Caxton couldn’t deny it—she’d had her mind invaded by more vampires than she liked to remember.
“And after the second week in October he starts talking about a ‘she’ as well. Here: ‘She was beautiful once, and can be again. It would be an honor to feed her, to make her whole. It would be an act of love.’”
“So he was talking to Malvern, too. Okay. And this kid sounds about the right type to get a vampire’s interest. He was fucked up already, spiraling toward violence, ready to obliterate himself as long as he could take some other people with him. That would make him a perfect candidate to accept the curse.”
“Yeah,” Glauer said.
“But in the end they didn’t give it to him. He had to pretend he was a vampire. We know Jameson is recruiting. We know Malvern has recruited in the past, and I have no doubt she wants more vampires to come worship her. Neither of them gave Carboy what he wanted. That suggests to me he never met either of them face-?to-?face. Maybe he just imagined these conversations. Maybe he was just crazy.”
“Maybe, but there’s something here. Something…I need to read more.”
Caxton threw up her arms. “Alright. I don’t need you right now, actually. I’m going out to Allentown, to Raleigh’s place, but they don’t let men in there, you said. So spend the day on this if you need to. One day.”
He nodded gravely. “Thanks. This one is haunting me. If I can figure out what made him do it…I don’t know. I don’t know what that will achieve, in concrete terms, but it means something to me.”
“One day,” she repeated. “Wish me luck.” She left the basement and headed up to her car, finally ready to go to Allentown. She had her key in the ignition before she realized she hadn’t actually apologized to Glauer. Well, maybe, she thought, letting him dig through Carboy’s diseased brain was apology enough. She hoped so.
It was a long ride to Allentown, and she needed her sunglasses the whole way. Snow lay deep and thick on the fields she passed through, but the sun was out. In the towns, as she drove through the quiet residential streets, the eaves and gutters glittered with ice melt and the streets were filled with dark slush. The radio told her it was going up to fifty degrees by afternoon but that more snow was on the way. If there were blizzards coming, she thought, she would have to get Fetlock to give her a four-?wheel-?drive vehicle. The little Mazda wasn’t made for slippery conditions.
Eventually she started to recognize landmarks, old family restaurants that had been in business for decades, the main squares of little towns she’d visited a million times. Caxton had grown up in small towns all around the area, the old coal mining part of Pennsylvania, sometimes in the cities and sometimes in places that were nothing more than rows of cheap company housing built for coal miners in the previous century—places that didn’t even deserve the title of “town,” so instead they were called patches. She got to see one or two of them as she drove past, though very few of them lay near the main road. Almost all the old patches had been forgotten by time once the coal dried up or the mines were just shut down.