Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #21)

THE ROOM LOOKED like a set for a slasher flick, with dirty walls; pale paint that might have started as white had flaked away from the bricks, so that the paint debris lay at the base of the walls as if something big had clawed at the walls. The question was, had it been clawing to get in, or get out? There seemed to be a layer of grit and dust on the floor, crunching underfoot, clinging to the walls, and coating the huge pillars that decorated the room and held up the soaring rise of the ceiling. There were a few windows very high up, almost touching the ceiling, but they were small windows, and probably weren't much good for light, let alone for escape. The room was huge and echoing with only a handful of police and two members of SWAT decked out for battle, holding their AR rifles at ease, but strangely ready, too, that combat ready, so that "at ease" is never really the truth. I nodded to them; they gave a slight nod back. The two uniforms on either side of the prisoner stared straight ahead, their cross-shaped tie tacks visible. Once the police officers had a reasonable fear for their lives, as in dead policemen, we could all wear our holy objects visibly without getting shit about them being an implied threat to the prisoner.

Zerbrowski had picked the vampire he thought was the weakest link, and I trusted his judgment, but it wouldn't have been the prisoner I would have chosen. The vampire was one of the ones that looked like she should be asking Chad to go to the junior high dance. She was thin, body barely starting to have a figure, hands small and very childlike. Her yellow hair was cut short and badly, in one of those feathered cuts that were popular somewhere in the seventies, but her hair was too thick for the cut, so that it didn't quite work. Did she know the haircut looked bad on her, that it made her thin face look even thinner, more childlike, rather than less? If she did, why didn't she cut it? Because if she was like most vampires, she couldn't grow her hair out; once cut, it would never grow longer again. She was dead, frozen forever at that point. Her almost bird-thin arms and legs had stopped at one of the most awkward moments, where you've just hit that growth spurt, and the legs and arms are gangly and your balance is bad, and that was it - forever.

Jean-Claude and some of his vampires could put on muscle, grow their hair out, but I'd learned just a few months ago that it was because he was powerful enough to do it. He was the Master of the City of St. Louis, which meant his power helped all the vampires blood-oathed to him in his territory rise at dusk. His will, his power; and with his death some of them would die at dawn and never rise again, or that was the theory. I knew two vampires that had killed the head of their bloodline and survived. I'd been told that Jean-Claude took power from his lesser vampires and shared it with those he valued. The person who told me had been an enemy, but still... I had asked him about it. His answer, "I am Master of the City, ma petite; that comes with a certain amount of power."

"You told me once that you wasted power to grow your hair out for me, because I like men with long hair, but Asher's hair is longer, too, and the vampire dancers at your clubs have put on extra muscle in the gym. Are you sharing power with them, too?"

"Oui."

"Do you take it from the other vampires?"

"I gain power from every vampire that is mine, but I do not steal from them. Individually they do not have enough power to grow a single hair upon their heads, or add an ounce of muscle to their backs. I do not change their level of power, but I gain from it, and I can share that gain with those I choose to."

So, like a lot of things about vampires, it was true and it wasn't. The girl vampire prisoner's name was Shelby, and she wasn't one of Jean-Claude's chosen few; she was like most vampires stuck with how she'd died - she'd been about fourteen, a young, skinny, barely adolescent girl. None of the new manacles and shackles fit her, so she was in regular cuffs, chained to her waist, but none of the ankle shackles fit her. She was just too small. Which meant she potentially had enough strength to pop the chains, just as the one back at the police station had done, but his body had been six feet of muscled grown man, and Shelby was a very petite, very fragile-looking young girl. I was hoping that meant she didn't have the strength to break free, especially since I was about to scare her within an inch of her undead life.

She watched me with huge eyes, fear plain in them. The older vampires could hide almost any emotion behind centuries of practice, but when you're only about thirty years dead, you're just like someone who's that age, except you're dead and trapped in the body you wanted to leave behind in junior high. Being a vampire doesn't automatically give you great acting abilities. Just like it didn't give you instant martial arts skills, money, or sex appeal, or make you great in bed - that came with practice, and some vampires never learned how to manage money. Shelby the vampire didn't look like she'd gained much from being undead, or maybe it was a trick? Maybe she was playing to her pitiful exterior, and the first chance she got she'd kill us all? Maybe. One of the scariest vampires I'd ever met had looked like a twelve-year-old girl - she'd been a monster and over a thousand years old.

