Affliction ab-22

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  ‘I was trained in raising the dead and hunting vampires by a fellow animator, and by Marshal Forrester here when he was a bounty hunter specializing in monsters.’

  ‘The animator you’re referring to is Manuel Rodriguez.’

  I nodded.

  ‘He has no background in police or military either.’

  ‘No, sir, he was an old-fashioned vampire hunter. What we call a stake-and-hammer man.’

  ‘That’s still standard for morgue executions,’ Chapman said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and couldn’t quite keep my disdain for it out of that one word.

  ‘You disapprove, Marshal?’

  ‘You try putting a stake in someone’s heart while they’re chained to a gurney and begging you not to kill them, then come tell me how much you liked it.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be done during daylight when the vampires are comatose.’

  ‘Yeah, it is, but when I was new to this business I let people bully me into executing as soon as possible; sometimes that meant the vampire was awake. A few executions like that, sir, and I lost my taste for it.’

  He nodded again, rocking on the balls of his feet, hands behind his back. I think it was a nervous gesture. Hmm … why was he nervous? ‘I can certainly understand that, Marshal Blake.’

  ‘Good to know,’ I said, and studied his careful eyes and face. Either there was more and worse to come, or something else.

  Hatfield looked at me from the chair, and her eyes were even wider. ‘God, you mean you put a stake through someone who was begging and struggling?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ve shot ones that were begging, but that’s …’ She turned back to the paper, pen poised.

  ‘No,’ Chapman said.

  She looked up at him. ‘Why not, sir? Why shouldn’t I sign this over to the best person for the job?’

  ‘We’ve started fielding new preternatural marshals with older, more experienced ones, much as Forrester and Blake did on their own, but, Hatfield, you have the field experience. You’re a good marshal, a good cop.’

  ‘I am, sir, but I am not a psychic anything. When they did the mandatory testing in the Marshals Service, I came up as a total blank. Blake has a psychic ability with the dead and with shapeshifters. She has skills with the very creatures we are hunting that I will never have no matter how many more years I have with a badge. I cannot learn Blake’s skills with the monsters.’

  ‘Preternatural citizens,’ Chapman corrected automatically.

  ‘Whatever you want to call them, but no amount of time behind the badge will give me the skills Blake has naturally. A lot of the SWAT are starting to put psychics on their teams, and police forces across the country are pairing up cops with psychic ability with partners who have none. I believe that the preternatural service should do the same thing. I’ve spent all night trying to think how I could have done things differently, and the only thing I can come up with is that I needed someone who was psychic to tell me the bodies weren’t dead, or warn me that it was a bad decision. With the information and the standard practices as they are, sir, I did my best, but I believe that I did not have all the information I needed to make an informed decision. I will happily work with Blake, and I am eager to see how her psychic abilities change how we do this job.’

  ‘Forrester barely tested on the psychic profiling,’ Chapman said. ‘How do you explain his success?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, but I know that the psychic testing isn’t perfect.’

  ‘You believe that Forrester is more psychic than the testing showed?’

  ‘Or maybe he’s spent years fighting monsters, and the rest of us just don’t have his wealth of experience, but I know that he listens to Blake even though he started out as her mentor. They work as a team, sir, and I believe that’s part of the key. They don’t seem to care who gets the credit or rises in rank; they just do their job to the best of their ability, which I believe saves lives.’

  She bent over the piece of paper again. He protested, but this time she signed it and handed the pen to me.

  ‘I’m not sure this is the best course of action,’ Chapman said.

  I had to walk past him to take the pen from Hatfield.

  ‘You aren’t the boss of us,’ Edward said, ‘not even of Hatfield, because she’s one of us now.’

  I signed my name, then turned and held the pen out to Edward. ‘Want to witness it?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and he had to walk past Chapman, too.

  ‘And the fact that I am not the boss of any of you is precisely the problem. The Preternatural Branch of our service is like a speeding car with no one at the wheel; eventually it’s going to crash and then we’ll be expected to clean up the mess.’

  ‘If by we, you mean the Marshals Service, don’t sweat it; I heard we’re about to be spun off into our own bureaucratic entity.’

  ‘If they do that, Blake, you will be what amounts to legal death squads hunting legal citizens in the United States.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a good idea, or even that I agreed with it, but it still looks like it’s going to go through,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t believe it will.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we will.’

  Edward looked at the other man. ‘The problem is that you keep trying to treat this problem like it’s a police and civil liberties issue, and it’s not.’

  ‘What is it then, Marshal Forrester? You tell me.’

  ‘Have you ever had a nightmare so real that when you wake up in a cold sweat, you look around the room and you feel that rush of relief to know that it wasn’t real?’

  Chapman shrugged. ‘We all have.’

  Edward nodded. ‘Have you ever felt that rush of relief and then heard a noise that shouldn’t have been there, because you’re supposed to be alone?’

  Chapman just looked at him, controlling his face and giving blank face back. ‘I can’t say I have.’

  ‘I have. Anita has. We know that the nightmare can be real, and we have the skills, the will, and the tools to fight the nightmares and win.’

