Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  There was a fight at the end of the hallway. Our civies, one dark and one blond, had caught up with the bad guy. They seemed to be winning. They had him on the ground, though the dark-haired civie was on the ground, too. I cleared the door, gun in a two-handed grip, with Zerbrowski right behind me. He yelled, “Police, everybody freeze!”

  The civilians hesitated in the fight, because they were upstanding citizens. Upstanding citizens tend to listen to the cops. It wasn’t much of a hesitation, they just stopped fighting as hard, and they glanced at us. That was it, then they turned right back to the bad guy, but he was a bad guy, and he hadn’t looked at us, or hesitated in the fight. After all, he had nothing to lose. I already had a warrant that let us kill his ass.

  The two vampires had him down, but when they hesitated, one of them must have loosened their grip, just a fraction. I saw something silver glint in the bad guy’s hand. I yelled, “Knife!” but it was too late. The blade hit the dark one in the chest. Something about that blow seemed to stagger the blond, because he went to his knees beside his friend. Maybe he thought we had the bad guy covered. He knelt and reached for his fallen friend, and if the bad guy had done the usual and stood up and run through the door, we’d have had clean shots at him. But he didn’t, he pushed the door wide with his hand, and half-crawled, half-rolled through the door. The two civilians were blocking our shots completely.

  I yelled, “Fuck!” and started to run.

  67

  WE CLEARED THE far door, me going low, Zerbrowski high. Marconi and Smith a weight at our backs waiting for a clear angle. We were in the parish hall, and in the middle of all those long tables was the vampire. He was using his leather jacket to shield his face from the white-hot glow of the two uniforms’ crosses. They had their guns in one hand, and the crosses in the other, almost like you’d hold flashlights, so that they were able to maintain a two-handed grip and still show the crosses. Training will tell.

  I yelled, “He’s got a knife!”

  I saw one of the men’s eyes flick to me, but only for a second. “We’ll cover him, you pat him down.”

  “Don’t be a wussy, Roarke,” Smith said, from behind me.

  “Call me a wussy when you’re standing this close to him.”

  I kept my gun on the vampire and walked slowly toward him. I talked while I moved, “Slowly, drop the knife.”

  The vampire didn’t move, except to cower behind his jacket.

  I stopped moving and looked down the barrel of my gun at him. I felt myself going quiet inside, slipping away inside my head to that distant strangely peaceful place I went when I killed, and had time to rev up for it. “I’ll ask one more time, Jonah. Drop the knife, or I put a bullet in you. I won’t . . . ask . . . again.” All the air slid out of me, and my body went as still and peaceful as my head. I didn’t hear that white noise tonight, that static, it was just quiet. The world had narrowed down to the crouching figure and nothing else. I wasn’t really aware of the police, Zerbrowski behind me, even the glow of the crosses had pulled back, so that my vision was sharpened down to the man I was about to shoot.

  Something dropped from that dark figure, something silver that glinted in the white glow, but it didn’t really register. I didn’t think knife. I had passed the point of no return. I was committed.

  Zerbrowski’s voice brought me back. “Knife, Anita, he dropped the knife.” His voice was gentle, as if he understood that I was on the edge. The edge where a sharp voice might have pressed that trigger for me.

  My breath came back in a sharp hiss of air. I pointed the gun at the ceiling, because I had to stop pointing it at the man. I had to point it elsewhere, or I was going to shoot him. Legally, I could have done it, but we needed him to talk to us. The dead, the true dead, aren’t a chatty bunch.

  “I’ve got him,” Zerbrowski said. He had his gun nice and steady on the vampire.

  I nodded and pressed the back of my gun to my forehead. It didn’t feel cool, it was warm. Warm from being tucked up under my arm, wedged next to my breast. If I wore the wrong bra I scraped the edge of my breast as I drew, so I’d learned that all those minimizer bras that spread the breast to the side are not my friend wearing a shoulder holster. Push-up bras actually keep your breasts up and out of the way. You just had to make sure that the bra actually covered the front of you, so you could run without falling out of it. Why was I thinking about bras when we had a double murdering vampire still to be subdued? Because I’d almost killed him. I’d almost shot into the mass of his body, not because it was time, but because that’s what I did. I rarely looked down the barrel of a gun without being able to pull the trigger.

