Bodies on the ground between him and the big bed. A glimpse of pale, naked flesh on the bed-female. Two other vampires riding two of the men. One rode him to the floor, so he had to be lost to sight from Hudson and Killian’s position. The other man was trapped against the wall, still firing his gun into the chest of the vamp, while the body bucked and wouldn’t die. The vamp was pressed tight to the white glow of something that looked like a luminous rosary.
Mendez with his rifle, trying to find a shot in the mess. Stepping around giving his back to the bed, so he could pin the gunbarrel against the back of the vamp’s head. The vamp never lifted from Jung’s neck. The gunshot, like all the others, was loud, but not nearly as loud as it could have been.
It was wrong, all wrong. No vamp, except the most powerful, could stand up to holy objects like this. Only revenants, mindless newbies would feed while you pushed a gun to their head and blew their brains out. You can’t be ancient and a newbie, which meant, we were missing someone, someone that was standing right fucking here.
I dropped my shields, and I looked not toward the fighting, but away from it. Either he was better than I was, and he was invisible, which meant he was farther into the room, or he was hiding somewhere that the team hadn’t gotten to yet, or both.
I found the energy of him in the far corner in plain sight. Even knowing he was there, I couldn’t see him. Which meant either I was wrong, or he was good enough that he could stand wrapped in shadows and darkness and be invisible. The only other vamp I’d ever known that was that good had never been human. I think I could have stripped him of it using my necromancy, or Jean-Claude’s marks, but I had the Mossberg in my hands. Why waste magic, when you’ve got technology?
I tightened my brace of the butt against my shoulder, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The shot didn’t kill him, but it brought him stumbling away from the wall. Suddenly everyone could see him. His hands were holding his stomach where I’d shot him. He looked surprised. Tall bastard, I’d been aiming for his chest.
I hit him again, and there was an echo, two echoes. His body slammed back against the wall. I yelled into the mike, “I want to see the wall through his chest.”
No one argued. Derry had moved over to help Mendez. I was betting that Hudson had sent him, while I was concentrating on vampire stuff.
Hudson, Killian, and I shot the master vampire, until there was a pale smear of wall through his chest. He slid down the wall like a broken puppet, painting the wall dark with blood. Hudson and Killian stopped firing, but I didn’t. I put a shot into the head, and had a second shot in before they joined me, but they did join me. With three of us, it didn’t take long to explode most of his head like a melon thrown against a wall. When most of his head was gone from his shoulders, I lowered my gun enough to look around and see how everyone else was doing.
Now that the master was dead, the newbie vamps were cringing away from the holy objects, just like they’re supposed to. Well, the one vamp that was still alive cringed. She pressed her bloody face against the corner behind the bed, her small hands held out as if to ward it off. At first it looked like she was wearing red gloves, then the lights shone in the blood, and you knew it wasn’t opera-length gloves, it was blood all the way to her elbows. Even knowing that, even having Melbourne motionless on the floor in front of her, still Mendez didn’t shoot her. Jung was leaning against the wall, like he’d fall down if he didn’t concentrate. His neck was torn up, but the blood wasn’t gushing out. She’d missed the jugular. Let’s hear it for inexperience.
I said, “Shoot her.”
The vampire made mewling sounds, like a frightened child. Her voice came high and piteous, “Please, please, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. He made me. He made me.”
“Shoot her, Mendez,” I said into the mike.
“She’s begging for her life,” he said, and his voice didn’t sound good.
“Shit,” I said and started across the room. Something grabbed my ankle. Reflex pointed the shotgun downward. One of the “dead” vampires hissed up at me, with a hole in its forehead, but it still had my ankle, and it was still going to bite me. From less than two feet away, the sawed-off would have been better, but there was no time. I emptied my gun into its head and back, until it let go of me and blood and other things leaked out of the body. “Hudson, dead is at least half their brains spilled, and daylight through their chests.”
He didn’t argue, just stepped up close to the other vamp and started pegging away at it. I guess making invisible vampires visible had earned me some credits with the sergeant.
I peeled shotgun shells out of the stock holder and fed them into the gun, as I walked toward Mendez and the vampire. She was still crying, still begging, “They made us do it, they made us do it.”
The woman on the bed was naked, and her eyes had started to glaze.
Shit. But the room had to be secured before we could see to the victim. Secured in my line of work meant something different than for most officers of the law. Secured meant that everything in the room that wasn’t on my side was dead.
Killian was moving up by the bed to check on our victim. I hoped he could help her, because it seemed worse to lose people who were trying to save someone that didn’t get saved. Jung was trying to hold pressure on his own neck wound. Melbourne’s body lay on its side, one hand outstretched toward the cringing vampire. Melbourne wasn’t moving, but the vampire still was: That seemed wrong to me. But I knew just how to fix it.
I had the shotgun reloaded, but I let it swing down at my side. At this range the sawed-off was quicker, no wasted ammo.
Mendez had glanced away from the vamp to me, then farther back to his sergeant. “I can’t shoot someone who’s begging for her life.”
“It’s okay, Mendez, I can.”
“No,” he said, and looked at me, his eyes showed too much white.
“No.”
“Step back, Mendez,” Hudson said.
“Sir…”
“Step back and let Marshal Blake do her job.”
“Sir… it’s not right.”
“Are you refusing a direct order, Mendez?”
“No, sir, but-”
“Then step back, and let the marshal do her job.”
Mendez still hesitated.
“Now, Mendez!”
He moved back, but I didn’t trust him at my back. He wasn’t bespelled, she hadn’t tricked him with her eyes. It was much simpler than that. Police are trained to save lives, not take them. If she’d attacked him, Mendez would have fired. If she’d attacked someone else, he’d have fired. If she’d looked like a raving monster, he’d have fired. But she didn’t look like a monster as she cringed in the corner, hands as small as my own held up trying to stop what was coming. Her body pressed into the corner, like a child’s last refuge before the beating begins, when you run out of places to hide and you are literally cornered, and there’s nothing you can do. No word, no action, no thing that will stop it.
“Go stand by your sergeant,” I said.
He stared at me, and his breathing was way too fast.
“Mendez,” Hudson said, “I want you here, now.”
Mendez obeyed that voice, as he’d been trained to, but he kept glancing back at me and the vampire in the corner.
She glanced past her arm, and because I didn’t have a holy item in sight, she was able to give me her eyes. They were pale in the uncertain light, pale and frightened. “Please,” she said, “please don’t hurt me. He made us do such terrible things. I didn’t want to, but the blood, I had to have it.” She raised her delicate oval face to me. “I had to have it.” The lower half of her face was a crimson mask.
I nodded and braced the shotgun in my arms, using my hip and arm instead of my shoulder for the brace point. “I know,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said, and held out her hands.
I fired into her face from less than two feet away. Her face vanished in a spray of blood and thicker things. Her body sat up very straight for long enough that I pulled the trigger into the middle of her chest. She was tiny, not much meat on her, I got daylight with just one shot.