  ‘You and Blake are tough motherfuckers, I get that, Forrester.’

  Edward shook his head. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘Then explain it to me,’ he said, and his irritation sounded in his voice.

  ‘The newer marshals think like cops, which means they’re trained to preserve life. Blake and I think more like soldiers; our job is to take lives, not save them. In killing the monsters we save lives, but our actual job is to take life. We aren’t Officer Friendly coming into the classroom to reassure the kids. We aren’t the person with a badge who the nice elderly lady can call for help when her cat’s up a tree. We aren’t the patrol officer who will give you directions when you’re lost. We aren’t the state trooper who will stop you when you’re drunk so you don’t kill anyone else or yourself with your car. We aren’t any of those things and neither of us ever has been; we weren’t trained for it. All the best executioners come from backgrounds that do not include police work but often include military, or a civilian background where they hunted and killed large game.’

  ‘Blake is not a great white hunter,’ Chapman said.

  ‘No, but her dad took her hunting for deer, which was the biggest game they could hunt in her home state.’

  He glanced at me. ‘That’s not in your file.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘We hunt and kill things. When it comes to a stand-up fight like it did yesterday, we are soldiers first, cops second, because even if we negotiate with the bad guys, they know, and we know, that we are going to kill them. We are assassins with badges. We are death squads, and the fact that Hatfield and all the good police officers in our field don’t understand that is why they aren’t as good at the job as we are, and Bernardo Spotted-Horse, and Otto Jeffries, or … All the best of us started out as bounty hunters, or vampire hunters who were supplementing the police.’

  ‘You’re admitting
that you’re just killers with badges,’ he said.

  Edward nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t endorse the Marshals Service being a party to that.’

  ‘I know,’ Edward said, ‘because being a police officer is about preserving life, liberty, and safety.’

  ‘We put the bad guys away, so the innocent aren’t hurt,’ Chapman said.

  ‘The police are really good at that if the politicians let them do their job, but the monsters are real, Chief Deputy Marshal Chapman. When the government decided that the monsters were too dangerous to put in jail and that executing them was the only way to keep the innocent safe, then it stopped being a job for the police.’

  ‘You have badges; you are the police,’ Chapman said.

  ‘We have badges and we are police officers, but you don’t really believe that. If you did, you wouldn’t have cared that Hatfield was giving the warrant to Anita.’

  ‘It’s the lack of control, the lack of checks and balances for you and her,’ he said.

  ‘We make you nervous.’

  ‘No, you don’t make me nervous.’

  I wanted to say Liar, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

  Then Chapman looked at us, and finally at Hatfield. ‘You’re a good marshal, Hatfield; if you want to leave the Preternatural Branch and come back to our side of things I will fully support you. I’ll personally see that you don’t suffer any ill effects careerwise.’

  ‘Thank you, Chapman, and I may do that, but I feel I have to stay with this case until it’s done. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t.’

  ‘When it’s over, you can come back to regular service,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir; I think I’d prefer that.’

  He turned to Edward and said, ‘You and Blake, Spotted-Horse, Jeffries, the rest of you, don’t make me nervous, Forrester; you scare me, because you aren’t cops, and I don’t like people thinking that just because the monster has a badge it ceases to be a monster.’

  ‘Are you calling us monsters, Chapman?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ve let two marshals who tested positive for lycanthropy keep their badges. They’re in the field again, but I saw the damage that Blake’s shifter friend did to the officers in the chopper. Are you really comfortable letting something like that have a badge?’

  ‘I will hunt down the vampire that made Ares attack us. I will hunt him down and I will kill him.’

  ‘In revenge?’

  ‘No, sir, because it’s my job.’

  Chapman shook his head. ‘You’re right, Forrester; you’re death squad soldiers with badges. I suspected that, and it was one of the reasons I was pushing so hard to have people like Hatfield join your branch. I was hoping it would help balance the rest of you, but now I’m afraid that instead of her balancing you, you will corrupt her.’

  ‘I’m a little too old to be corrupted, sir,’ Hatfield said.

  He looked at her and his eyes were sad. In that moment I knew that Chapman had seen real combat; there’s a look that only real violence, real survival, and real survival guilt can give you.

  ‘Until the devil takes your soul, Hatfield, you’re never too old to be corrupted.’ With that he turned and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

  We gathered up our stuff and went to talk to witnesses, read over the police reports, and hope we found a clue.

  56

  The local PD gave us a small room in the depths of the building to spread the papers around. There’d been some reluctance, but I had the warrant now and that made this my case. I tried not to be too rude, but I also was all out of taking shit. We had until nightfall to learn what we could from the reports, pictures, and witness statements. I was hoping to talk to some of the human witnesses, the few who had lived through being a witness, but first the reports. Yeah, they can be tedious and even boring, but there’s a reason we write reports and take pictures and measurements from every angle, and not all of it’s for court; sometimes you learn new things that help you catch the bad guys.

