He touched my shoulder lightly. When I didn’t say anything, he moved into me, wrapping his arms across my back, holding me against him. I stayed stiff in his arms for a second or two, but didn’t pull away. I relaxed against him in inches, until my head rested in the curve of his neck, my arms tentatively around his waist.
He whispered, “It will be all right, Anita.”
I shook my head against his shoulder. “I don’t think so.”
He tried to see my face but I was standing too close, at too awkward an angle. I pulled back so he could see my face, and suddenly I felt awkward standing there with my arms around a stranger. I pulled away, and he let me go, only keeping the fingers of one hand grasped in his. He gave my hand a little shake. “Talk to me, Anita, please.”
“I’ve been doing cases like this for about five years. When I’m not looking at the messily dead, I’m hunting vampires, rogue shapeshifters, you name it.”
His was holding my hand solidly now, wrapped in the warmth of his skin. I didn’t pull away. I needed something human to hold onto. I tried to put into words what I’d been thinking for awhile now. “A lot of cops never use their guns, not in thirty years. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve killed.” His hand tightened on mine, but he didn’t interrupt. “When I started out, I thought vampires were monsters. I really believed it. But lately I’m not so sure. And regardless of what they are, they look very human. I could get a call tomorrow that would send me down to the morgue to put a stake through the heart of a body that looks every bit as human as you and me. Once I’ve got a court order of execution, I am legally sanctioned to shoot and kill the vampire or vampires in question, and anyone that stands in my way. That includes human servants or people with just a bite on them. One bite, two bites, they can be healed, cured. But I’ve killed them to save myself, to save others.”
“You did what you had to do.”
I nodded. “Maybe, maybe, but that doesn’t really matter anymore. It doesn’t matter whether I’m right to do it, or not. Just because it’s a righteous kill doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you. I use to think that if I was right, it would be enough, but it’s not.”
He drew me a little closer with his hand. “What are you saying?”
I smiled. “I need a vacation.”
He laughed then, and it was a good laugh, open and joyous, nothing special about it but his own astonishment. I’d heard better laughs but none when I needed it more. “A vacation, just a vacation?”
I shrugged. “I don’t see myself taking up flower arranging, Detective Ramirez.”
“Hernando,” he said.
I nodded. “Hernando. This is part of who I am.” I realized we were still holding hands, and I drew away from him. He let me, no protest. “Maybe if I take a break, I’ll be able to do it again.”
“What if a vacation isn’t enough?” he asked.
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” It wasn’t just the brutal day in and day out of the job. My reaction to Bernardo’s body and letting a perfect stranger comfort me were so unlike me. I was missing the guys, but it was more than that. When I left Richard, I left the pack, all my werewolf friends. When I left Jean-Claude, I lost all the vamps, and strangely one or two of them were friends. You can be friends with a vampire as long as you remember that they are monsters and not human beings. How you can do both at the same time, I can’t really explain, but I manage.
I hadn’t just cut myself off from the men in my life for six months. I’d cut myself off from my friends. Even Ronnie, Veronica Sims, one of my few human friends had a new hot romance. She was dating Richard’s best friend which made socializing awkward. Catherine, my lawyer and friend, had only been married two years, and I didn’t like to interfere with her and Bob.
“You’re thinking something very serious,” Ramirez said.
I blinked and looked at him. “Just realizing how isolated I am even back home. Here, I am so . . .” I shook my head without finishing it.
He smiled. “You’re only isolated if you want to be, Anita. I’ve offered to show you the local sights.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, really. Under other circumstances, I’d say yes.”
“What’s stopping you?” he asked.
“The case for one. If I start dating one of the local cops, then my credibility goes down the tubes, and I’m not too high on some lists already.”
“What else?” He had a very gentle face, soft, as if he would be very gentle in everything he did.
“I’ve got two men waiting back home. Waiting to see who I’m going to choose, or if I’m dumping both of them.”
His eyes widened. “Two. I’m impressed.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be. My personal life is a mess.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“I can’t believe I just told you all that. It isn’t like me.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“May I escort you back?”
I smiled at the old-fashioned phrasing. “Can you answer some questions first?”
“Ask.” He sat down on the ground in his dark brown pants, lifting the pants legs so they wouldn’t bunch.
I sat down beside him. “Who called the police?”
“A guest.”
“Where is he or she?”
“Hospital. Severe shock brought on by trauma.”
“No physical injuries?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Who were the mutilation vics this time?”
“The wife’s brother and two nephews, all over twenty. They lived and worked on the ranch.”
“What about the other guests? Where were they?”
He closed his eyes, as if visualizing the page. “Most of them were off on a planned outing, an overnight camping trip into the mountains. But the rest borrowed the ranch cars that are kept for the guests’ use and left.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “They just felt restless, jittery, had to get out of the house.”
Ramirez nodded. “Just like the neighbors around all the other houses.”
“It’s a spell, Ramirez,” I said.
