Affliction

55

Marshal Hatfield sat in Deputy Marshal Chapman's office on the edge of her chair with the warrant of execution spread on the edge of his desk. She wanted to sign it over to me. There was precedent for it, but for some reason Chapman didn't want her to do it.

Hatfield gazed up at him with hollow eyes. I wondered if she'd slept at all. Her hair was coming loose in strands as her ponytail sagged at the nape of her neck. She'd looked so crisp and together yesterday; now she looked like she needed a hug. I wondered if she had anyone in her life who could give her one.

'I don't understand, sir. It would have been Marshal Blake's warrant in the first place, if she hadn't been shot.'

'The warrant was assigned to you, Hatfield, and we expect you to fulfill it.'

A look of near pain came over her face; lines that hadn't been there before showed sharp and harsh. I'd have put her under thirty, but in that moment I put her over, but it wasn't age it was just stress. It'll mark you up. Sometimes the marks fade and sometimes they don't. Just as smile lines are the mark of every happiness you've ever had, so some lines are the mark of every disappointment carved into your flesh as surely as any scar.

'Technically, sir, Hatfield is a part of the Preternatural Branch of the service just like we are,' Edward said.

'I'm aware of that, Marshal Forrester.'

'Well then, sir, you are aware that we are not in your direct line of command because you're regular service and we're preternatural service.'

Hatfield blinked at Edward, as if she weren't tracking everything, but she'd heard something that seemed important.

'Hatfield was in my direct command for several years, Forrester; she knows her duty.'

'I thought our duty was to execute each warrant in the most efficient way with the least loss of life,' I said.

Chapman frowned at me. 'Of course,' he said.

'Then Blake should take this warrant,' Hatfield said. 'I'll still work with her and Forrester to complete it, but I'd feel more comfortable with her in charge of the overall investigation.'

'You have been a law enforcement officer longer than Blake. You have five years more experience than she does,' Chapman said.

'I do, and there are men on the force who are ex-military and she's never been that either, but none of us have her background in dealing with the undead, sir. I believe that my lack of experience in that area led directly to the five deaths yesterday.'

'You can't blame yourself because Blake and Forrester here didn't share information.'

I pushed away from the wall. 'I was unconscious in the hospital, Chapman. How was I supposed to share information?'

He looked at me, then gave a little nod. 'Perhaps that was unfair; if so, my apologies.'

'I didn't arrive in the state until after Marshal Blake was shot,' said Edward. 'I didn't know the facts of the case until dark the next night; in what way did I conceal information that would have prevented the deaths yesterday?' His voice was quiet, calm, but held enough suppressed anger to set fire to something. I'd never heard Edward sound this angry as Ted.

Chapman shifted on the balls of his feet, hands clasped behind his back like an echo of being at ease in the military. His gray hair was cut high and tight. I'd have said Marines, but it felt more like Army. Marines fucked about a little less and were less likely to rise as high in rank as Army, due to a certain cussedness that seemed to go with being a nonpracticing Marine. You had Marines who rose to high rank, and you had ex-Army who were as stubborn as a Marine, but it was usually the other way around.

'Sir,' Hatfield said, 'I knew about the rotting vampires in Atlanta. I read the same information that Blake and Forrester did, but I failed to make the logic leap that these vampires might need fire just like the ones in Atlanta did. I'd never seen anything like them, and I thought ... heads blown up, spines damaged, hearts ... I could see through their chests, sir. I thought that was dead enough; I was wrong.'

Hatfield's willingness to fall on the grenade for what had happened made me like her better, and it was even true. She should have erred on the side of caution, and she hadn't, and people were dead because of it, but ... she was letting the guilt tear her up.

'They were missing civilians, Marshal Hatfield. We owed it to their families to identify them before the bodies were burned,' Chapman said.

'Are you saying it's become acceptable practice to not burn vampires once we've taken their heads and hearts?' I asked.

'Outside of special circumstances, it has worked very well. We've closed missing-person cases that were decades old.'

Huh. 'I honestly hadn't thought about that, sir, that some of the vampires that go bad would be filed missing persons from decades and probably cities away.'

'It's given closure to families who had given up on ever hearing news.'

