Bradley had said to look. I looked. The ranch lay in a large round valley or maybe a plateau, since we'd had to drive up some hills to get here. Whichever, the land stretched flat and smooth for miles to the rim of distant hills. Of course, I'd been surprised by distances here, so maybe the hills were really mountains, and the land stretched for a very long way in every direction. There were no trees. There was almost no vegetation above thigh height to me. Whatever had taken that door out had been big, bigger than a man, though not by much. I turned in a slow circle, scanning the ground, and there was nowhere for something that large to hide. They'd walked this ground when they first arrived, full of confidence that the creature couldn't have gotten far. They marched out, and out, and out, and found nothing. The helicopter buzzed overhead, high enough that it didn't disturb the wind, but low enough that I was pretty sure it was looking at me. They were looking for anything unusual, and I was standing out here by myself, unusual enough.
The helicopter circled a few times, then buzzed off to search somewhere-else. I looked out at the empty land. There was nowhere to hide. Where had it gone? Where could it have gone?
Underground, maybe, or it flew away. If it flew away, I couldn't help them find it, but if it went underground ... Caves, or an old well, maybe. I'd suggest it to Bradley, and probably be told that they'd checked it. But hey, I was here to offer suggestions, wasn't I?
I heard someone behind me and whirled. I had the gun halfway up when I recognized Detective Ramirez. He had his hands up and to each side, away from his gun. I let out the breath I'd been holding and holstered the gun "Sorry."
"That's okay," he said. He was wearing another white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled back over dark, strong forearms. The tie was a different color but it still hung loose like a necklace, and the top two buttons of his shirt were open so that you could see the smooth hollow of his throat.
"No it's not. I'm not usually this jumpy." I hugged myself, not because I was cold. Far from it. But because I badly wanted someone to hold me. I wanted to be comforted. Edward had many uses. Comfort was not one of them.
Ramirez came up beside me. He didn't try and touch me, just stood very close and looked out over the land where I was looking. He spoke still staring out in the distance. "The case getting to you?"
I nodded. "Yeah, I don't know why."
He gave a sharp laugh and turned to me, face halfway between astonishment and humor. "You don't know why?"
I frowned at him. "No, I don't."
He shook his head, smiling, but his eyes were gentle. "Anita, this is an awful case. I've never seen anything this bad."
"I've seen things as bad as the vivisected victims, the ones that died."
His face sobered. "You've seen things that bad before?"
I nodded.
"What about the mutilations?" he asked. His face was very serious now, His smooth nearly black-brown eyes watched my face.
I shook my head. "I've never seen anything like the survivors." I laughed, but it wasn't a happy sound. "If survivor is the word for them. What kind of life are they going to have, if they live?" I hugged myself tighter, staring at the ground, trying not to think.
"I've been having nightmares," Ramirez said.
I looked up at him. Police don't admit things like that often, especially not to civilian consultants that they've just met. We looked at each other, and his eyes were so gentle, so genuine. Unless he was a much better actor than I thought he was, Ramirez was letting me see the real him. I appreciated it, but didn't know how to say it out loud. You don't verbalize something like that. The best you can do is return the favor. The trouble was, I wasn't sure what the real me was anymore. I didn't know what to put in my eyes. I didn't know what to let him see. I finally stopped trying to pick and choose, and think I settled for confused, bordering on scared.
He touched my shoulder lightly. When I didn't say anything, he moved into me, wrapping his arms across my back, holding me against him. I stayed stiff in his arms for a second or two, but didn't pull away. I relaxed against him in inches, until my head rested in the curve of his neck, my arms tentatively, around his waist. Hewhispered, "It will be all right, Anita."
I shook my head against his shoulder. "I don't think so."
He tried to see my face but I was standing too close, at too awkward an angle. I pulled back so he could see my face, and suddenly I felt awkward standing there with my arms around a stranger. I pulled away, and he let me go, only keeping the fingers of one hand grasped in his. He gave my hand a little shake. "Talk to me, Anita, please."
"I've been doing cases like this for about five years. When I'm not looking at the messily dead, I'm hunting vampires, rogue shapeshifters, you name it."
His was holding my hand solidly now, wrapped in the warmth of his skin. I didn't pull away. I needed something human to hold onto. I tried to put into words what I'd been thinking for awhile now. "A lot of cops never use their guns, not in thirty years. I've lost count of how many people I've killed." His hand tightened on mine, but he didn't interrupt. "When I started out, I thought vampires were monsters. I really believed it. But lately I'm not so sure. And regardless of what they are, they look very human. I could get a call tomorrow that would send me down to the morgue to put a stake through the heart of a body that looks every bit as human as you and me. Once I've got a court order of execution, I am legally sanctioned to shoot and kill the Vampire or vampires in question, and anyone that stands in my way. That includes human servants or people with just a bite on them. One bite, two bites, they can be healed, cured. But I've killed them to save myself, to save others."
"You did what you had to do."
