Affliction ab-22

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes full on before she said, ‘No, they don’t do much talking during the day.’

  ‘Have you ever even served an active warrant?’ Edward asked.

  ‘Once you serve it, it qualifies as an active warrant,’ she said.

  ‘Have you ever been on a vampire hunt?’ I asked.

  She just stood there glaring at us.

  ‘Have all your vampires been morgue kills?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’ve tracked the bloodsuckers to their lairs and killed their asses in coffins and fucking sleeping bags. I’ve been lucky and found them in daylight most of the time, so there wasn’t a lot of talking happening; besides, they’re not afraid of me. I’m not the Executioner.’

  I exchanged a look with Edward. Hatfield wasn’t exactly a newbie, but she wasn’t us. Maybe it showed on our faces, because she said, ‘I am a legal vampire executioner; I do my job, I’m just not the Executioner,’ she said. ‘The vampires haven’t given me some cute pet name yet.’

  ‘They don’t hand those out to every marshal,’ Edward said.

  ‘Yeah, I know you’re Death,’ she said.

  For a second I thought Hatfield knew about Ted’s big secret identity as Edward, because he’d been Death as long as I’d been the Executioner, but the nickname had been his before a badge and falling in love with Donna had tamed him down some. But the vampires had dubbed Edward Death once as an assassin/bounty hunter and once as a bounty hunter/marshal. It was convenient of them to use the same name twice.

  I fought to keep my face blank as Edward drawled in his best Ted voice, ‘If you know I’m one of the Four Horsemen, then you know that Anita has two earned names among the vampires.’

  She looked sullen. ‘Yeah, I know she has two pet names.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Jonas said. ‘Enlighten me.’

  We both looked at Hatfield. She glared at both of us, then finally back at Jonas. ‘Forrester is Death and Blake is War.’

  ‘Who are the other two Horsemen?’

  ‘Otto Jeffries is Pestilence, and Bernardo Spotted-Horse is Hunger.’

  ‘I’ve met Spotted-Horse and I know Jeffries by reputation; they’re both ex-military, and so are you, right, Forrester?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then why is Blake “War”? She’s never been military.’

  ‘She has a higher kill count than I do,’ Edward said, ‘and the vampires see Death as a one-on-one killer, whereas War kills a lot all at one time.’

  ‘You asked the vampires,’ Jonas said.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘But why not Jeffries, or Spotted-Horse?’

  ‘You’ve met Bernardo, right?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve met him, too,’ Hatfield said. ‘He didn’t seem that scary.’

  ‘He’s Hunger,’ Edward said.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Hatfield said.

  ‘The vampires said Bernardo looks good enough to eat, but no one’s ever tasted him, so he leaves them hungry.’

  She frowned.

  Jonas seemed to think about it, and then he grinned wide and happy. He laughed. ‘He’s tasty like food, I get it.’

  ‘Dangerous food,’ Edward said. ‘He has the fifth highest kill count of any marshal.’

  ‘I’ve met Jeffries once. He had a way of looking at women when he thought no one else was looking, like we were meat, and that was before he caught lycanthropy on the job. Now I guess we really are meat to him.’ She shivered, shoulders hunching a little, and then seemed to realize what she’d done and stood up straight, shoulders back.

  The fact that she’d noticed made me think better of Hatfield. I knew Otto Jeffries as Olaf. Olaf’s hobby was being a serial killer, never in this country, and never on government work, so if you could keep him working he was ‘safe.’ The military kept him busy, and since he got a badge he was even busier, and being a part of the Preternatural Branch of the Marshals Service meant he could torture and kill vampires and rogue shapeshifters to his heart’s content, and as long as he killed them in the end, there were no rules to how he carried out the execution or how long he took to do it. Olaf was one of the scariest people I’d ever met, alive or undead, and that was an impressive list to be near the top of. Hatfield was right; he’d been that scary before he got cut up by a werelion and tested positive for lycanthropy. He’d gone AWOL after he got his test results, but he’d resurfaced a few months later. If he’d done anything unfortunate while he was learning to control his beast, the human authorities hadn’t heard about it.