Urlrich had come with me, carrying the second bag, the one I kept for more official executions. When I was on a vampire hunt I killed them any way I could, and didn't worry about the mess, but when the body is already "dead" and we're using property that belongs to a taxpaying citizen, we have to mind the mess. I unzipped the first bag and took out the big folded tarp with its one plastic-coated side. Urlrich helped me spread it on the floor.

Shelby the vampire whispered, "Please, don't"; the soft words echoed in the big room. It was going to be great acoustics for screams.

I knelt by the bag and started getting out the stuff that the law said vampire executioners had to carry but I almost never used. Since the main point of all of this was intimidating the witness/suspect, the contents of the bag were great visuals. The stakes were first. They were in a plastic carrier that folded over and tied; each of the six stakes had a slot where it rode so it wasn't rattling around in the bag stabbing me every time I rummaged around in it. I unfolded the plastic and took each stake out, laying them bare on the plastic in a sinister row of very pointy bits. I almost never used stakes on anything, but the ones I carried were very sharp hard wood, because if I did need them, I wanted them to be ready. You're only as good as your equipment sometimes, so I made sure mine was good.

The girl vampire whimpered, and said, "You can't do this. I haven't hurt anyone."

"Tell that to the officers your friends killed," I said.

She looked up at the uniformed officers on either side of her, raising her small hands as far as the waist shackle would allow. "Please, I didn't know they would kill anyone. We would have brought the girl over, but she wanted to be a vampire until the last minutes. She got scared. We all got scared."

"Who's we?" I asked.

She looked at me again, eyes wide, her fear paling the color to an almost white gray. "No," she whispered.

"No, what?" I asked, and drew out a slender black leather cover. It was tied closed like the stakes carrier had been. I untied it and slowly, lovingly, unwrapped a shiny silver hand saw, the kind they used in surgery for amputations. I'd tried to use it once, and hadn't liked the feel and sound of the blade on the spine. It was supposed to make decapitating the bodies easier, and the law said I had to carry it. I'd never used it for taking the head off a vampire; I never planned on using it, but the sight of it made the girl vampire scream. One brief, piteous sound that she muffled quickly, rolling her lips under, biting on them, as if she expected to be punished for calling out. The automatic gesture made me wonder what her undead life had been like, and how much abuse had gone into it. She'd died when vampires were still illegal in this country, able to be killed on sight, by anyone, just for being undead, so she'd had to hide for decades. It's hard to hide as a child vampire; you usually need an adult to help you pretend. What price had she paid for that pretending?

Did I feel sorry for her? Yes. Would it change what I was about to do? No. The days when my feelings affected my job that badly were long past. Now, if my feelings affected my job it was more serious, but happened less often.

Urlrich knelt down beside me, shifting his equipment belt to one side. He favored one knee as if it were stiff. He spoke low. "I'm not enjoying this like I thought I would."

"She can hear you," I said.

He looked startled, then glanced at the girl and back at me. "Their hearing is that good?"

I nodded and drew out a clear plastic jar of pink rosebuds and red petals, all dried and ready to be made into potpourri.

"Roses, what's that for?" he asked.

"To stuff in the mouth."

"I thought you stuffed garlic in a vampire's mouth."

"You can, and most do, but the garlic makes the bag smell, and the roses don't, and they both work just as well." What I didn't say out loud was that I'd never stuffed a piece of anything into a decapitated vampire head, or into a dead vampire when it was whole. Once I severed the spine, I might burn the body parts separately and throw the ashes into different bodies of running water if the vamp was really old, or really powerful, but as far as I could tell the whole stuffing-crap-in-the-mouth didn't do a damn thing to keep them from rising from the grave. The powers that be had added it as a step in the morgue stakings, but the only thing I'd come up with was that it was quicker and less messy to stuff the garlic, or roses, in the mouth than to stake them. Maybe, if you were close to dawn, the vampire wouldn't be able to bite until they got the plants out of their mouth, or maybe they'd choke? I had no idea, but as far as I knew it didn't do anything metaphysical to the bodies of vampires. But it did make the vampire in the room with us start to cry.

