Vincombe waited for her there.
“Damn ye,” Justinia grunted. “Ye followed me.”
Vincombe ignored her and squatted down to catch the girl and look deeply into her eyes. “It’s alright, now, child,” he said. “I’m your father. I’m perfectly fine. And you’re safe now. Trust me.”
Justinia watched the girl go limp in Vincombe’s arms. She actually sighed a little in pleasure as he twisted her head until her neck snapped.
“We are meant to be hunters. Not demons,” he said. Then he tossed the body to Justinia. “Drink. Then come find me outside. It’s time we talked.”
Justinia did not waste a drop. It was getting difficult to conceal her murders these days. The local authorities knew something was up—too many bodies had been discovered in the river, bloodless and mutilated. Questions had been asked. Justinia had been forced to flee Manchester, the city of her awakening, and instead haunt the darker night out in the countryside.
When she’d finished, she walked out into the light of the burning barn. Vincombe waited for her inside the flames. They did not harm him. She approached, and found that her skin shriveled as she got too close. The fire couldn’t kill her, she knew that from past experience—but it could cause her unbearable pain.
Yet he simply stood there in the conflagration and stared at her.
“How?” she demanded.
He refused to answer her question. “Ye didn’t fear death. I thought, perhaps, that finally someone understood my work,” he told her. “That I had been given someone to help me. A new angel of death, to lighten my burden.”
She snarled at him.
They had met only rarely since her transformation, and never for more than a single night. She didn’t know where he slept during the day. If she ever found out, she would find a way to destroy him. He wasn’t her father. He wasn’t anything to her, except competition.
But now—now as she watched him stand in the flames that would not consume him—now she wondered if maybe he did not have more to give her.
“Ye tease them,” he said, and there was a sorrow in his voice that she would never understand. “Ye make them fear you before you do what is necessary. This isn’t a game.”
Justinia closed her eye and saw the cards falling toward the table. Lucky cards, ill-favored cards. Aces and deuces, diamonds and clubs. How could he not understand? All of life was a game. A wager, placed against death. And death always won.
“Ye may justify your actions as you please,” she said. “We were given these powers to use at our pleasure.”
“God granted me the right to take lives, lives that are ready to be culled. Lives that have lost meaning, the lives of men who have forgotten their souls, though their bodies are still strong and—”
“God?” Justinia demanded. “Ye think God made us like this?”
He came out of the flames then, so fast and so strong she had no time to defend herself. He grasped her around the waist in arms like iron bars, twisted her around, thrust her face toward the flames.
“Ye didn’t fear death,” he said. “Do ye not fear hell, either?”
She felt the skin of her nose dry out, felt it stretch painfully. She felt her chin burning like a brand. Her eye began to boil in its socket.
“I’ll teach you,” he said, and his voice was harsh and breathless. It was a voice she knew, the voice of the men who had paid to lie with her. The voice they used when they called her a whore. When they announced how they would possess her, how they would show her to her proper place. “I’ll teach ye to fear hell.”
“Yes,” she said, because she knew what men wanted when they used that voice. “Yes. I’ve been such a naughty girl. Teach me, master.”
And while you’re at it, she thought, teach me to stand in fire and not be burned. Teach me how to hypnotize a child by simply looking into her eyes. Teach me everything you know.
When he finally pulled her out of the flames the skin and flesh on her head had burned down to the skull. Her one eye had gone milky and dull, and she could see nothing. Her tongue was gone and she could not speak.
In the morning, when she slept, all would be healed. This new body could heal any wound. But in the meantime, she could still listen. She could still hear him as he whispered secrets in her ears.
And she forced herself to remember every word. To fix them in her mind, as eternal and changeless as scripture. That was the night she began to learn the orisons.
He let her sleep, and heal, when dawn began to break. She did not expect to see him the next night when she rose from her coffin, but he was there. He had more to teach her, and by then she understood the game. If she made him believe that she wanted to be a good little angel of death, that she wanted to be his protégé, he would teach her everything she wanted to know.
Eventually he began to even trust her. “It’s time ye met the others,” he said.
“There are others?” she demanded. “Others like ye?”
Because she knew there could be no others like herself.
14.
A little bell rang as Clara pushed open the door of a diner in Bridgeville, one of the suburbs of Pittsburgh. She’d been driving for hours to get here, but she wasn’t tired. If Glauer had what he claimed, it would be more than worth it.
Her eyes had been trained by working for the police for so long. She took in all the little details right away. The diner was deserted except for one waitress who was mopping up a spill of coffee on the counter. At the very back of the dining room, as far away from the parking lot as you could get, Glauer sat hunched over a table. A half-eaten plate of pancakes sat in front of him, as well as three empty coffee cups. He’d been waiting awhile.
The two of them had to meet in secret like criminals even though they were both decorated police officers. Fetlock had a passionate disregard for personal privacy, and since he was still their boss he was allowed to pry into their lives as much as he liked. He routinely tapped their phones and kept tabs on where they went and what they got up to.
Fetlock had a good enough reason for that paranoia, Clara supposed. After all, his employees were conspiring against him.
