‘I know,’ he said.
Nicky and Dev looked at us. ‘Come on, let us keep them out of the room,’ Dev said.
Micah shook his head.
‘Sorry, no,’ I said.
‘Pleeeassse,’ Dev said, drawing out the word as if he were three instead of twenty-three.
‘Tempting,’ I said.
‘So tempting,’ Micah agreed, ‘but let them through.’
Nicky watched the couple pass between him and Dev like he was watching a couple of wounded antelopes and it was just a matter of time.
Al spoke over their heads as they entered the room. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t distract them enough. Apparently, I’m not sinful enough to interest them.’
‘You’re a good boy,’ Bertie said, patting his arm.
Al shrugged. ‘Sorry, Mike.’
‘Don’t apologize to him because you aren’t a sinner,’ Jamie said.
‘I don’t think that’s what he was apologizing for, Uncle Jamie,’ Micah said.
‘Leave the boy alone, Jamie,’ Aunt Bobbie said. She sounded disgusted with the situation and she’d just gotten here.
‘If you hadn’t interfered in the first place, Bobbie, there wouldn’t be any Coalition, and hundreds of people would have been saved from becoming monsters for them.’
‘I checked into your allegations, Bertie, and it’s paranoid nonsense,’ Bobbie said.
Micah said, ‘We do not encourage people to become lycanthropes. We help families deal with members who are already shapeshifters. We counsel people after attacks, but we do not encourage anyone to become wereanimals. We aren’t like the Church of Eternal Life; we don’t recruit.’
‘You and the vampires want everyone to be like you,’ Aunt Bertie said.
‘That’s unsubstantiated rumor,’ Aunt Bobbie said.
‘I don’t know where the rumors started,’ Micah said, ‘but I can tell you that they are lies. We help people deal with the trauma of attacks the way I wish someone had helped me.’
‘I’ve heard the rumors, but I didn’t think anyone was taking them that seriously,’ I said.
‘A certain branch of religious conservatives have jumped on the bandwagon pretty strongly,’ Micah said. He looked at his aunt and uncle.
‘The rest of them here will believe your lies, but we know that you’ve deceived hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent humans.’ Bertie turned on Bobbie and pointed an accusing finger at her. ‘Innocent lives that could have been saved from evil if you hadn’t gone against us.’
‘You had no grounds to try to imprison Mike, and a judge agreed with me,’ Bobbie said.
‘What are they talking about?’ Nathaniel asked.
‘Jamie and Bertie wanted me to turn myself in to a government safe house when my tests came back positive for lycanthropy. Their church believed that all shapeshifters should be isolated like lepers. When I wouldn’t do it voluntarily, they tried to get me declared legally incompetent and be made my guardians, because the rest of the family was too emotionally overwrought to take care of me.’
‘The government safe houses are prisons,’ Nathaniel said.
I said, ‘Once you sign yourself in you can’t get out, no matter what they tell you to get you there.’
‘I know, and I had Aunt Bobbie to back me up in court.’
‘Thank you,’ I said to her.
She waved it away. ‘They didn’t have any right to do it, or legal ground to stand on, but they had a judge who was a church member. Once I got him recused, we were fine.’
‘If the monster that attacked you had been in a safe house, Steve and Richie would still be alive and you’d still be human instead of an animal,’ Bertie said.
‘Aunt Bertie!’ Juliet nearly yelled it.
‘That’s enough!’ Bea said; her face was flushed, eyes paling to gray. I was betting that was her angry color of eyes, just a hunch.
‘Just tell me these two are the craziest members of your family,’ I said.
‘Last time I visited, yes.’
‘Good,’ I said.
Uncle Jamie turned on me like he’d been saving up. ‘We know who you are, Anita Blake. You raise the dead from the grave, something only God is allowed to do.’
‘I don’t do resurrection, just zombies.’
‘Of course you can’t do what God can do,’ Bertie said. ‘The devil is only a poor imitation of God.’
I raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Excuse me?’
Aunt Jody stepped up. ‘You are an evil, narrow-minded person.’
