Kiss the Dead (6 page)

His hand let go of my hair, and he lowered me to the ground. His eyes were open wide; his face tried to frown as if he were struggling to remember something. He looked confused as he set me gently on the floor.

“Where are we?” he asked.

I was still holding his arm, though now it was more like holding
hands than holding on. “We’re at the old brewery,” I said, and I didn’t like that he didn’t know where he was; it made me wonder what else he didn’t remember. What had I done to him? I’d fed on anger before and never had anyone forget things.

He wrapped his big hand around one of my small ones, and blinked at the vampire that was crumpled at his feet. “Why are these people shackled?”

Jesus, he didn’t remember they were vampires, which meant… “Lieutenant Billings, what’s the last thing you remember?”

He frowned at me, and the effort of concentration was visible on his face and in the pressure of his hand, tense around mine. His eyes were a little scared, and he just shook his head. Shit.

Zerbrowski was there with Smith and some uniforms at his back. “Ray,” Zerbrowski said, “we need to go for a walk.”

“A walk?” Billings made it a question.

“Yeah,” he said, and touched Billings’s arm where he was still holding my hand.

Billings just nodded, but he didn’t let go of me.

Zerbrowski pulled on his arm, just a little, to get him to come along, and Billings moved, but he also kept my hand in his. “Can she come with us?”

“Not right now,” Zerbrowski said, and he looked at me; the look said, clearly, what had I done to him? I shrugged, and I knew he understood my expression, too. He might even believe that I didn’t know what I’d done to the big lieutenant.

Billings was reluctant to let go of my hand, and that wasn’t good either. I’d done more than feed on his anger, and way more than I’d intended.

Zerbrowski managed to get Billings to let go of me and go with him, but he mouthed,
Later
. We’d talk later, I knew we would. Double shit.

The vampire on the floor said, “Thank you.”

I looked down at him. His eyes were blue-gray, grayer at the moment. His short blond hair was almost shaggy, as if when it was a little longer it would be wavy, and was struggling to do it even short, so that
his hair looked messy when it wasn’t exactly. The hair seemed too big for his face or his face too thin for the thick hair. His jean jacket and rock band T-shirt untucked over jeans and jogging shoes made him look like a hundred other teenage boys, except for the odd haircut, and the strangely too-thin face. I realized it seemed hungry, as if he hadn’t been eating enough, and then I realized what it was; he hadn’t fed tonight. He was so recently dead that his skin hadn’t lost the human tan he’d died with, so he didn’t look too pale, but I could feel that he hadn’t fed on blood tonight. This one, at least, hadn’t had a piece of the cop we’d found eaten by dozens of fangs.

I looked past him to the other kneeling vampires and I felt their hunger. None of them had fed tonight. They were all hungry, and they were all very recently dead, their skins still kissed with the sun. Fresh-risen vampires could look like everything from corpse-like to nearly human. The more powerful the vampire that brought you over, the more human you could look, depending on the bloodline that your master descended from. Whoever had brought these guys over was powerful, very powerful. The vampire that had been holding the girl hadn’t been, not even close, and all the vampires were hungry. I could feel it; in fact, I’d been picking it up without realizing it. It had made me feed too strongly on Billings. That shouldn’t have been able to happen unless someone connected to Jean-Claude had made them. Was their master being of Jean-Claude’s bloodline enough, or had one of our people fully blood-oathed to us done this horrible thing? And it was horrible. Six of the surviving vampires were teens, or younger, tweens. They were all children, all too young for that secondary growth spurt. They’d all been brought over before they finished puberty. It was forbidden to bring children over, and their faces staring up at me were all borderline, and all recently dead. Fuck, and double fuck.

I looked beyond the kids in front and found that the grown-ups weren’t much better. Some of the women looked like they should be baking cookies for scout meetings and packing for family vacations, not kneeling here in cuffs with fangs. Some of the people were a little out of shape or overweight. It was a myth that being a vampire made you
thin. Some low-level vampires stayed the same size they were at death, frozen in whatever shape they’d been forever, so if you were going to become a vampire you should drop that extra few pounds first. Some lines of vampires could change their body after death. I’d seen them put on more muscle in the gym, but I wasn’t sure how much they could change after they were dead. Had these people chosen to be vampires, or had they been forced? If forced, then it was a truly horrible crime. I’d cheerfully kill the vampire that made them.

