“It’s probably best if you stay away from my family for a while, Special Deputy. You’re on your way here right now, I presume. It would be better if you just turned around and went home. Of course, we both know you won’t.”
“When I get there will you be waiting for me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be there or not. The last time they’d met she’d put two nine-?millimeter slugs in his heart and it hadn’t done the trick. Would three work? Would the whole clip of fifteen in her Beretta be enough?
“I’m going to do my level best not to kill you yet, Special Deputy. I have a reason to want to keep you alive. But if you put yourself in harm’s way I can’t be held responsible anymore for your safety.”
“Stay there. I’m very close now,” she said, her pulse pounding in her temples. “Stay there and we can finish what we started. You didn’t want to become this monster, Jameson. Do you remember that? You accepted the curse to do one last good deed. To be a hero one more time. You’ve undone all that now, but it doesn’t have to go any further. We can still salvage something of your reputation.”
She was talking to dead air. The phone beeped at her twice, telling her the connection had been terminated.
She dropped the phone and screamed, pounding against the steering wheel with her hands. Glauer reached over to take the wheel away from her, but she shook herself violently and said, “Don’t. I’m alright.”
She wasn’t, of course. Not in the slightest. But she could still drive.
Vampire Zero
Chapter 19.
The roads were nearly empty as they tore into Bellefonte, racing up Water Street where it followed Spring Creek. By moonlight, sprinkled with snow, the town was eerily beautiful. Caxton had driven past the built-?up section of riverbank at the western end of town a thousand times and admired the gazebo and the parks there, but never before had it looked so spectral, so haunting. Stop that, she told herself. She was letting the night’s events get to her. She yanked out the cord of the blue flasher as she turned down a side road, cutting her speed to a bare crawl. “There’s a shotgun in the trunk,” she told Glauer.
“I thought this was your personal car,” he said.
She shrugged. “The last two months have been all business. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells there too. You grab those the second I stop the car, then follow my lead. This is not going to be fun.”
“Got it,” he said.
She took them down a street lined with massive trees that sheltered Victorian houses topped with mansard roofs and elaborate gables. Astarte’s house wasn’t hard to find. She just looked for the one with all the police cars parked out front.
Caxton stopped the Mazda well back, parking in the middle of the street in case she needed to make a quick getaway—or in case anyone else tried the same thing. Her car would block the main route back to the highway. It was a trick she’d learned in a course on tactical parking at the academy. She killed her lights and wrestled her Beretta out of its holster before she set a foot on the pavement. She didn’t watch Glauer get out of the car—her eyes were fixed on the street before the house—but she could hear him moving to the trunk. She could count on him, she knew. It was why they worked so well together. He always did exactly what she wanted.
Keeping her weapon low but ready, she moved quickly to the nearest cop car—one of the local units. Its flashers cycled wildly on its roof and its radio crackled with occasional calls from the Bellefonte dispatcher, but the seats were all empty, front and back. She moved to the next car, the other local patrol cruiser, and heard that its engine was still running. It was as empty as the first one, but there was blood on the windshield. The inside of the windshield.
The Bellefonte cops hadn’t even had a chance to get out of their car before Jameson was on them like a cat on a flock of pigeons. She bit her lip and tried not to think about the fact that she had authorized their approach. She was directly responsible for whatever had happened to them, but she could worry about that later.
Farther up the street the three state police cars made a roadblock across the eastern end of the street. Their flashers and engines were off, but she could see right away they were empty too. She didn’t see any bodies anywhere, nor any pieces of bodies. There was some more blood on the snow that covered Astarte’s lawn, but not enough of it to account for all the cops. There had been three state troopers and four local cops on the assault—seven men and no sign of any of them. It wasn’t like a vampire to clean up his own mess. She considered the fact that some of them might still be alive. If so she had to move fast. Beckoning to Glauer with a hand signal, she rushed up the steps of Astarte’s porch and threw herself against the green clapboard wall just to the left side of the door. There was a plaque there of polished brass, showing the outline of a hand crisscrossed with curving lines. Underneath was written:
MADAME ASTARTE
READINGS AND ADVICE