Urlrich leaned in and whispered, "She's the age of my granddaughter."

"No, she looks like she's the age of your granddaughter, but she's really the age of one of your children if they're in their thirties, and she can still hear you."

He glanced at her again.

I heard the chains rattle, and she said, "Please, please, help me. I didn't know they would kill them. I was too small to stop them, too weak. I'm always too weak."

Urlrich went very still as he knelt beside me. I poked him in the shoulder; when that didn't make him move, I punched him in the shoulder. It moved his body, made him almost fall.

"What the hell, Blake?"

"You were looking in her eyes, Urlrich; she was fucking with you."

The two SWAT team members aimed their ARs at the vampire. "You're the green light, Blake, just say the word," Baxter said.

"Not yet," I said. I knew that Baxter had said it out loud to help spook the vampire, but I also knew it was true. A U.S. Marshal with an active warrant of execution was a walking green-light zone for SWAT. Give the word, it was a clean shoot.

Urlrich looked at me, started to protest, and then got a thoughtful look on his face. "Shit, I was thinking about my granddaughter and how much she looks like her, but she doesn't. My kiddo is dark-haired and younger, but for just a minute there I saw the vampire's face over my granddaughter's, as if she were her." There was just the edge of fear in his eyes when he looked at me then. "Jesus, Blake, that fast, she mind-rolled me that fast?"

"It can happen, especially if the vampire appeals to some issue in your own head, like having a granddaughter about the same age."

One of the uniformed officers said, "Our crosses didn't glow; they glow if she uses vampire powers."

"They glow if she uses enough power, or aims it at you, but she wasn't doing a damn thing to you, and she made it subtle." I looked at her then, gave her my full eye contact, because I didn't have to be afraid of a vampire as weak as this one, not just with mind tricks anyway. "Very nice; I bet that pitiful act works for you almost every time you need a grown-up to protect you, or feed on."

Her thin little face went sullen, and there it was in those gray eyes, the monster peeking out. This was the truth, this was what had lived for more than thirty years, and fed on humans back when if her blood donors went to the authorities, she'd be hunted down and killed. I didn't think she was strong enough to wipe their minds clean; her only other option would have been to take blood and eventually kill them, or make them a vampire, so they wouldn't give her away. Most child vampires weren't powerful enough to make humans into vampires.

"How many humans have you killed, not for food, but to keep them from telling on you? How many have you fed on and then killed to keep your secret?"

"I didn't ask to be a vampire," she said. "I didn't ask to be trapped like this. The vampire that brought me over was a pedophile, and he made me into his perfect victim forever."

"How many years did it take for you to kill him?"

"I wasn't strong enough to kill him," she said, and the voice was still a child's, but the tone, the edge of force, that wasn't childlike at all.

"But you manipulated someone else to do it for you, didn't you?"

"They wanted to save me from him, and I wanted to be saved. You have no idea what it was like."

I sighed. "You're not the first child vampire I've met that was brought over by a pedophile."

"He deserved to die," she said.

I nodded. "No arguments."

"Then please, don't hurt me. I don't want to be hurt anymore." She called up some tears to shine in those big eyes of hers.

"You're good," I said, "I thought you couldn't act well enough to hide your fear, but you wanted me to see it. You wanted everyone to see it. I should have thought that in that body you'd have to be a master manipulator to have survived this long."

"Tears and pity are all I have, all I've ever had to protect myself with."

Urlrich was moving for the door. "I can't watch this, it's too close to home."

"Go, check on your partner, and remember she'd kill you as soon as look at you."

"I wouldn't," she protested.

I looked her in the face. "Liar."

She hissed at me, and just like that no one in the room thought she was a little girl anymore. Her eyes started to drown in that glow that meant she was about to go all vampire on us; she was weak enough that she was going to give us clues before she went apeshit.

"Blake?" Murdock said, settling his rifle very still against his shoulder; his partner followed suit.

"Stop, or we shoot you in the heart, and the head, right now."

"Better a quick death than stuffed full of flowers and beheaded."

