“It was Gerald Mallory, the vampire hunter assigned to Washington, DC, wasn’t it?” I said.
“How did you know?”
“Mallory thinks I’m the whore of Babylon because I’m sleeping with vampires. He might forgive shapeshifters, but he hates vampires with a depth and breadth of hate that’s frightening.”
“Frightening?” She made it a question with a upward lilt of her voice.
“I’ve seen him kill. He gets off on it. He’s like a racist who has permission to hate and kill.”
“You say race because I’m black.”
“No, I say racist because it’s the closest thing I can imagine to his attitude toward vampires. I’m not joking when I say after seeing him stake vampires that he scares me. He hates them so much, Karlton. He hates them without reason, or thought, or any room in his mind for a reason not to hate them. It consumes him, and people consumed by hate are crazy. It blinds them to the truth, and makes them hate anyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
“He also says that you should always stake a vampire. He doesn’t approve of using silver ammunition.”
“He’s a stake and hammer man.” I knelt by my backpack and came up with the Mossberg 500 Bantam shotgun. “This is my favorite for shooting them in their coffins. All you need to do is destroy the brain and the heart, but don’t just shoot them in the head and chest and think you’ve got the job done. You need to make sure the brain is leaking out on the floor, or the head is completely detached from the body, and then you need to see some daylight through the chest. The older the vampire, the more completely you need to destroy the heart and head.”
“He said just staking the heart was enough.”
“If I see daylight through the chest and the heart is completely destroyed, you’re probably okay, but if I have time I destroy the brain, too, just to be safe, and I want you to know that’s safer in the field. I’d still go back and shoot them in the head after the heart was taken out in a field situation.”
“You mean on a hunt,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“This is my first hunt.”
In my head, I thought, Well, fuck. “You mean you have never participated in a hunt?”
“No,” she said.
“I know you said you’d only done morgue stakings, but I thought you’d gone on at least one hunt as the junior marshal. You’ve never even seen a vampire hunted and killed in the field?”
“I can handle myself.”
I shook my head. “Now I need to ask you something without you getting insulted,” I said.
She sat on the side of her bed. “That’s fair; what do you want to know?”
“This is a bad case, Karlton. It’s not a hunt for a first-time field agent.”
“I know it’s a bad one,” she said.
“No, you don’t, not yet.” I sat on my bed and faced her. “I want you to sign the warrant over to me, please.”
She was angry and didn’t try to hide it. “I can’t. I’m the girl, and if I back down on this the other marshals will never trust me again.”
“It’s not about being a girl, Karlton, it’s about being new and inexperienced.”
“I’ll have your back, Blake.”
“I’m not worried that you’ll get me killed.”
She frowned again. “Then what are you worried about?”
I looked into those dark brown eyes, that earnest face and said, “I’m worried you’ll get yourself killed.”
There was no more girl talk after that. We just got ready for bed. I went into the bathroom to get dressed. I had packed my weapons, but not my clothes. Nathaniel, one of my live-in sweeties, a wereleopard and my leopard to call, had. He was the most domestic of us all, and I was fine with the jeans, T-shirts, boots, and jogging shoes, but the pajamas, well, I’d be talking to him about the pajamas. It was a camisole and boy shorts except they were both black lace and stretchy fabric that fit like a second skin. There was enough lift to the fabric that the camisole actually supported my breasts enough for it to fit right. The skimpy pj’s looked great on me, but were so not appropriate marshal jammies. But they were the most appropriate of what he’d packed. Soooo going to talk to him about that.
When I came out, Karlton said, “Nice pajamas. Sorry to disappoint that you’re not bunking with the boys.”
I didn’t bother to glare at her. “My boyfriend packed my clothes while I packed the weapons.”
“You let a man pack your clothes?”
“He’s usually pretty good at it, but I think he picked the pajamas for what he wanted to see.”
She snorted. “That’s a man.”
I sighed. “I guess so.”
The oversized T-shirt she was wearing had someone I didn’t recognize singing into a microphone stand. I slid between the covers, and the sheets were the cheap cotton that had been in every hotel or motel on this trip. I missed the silk sheets of Jean-Claude’s bed, and the highthread-count cotton of the bed that Micah and Nathaniel and I shared. I was sheet spoiled.
“Do you always sleep with that many weapons?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t entirely true. I always slept with a gun close at hand, but I didn’t normally sleep in the wrist sheaths with their slender silver-edged blades. They weren’t that comfortable for sleeping in, but if the Harlequin were faster than normal vampires and shapeshifters, then there might not be time to reach under my pillow for a gun. The knife draw from the wrist sheaths was quicker, because any gun under my pillow either had the safety on or stayed in a holster, so either way it was a few seconds slower than just drawing the knives. I put the big knife that usually rode along my spine beside the bed, on top of the backpack, so that I could reach it if I had to, though honestly if the two knives on me and the gun under my pillow didn’t take care of the problem I’d be dead before I got the third blade, or the other guns. With that cheerful thought, I turned off the light on my side of the room.
The room was suddenly very dark, only a thin line of artificial light sliding between the slightly crooked curtains that led to the balcony, which was just a sort of walkway with a railing. The door led directly out into the night. Vampires couldn’t come into the room without permission, but wereanimals could, and bespelled humans could, and . . . I was less than happy with the room, but it was cheap and I’d learned that if you were traveling on the government’s dime they pinched their dimes; pennies didn’t even figure into the equation.
Her voice came out of the less-than-perfect dark. “Is Gerald Mallory right—are women more likely to be seduced by vampires than men?”
“No.”
“Then why are you the only marshal who’s living with them?”
“Have you ever been in love?” I asked.
I couldn’t see her face, but I felt her go still, and then the sheets rustled. “Yes.”
“Did you plan on falling in love with him?”
The sheets moved again, and then she said, “You don’t plan love, it just happens.”
“Exactly,” I said.
Sheets sighed in the dark as she turned over. “I get it. I have seen pictures of your Master of the City; he’s pretty if you like white boys.” And she laughed.
It made me laugh, too. “I guess so. Good night, Karlton.”
“Call me Laila; all the guys call me Karlton. I’d like to hear my name sometimes.”
“Okay. Good night, Laila.”
“Good night, Anita.”
I heard her roll over a couple more times, the sheets stretching and moving with her, and then her breathing evened out and she slept. Edward and I would play by the book until they consolidated the warrants, and then we’d try to take over the hunt; until then, we waited for a warrant to be reassigned. The trouble was, the only way it got reassigned was if one of the other marshals was too injured, or too dead, to finish the hunt. I lay awake in the dark, and thought, Please, God, don’t let her get killed.