Dead and Everything (Eve Benson: Vampire Book 2) (13 page)

The
footage, which Eve had to turn her head to see even a bit of, made her seem
way
more bad ass than she’d figured it would. To her she’d been a bit too hesitant
and soft seeming. Scared even, when it all started. The version that showed up
had her barking orders at the other Vampires to give up, along with a rather
planned sounding little speech about what the Council wasn’t going to allow,
and then showed a blur as the other Vampires died.

Althea
watched it twice, and then cleared her throat.

“I…
Think I understand. You may as well get up, Miss Benson. This was clearly an
attack on civilians, if nothing else. The truth is we don’t have any way to
hold someone that can do what you did there. I trust that you’ll report to
prison if that becomes needed? I doubt it will. It’s clear that you took the
right action here. These were righteous kills. I’ll need to run this by the DA,
of course. Now, we need to go over all of this, and find out what was really
going on.”

That was
going to take most of the night, and while the club didn’t open, Ed had the
wait-staff and Troy get drinks for everyone that wanted them. Soft drinks only,
and water, but it seemed to help keep people’s mood more stable. The very
strange thing was that no one was arrested for anything. Not even Eve. That
didn’t mean she was in the clear, and she got that, since the District Attorney
was the one that would make the call as to if she went to court or not, unless
there was a Grand Jury trial about it. She was a bit weak on what would really
be going on that way, but it didn’t take too long to get a tentative ruling
from the man, who watched the footage of the scene, on the net already, and
spoke to Althea about it directly.

Apparently
there was just too much information showing that she had every reason to be
acting as she did, even if claiming to be a secret Vampire cop meant nothing to
anyone other than her. It had been worth a shot.

Still,
they let her go, after the bodies were packed up. On the bad side they took the
bald Vampire, which meant he escaped before they got to the station. He killed
six officers at the same time. That did not leave anyone on the force happy,
needless to say. Eve either, since they’d lost the man she’d specifically saved
to question.

Bey
however took everything in stride, and suggested that, even though it was late,
Edom and Troy open the establishment to everyone that wanted entry. About
eighty people had ended up standing there all night long, and while the
protestors were escaping, walking over to their cars, carrying their rather
silly, and in some places, blood stained, signs, not all of the people that had
come to the club had left yet.

It
wasn’t all that festive, but a few people came, since there was no real way to
salvage the night anymore.

On the
good side she wasn’t spending the day in jail, so that was happy making. For
her. Eve washed up as well as she could, inside, the dried Vampire blood making
it really hard to get clean. If Human blood was a pain to get out of things,
the undead kind just stuck to everything. Clinging on as if trying to paint the
world. Even under hot water. By the time she was done scrubbing up in one of
the restrooms, number one, she then had to turn around and clean it, since
there was crud all over the place inside.

Then,
because dead people had been outside, she did the rest of the club. The parking
lot was just going to have to wait, because she was going to need a hose and to
have the thing free of cars, and foot traffic for a while. Plus it was still a
crime scene and all that, she thought. There was yellow tape left at any rate,
and while no police stayed, having better things to do, no doubt, you could
tell they’d been there.

Eve, for
her part, tried not to think about what she’d just done for the rest of the
night. That meant working, and fighting to keep her mind mellow and clear.
Meditation actually helped for once, because she kind of ignored everything
else around her.

That
part wasn’t good though. Not with people trying to kill her. Or, to be more
exacting, planning to kill people around her. At
her
place. Her club.
Except that it wasn’t that at all. She didn’t own it, and didn’t even have any
power or control there. Why would she feel like that? Territorial behavior was
a thing for Vampires, but she accepted that Edom ran the place. Didn’t she? He
was the boss, after all. Her maker. That just seemed right.

So why
would she feel like those Vampires had been about to hurt
her
people?
She didn’t even know most of them, and the bad guys had been going for the
protestors. She certainly didn’t hold any kind of love for those a-holes.
Keeping them alive had been needed, she could see that, since the bad press of
letting them die would be worse than almost anything she could think of. It had
been part of someone’s plan to ruin any real chance that they, the Vampires,
had to integrate. She couldn’t prove anything, but her bet was that whoever was
behind influencing Swerlin had put this together too. Set the situation up,
when no one was ready for it, then bring in a bunch of newbie Vamps and set
them on a large number of Humans. Good Christians at that, who were just there
to…

Be
general pains in the ass.

That
wouldn’t have made any difference in the press if they’d been slaughtered and
drained on camera.

She ran
over the whole thing a thousand times,
knowing
that there would be
fallout from it. What she was missing exactly was how it was going to happen.
She’d taken out some rogue Vampires, but that probably wasn’t going to get her
in trouble. It could, but was she
really
supposed to let those people
die? The answer was no. She knew that, and knew that everyone, even the
council, would back her on that one. It just made sense.

The
trick was that she could get a vague sense of a piece of the whole thing being
slightly off kilter. It was like the facts were going to be slid around, and
used to attack her. By…

That she
had no clue about.

Some
enemy, but it didn’t have to be the ones she knew about. Honestly, she half
expected Bey and Edom to lock her in a closet or a box for weeks, to punish her
for it anyway. Because she’d made too big of a scene, and that wasn’t really
allowed. What she was supposed to do differently she didn’t understand. Could
she have done anything at all? Maybe moved so fast that no one had known she
was the one doing anything? She very nearly pulled that off, she knew. If she
hadn’t made a speech first, and had moved just, say, twice as fast, no one
would have known why the attackers had exploded.