"None of this is for you, Shelby. It's for the bodies."

The glow began to leak out of her eyes. "What bodies?"

"The dead vampires; you know, we have to take the head and heart once a vampire is dead to keep it from rising from the grave."

"Why show me all this, then?"

"Help us find the ones who did the killing and maybe you don't get executed with them, but if you don't help us and they kill again, when you could have helped us stop it..." I motioned at the stakes. "This will be for you."

"If I tell you where they are, they'll kill me."

"Not if I kill them first, Shelby. I'll have a whole team of SWAT with me; we will kill them. They won't ever hurt you, or bully you, again."

"Someone else will bully me; I'm too weak."

"Join the Church of Eternal Life; they have foster groups for child vampires. You can be with others like you, and it's all legal, and you can go to college, hold a job, and have a life."

"To join the Church I have to drink the blood of your master, and then he'll own me. I don't want to be anyone's slave."

"The blood oath is to keep vampires from doing exactly what you did - kill humans. A strong Master of the City can keep his followers from acting on their blood hunger."

"He's too powerful, and so are you, Anita Blake! It's not like a blood oath to a regular Master of the City; you lose your will. You turn us into humans blindly following our beautiful leader and his blood whore!"

I smiled. "Sticks and stones, Shelby; call me all the names you want, but you watched two human police officers murdered in front of you, and did nothing to stop it. Under the law you're just as guilty as the vampires that sank fangs into them, and you will be executed for it. Help us find them, and the new laws may have a loophole for you to slip through, and live."

"I'm already dead, Anita Blake."

"No, no you're not. You're alive. You walk, you talk, you think, you're still you - undead isn't the same thing as dead." I went to the door, opened it, and said, "Bring it in." Two officers brought a black plastic - wrapped body. The face was pale and still showing. It was the vampire that had tried to hide behind the human girl. I'd shot him, and now I'd get to finish the job.

"Lay it down in the middle of the tarp," I said.

The two officers laid the body down where I directed. One of them half stumbled, and an arm flopped out of the plastic, limp as only true death can make it.

Shelby gasped, and I thought that one might be genuine.

I unrolled the plastic and looked down at the dead vampire. The wounds in his upper and middle chest had dried black around the edges, but the blood was still red enough that it had darkened his button-down shirt to shades of crimson, brown, and then the last color of most blood - black. They can say that death is the big sleep, but a dead body doesn't act like it's asleep; even the unconscious don't have the loose-boned fall of the freshly dead. Some vampires go into rigor immediately, but this one wasn't old enough for that; he was just like any dead body that was less than two hours old, though the blood wouldn't pool in the body as it did in a human.

"This is dead, Shelby; whatever you are, it's not this."

I got the coveralls out of the other bag, the one that held the equipment I used most often, rather than the government-sanctioned stuff. The government didn't tell me I had to wear the coverall, but then the people making the laws had never had to do my job. They'd never found out how much blood and mess comes out of a body when you remove its head and heart. Until you've been covered in that much blood and gore, you just don't understand. Coveralls kept the dry-cleaning bills down and helped me sleep better at night. There's only so many times you can scrub blood out from under your fingernails before you start going all Lady Macbeth and stop believing the blood is ever gone.

I braided my hair, something that Nathaniel had taught me to do. With my curls it would never be as neat a braid as his, but it meant I could tuck the nearly waist-length hair into a skullcap. I'd tried the disposable plastic shower caps, but I was just vain enough that I'd started to use the cheap skullcap hats; they were more expensive than the shower caps, but they looked less dorky. It was harder to tuck my hair under the cap, but the black cap looked more threatening than poufy plastic, and tonight that counted.

Shelby said, "Why are you putting your hair up?"

"Got tired of cleaning bits of people out of my hair."

"Bits of people." She said it low, like she was testing out the phrase.