Then my metaphysics got out of the way of my cop brain, and I realized I was being stupid, distracted by the metaphysics—which was why the cops had started partnering one normal with a supernormal, so you had a mundane double check. Fuck!

I turned from the vampires and hurried to the knot of uniforms with Smith. “The vampires are all hungry! They haven’t fed tonight.”

One uniform looked at me, with all the cynicism you gain in police work. He was about forty pounds too heavy around the middle, but his eyes held the years of experience that can make up for speed and athleticism if you paired him with a rookie who could run. “They have to have fed. You saw what they did to Mulligan.”

Smith said, “If Anita says they haven’t fed, she’ll be right. She knows the undead.”

I checked the nameplate and said, “Exactly, Urlrich; if these guys didn’t feed, then we’re missing the ones who did.”

“I don’t understand,” the younger uniform said, and shook his head. He had short brown hair, matching eyes, and a slim, runner’s build. The brawn for the brains of his partner.

Urlrich understood. He undid the snap on his gun and rested his hand on the grip. “The body was warm; are they still here, Ms. Vampire Expert?”

“I don’t know. With this many vampires, my spider-sense is on overload, and they have to have a vampire master with them powerful enough to possibly hide them.” In my head I added,
Powerful enough to hide this much activity from Jean-Claude, the Master of St. Louis
. You gained a lot of power over a piece of real estate as master, and over the
vampires in it, so at this point the rogue would have to be either fucking powerful, or so good at hiding in plain sight that it was a type of power.

“Is it a trap?” Smith asked.

“I don’t know, but they left these vampires here to take the blame for the crimes. Master vamps don’t waste this much manpower without a good reason.”

“Maybe they thought we’d believe it,” Smith said, “and they’d be in the clear.”

“Only if we killed them all on sight,” I said.

Urlrich said, “You do have a reputation for shooting first, Marshal Blake.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Was that what the vampires had counted on, that I’d just kill everyone in the building? If that was the plan, then my reputation was even worse than I thought. I wasn’t sure whether I was sad or happy about that. You’re only as tough as your threat is good; apparently my threat totally rocked.

Zerbrowski came back up as we were talking. “We need to talk about Billings, Anita.” He looked very serious.

I nodded. “Agreed, but later.” I told him that the vampires hadn’t fed.

“Is it like the serial killer who left his wee little vamps to take the blame for his kills, a few years back?”

I nodded. “Maybe, but the laws were different back then; SWAT and I had the green light and had no legal option but to use it. We have options now.”

“Tell that to Mulligan’s wife,” Urlrich said.

I nodded again. “If they helped kill Mulligan and the other officer, then I’ll happily end their lives, but I’d like to make sure I’m putting a bullet between the right pair of eyes.”

“You don’t shoot ’em between the eyes,” his partner said.

I checked his nameplate. “Stevens, is it?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, you do, and one in the heart, and then you take the heart and decapitate them.”

He gave me wide eyes. “God.”

“Would you want to put a bullet in their brains while they were looking at you, and chained up?”

He looked at me, a soft, growing horror in his eyes. “Jesus.” He looked past me at the vampires. “They look like my grandparents, and kids.”

I turned and looked at the vampires, too, and Stevens was absolutely right. Except for the two male bodies that were with the two teens we’d killed, everyone looked like either a kid, or a grandparent, or a soccer mom. I’d never seen a more ordinary-looking bunch of vampires in one place at one time. Even in the Church of Eternal Life, the vampire church, you didn’t have this many older people and children. No one wanted to be trapped forever in a child’s body, or an elderly one; it was too early, or too late, to want to live forever in the bodies that were kneeling on the floor.

I leaned in and whispered to Zerbrowski, “I’ve never seen this many elderly vampires ever, and this many kids in one place, also never.”

“And that means what?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“For a vampire expert, you don’t know a hell of a lot,” Urlrich said.

I’d have liked to argue with him, but I couldn’t.

I
T 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.