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.