"Yep," I said. I slid the plastic booties over my shoes next. I'd gotten where I could do it standing up on one foot, and I didn't track pieces of my work home with me. I still hadn't heard the end of the time I had a piece of brain matter stuck to one shoe and didn't notice until I was walking across the living room carpet. All right, honestly, I didn't notice at all. Micah noticed, and Nathaniel said he had no idea how to clean brains out of carpeting, so please don't get it on the carpet. But it was Sin's reaction that made me throw the shoes out. You'd think a weretiger, no matter how young, would be a little more understanding. Asher had totally backed Sin, and thought it was beyond the pale. He was the only vampire that complained. I pointed out that with their all-liquid diet, they didn't have to worry about stuff like this; the wereanimals did, so they could bitch. Asher had said, "I don't have to eat flesh to not want brain matter in the carpet." I'd called him a pussy, but I'd thrown the shoes out.

There was another leather fold, tied tight so it wouldn't shift in transport, but this one didn't have wooden stakes in it. I untied the leather thong, laid it on the ground beside the stakes, and undid the flap. Blades gleamed in the dim light, glowing softly silver. They were knives that Fredo, one of our lead bodyguards and a member of the local wererat rodere, had helped me pick out after I'd borrowed one of his knives to cut out a vampire's heart, because his knife collection was better. Fredo liked knives the way Edward liked guns. Fredo taught knife-fighting classes to the guards, and I took the class whenever I could.

I took out a blade and made a show of testing the balance in my hands, letting it lie across my fingertips, and resting on a single fingertip. I loved the balance of this knife, but balance for fighting wasn't always the best balance for carving someone's heart out of their chest.

"What are you going to do with that?" the vampire asked, in a breathy, frightened voice.

I didn't bother looking at her as I answered, "You know what I'm going to do with it." I slid the knife back into its leather home and took out another one. I didn't bother trying to balance this one on my fingertips, because it didn't balance that way. I was never going to try to throw this one, and if I had to fight a "living" target with it, then things would have gone so pear-shaped I wouldn't have to worry about how balanced my knives were ever again.

I put the blade on top of the leather, so that the vampire could see it clearly. So she could watch the sharp edge gleam in the dim light. I fished in the equipment bag one more time, and came out with a pair of paramedic's scissors and a box of plastic gloves.

"What is that?" The vampire whispered it. The tone of fear in her voice made me look at her. Her face was pinched, and strained, not with vampire powers but simple fear. If you've never seen a pair of the scissors, they are a little odd-looking, and you might not call them scissors; you might think they were some sort of metal cutters, or pointy pliers. She didn't know what they were, or what I was going to do with them, and that bothered her. The unknown bothered her more than the knowing. Interesting, and potentially useful.

I didn't answer her. The face shield was next, with its little strap that went around the back of the head. That was government ordered, but I actually agreed with it; again, cleaning blood out of your eyelashes loses its charm after a while. The face shield sent my breath back to me, so that I could feel how warm it was. I had a moment to be claustrophobic, but fought it off. If I did it right, I didn't really need it, but every once in a while the undead bodies acted weird, and they'd squirt at you when you weren't expecting it. I really didn't want this guy's blood on my face.

I got out the thin gloves, and then put the longer rubber gloves over that. They went up past my elbows, which I'd need because of the way I took the heart out of the body. A lot of executioners just destroyed the heart with a stake, a knife, or a gun, but left the remnants of it in place. If I could see daylight through the chest, so that I knew the heart was utterly destroyed, I'd do that, but when I couldn't see into the chest cavity, I didn't trust the heart to be destroyed enough. New vampires like this one, the gunshot wounds I'd put in his chest were probably enough to ensure he wouldn't heal and rise unexpectedly, but I'd never gotten in trouble being overly cautious when it came to making certain a vampire was really, truly, completely, dead.

Of course, it was a little hard to see the extent of the gunshots through the clothes, which was why I had the paramedic's scissors. They'd cut through anything but metal, and even cheap metal would yield to them, but harder things like handcuffs were proof against them - but clothes, no sweat.

I knelt beside the body, tucking the scissors in between the buttons just above the waist of the jeans, cutting to one side so I could parallel the fastened buttons.

"Just unbutton it," she said.

"This is faster," I said, keeping my gaze and my attention on what I was doing.

"But the buttons are right there," she said. It's funny what will bother someone most; you never know what it will be. Things that you would never dream would frighten someone, or creep them out, scare the hell out of them or make their skin crawl. For whatever reason, it seemed to really bother her that I was cutting beside the line of neatly fastened buttons, but not using the buttons.

