“Get somewhere safe, as safe as you can,” Caxton said. “I’m coming!”
Glauer came thumping up the stairs and rushed out into the lobby. He didn’t need to be told what was going on—when Caxton beckoned him and ran out into the parking lot he just followed. A thin layer of powdery snow had covered her Mazda when she reached it. She didn’t have time to brush it off. Climbing inside, she grabbed the blue flasher she kept for emergencies and clamped it on the roof of the car, then plugged it into the cigarette lighter. She didn’t have a siren built into the car, but the light would at least keep them from getting pulled over on the way. She waited for Glauer to cram himself into the small passenger seat, then slammed on the accelerator and tore out of the parking lot and shot out toward the highway. The windshield wipers made short work of the snow in front of her, but new drifts kept piling up on the hood. At the on ramp she fought her way through the midst of the rush-?hour traffic—for once people actually got out of the way when they saw the flasher—and raced up the fast lane, heading northeast.
“It’s Jameson’s wife. His widow. His whatever,” Caxton explained. Glauer hadn’t asked, but she figured he must be wondering where they were going in such an all-?fired hurry. “She’s under attack.” She risked a glance over at him. He sat patiently looking straight ahead, his hands on the dashboard to brace himself every time she stepped on the brake. “From what I heard she hasn’t got a lot of time.”
Glauer took a look at the speedometer. “We’ll make it,” he promised, though he must know as well as she did that he was just being optimistic.
She tossed her cell phone to him. “Coordinate with the locals. Bellefonte can’t have much of a police force; it’s a tiny little place. Isn’t there a state police barracks out there, though?”
He flipped open the phone. “Yeah. At Rockview Station. That’s just a couple miles from town.” He made the calls, got people moving. Before she was halfway to Bellefonte he had three patrol cars headed for the scene, and two more cars with a pair of local cops each already parked out front. “There’s no answer at the door. They want authorization to force entry. Do I send them in?” he asked. They’ll probably get killed if they do, she thought. Astarte would definitely get killed if they didn’t.
“Yeah,” she said. “But tell them—tell them to be careful. Tell them to treat this like they’re breaching a survivalist compound full of gun nuts. Tell them not to get themselves killed if they can help it.”
Confirmation came back shortly that the troopers were leading an assault on the house, with the locals covering their backs. It would be long tense minutes before they heard anything more, but Caxton grabbed the phone out of Glauer’s hand and held it against the steering wheel, ready to answer the moment anyone called.
She tried to focus on her driving. The road conditions weren’t great—lots of thin crystalline snow blowing across the road, patches of black ice every time she crossed a bridge or a sketchy piece of highway. The Mazda wasn’t built for that kind of driving to begin with, and at her speed—eighty or better—it would slip and slide the second she let up a little on her grip on the wheel. She had to cut her speed drastically as she tore through State College. The road went right through the university town and she couldn’t risk hitting any students. Once she was past the Nittany Mall, though, she pushed the car back up to its limit.
The phone rang in her hand and she nearly lost control. No time for the hands-?free unit, she decided, and pushed it up against her ear, holding it there with her shoulder. “Go ahead,” she nearly screamed.
“Trooper?” the voice on the other end asked, sounding slightly surprised. “Is that you?” The voice was deep and rasping and she didn’t recognize it at first.
“Special Deputy, actually. What’s going on over there?”
“They made you a Special Deputy. That’s fascinating. I spent my adult life thinking I was unique, that no one else could fulfill my special purpose. Yet practically the moment I was gone, destiny just plugged someone else into the empty socket. Have we come full circle?”
“Oh, fuck,” Caxton said. Her foot eased off the accelerator. She was suddenly too scared to drive as fast as she’d been going. “Jameson. It’s you, isn’t it?”
“That’s a question for the philosophers. My wife seemed to think not.”
Caxton swallowed thickly. If it was Jameson on the phone, if he had somehow acquired the phone belonging to the lead of the state trooper team, that meant a lot of very bad things were also true. “You came for Astarte. You offered her the same choice you gave Angus, didn’t you? Become like you, or die. And she also refused.”