Some vampires go into rigor immediately, but this one wasn’t old enough for that; he was just like any dead body that was less than two hours old, though the blood wouldn’t pool in the body as it did in a human.
“This is dead, Shelby; whatever you are, it’s not this.”
I got the coveralls out of the other bag, the one that held the equipment I used most often, rather than the government-sanctioned stuff. The government didn’t tell me I had to wear the coverall, but then the people making the laws had never had to do my job. They’d never found out how much blood and mess comes out of a body when you remove its head and heart. Until you’ve been covered in that much blood and gore, you just don’t understand. Coveralls kept the dry-cleaning bills down and helped me sleep better at night. There’s only so many times you can scrub blood out from under your fingernails before you start going all Lady Macbeth and stop believing the blood is ever gone.
I braided my hair, something that Nathaniel had taught me to do. With my curls it would never be as neat a braid as his, but it meant I could tuck the nearly waist-length hair into a skullcap. I’d tried the disposable plastic shower caps, but I was just vain enough that I’d started to use the cheap skullcap hats; they were more expensive than the shower caps, but they looked less dorky. It was harder to tuck my hair under the cap, but the black cap looked more threatening than poufy plastic, and tonight that counted.
Shelby said, “Why are you putting your hair up?”
“Got tired of cleaning bits of people out of my hair.”
“Bits of people.” She said it low, like she was testing out the phrase.
“Yep,” I said. I slid the plastic booties over my shoes next. I’d gotten where I could do it standing up on one foot, and I didn’t track pieces of my work home with me. I still hadn’t heard the end of the time I had a piece of brain matter stuck to one shoe and didn’t notice until I was walking across the living room carpet. All right, honestly, I didn’t notice at all. Micah noticed, and Nathaniel said he had no idea how to clean brains out of carpeting, so please don’t get it on the carpet. But it was Sin’s reaction that made me throw the shoes out. You’d think a weretiger, no matter how young, would be a little more understanding. Asher had totally backed Sin, and thought it was beyond the pale. He was the only vampire that complained. I pointed out that with their all-liquid diet, they didn’t have to worry about stuff like this; the wereanimals did, so they could bitch. Asher had said, “I don’t have to eat flesh to not want brain matter in the carpet.” I’d called him a pussy, but I’d thrown the shoes out.
There was another leather fold, tied tight so it wouldn’t shift in transport, but this one didn’t have wooden stakes in it. I untied the leather thong, laid it on the ground beside the stakes, and undid the flap. Blades gleamed in the dim light, glowing softly silver. They were knives that Fredo, one of our lead bodyguards and a member of the local wererat rodere, had helped me pick out after I’d borrowed one of his knives to cut out a vampire’s heart, because his knife collection was better. Fredo liked knives the way Edward liked guns. Fredo taught knife-fighting classes to the guards, and I took the class whenever I could.
I took out a blade and made a show of testing the balance in my hands, letting it lie across my fingertips, and resting on a single fingertip. I loved the balance of this knife, but balance for fighting wasn’t always the best balance for carving someone’s heart out of their chest.
“What are you going to do with that?” the vampire asked, in a breathy, frightened voice.
I didn’t bother looking at her as I answered, “You know what I’m going to do with it.” I slid the knife back into its leather home and took out another one. I didn’t bother trying to balance this one on my fingertips, because it didn’t balance that way. I was never going to try to throw this one, and if I had to fight a “living” target with it, then things would have gone so pear-shaped I wouldn’t have to worry about how balanced my knives were ever again.
I put the blade on top of the leather, so that the vampire could see it clearly. So she could watch the sharp edge gleam in the dim light. I fished in the equipment bag one more time, and came out with a pair of paramedic’s scissors and a box of plastic gloves.
“What is that?” The vampire whispered it. The tone of fear in her voice made me look at her. Her face was pinched, and strained, not with vampire powers but simple fear. If you’ve never seen a pair of the scissors, they are a little odd-looking, and you might not call them scissors; you might think they were some sort of metal cutters, or pointy pliers. She didn’t know what they were, or what I was going to do with them, and that bothered her. The unknown bothered her more than the knowing. Interesting, and potentially useful.
