Affliction ab-22

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I smiled and looked at Nicky. ‘You see wings?’

  He shook his head.

  I smiled at the doctor. ‘If you saw wings, Dr Aimes, they weren’t mine.’

  ‘Whose were they, then?’

  I smiled wider. ‘I believe in angels, remember.’

  He looked shaken. ‘You’ll drive a man to drink, or to church, saying things like that, Marshal.’

  ‘It’s not my job to drive you to church and not my intention to drive you to drink.’

  Dr Aimes looked at me. He had a look I’d seen before, but it was usually the first time people see a ghost, or a vampire, and they get good and truly scared for the first time.

  ‘What is your intention, Marshal Blake?’

  ‘I want to question Henry and see if we can get a clue where the vampire’s body is. If we can destroy the original body, we can end this.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to question Mr Crawford. I think I’ll go get that drink.’

  ‘On duty?’ I said.

  ‘If any good science-loving atheist wouldn’t need a drink after what I just saw, he’s a better disbeliever than I am.’ With that, he left.

  The other cops were almost evenly divided between being scared by what they’d seen and being so impressed that it was almost worse, because I wasn’t sure what they’d expect me to be able to do next time. Aimes hadn’t been the only one who saw the white-shadowed outline of wings. I told them it was an answer to prayer, not me personally. I finally told one overly solicitous uniform, ‘Trust me, I’m no angel.’

  Nicky started laughing and couldn’t seem to stop.

  ‘Yuk it up, lion boy.’

  That made him laugh harder, until he had to lean against the wall with tears trailing down from his eye. At least his laughing stopped any more weird theological questions; they just couldn’t seem to talk about angels with this big, muscled bad-ass guy laughing his ass off beside me.

  72

  My phone rang, and it was Ted Nugent’s ‘Bad to the Bone,’ which was Edward’s ring tone.

  ‘Hey, Ted, what’s up?’

  ‘All the older crime scenes that we found today were in Callahan’s district almost without exception.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t think the sheriff was targeted by accident. Gutterman says that Callahan senior visited the isolated houses regularly, had coffee with them, checked on his older couples, or people with disabilities, anyone he was concerned about.’

  ‘I take it those were a lot of the people who got hit,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  I said, ‘Hang on a minute, Ted.’ I turned to the cops and nurses with Henry. ‘I’m going to take this call. I’ll be right back; I have a few questions for you, Mr Crawford.’

  ‘Marshal Blake, you just saved my immortal soul; you can call me Little Henry.’

  I smiled. ‘I don’t know about your soul, I think that was yours either way, but I can’t call you Little Henry when you’re over a foot taller than me.’

  He smiled. ‘Everyone calls me that, and I’m taller than all of them.’

  I smiled and made a vague motion at him, trying for noncommittal. I went out into the hallway with Nicky trailing behind. We walked a little way away from all the other police to have more privacy. ‘I’m back, Ted.’

  ‘I take it you cured Little Henry.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a whole ’nother story, but it sounds like they took Callahan out before he could piece together that they were hitting his people. The vamp’s original body has to be in the sheriff’s territory, somewhere that the sheriff would have known about.’

  ‘Gutterman says that Al knows the area just about as well as the sheriff,’ Edward said.

  ‘Al left to take a phone call, but I can ask him about old mines, caves, anything with a rock wall and a dirt floor.’ I told Edward about the vision I’d had with Little Henry.

  ‘I called Al and told him to start making a list of places, but I’ll call him again and add your information so he can narrow it down.’

  ‘I love that you already had Al making a list.’

  ‘And you’re going to stay and see if Henry has any other information that will help us narrow the list down even further, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hatfield and I are making teams to go search the area now. If you want to be in on it, don’t take too long questioning your new conquest.’

  ‘Oh, God, Ted, don’t say it that way, I worked really hard to not make him another conquest.’

  ‘Sorry, bad joke; question Henry fast and get over here. I’ll quote one of your favorite movies, “We’re burning daylight.”’

  I grinned. ‘You’re one of the few people who knew I had a thing for John Wayne movies until very recently.’

  ‘That one shitty night in the hotel and a marathon on the Western channel makes it hard to forget,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, you liked them, too.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And the next day when we said we hadn’t gotten much sleep, the other cops thought we’d had marathon sex,’ I said.

  ‘They wouldn’t believe the movie marathon,’ he said.

  ‘They never do.’

  ‘We’re going to be ready to start searching in about forty-five minutes. Will you be ready?’

  ‘Do my best, though I’m down a guard.’

  ‘What’d you do to this one?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and let the offended tone sound.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll explain when we’re out searching for vampires.’

  ‘I was going to divide you and me up on different teams so that we could trust that at least two of the groups know enough about vampires to look in every place a body could be.’

  ‘That makes sense, but I’ll miss having you at my back,’ I said.

  ‘Same here, but we really are burning daylight, and I don’t mean to go all movie line on you, but I have a bad feeling about tonight.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The Lover of Death is spooked now. He has nothing to lose by throwing everything at us.’