'But you need an intact head for dental records, so only decapitations, not blowing the face away with an AR or shotgun, right?' Edward asked. His voice was a little less hostile, but not much.

Chapman nodded. 'Exactly; many people don't have their fingerprints on file.'

'If you're looking at people missing for decades, then dental records don't always help either,' Edward said. 'It's routine that when a dentist retires, old patient records aren't kept track of if the patient isn't being referred to another dentist.'

'That is true.'

'How are you identifying the dead vampires then?' I asked.

'DNA of surviving family members, female in particular.'

'Because the maternal line carries the most direct DNA,' I said.

He nodded. 'Yes, most people don't know that.'

'In my misspent youth I got a BS in biology,' I said.

'I read that in your file. There's been some discussion that your science background is part of what makes you so effective at this job; do you believe that's true?'

I thought about it, then nodded. 'I actually took preternatural biology classes and classes on myth and folklore beasts and beings that exist in the real world, so yeah, it gave me a jump on knowing what I was supposed to be up against.'

'You had no police background, no military, nothing but the biology, and yet new marshals who have come straight from the classroom to the Preternatural Branch aren't doing as well as you did at the beginning of your career.'

'I was trained in raising the dead and hunting vampires by a fellow animator, and by Marshal Forrester here when he was a bounty hunter specializing in monsters.'

'The animator you're referring to is Manuel Rodriguez.'

I nodded.

'He has no background in police or military either.'

'No, sir, he was an old-fashioned vampire hunter. What we call a stake-and-hammer man.'

'That's still standard for morgue executions,' Chapman said.

'Yeah,' I said, and couldn't quite keep my disdain for it out of that one word.

'You disapprove, Marshal?'

'You try putting a stake in someone's heart while they're chained to a gurney and begging you not to kill them, then come tell me how much you liked it.'

'It's supposed to be done during daylight when the vampires are comatose.'

'Yeah, it is, but when I was new to this business I let people bully me into executing as soon as possible; sometimes that meant the vampire was awake. A few executions like that, sir, and I lost my taste for it.'

He nodded again, rocking on the balls of his feet, hands behind his back. I think it was a nervous gesture. Hmm ... why was he nervous? 'I can certainly understand that, Marshal Blake.'

'Good to know,' I said, and studied his careful eyes and face. Either there was more and worse to come, or something else.

Hatfield looked at me from the chair, and her eyes were even wider. 'God, you mean you put a stake through someone who was begging and struggling?'

'Yeah.'

'I've shot ones that were begging, but that's ...' She turned back to the paper, pen poised.

'No,' Chapman said.

She looked up at him. 'Why not, sir? Why shouldn't I sign this over to the best person for the job?'

'We've started fielding new preternatural marshals with older, more experienced ones, much as Forrester and Blake did on their own, but, Hatfield, you have the field experience. You're a good marshal, a good cop.'

'I am, sir, but I am not a psychic anything. When they did the mandatory testing in the Marshals Service, I came up as a total blank. Blake has a psychic ability with the dead and with shapeshifters. She has skills with the very creatures we are hunting that I will never have no matter how many more years I have with a badge. I cannot learn Blake's skills with the monsters.'

'Preternatural citizens,' Chapman corrected automatically.

'Whatever you want to call them, but no amount of time behind the badge will give me the skills Blake has naturally. A lot of the SWAT are starting to put psychics on their teams, and police forces across the country are pairing up cops with psychic ability with partners who have none. I believe that the preternatural service should do the same thing. I've spent all night trying to think how I could have done things differently, and the only thing I can come up with is that I needed someone who was psychic to tell me the bodies weren't dead, or warn me that it was a bad decision. With the information and the standard practices as they are, sir, I did my best, but I believe that I did not have all the information I needed to make an informed decision. I will happily work with Blake, and I am eager to see how her psychic abilities change how we do this job.'

'Forrester barely tested on the psychic profiling,' Chapman said. 'How do you explain his success?'

'I don't know, sir, but I know that the psychic testing isn't perfect.'

'You believe that Forrester is more psychic than the testing showed?'

'Or maybe he's spent years fighting monsters, and the rest of us just don't have his wealth of experience, but I know that he listens to Blake even though he started out as her mentor. They work as a team, sir, and I believe that's part of the key. They don't seem to care who gets the credit or rises in rank; they just do their job to the best of their ability, which I believe saves lives.'

