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

I WALKED OUT into the courtyard into chaos. People were yelling, there were lights everywhere, including a chopper overhead, with a spotlight. One uniformed officer was kneeling over a child vampire, holding his hands over her stomach wound, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to save her. A gunshot sounded loud, close, and I turned, gun in hand, pointed and ready. Another uniformed officer was shooting into a vampire on the ground, finishing him off. Another cop with a blond ponytail was yelling at him, "Stand down! Stand down!"

Smith asked, "Do we save them, or kill them?"

That was an excellent question. Legally we could kill all of them. I'd invoked the act, which meant it was a paperless warrant of execution. We could legally do a coup de grace and put a bullet in everyone's head and heart. Some officers were trying to stanch the wounds with their hands or jackets. Some had guns out, pointed at the fallen. If I gave the word, we'd just make sure they were dead. Legally I could do it; a few years back I would have, and been absolutely sure I was right. Now... I wasn't sure. What legal options did I have here? What did the law say I could do? When you have a badge, sometimes that's all that's left; you have to follow the law. Problem is that sometimes the law is gray, and not clear, and other times, it's too clear - clear, but not just, not right. Once I'd believed that the law was about justice, but I'd carried a badge and a gun too long not to understand that the law was about the law. It was about how it was written by people who would never have to stand here in the night with bodies bleeding, and men asking them, What do we do? Fuck.

Zerbrowski had his phone and came to me, speaking quietly, "Everyone upstairs is getting antsy. Do they shoot the rest, or try to bring them downstairs? And we've got two ambulances outside the kill zone. Do I have them come ahead and try to save the ones they can, or are we going to finish the job?"

"You know the legal options as well as I do," I said. I didn't want to make this call. Why couldn't someone else make it?

"You want us to just shoot the ones upstairs, and send the ambulances away?" he asked, and he was studying my face, as if he didn't know me, or was waiting to figure out who the fuck I was; maybe we both were.

I shook my head. "No, fuck it, but no, I guess not."

"Guess?" he asked.

I shook my head again, and started moving. "Let the ambulances through. Tell the cops upstairs to reassure the vampires that we will get them to safety, but things are too volatile down here to guarantee their safety. Tell them to sit tight; everyone will get out alive, if everyone cooperates."

He did what I said, and I went to help the wounded, and show, by example, what we were going to do tonight. How we were going to handle this would all depend on the next few minutes.

How do you help wounded undead? Smith was kneeling beside a teenage girl vampire. "Is she supposed to have a heartbeat?" he asked.

"Not necessarily," I said, and went to kneel by him because it was as good a place to start as any.

"Then how do we tell if they're dead, or... saveable?"

"Good question," I said.

He spoke low. "You got a good answer?"

I smiled, but he didn't smile back. I sighed and dropped some of my psychic shields. I was a necromancer, the first real one allowed to live and mature into their power in over a thousand years. The vampires had killed people like me for centuries, because legend said truly powerful necromancers controlled all the undead, not just zombies. I couldn't control vampires the way I could a zombie I'd raised, but I had power over them... sometimes. I looked down at the "girl" with her short black hair and pale, pale skin. She was the most Goth, or emo, of the vampires. The hair so wasn't her natural color. She looked about fourteen, maybe younger, the age when a lot of us rebel. I tried to "see" more than just the physical packaging. I'd been able to feel their hunger earlier; maybe I could do more? I'd saved a vampire or two in my time. There... a spark, like a cold flame flickering in the center of her body, about where the sternum and stomach met. The energy that I saw wavered like a candle flame moving in the wind, guttering down to die. I "looked" at the other bodies, concentrating, trying to see. Some of them were cold, no hint of energy. They were gone, truly dead, but three others had flames burning above them, in them.

The ambulances were here, the emergency medical technicians coming with wheeled stretchers. I saw them hesitate, wondering where to start. I called out, "Start with the woman at the edge of the group, near you, she's closest to dying."

They exchanged glances, sort of shrugged, and started hooking the vampire up to plasma. They'd found that plasma, or a rush of blood transfusion, could "save" a vampire and give them a chance to heal on their own. It was about all they'd found to do for vampires in an emergency. I directed the second group of EMTs to the next vampire whose flame was wavering; that left us with two that were still alive, but hurt, but you can hook IVs up only so fast.

I touched the girl's cold skin. Vampires that haven't fed and are less than a hundred years are cold without our blood to make them live. I willed that flickering flame to burn steadier, brighter. It flared enough that I pulled back, as if it were real fire.

"You okay?" Smith asked.

"Yeah, just bring the other live one over here, so I can touch him, too."

"You'll explain why later," he said.

"Yeah."

