Laurell Hamilton - Kiss The Dead

I looked beyond the kids in front and found that the grown-ups weren’t much better. Some of the women looked like they should be baking cookies for scout meetings and packing for family vacations, not kneeling here in cuffs with fangs. Some of the people were a little out of shape or overweight. It was a myth that being a vampire made you thin. Some low-level vampires stayed the same size they were at death, frozen in whatever shape they’d been forever, so if you were going to become a vampire you should drop that extra few pounds first. Some lines of vampires could change their body after death. I’d seen them put on more muscle in the gym, but I wasn’t sure how much they could change after they were dead. Had these people chosen to be vampires, or had they been forced? If forced, then it was a truly horrible crime. I’d cheerfully kill the vampire that made them.

Then my metaphysics got out of the way of my cop brain, and I realized I was being stupid, distracted by the metaphysics-which was why the cops had started partnering one normal with a supernormal, so you had a mundane double check. Fuck!

I turned from the vampires and hurried to the knot of uniforms with Smith. “The vampires are all hungry! They haven’t fed tonight.”

One uniform looked at me, with all the cynicism you gain in police work. He was about forty pounds too heavy around the middle, but his eyes held the years of experience that can make up for speed and athleticism if you paired him with a rookie who could run. “They have to have fed. You saw what they did to Mulligan.”

Smith said, “If Anita says they haven’t fed, she’ll be right. She knows the undead.”

I checked the nameplate and said, “Exactly, Urlrich; if these guys didn’t feed, then we’re missing the ones who did.”

“I don’t understand,” the younger uniform said, and shook his head. He had short brown hair, matching eyes, and a slim, runner’s build. The brawn for the brains of his partner.

Urlrich understood. He undid the snap on his gun and rested his hand on the grip. “The body was warm; are they still here, Ms. Vampire Expert?”

“I don’t know. With this many vampires, my spider-sense is on overload, and they have to have a vampire master with them powerful enough to possibly hide them.” In my head I added, Powerful enough to hide this much activity from Jean-Claude, the Master of St. Louis . You gained a lot of power over a piece of real estate as master, and over the vampires in it, so at this point the rogue would have to be either fucking powerful, or so good at hiding in plain sight that it was a type of power.

“Is it a trap?” Smith asked.

“I don’t know, but they left these vampires here to take the blame for the crimes. Master vamps don’t waste this much manpower without a good reason.”

“Maybe they thought we’d believe it,” Smith said, “and they’d be in the clear.”

“Only if we killed them all on sight,” I said.

Urlrich said, “You do have a reputation for shooting first, Marshal Blake.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Was that what the vampires had counted on, that I’d just kill everyone in the building? If that was the plan, then my reputation was even worse than I thought. I wasn’t sure whether I was sad or happy about that. You’re only as tough as your threat is good; apparently my threat totally rocked.

Zerbrowski came back up as we were talking. “We need to talk about Billings, Anita.” He looked very serious.

I nodded. “Agreed, but later.” I told him that the vampires hadn’t fed.

“Is it like the serial killer who left his wee little vamps to take the blame for his kills, a few years back?”

I nodded. “Maybe, but the laws were different back then; SWAT and I had the green light and had no legal option but to use it. We have options now.”

“Tell that to Mulligan’s wife,” Urlrich said.

I nodded again. “If they helped kill Mulligan and the other officer, then I’ll happily end their lives, but I’d like to make sure I’m putting a bullet between the right pair of eyes.”

“You don’t shoot ’em between the eyes,” his partner said.

I checked his nameplate. “Stevens, is it?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, you do, and one in the heart, and then you take the heart and decapitate them.”

He gave me wide eyes. “God.”

“Would you want to put a bullet in their brains while they were looking at you, and chained up?”

He looked at me, a soft, growing horror in his eyes. “Jesus.” He looked past me at the vampires. “They look like my grandparents, and kids.”

I turned and looked at the vampires, too, and Stevens was absolutely right. Except for the two male bodies that were with the two teens we’d killed, everyone looked like either a kid, or a grandparent, or a soccer mom. I’d never seen a more ordinary-looking bunch of vampires in one place at one time. Even in the Church of Eternal Life, the vampire church, you didn’t have this many older people and children. No one wanted to be trapped forever in a child’s body, or an elderly one; it was too early, or too late, to want to live forever in the bodies that were kneeling on the floor.

I leaned in and whispered to Zerbrowski, “I’ve never seen this many elderly vampires ever, and this many kids in one place, also never.”

“And that means what?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“For a vampire expert, you don’t know a hell of a lot,” Urlrich said.

I’d have liked to argue with him, but I couldn’t.

IT WASN’T JUST the vampires that watched me as I moved around the room armed to the teeth. Someone muttered, “Who does she think she is, Rambo?” I didn’t look around to see who had said it; it didn’t really matter. I was a girl and I had the best deadly toys in the room. Gun envy is an ugly thing.

“She’s the Executioner,” the blond boy vamp said.

“They’re all executioners,” Stevens said. His partner hit him in the side with his elbow; you didn’t talk to prisoners, especially not vampires.

“No, Anita Blake is one of only a handful of the vampire hunters that we’ve given names to; she was the Executioner, years before the rest.” He studied my face with those blue-gray eyes of his, so serious. “We only give names to the ones that we fear. She is the Executioner, and along with three others she makes up the Four Horsemen.”

I heard Stevens take a breath, and then stop. He obviously wanted to ask, but Urlrich had probably stopped him, so I asked for him. “The Executioner isn’t a name of one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

“You are the only one with two earned names,” he said.

“Let me guess, I’m Death,” I said.

He shook his head very solemnly. “You’re War,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’ve killed more of us than Death.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to ask who the other Marshals were, but I was afraid that Death was my very good friend Ted Forrester, and he’d earned that nickname long before we all had badges, and some of the things he’d done to earn the name hadn’t been legal. I wasn’t sure how much the blond vampire knew, or how much he’d share. He was acting too odd for me to judge what he’d say next.

A woman who looked more like someone’s youngish grandma than a vampire said, “Why haven’t you killed us?”

“Because I didn’t have to,” I said.

The blond boy that Billings had tried to hit said, “The other officers want you to.”

“You haven’t fed, so you didn’t take the officers’ blood. You didn’t kill them.”

“We watched it done,” he said, “under the law that makes us as guilty as the ones who tasted them.”