She bent over the piece of paper again. He protested, but this time she signed it and handed the pen to me.

'I'm not sure this is the best course of action,' Chapman said.

I had to walk past him to take the pen from Hatfield.

'You aren't the boss of us,' Edward said, 'not even of Hatfield, because she's one of us now.'

I signed my name, then turned and held the pen out to Edward. 'Want to witness it?'

'Sure,' he said, and he had to walk past Chapman, too.

'And the fact that I am not the boss of any of you is precisely the problem. The Preternatural Branch of our service is like a speeding car with no one at the wheel; eventually it's going to crash and then we'll be expected to clean up the mess.'

'If by we, you mean the Marshals Service, don't sweat it; I heard we're about to be spun off into our own bureaucratic entity.'

'If they do that, Blake, you will be what amounts to legal death squads hunting legal citizens in the United States.'

'I didn't say it was a good idea, or even that I agreed with it, but it still looks like it's going to go through,' I said.

'I don't believe it will.'

'We'll see,' I said.

'Yes, we will.'

Edward looked at the other man. 'The problem is that you keep trying to treat this problem like it's a police and civil liberties issue, and it's not.'

'What is it then, Marshal Forrester? You tell me.'

'Have you ever had a nightmare so real that when you wake up in a cold sweat, you look around the room and you feel that rush of relief to know that it wasn't real?'

Chapman shrugged. 'We all have.'

Edward nodded. 'Have you ever felt that rush of relief and then heard a noise that shouldn't have been there, because you're supposed to be alone?'

Chapman just looked at him, controlling his face and giving blank face back. 'I can't say I have.'

'I have. Anita has. We know that the nightmare can be real, and we have the skills, the will, and the tools to fight the nightmares and win.'

'You and Blake are tough motherfuckers, I get that, Forrester.'

Edward shook his head. 'That's not it.'

'Then explain it to me,' he said, and his irritation sounded in his voice.

'The newer marshals think like cops, which means they're trained to preserve life. Blake and I think more like soldiers; our job is to take lives, not save them. In killing the monsters we save lives, but our actual job is to take life. We aren't Officer Friendly coming into the classroom to reassure the kids. We aren't the person with a badge who the nice elderly lady can call for help when her cat's up a tree. We aren't the patrol officer who will give you directions when you're lost. We aren't the state trooper who will stop you when you're drunk so you don't kill anyone else or yourself with your car. We aren't any of those things and neither of us ever has been; we weren't trained for it. All the best executioners come from backgrounds that do not include police work but often include military, or a civilian background where they hunted and killed large game.'

'Blake is not a great white hunter,' Chapman said.

'No, but her dad took her hunting for deer, which was the biggest game they could hunt in her home state.'

He glanced at me. 'That's not in your file.'

I shrugged.

'We hunt and kill things. When it comes to a stand-up fight like it did yesterday, we are soldiers first, cops second, because even if we negotiate with the bad guys, they know, and we know, that we are going to kill them. We are assassins with badges. We are death squads, and the fact that Hatfield and all the good police officers in our field don't understand that is why they aren't as good at the job as we are, and Bernardo Spotted-Horse, and Otto Jeffries, or ... All the best of us started out as bounty hunters, or vampire hunters who were supplementing the police.'

'You're admitting that you're just killers with badges,' he said.

Edward nodded. 'Yes.'

'I can't endorse the Marshals Service being a party to that.'

'I know,' Edward said, 'because being a police officer is about preserving life, liberty, and safety.'

'We put the bad guys away, so the innocent aren't hurt,' Chapman said.

'The police are really good at that if the politicians let them do their job, but the monsters are real, Chief Deputy Marshal Chapman. When the government decided that the monsters were too dangerous to put in jail and that executing them was the only way to keep the innocent safe, then it stopped being a job for the police.'

'You have badges; you are the police,' Chapman said.

'We have badges and we are police officers, but you don't really believe that. If you did, you wouldn't have cared that Hatfield was giving the warrant to Anita.'

'It's the lack of control, the lack of checks and balances for you and her,' he said.

'We make you nervous.'

'No, you don't make me nervous.'

