Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  She glanced past her arm, and because I didn’t have a holy item in sight, she was able to give me her eyes. They were pale in the uncertain light, pale and frightened. “Please,” she said, “please don’t hurt me. He made us do such terrible things. I didn’t want to, but the blood, I had to have it.” She raised her delicate oval face to me. “I had to have it.” The lower half of her face was a crimson mask.

  I nodded and braced the shotgun in my arms, using my hip and arm instead of my shoulder for the brace point. “I know,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said, and held out her hands.

  I fired into her face from less than two feet away. Her face vanished in a spray of blood and thicker things. Her body sat up very straight for long enough that I pulled the trigger into the middle of her chest. She was tiny, not much meat on her, I got daylight with just one shot.

  Mendez’s voice came over the mike, “We’re supposed to be the good guys.”

  “Shut up, Mendez,” Jung said in a voice that was choked and thicker than it should have been.

  I knelt by Jung. “Check Mel,” he whispered.

  I didn’t argue with him, though I was pretty sure that it was useless. I reached for the big pulse in his neck and found torn, bloody meat. The carpet around him was spongy with blood. They hadn’t even fed on him. They’d just torn his throat out, not to feed, just to kill.

  “How is he?” Jung asked.

  “Hudson,” I said.

  Hudson was there, and I got up and let him tell Jung the bad news. Not my job to break the news to the wounded. Not my job. I walked out into the middle of the room. There was movement in the hallway, and it took everything I had not to shoot the medics as they came through. Hudson had had to call on the headsets, but I hadn’t heard him. Hell of a night.

  They descended on the wounded with their bags and boxes, and I walked farther into the room, because there was nothing I could do. I had no power over human mortality. Vampires, some shapeshifters, but not straight humans. I didn’t know how to save them.

  “How could you look her in the eyes and do that?”

  I turned and found Mendez by me. He’d taken off his mask and helmet, though I was betting that was against the rules until we left the building. I covered my mike with my hand, because no one should learn about someone’s death by accident. “She tore Melbourne’s throat out.”

  “She said the other vampire made her do it, is that true?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Then how could you just shoot her?”

  “Because she was guilty.”

  “And who died and made you judge, jury, and ex—” He stopped in mid-sentence.

  “Executioner,” I finished for him. “The federal and state government actually.”

  “I thought we were the good guys,” he said, and it had that note of a child who finally realizes that sometimes good and evil aren’t so much opposites, as two sides of a coin. You toss it one way, and it looks good, another way, and it’s evil. Sometimes it just depends on which end of the gun you’re on.

  “We are.”

  He shook his head. “You aren’t.”

  I have no excuse for what I said next, other than he hurt my feelings, and he said out loud something I’d began wonder about. “If you can’t take the heat, Mendez, get out of the fucking kitchen. Get a desk job. But whatever you do, right now, get the fuck away from me.”

  He stared at me.

  Hudson said, “Mendez, go get some air. That’s an order.”

  Mendez gave us both a glance, then he went for the door. Hudson watched him go, then looked back at me. “He didn’t mean that.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “He doesn’t understand what you do.”

  I sighed. “Sure.”

  “In the movies, the vampires look peaceful. Nothing here looks peaceful.”

  “I don’t bring peace, Sergeant, I bring death.”

  “You save more lives than you take.”

  “Pretty to think so,” I said.

  He clapped me on the back, the closest he’d ever get to hugging one of his people, but I took it for the compliment it was. “You did good tonight, Blake, don’t let anyone take that away from you.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You don’t sound convinced,” he said.

  “Let’s just say that after awhile you get tired of having to shoot people who are begging for their lives.”

  “They’re vampires, they’re already dead,” he said.

  I shook my head and smiled. “I wish I believed that, Sergeant Hudson, I do surely wish I believed that.” I watched them start taking out the wounded. They left Melbourne where he lay, but took the girl from the bed. They were triaging, taking the ones they could save; the dead aren’t going anywhere. Well, none of the dead in this room.

  79

  I WAS HAVING an argument with Sergeant Hudson. We were doing it quietly at the back of the equipment van, so the media that had descended on us wouldn’t get us on camera, but it was still an argument.

  “It isn’t them, Sergeant,” I said.

  “So there was an extra vamp or two than the bite marks on the earlier victims. They made more.”

  “The master vamp of this group is strong enough to hide his power from both the Church of Eternal Life and the Master of the City, nothing we killed up there had that kind of power.”

  “We lost three men up there, I think that’s plenty powerful enough.”

  I shook my head. “Most of these were babies, almost brand-new. What I saw at the earlier crime scenes wasn’t a feeding frenzy, it was methodical. The vampires up in that condo were still more like animals than thinking beings. They were too wild to be taken on an organized hunt.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, an organized hunt. You make it sound like killing humans is like hunting deer, or rabbit.”

  “To some of the vampires, it is.”

  He shook his head, hands on hips, and started to pace in a tight circle, but the open door of the van stopped his pacing. “It’s the right number of vamps. They had one dead stripper, and one that they nearly killed. That’s good enough.”