  Micah had asked around in the preternatural community, and Olaf seemed to be playing the part of a nomad lion. He had stayed away from any group. Where he’d gone to learn to control himself, no one seemed to know. I actually wondered if he hadn’t gone anywhere, if the serial killer part of him was actually so close to an inner beast that he’d understood how to control both?

  Since Olaf had considered me his little serial killer girlfriend because we went out and killed people together, I’d avoided him before he learned to turn furry; now he was avoiding me as hard as I avoided him. He’d known Nicky before he became my Bride, and Olaf was afraid of my taming him the same way. Anything that kept Olaf away from me was fine in my book.

  ‘I haven’t seen Otto since he caught lycanthropy either.’

  ‘You’re a fur-banger; why would him being a wereanimal bother you?’ Hatfield asked.

  I turned and looked at her. ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘So you don’t deny that you slept with Jeffries, too.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him, but I’ve learned two things. One, it’s impossible to prove a negative, to prove I didn’t do something. Two, when a woman sleeps with more than one man, she gets accused of sleeping with damn near everybody. But let’s get back to you calling me a fur-banger.’

  ‘I’m not familiar with the term,’ Jonas said, ‘so before I yell at someone for saying it, tell me what it means.’

  ‘It means someone who fucks shapeshifters,’ Hatfield said.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ I said. ‘It means people who will fuck any shapeshifter just because they are one. It’s like badge bunnies are about cops.’

  ‘Hatfield, that sounds pretty insulting to a fellow marshal.’

  ‘I heard you were living with Sheriff Callahan’s son, Mike, and another wereleopard from his group; that true?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s true.’

  ‘The two blonds you brought in with you tonight. They’re shapeshifters just like Rickman said, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘You sleeping with them, too?’

  I took a deep breath in and let it out slow. I counted slow, before saying, ‘Yes.’

  ‘So four shapeshifters,’ she said.

  ‘I never said I didn’t date shapeshifters.’

  ‘And Forrester here, too, right?’

  I looked at Edward. ‘Will it do any good to deny it?’ I asked.

  ‘If she wants to believe it, she’s going to,’ he said, but his voice was losing the Tedness and getting colder and more empty. The real Edward was beginning to seep through.

  ‘And I hear your Master of the City flew to your side, so you’re also screwing him.’

  ‘You know, Hatfield, I was going to try to like you, but I don’t think I want to work that hard; let’s just hate each other and get it over with.’

  ‘You’re fur-banging coffin bait and helping Forrester cheat on his fiancée who has two kids; I was never going to like you, Blake.’

  ‘Hatfield,’ Jonas said, one word, sharp and unhappy with her.

  ‘If I’m really doing Ted here, then why is Donna, that’s his fiancée, okay with me being in the wedding? She’s wanting one of my fur-bangees to be in the wedding, too. I know some of the other law enforcement people will be at the wedding; maybe when they see me standing at the altar with Donna and Ted, this stupid rumor will go away.’

  Hatfield’s mouth opened and then closed; unfortunately it opened again. ‘If that�
�s true, I’ll apologize after the wedding.’

  ‘Fine, what’s the longest-term relationship you’ve ever had?’

  ‘I don’t see how that’s any of your business,’ she said.

  ‘You call me names and get up in my face about my personal life. You spread rumors about me and Marshal Forrester, and you get insulted because I ask a simple question?’

  She went back to looking sullen. There were lines around her mouth that showed she frowned a lot more than she smiled. Smile lines are happy exclamations; frown lines just makes you look old before your time. If Hatfield wasn’t careful she was going to do the latter.

  ‘Blake is being polite after everything you’ve said to her, Susan,’ Jonas said.

  She frowned harder but said, ‘Three years. I was married for three years.’

  ‘Okay. Micah Callahan, Nathaniel, and I have been living together for three years. I’ve been dating Jean-Claude, my Master of the City, for almost seven. The blonds, as you call them, have both been with me over a year.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing as being married,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not my fault that it’s illegal to marry multiple men at the same time; that’s like saying that a gay couple isn’t as serious as a straight couple because the straight couple is married, at the same time you make it impossible for the gay couple to marry.’

