Mendez’s voice came over the mike, “We’re supposed to be the good guys.”
“Shut up, Mendez,” Jung said in a voice that was choked and thicker than it should have been.
I knelt by Jung. “Check Mel,” he whispered.
I didn’t argue with him, though I was pretty sure that it was useless. I reached for the big pulse in his neck and found torn, bloody meat. The carpet around him was spongy with blood. They hadn’t even fed on him. They’d just torn his throat out, not to feed, just to kill.
“How is he?” Jung asked.
“Hudson,” I said.
Hudson was there, and I got up and let him tell Jung the bad news.
Not my job to break the news to the wounded. Not my job. I walked out into the middle of the room. There was movement in the hallway, and it took everything I had not to shoot the medics as they came through.
Hudson had had to call on the headsets, but I hadn’t heard him. Hell of a night.
They descended on the wounded with their bags and boxes, and I walked farther into the room, because there was nothing I could do. I had no power over human mortality. Vampires, some shapeshifters, but not straight humans. I didn’t know how to save them.
“How could you look her in the eyes and do that?”
I turned and found Mendez by me. He’d taken off his mask and helmet, though I was betting that was against the rules until we left the building. I covered my mike with my hand, because no one should learn about someone’s death by accident. “She tore Melbourne’s throat out.”
“She said the other vampire made her do it, is that true?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Then how could you just shoot her?”
“Because she was guilty.”
“And who died and made you judge, jury, and ex-” He stopped in mid-sentence.
“Executioner,” I finished for him. “The federal and state government actually.”
“I thought we were the good guys,” he said, and it had that note of a child who finally realizes that sometimes good and evil aren’t so much opposites, as two sides of a coin. You toss it one way, and it looks good, another way, and it’s evil. Sometimes it just depends on which end of the gun you’re on.
“We are.”
He shook his head. “You aren’t.”
I have no excuse for what I said next, other than he hurt my feelings, and he said out loud something I’d began wonder about. “If you can’t take the heat, Mendez, get out of the fucking kitchen. Get a desk job. But whatever you do, right now, get the fuck away from me.”
He stared at me.
Hudson said, “Mendez, go get some air. That’s an order.”
Mendez gave us both a glance, then he went for the door. Hudson watched him go, then looked back at me. “He didn’t mean that.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“He doesn’t understand what you do.”
I sighed. “Sure.”
“In the movies, the vampires look peaceful. Nothing here looks peaceful.”
“I don’t bring peace, Sergeant, I bring death.”
“You save more lives than you take.”
“Pretty to think so,” I said.
He clapped me on the back, the closest he’d ever get to hugging one of his people, but I took it for the compliment it was. “You did good tonight, Blake, don’t let anyone take that away from you.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” he said.
“Let’s just say that after awhile you get tired of having to shoot people who are begging for their lives.”
“They’re vampires, they’re already dead,” he said.
I shook my head and smiled. “I wish I believed that, Sergeant Hudson, I do surely wish I believed that.” I watched them start taking out the wounded. They left Melbourne where he lay, but took the girl from the bed. They were triaging, taking the ones they could save; the dead aren’t going anywhere. Well, none of the dead in this room.
79
I was having an argument with Sergeant Hudson. We were doing it quietly at the back of the equipment van, so the media that had descended on us wouldn’t get us on camera, but it was still an argument.
“It isn’t them, Sergeant,” I said.
“So there was an extra vamp or two than the bite marks on the earlier victims. They made more.”
“The master vamp of this group is strong enough to hide his power from both the Church of Eternal Life and the Master of the City, nothing we killed up there had that kind of power.”
“We lost three men up there, I think that’s plenty powerful enough.”
I shook my head. “Most of these were babies, almost brand-new.
What I saw at the earlier crime scenes wasn’t a feeding frenzy, it was methodical. The vampires up in that condo were still more like animals than thinking beings. They were too wild to be taken on an organized hunt.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, an organized hunt. You make it sound like killing humans is like hunting deer, or rabbit.”
“To some of the vampires, it is.”
He shook his head, hands on hips, and started to pace in a tight circle, but the open door of the van stopped his pacing. “It’s the right number of vamps. They had one dead stripper, and one that they nearly killed. That’s good enough.”
“They took her and left a state trooper as a witness, so we’d know. They wanted us to come here tonight. Why?”
“They ambushed us in the hallway, Blake. I think we were just better at killing them than they planned for us to be.”
“Maybe, but what if it wasn’t a trap to kill us? What if it was a trap to kill the vampires?”
“That’s just… that makes no sense.”
“You’re ready to close the case. You’re ready to declare them dead, defeated. We kill a few vampires, find a few dead humans in the condo, and you’re ready to believe it’s our serial killers.”
“And who else would it be? Are you saying we’ve got copycats?”
“No, I’m saying that if we close this case, then they can just move on to the next town. They can start over.”
“You’re saying they left us some of their baby vampires so we’d kill them and think it was them? They sacrificed their own people for this?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“You know what I think, Blake?”
“No, what?”
“I think you just can’t let it go. I think you want it not to be over.”
It was my turn to try to pace, but I was smaller, and standing a little farther out from the doors, so I got almost a full circle out of my pacing. It didn’t help. “I want this over with, Hudson, more than you do. Because if these vampires were left up there as sacrificial lambs, then they used me to kill them. They used all of us as a sort of a weapon, their weapon.”
“Go home, Blake, go home to your husband, or boyfriend, or fucking dog, but go home. Your job is done here. Do you understand that?”
I looked up at him and tried to think how to explain it. I finally tried something I didn’t like admitting to the police at large. “I saw inside the memories of one of the vampires at the church earlier tonight. I saw some faces. I got some names. Those faces aren’t up there. Those names aren’t going to belong to any of the dead.”
“This case is closed, Blake, which means your warrant has been fulfilled. You’re done. Go home.”
“Actually, Sergeant, I have sole discretion on whether a warrant is finished or not. Mark me on this, if we don’t get these guys in St.
Louis, they’ll move shop. We got some of them tonight, but not all of them, and we sure as hell missed the big guy, and if you don’t kill the main master, he just moves somewhere else and starts making new vampires. It’s like going in for cancer surgery, if you don’t get it all, then it keeps spreading.”
“I thought you were dating a vampire,” he said.
“I am,” I said.
“For someone who’s dating one of them, you have a damned dark view of them.”
“Ask me how I feel about human beings sometimes. I’ve gotten called in on too many serial killer cases, where they want it to be a monster, because they don’t want to believe that one human being could do shit like that to another human being.”
“How long you been doing this, hunting vamps, doing the bad crimes?”