I usually cut a quick, clean line through a shirt, but now I slowed down, took my time, let her watch, let her think, let whatever it was about it have time to bother her more.

"Just do it," she said, her voice holding an edge of franticness. "Just cut through it, if you're going to, or unbutton it. Why do it like that? Why cut it off like you're enjoying it?"

Ah, I thought, she thought what I was doing looked sensual, like I was enjoying it. I wasn't; it didn't move me one way or the other. The days when it would have creeped me out to cut through the clothes were long past. Cutting clothes off a willing lover who enjoyed that sort of thing was fun, exciting, sexy. Cutting clothes off a corpse wasn't any of those things. It was just cutting the cloth away so I could see the chest and judge how much damage the bullets had done to the heart, so I'd know if I needed to take out the heart, or if the bullets had done the job for me. Baring the pale, cool skin was more like unwrapping a piece of butchered meat, inert, not alive, nothing but meat that you might have to cut up. That was the only way to think of it; the only way to do it, and stay sane.

"Just finish cutting it!" She half-yelled it.

The door opened behind me; I caught the movement out of my peripheral vision, so I was able to see Zerbrowski come smiling through the door without actually turning away from the body in front of me.

"What's all the fuss?" he said cheerfully.

The vampire tried to get up off her knees, where the uniforms had put her. The rattle of the chains made me look at her and see one of the officers put a hand on her thin shoulder, automatically pushing her back to her knees.

"Make her stop," the vampire said.

"Marshal Blake isn't under my command. She doesn't answer to me."

The vampire gave me wide frightened eyes. I looked into her eyes and smiled a slow, tight spread of lips. She actually tried to move backward, as if ten feet were suddenly too close to me. I smiled a little more, and she made a small sound in her throat, as if she were trying not to whimper, or scream.

"Please," she said, and held her hand up to the officer who was keeping her on her knees. "Please, please, I don't want to see her cut Justin up. Please don't make me watch!"

"Tell us where the vampires are that killed the officers and you don't have to watch," Zerbrowski said.

I had cut through the shirt, just the collar being upright and the way it fitted through the shoulders keeping it closed over the chest - well, that and the blood. The cloth was sticking to that. I laid the scissors down and began to peel the cloth off the wounds, slowly, letting the sound of it sucking away from the skin fill the silence. I knew the sound would be so much louder to the vampire than to the rest of us. I made it last, made it peel and hiss as I pried the cloth out of the drying blood and the cooling flesh. Some of the cloth was actually sucked into the wounds in the chest, riding along on the force of the bullets, so that I used my fingertips to pick the cloth from the wounds. I didn't have to; I usually just pulled the cloth away in one big movement like tearing a Band-Aid off a cut, but I was pretty sure it would bother Shelby the vampire to do it this way. I was right.

"Please, please, don't make me watch this." She held her hands out to Zerbrowski.

"Tell us where they are, honey," he said, "and the nice officers will take you out of here."

"They'll kill me if they know I told," she said.

"We discussed this; they can't kill you if we kill them first," I said, forcing myself to look at the wounds I'd put in the body, rather than at her. I was hoping she'd think I was gazing longingly at the dead chest, and since I wasn't sure my acting was up to looking sexy, since I totally didn't feel that way, I kept my expression down where she couldn't see it.

"You can't kill them all," she said.

"Watch me," I said, and I did look at her then; I let her see my expression, because I knew it was cold, and empty, and yet a smile started across my lips. I knew the smile; I'd seen it in mirrors. It was most unpleasant. It was the smile that I had when I killed, or felt justified in it. It was a smile that left my eyes cold and dead. I wasn't sure why I smiled sometimes when death was on the line, but I did, and it was involuntary, and it was creepy, even to me, so I let the vampire see it. I let her make everything there was to make of it.

She screamed a short, choked sound. Her breath came in a choked sob. "All right, all right, just get me out of here before she... get me out of here! I don't want to watch. Please, don't make me watch." She started to cry, her thin shoulders shaking with the force of it.

