Kiss the Dead (28 page)

Brice’s gun came back up, aimed solid, except that there was nothing we wanted to aim at. None of us wanted to shoot Hermes, and none of us had a shot at the vampire behind him. Shit.

My cross flared white and blue with that holy flame that was never really hot until vampire flesh touched it, but it was bright. I was glad the bedroom lights were on, because otherwise it could be blinding, but now it merged with the light in the room, and I could squint past it, except that the only thing I could really see was Hermes.

There was no holy glow from him. She’d persuaded him to take off his holy object, or torn it off of him before she mind-fucked him. If he’d still been wearing it, she wouldn’t have been able to roll him, if he believed. Had Hermes had a moment of doubt? Later; I’d worry about his possible crisis of faith later.

The vampire was screaming now. “Help me!”

I had a moment to see Hermes tense; I moved, driving my body with everything I had. If I was supernaturally fast, I called it up and drove my body low into Brice. The rifle shot hit as Brice and I were still falling to the floor. I was on top of Brice’s side, with him lying on the bloody sleeping bags. The bed hid us and the action from view.

Hill said, “Blake!”

I said the only thing that came to mind. “Here!”

“Same thing, to the front of me!”

It took me a second, and I hoped I understood the cryptic message, because if I didn’t… I trusted Hill, he trusted me. I slid off Brice and crawled for the corner of the bed, got down on one knee, rifle held across my body, set my rear foot into the carpet the way you do on the track, fingertips of one hand down to help with the spring. I breathed a prayer, and visualized putting Hermes through the wall, the way you do in judo; you don’t aim a throw at the mat, you aim it inches below the mat. I came up off the floor and launched myself at him, trusting that I was faster than Hermes could move to aim at me, or that the other men would shoot him before he could do it.

It was like magic; one moment I was on the floor, the next slamming low into Hermes’s body, driving with everything I had. It was like a giant hand smashed him backward. There was a sharp crack, crunching sounds, and a woman’s scream. I had a moment to feel Hermes’s body give under my push, saw a pale arm sticking out behind him, and then there were men at my back, hands grabbing Hermes’s rifle, grabbing him. I was bringing my rifle up to find the body that went with that pale arm when another rifle barrel appeared in my line of sight. I dropped to my knee and turned my head just as the rifle sounded so loud next to my head that I was deafened.

I’d protected my eyes from the muzzle flash, but my ears behind the special earplugs had been on their own. The inside of my head was a mix of strange quiet and muffled-almost-noise. My head rang with the nearness of the shot, and I fought to look around and see what was happening.

The vampire’s head was gone, blown away by Montague’s bullet. Her body was smashed into the wall, in a crumpled outline like a cartoon. I could see her chest wound clearly now and knew part of what went wrong. The wound was too high and far to the left. Yeah, someone had shot her chest open, but the heart had been missed. There was a larger outline around her body, and I think it had been from Hermes hitting the wall.

Hermes was on the bloody bed with two of the other men on top of him, using twist ties on his wrists. If the vamp wasn’t dead, then the mind-fuck was still happening. Montague was bending over me. He was holding my arm and probably saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. It was like all sound was on the other end of some cotton-filled hallway, echoes, bits, but nothing I could actually understand.

He ripped off his face mask, and I could see his mouth move. I recognized my name but could only shake my head and try to shrug through all the equipment. I raised a hand and waved it next to my ear, shaking my head at the same time.

I caught him mouthing, “Sorry.” He pulled me to my feet, and I let him do it. He screamed next to my ear, “Are you hit?”

Hit, not hurt; it meant shot, or hurt more than just partially deafened. I shook my head. He left me standing there and started using twist ties on the wrists of some of the dead vampires. It was standard to bind everything in a house, even the dead, just in case dead wasn’t as dead as it appeared. They’d taken Hermes out of the room, but Hill was kneeling at the foot of the bed. Oh, shit, Brice. Please, God, don’t let him be dead his first night out.

Hill was putting pressure on Brice’s shoulder, but he was sitting up, blinking—alive. Yay, fucking yay! The distant wail of sirens made it through the lack of clear sound. My hearing was coming back, and I started to get snatches of sound almost as soon as I thought it.

“Ribs broken,” and I turned to look down at Hill and Brice.

