Authors: Laurell K. Hamilton
“Shit,” I whispered. It could be that the officers were having to stay off their radios to search for vampires, or they could be hurt, or dead, or hostages. We were out of time to mess with this vampire; others had our people. I needed him to hear me. I needed him to do what I wanted him to do. “Barney,” I said, “hear me.” And there was a thread of power in my voice now, a faint vibration of my necromancy. I was a vampire executioner as a job, but I’d started life raising zombies. My psychic gift was with the dead, or the undead. I hadn’t meant to, but my desire to control him had found a part of my own natural gifts that might do just that. Was it illegal to use psychic gifts on a suspect? Not after what he’d just done, and not with a fifteen-year-old girl maybe dying at this minute, and at least two officers gone into radio silence. We were out of time, and we needed any help he could give us. The law did allow for psychic force to be used if it would save lives, or if the suspect had proven uncooperative with more normal means. The same new laws that had made it so I couldn’t just shoot Barney also allowed
me to do things that would have been iffy before they were in place. The law giveth, and the law taketh away.
Barney whimpered, and then his voice came small and almost childlike: “Don’t.”
“Don’t what, Barney?” But my whisper held that echo of power. In the middle of the fight there hadn’t been time to think of it, because it took concentration to work with the dead. I could have put the power back in its box, but I wanted him to let me cuff him. I wanted him to talk to me. I wanted it enough that I was willing to go all “witchy” in front of the other cops.
“You aren’t my master,” he said, “and your master isn’t my master. We’re free vampires and we won’t let you control us.”
He was one of the new vampires, ones that didn’t want to follow a Master of the City. They wanted to be free like humans were, free to make decisions and be just people, but no matter how many vampires I might love, and protect, what Barney had done in the few minutes he’d been free proved why freedom from the control of the masters was a bad idea. Sometimes you had a bad master and the system went bad, very bad, but you couldn’t let people with this level of strength and power out there without a power structure. They needed someone to hold their leashes, because you give most people this kind of power and you find out that they aren’t nice people at all; they’d been nice because they were weak. It takes a truly good person to gain power, strength, and mystical abilities and not misuse them. Most people weren’t that good, or sometimes they’re just too stupid to not hurt someone by accident. Think about waking up one night strong as a superhero. There is a learning curve, and people can get hurt while you learn. How do you balance one section of the population’s right to be safe against the freedom of another? We were still struggling for that answer, but today, this moment, I knew my answer. I would take Barney Wilcox’s free will in trade for the safety of a fifteen-year-old girl and the officers that his vampire friends were holding hostage. If I could take it, that is. He wasn’t blood-oathed to Jean-Claude; if he had been, then I could have made him behave through my links to Jean-Claude. He was a free vampire
with no master to answer to, or no master he knew about. We’d found that most of the “free” vamps followed their group leader. Vampires are just like most other people; they want to follow, they just don’t want to admit it.
I called my necromancy and aimed it at this one very young vampire. He pressed himself into the corner, as if he could push himself through the wall. “You can’t do necromancy on me with the cross there.”
“I raise zombies every night with my cross on, Barney,” I said, voice still low and with slightly deeper power. There had been a time when I’d believed my power was evil, but God didn’t seem to feel that way, so until He changed His mind, I just had faith that my power came from the right side.
“No,” he said, “no, please don’t.”
“Let me cuff you, Barney, and then maybe I won’t have to.”
He held his hands out, but the remains of the first cuffs were still on his wrists. I had to lay the heavier cuff set on the floor and have someone hand me a key, because my keys with the cuff key on them were in my purse, which was in my locker with my weapons and cross.
The light from Zerbrowski’s cross began to fade. One of the younger officers asked, “Why is the glow fading?” First, he shouldn’t have asked that in front of the vampire, and second, he shouldn’t have asked until the emergency was over.
Another cop called out, “I’m surprised that Zerbrowski could make it glow at all.”
“Yeah, Sarge, didn’t know you were that goody-two-shoes.”