I wanted to say Liar, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

Then Chapman looked at us, and finally at Hatfield. 'You're a good marshal, Hatfield; if you want to leave the Preternatural Branch and come back to our side of things I will fully support you. I'll personally see that you don't suffer any ill effects careerwise.'

'Thank you, Chapman, and I may do that, but I feel I have to stay with this case until it's done. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't.'

'When it's over, you can come back to regular service,' he said.

'Thank you, sir; I think I'd prefer that.'

He turned to Edward and said, 'You and Blake, Spotted-Horse, Jeffries, the rest of you, don't make me nervous, Forrester; you scare me, because you aren't cops, and I don't like people thinking that just because the monster has a badge it ceases to be a monster.'

'Are you calling us monsters, Chapman?' I asked.

'They've let two marshals who tested positive for lycanthropy keep their badges. They're in the field again, but I saw the damage that Blake's shifter friend did to the officers in the chopper. Are you really comfortable letting something like that have a badge?'

'I will hunt down the vampire that made Ares attack us. I will hunt him down and I will kill him.'

'In revenge?'

'No, sir, because it's my job.'

Chapman shook his head. 'You're right, Forrester; you're death squad soldiers with badges. I suspected that, and it was one of the reasons I was pushing so hard to have people like Hatfield join your branch. I was hoping it would help balance the rest of you, but now I'm afraid that instead of her balancing you, you will corrupt her.'

'I'm a little too old to be corrupted, sir,' Hatfield said.

He looked at her and his eyes were sad. In that moment I knew that Chapman had seen real combat; there's a look that only real violence, real survival, and real survival guilt can give you.

'Until the devil takes your soul, Hatfield, you're never too old to be corrupted.' With that he turned and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

We gathered up our stuff and went to talk to witnesses, read over the police reports, and hope we found a clue.

56

The local PD gave us a small room in the depths of the building to spread the papers around. There'd been some reluctance, but I had the warrant now and that made this my case. I tried not to be too rude, but I also was all out of taking shit. We had until nightfall to learn what we could from the reports, pictures, and witness statements. I was hoping to talk to some of the human witnesses, the few who had lived through being a witness, but first the reports. Yeah, they can be tedious and even boring, but there's a reason we write reports and take pictures and measurements from every angle, and not all of it's for court; sometimes you learn new things that help you catch the bad guys.

The three of us divided the reports into three piles: the missing-person reports, most of which were now solved; the crime scenes where people had been killed; and the reports from the doctors about the survivors' injuries and the rotting disease. I skipped the last pile, because I'd talked directly to the doctors, and Edward had spoken to Micah about his dad while I was unconscious, so Hatfield got that pile. She hadn't taken time to read any of it through; most of the time if you're given a warrant against vampires in custody, there isn't time to study up on it. The marshal can insist on reading about the crime, but most don't. They ride into town, perform the execution, and ride out again. We're sort of the Lone Rangers of Death, and yes I do know that the Lone Ranger was a Texas Ranger, not a U.S. Marshal, but it's still what most people think of when we show up. One modern inner-city slang term for us was Lone Rangers, or just Rangers. We don't usually solve the crime, but we sure as hell end the investigation. Death is about as final as you can get - mystery solved, time to ride off into the sunset on our pale horse with our blood-spattered scythe. I'd started reading before I did custody executions, because if I was ending someone's life, I wanted to know what they'd done to earn it. I wasn't called out on morgue kills anymore, partially because they knew I'd be a pain in the ass about it and actually insist on seeing case files, and because there were plenty of marshals like Hatfield and one of my fellow marshals back home who would be happy to ride into town, take care of your vampire problem, and ride out without asking a damn thing.