"Tell us where they are," I said, "and then the nice officers will take you away from the big, bad executioner." I made my voice low, and deep, with a sort of purr underneath it. I'd used the voice before. It worked both for real sex and for threats. Funny, how some things worked for both.

Shelby gave up her friends. She told us three different daytime retreats. She told us where all the coffins were, all the places where they hid from the sunlight, and where we could find them once the sun rose and they lay helpless.

I asked her one last question. "Are they all as newly dead as the vampires here tonight?"

She nodded, and then wiped pink-stained tears against her jacket with a swipe of her cheek, as if she'd been chained before and knew how to wipe tears away without using her hands. It made me wonder just how horrible her undead life had been up to this point.

"Except for Benjamin, he's older. He's been dead a long time."

"How long?" I asked.

"I don't know, but he's old enough to remember the council in Europe and to not want that to happen here."

"So Benjamin is from Europe," I said.

She nodded again.

"How long has he been in this country?" I asked.

"I don't know; he doesn't have an accent, but he knows things. He knows about the council and the evil things they did over there, and the things they forced other vampires to do. He says you have no will of your own, and you'll just do what the masters want, and you can't say no. We won't be slaves to Jean-Claude, or you!" She put some serious defiance into that last part.

I smiled at her. "I'll be seeing you later."

She looked confused, then scared. "I told you what you wanted to know. I did what you asked."

"You did, and now they'll take you to a cell while I cut up your friend. You don't have to watch, just like we promised."

"Then why will you see me later?"

Zerbrowski said, "Anita, it's over; we don't need to scare her anymore."

I looked into his serious eyes behind their glasses, and just started back toward the body on the tarp. "Fine, get her out of here."

"No," Shelby said. "Why will you see me later?" The police officers were actually having to drag her toward the door. She wasn't exactly struggling, but she wasn't helping either.

"You wanted to go; go," I said.

"Why will you see me later?" She yelled it.

I looked back at Zerbrowski. We shared a long look, and then he gave a small nod.

I took off the face shield and looked into her pale frightened face, and said, "Because all bad little vampires see me in the end."

She started to tremble, then shake, so that she seemed to be vibrating in place, so scared that she couldn't control her body anymore. "Why?" and it was the barest of whispers; I'm not sure the others heard her, just saw her lips move.

"Because I'm the Executioner, and you helped kill two men."

She fainted. Knees buckling, head lolling, and only the officers at her arms kept her upright. They carried her through the door that Zerbrowski held for them. The SWAT guys followed them; their job was to keep an eye on the vampire, after all.

Zerbrowski and I stood in the empty room. I turned back to the body, putting the face shield back in place.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"My job," I said.

"We can transport the bodies to the morgue like normal now, and Kirkland can stake and chop the bodies just as well as you can."

I glanced back at Zerbrowski. "And what am I going to be doing while Larry does all that?"

"You're with us, while we check out the locations she gave us."

"We want to wait until after dawn to raid the places, Zerbrowski. They don't have any other hostages that need rescuing."

"So, we just wait until dawn?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I still want you with us. Kirkland can do this part. I'd rather have you at my back in a fight."

"If we wait until dawn, there won't be a fight," I said.

"Maybe, but just in case, you come with the rest of us. Leave Kirkland to clean up."

I took the face shield off again, and looked at him. "You don't trust Larry in a fight either, do you?"

"Let's just say that no vampire is ever going to faint from fear of him."

"Diplomatic," I said.

"I heard that he refused to help us interrogate the prisoners."

"He refused to cut up the dead while the living watched. He said it was evil, said I was no one's pet monster, and that if anyone made me a monster, it was me."

Zerbrowski looked down, pursed his lips into a thin line, and when he looked up, his eyes were angry. "He had no right to say that to you."

I shrugged. "If it's true, it's true."

He put his hand on my shoulder, made me look at him. "It's not true. You do what the job needs to get done. You save lives every night; don't let anyone tell you different, especially not someone who keeps his hands clean because you do the bad things he won't do."

I smiled, but not like I was happy. "Thanks, Zerbrowski."

He squeezed my shoulder. "Don't let him make you feel bad about yourself, Anita. He hasn't earned it."

I thought about it. "Is that why you don't let him work with you much?"

"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.