Clara sat down across from Glauer without a word. They went through their old ritual of putting their cell phones on the table. Clara popped the battery out of her phone and set it down next to the salt and pepper shakers. Glauer’s phone had already been sabotaged in the same way.
It was a creepy world they lived in. Fetlock could listen to their conversations through their phones even if the phones were turned off and hidden in their pockets. They had to be careful.
“It’s good to see you,” Clara said once they’d both sighed and relaxed a little.
“You been alright? Bruises healed up?” Glauer asked.
“I’m good,” Clara said. She gave him a warm smile. “How are your investigations going?”
Glauer shrugged. “You mean my official stuff, right? We’re closing in on a guy who provides chemical supplies to meth labs. Technically he doesn’t do anything illegal. Just runs a wholesale scientific supply warehouse. We might have to run a sting, send somebody in undercover and get him to implicate itself. It’s a long job.”
Clara nodded. When Justinia Malvern was—allegedly—killed during a prison riot, their old outfit, the special subjects unit, was closed down. Disbanded. Fetlock had found other things for the two of them to do. Glauer had become a kind of detective at large, while Clara had been sent off to school to become a forensic analyst. Both of them still got their paychecks from Fetlock, but he didn’t want them to screw up his manhunt for Laura Caxton.
He couldn’t stop them from talking to each other, though.
“You said you had something,” Clara said, and bit her lip. As always when they met she wondered if she should ask Glauer about his family, about his notoriously unsuccessful love life. She often worried she didn’t spend enough time shooting the shit with him. Acting like she was his friend, instead of jumping right in to what she r
eally wanted from him.
He didn’t seem to mind. She thought maybe he was just as desperate as she was to find Caxton. Though for very different reasons.
“Simon Arkeley,” Glauer said, and laid a manila file folder on the diner table.
Clara’s eyes lit up. “The only survivor,” she said. “The only one who made it out alive from the Jameson Arkeley case.”
Glauer nodded and tapped the folder. “He’s—”
He stopped abruptly as the waitress came over to take Clara’s order. “Just a Diet Coke, thanks,” she said.
The waitress tried to stifle a yawn as she went back to the counter.
“Simon,” Clara said. “I’ve heard he’s a little unstable. Not that I blame him after what happened to his family.”
Glauer nodded. “He spent the last two years in heavy therapy. Even went away for a while, for a rest at a private mental hospital in Colorado. I guess he wanted to get as far from Pennsylvania as he could. Away from where it all happened. For the last six months he’s been seeing a therapist three times a week.”
“Poor kid,” Clara said with a frown.
Glauer nodded. “I feel for him. It can’t have been easy.”
“You think he’s in contact with Laura, though? I would think she was the last person he’d want to see.” Clara shivered, though it was warm enough in the diner. “Laura … well, she killed his father. And his sister. They were vampires, but—she tried to save his uncle but was too late. She tried to save his mom, and …”
“I was with her that night. It was bad. Real bad.” Glauer pushed the manila folder to one side. “No. No, I don’t think he’d want to see her at all. But.”
He took another folder from beside him on the seat and put it before her. She thumbed it open as the waitress brought her drink. Inside the folder was a dossier on Urie Polder. It was strangely incomplete. Polder had no social security number. He paid his taxes every year, on time, but used money orders instead of personal checks. He didn’t seem to have a bank account, or a credit card, or even a telephone number. There was one report in the folder that stood out, a memorandum from the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that listed Polder as a potential cult leader, but offered no proof of that statement. Funny how a dossier like that could twist things around. It made Polder look like some kind of homegrown terrorist. She’d met him a couple of times, however, and she knew he was a sweet, if slightly creepy, old man. Completely harmless. “Now, he’s someone I’d like to talk to.”
Glauer nodded. “He disappeared shortly after Caxton broke out of prison. Moved house, no forwarding address provided. Took his daughter with him. Child Services for Centre County would really like to ask him about her schooling, but of course, they can’t find him either. We’ve suspected for a long time that Caxton went underground with Polder, but neither of them has so much as blipped on the radar screen since they disappeared.”
Clara nodded. “Okay. I knew most of this already. So what’s the connection? How do you get from Simon Arkeley to Urie Polder?” Which, of course, meant getting to Laura.
“That,” Glauer said, leaning back in his seat, “took some actual good old-fashioned police work. I asked my hairstylist.”
15.
Clara smiled, but she didn’t say anything. She let Glauer tell it in his own words.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on Simon. Not even thinking he would lead me to Caxton—I just wanted to make sure the kid was okay. I always felt … responsible for what happened to his sister. I was supposed to be guarding her when she went vamp on us. I just … I feel bad about that.”
Clara reached across the table and gave Glauer’s hand a warm squeeze. He was such a good man, and he gave himself so little credit.
