I tried sitting at Sutton’s waist, but I was too short to reach what I needed to with my gun, so finally I ended up half-kneeling, half-sitting on Sutton’s lower back and leaning over his shoulder.
“Put less weight on my shoulders if you can,” Sutton said.
It was like leaning on him, and not, a careful balance of being so close, so that the heat and rhythm of him was just below me, and yet not touching too much, not putting too much weight so I didn’t fuck with his hold, his aim, his sniper mojo. It took too much concentration. I leaned over his shoulder, sliding my AR down his Barrett, but not directly on top; there was too much on the bottom of the AR to make it a smooth slide.
The vampire was almost free. I fought to hold him, and hit the AR against the Barrett. “Don’t do that,” Sutton said in a tight voice.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I called out to the vampire, threw my power into him like a spear. I felt it stagger him, but I also knew that I’d have to let him go to do the other part. Fuck. I hit him one more time; all that necromancy aimed at him staggered him, so that I think he had to grab the kitchen cabinets to stay upright, and in that split second I leaned over Sutton’s body, married my gun along his as close as I could, and aimed where I knew the vampire’s head would be. Sutton’s point of light followed mine like a red-and-green game of tag on the side of the house. I held my red dot steady, and breathed, “There.”
Sutton’s green dot covered mine. I held my breath, willed my body still, even as I felt his go still underneath me. We held our breaths together, and in that moment of sinking stillness and concentration at that one bright dot, the vampire ripped himself free of me. Sutton fired, and the recoil moved him enough that I slid off, tumbling to one side. I got to my knees, sighting at the house, to find a surprisingly small hole in the white siding.
I could hear the woman screaming inside.
“Did we get him?” Hill said, almost yelling.
“Blake,” Sutton said.
I reached out to the vampire, and found… “Dead, down, done.”
And they accepted that. They gave the all clear, and let officers enter the house from the front, and the only confirmation they had that the vampire was dead was me and my psychic abilities. There were other police officers in St. Louis and elsewhere who didn’t trust me or my abilities, but this team did. Sutton, Hermes, and Hill trusted me enough to send the rest of their team into a house with a rogue vampire, with only my say-so that it was no longer a threat.
I heard the other SWAT team members over the radio moving through the house room by room, calling “Clear” as they moved. Hill started up the yard toward the house with his gun at his shoulder. I put my AR to mine and followed Hill, because when your team moves, you move; when they put their guns to their shoulders and start into a house, you go with them. Sutton and Hermes brought up the rear, because they’d packed the Barrett up, and the four of us moved toward the house, guns up, watching for threats. Over the radios we heard, “House secure. Hostage secured… Suspect down.”
There were no other bad guys in the house. The pregnant ex-wife was being taken out to the waiting ambulance. The vampire was dead. It was a good night.
19
DAWN HAD WASHED the world in soft, golden light by the time I started driving for home. I had texted before I got in the car, letting Nathaniel and Micah know that I was headed their way. I got a typed “kisses” back from Nathaniel, and a “Putting on coffee now.” I’d sent “kisses” back, and started driving.
Micah’s ring tone sounded. I actually had a Bluetooth earpiece; it made me feel all high-tech. “Hey, my Nimir- Raj, I’ll be home in about thirty.”
“Good morning, my Nimir-Ra,” and there was that edge of smile and just happiness that his voice had held for so long when he called me his.
“You guys should still be asleep. I texted instead of called, so I wouldn’t wake you.” I was driving on old Route 21 with the early-morning light streaming through the late-spring trees. The leaves were still that tender green, fresh, with its undertone of golds and yellows. It made me think of a poem. “Nature’s first green is gold,” I said out loud, too tired to just think it.
“What?” Micah asked.
“It’s a poem; the trees made me think of it. ‘Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only for an hour,’ and I can’t remember the rest.”
Micah said, “I can. ‘Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.’”
“How did you know the whole poem?” I asked.
“My dad’s favorite poet is Robert Frost. He used to read Frost poems to us, and quote him a lot.”
“I thought your dad was a sheriff.”
“He was, maybe still is.”
“A sheriff who loved poetry and quoted it in his everyday conversation, that’s nifty.”
“Hey, you quoted it first,” he said softly, and again there was that edge of happiness in his voice, contentment maybe.
“True; you know, there’s no reason you can’t get in touch with your family now.”
“What do you mean?” and the happy tone was gone, replaced by suspicion. Crap; I wished I’d kept my mouth shut, but I’d been meaning to say something for a few months, and…
“You estranged yourself from your family because Chimera used the other lycanthropes’ families against them, but he’s been dead a few years now.”
“You killed him for me,” he said, voice quiet, but still without that happy undertone.
I took a deep breath, let it out, and plowed ahead. I was nothing if not relentless. “And then you wanted to make sure you were safe here in St. Louis.”
“And then the Mother of All Darkness started trying to eat us all,” Micah said.
“But she’s gone now, Micah. There’s no one left to hurt your family if you show that you care about them.”
“There will always be more bad guys, Anita; you’ve taught me that.”
Just hearing him say that made me sad. “I hate that it’s something you learned from me.”
“Not just you,” he said.
“It’s just that you seem to like your family, and miss them. I don’t see mine, because I don’t get along with my stepmother or stepsister.”
“I’ll get in touch with my family after you take us to see yours,” he said.
“Us?” I said.
“Yes, Anita, I love you, but who would you take home to meet your dad? One of us, both of us, more?”
“I wasn’t planning on going home,” I said.
“But if you did, who would you take as your boyfriend?”
“No vampires; my Grandmother Blake is a little crazy. She’d go apeshit around Jean-Claude.”
“Okay, then who?”
“You, Nathaniel, I think.”
“And who would I take home?”
I sighed, and wished I had left the entire topic the fuck alone. I was too tired for this kind of conversation. “Are you saying that you don’t want to take Nathaniel home to meet your family?”
“No, I’m saying that if I go home to my family I need to take you and Nathaniel. The three of us have been a couple from the beginning, and it’s been two years. Two years that have been wonderful, and that wouldn’t have been as wonderful if Nathaniel hadn’t been with us.”
I said the only thing I could to that. “Nathaniel is part of our… coupleness. I mean, our menage a trois, or trio, or whatever you call it.”
“Exactly,” he said, “so how can I go home without both of you?”
“Are you saying you don’t want to take both of us?” I asked.
“I’m not sure how my parents would take me bringing another man home, especially after the horrible things I said to them to convince Chimera I didn’t give a damn about them.”