Then she
could have gotten back by the door and taken the same position. With bloody
hands, but still, that might be hidden. Other than that, she was at a loss.
Magic maybe? Get some kind of amulet, or a weapon that didn’t make noise, or
something? If that kind of thing existed, she’d never heard of one that would
really be effective on Vampires. Especially not against twelve at once.

Could
she have compelled them? That was a thing she really hadn’t done a lot yet.
Mainly because they weren’t supposed to use that kind of thing to feed right now,
and other than convincing one street guy that she’d given him a handjob, so
he’d leave her alone, she really hadn’t had any experience doing that kind of
thing yet. It wasn’t a really strong gift in most Vampires, not the Classics
like her, at any rate. Enough to be useful, but not something that would stop
loads of other Vamps all at once.

Not if
she did it the same way that everyone else did it. It was, she decided, a thing
to look into, as soon as her punishment was done for what had happened.

It
wouldn’t
just be a beating, she didn’t think, not unless Bey did it. She’d been
too
bad ass. It might be that Lenore could take her in a
fight
. Edom, too.
That went without saying, because they were both old and powerful. They’d have
skills that she just didn’t yet, and reactions honed through centuries of
living as Vampires that would be impossible for a baby like her to match. But
they’d have to really be
trying
, she thought, and they’d both know that
now. Oh, she could
let
herself be beaten, but once they got that she
might
win if she fought back as hard as she could, they’d
have
to be more
careful.

Like her
mom, after the last time she’d tried to beat Eve into servicing some guy. She’d
been fourteen, and nearly as large as her mother. Heavier, since, by some
miracle,
she’d
never gotten into heavy drug use. That level of extreme
dissipation just hadn’t been a thing for her, like it was her mom. It had
turned into a fight, instead of Eve just being hit with a belt, though in the
end she was raped anyway, since the guy hadn’t actually cared if she was
willing. Her mother had treated her better after that. Like she knew that
someday Eve might just kill her, if she were pressed. That she could pull it
off, too.

If her
mother had ever considered that, well, then she was smarter than Eve was
willing to credit her with. Ed and Lenore would get the idea though. She was
too big to just spank, suddenly. Not by them. So, Bey might be called on to do
it, or they might be more clever than that. Hence her being worried about being
locked away. It was really a common enough punishment. Sort of like prison for
misbehaving undead people. Other than a beating or death, or possibly rape just
to show who was more powerful, that was the most common kind of thing to do to
a Vampire who got out of line. The idea was basically a combination of
isolation and starvation. After twenty days of being locked up, you wouldn’t
have any links left to energy sources. Not even if you were old, and good at
that kind of thing. Then you had only the life left in your physical form to
keep you going.

If you
didn’t move at all, and refused to think, you could, supposedly, last for a
long time.

Most
people weren’t that great at not thinking though, were they? After a few months
of that kind of thing, most Vampires just died. Even the most ancient ones
could only go for about six months. If anyone went longer than that, they were
probably either very ancient, or had some kind of trick that she just didn’t
know about. Maybe some way to feed magically? It was pretty clear that even if
they had to drink blood, Vampires were really magical in nature. To her it just
made sense. They didn’t eat blood, they just felt like they had to. Since most
Vampires were young, dying off over the years from one thing or another like
they did, it probably seemed like there was a huge focus on constantly getting
things to eat, even if it wasn’t really needed.

Those links
however… Were they things that had to be used the way they were? Eve tried to
think it through, not knowing how to do anything like what she was imagining
might be possible. She was, supposedly, able to use magic, wasn’t she? Not
much, and not well, but Keels had taught her the basics, and she had been
practicing daily. That was all inside herself though. She had a feeling, right
or wrong, that doing anything away from her interior landscape would burn a lot
of energy. That just felt right.

The
links she currently had… They were internal, in part, right?

That
idea distracted her for the rest of the night as she scrambled to first help
make sure everything stayed clean and then got people drinks, acting as a
waitress. Unlike the other times that she’d done that kind of thing almost no
one slapped her on the rear or tried to cop a feel. A few very drunk men did,
but in each case they were stopped by their friends, or for one of them a woman
that was just standing there. She seemed scared, which was a bit unkind.

After
all, Eve had only killed those Vampires to protect people. Not that she really
expected anyone to get that in particular. That the current plan wasn’t for her
to serve the rest of her life in prison was huge though. A thing that might not
hold, come morning, after the outcry that would be happening.

After
all, it was one thing for a man to show that his blood work was funny on
television, or even for him to lift some really heavy weights to show the kind
of power he had. People would see that as a curiosity, but not be really afraid
of it. They saw a lot of impressive things in movies all the time, so it would
just seem normal to them. The idea that it was supposed to be real was kind of
a big one, but no one would really care all that much, other than some
religious nutjobs.

Not
about that.

Eve
acting alone, had just shown that a single Vampire could be lethal, in a way
that any regular Joe or Josina wouldn’t be able to survive if they were on the
receiving end. That was going to be a big deal to a lot more people. Ones
suddenly worried that their kids would be taken if they were out after dark, or
if they got a yogurt at the wrong mall.

Still,
no one came for her instantly, which meant that she had floors to clean, and
drinks to get to thirsty people. Eve hurried to get that done, rushing from
table nine directly to the supply closet to grab one of the sturdy wooden
handled brooms.

It was
very strange, but no one actually tried to talk to her about what had happened
yet. Not Bey, or Edom, or even Barb. The Humans were all polite about it, too,
as if they didn’t really believe what had taken place. That was, she knew, very
possible.