alive.”
It was nice to have someone else in charge who could lecture Olaf. I had to turn away both to hide my pleased expression and not to make eye contact with Edward or Bernardo; I was afraid it would have turned from a smile to giggles. The tension was growing thicker around all of us, anticipation and adrenaline in the very air. I realized that was something that lycanthropes could sense, too. But again, what could we do about it? If they’d truly been animals, we could have used things to disguise our scent, but if we smelled strongly of something weird, they’d know it was all wrong. They were people with the senses of animals; it made them hard to kill, dangerous to hunt. I looked up at the sky and the sun that was moving, inexorably, toward the horizon.
“We want to do this before dark, too, Blake,” Harry said.
“Sorry, but when you spend most of your life hunting vampires, you get very aware of where the sun is in the sky.”
He looked very serious. “I wouldn’t want to do your job every day.”
I smiled, not sure it was amused. “Some days neither do I.”
Undersheriff Shaw moved closer. I’d hoped he was just going to observe. “You know more than you’re telling about the local tigers, Blake.”
“You questioned all of us for hours apiece, Shaw. We could have been ahead of this, and maybe, just maybe, done before dark. Now there’s no way. We’ll do our best, but dark will catch us, and this situation will go from bad to worse.”
“I heard you came out of Max’s place with a new friend. Hand in hand with one of his weretigers. You really have a thing for strippers, don’t you, Blake?”
That let me know that we’d been watched, or Max was being watched. More than that, Edward hadn’t picked up on it, either, so they were good, whoever it had been.
I lowered my sunglasses enough to give him my eyes. “I find your overly intense interest in my personal life disturbing, Shaw.”
He actually blushed a little for me. That was interesting. I wasn’t the only one who noticed that, because Hooper said, “You better suit up, Sheriff Shaw.”
“What?” he asked.
“You’re going in with us, right?”
“You know I’m not.”
“Marshal Blake is going in with us. Please don’t distract her.”
“You’re defending her, Hooper?” He glared at me. “I thought you didn’t do cops, Blake.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you visit SWAT for a couple of hours, and suddenly they’re willing to trust you at their backs, and talk back to their superiors. You must be as good as they say.”
You don’t get to see men like this-shocked-often, but I saw it now. That open-mouthed moment when you can’t believe that slipped from someone’s mouth. They moved around us, and there was that sense of the pack tightening around someone they didn’t like.
Hooper spoke low, but clear, not yelling, but the emotion was there. “This woman is about to put her shoulder next to ours and go into that house, while you stay outside where it’s nice and safe.”
“I don’t have the training anymore,” Shaw said. His face couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to be pale or red, so it tried for both.
“But you did once, and you know better than to mess with our heads this close to go time.”
It was Cannibal who sidled up through the green uniforms and spoke low, near Shaw. “Getting up in Anita’s face isn’t going to make your wife come home.”
“That is none of your business.”
“You made it our business when you accused us of fucking a federal officer rather than doing our jobs.”
Lieutenant Grimes was suddenly working his way through the group, but he wasn’t going to get there in time to stop the next few moments.
“You stay away from me, Rocco,” Shaw said.
“Yeah, that’s right, you’re afraid of psychics, too, but you don’t hate us like you do shapeshifters, because your wife didn’t run off with one of us.”
And just like that, the clue to why Shaw hated my ass was there. Cannibal shouldn’t have said it to his boss’s boss, but… I appreciated him defending my honor, or maybe he was defending his; either way, it was nice not to be alone.
38
GREGORY MINNS’S PROFESSION was listed as bouncer, but Victor had just flat-out told us that he was an enforcer for their clan and, by hint, maybe some not-so-legal activities for Victor’s dad. Most of the wererats that guarded Jean-Claude’s businesses had police records, or just hadn’t been caught, so I really couldn’t bitch. Lately, when I didn’t have room to bitch, I didn’t. Maturity, at last.
We had the guy on the metal shield with its little window leading the way. We even had one guy with the little battering ram, and the rest of the team in full gear, weapons at the ready. Each of us-Edward, Olaf, Bernardo, and I-were assigned to one of the team members. We would follow their lead and go where they went. The suburbs are not great for finding spots to put a sniper, but we had them in place, some in evacuated houses near Minns’s house. He had to know we were out here, but with this many people and this much procedure, it was the best we could do. Good thing about this many people, though, was we had eyes on the back of the house the whole time, and he didn’t run. They’d seen him in there, and no one had seen him leave, so he was still in there. Getting everyone in place took more time. That was the thing we had the least of, and I was having trouble staying calm about it. I wasn’t bitching, but I wanted to start pacing and knew I couldn’t. It was one of those moments when smoking seemed like an interesting idea, or just anything to do while we waited to do this. I watched the sun get lower in the sky and had to fight my pulse from speeding up. I did not want to tackle Vittorio and his people in full darkness. I admitted to myself, if to no one else, that the feeling in the pit of my stomach was fear. One serial killer sends me a human head in a box, and I get all spooked; go figure.
I tried one more time to explain how precious our time was, as we waited for yet another team member to get into some distant place. I was actually assigned to Hooper, which meant that I’d be in the front of the line. I don’t know how they decided who went where.
“Hooper, they killed your men in daylight; once darkness falls, the vampires will be able to help them, and it will be worse, much worse.”
“How much worse?” he asked.
“If we keep dicking around, we’re going to find out.”
“I can’t go against orders, Blake.”
I nodded. “I know it’s not your fault, but it will be you and your men who are going to be at risk.”
“My men and yours,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m not sure they’re exactly my men, but yeah. Your men and us.”
“I’d heard that the preternatural marshals didn’t have a strict command structure.”
I laughed. “That’s one way of putting it.”
That earned me a smile. “Then how do you decide who does what?”
“Ted has the most experience, and I let him take the lead a lot. Sometimes he gives it to me. I’ve worked with Otto and Bernardo before, so we sort of know what our strengths and weaknesses are.” I shrugged. “Mostly, we work by ourselves, and we end up being shoved into the command structure of whatever police force we’re working with, but mostly it’s just us, alone.”
“Like the Lone Ranger,” he said, and he held up his hand. “I remember what you told Spider, that the Lone Ranger was a Texas Ranger.”
I smiled. “Yeah, but the whole lone-gunman mentality is pretty high in the preternatural branch. We worked alone for so many years that we just don’t play well with others.”
A boy who looked too young to be doing this, even to me, with huge blue eyes and his hair hidden completely