  I’d almost killed him before we tried to question him. I’d almost killed him, because my body and mind fell into it. Fall into this is what we do. We look down the barrel of a gun, and we pull the trigger, and we shoot to stop. Dead is stop.

  “Anita, how you doing?” Zerbrowski asked.

  I nodded and lowered the gun to point at the floor. I trusted Zerbrowski to get a shot off and slow the vamp down. I trusted me to get my gun up in time to finish it. I wasn’t sure in that moment that I trusted me to stand there with a bead on the vampire. Funny, but I didn’t.

  “I’m fine, Zerbrowski.”

  He kept his eyes on the vampire along with his gun. “Okay. It’s your warrant.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “my dime.” I looked at the vampire, still hiding behind his leather jacket, and felt nothing. He was just something that I wanted information from. I couldn’t offer him a deal for it. The law didn’t allow deals with vampires who had murdered. But that was a problem for another hour.

  “Slowly, put your hands on your head and lace your fingers. Now!”

  His voice came strangely muffled. “Have them put the crosses up.”

  “Do you want to die right this second?”

  He was quiet for a moment, then his voice again, “No.”

  “Then do what you’re told. Hands on head, fingers laced, right fucking now. Now!”

  He tried to keep his face hidden in the jacket, eyes squeezed tight shut as his arms came up and he put his hands on top of his head.

  “Lace the fingers.”

  He did.

  “Now, on your knees.”

  “Can I use my hands?”

  I had my gun back up and pointed. “You are beginning to get on my nerves. Drop to your fucking knees.”

  He did it. Goodie.

  “Cross your ankles.”

  “What?”

  “One ankle over the other, cross your ankles.”

  He did it. Which meant it was time to actually pat him down. I hate patting down someone who’s alive, so much easier to search the dead for weapons. How can you tell when you’ve been killing maybe a little too much? When you think it’s a pain in the ass having to pat down someone who can still move.

  I put the barrel of my gun against his head. “If you move, I shoot. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” he said in a strained voice.

  The other nice thing about only touching them after they’re dead is that you don’t hear the fear in their voices, or feel that fine tremble in their hands and arms. You don’t have to know that what they’re afraid of is you. You don’t have to think about the fact that the person you’re touching is going to have to die, and that nothing they can do, or you can do will stop it. The law isn’t about justice or mercy. The law is about the law, and law didn’t give Jonah NoLastName, or me, options.

  He had another knife, this one was at the small of his back in a sheath on the inside of his belt. He had a wrist sheath, empty, and a larger sheath at his neck, hidden by the jacket’s collar. I’d never known a vampire to carry that many weapons. When he dropped the knife, I thought I’d been wrong about seeing the knife in the other vamp’s chest, but no, the bastard had stabbed him and had plenty of knives left. I remembered the knife like an exclamation point in the vamp’s chest.

  It made me wonder. I looked at one of the knives, hef
ted it, touched the flat of it with my thumb. “Shit, it’s silver.” I didn’t run back to the vampire. I waited and helped them get Jonah the vampire handcuffed, though I knew that they would only slow him down, if he really wanted free. We just hadn’t come up with anything that could hold up against a vampire’s strength. It was one of the reasons that they were killed instead of held over for trial. One state had tried cross-wrapped coffins, but it had been shot down as cruel and unusual. If I’d been asked, I would have asked the legislators that decided the coffins were too cruel, if they, themselves would rather be held in a small confined space until trial, or just killed. I’d have bet they’d have chosen the coffin, but then, no one asked me. I’d been invited to speak before a Senate subcommittee on undead rights, but the date kept being switched, or the committee chairperson kept changing, or . . . it was almost as if someone didn’t want the committee to finish its report. Probably political, but whatever, I hadn’t been called. I’d just been asked, a date to be specified later. Funny, but I think the committee would have liked my testimony better if they’d let me come talk when they first issued the invitation. Lately, I had nothing comforting to say.

