“He’s proud of me.”
“Mine, too,” I said. “He just worries.”
“Yeah, mine, too.” She looked at me sort of sideways and then said, “They talk about you in the training. Anita Blake, the first female vampire executioner. You still have the highest kill count of any marshal.”
“I’ve been doing it longer,” I said.
“There’s only eight of you from the early days,” she said.
“There were more of us than that,” I said.
“They either retired early like your friend Manny Rodriguez, or they . . .” She was suddenly very interested in getting her clothes in a drawer. “Is it okay if I take the top drawer?”
“Fine, you’re taller.”
She smiled, a little nervous around the edges. “It’s okay, Karlton,” I said. “I know the mortality rate was high when the vampire executioners first started serving warrants.”
She put her clothes in the drawer, closed it, and then looked at me, sort of sideways, again. “Why did the mortality rate among the executioners go up after the warrant system was put in place? The books all say it went up, way up, but it doesn’t explain why.”
I knelt down and she gave me enough room to put my clothes in the bottom drawer. I thought about how to answer her. “Before warrants, vampire hunters weren’t always particular about how they killed. We didn’t have to defend it in court, so we were a little more trigger happy. After the warrant system some hunters hesitated, worried about what would happen if they couldn’t defend it in court and ended up on murder charges. Remember, back then we had no badges. Some of us went to jail for murder even though the vampire killed was confirmed as a serial killer. It made some of us hesitate to kill. Hesitation will get you killed.”
“We have badges now.”
“Yeah, and officially we’re cops, but make no mistake, Karlton, we are still executioners. A policeman’s main job is to prevent harm to others. Most of them go twenty years and never draw their gun in the line of duty, not matter what you see on television.” I laid shirts on top of bras and underwear in the drawer. “Our main job is to kill people; that’s not what cops do.”
“We don’t kill people, we kill monsters.”
I smiled, but knew it was bitter. “Pretty to think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four, why?”
I smiled, and it still didn’t feel happy. “When I was your age I believed they were monsters, too.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“You’re only six years older than me, Blake.”
“Cop years are like dog years, Karlton, multiply by seven.”
“What?” she asked.
“I may only be six years older than you chronologically, but in dog years I’m forty-two years older.”
She frowned at me. “What the hell is that even supposed to mean?”
“It means, how many vampires have you executed?”
“Four,” she said, and it was a little defensive.
“Hunted them down and killed them, or morgue stakings where they’re chained to a gurney and unconscious while you do it?”
“Morgue, why?”
“Talk to me after you’ve killed some of them awake, while they’re begging for their lives.”
“They beg for their lives? I thought they’d just attack.”
“Not always; sometimes they’re scared and they beg, just like anybody else.”
“But they’re vampires, they’re monsters.”
“According to the law we uphold they’re legal citizens of this country, not monsters.”
She studied my face. I don’t know what she saw there, or wanted to see, but she finally frowned. I think a blank face wasn’t what she’d been hoping to see. “So you really do believe that they’re people.”
I nodded.
“You believe they’re people, but you still kill them.”
I nodded again.
“If you really believe that, then it would be like me killing Joe Blow down the block. It would be like me putting a stake through a regular person’s heart.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She frowned and turned back to unpacking. “I don’t know if I could do my job if I thought of them as people.”
“It does seem a conflict of interest,” I said. I began debating on where to put the weapons I’d want easy access to, just in case. Knowing that the Harlequin might be planning to try to kidnap or kill me made me more than normally interested in being well armed.
“Can I say something without you taking it wrong?” she asked, and sat on the edge of her bed.
I stopped with one gun and two knives laid out on the bed. “Probably not, but say it anyway.”
She frowned again, putting that little pucker between her eyes. If she didn’t stop frowning so much she’d have lines there before too many years. “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you.”
I sighed. “What I mean, Karlton, is anytime someone asks me, ‘Can I say something without you taking it wrong?’ it usually means it will be something insulting. So say it, but I can’t guarantee how I’ll take it.”
She thought about that a minute, serious as a small child on the first day of school. “Okay, I guess that was a stupid thing to say, but I want to know the answer enough to be stupid.”
“Then ask,” I said.
“We had some of the other vampire executioners come and give lectures. One of them said you’d been one of the best before you got seduced by the master vampire of your city. He says that women are more likely to be seduced by vampires than men, and you’re proof of that.”
“It was Gerald Mallory, the vampire hunter assigned to Washington, DC, wasn’t it?” I said.
“How did you know?”
“Mallory thinks I’m the whore of Babylon because I’m sleeping with vampires. He might forgive shapeshifters, but he hates vampires with a depth and breadth of hate that’s frightening.”
“Frightening?” She made it a question with a upward lilt of her voice.
“I’ve seen him kill. He gets off on it. He’s like a racist who has permission to hate and kill.”
“You say race because I’m black.”
“No, I say racist because it’s the closest thing I can imagine to his attitude toward vampires. I’m not joking when I say after seeing him stake vampires that he scares me. He hates them so much, Karlton. He hates them without reason, or thought, or any room in his mind for a reason not to hate them. It consumes him, and people consumed by hate are crazy. It blinds them to the truth, and makes them hate anyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
“He also says that you should always stake a vampire. He doesn’t approve of using silver ammunition.”
“He’s a stake and hammer man.” I knelt by my backpack and came up with the Mossberg 500 Bantam shotgun. “This is my favorite for shooting them in their coffins. All you need to do is destroy the brain and the heart, but don’t just shoot them in the head and chest and think you’ve got the job done. You need to make sure the brain is leaking out on the floor, or the head is completely detached from the body, and then you need to see some daylight through the chest. The older the vampire, the more completely you need to destroy the heart and head.”
“He said just staking the heart was enough.”
“If I see daylight through the chest and the heart is completely destroyed, you’re probably okay, but if I have time I destroy the brain, too, just to be safe, and I want you to know that’s safer in the field. I’d still go back and shoot them in the head after the heart was taken out in a field situation.”
“You mean on a hunt,” she said.
“Yeah.”
