quicker and less messy to stuff the garlic, or roses, in the mouth than to stake them. Maybe, if you were close to dawn, the vampire wouldn’t be able to bite until they got the plants out of their mouth, or maybe they’d choke? I had no idea, but as far as I knew it didn’t do anything metaphysical to the bodies of vampires. But it did make the vampire in the room with us start to cry.
Urlrich leaned in and whispered, “She’s the age of my granddaughter.”
“No, she looks like she’s the age of your granddaughter, but she’s really the age of one of your children if they’re in their thirties, and she can still hear you.”
He glanced at her again.
I heard the chains rattle, and she said, “Please, please, help me. I didn’t know they would kill them. I was too small to stop them, too weak. I’m always too weak.”
Urlrich went very still as he knelt beside me. I poked him in the shoulder; when that didn’t make him move, I punched him in the shoulder. It moved his body, made him almost fall.
“What the hell, Blake?”
“You were looking in her eyes, Urlrich; she was fucking with you.”
The two SWAT team members aimed their ARs at the vampire. “You’re the green light, Blake, just say the word,” Baxter said.
“Not yet,” I said. I knew that Baxter had said it out loud to help spook the vampire, but I also knew it was true. A U.S. Marshal with an active warrant of execution was a walking green-light zone for SWAT. Give the word, it was a clean shoot.
Urlrich looked at me, started to protest, and then got a thoughtful look on his face. “Shit, I was thinking about my granddaughter and how much she looks like her, but she doesn’t. My kiddo is dark-haired and younger, but for just a minute there I saw the vampire’s face over my granddaughter’s, as if she were her.” There was just the edge of fear in his eyes when he looked at me then. “Jesus, Blake, that fast, she mind-rolled me that fast?”
“It can happen, especially if the vampire appeals to some issue in your own head, like having a granddaughter about the same age.”
One of the uniformed officers said, “Our crosses didn’t glow; they glow if she uses vampire powers.”
“They glow if she uses enough power, or aims it at you, but she wasn’t doing a damn thing to you, and she made it subtle.” I looked at her then, gave her my full eye contact, because I didn’t have to be afraid of a vampire as weak as this one, not just with mind tricks anyway. “Very nice; I bet that pitiful act works for you almost every time you need a grown-up to protect you, or feed on.”
Her thin little face went sullen, and there it was in those gray eyes, the monster peeking out. This was the truth, this was what had lived for more than thirty years, and fed on humans back when if her blood donors went to the authorities, she’d be hunted down and killed. I didn’t think she was strong enough to wipe their minds clean; her only other option would have been to take blood and eventually kill them, or make them a vampire, so they wouldn’t give her away. Most child vampires weren’t powerful enough to make humans into vampires.
“How many humans have you killed, not for food, but to keep them from telling on you? How many have you fed on and then killed to keep your secret?”
“I didn’t ask to be a vampire,” she said. “I didn’t ask to be trapped like this. The vampire that brought me over was a pedophile, and he made me into his perfect victim forever.”
“How many years did it take for you to kill him?”
“I wasn’t strong enough to kill him,” she said, and the voice was still a child’s, but the tone, the edge of force, that wasn’t childlike at all.
“But you manipulated someone else to do it for you, didn’t you?”
“They wanted to save me from him, and I wanted to be saved. You have no idea what it was like.”
I sighed. “You’re not the first child vampire I’ve met that was brought over by a pedophile.”
“He deserved to die,” she said.
I nodded. “No arguments.”
“Then please, don’t hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt anymore.” She called up some tears to shine in those big eyes of hers.
“You’re good,” I said, “I thought you couldn’t act well enough to hide your fear, but you wanted me to see it. You wanted everyone to see it. I should have thought that in that body you’d have to be a master manipulator to have survived this long.”
“Tears and pity are all I have, all I’ve ever had to protect myself with.”
Urlrich was moving for the door. “I can’t watch this, it’s too close to home.”
“Go, check on your partner, and remember she’d kill you as soon as look at you.”
“I wouldn’t,” she protested.
I looked her in the face. “Liar.”
She hissed at me, and just like that no one in the room thought she was a little girl anymore. Her eyes started to drown in that glow that meant she was about to go all vampire on us; she was weak enough that she was going to give us clues before she went apeshit.
“Blake?” Murdock said, settling his rifle very still against his shoulder; his partner followed suit.
“Stop, or we shoot you in the heart, and the head, right now.”
“Better a quick death than stuffed full of flowers and beheaded.”
“None of this is for you, Shelby. It’s for the bodies.”
The glow began to leak out of her eyes. “What bodies?”
“The dead vampires; you know, we have to take the head and heart once a vampire is dead to keep it from rising from the grave.”
“Why show me all this, then?”
“Help us find the ones who did the killing and maybe you don’t get executed with them, but if you don’t help us and they kill again, when you could have helped us stop it…” I motioned at the stakes. “This will be for you.”
“If I tell you where they are, they’ll kill me.”
“Not if I kill them first, Shelby. I’ll have a whole team of SWAT with me; we will kill them. They won’t ever hurt you, or bully you, again.”
“Someone else will bully me; I’m too weak.”
“Join the Church of Eternal Life; they have foster groups for child vampires. You can be with others like you, and it’s all legal, and you can go to college, hold a job, and have a life.”
“To join the Church I have to drink the blood of your master, and then he’ll own me. I don’t want to be anyone’s slave.”
“The blood oath is to keep vampires from doing exactly what you did-kill humans. A strong Master of the City can keep his followers from acting on their blood hunger.”
“He’s too powerful, and so are you, Anita Blake! It’s not like a blood oath to a regular Master of the City; you lose your will. You turn us into humans blindly following our beautiful leader and his blood whore!”
I smiled. “Sticks and stones, Shelby; call me all the names you want, but you watched two human police officers murdered in front of you, and did nothing to stop it. Under the law you’re just as guilty as the vampires that sank fangs into them, and you will be executed for it. Help us find them, and the new laws may have a loophole for you to slip through, and live.”
“I’m already dead, Anita Blake.”
“No, no you’re not. You’re alive. You walk, you talk, you think, you’re still you-undead isn’t the same thing as dead.” I went to the door, opened it, and said, “Bring it in.” Two officers brought a black plastic-wrapped body. The face was pale and still showing. It was the vampire that had tried to hide behind the human girl. I’d shot him, and now I’d get to finish the job.
“Lay it down in the middle of the tarp,” I said.
The two officers laid the body down where I directed. One of them half stumbled, and an arm flopped out of the plastic, limp as only true death can make it.
Shelby gasped, and I thought that one might be genuine.
I unrolled the plastic and looked down at the dead vampire. The wounds in his upper and middle chest had dried black around the edges, but the blood was still red enough that it had darkened his button-down shirt to shades of crimson, brown, and then the last color of most blood-black. They can say that death is the big sleep, but a dead body doesn’t act like it’s asleep; even the unconscious don’t have the loose-boned fall of the freshly dead.