“Don’t make me ask you again to use my first name.”
I smiled and looked away from the teasing look in his eyes. “Hernando, this is either a spell or some sort of ability the creature possesses to cause fear, dread, in the ones it doesn’t want to kill or hurt. But I’m betting on a spell.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s too selective to be a natural anxiety like a vampire’s ability to hypnotize with its eyes. A vamp can bespell one person or a room full of people, but it can’t do an entire street except for one house. It’s too exact. You need to be able to organize your magic for this, and that means a spell.”
He picked one of the rough-looking blades of grass, running it between his fingers. “So we’re looking for a witch.”
“I know something about wiccan and other flavors of witchcraft, and I don’t know any way a lone wiccan, or even a coven could do this. I’m not saying there isn’t a human spell worker involved somewhere, but there is definitely something otherworldly, nonhuman, at work here.”
“We got some blood traces off the broken door.”
I nodded. “Great. I wish someone would tell me when we find a clue. Everyone, including Ted is playing it so close to the chest, I’ve spent most of my time going over ground that someone else has already figured out.”
“Ask me and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” He tossed the grass blade to the ground. “But we better be getting back before you get a worse reputation than just dating me.”
I didn’t argue. Put any woman in an area run mostly by men and rumors will fly. Unless you make it very clear that you are off limits, there is also a certain competitiveness that sets in. Some men are either trying to run you out of town or get into your pants. They don’t seem to know any other way to deal with a woman. If you’re not a sexual object, you’r
e a threat. Always makes me wonder what kind of childhoods they had.
Hernando stood, brushing grass and dirt off the back of his pants. He seemed to have had a dandy childhood, or at least he’d turned out well. Congrats to his parents. Someday he’d bring home a nice girl and have nice children in a nice house with yard work on the weekends, and every Sunday dinner at one set of grandparents or another. A nice life if you can get it, and he still got to solve murders. Talk about having it all.
What did I have? What did I really have? I was too young for a mid-life crisis, and too old for an attack of conscience. We started walking back towards the cars. I was hugging my arms again, and had to force myself to stop. I lowered my arms to my sides and walked along beside Ramirez . . . ah, Hernando, like nothing was wrong.
“Marks said that one of the first cops on the scene had his throat nearly bitten out. How did that happen?”
“I wasn’t here for the first rush. The lieutenant waited to call me in.” There was a trace of harshness in his voice. He was gentle, but not if you pushed him. “But I heard that the three living victims attacked the cops. They had to subdue them with batons. They just kept trying to take pieces out of them.”
“Why would they do that? How would they do it? I mean you skin most people and rip off pieces, they aren’t going to feel like fighting.”
“I helped pick up some of the earlier survivors, and they didn’t fight. They just lay there and moaned. They were hurt and they acted hurt.”
“Have they ever traced down Thad Bromwell, the son of the first scene I saw?”
Hernando’s eyes widened. “Marks didn’t call you?”
I shook my head.
“He is such a shithead.”
I agreed. “What? Did they find the body?”
“He’s alive. He was away on a camping trip with friends.”
“He’s alive,” I said. Then whose soul had I seen hovering in the bedroom? I didn’t say it out loud because I’d forgotten to mention the soul to the police. Marks had been ready to chase me out of town. If I’d started talking about souls floating near the ceiling, he’d have gotten matches and a stake.
But someone had died in that room, and the soul was still confused about where to go. Most of the time if the soul hovers, it hovers over the body, the remains. Only three people lived in the house, two of them mutilated, and the boy somewhere else.
I had an idea. “These new mutilation victims, they kept fighting, kept trying to take bites out of the officers?”
He nodded.
“Are you sure about the bites, not just hitting, but like they were trying to feed?”
“I don’t know about feeding, but it was all bite wounds.” He was looking at me strangely. “You’ve thought of something.”
I nodded. “I may have. I have to see the other body, the one behind the door first, but then I think it’s time to go back to the hospital.”
“Why?”
I started walking again, and he grabbed my arm, turned me to face him. There was fierceness in his eyes, an intensity that trembled down his arm. “You’ve only been here a couple of days. I’ve been dealing with this for weeks. What do you know that I don’t?”
I looked at his hand until he let me go, but I told him. He was having nightmares about this shit, and I hadn’t gotten to that point yet. “I’m an animator. I raise zombies for a living. My specialty is the dead. One thing that the living dead have in common with one another from zombie, to ghoul, to vampire, is that they must feed off the living to sustain themselves.”
“Zombies don’t eat people,” he said.
“If a zombie is raised and the animator that raised it can’t control it, then it can go wild. It becomes a flesh-eating zombie.”
“I thought that was just stories.”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve seen it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that maybe there are no survivors. Maybe there are just dead and the living dead.”
He actually went pale. I touched his elbow to steady him, but he stood straight. “I’m all right. I’m all right.” He looked at me. “What do you do with a flesh-eating zombie?”
