If I'd been there from the beginning, my mind would have been slow and taking it all in with that artificial sense that you have more time to do things, decide things, than you actually do. But sometimes when you step into the middle of it, you see things in strobe effect, an image here, there, but never the large picture, as if to see it all at once would overwhelm you. Hudson yelling, MP5 to his shoulder. Bodies on the ground between him and the big bed. A glimpse of pale, naked flesh on the bed—female. Two other vampires riding two of the men. One rode him to the floor, so he had to be lost to sight from Hudson and Killian's position. The other man was trapped against the wall, still firing his gun into the chest of the vamp, while the body bucked and wouldn't die. The vamp was pressed tight to the white glow of something that looked like a luminous rosary.
Mendez with his rifle, trying to find a shot in the mess. Stepping around giving his back to the bed, so he could pin the gunbarrel against the back of the vamp's head. The vamp never lifted from Jung's neck. The gunshot, like all the others, was loud, but not nearly as loud as it could have been.
It was wrong, all wrong. No vamp, except the most powerful, could stand up to holy objects like this. Only revenants, mindless newbies would feed while you pushed a gun to their head and blew their brains out. You can't be ancient and a newbie, which meant, we were missing someone, someone that was standing right fucking here.
I dropped my shields, and I looked not toward the fighting, but away from it. Either he was better than I was, and he was invisible, which meant he was farther into the room, or he was hiding somewhere that the team hadn't gotten to yet, or both.
I found the energy of him in the far corner in plain sight. Even knowing he was there, I couldn't see him. Which meant either I was wrong, or he was good enough that he could stand wrapped in shadows and darkness and be invisible. The only other vamp I'd ever known that was that good had never been human. I think I could have stripped him of it using my necromancy, or Jean-Claude's marks, but I had the Mossberg in my hands. Why waste magic, when you've got technology?
I tightened my brace of the butt against my shoulder, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The shot didn't kill him, but it brought him stumbling away from the wall. Suddenly everyone could see him. His hands were holding his stomach where I'd shot him. He looked surprised. Tall bastard, I'd been aiming for his chest.
I hit him again, and there was an echo, two echoes. His body slammed back against the wall. I yelled into the mike, "I want to see the wall through his chest."
No one argued. Derry had moved over to help Mendez. I was betting that Hudson had sent him, while I was concentrating on vampire stuff. Hudson, Killian, and I shot the master vampire, until there was a pale smear of wall through his chest. He slid down the wall like a broken puppet, painting the wall dark with blood. Hudson and Killian stopped firing, but I didn't. I put a shot into the head, and had a second shot in before they joined me, but they did join me. With three of us, it didn't take long to explode most of his head like a melon thrown against a wall. When most of his head was gone from his shoulders, I lowered my gun enough to look around and see how everyone else was doing.
Now that the master was dead, the newbie vamps were cringing away from the holy objects, just like they're supposed to. Well, the one vamp that was still alive cringed. She pressed her bloody face against the corner behind the bed, her small hands held out as if to ward it off. At first it looked like she was wearing red gloves, then the lights shone in the blood, and you knew it wasn't opera-length gloves, it was blood all the way to her elbows. Even knowing that, even having Melbourne motionless on the floor in front of her, still Mendez didn't shoot her. Jung was leaning against the wall, like he'd fall down if he didn't concentrate. His neck was torn up, but the blood wasn't gushing out. She'd missed the jugular. Let's hear it for inexperience.
I said, "Shoot her."
The vampire made mewling sounds, like a frightened child. Her voice came high and piteous, "Please, please, don't hurt me, don't hurt me. He made me. He made me."
"Shoot her, Mendez," I said into the mike.
"She's begging for her life," he said, and his voice didn't sound good.
"Shit," I said and started across the room. Something grabbed my ankle. Reflex pointed the shotgun downward. One of the "dead" vampires hissed up at me, with a hole in its forehead, but it still had my ankle, and it was still going to bite me. From less than two feet away, the sawed-off would have been better, but there was no time. I emptied my gun into its head and back, until it let go of me and blood and other things leaked out of the body. "Hudson, dead is at least half their brains spilled, and daylight through their chests."
He didn't argue, just stepped up close to the other vamp and started pegging away at it. I guess making invisible vampires visible had earned me some credits with the sergeant.
I peeled shotgun shells out of the stock holder and fed them into the gun, as I walked toward Mendez and the vampire. She was still crying, still begging, "They made us do it, they made us do it."
The woman on the bed was naked, and her eyes had started to glaze. Shit. But the room had to be secured before we could see to the victim. Secured in my line of work meant something different than for most officers of the law. Secured meant that everything in the room that wasn't on my side was dead.
Killian was moving up by the bed to check on our victim. I hoped he could help her, because it seemed worse to lose people who were trying to save someone that didn't get saved. Jung was trying to hold pressure on his own neck wound. Melbourne's body lay on its side, one hand outstretched toward the cringing vampire. Melbourne wasn't moving, but the vampire still was: That seemed wrong to me. But I knew just how to fix it.
I had the shotgun reloaded, but I let it swing down at my side. At this range the sawed-off was quicker, no wasted ammo.
Mendez had glanced away from the vamp to me, then farther back to his sergeant. "I can't shoot someone who's begging for her life."
"It's okay, Mendez, I can."
"No," he said, and looked at me, his eyes showed too much white. "No."
"Step back, Mendez," Hudson said.
"Sir..."
"Step back and let Marshal Blake do her job."
"Sir... it's not right."
"Are you refusing a direct order, Mendez?"
"No, sir, but—"
"Then step back, and let the marshal do her job."
Mendez still hesitated.
"Now, Mendez!"
He moved back, but I didn't trust him at my back. He wasn't bespelled, she hadn't tricked him with her eyes. It was much simpler than that. Police are trained to save lives, not take them. If she'd attacked him, Mendez would have fired. If she'd attacked someone else, he'd have fired. If she'd looked like a raving monster, he'd have fired. But she didn't look like a monster as she cringed in the corner, hands as small as my own held up trying to stop what was coming. Her body pressed into the corner, like a child's last refuge before the beating begins, when you run out of places to hide and you are literally cornered, and there's nothing you can do. No word, no action, no thing that will stop it.
"Go stand by your sergeant," I said.
He stared at me, and his breathing was way too fast.
"Mendez," Hudson said, "I want you here, now."
Mendez obeyed that voice, as he'd been trained to, but he kept glancing back at me and the vampire in the corner.
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 one 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 abou
t 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."
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