The vampire in the corner began to be visible again as the light faded, almost as if the glow had made him partially invisible, and he became more solid as the holy fire receded. I had the old cuffs off and was able to see Barney’s wrists clearly enough to think that they were both thicker than mine, though still narrow for a man of his height. I had a moment of struggling with the locking mechanism on the new cuffs. It was only the third time I’d put them on anyone outside the practice that we’d all been ordered to attend when they became semistandard issue. I was up on my knees, concentrating so hard on the
metal that Barney leaned close enough so his mouth almost touched my hair, before Dolph put a foot on his shoulder and kept him pressed against the wall. He also had a handgun pointed at him. It would be hell to pay if he died in custody, but Dolph was the boss, and if the boss said it was time for guns, you didn’t argue. I couldn’t even argue, not really.
I answered the young cop’s question, now that I had Dolph there ready and willing. “Most holy items only glow like that when the vampire is using vampire powers; once the vamp quiets down the glow diminishes, or goes out.”
I got the shackles off over Barney’s boots; they were the big ones designed to go over men’s boots. The cuffs were big enough to fit around my neck and have room to spare. The vampire was tall enough that he had to draw his knees up so the single solid metal bar between cuffs and shackles could reach, since Dolph was keeping his upper body very solid against the wall.
“So, it’s not that the Sarge lost his faith?” the young guy asked, and the moment he asked I realized we had a more serious problem. I stood up so I could keep half my attention on the newly chained vampire and still see the cop who’d asked. He was a uniform, with brown hair cut too short for his triangular face. His eyes were a little wide still. I didn’t get into it in front of the suspect, but I made a mental note later, noting the name tag on the officer: Taggart. If you didn’t have faith in God, or whatever, then holy items didn’t work no matter how bug-nuts the vampires got. It was the person’s faith that made it work, unless it was blessed by a priest or someone equally holy. Blessed items glowed and protected without need of faith, but just regular crosses, not so much. Even blessed items needed to be reblessed from time to time. I would have to see if Taggart was having a crisis of faith, because if he was, he had to be moved to a different squad. This was the monster squad, and an officer without faith was crippled against vampires.
I started to help Dolph get the vamp on his feet, but Dolph wrapped one big hand around the other man’s upper arm and just pulled him up. I was strong enough, but not tall enough or heavy enough to have the leverage to do it with someone so tall. The vampire was about six foot
three, but Dolph still towered over him. The vampire marks I shared with Jean-Claude made me stronger, faster, harder to hurt, but nothing would make me taller.
Dolph put him back in the chair he’d knocked over. He kept one big hand on the vampire’s shoulder, and the gun was very big, and very black, as he held it beside his thigh. The implication was clear: Cooperate, or else. We couldn’t actually shoot him now, but no law prevents the police from making threats to get suspects to talk, and the vampire had opened the door for naked guns in the interrogation room. It took two men to help the worst of the wounded officers out the door, but everyone was able to walk out; it was a good night. Now all we had to do was get the girl out before she was murdered as a vampire, and find the officers that had gone radio silent unhurt. Oh, and get them all away from a rogue vampire kiss. Yeah, that’s the group name for a bunch of vampires: a kiss of vampires. A gobble of ghouls, a shamble of zombies, and a kiss of vampires; most people don’t know that, and the rest don’t care. A pretty name for a group of super-strong, super-fast, mind-controlling, blood-drinking legal citizens, who might live forever if we didn’t have to shoot them. That last part made them just like any other bad guys; the earlier parts made them unique, and too fucking dangerous.
P
OLICE OFFICERS GO
radio silent for a lot of reasons, including equipment failure. It doesn’t automatically get SWAT called out, or anything much except more officers dispatched to the scene to check on things, unless preternatural citizens are involved. Words like
vampire
,
werewolf
,
wereleopard
,
zombie
, et cetera, can be an automatic rollout for our special teams. Unless they’re already busy elsewhere with a genuine situation, not just a maybe one. Some of them were with my fellow U.S. Marshal Larry Kirkland delivering a warrant of execution on a vampire that had moved into our town with a live warrant from another state. He’d killed the last Marshal who tried to “serve” the warrant, so the warrant had been electronically transferred to the Marshal who was next up in the rotation here, which made it Larry’s warrant. A warrant of execution was always considered a no-knock warrant, which meant we didn’t have to announce ourselves before coming through the door. I’d started Larry’s training, but the FBI had finished it; he was all grown up now, married with a kid, and I’d learned to ignore the tight feeling in my gut when he went off on his own into something dangerous. There was also a more routine warrant on drug dealers, suspected of a string of deaths,
so SWAT was going in with that one, too. St. Louis is a smaller city; our SWAT had enough men to field one more team, but we wouldn’t get it until we had proof something bad had happened. Until then it was just the officers originally dispatched to the scene and us, RPIT. Frankly, I preferred it that way sometimes. Too many rules with SWAT.