  ‘You worried about zombies?’ I asked.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  I thought about all the bodies we’d found in the house, like a creepy grocery store. Nicky had said you’d need a hell of a lot of zombies to store food like that. ‘Yeah, I’m worried about more zombies.’

  ‘Then question Little Henry, and I’ll have SWAT meet you at the hospital to drive out with you. Hatfield and I will take our teams and start searching our sections. SWAT will have the map with the locations marked. Let’s find the bastard before nightfall.’

  ‘Will do,’ I said. We hung up, and I went back to see if Little Henry remembered anything about a room with stone walls and a dirt floor.

  73

  Little Henry was already up and yelling for fresh clothes when we went back into the room. The hospital gown, which would have wrapped around me three times and tied twice, didn’t reach his knees, and gaped in the back badly. The view was a nice one, but I looked away, because he wasn’t mine to gape at. I’d worked too hard to not ardeur his ass to look at it now. Either Henry didn’t realize he was flashing us, or he didn’t care.

  ‘I need clothes!’

  ‘Mr Crawford, you didn’t have any when you came in,’ the small blond nurse told him, finally raising her voice back, just this side of yelling at him. She’d been the one he tossed across the room, though he probably didn’t remember it.

  ‘I’ve got an extra T-shirt in my tac bag that will fit you,’ Nicky said.

  Henry turned, his long, long hair in a tangle around him. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But your inseam isn’t going to fit in my extra pair of pants.’

  I turned to the nurse, who was glaring at him. ‘Can you find some scrub pants that will fit him?’

  ‘I can try,’ she said, and stalked past him.

  I touched her arm as she went past, and she turned the glare on
me. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’ she asked.

  ‘Doing your job. Henry doesn’t remember throwing you across the room.’

  Her eyes softened a little.

  Henry said, ‘I did what?’

  ‘You fought the nice doctors and nurses when you were under vampire influence,’ I said.

  He looked at the nurse, who was my size but not as muscular. ‘I am so sorry, did I hurt you? And I’m sorry I yelled just now.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not really hurt, no, bruised. Apology accepted, and I’ll see about getting you some pants; we can’t have you leaving in just a shirt.’ She laughed at some inside joke.

  ‘They won’t have shoes either,’ I said.

  ‘What size do you wear?’ Nicky asked.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘You’re in luck; I got an extra pair in the car.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Nicky said.

  ‘You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re a civilian and we’ll be riding with SWAT on this one.’

  ‘I know most of the cops in town, Marshal Blake. My dad and I were the ones who led them out on survival searches and helped them do wilderness training around here.’

  I nodded. ‘Okay, but when they arrive, if you’re not ready to go, we can’t wait.’

  ‘I’ll be ready, but you can’t leave without me anyway.’

  ‘SWAT is bringing a map of our search grid.’

  ‘I saw the same image you saw, but I know the place where he’s holed up.’

  ‘You recognized it?’

  ‘I told them about it.’

  ‘Tell me and I’ll tell the others.’

  ‘You’ll never find it without me.’ His face grew very serious. ‘They were right to kill us; we’d find them anywhere in the mountains here.’

  I wanted to correct him on his pronoun choice, but I didn’t think it had been accidental, and if it had been it was too big a Freudian slip for me to deal with, I’d leave it to the professionals when he started therapy for the fresh PTSD.

  ‘If you get the shirt and boots, he can at least be that much dressed,’ I said.

  Nicky shook his head. ‘I’m your only bodyguard right now, so you have to come with me, or we take him down to the car in the scrubs they’re looking for.’

  ‘If I said I’ll be fine until you get back, you would say what?’

  He just looked at me, that one blue eye giving me attitude, and since it was Nicky it was a lot of attitude. ‘That if this were a scary movie, I’d leave, and you’d be gone or dead when I come back, so we stay together.’

  ‘Because it would be the kiss of death in a horror flick?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I’m your bodyguard.’ He said it flat with no return of the humor I’d been trying for.

  Henry said, ‘I heard you two talking about how the zombies needed so much food and where they’re going to get more.’

  I looked at him. ‘Sorry, I didn’t think until too late that you might hear us the way people do when they’re coming out of anesthesia.’

  ‘It’s okay, it helped wake me up. He’ll start with Boulder and the surrounding towns.’

  ‘Start how?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s just going to keep raising the dead until they consume the living.’

  ‘He’s going to raise an undead army?’ I asked.

  Henry shook his head, sending his long golden-brown hair swinging as much as the tangles would allow. ‘Not an army, more like undead locusts. He just wants them to kill as many people as possible, and he’ll feed off each death. He feeds on fear and death.’

  ‘I knew he originally fed on death, but I didn’t know he was one of the night hags.’

  ‘You mean nightmares?’

  ‘Not exactly; night hags is a nickname for vampires that can cause fear in people and then feed on it from a distance. They can cause and feed on nightmares. Maybe that’s where the idea of a nightmare comes from, but it’s a vampire trick.’

  ‘He showed me what he meant to do to the city.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He put it in my head. At first I just saw it in my dreams, but then I started seeing it when I was awake anytime that I wasn’t bespelled by his puppet.’

