Kiss the Dead (14 page)

“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.