Laurell Hamilton - Kiss The Dead

Shelby the vampire whispered, “Please, don’t”; the soft words echoed in the big room. It was going to be great acoustics for screams.

I knelt by the bag and started getting out the stuff that the law said vampire executioners had to carry but I almost never used. Since the main point of all of this was intimidating the witness/suspect, the contents of the bag were great visuals. The stakes were first. They were in a plastic carrier that folded over and tied; each of the six stakes had a slot where it rode so it wasn’t rattling around in the bag stabbing me every time I rummaged around in it. I unfolded the plastic and took each stake out, laying them bare on the plastic in a sinister row of very pointy bits. I almost never used stakes on anything, but the ones I carried were very sharp hard wood, because if I did need them, I wanted them to be ready. You’re only as good as your equipment sometimes, so I made sure mine was good.

The girl vampire whimpered, and said, “You can’t do this. I haven’t hurt anyone.”

“Tell that to the officers your friends killed,” I said.

She looked up at the uniformed officers on either side of her, raising her small hands as far as the waist shackle would allow. “Please, I didn’t know they would kill anyone. We would have brought the girl over, but she wanted to be a vampire until the last minutes. She got scared. We all got scared.”

“Who’s we ?” I asked.

She looked at me again, eyes wide, her fear paling the color to an almost white gray. “No,” she whispered.

“No, what?” I asked, and drew out a slender black leather cover. It was tied closed like the stakes carrier had been. I untied it and slowly, lovingly, unwrapped a shiny silver hand saw, the kind they used in surgery for amputations. I’d tried to use it once, and hadn’t liked the feel and sound of the blade on the spine. It was supposed to make decapitating the bodies easier, and the law said I had to carry it. I’d never used it for taking the head off a vampire; I never planned on using it, but the sight of it made the girl vampire scream. One brief, piteous sound that she muffled quickly, rolling her lips under, biting on them, as if she expected to be punished for calling out. The automatic gesture made me wonder what her undead life had been like, and how much abuse had gone into it. She’d died when vampires were still illegal in this country, able to be killed on sight, by anyone, just for being undead, so she’d had to hide for decades. It’s hard to hide as a child vampire; you usually need an adult to help you pretend. What price had she paid for that pretending?

Did I feel sorry for her? Yes. Would it change what I was about to do? No. The days when my feelings affected my job that badly were long past. Now, if my feelings affected my job it was more serious, but happened less often.

Urlrich knelt down beside me, shifting his equipment belt to one side. He favored one knee as if it were stiff. He spoke low. “I’m not enjoying this like I thought I would.”

“She can hear you,” I said.

He looked startled, then glanced at the girl and back at me. “Their hearing is that good?”

I nodded and drew out a clear plastic jar of pink rosebuds and red petals, all dried and ready to be made into potpourri.

“Roses, what’s that for?” he asked.

“To stuff in the mouth.”

“I thought you stuffed garlic in a vampire’s mouth.”

“You can, and most do, but the garlic makes the bag smell, and the roses don’t, and they both work just as well.” What I didn’t say out loud was that I’d never stuffed a piece of anything into a decapitated vampire head, or into a dead vampire when it was whole. Once I severed the spine, I might burn the body parts separately and throw the ashes into different bodies of running water if the vamp was really old, or really powerful, but as far as I could tell the whole stuffing-crap-in-the-mouth didn’t do a damn thing to keep them from rising from the grave. The powers that be had added it as a step in the morgue stakings, but the only thing I’d come up with was that it was quicker and less messy to stuff the garlic, or roses, in the mouth than to stake them. Maybe, if you were close to dawn, the vampire wouldn’t be able to bite until they got the plants out of their mouth, or maybe they’d choke? I had no idea, but as far as I knew it didn’t do anything metaphysical to the bodies of vampires. But it did make the vampire in the room with us start to cry.

Urlrich leaned in and whispered, “She’s the age of my granddaughter.”

“No, she looks like she’s the age of your granddaughter, but she’s really the age of one of your children if they’re in their thirties, and she can still hear you.”

He glanced at her again.

I heard the chains rattle, and she said, “Please, please, help me. I didn’t know they would kill them. I was too small to stop them, too weak. I’m always too weak.”

Urlrich went very still as he knelt beside me. I poked him in the shoulder; when that didn’t make him move, I punched him in the shoulder. It moved his body, made him almost fall.

“What the hell, Blake?”

“You were looking in her eyes, Urlrich; she was fucking with you.”

The two SWAT team members aimed their ARs at the vampire. “You’re the green light, Blake, just say the word,” Baxter said.

“Not yet,” I said. I knew that Baxter had said it out loud to help spook the vampire, but I also knew it was true. A U.S. Marshal with an active warrant of execution was a walking green-light zone for SWAT. Give the word, it was a clean shoot.

Urlrich looked at me, started to protest, and then got a thoughtful look on his face. “Shit, I was thinking about my granddaughter and how much she looks like her, but she doesn’t. My kiddo is dark-haired and younger, but for just a minute there I saw the vampire’s face over my granddaughter’s, as if she were her.” There was just the edge of fear in his eyes when he looked at me then. “Jesus, Blake, that fast, she mind-rolled me that fast?”

“It can happen, especially if the vampire appeals to some issue in your own head, like having a granddaughter about the same age.”

One of the uniformed officers said, “Our crosses didn’t glow; they glow if she uses vampire powers.”

“They glow if she uses enough power, or aims it at you, but she wasn’t doing a damn thing to you, and she made it subtle.” I looked at her then, gave her my full eye contact, because I didn’t have to be afraid of a vampire as weak as this one, not just with mind tricks anyway. “Very nice; I bet that pitiful act works for you almost every time you need a grown-up to protect you, or feed on.”

Her thin little face went sullen, and there it was in those gray eyes, the monster peeking out. This was the truth, this was what had lived for more than thirty years, and fed on humans back when if her blood donors went to the authorities, she’d be hunted down and killed. I didn’t think she was strong enough to wipe their minds clean; her only other option would have been to take blood and eventually kill them, or make them a vampire, so they wouldn’t give her away. Most child vampires weren’t powerful enough to make humans into vampires.

“How many humans have you killed, not for food, but to keep them from telling on you? How many have you fed on and then killed to keep your secret?”

“I didn’t ask to be a vampire,” she said. “I didn’t ask to be trapped like this. The vampire that brought me over was a pedophile, and he made me into his perfect victim forever.”

“How many years did it take for you to kill him?”

“I wasn’t strong enough to kill him,” she said, and the voice was still a child’s, but the tone, the edge of force, that wasn’t childlike at all.