Edward read the crime scenes to begin with and I read the missing persons. It was interesting that some of the missing would turn out to be victims and others would be moved over to 'vampire.' Vampires were never considered victims in these cases. Once you moved from human to vamp you were the enemy; it was like you started out as the princess waiting to be rescued and ended up being the dragon to be slain. I'd theoretically known that this was the way things worked, but seeing the missing people divided up so neatly made me have to look at it differently. I even agreed with the change, because when a person was first made a vampire and the rogue master that made them was still controlling them, the new vampire was like a loaded gun in the hands of a killer. It would take weeks for them to be self-aware enough to be anything more than blood-seeking killers. New vamps were the most likely to tear out people's throats by accident, because they could sense the blood in the body, and they wanted it, but there is a practice curve to learning to use fangs. Hell, once a person had been captured by vampire gaze, they could turn into an enemy. I'd had more than one fellow cop try to shoot his own men after a vamp mind-fucked them. So I agreed it was just standard because the evil master vampire would control them until he or she was killed, and if the master was new enough, killing him or her would turn the newbie vamps into damn near revenants that attacked and killed anything. Some vampires' minds could survive the deaths of their masters, and some couldn't, and those had to be put down like a rabid animal, because that was probably all they'd ever be. But as I read through the reports about families with children, engagements announced just before they disappeared, parents asking after their grown children on a weekly basis, I began to wonder if given enough time even the most insane new vamp could become more like who they had been?

There was no way to test the theory, because they were animals with superhuman strength and super-speed that lived off the blood of the living. They weren't much more alive than a flesh-eating zombie. You couldn't cage something like that and hope it improved over time, but looking at pictures of the vampires before they became vampires made me wonder how many people we'd killed who might have recovered to be law-abiding citizen vamps. It was like wondering if a serial killer could be reformed. The answer was no, but it was still something you wondered about when you heard of one who could go twenty years without a kill while he raised his kids to be teenagers. Apparently being the parent of teens was enough to send him back to killing. I've heard having teenagers was stressful, but geez.

'You've thought of something,' Edward said.

I looked up from the files, blinking because I had to drag myself back from the files, and the smiling faces, and the bloody faces, and my own thinking.

'Not really, or not in the way you mean.'

'Share,' he said.

I glanced at Hatfield, who was looking at me now, too. If had just been Edward then I would have shared, but ... 'Just a weird thought I had about how new these vampires are. I've never been called in where this many people were listed as missing and then changed to killer vamps; one or two, yeah, but not dozens.'

'It's not dozens,' Hatfield said.

'I requested they send me all the missing-person reports for this area in the last three months, even ones they didn't think were linked. A lot of people vanished in the same area, but over about a three-month time period. They found three bodies so decomposed that they thought they'd all fallen to their deaths and then animals got to them. That may be what happened; animals do that in wilderness areas and it's routine to just accept it as accidental death.'

'But you don't think it was,' Hatfield said.

'If a vampire is powerful enough, it can go inactive for years and sustain itself, but when it wakes, or gets out of where it was trapped, whatever, it usually is a little crazy. It feeds in a more animalistic fashion, like a newbie vampire again, until it's had enough blood to sort of get its head back to a point where it's not crazy anymore. Some vampires never come back after being trapped without food for too long.'

'Trapped how?' Hatfield asked.

'Cross-wrapped coffins, usually,' I said.

'Who traps them in cross-wrapped coffins? We'd just kill them,' she asked.

I debated on what to say, and finally Edward said, 'Vampires have what amounts to jail when one of their kind goes crazy and they don't want to kill them.'

'I thought they just killed each other like any other predator.'

'Even animal predators don't like killing one of their own friends, but vampires are just like regular people. They find it hard to kill someone they've known a long time, so they try to imprison them and hope they can cure them.'

'You mean rehabilitate them?' she asked.

'Something like that,' I said. In truth, being trapped in a coffin was usually more punishment than trying to save you. I'd known vampires that had been driven crazy from long coffin imprisonment, but that wasn't something I was sharing with Hatfield. She was being friendly, but she wasn't my friend, not yet.

'So, say you had a vampire wake up, or escape being imprisoned, whatever; they'd go after the nearest food, which would probably be animals, right?' Hatfield asked.

'Animals are harder to catch than you'd think,' I said, 'but maybe you can't actually sustain yourself on animal blood, not even freshly killed animals.'

'Why not?' she asked.

'Because you need that spark, that extra energy, whatever it is from humans to go with the blood.'

'You mean like drinking someone's soul?'

'That presupposes that animals don't have souls and I wouldn't be willing to say that,' I said.

'Okay, then what? What makes us so special for vampires?'

I smiled. 'If you can answer that question in a definitive way, Hatfield, you'll be doing better than hundreds of years of religion and philosophy.'