“Once it’s gone amok, there isn’t anything anyone can do except destroy it. The only way to do that is fire. Napalm is good, but any fire will do.”
“They’ll never let us roast these people.”
“Not unless we can prove what I’m saying is true.”
“How can you prove it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet, but I’ll talk to Doctor Evans and we’ll come up with something.”
“Why would the earlier vics be docile and these new ones be vicious?”
“I don’t know, unless the spell or the monster is changing, maybe growing stronger. I just don’t know, Hernando. If I’m right about there being no survivors, then I’ve had my brilliant idea for the day.”
He nodded, face very serious. He stared at the ground. “Jesus, if they are all dead, then that means that this thing we’re after is making more of itself?”
“I’d be surprised if it was ever human but maybe. I don’t know. I do know that if it is growing stronger and the skinned ones are growing more violent, then the creature may be controlling them.”
We looked at each other. “I’ll call the hospital and get more men down there.”
“Call the Santa Fe hospital, too.”
He nodded and broke into a half-run across the gravel, moving through the cars like he had a purpose. The other cops were watching him, as if wondering what the rush was. I hadn’t asked Hernando if they’d checked for underground hiding places. Shit. I went to find Bradley and ask him. Then I’d go back into the house one last time, see the last body, and then . . . off to the hospital to answer the age-old question: what is life and when is death a sure thing?
34
THE MAN’S FACE stared up at me, eyes wide, glazed, unseeing. His head was still attached to his spine, but the chest had been split open as though two great hands had dug into his rib cage and pulled. The heart was missing. The lungs had been ripped, probably when the rib cage gave. The stomach had been punctured, giving a sour smell to the smaller room. The liver and intestines lay in a wet heap to one side of the body as if they had all spilled out at the same time. The lower intestine still curled down inside the lower end of the body cavity. By smell alone I was pretty sure that the intestines hadn’t been pierced.
I sat back on my heels beside the body. Blood had splattered the lower half of the man’s face, drops of it scattering across the rest of his face and into his graying hair. Violent, very violent, and very quick. I stared into his sightless eyes and felt nothing. I was back to being numb and I was not complaining. I think if I’d seen this body first, then I’d have been horrified, but the remains in the dining room had just used me up for the day. This was awful, but there were worse things, and those things were in the next room.
But it wasn’t the body that was interesting. It was the room. There was a circle of salt around the body. A book lay within the circle covered so thickly in blood that I couldn’t read the pages it was opened to. They’d taken all the pictures and videos they were going to in this room so I used borrowed gloves to raise the book up. It was bound with embossed leather, but there was no title. The middle half of the book had soaked so much blood up that the pages were sticking together. I didn’t try and pry them apart. The police and the Feds had technicians for delicate work. I was careful not to close the book and lose the place the man was probably reading from. For all I knew the book had been on the desk that the man shoved against the door, and it had simply fallen to the floor, opening on its own. But to think that meant we had no clue, so we’d all pretend we were sure that the man had deliberately opened the book. In the middle of being chased by a monster that had just butchered his wife, he went for this book, opened it, started to read. Why?
The book was handwritten and I read enough to know that it was a book of shadows. It
was the spell book, sort of, of a practicing witch. One that followed an older or more orthodox tradition than the neo-pagan movement. Gardian or Alexan drian, maybe. Though again I couldn’t be sure. I’d had one semester in college on comparative witchcraft, though now I’m sure they called it comparative wiccan. Of the wiccan practitioners I knew personally, none of them practiced anything this traditional.
I put the book carefully back where’d I’d found it and stood. The bookshelves against the near wall were full of books on psychic research, the preternatural, mythology, folklore, and wicca. I had some of the same books at home, so the books alone weren’t proof of much. But the clincher was the altar. It was an antique wooden chest with a silk cloth over the top. There were silver candlesticks with partially burned candles in them. The candles had runes carved into them. Other than the fact that they were runes, I couldn’t read them.
There was a round mirror with no frame sitting flat between the candles. There was a small bowl of dried herbs to one side, a larger bowl of water, and a small carved box tightly shut.
“Is that what I think it is?” Bradley asked.
“An altar. He was a practitioner. I think that book is his book of shadows, his spell book for lack of a better term.”
“What happened here?”
“There’s salt on the floor of the dining room.”
“That’s not unusual,” Bradley said.
“No, but a salt circle is. I think he was somewhere farther back in the house. He heard his wife screaming or heard the monsters. Something alerted him. He didn’t come running with a gun, Bradley. He came running with a handful of salt. Maybe he had something else in his hands or on his person, some charm or amulet. I don’t see it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here.”
“Are you saying he threw salt at this thing?”
“Yes.”
“Why, for god’s sake?”
“Salt and flame are two of our oldest purifying agents. I use salt to bind a zombie back into its grave. You can throw it on fairies, fetches, a whole host of critters, and it will make them hesitate, maybe not much more.”
“So he threw salt and maybe some charm at the creature, then what?”
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 162
