Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

I touched Edward’s arm. ‘Did the zombies smell rotten to you?’

Edward seemed to think about it, then said, ‘No.’

I looked past Edward to Dev, who was standing against the wall. His eyes looked too wide by the light of burning bodies. ‘Did they smell like rotting corpses to you?’

He just shook his head, taking too long to blink. He looked shocky, but I’d worry about it later.

I turned to Nicky, on the other side of me. ‘Were you able to smell them rotting?’

‘No, but zombies don’t smell like rotting corpses.’

‘Mine don’t,’ I said, ‘and those are the ones you’ve been around.’

‘True, but you’re scared; why?’

‘Most zombies smell like what they are – corpses; the amount of smell comes from the amount of rot. My zombies don’t smell bad because I’m powerful enough that they don’t rot right away. But rotting vampires don’t smell bad until they want to; they look bad, but they don’t smell. The vampires and zombies in the mountains, they didn’t smell bad, did they?’

‘No,’ Nicky said.

‘I’m missing something,’ Yancey said. ‘Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?’

The fire alarm started to scream around us, but with our hearing still recovering from the shooting, it was like hearing it down a tunnel, as if it were echoing a long way off instead of just above us. The sprinklers kicked in, and suddenly it was raining.

Water pounded down on us and helped ease some of the battle fatigue, like a quick, sharp slap of ice-cold water. For the first time I wished I had the helmet I usually hated to wear when I enacted a warrant with SWAT backup. I had to look at the floor to keep the water from running in my eyes and had to wipe my face to keep the blowback of blood and other things from running into my eyes or mouth. Yeah, I knew to keep my mouth shut, but still … there was just something about certain things touching your lips that was an ick, and zombie bits were an ick.

Dev made a sound that I heard above the water, the alarm, and the fire blazing up like a white-flame version of hell, which meant it was a louder sound that my ear could make out right now.

He was wiping at his face frantically, and I realized he didn’t know the rule that plumbers and monster hunters know – keep your mouth closed.

He stumbled away from the wall, fell to his knees, and threw up next to the burning pyre, while the water rained down on him. I went and knelt beside him. I tried to smooth his hair back from his face, but it was so plastered from the water that I had to pick up the wet locks of it and put it behind his ear. His hair was short enough and fine enough that the water kept it back where I’d put it. He looked sideways at me, his eyes flashing too much white, like a horse that’s about to bolt. Then his eyes tracked something behind me that made them go even wider, and fear was plain on his face. I whirled still on my knees, bringing the AR up to bear, and found nothing but the white flames and the writhing of the body parts like octopus tentacles trying to get out of boiling water.

I glanced back at Dev, tracked back where his sightline was, and found a zombie arm with a hand still intact enough to finger-crawl coming toward us. I let my AR swing back on its strap, unholstered my Browning, and shot the hand so it wouldn’t move so well, picked the arm up, and tossed it back into the fire.

When I turned back to Dev, he was looking at me with something like horror in his face, as if I’d done something terrible. I started to touch his shoulder, then realized he might not want me to touch him with the same hand I’d just touched the zombie with, so I let my hand drop.

‘Go, up top, check on the guard, Miller.’

Dev nodded, a little too fast, a little too often, and he mouthed, I’m sorry .

I didn’t ask, Sorry about what? I knew the what. He was my bodyguard, but being at my side tonight had broken something in him. It remained to be seen whether the break could be mended or whether it was permanent. There’d been a time when I’d thrown up at crime scenes, but Edward had taken me into the thick of things at about the same time and I had managed not to break, but that had been me.

Dev got to his feet, steadying himself against the wall. He stumbled when he took his first step, and I caught his arm to help him. He tensed but didn’t pull away. He smiled at me, weak and uncertain, but he tried. I took it for a positive sign that he could smile at all and hadn’t pulled away from me. I’d had other friends and lovers over the years who had pulled away and never been able to close the distance again.

He went to the elevator, still a little shaky on his feet. I could have gone with him, helped him, but honestly I didn’t want to. He was supposed to be taking care of me, and instead I was having to take care of him. It wasn’t what bodyguards were for, and I wasn’t getting enough out of my relationship with Dev to make up for this kind of loss. A loss of what, you might ask? Trust. I would never trust him to stay by my side and hold his own against the horrors in my life again. I would remember this moment and it would color things, just as he would remember.

Edward leaned over me and said, ‘Why is it bad that the zombies and vampires don’t smell?’

I smiled up at him; trust Edward to go right back to business. I followed his lead and said, ‘It means that something, or someone, is controlling these things, or at least keeping enough power over them to keep them from rotting.’

Nicky leaned over us, talking into the roar of water and flame. ‘But the vamps and zombies in the mountains were rotting. Bits fell off them.’

‘I’ve seen rotting zombies lose bits off, but when they changed to their human form the parts they’d lost were still there, and whole.’

‘How does that work?’ Yancey asked.

I told the truth. ‘I don’t know. I just know it works that way, or can.’

‘Are you saying sometimes it doesn’t work that way?’ he asked.

I wiped water and something thicker off my face before I answered. ‘Rotting vampires are special; a lot of vamp rules don’t apply to them.’

‘So is the vampire that possessed the vamps in the mountains the one raising the zombies?’ Nicky asked.

I started to say yes, then stopped myself. ‘I don’t know.’ If Yancey hadn’t been with us I’d have just brainstormed out loud, but I wasn’t sure where the thoughts would go, so …

Dev called out, ‘The elevator won’t work.’

‘Once the alarms are triggered, it goes to the lobby and waits for the firemen to use a key to override it,’ Yancey said.

‘You could have said something before he went and pushed the button,’ I said.

Yancey shrugged.

‘I knew, too,’ Edward said.

‘And you didn’t say something, why?’ I asked.

Edward just looked at me. It was an eloquent look.

I looked at Nicky. The water had plastered his hair to the right side of his face like it had been glued in place. ‘And your excuse?’ I asked.

‘I’m a sociopath; I don’t have to be nice,’ Nicky said.

I gave him a look.

‘You’re mad at him. I can feel it, which means I really don’t have to be nice to him.’

‘I thought you were friends.’

‘What part of sociopath didn’t you understand?’ he asked.

The water stopped pouring down and the sudden absence of it seemed loud, as if my body had gotten used to the pounding cold of it. I actually heard myself gasp; that meant my hearing wasn’t permanently damaged, which was nice to know.

Dev leaned against the wall and slowly slid down it until he was sitting with his knees drawn up, and tears shone in the overhead lights. I looked at the men standing around me and realized that though they’d all help me kill monsters and burn the bodies later, they were so not helping me do the emotional stuff.