'Oh,' she said, 'I get that. But why do you think it's an old vamp that just woke up?'

'Because it's a really rare talent, and I've only seen it in ancient vampires. If there were a vampire that old and this powerful, we'd know about it. You just can't hide this much power from both the vampire and human community, not to mention the shapeshifters. He was able to mess with my friend through the bite of one of the vampires he possessed, not even his own bite, and he was able to control Ares, or drive him crazy, from a distance.'

'I've never even heard of a vampire being able to possess its vamp followers in any of the literature. You should write a paper about it, publish it for the rest of us to read.'

I looked at Edward and he looked back. 'Not all the really old vamps like their secrets being that out in the open, Hatfield.'

'Oh, you mean they're still alive. I guess I thought you killed them.'

'I don't kill every vampire I meet, Hatfield.'

She looked a little embarrassed. 'I guess not; I mean, you are with your Master of the City. No offense meant.'

'None taken; I am dating him.'

Hatfield had a moment where thoughts chased across her face so quickly I wasn't sure what she was thinking; maybe she didn't even know what she was thinking exactly.

'Just say it, Hatfield,' Edward said.

'I don't think I could ever get past the fact that he was dead, but if you had to be dating a vampire, your Master of the City is pretty gorgeous - again, no offense.'

I smiled. 'Why should I be offended? Jean-Claude is gorgeous.'

'I'm sorry I said pretty horrible things to you earlier about him, and Micah Callahan, and ... oh, hell, I was awful and it was just that you cast a long shadow over the Preternatural Branch of the Marshals Service for the rest of us female officers.'

'I'm sorry if my dating preternaturals makes it harder for the rest of you, but I'm not going to stop dating the men I love because people are bothered by it.'

'Now that I've seen you in person, I realize a lot of it's jealousy. You're as tough as you are beautiful, which means a lot of women must hate you on sight, and the men can't decide whether to try to compete with you or sleep with you.'

I frowned at her. 'Sorry, I spend most of my time around men who make me look like the ugly stepsister, so I don't get the beauty-being-intimidating part, but on the tough part, most of them can't compete.'

'If you're the ugly stepsister, then your guys must be even prettier than their pictures.'

'They're pretty spectacular,' I said.

'And you let the men know they can't compete,' she said.

I shrugged. 'In our job we can't afford to baby anyone's ego. They're either up to the job or they're not.'

She gave a small laugh. 'Oh, yeah, a lot of your haters are just insecure around you. I didn't think anyone could live up to your reputation, but you made a believer out of me, Blake.' Her face sobered. She looked down at the papers in front of her. 'This disease is pretty terrible. I'm sorry about Sheriff Callahan for a lot of reasons, but if he really is your future father-in-law, I'm sorry that Micah Callahan had to come home to this.'

'The best thing I can do for Micah and his dad is find the vampire that started all this. Until night falls and we can question the vampires, we look at what the victims can tell us. I want to see how close the missing-person reports are to each other geographically. I need a map to see if I'm right, but if I am, then it may be where our master vampire is hiding his body. If the missing persons are clustered originally in one area like I'm thinking, then I'd send police up to check on anyone living up in the area. There are always people in the mountains who don't come to town much if you go far enough up. Some because they're just good old-fashioned mountain people and antisocial. Or, the new mountain people have money and some of them have helipads at the summit of their mountains, so either way potentially no one would know they're missing for a while.'

'You really think we have a lot more people missing?'

'I'm half-hoping we do, because that will give us someplace to start looking for the master vampire's body.'

'You say body like he's not in it,' Hatfield said.

'A vampire that can take over his created offspring this easily usually does leave their body somewhere safe and just uses other bodies as a sort of stalking horse. That body gets damaged, they abandon it like a sinking ship and find another boat to take over.'

'They jump bodies that easily?' she asked.

'I've known a couple that could, and I'm thinking worst-case scenario here.'

'If the bad vamp can jump bodies that easily, how do you kill it?'

Edward and I spoke in unison. 'Destroy the original body.'

She looked from one to the other of us and almost laughed. 'You've done this before.'

Edward and I looked at each other. Then I said, 'Yeah,' and he said, 'Yes.'

'Okay,' she said, giving us wide eyes, 'let's go find that map.'