  ‘Are you saying that you would marry all of them?’ She made sure I didn’t miss the disdain in her voice.

  ‘Not all of them, but a lot of them, yeah.’

  ‘A lot of them?’ Again, she made sure the disdain dripped all over her words.

  ‘We’re still working out who’s going to marry whom,’ I said.

  ‘Are you telling me that the engagement to Callahan’s son is real?’

  ‘Something like that, yeah.’

  ‘It’s not just so the sheriff can die knowing his son is okay, and not gay?’

  I laughed; I couldn’t help it. She obviously knew nothing about the sheriff’s domestic arrangements.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

  ‘Hatfield,’ Jonas said, ‘you may be our local vampire executioner, but you haven’t been here long. You don’t know all the local PD all that well yet.’

  She looked from him, to me, to Edward, and back to Jonas. She knew she’d stepped in something, but not exactly what. I had no intention of enlightening her. I wasn’t sure that Edward even knew about Micah’s dad’s love life, but no one living did better poker face than Edward, so it seemed like the only one in the room who didn’t know that Sheriff Callahan was living with another man, and a woman, was Hatfield.

  She decided to go back to something she was certain of and said, ‘This is my warrant and I don’t need Forrester or Blake looking over my shoulder. It’s just two vampires to execute.’

  ‘There were more than two vampires in the woods,’ I said.

  ‘You saw them die, Blake. From what I hear you helped blow some of them away with that arsenal you carry.’

  I turned to Edward and said, ‘Please tell me that someone burned the remains of the rotting vampires that we blew to hell with the guns?’

  ‘Ask Hatfield; she was the marshal in charge by the time I got here.’ Ted’s cheerful voice was wearing around the edges so that Edward’s coldness was leaking out. He didn’t like Hatfield either.

  ‘They all either were decapitated or had their chests blown open, and all of them had their spines damaged. That’s dead enough,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t you follow what happened in Atlanta when the Master of the City went crazy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, the police used flamethrowers on the vampire lair and ruined most of the evidence. They still haven’t identified all the victims’ remains. Local police say you were the one who told them they had to use fire to cleanse it, which is bullshit and overkill.’

  ‘Fire is the only surety with rotting vampires,’ I said.

  ‘There are still people waiting for news of their loved ones, thanks to your suggestions in Atlanta,’ she said.

  ‘Anita’s right,’ Edward said, and his voice was cold now. ‘Fire is the only way to make sure the rotters don’t heal and rise again. Tell us you burned their bodies, Hatfield.’

  She was looking from one to the other of us. ‘Nothing keeps moving after a decapitation except zombies.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and rotting vampires are a lot more like zombies than most vampires.’

  ‘The Master of Atlanta may have needed fire, but that’s a master vampire. They’re all harder to kill. These were all newly risen, right?’

  ‘New makes them easier to kill,’ I said, ‘but I burn all rotting vampires regardless of age just to be safe, and then sometimes I do the whole scattering of the ashes in different bodies of running water.’

  ‘You are just trying to spook me now,’ she said.

  ‘I travel with a flamethrower when I drive,’ Edward said, ‘and sometimes I can even get it on the plane if I promise there’s no fuel in it.’

  ‘I heard you liked fire, Forrester. Were you a bed-wetter and terror to the neighborhood pets?’

  Edward ignored the insult. ‘Captain, where did the bodies from the woods get transferred?’

  ‘The hospital morgue has a special room for vamp and lycanthrope undead.’

  ‘Is it more heavily armored so they can’t get out?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s just separate so that the human dead don’t get … contaminated.’ He sounded a little apologetic when he said the last word.

  ‘To my knowledge normal dead just stay dead even if you mix them with a whole bunch of vampire and lycanthrope bodies, but are you telling us that all the dead from the woods are now in the morgue in the basement of the hospital where Micah and Nathaniel are? Where Sheriff Callahan is?’ Jean-Claude and the rest of the vampires had gone for the hotel because dawn was only two hours away, and traffic accidents happened, and there was no saving throw between a vampire and sunlight, so he was safe, but he also had some of the most dangerous guards with him, so it was a mixed blessing, damn it!