  “They took her and left a state trooper as a witness, so we’d know. They wanted us to come here tonight. Why?”

  “They ambushed us in the hallway, Blake. I think we were just better at killing them than they planned for us to be.”

  “Maybe, but what if it wasn’t a trap to kill us? What if it was a trap to kill the vampires?”

  “That’s just . . . that makes no sense.”

  “You’re ready to close the case. You’re ready to declare them dead, defeated. We kill a few vampires, find a few dead humans in the condo, and you’re ready to believe it’s our serial killers.”

  “And who else would it be? Are you saying we’ve got copycats?”

  “No, I’m saying that if we close this case, then they can just move on to the next town. They can start over.”

  “You’re saying they left us some of their baby vampires so we’d kill them and think it was them? They sacrificed their own people for this?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “You know what I think, Blake?”

  “No, what?”

  “I think you just can’t let it go. I think you want it not to be over.”

  It was my turn to try to pace, but I was smaller, and standing a little farther out from the doors, so I got almost a full circle out of my pacing. It didn’t help. “I want this over with, Hudson, more than you do. Because if these vampires were left up there as sacrificial lambs, then they used me to kill them. They used all of us as a sort of a weapon, their weapon.”

  “Go home, Blake, go home to your husband, or boyfriend, or fucking dog, but go home. Your job is done here. Do you understand that?”

  I looked up at him and tried to think how to explain it. I finally tried something I didn’t like admitting to the police at large. “I saw inside the memories of o
ne of the vampires at the church earlier tonight. I saw some faces. I got some names. Those faces aren’t up there. Those names aren’t going to belong to any of the dead.”

  “This case is closed, Blake, which means your warrant has been fulfilled. You’re done. Go home.”

  “Actually, Sergeant, I have sole discretion on whether a warrant is finished or not. Mark me on this, if we don’t get these guys in St. Louis, they’ll move shop. We got some of them tonight, but not all of them, and we sure as hell missed the big guy, and if you don’t kill the main master, he just moves somewhere else and starts making new vampires. It’s like going in for cancer surgery, if you don’t get it all, then it keeps spreading.”

  “I thought you were dating a vampire,” he said.

  “I am,” I said.

  “For someone who’s dating one of them, you have a damned dark view of them.”

  “Ask me how I feel about human beings sometimes. I’ve gotten called in on too many serial killer cases, where they want it to be a monster, because they don’t want to believe that one human being could do shit like that to another human being.”

  “How long you been doing this, hunting vamps, doing the bad crimes?”

  “Six years, why?”

  “Most violent crime units rotate their people about every two to five years. Maybe you need to see something a little less bloody for awhile.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I sort of side-stepped it. “Up there, the master vampire that was hiding in the corner, none of you could see him, right?”

  “Until you shot him.”

  “I could feel him. I knew exactly where he was. He was controlling the others in the bedroom. If he hadn’t died, then the others would have kept attacking, even with the holy objects visible. We’d have lost more people.”

  “Maybe, but what’s your point?”

  “My abilities with the dead are genetic, it’s like a psychic gift. No amount of training or practice will teach you how to see the invisible. There are less than twenty people in the entire country that have abilities even close to mine.”

  “There are a hell of a lot more than twenty people in the new federal marshal’s program,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, and some of them are good. Some of them would have sensed his power, but I don’t know if any of the rest would have known exactly where to shoot.”

  “You’re saying that you’re the only one who can do your job?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look, Blake, take some advice from someone who’s been doing this longer than you have. You’re not God, you can’t save everybody, and the police work in this town has been running just fine without you to baby-sit. You aren’t the only cop in this city, and you aren’t the only one who can do this job. You’ve got to let go of that idea, or you’ll go crazy. You’ll start blaming yourself for not being there twenty-four-seven. You’ll start thinking, if only I’d been there, this bad thing, or that bad thing, wouldn’t have happened. It’s a lie. You’re just a person, with some good abilities, and good judgment, but don’t try and carry the weight of the whole fucking world. It’ll crush you.”

  I looked up into his brown eyes, and there was something in his face that said he was giving advice that had been hard-won. If I’d been a girl-girl, I’d have said something like, you sound like you’re talking from experience, but I’d hung around with the boys’ club too long not to know my manners. Hudson was opening up, and he didn’t have to, he was trying to help me; asking him personal shit would have made me an ungrateful wretch. “I’ve been the only one for so long.”

  “Did you go up in that condo by yourself?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then stop acting like you did. Do you have anyone waiting for you at home?” His voice was gentler than it had been when he’d first told me to go home to my husband or boyfriend.

  “Yeah, I got someone waiting.”

  “Then go home. Call him from the car, let him know that the officer down calls weren’t you.” They never released names of the downed officers to the media until all the families had been contacted, better for the bereaved, but hell on all the other families with police officers out and about tonight. They were all waiting for the phone to ring, or worse, the doorbell. No one with a police officer in the family wanted to see another cop on their doorstep tonight.

  I thought about how I’d left Micah and Nathaniel standing in the parking lot. How I’d told them to take Ronnie home. How I hadn’t kissed either of them good-bye. My eyes were hot, and my throat hurt.

