Derry’s shoulders slumped, saying he was disappointed, but he didn’t argue.
Derry just moved up with me, rifle still at the ready. I went with him, though I pointed my shotgun a little to one side. The room wasn’t that wide, and I just wasn’t sure there was enough room for all of us pointing guns in, without risking crossing someone’s body. One of my goals tonight was not to do that.
I knew some of what we’d find, because I could smell it. Not just the blood, old blood, but that meaty, fluid smell, and a stale whiff of sex. Male sex. It helped me steel myself for what I was about to see.
She lay spread-eagle on the small four-seater table. Her legs had folded over the edge of the table, and her groin was splayed in a line for the door, so the view was painfully clear. She’d been raped, and for that much damage, probably not just with someone’s body. Or at least not just with a penis. I was glad when I could look away. She was wearing what looked like a silver sequined bikini, but she had pantyhose on under it. Though I might not have realized that if the clothes on her lower body hadn’t been ripped away. The pantyhose told me she was a stripper from this side of the river. The laws on the books in St. Louis for strippers are odd. Jean-Claude’s club gets around it on a grandfather clause, because as a vampire he was here before the laws went into effect, but anyone else had to abide by the rules. One of the rules was that the girls had to wear pantyhose, not just hose, under their outfits. The rules were designed by people who wanted to make sure that St. Louis could not have “those kinds” of clubs. There’s no one so self-righteous as someone policing someone else’s morality.
Her head was back, so that her eyes were staring at the far wall of the small but expensive-looking kitchen. Her hair was brown and must have been at least to her waist. I’d become pretty good at judging hair length when people were lying down. The hair was real, not a wig, so it wasn’t our missing stripper. This was indeed someone else. How many people had they kidnapped tonight?
Either Mendez or Derry had used flex cuffs on her wrists. It was standard op on intact bodies. Officers had been killed by “dead” bodies. Better safe than sorry.
Mendez squatted down. He was peering under the table. “What is that?”
I squatted, because I was closer to the ground. Derry kept an eye on the room, gun sort of at the ready, but careful to not point out toward us. It was nice to work with professionals.
There was a long cylindrical object under the table. It was black with dried blood on it. It was so caked with blood that for a second I couldn’t tell what it was, then it was like one of those abstract pictures that suddenly snap into place, and you know. I swallowed hard, against the burn of nausea. I took a slow breath through my nose and let it out easy through my mouth. My voice sounded odd even to me, when I said, “Bottle, wine bottle.”
Mendez said, “God.” He must have hit his button by accident, because Hudson heard him.
“What is it, Mendez?” Hudson asked over the headsets.
“Sorry, sir, just, Jesus, this was a bad way to die.”
“Steady, Mendez.”
“That didn’t kill her,” I said, and stood up.
Mendez moved with me. His eyes flashed white through his mask and gear.
I pointed with one hand at her neck, her breast, her arms. “They bled her to death.”
“Before?” he asked, sort of hopefully. Never a good sign when the police are asking you to please make this not as horrible as it looks.
I shook my head. “But multiple bites means she’s dead, she can’t be a vampire. The body is checked out, guys. Can I join you, or am I on permanent baby-sit duty?”
Derry moved for the door of the kitchen. Oh, goody, I wasn’t the only one who wanted out of here. I followed Derry, and Mendez brought up the rear. I’d have moved to the back of the line, but no one complained, so I stayed where I was. The sound of gunfire and yelling and screaming was ahead. I wanted to run, but Derry moved at a jog. If his body was tight with adrenaline, and his pulse thundering, it didn’t show. Mendez followed Derry’s lead, and so did I.
A woman’s scream came high and shrill, from deeper into the apartment. Her screams were accompanied by sounds that were more animal than human. Thick, wet, sucking sounds. The vampires were feeding, and Dawn Morgan was still alive. We did the only thing we could. We rushed into the hallway. We rushed off to save her. We jogged into the trap, because the bait was screaming.
78
« ^ »
The only light was the sweep of flashlights ahead and behind. Because I didn’t have a light, it ruined my night vision, but didn’t really help me. Derry jumped over something, and I glanced down to find that there were bodies in the hallway. The glance down made me stumble over the third body. I only had time to register that one was our guy, and the rest weren’t. There was too much blood, too much damage. I couldn’t tell who one of them was. He was pinned to the wall by a sword. He looked like a shelled turtle, all that careful body armor ripped away, showing the red ruin of his upper body. The big metal shield was crushed just past the body. Was that Baldwin back there? There were legs sticking out of one of the doors. Derry went past it, trusting that the officers ahead of him hadn’t left anything dangerous or alive behind them. It was a level of trust that I had trouble with, but I kept going. I stayed with Derry and Mendez, like I’d been told.
There was a vamp near the end of the hallway with most of the top of his head missing. His mouth was wide, showing fangs in the flash of someone’s light. Derry hit the doorway and hugged the wall to the left. I followed him. Mendez went right. Only when Mendez didn’t follow me, did I realize that I should have peeled off to the other wall with him. Hell, there were too many rules. I stayed with Derry, because there wasn’t time to correct the mistake, if it was a mistake. If we lived, I’d ask someone.
The holy objects had blazed to life, so bright, white and blue like captive stars. They were ruining everyone’s night vision. Made it hard to shoot. My cross was safely tucked away, for just that reason. By the thin flashlight beams and the incandescent flare of holy fire I saw what there was to see.
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 ev
er 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.”
Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams Page 80