“You know the answer to that.”
I nodded.
“Anita, you are not a monster.”
“You said we’d talk later about what happened with Billings,” I said.
He smiled, but not like he was happy, and shook his head, letting his hand drop from my shoulder. “You just have to do it the hard way, don’t you?”
I nodded. It was the truth, why argue.
“You mind-fucked him,” Zerbrowski said.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I sort of absorbed his anger.”
“Absorbed?” Zerbrowski made it a question.
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“It’s a metaphysical ability.” I shrugged.
“Can you absorb other emotions?”
I shook my head. “Just anger.”
“You don’t get angry much anymore; is that why?”
“I’m not sure; maybe. Maybe in learning to control my own anger, I can control others. Honestly, I’m not sure.”
“He still doesn’t have much memory of the last two hours before you absorbed”-and he made air quotes-“his anger.”
“That’s never happened before, and I didn’t do it on purpose. He startled me and I…”
“Lashed out,” Zerbrowski said, “like with a fist, just not a physical one.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We looked at each other for a moment, and because it was me, I had to say, “Still think I’m not the monster?”
“You were the only one in the room fast enough to get to Billings before he hit that vampire. Watching him raise you up on his arm like you were… you looked tiny, Anita. We were all moving to help, but you took care of it, like you usually do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.
He smiled, shook his head. “Damn it, you are the hardest person I know, on yourself and everyone around you. You push until the truth comes out; good, bad, indifferent, ya gotta push, don’t you?”
“Not always anymore, but usually, yeah, I push.” I studied his face, waited for him to answer.
He frowned, sighed, and then looked at me. He was studying me back. “You’re not a monster. When Dolph was having his issues and trashed a couple of rooms with you in it, you didn’t report him. You let him go all apeshit on you; a lot of guys wouldn’t have, not without getting his ass in a sling.”
“He’s better now,” I said.
“We’re all capable of losing it. The difference is that we get it back; we don’t stay in the apeshit place, we regain ourselves.”
“Regain ourselves, nice phrase,” I said.
He grinned. “Katie’s been reading me some of her psychology books again.”
I smiled at him. “Good to have a smart spouse.”
He nodded. “Always marry someone smarter, and prettier.”
That made me laugh, just a little. The laugh sounded odd and echoing in the big room. I glanced back at the vampire I’d killed to save the fifteen-year-old girl he’d meant to make into a vampire. Was I sorry he was dead? No. Was I sorry the girl was still a living, breathing human being? Nope. Was I sorry that I’d scared the vampire Shelby? A little. Was I glad we had the locations of the rogue vampires that had killed the police officers? Yes.
Zerbrowski touched my shoulder again. “Don’t let people like Kirkland make you feel bad about yourself, Anita.”
I turned and looked at him, and there was something in his face that made me smile again. “I’ll do my best.”
“You always do,” Zerbrowski said.
That earned him a grin, and me one in return.
“Pack up your gear; we’ve got vampires to hunt.”
“Be right there,” I said, and pulled the black cap off my hair, but I left the braid in, because sometimes the hair blew in my face and I might be shooting at people. You want to see what you’re aiming at when you’re trying to kill people. It’s important to shoot the right ones.
13
EVERYONE AGREED THAT we’d hit the locations after dawn so the vampires would be dead to the world. We had two dead cops; we didn’t need more, so we waited. Waiting is hard. It gets on your nerves. There’s a chance to sleep for a few hours, and if you can do it, they’ll find you a cot in the back of the station so you can rack out. Almost no one would sleep. We had two of our own dead, and we’d be hunting their killers in a few hours. It either buzzed you or made you think too hard; either way, sleep wasn’t happening. Most of us had never known either officer personally, but it didn’t matter. If you’d thought one of them was the biggest dick in the world while he was alive, that didn’t matter either. What mattered was that he carried a badge and so did you. That meant that if you’d put out a call for help, he’d have come, and he would have put his life on the line for you. Stranger, friend, it didn’t matter; you would have risked your life for him, and he for you, and if you had to, you’d have walked into a firefight with him, because that was what it meant to carry the badge. It meant that when everyone else was running away, you ran toward the problem, and anyone else who was willing to run into the shitstorm with you was your brother in arms. Civilians think that cops react like this because they’re thinking,
The vampires hadn’t just killed two cops, they’d killed two men who would have put their shoulders beside ours and hit the door. They’d taken out two of the good guys, and that wasn’t allowed. Part of the energy, as we waited, was that we weren’t just going to track the bad guys down; we were going to kill them, and it was all nice and legal. We’d hunt them down and we’d execute them. Technically, it was serving a warrant of execution, because now we had an official warrant, but to me it was just a vampire hunt with SWAT backup.
There were three locations, so I was the Marshal at one; Larry would be the Marshal at the second location, and our newest member of the Preternatural Branch, U.S. Marshal Arlen Brice, would go in with the third team. Brice was one of the new breed of preternatural Marshals, one who had been a regular police officer for at least two years and then trained for preternatural work in classrooms, not in the field. I had yet to meet a Marshal who had been trained this way who came from any branch of law enforcement that gave them the skill set they needed for hunting vampires and rogue wereanimals, because badge or no badge, preternatural Marshals are legalized assassins. We kill people in order to save lives, but our main job is killing. Police save lives, and most go their whole twenty without ever drawing their gun in the line of duty. Most Marshals in the Preternatural Branch kill at least one vampire their first month in the field, sometimes more. Anyone who thinks that killing vampires isn’t like killing real people should try it for a while and see how it feels. I’ve killed human beings in the line of duty, and honestly, other than the fact that they’re easier to kill, it just doesn’t feel that different.
But U.S. Marshal Arlen Brice didn’t know that yet.
Brice was five-eight, five-nine, short, but with nicely cut hair in one of those in-between colors that was either pale brown or a really dark blond. When I’d been a little girl I would have called it pale brown, but a girl in my class had hair almost the same color and she had informed me that it was “champagne blond.” My stepmother had