The night was strobed with blue and red lights as Zerbrowski and I pulled up. There were no sirens, just the lights. In the movies there’s noise to go with the lights, but sometimes like now, when you get out of the cars, it’s quiet, just the colored lights swirling over and over the huge brick buildings and empty brick courtyard. In the 1800s the brewery had been one of the major employers in the city, but it had been abandoned for years. Someone had bought it and was trying to convince people it could be condos and office space, but mostly it rented out for photo and video shoots. The two police cars looked empty. Where were the cops who went with them, and why weren’t they answering their radios?
Detectives Clive Perry and Brody Smith got out of their car. Perry was tall, slender, neatly but conservatively dressed. He was African American, but his skin wasn’t as dark as the colored lights made it seem; Smith was a natural blond, and he looked paler as the lights painted him blue and red. Perry was almost six feet, Smith not much taller than me. Perry was also built like a long-distance runner, all height and slender frame; Smith’s shoulders were broad and he was built like someone who’d muscle up if he ever hit the gym enough. Smith’s white shirt was open at the collar, no tie, and his jackets always fit wrong through his shoulders, as if he had trouble finding suits that fit them and were still short enough for his height. They say opposites attract, or at least work well together, and Perry and Smith did. Perry was the normal one of the pairing, and Smith the supernormal—which sounded better than
psychic
, or
witch
. Smith was part of an experimental program that St. Louis was trying in which cops with some psychic ability were trained up so they could use their talents for more than just following their gut. What had surprised the top brass had been how many cops were psychic, but it hadn’t surprised me. Most cops talk about their gut feelings,
instinct, and most of them will tell you it’s kept them and their partners alive. When tested, it turned out most of the “gut instinct” was latent psychic ability. Smith could sense the monsters once they used some sort of ability. When a lycanthropy suspect started to shapeshift, Smith would sense it and warn everyone, or warn the suspect not to do it. He could sense vampires once they went all vampire-wiles on your ass. He was better with the furry than the undead. He could sense when someone was using certain psychic abilities, like when I searched for the undead. As psychics went, Smith was pretty mild, or they hadn’t found his true ability. It was sort of a wait and see.
Zerbrowski and I weren’t officially partners. U.S. Marshals didn’t usually have official partners, and Preternatural Branch, never. But I’d probably worked with Zerbrowski more than any other single cop over the years. We knew each other. I’d been invited over to his house for dinners with his wife and kids, and last cookout he’d let me bring my two wereleopard live-in sweeties. Two men who were “monsters,” and I was living in sin with both of them, and he let me bring them to his house with his family and a bunch of other cops and their families; yeah, Zerbrowski and I were friends. We might never confide our deepest darkest secrets in each other, but we were cop-friends. It’s like work-friends, but you get each other’s blood on you, and keep each other alive. But when I went out with RPIT they did try to pair me with normals. Zerbrowski had gut instinct, but not enough to score on the tests.
We checked the two cars, found them empty, and I just said it: “We have to assume that the officers are hurt, so I’m invoking.” Invoking the Preternatural Endangerment Act, that is; it was a loophole in the new, more vampire-friendly laws that allowed Marshals of the Preternatural Branch to use lethal force if they thought human lives were endangered and would be lost waiting for a warrant of execution. At least two officers missing from their cars, maybe more if either ride had two officers apiece, they were either hurt or dead, and there was still the missing girl. If we wanted anyone left alive, we needed to be able to shoot the vampires.