  “Sit him in a chair. If he tries anything funny, shoot him.”

  “Where are you going?” Zerbrowski asked.

  “The knives are silver.”

  “So?”

  “So, our good Samaritan vampire may be dead, or dying.” I was already moving for the door. “If he’s going to survive, we’ve got minutes to save him.”

  “Save him how?” Zerbrowski asked.

  I just shook my head and went for the door.

  “Go with her, Smith.”

  Smith just changed his grip on his gun so it was pointed two-handed at the floor. “I got your back.”

  I didn’t argue with Smith coming along. Zerbrowski and I were partnering tonight. We trusted each other to watch the bad vamp, but I had to check on the wounded vamp, so Zerbrowski stayed on the suspect and gave me backup. Because neither of us trusted anyone else to cover Jonah the vampire. Zerbrowski got the murderer, and I got the hero. Life had been so much simpler when vampires didn’t come in hero-flavor.

  68

  I COULDN’T SEE our hero for the broad back of his friend. The blond was still kneeling there, holding his hand. The blond’s shoulders were slumped, and he turned a tear-stained face up to me. Faint reddish-pink tracks down his face where the blood in his own tears had marked him. The tears made me fear the worst, until I moved around the feet of the other vamp. The hero lay on his back, but he blinked wide gray eyes up at me. The eyes were the only thing pale about him. Longish dark hair, and the beginnings of a beard around a wide mouth. I almost said out loud what I was thinking, Oh, good, you’re not dead, but I managed not to. Point for me.

  I knelt on the other side of him, across from his friend. The knife was sticking out of his chest like an exclamation point. I’d stabbed my share of vamps in my time, and I knew a heart blow when I saw one. Blood welled out around the blade, soaking into the dark-haired one’s clothing. It was bleeding a lot. Which meant either he’d fed tonight, or it was a bad injury, or both.

  “I didn’t realize the knife was silver until we disarmed him. I’d have come back sooner.”

  Smith said, “We got company.”

  “Sooner or later,” a voice said behind us, “it matters not.” Malcolm was behind us. Other church members were behind him. You always get gawkers, I guess.

  “It matters,” I said.

  “He is dying, Anita, and nothing we can do will save him.”

  I looked back at the hurt man and caught the look in his friend’s blue eyes. Blue eyes framed by the blue of his shirt collar. “I’ve seen vampires survive worse.”

  “You have seen master vampires survive worse. He is not a master.”

  “He gets power from his line, his master,” I said, “it isn’t always about personal power.”

  “Truth and Wicked have no masters, do you?”

  The blond looked at Malcolm, and there was such hopelessness in his face. I couldn’t even make remarks about the names. I mean, who gets named Truth and Wicked? But in the face of such raw pain, I couldn’t do anything but say, “If you have something important to say, Malcolm, say it.”

  “They are masterless, Anita. The master that made them died, and the sourdre de sang that created their line was destroyed, too. They survived the destruction of their line, but it weakened them.”

  I looked up at the blond’s face, Truth or Wicked, I didn’t know which he was. He was staring at Malcolm, but the look in his eyes said it was the truth. “If you had blood-oathed them, they’d have a master right now.”

  “I allowed them into my church. Most masters would kill them.”

  “Why?”

  The vampire on the ground answered, “They fear us,” in a strangled voice.

  The blond said, “Don’t talk, brother, I will talk for you. They fear that if other vampires knew we survived the slaying of our entire bloodline, then others might wonder if they could kill those that enslave them, too, and survive.”

  “Brother?” I said.

  The blond looked up at me, fresh tears giving his blue eyes a reddish cast. “Truth is my brother.”

  Shit, I thought. “Is Malcolm right, if we remove the knife will . . . Truth not heal it?”

  “Once, yes, but the death of our line did weaken us. When a silver weapon is used, we heal like a human.”

  I looked down at the hilt sticking out of the vampire’s chest. “If he was human, he’d be dead already, he’s not.”

