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

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 the Executioner, years before the rest." He studied my face with those blue-gray eyes of his, so serious. "We only give names to the ones that we fear. She is the Executioner, and along with three others she makes up the Four Horsemen."

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."

"I don't have enough power to grow my hair long after death like the vampires closest to you. Your master steals energy from me, from all of us, and uses it to heal his people, and grow his long, black curls out for you."

I'd known that Jean-Claude took power from his followers, and gave power to them, but I hadn't thought how that exchange of power might affect the other side of the equation. Was Blondie here right? Did Jean-Claude steal power from them just to grow his hair long for me, when they could have used it to heal their wounds, grow their own hair? Was it true?

"You didn't know," he said.

"She knew! She knows!" Grandma said. Her voice was strident with her anger, but under the anger was a thread of fear like a hint of spice in a piece of cake. I looked at her, and something she saw in my face stopped her, and upped the fear in her. Was she really that afraid of me?

Zerbrowski came to me. "Anita, the bus is back. We need to move them."

I nodded, and realized I'd made the rookie mistake. I'd let the bad guys talk me into doubting people I trusted. They say if you listen to the devil he won't lie, but he won't exactly tell the truth either. Blondie wasn't the devil, far from it, but he'd spoken the truth as he saw it, and I'd ask Jean-Claude tonight when I got home.

I addressed the prisoners. "If you try to escape, try to run, we will shoot you."

"Because of the Preternatural Endangerment Act," Blondie said.

"That gives us the legal right to kill you, yes, but the two dead cops, killed by vampire bites, make you all murder suspects. Vampires suspected of murder can be killed if they try to escape."

"If we were people, it wouldn't work like that," he said.

"With two dead cops, it might," I said.

"Not legally," he said. I grabbed him by the arm and helped him to his feet hard enough that he stumbled and I had to catch him.

He whispered, "You're as strong as we are, and I felt you feed on the other officer. You're not human either."

I pushed him away from me, forgot he was wearing shackles to go with his cuffs, and had to catch him again. No one else in the room could have moved fast enough to catch him with barely a pause between the push, the start of the fall, and the catch - no human in the room.

"See," he said.

I got him shuffling along with the others that were being helped to their feet. I wasn't sure if I needed to put him close to me so I could watch him, or far away so he couldn't keep fucking with me. Why was he getting on my nerves so badly? Answer: because I believed what he'd just said. I'd raised my first dead by accident when I was a teenager, saw my first ghost at ten; the dead had always liked me. I wasn't like most of the Marshals; they were humans who just happened to be good at killing monsters. I was one of the monsters.

A girl stumbled in her shackles. I grabbed her arm to steady her, and she mumbled, "Thank you," then turned and saw who was touching her. She let out a little shriek and began to struggle. I held on just a moment, caught off guard by the fear that just radiated through her, from her, down my hand, across my tongue. I could taste her fear the way I could taste it on a shapeshifter or a human. Anything that's afraid of you is food. I let her go, and she fell, unable to catch herself. The other vampires tried to help her up, but they were struggling, too. Zerbrowski finally helped her to her feet.

The vampires watched me and even behind the sullenness, the anger, there was fear. What do the monsters fear? Other monsters, of course.

I caught Blondie watching me, but it was Grandma who spat the word at me. "Monster!"

I said the only thing I could think of. "That's Marshal Monster to you, Grandma."

Zerbrowski said, "Why don't I have any nifty nicknames?"

"No one's afraid of you, Zerbrowski," I said, and smiled at him for trying to make a joke out of it.

"You're just so bad-ass, I can't compete."

"That's what your wife says."

"Oooh," Smith said, "that was low."

Zerbrowski grinned at me. "I don't have a problem with you being the better man, Anita; I never have."

If I hadn't been armed to the teeth, surrounded by murderous vampires, in view of way too many other cops, I'd have hugged Zerbrowski. "Thanks, Zerbrowski." But I tried to show him in my eyes how much it had meant to me, that guy moment where you can't actually say how many emotions you've got running through your brain.

He smiled, not his cocky teasing grin, but that gentle one that let his eyes look tired and sort of tender. He gave a small nod, and I smiled back, and that was it. He understood that I'd understood that he'd understood. It took us one sentence, two looks, and a nod - with another woman it would have been at least five minutes of out-loud talking. Lucky for me I spoke fluent guy.