Kiss the Dead (13 page)

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.