Brice’s voice came tinny, but clearish. “Thanks for saving my… but did you have to…”

I finally got that he was grateful I’d saved him from getting shot in the chest, but that the force of the “save” had probably broken some ribs. I called him an ungrateful baby. We laughed, he winced, and then two men in different uniforms came in with a stretcher and equipment. The medics were here; my job was done. It wasn’t my job to heal the sick, only to make the dead lie down and stop moving.

I looked at the bloody bed, the gory pile of sleeping bags beside Brice and Hill. I’d done my job. I moved out of the room and gave the EMTs room to do theirs.

I
F
I
’D BEEN
on my own, or just with another Preternatural Branch Marshal, I could have gone home, but working with SWAT meant that I had to give my version of events, since we had wounded officers.

I sat at the little table, huddled over my umpteenth cup of really bad coffee, feeling the dried blood on my pants crinkle as I shifted my weight in the hard metal chair. Two men in nice clean suits sat across from me, asking the same questions for the dozenth time. I was beginning to resent them, just a little.

Detective Preston said, “How did Officer Hermes get his leg broken?”

I raised my eyes from the tabletop to look at him. He was tall, thin, balding, and wore glasses that were too small and round for his long angular face. “Are you asking the same questions over and over because you think you’ll wear me down and I’ll tell a different story, or do you guys just have nothing better to do?”

I rubbed my fingers across my eyes. They felt gritty, and I was tired.

“Ms. Blake…”

I looked up then, and I knew it wasn’t a friendly look. “Marshal, it’s
Marshal Blake, and the fact that you keep forgetting that is either deliberate, or you’re just an asshole; which is it? Is it a tactic, or are you just rude?”

“Marshal Blake, we need to understand what happened so we can keep it from happening again.”

The second detective cleared his throat. We both looked at him. He was older, heavier, as if he hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in a decade or more. His white hair was cut short and precise to his soft face. “What I don’t understand, Marshal, is how you moved fast enough and with enough force to break the ribs on both Marshal Brice and Officer Hermes, and break Hermes’s leg? Why did you attack your own men?”

I shook my head. “You know the answer to all of that.”

“Humor me.”

“No,” I said.

They both sort of stiffened in their chairs. Owens, the shorter, rounder one, smiled. “Now, Marshal Blake, it’s just procedure.”

“Maybe, but it’s not my procedure.” I pushed back my chair and stood up.

“Sit back down,” Preston said.

“No, I am a federal officer, so you guys aren’t the boss of me. If I were SWAT, I might have to sit here and take this, but I’m not, so I don’t. I’ve answered all the questions, and the answers aren’t going to change, so…” I waved at them and started for the door.

“If you ever want to work with SWAT again, you will sit here as long as we want you to sit here, and you’ll answer any question we ask,” Preston said.

I shook my head, and smiled.

“I fail to see the humor,” Owens said.

“Last I heard, Brice and Hermes are both going to heal up just fine.”

Preston stood up, using that tall, gangly height to look down on me. I so didn’t care. “Hermes is over six feet tall, and you shoved him into a wall, left a fucking imprint of his body, and shoved a vampire halfway through the wall by throwing Hermes into her. That’s not
standard operating procedure, Blake. We want to understand what happened.”

“You have my blood tests somewhere. I’m sure that’ll help you figure it all out.”

“You carry six different kinds of lycanthropy, but you don’t shapeshift, which is a medical impossibility.”

“Yeah, I’m just a medical marvel, and I’m taking my marvelous ass home.”

“Which home?” Owens said.

I looked at him, eyes narrowing. “What?”

“Your house, or the Circus of the Damned and the Master of the City of St. Louis; which home are you going to tonight?”

“Circus of the Damned tonight, not that it’s any of your business.”

“Why there tonight?” he asked.

I was tired, or I wouldn’t have answered. “Because we’re scheduled to sleep there tonight.”

“Who are
we
?” Owens asked, and something about the way he said it made me suspect that it was my personal life more than my professional life they were after.

I shook my head. “I don’t owe you my personal life, Detective Owens.”

“There are people on the force who believe your personal life compromises your loyalties.”

“No one who’s ever put their shoulder next to mine and gone into a dangerous situation with me questions my loyalty. No one who went in to that house today with me questions my loyalty, and frankly that’s all I care about it.”

“We can recommend that you are too dangerous and unpredictable to work with SWAT here in St. Louis,” Owens said.

