said anything.

The snowplows had cleared the highways and laid down a thick scurf of rock salt. The road surface was wet and shiny, but the chains on her tires held it just fine.

It was only a little after noon when she arrived back at Harrisburg and the state police headquarters. She brought Simon inside and went looking for Glauer. He was down in the SSU briefing room, pinning up a picture of Raleigh’s friend Violet under VAMPIRE PATTERN #1. In the picture the girl wore a black hooded sweatshirt, unzipped to show some generous cleavage, and piercings in her nose and ears. She looked unhappy. Nothing like the smiling girl in a baggy sweater Caxton had seen die at the convent.

“Where’d you get that?” Caxton asked.

“The girl’s parents. They agreed to the cremation, by the way. They did it last night, as a rush job.”

“Good,” Caxton said, “though it was probably unnecessary. Jameson would know I had a guard on her body. If he raised her I could have interrogated her.”

“Sure,” Glauer said. He wrote Violet’s name on the board with a dry erase marker. VIOLET HARMON. Caxton hadn’t even known her last name before.

“I brought Simon back in one piece,” Caxton said, and introduced the boy to the big cop.

“I’m so sorry, for everything that’s happened,” Glauer said, his big hand folding around one of Simon’s. “I promise, we did everything we could to help your mother.”

“I’m sure you did,” Simon said.

“Listen, your sister is here. Do you want to see her?”

The boy frowned. “Why?” he asked. Then he shook his head as if to clear it.

“You should talk about what’s happened.” Glauer patted Simon on the shoulder. “Your family needs to be together at a time like this. Love and support mean everything in the face of grief.”

Simon shrugged. “I’ve never really done the big brother thing before.”

“Just wait in the lounge, then,” Glauer said, and gestured toward the door. When Simon went out of the room the big cop turned to Caxton and rolled his eyes. “He’s about as bad as you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Caxton asked, but with a smile. Nothing could ruin her good mood. When Glauer didn’t answer she followed him out into the hallway. “I take it,” she said, “from the fact that everybody here is still alive, that Jameson didn’t attack last night.”

“No, he didn’t,” Glauer told her. “And I’ll admit I was kind of relieved. You made it sound like one night alone with Raleigh was going to be the death of me. Instead it was kind of fun.”

“Really?” Caxton’s smile broadened. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?”

Glauer blushed but assured her nothing like what she was insinuating had happened. “She got bored pretty early, which didn’t surprise me. I mean, what’s a nineteen-year-old girl going to do spending the night in an office building? We played a game of Scrabble—”

“Who won?” Caxton asked.

“She did. With chasma on a triple word score. I challenged, because I’d never heard of it before, but it turns out it’s a medical term for excessive yawning. After that I gave her the grand tour of the place—the PCO room, the computer crimes unit, the evidence room, the garage…”

“Did you let her wear your Smokey Bear hat?”

Glauer blushed again, but didn’t comment on whether he had or not. They went up the stairs to the barracks wing of the headquarters, where off-duty troopers often slept between shifts. There were several semiprivate bedrooms there. “I kept her up kind of late—I didn’t sleep at all myself, of course, because I was on watch. She’s still sleeping, I think, or at least she hasn’t come out of there yet.” He indicated a particular door and raised his knuckles as if to knock on it. “I don’t know, maybe we should just let her sleep.”

“It’s almost one o’clock,” Caxton said. “If she sleeps any later she’ll never sleep tonight. Go on.”

Glauer knocked once, tentatively, and waited a second. When there was no answer he knocked again with more determination. By the time Caxton started frowning he had knocked three times and gotten no response at all.

“Open it,” she said.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open. The shades were drawn over the windows of the room beyond, so it was lit by the glow of a television with the sound turned off. It gave a bluish cast to everything, but instantly Caxton realized that it couldn’t explain why Raleigh’s lips were so purple, or why her face was so pale. She rushed inside and cupped her hand over the girl’s mouth and nose.

“She’s not breathing,” she said, looking up at the big cop in the doorway, who could only stare back with nothing on his face but surprise.