  ‘The female vampire,’ I said.

  He nodded and suddenly looked very unhappy. ‘She mind-fucked me, and then she was beautiful and I couldn’t help but want her. She mind-fucked me with his help, and then she fucked me for real, or made me fuck her.’ He gave a bitter laugh.

  ‘You had no choice, Henry; you were under their spell, literally.’

  ‘Please call me Little Henry. Straight Henry was my dad.’

  ‘Okay, Little Henry. Vampires can make humans do anything they want once they have your mind thoroughly rolled.’

  ‘I remember pieces of what they did to me, and that was bad, but what they made me do was worse, and Pop, he …’ He looked away, shoulders hunching as if the memory were a blow.

  ‘Don’t try to remember today,’ Nicky said.

  Henry looked at him. ‘The real stuff is hazy, or missing, but the dreams are crystal clear. They were his wish, his goal. He wants to turn everyone into a walking corpse like him. He wants to fill the city streets with walking dead that are faster, smarter, than regular zombies. You know how they say some people just want to watch the world burn?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nicky said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he wants to watch it die.’

  74

  The nurse, whose name was Brenda, found scrubs that fit and a hairbrush and a hair tie so that Little Henry could put all that hair back in a braid. She’d also brought him little slip-on booties. He stripped off the hospital gown so that he walked out with us in just the scrubs and boots. Nurse Brenda gazed on the tall muscled yummy of him without a shirt like she was viewing property with an eye to purchase. Little Henry didn’t notice, but Nicky did. He and I exchanged looks, then smiled and looked away. It wasn’t our job to match-make, and honestly right now Henry’s mind wasn’t thinking anything but revenge.

  While we waited for SWAT I tried to call Edward, but wherever he was in the mountains there was no cell service. I walked a little distance from Henry so I could call Claudia then; our head of security needed to know that the Lover of Death wasn’t dead and had a whole new level of power and crazy. Nicky stayed talking to Henry, so I didn’t go too far; if I did Nicky would feel compelled to follow me.

  Claudia answered on the second ring. ‘You okay?’

  Something in her voice made me say, ‘Yeah, but your voice says that I shouldn’t be.’

  ‘Seamus is missing,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, motherfucker,’ I said.

  ‘What? That’s your curse for special occasions. Do you know where Seamus is?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I told her that the vampire we were hunting was the Lover of Death.

  ‘He’s supposed to be dead,’ she said.

  ‘Vamps that jump bodies are hard to kill, and harder to make sure of the kill. Apparently, when I was taking care of business with the Mother of All Darkness, she tried to spill herself into him and use him as her escape. I was stronger than she’d planned and it didn’t work, but it worked a little. He’s gained power from what she did give him.’

  ‘Just like you and Jean-Claude gained from it,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, except that he seems to plan on using his new-found power level to raise as many flesh-eating zombies and rotting vampires as possible and turn them on the humans.’

  ‘That’s bad, but what does it have to do with Seamus?’

  ‘The Lover of Death bit him, rolled his mind. I was able to use my connection to hyenas to help him fight it, and his ties to his vampire master probably helped him fight it better than Ares, but—’

  She cut me off. ‘But you thought Seamus was free of the mind control because the vamp that did it was dead.’

  ‘I should have called you as soon as I suspe
cted that the vamp wasn’t dead, but I was trying to save one of our human victims and … Oh, hell, Claudia I didn’t think about Seamus until you said it.’

  ‘You think the Lover of Death has control of Seamus.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, fuck,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘The Harlequin may not be as good as advertised, but they are good, some of them very good, and Seamus is one of their best fighters.’

  ‘What’s his weapons skill? I haven’t trained with him much; our schedules don’t seem to overlap.’

  ‘Don’t try hand-to-hand with him, he’s wicked fast, Anita. Fredo nicknamed him Water because he’s that smooth and fast. You shoot better than he does, but you and he both like knives. Seamus beat Fredo in knife practice, not just cut him like you’ve managed, but beat him.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, Fredo is the knife guy. I’ve never seen anyone beat him like that before.’

  ‘If we have to shoot him, then his vampire master may die with him,’ I said.

  ‘I know that, but unless you shoot him, you’re going to lose, and so is Nicky. If Nicky can land a blow, he’s stronger, but he’s not faster, and he’s not better with the martial arts. We were thinking of letting Seamus help teach the mixed martial arts class.’

  ‘He’s that good,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t this just suck,’ I said.

  ‘Anita, I need you to tell Nicky that Seamus is the hand-to-hand fighter that I’d least want to face for real. Make sure he understands not to mess around; if he gets a chance he must kill him, because there won’t be a second chance.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ I said.

  ‘Do I need to give you the safety talk, too?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean tell me not to try to trade punches with Seamus?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  I laughed, though it wasn’t exactly a happy laugh. ‘Trust me, Claudia, if I have to fight him without weapons it won’t be because I didn’t try to kill him first.’

  ‘If you lose all your weapons you cannot fight him and live, Anita. You’re good, but I’m not sure I could beat him, and I’m closer to his weight class.’