  The three of us divided the reports into three piles: the missing-person reports, most of which were now solved; the crime scenes where people had been killed; and the reports from the doctors about the survivors’ injuries and the rotting disease. I skipped the last pile, because I’d talked directly to the doctors, and Edward had spoken to Micah about his dad while I was unconscious, so Hatfield got that pile. She hadn’t taken time to read any of it through; most of the time if you’re given a warrant against vampires in custody, there isn’t time to study up on it. The marshal can insist on reading about the crime, but most don’t. They ride into town, perform the execution, and ride out again. We’re sort of the Lone Rangers of Death, and yes I do know that the Lone Ranger was a Texas Ranger, not a U.S. Marshal, but it’s still what most people think of when we show up. One modern inner-city slang term for us was Lone Rangers, or just Rangers. We don’t usually solve the crime, but we sure as hell end the investigation. Death is about as final as you can get – mystery solved, time to ride off into the sunset on our pale horse with our blood-spattered scythe. I’d started reading before I did custody executions, because if I was ending someone’s life, I wanted to know what they’d done to earn it. I wasn’t called out on morgue kills anymore, partially because they knew I’d be a pain in the ass about it and actually insist on seeing case files, and because there were plenty of marshals like Hatfield and one of my fellow marshals back home who would be happy to ride into town, take care of your vampire problem, and ride out without asking a damn thing.

  Edward read the crime scenes to begin with and I read the missing persons. It was interesting that some of the missing would turn out to be victims and others would be moved over to ‘vampire.’ Vampires were never considered victims in these cases. Once you moved from human to vamp you were the enemy; it was like you started out as the princess waiting to be rescued and ended up being the dragon to be slain. I’d theoretically known that this was the way things worked, but seeing the missing people divided up so neatly made me have to look at it differently. I even agreed with the change, because when a person was first made a vampire and the rogue master that made them was still controlling them, the new vampire was like a loaded gun in the hands of a killer. It would take weeks for them to be self-aware enough to be anything more than blood-seeking killers. New vamps were the most likely to tear out people’s throats by accident, because they could sense the blood in the body, and they wanted it, but there is a practice curve to learning to use fangs. Hell, once a person had been captured by vampire gaze, they could turn into an enemy. I’d had more than one fellow cop try to shoot his own men after a vamp mind-fucked them. So I agreed it was just standard because the evil master vampire would control them until he or she was killed, and if the master was new enough, killing him or her would turn the newbie vamps into damn near revenants that attacked and killed anything. Some vampires’ minds could survive the deaths of their masters, and some couldn’t, and those had to be put down like a rabid animal, because that was probably all they’d ever be. But as I read through the reports about families with children, engagements announced just before they disappeared, parents asking after their grown children on a weekly basis, I began to wonder if given enough time even the most insane new vamp could become more like who they had been?

  There was no way to test the theory, because they were animals with superhuman strength and super-speed that lived off the blood of the living. They weren’t much more alive than a flesh-eating zombie. You couldn’t cage something like that and hope it improved over time, but looking at pictures of the vampires before they became vampires made me wonder how many people we’d killed who might have recovered to be law-abiding citizen vamps. It was like wondering if a serial killer could be reformed. The answer was no, but it was still something you wondered about when you heard of one who could go twenty years without a kill while he raised his kids to be teenagers. Apparently being the parent of teens was enough to sen
d him back to killing. I’ve heard having teenagers was stressful, but geez.

  ‘You’ve thought of something,’ Edward said.

  I looked up from the files, blinking because I had to drag myself back from the files, and the smiling faces, and the bloody faces, and my own thinking.

  ‘Not really, or not in the way you mean.’

  ‘Share,’ he said.

  I glanced at Hatfield, who was looking at me now, too. If had just been Edward then I would have shared, but … ‘Just a weird thought I had about how new these vampires are. I’ve never been called in where this many people were listed as missing and then changed to killer vamps; one or two, yeah, but not dozens.’

  ‘It’s not dozens,’ Hatfield said.

  ‘I requested they send me all the missing-person reports for this area in the last three months, even ones they didn’t think were linked. A lot of people vanished in the same area, but over about a three-month time period. They found three bodies so decomposed that they thought they’d all fallen to their deaths and then animals got to them. That may be what happened; animals do that in wilderness areas and it’s routine to just accept it as accidental death.’

  ‘But you don’t think it was,’ Hatfield said.

  ‘If a vampire is powerful enough, it can go inactive for years and sustain itself, but when it wakes, or gets out of where it was trapped, whatever, it usually is a little crazy. It feeds in a more animalistic fashion, like a newbie vampire again, until it’s had enough blood to sort of get its head back to a point where it’s not crazy anymore. Some vampires never come back after being trapped without food for too long.’

  ‘Trapped how?’ Hatfield asked.

  ‘Cross-wrapped coffins, usually,’ I said.

  ‘Who traps them in cross-wrapped coffins? We’d just kill them,’ she asked.

  I debated on what to say, and finally Edward said, ‘Vampires have what amounts to jail when one of their kind goes crazy and they don’t want to kill them.’

  ‘I thought they just killed each other like any other predator.’