Smith took me at my word and just went to help carry the vampire to me. I heard a gasp, and a stifled scream from someone. I looked over, and the fire wavered with my concentration. Shit. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"He's awake," Smith said. "It startled someone." He gave one of the uniforms with him a look, but they carried the man's body over to me in a cradle of their arms. They laid him down on the other side of me so I'd have a hand for each vampire.

The man blinked large dark eyes at me, his face grimacing in pain. His short hair was naturally black, to match the slight uptilt of his eyes. I wasn't a good judge of Asian ethnicity. If I'd had to guess, I'd have said Japanese or Chinese, but he could have been Korean. I guess it didn't matter. He was slender, and about my size, so he looked delicate for a man. Like everyone in this group he looked like a victim, or at least not dangerous. The bullet hole in his upper chest added to the whole not-dangerous thing. I reached out to touch his hand. He flinched and did his best to move it away from me.

"Let me help you," I said. I lost concentration on the girl's spark as I spoke, and had to put more energy into that, closing my eyes for a moment, so I could see her flame burning brighter. I could see his more with my eyes closed, too. It was burning better than hers, fueling itself. He was probably the least hurt of any of them.

"Get away from me," he said.

I opened my eyes to see fear on his face. "I'm not touching you," I said, and worked to keep my voice steady, even, so I could keep the girl's energy steady.

"You know exactly what you're doing," he said, and there was anger with the fear now.

Actually, I didn't know exactly what I was doing. I'd done the whole flame/energy hold only once before, and that had been on a vampire I knew really well, and had done energy work with before the emergency. I shouldn't have been able to work this smoothly with strange vampires, and the moment I thought it, my hold on the girl's energy wavered. Psychic ability is like magic; ya gotta believe. I pushed my doubts away and held on, helped her hold on.

The other vampire half sat up, trying to push farther away from me. He gasped and fell back on the bricks, his face contorted in pain. He was suddenly doing much less well.

"Shit," I said, "bullet's still in there, and he's shifted it." The girl vampire's flame wavered as my emotions did, and her spark was a candle in a strong wind, almost out, but now his was guttering in the "wind."

I yelled, "Medic!"

One of them was running our way with his case, leaving his partner to keep the IV going for another victim. Seconds, just seconds, minutes, and there'd be more help.

I grabbed the boy's cold hand. I shoved power into him, and he yelled, "No! No, I won't be another of your slaves!" I was so startled, I let go of him.

He settled back into the bricks, coughing blood the color of black syrup. The EMT hesitated between the two. "Girl, she's fading faster." He took my word for it, kneeling down, beginning to work on the girl. He got one of the uniforms to help hold things. I was left with the man, a boy physically, maybe seventeen when he had died the first time.

"Let me help you."

"No." He coughed harder, and it looked like it hurt.

I put more energy his way, but he screamed, "NO!"

I couldn't concentrate on both of them, because my emotions were getting in the way. I fought to hold the girl's spark steady as the IV went in, and they began to put something in her veins that would help more than my power. I offered my wrist toward his face. "Feed then, if you won't take energy."

"Then I'll be bound to Jean-Claude."

The police didn't really understand how deeply tied I was to Jean-Claude with the whole human-servant thing, so I had to be careful what I said next. "Would you rather die?"

"Yes." He coughed again, and writhed in pain as Smith tried to keep him still.

"Why?" I asked.

When he could speak past the pain, his voice came thick with the blood spilling from his lips, "Freedom; we don't want to belong to a master. We want to be free, not belong to another council. They're gone; let them stay gone."

The girl's spark clicked into place, the plasma keeping her "alive." I sent all my energy into him. His flame flared so that I had to fight not to close my eyes against the brightness that was all inside my head.

"No." He rolled on his side, and the blood drained faster from his mouth. "I refuse medical or metaphysical aid. I refuse."

The EMT said, "I don't know what you're doing to him psychically, but you've got to stop now. He's refused aid; legally you have to stop."

"He'll die," I said.

"I'm already dead, I'm a vampire."

"You're not dead," I said, "you're undead; it's not the same."

"I die for the cause." His voice sounded rough, almost painfully deep. A gout of black blood welled up and spilled from his mouth.

"What cause?" I asked.

"Freedom," and it was the last thing he said before his eyes glazed over; his body gave one last convulsive movement and I watched his flame flicker and go out, as if some great breath had blown it away.

I grabbed his hand, and it was too late to save him, but not too late to feel him go. It didn't feel the same as a human dying in my arms; there was a difference to what went out of a vampire when they died. Was it a difference of souls? Were they evil? Were they lost like the Church maintained? I didn't know the answers to any of that. All I knew was he wasn't much older than his physical body looked, and he'd forced us to kill him, and I didn't understand why.