and a slim, runner’s build. The brawn for the brains of his partner.
Urlrich understood. He undid the snap on his gun and rested his hand on the grip. “The body was warm; are they still here, Ms. Vampire Expert?”
“I don’t know. With this many vampires, my spider-sense is on overload, and they have to have a vampire master with them powerful enough to possibly hide them.” In my head I added,
“Is it a trap?” Smith asked.
“I don’t know, but they left these vampires here to take the blame for the crimes. Master vamps don’t waste this much manpower without a good reason.”
“Maybe they thought we’d believe it,” Smith said, “and they’d be in the clear.”
“Only if we killed them all on sight,” I said.
Urlrich said, “You do have a reputation for shooting first, Marshal Blake.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Was that what the vampires had counted on, that I’d just kill everyone in the building? If that was the plan, then my reputation was even worse than I thought. I wasn’t sure whether I was sad or happy about that. You’re only as tough as your threat is good; apparently my threat totally rocked.
Zerbrowski came back up as we were talking. “We need to talk about Billings, Anita.” He looked very serious.
I nodded. “Agreed, but later.” I told him that the vampires hadn’t fed.
“Is it like the serial killer who left his wee little vamps to take the blame for his kills, a few years back?”
I nodded. “Maybe, but the laws were different back then; SWAT and I had the green light and had no legal option but to use it. We have options now.”
“Tell that to Mulligan’s wife,” Urlrich said.
I nodded again. “If they helped kill Mulligan and the other officer, then I’ll happily end their lives, but I’d like to make sure I’m putting a bullet between the right pair of eyes.”
“You don’t shoot ’em between the eyes,” his partner said.
I checked his nameplate. “Stevens, is it?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, you do, and one in the heart, and then you take the heart and decapitate them.”
He gave me wide eyes. “God.”
“Would you want to put a bullet in their brains while they were looking at you, and chained up?”
He looked at me, a soft, growing horror in his eyes. “Jesus.” He looked past me at the vampires. “They look like my grandparents, and kids.”
I turned and looked at the vampires, too, and Stevens was absolutely right. Except for the two male bodies that were with the two teens we’d killed, everyone looked like either a kid, or a grandparent, or a soccer mom. I’d never seen a more ordinary-looking bunch of vampires in one place at one time. Even in the Church of Eternal Life, the vampire church, you didn’t have this many older people and children. No one wanted to be trapped forever in a child’s body, or an elderly one; it was too early, or too late, to want to live forever in the bodies that were kneeling on the floor.
I leaned in and whispered to Zerbrowski, “I’ve never seen this many elderly vampires ever, and this many kids in one place, also never.”
“And that means what?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“For a vampire expert, you don’t know a hell of a lot,” Urlrich said.
I’d have liked to argue with him, but I couldn’t.
4
IT WASN’T JUST the vampires that watched me as I moved around the room armed to the teeth. Someone muttered, “Who does she think she is, Rambo?” I didn’t look around to see who had said it; it didn’t really matter. I was a girl and I had the best deadly toys in the room. Gun envy is an ugly thing.
“She’s the Executioner,” the blond boy vamp said.
“They’re all executioners,” Stevens said. His partner hit him in the side with his elbow; you didn’t talk to prisoners, especially not vampires.
“No, Anita Blake is one of only a handful of the vampire hunters that we’ve given names to; she was
I heard Stevens take a breath, and then stop. He obviously wanted to ask, but Urlrich had probably stopped him, so I asked for him. “The Executioner isn’t a name of one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
“You are the only one with two earned names,” he said.
“Let me guess, I’m Death,” I said.
He shook his head very solemnly. “You’re War,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’ve killed more of us than Death.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to ask who the other Marshals were, but I was afraid that Death was my very good friend Ted Forrester, and he’d earned that nickname long before we all had badges, and some of the things he’d done to earn the name hadn’t been legal. I wasn’t sure how much the blond vampire knew, or how much he’d share. He was acting too odd for me to judge what he’d say next.
A woman who looked more like someone’s youngish grandma than a vampire said, “Why haven’t you killed us?”
“Because I didn’t have to,” I said.
The blond boy that Billings had tried to hit said, “The other officers want you to.”
“You haven’t fed, so you didn’t take the officers’ blood. You didn’t kill them.”
“We watched it done,” he said, “under the law that makes us as guilty as the ones who tasted them.”
I frowned at him. “Do you want me to shoot you?”
He nodded.
I frowned harder. “Why?”
He shrugged and dropped his eyes so I couldn’t read his face.
“You are evil and your master is evil,” said the grandma.
I looked at her. “I didn’t just rip the throat out of a man who was trying to keep you from making a fifteen- year-old girl a vampire against her will.”
Her eyes showed hesitation for a moment and then she said, “The girl wanted to be one of us.”
“She’d changed her mind,” I said.
The grandma shook her head, looking sullen. “There was no going back.”
“That’s the same thing date rapists say: ‘She agreed to the date, so it’s too late for her to say no to the sex.’”
She looked shocked, as if I’d slapped her. “How dare you compare us to that.”
“Forcing someone to be a vampire against their will is rape and murder all rolled into one,” I said.
The boy said, “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“And yet, you cohabitate with the master vampire of this city,” he said.
“Cohabitate,” I said. “You’re older than you look.”
“Can’t you tell my age?” he asked.
I thought about it, just a tiny use of power, and said, “Twenty years dead, that’s why the eighties haircut.”