I didn’t answer her. The face shield was next, with its little strap that went around the back of the head. That was government ordered, but I actually agreed with it; again, cleaning blood out of your eyelashes loses its charm after a while. The face shield sent my breath back to me, so that I could feel how warm it was. I had a moment to be claustrophobic, but fought it off. If I did it right, I didn’t really need it, but every once in a while the undead bodies acted weird, and they’d squirt at you when you weren’t expecting it. I really didn’t want this guy’s blood on my face.
I got out the thin gloves, and then put the longer rubber gloves over that. They went up past my elbows, which I’d need because of the way I took the heart out of the body. A lot of executioners just destroyed the heart with a stake, a knife, or a gun, but left the remnants of it in place. If I could see daylight through the chest, so that I knew the heart was utterly destroyed, I’d do that, but when I couldn’t see into the chest cavity, I didn’t trust the heart to be destroyed enough. New vampires like this one, the gunshot wounds I’d put in his chest were probably enough to ensure he wouldn’t heal and rise unexpectedly, but I’d never gotten in trouble being overly cautious when it came to making certain a vampire was really, truly, completely, dead.
Of course, it was a little hard to see the extent of the gunshots through the clothes, which was why I had the paramedic’s scissors. They’d cut through anything but metal, and even cheap metal would yield to them, but harder things like handcuffs were proof against them-but clothes, no sweat.
I knelt beside the body, tucking the scissors in between the buttons just above the waist of the jeans, cutting to one side so I could parallel the fastened buttons.
“Just unbutton it,” she said.
“This is faster,” I said, keeping my gaze and my attention on what I was doing.
“But the buttons are right there,” she said. It’s funny what will bother someone most; you never know what it will be. Things that you would never dream would frighten someone, or creep them out, scare the hell out of them or make their skin crawl. For whatever reason, it seemed to really bother her that I was cutting beside the line of neatly fastened buttons, but not using the buttons.
I usually cut a quick, clean line through a shirt, but now I slowed down, took my time, let her watch, let her think, let whatever it was about it have time to bother her more.
“Just do it,” she said, her voice holding an edge of franticness. “Just cut through it, if you’re going to, or unbutton it. Why do it like that? Why cut it off like you’re enjoying it?”
Ah, I thought, she thought what I was doing looked sensual, like I was enjoying it. I wasn’t; it didn’t move me one way or the other. The days when it would have creeped me out to cut through the clothes were long past. Cutting clothes off a willing lover who enjoyed that sort of thing was fun, exciting, sexy. Cutting clothes off a corpse wasn’t any of those things. It was just cutting the cloth away so I could see the chest and judge how much damage the bullets had done to the heart, so I’d know if I needed to take out the heart, or if the bullets had done the job for me. Baring the pale, cool skin was more like unwrapping a piece of butchered meat, inert, not alive, nothing but meat that you might have to cut up. That was the only way to think of it; the only way to do it, and stay sane.
“Just finish cutting it!” She half-yelled it.
The door opened behind me; I caught the movement out of my peripheral vision, so I was able to see Zerbrowski come smiling through the door without actually turning away from the body in front of me.
“What’s all the fuss?” he said cheerfully.
The vampire tried to get up off her knees, where the uniforms had put her. The rattle of the chains made me look at her and see one of the officers put a hand on her thin shoulder, automatically pushing her back to her knees.
“Make her stop,” the vampire said.
“Marshal Blake isn’t under my command. She doesn’t answer to me.”
The vampire gave me wide frightened eyes. I looked into her eyes and smiled a slow, tight spread of lips. She actually tried to move backward, as if ten feet were suddenly too close to me. I smiled a little more, and she made a small sound in her throat, as if she were trying not to whimper, or scream.
“Please,” she said, and held her hand up to the officer who was keeping her on her knees. “Please, please, I