‘You are an abomination before the Lord,’ Bertie said, in a voice full of such rage it was almost frightening. She’d been yelling at Micah and me, but she was furious with Jody.
‘You didn’t think that in high school,’ Jody said; her voice was bland, empty, but it fell into the conversation like it was anything but.
‘We were friends once, before you became perverted,’ Bertie said.
‘You liked my perversion just fine in high school and then we scared each other. I married the first man who would have me, and you started sleeping with any man who would have you.’
‘Mama,’ Essie said, and she looked like this was news to her.
‘I’m happy now,’ Jody said. ‘Can you say the same, Bertha?’
‘Don’t call me that! Don’t ever call me that!’
‘It’s your name,’ Jody said.
I felt like I was missing a whole lot. Bertie launched herself at Jody. Al got in the way, keeping the two women apart. Nicky kept Uncle Jamie from joining the fight just by standing in his way and being big. The other man didn’t even try to get past him. Dev moved between us and Aunt Bertie, moving us physically back from the almost-fight. None of us told them to stop; I think they were more afraid of what we might do if the fight spread than the other way around.
Jamie yelled around Nicky, ‘You are the devil’s blood whore!’
‘Can I hit him, just once?’ Nicky called out.
‘No!’ I said, and made sure my voice carried.
‘Is he calling Micah the devil, or Jean-Claude?’ Nathaniel asked.
Dev moved Micah, Nathaniel, and me farther back from the fight. Micah’s mom and stepdad, Aunt Jody, Aunt Bobbie, Aunt Bertie, and Uncle Jamie were all screaming at one another. Juliet, Essie, and the rest of us watched like innocent bystanders at a train wreck. It’s sort of awful, but you can’t look away.
I put my mouth close to Micah’s ear and said, ‘Can’t wait to hear what your family Christmases were like.’
‘I’ve never seen them this bad,’ he said.
Juliet and Essie came to stand near us. Essie gave quick covert glances at Dev and Nathaniel, and even Micah. I was suspecting a childhood crush that still had some life in it.
Juliet spoke above the shouting, ‘Do you remember Ginger Dawson?’
‘I remember the Dawson farm; it was next door to ours.’
‘Do you remember the oldest daughter? The one who went away to the army?’
‘Vaguely,’ Micah said.
‘She and Aunt Jody have been living together for about five years.’
‘Living together, how?’ Micah asked.
‘What did you call cutie here? Your live-in partner?’
‘His name’s Nathaniel,’ I said, automatically.
Micah said, ‘Yeah.’
‘They’re living together like that.’
We all looked at one another. Micah said, ‘I had no clue.’
‘None of us did,’ Juliet said.
Aunt Bertie screamed, ‘You’re bringing up your children with your two catamites!’
‘I do not think that word means what she thinks it means,’ I said.
‘Bertie’s gone crazy,’ Juliet said.
Essie was hunching in on herself, trying to look like she didn’t know any of these people. She muttered, ‘I’m so sorry, Mike.’
He patted her arm. ‘It’s okay, Essie, your parents were never your fault.’
She flashed him adoring bl
ue eyes, and he missed it completely as he watched his mother and aunts fight. Nathaniel looked at me; he hadn’t missed it either.
‘You contaminated one son,’ Bertie yelled. ‘Look what he brought home to you! Stop living in sin before you contaminate your other children!’
The three of us, and Dev, all exchanged looks. He said, ‘I think they mean Nathaniel, but …’
Bertie got a handful of Bea’s hair and the fight was on. Hospital security arrived as the two sisters got down to some serious hair-pulling, fingernail-using girl fighting. It was kind of embarrassing, not that it was Micah’s mom, but that they fought like girls. I’d have to teach Bea how to throw a punch.
15
Morgues aren’t usually my favorite places, but it had been a choice of the morgue or helping Micah talk to the hospital security and police about not having his mom and aunt hauled off to jail. Frankly, I’d have let them take Aunt Bertie if it wouldn’t have sent his mom to jail, too. Richard Zeeman’s mom, my other almost-mother-in-law, had also had a temper. What was it with the men that I loved having moms who were such … live wires? Maybe they both liked women just like dear old Mom? In Micah’s case, I was a cop like his dad, so he got a two-for-one deal. It was all too weird and Freudian for me.