I shook my head, shrugged. It was easier to do now that I wasn’t in the vest and all the weapons. “You’re going to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Nothing I say will make a damn bit of difference. You’ve obviously decided to use my sexual orientation against me.” I said it that way deliberately; I knew the rules, too.

“We haven’t questioned your sexual orientation, Marshal Blake,” Owens said.

“I’m polyamorous, which means loving more than one person, and what I heard was you saying that the fact that I wasn’t white-bread, missionary-position monogamous compromised my loyalty. Isn’t that what they used to say about homosexual officers, too?”

“It’s not the number of men you live with that we object to, it’s that they’re all wereanimals and vampires,” Preston said.

“So, you’re discriminating against my boyfriends because they have a disease?”

Owens touched Preston’s arm. “We aren’t discriminating against anyone, Marshal Blake.”

“So, you aren’t prejudiced against vampires or wereanimals?” I asked.

“Of course not, that would be illegal,” Owens said. He pulled on Preston’s arm until the taller man sat down.

I stayed standing. “Good to know that you aren’t prejudiced on the basis of illness, or sexual orientation.”

“Poly-whatsit isn’t a sexual orientation; it’s a lifestyle choice,” Preston said.

“Funny, I thought it was my sexual orientation, but if you’re a psychologist with a background in sexuality, by all means, you’re right.”

“You know full well I’m not,” Preston said, and the first hint of real anger was creeping into his voice. If I kept poking at him, maybe I could get him to yell and that would be on the video, too.

“I have no idea what your areas of professional expertise are, Detective Preston. I thought since you were speaking like an expert about my sex life, you must know something I don’t.”

“I did not say a damn thing about your sex life.”

“I’m sorry, I thought you did.”

“You know damn well I didn’t.”

“No,” I said, and gave him the full unhappiness in my eyes, and the beginnings of anger in my cold, controlled voice, “no, I don’t know that at all. In fact, I thought I heard both of you question my loyalty to my
badge and my service, because I’m sleeping with monsters, and that must mean I’m a monster, too.”

“We never said that,” Owens said.

“Funny,” I said, “because that’s what I heard. If that’s not what you meant, then please, enlighten me. Tell me what you actually meant, gentlemen. Tell me what I misunderstood in this conversation.”

I stood there and looked at them. Preston glared at me, but it was Owens who said, “We would never question your home life, your sex life, or imply that people who suffer from lycanthropy, or vampirism, are less worthy of the rights and privileges accorded to everyone in this country.”

“When you run for office, let me know, so I won’t vote for you,” I said.

He looked surprised. “I’m not running for office.”

“Huh, usually when someone talks like a politician they’re running for something,” I said.

He flushed, angry at last. “You can go, Marshal. In fact, maybe you better go.”

“Happy to,” I said, and I left them to be angry together, and probably still angry with me. They could recommend that I not be allowed to go out with SWAT anymore, but it would be just that, a recommendation, and the other officers didn’t like these guys any better than I did. They could recommend all they wanted; they could go to hell for all I cared. I was going home.

W
HAT I WANTED
was a shower, a good cuddle, food, good sex, and sleep. What I got was two of my lovers arguing so loudly that I could hear it through the curtains that made up the living room walls in the underground of the Circus of the Damned. Nicky was behind me carrying one of my equipment bags; Claudia had the other bag. She was taller than Nicky by inches, one of the tallest people I’d ever met, and definitely the tallest woman. Her long black hair was back in its usual high, tight ponytail. It left her face dark and bare, and strikingly beautiful. It wasn’t the beauty of dainty female things, but one of strength and high, sculpted cheekbones. She was a knockout with not a touch of makeup, dressed in the black pants and black tank top of the guards’ unofficial uniform. The shoulders and arms that showed were muscled and ripped, so that doing the smallest motion made her arms flex and ripple with muscle. Nicky was broader through the shoulders, but Claudia didn’t look small beside him. She looked tall, strong, and dangerous. The shoulder holster and guns were almost not necessary, like an extra rose on top of your birthday cake when the icing was already thick and deep. The fact that she was a wererat, which made her faster
and stronger than I was, meant looks were totally accurate. Claudia was dangerous, but she was on our side, so it was all good. Besides, she had a conscience, unlike Nicky, who had to borrow mine. A conscience will get in the way of you being as deadly as you could be.