  “He is dying, Anita, can you not feel it?” Malcolm said.

  I put my hand on the vampire’s chest, near the blade, in the cooling blood in his clothes, and I concentrated. I felt his energy, for lack of a better word, fading.

  He took a deep gasping breath and had trouble getting the next breath.

  “Shit, he’s bleeding to death.” He was losing so much blood his body was beginning to shut down. Shit. I looked at the blond. “If we just sit here, he will die. If we pull the blade out, I may be able to save him.”

  “How?” the blond asked. I just couldn’t think of anyone as Wicked, not as a name.

  How? That was the question. If Jean-Claude were here, we could blood-oath him. Of course, now with the marks wide open between us, Truth could take my blood and be bound. Primo had found that out by accident, now it had possibilities.

  “I’m going to contact my master, the Master of the City. If he agrees, I’ve got an idea.” I called in my head, “Jean-Claude.”

  I had a sense of movement around him. He was in the club. “Oui, ma petite, you rang?”

  I didn’t use words, I let him riffle through my head in a kind of shorthand. We ended with him feeling amazed. “The Wicked Truth here in America.”

  “You know them?”

  “They are the only vampires in our history to purposefully hunt down their line and murder them.”

  That threw me. “What, why?”

  “I knew their master, and his master, the sourdre de sang. They were warriors, ma petite, such warriors. They were to battle what Belle Morte is to sex.”

  “So, are they too dangerous to bring on board?”

  “Do you know what happens when the source of a line goes mad?”

  It seemed like a trick question, but I said, “Something bad.”

  He laughed inside my head, and it made me shiver. “All in their line suddenly began to slaughter people without pay, without politics, or motive of any kind. I was still with Belle at the courts. I know that the council was planning on sending assassins, but two of the vampires in the line took action. They saved us from coming to attention in England, and for that the council was grateful, but they slew their source of bloodline, their creator, and that is a death sentence among us.”

  “So why aren’t they dead?”

  “Because some on the council interceded. I do not know why, or even entirely who, only that Belle v
oted for them to live, but they were masterless and sent to roam as they would with the hand of any master that met them turned against them. If they could slay their fountain of blood and survive, then most considered them too dangerous to survive.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “What are you offering, ma petite?”

  “Remember what happened with Primo?”

  “You will feed Truth, and he will be bound to me and to you, is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They are not the brutes of the Dragon’s line, but they are warriors that have survived centuries with every hand turned against them. I met them once when their master came to the courts. They were men of honor.”

  “What does he say?” Wicked asked.

  I held up a hand. “He’s thinking about it.”

  “No one will risk it,” Truth said in that horribly strained voice.

  Jean-Claude breathed through my mind, shivered over my skin. I moved my hand back from the wounded vampire, so the effect didn’t spread. I opened the marks between us wide, and he filled me. He spilled through my body, over my skin. His power hit mine, and it was like flame laid into some huge waiting bonfire. It spilled my head back, bowed my spine, and spilled out from my skin. It went out and out and out, and I could feel every vampire in the hallway. Feel them like individual lights in the dark, as if with closed eyes I would know them all.

  “Back, my children,” Malcolm’s voice came distant, as if he were talking through the roaring in my head, “we must leave this place to her black magic.”

  I opened my eyes and knew instantly that my eyes had bled to brown fire edged with black.

  “What’s about to happen?” Smith asked.

  I looked up at him, and he let out a surprised yelp. He licked his lips and stared at me, pale and frightened.

  “If you don’t want to watch, then go back to Zerbrowski.”

  Smith shook his head. “I’ll stay.”

  “You won’t like it,” I said.

  He was fighting not to hug himself, and I remembered that he could sense the energy of shapeshifters. Nothing like being a little psychic in the middle of a metaphysical event. “I don’t like it now, but I’ve got your back, at least against anything that a gun will stop.” That last made me think he might be more sensitive than I’d thought. He knew there were dangerous things in the hallway now, but nothing that guns could help with. That was almost too smart. I’d have to be careful around Smith with the metaphysics; he might figure out more than I wanted him to know.