  I nodded, maybe a little too rapidly. My voice was only a little shaky. “I’ll go home. I’ll call home.”

  “Get some sleep if you can, you’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  I nodded, but didn’t look at him. I’d taken a couple of steps when I turned back and said, “I’ll bet you almost anything, Hudson, that the crime lab is going to agree with me. The DNA in the bites from the first vics aren’t going to match most of the vamps upstairs.”

  “You just won’t let this go, will you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how to let go, Sergeant.”

  “Take it from someone who knows, Blake. You better start learning, or you’re going to burn out.”

  I looked at him, and he looked back, and I wondered what he’d seen in me tonight for him to feel that I needed the “burnout” lecture. Was he right? Or were we all just tired? Him, me, all of us.

  80

  I DROVE HOME thinking about vampires. Not the fun ones. The ones we’d just killed. It was nearly three in the morning, mine was almost the only car when I pulled out onto the highway. Eight dead vamps, plus one human cohort. My bet was a human servant, because he was the one that had killed Officer Baldwin with a sword. That spoke of long ago skills. Not many modern humans are good enough with a blade to take out a tactical officer armed with an MP5. Eight was enough to account for all of them, but I knew we’d missed Vittorio. He just hadn’t been there.

  The night was clear and bright, and as I left the city proper behind, stars studded the sky like someone had spilled a bag of diamonds across the velvet of it. I felt surprisingly good. I wasn’t sure why and didn’t look at it too closely, just in case it was fragile, and too much poking would have broken the mood. I felt good, and I was going home, and I’d saved everyone I could, and killed everyone I could. I was out of it for the night.

  There’d been enough dead females to account for Nadine and Nellie, the pair that had seduced Avery Seabrook. There’d even been an extra that could have been Gwenyth, Vittorio’s sweetheart, but I thought it long odds that all three of them would just let us shoot them without much of a fight. By the standards I was used to, it hadn’t been much of a fight. Not for what this group had been capable of. At least one of them, or more, should have tried to fly out a window, to escape. The sniper had had nothing to do tonight.

  It wasn’t until I was turning off onto 55 South that I realized the Circus of the Damned would have been much closer, and gotten me to bed sooner. Now it was too late, as long or longer to backtrack as go forward. But I wanted my own bed tonight. I wanted a certain stuffed toy penguin. I wanted Micah and Nathaniel, and right at that moment I didn’t really want to see another vampire. It wasn’t the vampire vics that made me not want to face another vampire tonight, it was my victims. It was the flash pictures in my head of the girl who’d begged for her life, and Jonah Cooper, and the silent crowd watching me at the church. I tried to hide behind the shield of the horrible things they’d done to the woman in the kitchen. It had been horrible. Once I’d justified it for myself, by thinking that I was the good guy, that there were things I wouldn’t do, lines I wouldn’t cross. Lately, the lines seemed blurry, or gone. I agreed with Mendez. You didn’t shoot someone begging for their life, not if you were a good guy. But a lot of them begged. A lot of them were sorry, once they were looking down the wrong end of a gun. But they weren’t sorry while they were killing people, torturing people, no
, they were having a good time, until they got caught.

  What got me tonight, was her saying, “He made us do it.” Had he? Had Vittorio so controlled them that they could not disobey him? I knew from the fallout with the London vamps that we’d adopted that you were legally bound to follow your master, almost morally bound, because he was like your liege lord. But was it more than that? Could vampires make other vampires do things they did not want to do? I’d ask Jean-Claude, but not tonight. Tonight I was tired.

  The highway stretched black and empty. My only company was a semi truck pulling some all-night load across the country off in the distance. The truck and I had the road to ourselves.

  I was betting that wherever Vittorio was, that’s where we’d find the women. The crime lab would check the dead vamps’ DNA against the bite marks in the first few victims, and we’d know how many we’d missed. As far the St. Louis police were concerned, it was over. We’d executed most of them and chased the survivors out of town. Trouble was, serial killers don’t stop killing, they just move on and start again somewhere else. Sergeant Hudson and his men were done with it, and they’d paid a high price to be done. But my badge said federal, which meant that I might not be done with Vittorio and his people. I pushed the thought away. For now we’d driven him and his surviving members out of town. That had to be enough, at least for tonight.

  I was off the highway now, on the smooth, more narrow road that led farther into Jefferson County and my house. Trees blocked the view, so the stars seemed farther away. I pulled into my driveway and saw the faint shine of lights against the living room drapes. Micah or Nathaniel had waited up. It was after three A.M., and someone had waited up. I felt guilty, happy, and apprehensive. Nothing good had ever come of my father and Judith waiting up for me. I still wasn’t completely used to living with anyone, so sometimes old reactions crept up, like I was seventeen again, and there was a light on. I told myself I was being silly, but this would be the first call-out like this one since Nathaniel had the right to make more demands on me. I wasn’t sure, yet, what all of those demands might be. So I was a little nervous as I put my key in the door. Was I being silly? Only one way to find out.