I nodded. "Maybe, maybe, but that doesn't really matter anymore. It doesn't matter whether I'm right to do it, or not. Just because it's a righteous kill doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. I use to think that if I was right, it would he enough, but it's not."
He drew me a little closer with his hand. "What are you saying?"
I smiled. "I need a vacation."
He laughed then, and it was a good laugh, open and joyous, nothing special about it but his own astonishment. I'd heard better laughs but none when I needed it more. "A vacation, just a vacation?"
I shrugged. "I don't see myself taking up flower arranging, Detective Ramirez."
"Hernando," he said.
I nodded. "Hernando. This is part of who I am." I realized we were still holding hands, and I drew away from him. He let me, no protest. "Maybe if I take a break, I'll be able to do it again."
"What if a vacation isn't enough?" he asked.
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it." It wasn't just the brutal day in and day out of the job. My reaction to Bernardo's body and letting a perfect stranger comfort me were so unlike me. I was missing the guys, but it was more than that. When I left Richard, I left the pack, all my werewolf friends.
When I left Jean-Claude, I lost all the vamps, and strangely one or two of them were friends. You can be friends with a vampire as long as you remember that they are monsters and not human beings. How you can do both at the same time, I can't really explain, but I manage.
I hadn't just cut myself off from the men in my life for six months. I'd cut myself off from my friends. Even Ronnie, Veronica Sims, one of my few human friends had a new hot romance. She was dating Richard's best friend which made socializing awkward. Catherine, my lawyer and friend, had only been married two years, and I didn't like to interfere with her and Bob.
"You're thinking something very serious," Ramirez said.
I blinked and looked at him. "Just realizing how isolated I am even back home. Here, I am so ... " I shook my head without finishing it.
He smiled. "You're only isolated if you want to be, Anita. I've offered to show you the local sights."
I shook my head. "Thanks, really. Under other circumstances, I'd say, yes."
"What's stopping you?" he asked.
"The case for one. If I start dating one of the local
cops, then my credibility goes down the tubes, and I'm not too high on some lists already."
"What else?" He had a very gentle face, soft, as if he would be very gentle in everything he did.
"I've got two men waiting back home. Waiting to see who I'm going to choose, or if I'm dumping both of them."
His eyes widened. "Two. I'm impressed."
I shook my head. "Don't be. My personal life is a mess."
"Sorry to hear that."
"I can't believe I just told you all that. It isn't like me."
"I'm a good listener."
"Yeah, you are."
"May I escort you back?"
I smiled at the old-fashioned phrasing. "Can you answer some questions first?"
"Ask." He sat down on the ground in his dark brown pants, lifting the pant legs so they wouldn't bunch.
I sat down beside him. "Who called the police?"
"A guest."
"Where is he or she?"
"Hospital. Severe shock brought on by trauma."
"No physical injuries?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"Who were the mutilation vics this time?"
"The wife's brother and two nephews, all over twenty. They lived and worked on the ranch."
"What about the other guests? Where were they?"
He closed his eyes, as if visualizing the page. "Most of them were off on a planned outing, an overnight camping trip into the mountains. But the rest borrowed the ranch cars that are kept for the guests' use and left."
"Let me guess," I said. "They just felt restless, jittery, had to get out of the house."
Ramirez nodded. "Just like the neighbors around all the other houses."
"It's a spell, Ramirez," I said,
"Don't make me ask you again to use my first name."
I smiled and looked away from the teasing look in his eyes. "Hernando, this is either a spell or some sort of ability the creature possesses to cause fear, dread, in the ones it doesn't want to kill or hurt. But I'm betting on a spell."
"Why?"
"Because it's too selective to be a natural anxiety like a vampire's ability to hypnotize with its eyes. A vamp can bespell one person or a room full of people, but it can't do an entire street except for one house. It's too exact. You need to be able to organize your magic for this, and that means a spell."
He picked one of the rough-looking blades of grass, running it between his fingers. "So we're looking for a witch."
"I know something about wiccan and other flavors of witchcraft, and I don't know any way a lone wiccan, or even a coven could do this. I'm not saying there isn't a human spell worker involved somewhere, but there is definitely something otherworldly, nonhuman, at work here."
"We got some blood traces off the broken door."
I nodded. "Great. I wish someone would tell me when we find a clue. Everyone, including Ted, is playing it so close to the chest, I've spent most of my time going over ground that someone else has already figured out."
"Ask me and I'll tell you anything you want to know." He tossed the grass blade to the ground. "But we better be getting back before you get a worse reputation than just dating me."
I didn't argue. Put any woman in an area run mostly by men and rumors will fly. Unless you make it very clear that you are off limits, there is also a certain competitiveness that sets in. Some men are either trying to run you out of town or get into your pants. They don't seem to know any other way to deal with a woman. If you're not a sexual object, you're a threat. Always makes me wonder what kind of childhoods they had.