  ‘Yeah,’ Jonas said, ‘tell me for real, can these things heal enough to attack people again?’

  ‘Rotting vampires are really rare, but I wouldn’t trust anything short of burning them up like zombies,’ I said.

  ‘Agreed,’ Edward said.

  ‘You did burn up all the zombie parts from the woods, right, Hatfield?’ I asked.

  ‘We couldn’t burn them in the woods; the fire danger’s too high.’

  ‘What did you do with the parts?’ I asked.

  ‘Once dawn came, they stopped moving,’ she said.

  I wanted to grab her and shake her, but I forced myself to be calm and dig my fingernails into my palms as I made fists so I wouldn’t do it. ‘What-did-you-do-with-the-zombie-parts?’

  ‘They’re in the morgue with the vampire bodies.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘It’s been dark for hours, Blake; if anything was wrong we’d have heard by now,’ Hatfield said.

  ‘Call the morgue,’ I said to Jonas. ‘If they say everything is hunky-dory, then Ted and I are wrong. I’m good with that. I’d love to be wrong.’

  The captain called, because calling didn’t cost him anything. I’d never actually seen a rotting vampire this young in undead terms, so maybe they got their uber-healing powers after a few years. Maybe a few weeks wasn’t enough time to be that scary?

  The phone rang a long time; I was getting nervous, and Jonas was looking worried.

  ‘See,’ Hatfield said, ‘you’ve both been on the job too long; it’s made you paranoid.’

  ‘Crap,’ Jonas said, and Hatfield and I looked back at the captain. ‘No one answered at the morgue,’ he said to whoever was on the phone. ‘No, I do not want you to send someone down to check. This is Captain Jonas of Boulder PD, and I want all the hospital staff to stay away from the morgue until I have some officers check it out.’

  Whoever was on the oth
er end of the line was talking, and he was trying to tell them, no, he didn’t want any of the staff to go down to the morgue. They wanted to know why and Jonas didn’t want to tell them, because in case it wasn’t vampires and killer zombies, but just a bad phone line, he didn’t want to scare everyone at the hospital.

  We didn’t have time for this. I got my cell phone out and dialed Micah. It went to voice mail. I dialed Nathaniel’s phone without letting myself think about why Micah hadn’t answered. He was in with his dad, had turned off the ringer, that was it, that had to be it. Nathaniel would answer. When he picked up I thought my heart was going to choke me, so I sort of croaked out, ‘Nathaniel, everything all right there?’

  ‘Micah’s dad is struggling in his sleep like he’s having a nightmare. The nurse says he shouldn’t be able to move with all the drugs in him.’

  ‘Is he saying anything?’

  ‘No, he’s just struggling like a nightmare we can’t wake him up from. Micah and his parents are in with him now. Why would you ask if he said anything?’

  ‘Ares was possessed just by being bitten with the rotting disease. I wondered if it would work the same way on regular people.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Micah’s dad have manifested some sort of weirdness by now if it worked that way on humans?’ Nathaniel asked.

  ‘Probably me being paranoid. Do you recognize any of the cops in the hallway? Anyone who I’ve met since we landed and who didn’t hate me on sight?’

  ‘Having more trouble with the local police?’ Nathaniel asked.

  ‘A little, but I really need to talk to someone there right now if possible.’

  ‘Anita, what’s wrong?’

  I had to swallow past a lump in my throat as I said, ‘They stored the vampire bodies in the morgue there, along with the zombie parts.’

  ‘They didn’t burn them?’ he asked. That was my boyfriend; he knew more than Hatfield did.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Fire hazard in the woods, and later I don’t know. Do you recognize anyone in the hallway?’

  ‘Deputy Al is here.’

  ‘Good, can you put him on?’

  ‘I love you, and you’ll explain everything later,’ he said.