Laurell Hamilton - Kiss The Dead

I frowned at him. “Do you want me to shoot you?”

He nodded.

I frowned harder. “Why?”

He shrugged and dropped his eyes so I couldn’t read his face.

“You are evil and your master is evil,” said the grandma.

I looked at her. “I didn’t just rip the throat out of a man who was trying to keep you from making a fifteen-year-old girl a vampire against her will.”

Her eyes showed hesitation for a moment and then she said, “The girl wanted to be one of us.”

“She’d changed her mind,” I said.

The grandma shook her head, looking sullen. “There was no going back.”

“That’s the same thing date rapists say: ‘She agreed to the date, so it’s too late for her to say no to the sex.’”

She looked shocked, as if I’d slapped her. “How dare you compare us to that.”

“Forcing someone to be a vampire against their will is rape and murder all rolled into one,” I said.

The boy said, “You believe that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“And yet, you cohabitate with the master vampire of this city,” he said.

“Cohabitate,” I said. “You’re older than you look.”

“Can’t you tell my age?” he asked.

I thought about it, just a tiny use of power, and said, “Twenty years dead, that’s why the eighties haircut.”

“I don’t have enough power to grow my hair long after death like the vampires closest to you. Your master steals energy from me, from all of us, and uses it to heal his people, and grow his long, black curls out for you.”

I’d known that Jean-Claude took power from his followers, and gave power to them, but I hadn’t thought how that exchange of power might affect the other side of the equation. Was Blondie here right? Did Jean-Claude steal power from them just to grow his hair long for me, when they could have used it to heal their wounds, grow their own hair? Was it true?

“You didn’t know,” he said.

“She knew! She knows!” Grandma said. Her voice was strident with her anger, but under the anger was a thread of fear like a hint of spice in a piece of cake. I looked at her, and something she saw in my face stopped her, and upped the fear in her. Was she really that afraid of me?

Zerbrowski came to me. “Anita, the bus is back. We need to move them.”

I nodded, and realized I’d made the rookie mistake. I’d let the bad guys talk me into doubting people I trusted. They say if you listen to the devil he won’t lie, but he won’t exactly tell the truth either. Blondie wasn’t the devil, far from it, but he’d spoken the truth as he saw it, and I’d ask Jean-Claude tonight when I got home.

I addressed the prisoners. “If you try to escape, try to run, we will shoot you.”

“Because of the Preternatural Endangerment Act,” Blondie said.

“That gives us the legal right to kill you, yes, but the two dead cops, killed by vampire bites, make you all murder suspects. Vampires suspected of murder can be killed if they try to escape.”

“If we were people, it wouldn’t work like that,” he said.

“With two dead cops, it might,” I said.

“Not legally,” he said. I grabbed him by the arm and helped him to his feet hard enough that he stumbled and I had to catch him.

He whispered, “You’re as strong as we are, and I felt you feed on the other officer. You’re not human either.”

I pushed him away from me, forgot he was wearing shackles to go with his cuffs, and had to catch him again. No one else in the room could have moved fast enough to catch him with barely a pause between the push, the start of the fall, and the catch-no human in the room.

“See,” he said.

I got him shuffling along with the others that were being helped to their feet. I wasn’t sure if I needed to put him close to me so I could watch him, or far away so he couldn’t keep fucking with me. Why was he getting on my nerves so badly? Answer: because I believed what he’d just said. I’d raised my first dead by accident when I was a teenager, saw my first ghost at ten; the dead had always liked me. I wasn’t like most of the Marshals; they were humans who just happened to be good at killing monsters. I was one of the monsters.

A girl stumbled in her shackles. I grabbed her arm to steady her, and she mumbled, “Thank you,” then turned and saw who was touching her. She let out a little shriek and began to struggle. I held on just a moment, caught off guard by the fear that just radiated through her, from her, down my hand, across my tongue. I could taste her fear the way I could taste it on a shapeshifter or a human. Anything that’s afraid of you is food. I let her go, and she fell, unable to catch herself. The other vampires tried to help her up, but they were struggling, too. Zerbrowski finally helped her to her feet.

The vampires watched me and even behind the sullenness, the anger, there was fear. What do the monsters fear? Other monsters, of course.

I caught Blondie watching me, but it was Grandma who spat the word at me. “Monster!”

I said the only thing I could think of. “That’s Marshal Monster to you, Grandma.”

Zerbrowski said, “Why don’t I have any nifty nicknames?”

“No one’s afraid of you, Zerbrowski,” I said, and smiled at him for trying to make a joke out of it.

“You’re just so bad-ass, I can’t compete.”

“That’s what your wife says.”

“Oooh,” Smith said, “that was low.”

Zerbrowski grinned at me. “I don’t have a problem with you being the better man, Anita; I never have.”

If I hadn’t been armed to the teeth, surrounded by murderous vampires, in view of way too many other cops, I’d have hugged Zerbrowski. “Thanks, Zerbrowski.” But I tried to show him in my eyes how much it had meant to me, that guy moment where you can’t actually say how many emotions you’ve got running through your brain.

He smiled, not his cocky teasing grin, but that gentle one that let his eyes look tired and sort of tender. He gave a small nod, and I smiled back, and that was it. He understood that I’d understood that he’d understood. It took us one sentence, two looks, and a nod-with another woman it would have been at least five minutes of out-loud talking. Lucky for me I spoke fluent guy.

ZERBROWSKI HAD TO take a call from Dolph, so it was Stevens, Urlrich, and Smith who helped me move another seven vampires to the big freight elevator. I decided to keep Blondie near me, because if he was screwing with me this badly, I didn’t trust how bad he’d fuck with the others. Besides, to move him away meant to admit he was fucking with me, and that I didn’t know what to do about it. The only way I knew how to face anything was head on, so Blondie stayed by me. He wasn’t half as disturbing as the elevator. It was a bare, metal cage, one that actually needed someone to pull a lever and drive the thing. It was open to the cool, dark shaft with wooden slats as a door on one side, and then metal mesh as a second door, but the rest of the elevator was truly a cage, open to the shaft. It was a killing box if someone could get above us.

I put Smith on the lever to drive the elevator. He’d driven it last time and hadn’t crashed us. I tucked my AR to my shoulder, then snugged my cheek to it and let out a breath, so that I was still as I pointed the barrel upward through the metalwork.

“Why are you pointing up?” Stevens asked.

I kept my attention on the top of the shaft as I answered him, “Some vampires can fly.”

“I thought that was just movie shit,” he said.

“Not just movie shit,” I said. I let my eyes relax, searching the darkness above us for movement, just movement, because there shouldn’t have been any.

“Moving,” Smith said.