I stared down at the first plastic-edged corpse and wasn’t happier here with the dead than up trying to figure out the living, but I was less confused. I had felt guilty leaving Nathaniel with Micah and the mess of the living, but he couldn’t come with me. Dr Rogers had barely gotten the okay from the local cops for me to see the first three victims. Including my boyfriends would have been asking too much, and besides, I didn’t want either of them to see the horrors I saw in my job, especially not if this was what would be happening to Rush Callahan. Previews are a bitch. I pushed away that last thought and looked down at the body.
There would be paperwork somewhere that told me her name, maybe even her background. Had she had a family? But I didn’t need, or want, any of that right now. The only way to stay sane was to think body, it; depersonalize. Background information got in the way of the pronoun it and made it more a her. Looking down at the body I didn’t want it to be a her. I needed it to be a thing. Sometimes I worried that I’d become like some legal serial killer with my victims just rogue vamps and shapeshifters, but moments like this made me understand that my empathy was way too good for me ever to be a serial killer. Most of them saw their victims as things like a lamp, or a chair, or a tree, no more real than that. It was what allowed them to do their crimes with so little remorse. You don’t feel bad about beating up a chair or breaking a lamp, right?
I stared down at the body and fought to keep in that Zen mind-set where it was all impersonal and I didn’t keep seeing Micah’s dad in the hospital bed, or think what this woman must have gone through before she died. I fought to keep all that in the back of my head, because in the front it would stop me from being helpful. I couldn’t function if my emotions were fucking me over. Yay, I wasn’t becoming some emotionless killing machine. Boo, I was staring down at a partially rotted corpse and all I could think was, What a horrible way to die.
‘Dazzle us, Blake,’ Detective Rickman said.
Did I mention I had an audience? Dr Rogers and the coroner, Dr Shelley, I’d sort of expected, but I also had Sergeant Gonzales; Rickman; his partner, Detective Conner; Commander Walter Burke; Deputy Al; and Deputy Gutterman. Al was apparently senior officer while Rush was hurt, but I wondered, if we had two of their officers, how many were left on their force to protect and serve while they stayed down here? It was a small-town sheriff’s department, it couldn’t be that big, but I didn’t question Al’s use of manpower. He was in charge and he knew his resources.
The audience had been part of what made Rickman not have a hissy fit about me looking at the bodies. Apparently, he was worried I’d mess up the victims or do suspicious magic. I’d run into officers like him before. Some were ultrareligious, so they thought I was evil, but others just had the same problem with me they had with all female cops, or with a federal cop of any kind butting into their case. I was a woman, a female cop, a godless user of magic, and a Fed – so many reasons for other cops to hate me. The fact that this many different flavors of police were cooperating was rare and good to see. I had a feeling it was Sheriff Rush Callahan’s good rep and work that made them all willing to band together. Normally police fought over jurisdiction like dogs over the last meaty bone. It was better than it had been years ago, but it was still a general rule that cops didn’t like to share, except when they wanted to pass the buck so that a messy or boring case was someone else’s problem. This case was messy, but it wasn’t boring, and one of their own was hurt, so it was personal, but more than that, solve a case like this and it could make your reputation. Fail at solving it and it could break you. I wasn’t big on failing or breaking.
Though with this many people in the room it was damn near claustrophobic. I felt like I had a wall looming up behind me that kept bending closer. It was actually Dr Shelley who finally turned around and said, ‘Gentlemen, you were allowed to observe, not to breathe down our necks. Now, everybody take two big steps back.’ She pushed her glasses back up on her nose with the back of her gloved hand and glared at them when they didn’t move. ‘This is my part of the crime, my domain; you’re here because I let you be here. If you don’t give us some room to work, then I’ll clear the room, is that understood? Now step the hell away from us.’