Hernando stood brushing grass and dirt off the back of his pants. He seemed to have had a dandy childhood, or at least he'd turned out well. Congrats to his parents. Someday he'd bring home a nice girl and have nice children in a nice house with yard work on the weekends, and every Sunday dinner at one set of grandparents or another. A nice life if you can get it, and he still got to solve murders. Talk about having it all.
What did I have? What did I really have? I was too young for a mid-life crisis, and too old for an attack of conscience. We started walking back towards the cars. I was hugging my arms again, and had to force myself to stop. I lowered my arms to my sides and walked along beside Ramirez ... ah, Hernando, like nothing was wrong.
"Marks said that one of the first cops on the scene had his throat nearly bitten out. How did that happen?"
"I wasn't here for the first rush. The lieutenant waited to call me in." There was a trace of harshness in his voice. He was gentle, but not if you pushed him. "But I heard that the three living victims attacked the cops. They had to subdue them with batons. They just kept trying to take pieces out of them."
"Why would they do that? How would they do it? I mean you skin most people and rip off pieces, they aren't going to feel like fighting."
"I helped pick up some of the earlier survivors, and they didn't fight. They just lay there and moaned. They were hurt and they acted hurt."
"Have they ever traced down Thad Bromwell, the son of the first scene I saw?"
Hernando's eyes widened. "Marks didn't call you?"
I shook my head.
"He is such a shithead."
I agreed. "What? Did they find the body?"
"He's alive. He was away on a camping trip with friends."
"He's alive," I said. Then whose soul had I seen hovering in the bedroom? I didn't say it out loud because I'd forgotten to mention the soul to the police. Marks had been ready to chase me out of town. If I'd started talking about souls floating near the ceiling, he'd have gotten matches and a stake.
But someone had died in that room, and the soul was still confused about where to go. Most of the time if the soul hovers, it hovers over the body, the remains. Only three people lived in the house, two of them mutilated, and the boy somewhere else.
I had an idea. "These new mutilation victims, they kept fighting, kept trying to take bites out of the officers?"
He nodded.
"Are you sure about the bites, not just hitting, but like they were trying to feed?"
"I don't know about feeding, but it was all bite wounds." He was looking at me strangely. "You've thought of something."
I nodded. "I may have. I have to see the other body, the one behind the door first, but then I think it's time to go back to the hospital."
"Why?"
I started walking again, and he grabbed my arm, turned me to face him, There was fierceness in his eyes, an intensity that trembled down his arm. "You've only been here a couple of days. I've been dealing with this for weeks. What do you know that I don't?"
I looked at his hand until he let me go, but I told him. He was having nightmares about this shit, and I hadn't gotten to that point yet. "I'm an animator. I raise zombies for a living. My specialty is the dead. One thing that the living dead have in common with one other from zombie, to ghoul, to vampire, is that they must feed off the living to sustain themselves."
"Zombies don't eat people," he said.
"If a zombie is raised and the animator that raised it can't control it, then it can go wild. It becomes a flesh-eating zombie."
"I thought that was just stories."
I shook my head. "No, I've seen it."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that maybe there are no survivors. Maybe there are just dead and the living dead."
He actually went pale. I touched his elbow to steady him, but he stood straight. "I'm all right. I'm all right." He looked at me. "What do you do with a flesh-eating zombie?"
"Once it's gone amok, there isn't anything anyone can do except destroy it. The only way to do that is fire. Napalm is good, but any fire will do."
"They'll never let us roast these people."
"Not unless we can prove what I'm saying is true."
"How can you prove it?" he asked.
"I'm not sure yet, but I'll talk to Doctor Evans and we'll come up with something."
"Why would the earlier vics be docile a
nd these new ones be vicious?"
"I don't know, unless the spell or the monster is changing, maybe growing stronger. I just don't know, Hernando. If I'm right about there being no survivors, then I've had my brilliant idea for the day."
He nodded, face very serious. He stared at the ground. "Jesus, if they are all dead, then that means that this thing we're after is making more of itself?"
"I'd be surprised if it was ever human but maybe. I don't know. I do know that if it is growing stronger and the skinned ones are growing more violent,
I then the creature may be controlling them."
We looked at each other. "I'll call the hospital and get more men down there."
"Call the Santa Fe hospital, too."
He nodded and broke into a half-run across the gravel, moving through the cars like he had a purpose. The other cops were watching him, as if wondering what the rush was. I hadn't asked Hernando if they'd checked for underground hiding places. Shit. I went to find Bradley and ask him. Then I'd go back into the house one last time, see the last body, and then ... off to the hospital to answer the age-old question: what is life and when is death a sure thing?
34
THE MAN'S FACE stared up at me, eyes wide, glazed, unseeing. His head was still attached to his spine, but the chest had been split open as though two great hands had dug into his rib cage and pulled. The heart was missing. The lungs had been ripped, probably when the rib cage gave. The stomach had been punctured, giving a sour smell to the smaller room. The liver and intestines lay in a wet heap to one side of the body as if they had all spilled out at the same time. The lower intestine still curled down inside the lower end of the body cavity. By smell alone I was pretty sure that the intestines hadn't been pierced.
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