Carboy’s lips curled back. “When I receive the curse, I’ll track you down, Caxton. I’ll return this torment and visit a thousand more upon you—”
She interrupted him. “Do you know about Malvern’s eye? She’s only got one, of course. She lost the other before she became a vampire. Now no matter how much blood she drinks, no matter how long she spends rejuvenating in her coffin, she still only has one eye. Body parts don’t grow back.” She shrugged.
“Let’s say the impossible happens, and Jameson does give you the curse. You’ll be the vampire with no feet. You’ll spend the rest of your life unable to walk and unable to hunt for victims. And of course, vampires live forever.”
“You won’t, Caxton, and you’ll beg for death before—”
She started the car and rolled up the windows. It was freezing inside. She could only imagine how his feet must feel.
Don’t, she told herself. Don’t imagine it. Just don’t.
She heard him shouting curses outside the car, but the engine noise muffled his words. She put the car in reverse and started to back up. He came running after her, of course, so she touched the accelerator and craned her head around to see where she was going.
She’d backed up a hundred yards before he started knocking on her window with his knuckles. She backed up another hundred before she rolled down her window. “Yes?” she asked.
He was breathing very hard. His face was pale and the hairs inside his nostrils looked frozen together. “I don’t know. I don’t know where the lair is.”
She started to roll up her window again. He pounded on her window and she saw he was crying.
“I’m telling the truth,” he promised. “He never took me there. I begged him to, but he said it was like hell, and mortals couldn’t survive there. He said he would take me there when I received the curse.”
“Think hard,” she said. “You have to know something more. You must have seen or heard something.
Do your feet still hurt?”
He nodded piteously. “Please—”
“Think hard,” she said again.
“Flowers,” he mumbled. “Malvern—”
“Make sense,” she told him, “or I’m leaving.”
“I never met Malvern, except in my dreams. There I saw her, and sometimes, I guess I saw what she saw. I saw her sitting up in her coffin, one night. Jameson had taken her out to get some air. I don’t know what this means, but there were flowers blooming in front of her. Flowers in a field, like in summer, though all around there was snow. I remember her thinking, there are flowers on his grave.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have?”
“Please,” he begged. “Just—please. It’s all. It’s all I have.”
She reached down into the leg well on the passenger side and picked up the slippers, intending on throwing them out to him and driving away. But no, she couldn’t do that. She knew what he was capable of—she couldn’t just let him go free.
“Get in,” she said, and pushed his door open.
Chapter 52.
Caxton drove in silence for a while, staring straight ahead. She’d thought this was going to work, that she was going to find out the lair’s location from Carboy. Instead he’d given her a very pretty, very useless image.
She was no closer to the solution than she’d ever been.
It was Carboy who started talking. Apparently once she’d broken the seal of his bravado, there was no controlling what came out. He started telling her about his childhood, about the frustrations and hardships of being a lonely teenage sociopath. He spoke freely of his desire to shoot up his school, and worse, about the night he’d killed his family. She didn’t want to hear it, not any of it. She almost hit him again, just to shut him up—but once he started talking about Jameson, she pricked up her ears.
“I found him, exhausted and starved. He was in my backyard. I was taking the trash out and he was leaning against the wall of our garage. I was scared at first. I mean, I knew what he was, right away. I thought he would kill me. But he didn’t. This was way back, in October, when he’d just accepted the curse. He’d been fighting his thirst for blood, but he’d gone as far as he could. He was sleeping in the woods, he said, in a tin bathtub in an abandoned house he’d found. The roof had caved in and there were broken beer bottles on the floor. I couldn’t imagine someone so beautiful living like that. I brought him into the house after my parents were asleep. I knew what he needed, so I cut my arm and dripped blood into his mouth.”
Caxton gripped the steering wheel harder and tried not to scream in frustration. If it had been anyone else’s house Jameson had crawled to—if Carboy’s parents had checked his room and seen what he had sleeping in his closet—everything could have been avoided. All the searching. All the false leads and dead ends. All the death.
“He talked to me all night long. Just for companionship, I think. I told him how much I respected him. His strength of will—to be in a house full of people, to smell our blood, and still he didn’t hurt any of us. Even though we all deserved it.”
That was the Jameson Caxton remembered. She felt her gorge rising. She knew what must have come next.
“You could have called me,” Caxton snapped. “You could have stopped this.”
“But—I didn’t want to. He was—he was my friend. He understood me, understood my, my anger.
Nobody else ever did. Nobody tried. They wanted me to go into therapy. As if I was the sick one. Not society, not everybody else, who only ever thought about money and, and sex, and being popular.”
So of course the object of that anger had become the one person who could take away his friend.
Caxton. He had begun filling his notebooks then with her name, and his vows to destroy her.
Carboy had more to tell. “With my blood in him he recovered fast. After just one night he was standing again, he was strong again. The second night, he went out. He went out to hunt. When he came back he told me he hadn’t killed anyone. I think he just followed some people around and thought about it.
Thought about what he’d become, and what that made us. It made us his food.
“He told me about you. About how you were hunting for him. He said he couldn’t stay there, in my house. So we found him a new place.”
“A disused grain elevator,” she prompted.
“Yes! It was perfect. He brought Malvern’s coffin there. He said he would lock himself in with her. That maybe he would bury them both alive. He wanted to rot away down there, until he couldn’t dig his way out again. He didn’t want to die, but he was willing to spend the rest of time buried under the ground, unable to move or see or feel anything. But the blood—he wanted one last taste of blood. By then he’d started to change. To get more—aggressive. We talked about his taking my blood, but he knew that if I opened my veins again he wouldn’t be able to stop. He would kill me. So I suggested another way.”
“You robbed a blood bank.”
Carboy was weeping noisily. “It didn’t work. The blood was cold. It didn’t work. It only made him hungrier. If I hadn’t—if I hadn’t told Cady about him—”
“Cady Rourke,” Caxton said. “Your girlfriend.”
The boy’s voice broke as he continued. “She wanted to see him. She—she wasn’t my girlfriend, by the way. We were just friends, and yeah, sometimes we fooled around. But we saw other people, too. At least, Cady did. I couldn’t handle that. It used to tear me up, but I could never get up the courage to break it off with her. I was so afraid of being alone. When I brought Cady to see Jameson he got angry, I mean, really angry. He said I was putting him at risk. That he couldn’t trust Cady. He—he—”