The big cop looked away from her face as he went on. “Simon’s been keeping his nose clean, of course. Finished up his schoolwork and got his diploma. Moved on, it looked like. Started applying to graduate schools. Bought a car. Then, one day, he started shopping at some pretty shady places. Botanicas—you know what a botanica is? I didn’t. It’s a place you can go and get magic herbs and fancy candles that drive away evil spirits. Stuff they use in Mexico, and Haiti, and Brazil. Most of them are just scamming their customers, promising that a jar of consecrated graveyard dirt will drive off the evil eye, whatever, and the dirt came from a ditch in back of the store. Simon went to one of these places in Wilkes-Barre, that’s almost a hundred miles from where he lives. He knew the right place to go. After he left, carrying a bunch of bags, I went in and asked to know what he bought. The old lady who ran the place told me to go to hell. Wouldn’t talk to me at all. I figured maybe that was as far as I needed to go in prying into Simon’s life. But then I thought of something.”
“What did you do?”
“I got his credit card statements. You wouldn’t believe how trusting people can be, even these days. If you call up a bank and say you’re with the U.S. Marshals, they give you whatever you want. So I went through the statements for the day in question and I found a list of everything he bought at the botanica. It was all itemized. Problem was, I had no idea what any of it meant or what it was good for. He bought a bunch of roots and plant parts. Weird stuff, too, exotic plants that don’t grow much north of the equator. I couldn’t even pronounce most of the names, but one stuck out. John the Conqueror root.”
“That sounds—weird,” Clara said.
Glauer nodded. “But so what, right? The kid gets a cold, he takes some funny plants as medicine. Lots of people do that. Unh-uh. Not that simple. John the Conqueror root isn’t an alternative therapy for pimples. They used to write blues songs about the stuff and what it could do to you if you shaved it into your oatmeal. I started asking around. The lady who does my hair knew what it was for. She’s Haitian. When I first asked her she clammed up real fast. Said that was nothing a white guy needed to worry about. Then she asked me if I was having trouble in the bedroom.”
Glauer blushed and looked down at his uneaten pancakes.
“I’m sure that’s not a problem for you,” Clara said.
“Damn straight. Er—you know what I mean. Anyway. I told her, yeah, I was, you know. She said one of the uses of John the Conqueror root is restoring sexual potency. But you can’t just eat it, or anything. It needs to be prepared properly. You need a guy who can work the right spells on it and so on. I asked her if she knew anybody like that and she said no. She didn’t know any conjure doctors.”
“Conjure—that’s—”
“That’s one of the things Caxton used to call Urie Polder. A conjure doctor. So we’ve got this kid, Simon, buying shady materials he has no use for. And we know he is very peripherally connected with somebody who does have a use for them. I’m thinking that connection got a little less peripheral recently. And the only reason I can imagine why Simon would have anything to do with Urie Polder—”
“—Is if Laura had asked him to,” Clara said.
For a long time the two cops just stared at each other. Then Clara picked up her Diet Coke and sipped at it. “This could be nothing. Or, if we watch Simon closely enough, he could lead us right to her.”
Glauer nodded. He’d said his piece.
“Okay,” Clara said. “Okay. This is—this is good. That was some first-rate old-fashioned detective work.”
Glauer shrugged.
Clara hugged herself. She wanted to giggle, but she didn’t dare. This was the first real lead in two years. This was it, she could feel it. She dug some money out of her wallet and threw it on the table. “Your pancakes are on me.” She started to get up, gathered up her cell phone and its battery. But he lifted one hand to stop her.
“Hold on,” he said.
“There’s something else?”
He seemed to be wrestling with something. Glauer didn’t look like the kind of man who had a lot of deep thoughts, but she knew appearances could be deceiving.
“What are you going to do? When you find her?” he asked.
Clara o
pened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words. “Just—talk to her,” she said, finally.
“You know she doesn’t want to be found.”
Clara’s heart sagged in her chest. “I know. I know that, but. But. But!”
“But what?”
“I need to tell her about that half-dead I saw. She needs to know about that.”
“The half-dead you think you saw,” Glauer clarified. “You’ve been a cop long enough to know that’s different from evidence. And anyway, what will that mean to Caxton? She already believes Malvern is still alive.”
“Come on! You’ve been working this case with me for years. You want to find her as much as I do.”
“I want to know she’s okay. I want her to know that anything I can do, all she has to do is ask. I can achieve that by telling Simon as much. I don’t have to put her at risk just to let her know that.”
Clara stared daggers at him, but he didn’t flinch. Was he really going to make her say it? “I need to tell her I still love her.”
He nodded. Accepting that. She knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t fight her on that. But then he said something that he must have known would hurt her. “Two years ago she made a choice. She could have gone back to her cell and waited for us to lock her away again. Instead she ran. Even knowing that it would make her a fugitive. An outlaw. Maybe she still loves you, but she chose the vampires instead.”
“She had to.” Clara’s cheeks were burning. “You know that, you asshole. You know she couldn’t just stop, not until Malvern was really, really dead. It’s who she is.”
Glauer shrugged. “I didn’t say she made the wrong choice.”
Clara grabbed her phone and fled the diner, not looking back. If the waitress wondered why she hurried off in such a huff, she didn’t care.
[ 1729 ]
Justinia shrank back in terror from the thing in the coffin. “What in the devil’s name is that?” she demanded, horrified because she already knew.
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 7