I liked her. The men exchanged glances as if waiting to see who would back up first. It was Gonzales who stepped back first, followed by Burke, then the deputies, and finally Rickman. Maybe it wasn’t just me he didn’t like, or maybe it was all women?
‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ she said in a voice that held no grudge. She turned back to me and Dr Rogers. ‘Marshal Blake, now that we can move without bumping into people, do you have any questions?’
Rickman piped up. ‘We want to know what she sees that we didn’t, not just information that you’ve already given us.’
Shelley turned around, and I didn’t have to see her eyes to know she was giving him her cold look. It was a good look, and we’d all seen it a few times already. It was a look that reminded you of that teacher in elementary school who could make thirty kids go silent with a glance, except this look was more hostile.
Rickman took the full weight and gave his own defiant look back; we’d seen that a few times, too. ‘If you feed her information, Sheila, we won’t know if she’s really an asset to this case or just another Fed to get in our way.’
‘This is my morgue, Ricky. I run it the way the way I see fit.’ Her voice was very cold, but the fact that he’d used her first name made me wonder if they’d had more than a working relationship once. Of course, maybe he just wanted to point out that her name was Sheila Shelley. He probably didn’t get to use names that were almost as bad as his own Ricky Rickman very often.
‘She’s supposed to be some hotshot zombie expert; let her prove it,’ he said, undaunted.
‘I can raise zombies from the grave,’ I said. ‘Can anyone else in this room do that?’
There was silence and a couple of nervous looks.
‘Was I not supposed to remind everybody that I raise the dead? Sorry, but it’s a psychic gift. I’d exchange it for something else if I could, but it doesn’t work that way. I make zombies rise from the dead the way some people are left-handed or have the recessive genes for blue eyes. It’s just the way it is; I raised my first one when I was fourteen, so yeah, that makes me a zombie expert, Detective Rickman.’
‘Then like I said, dazzle us, Blake.’
‘Get out of my morgue,’ Dr Shelley said.
‘Now, Sheila,’ he said.
‘Stop using my first name as if that will make us buddies, Detective. You have an issue with women in authority, you always have, and apparently you always will.’ She turned to me. ‘I’m sorry, Marshal, it’s nothing personal, he’s always like this.’
/> ‘How did he make detective this young if he’s always this big a pain in the ass?’ I asked.
‘Unfortunately, when he gets his head out of his ass he’s a really good detective. He solved some big cases early and saved lives by catching the monsters early. I mean murderers, not your kind of monster,’ she said.
I nodded, that I appreciated the difference.
She pointed a gloved finger at Rickman. ‘But right now you are being childish and unhelpful. Sheriff Callahan has helped everyone in this room do their jobs better. He’s saved lives literally and by simply helping all of us do ours. He never grabs credit, but we all know we owe him. Now, we are all going to let the marshal here do her job and respect her expertise with the preternatural, but more than that I hear she’s engaged to Callahan’s son and that means she deserves respect on that account, too, and you, Ricky, will by God give it to her for one of those three reasons. I don’t care which one you pick, but choose one and give her the same credit you’d give a man with the same badge, the same reputation, and the same connection to a wounded officer that we all respect and owe.’
I fought the urge to applaud. Rickman finally looked embarrassed; good to know he could be. The other officers looked shamefaced, too, as if the lecture were somehow contagious, or as if Rickman had made them all look bad. Either way, Rickman shut up and the rest of them were on their best behavior as if to make up for him.
‘Zombies, when they do bite, usually just bite down like a person. The first male victim’s shoulder is torn, savaged, more like a wereanimal or a vampire.’
‘Vampires don’t tear at you like a terrier with a rat,’ Burke said. ‘They kill neat, almost clean.’ He didn’t sound happy when he said it, but he sounded sure.
I tried to remember if I’d touched anything in the morgue that I wouldn’t want touching my bare skin. I thought and just couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. ‘I’d have to take my gloves off and reglove, but after we’re all done here I can show scars where a vampire did just that to me.’
Burke’s serious cop eyes let me know he wasn’t sure he believed me.
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