Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  It sounded like some kind of blessing turned curse, but I ignored it. Malcolm and I could squabble later. I had to use his gift while I still had it. I turned back to the vampire that was still cuffed to the chair.

  He’d heard at least part of what Malcolm and I had said. His face was angry, defiant. “I won’t talk.”

  “I won’t ask you to.”

  “What’s happening, Anita?” Zerbrowski asked.

  “I’m going to find out what we want to know.”

  “How?” He looked positively suspicious.

  It made me laugh. “God, Zerbrowski, what do you think I’m about to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That made the laughter fade, and the smile went with it. It’s always hard to see your friends look at you like they don’t trust you not to be monstrous. “I’m not going to do anything you haven’t seen me do already tonight.”

  He widened eyes at me. “This guy doesn’t like you, the other one did.”

  “It won’t matter.”

  He made a small gesture as if to say, help yourself, but he looked like he’d believe it when he saw it. I guess I couldn’t blame him. I reached out toward Cooper’s face.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Would you rather I shoot you?”

  He just glared at me.

  “Then hold still.” If I hadn’t been afraid that he’d either try to hurt me with his hands or his teeth, I’d have touched him from behind, but he was a vampire, and you don’t cuddle one if you aren’t sure about your safety. I touched him from the side, so if he tried to bite me I’d feel it, and could move. I touched the side of his face. He was clean shaven, but he was also cold. He hadn’t fed tonight.

  I thought, Who is your master?

  He fought me. He tried to think random thoughts. I got chaotic images. I saw the second stripper, the one from last night. I saw her alive and dancing on the stage. I saw a cloaked figure huddled by her stage.

  “No!” he jerked his head away from me.

  I pressed my hip against his arm and put a hand on either side of his head. His hair was soft, but not as soft as Avery’s. Cooper’s hair had the texture of someone who, if they let it grow out at all, it would have body and wave to it.

  “Don’t,” he said, but it wasn’t a shout this time. He tried to think of anything, everything. But somewhere in those confused images, I recognized a face. A woman’s face. I remembered her at a banquet table. I remembered her at Belle’s court. It wasn’t my memory.

  I thought, Jean-Claude. He whispered through me, and this time I got a sense that he was busy, or about to be. “Do you need me to come to you, ma petite? I can put this off.”

  I said it out loud, but for his ears, though more heard it. “Who is she?”

  “Gwenyth, Vittorio’s lovely Gwennie.”

  “Vittorio,” I said, and I had a face with the name. He was darkly handsome, and I doubted he’d started life with an Italian name. He looked very dark, Arabic maybe. “Vittorio.” I must have whispered it out loud, because Cooper screamed and stood up. He stood up still cuffed to the chair. He stood up, and the last thing I got from him was a very clear thought. I’ll make them kill me.

  I was the closest, but I’d had to put my gun up to do my little hand trick. I did the first thing I thought of, I hit him. I hit him as hard and fast as I could. I hit him the way I’d been trained for years in martial arts. You don’t try to throw someone to the floor, you aim for three feet below the floor. My target wasn’t his cheek, it was the other side of his face. When I was merely human, it was just a way to concentrate, to get the maximum punch out of your body. Now, suddenly, aiming to punch a hole through someone had a whole new meaning.

  Blood spattered, and his cheek gave under my fist. I thought I heard his jaw break. The blow spun him around, and he fell onto his side, chair and all. He fell on the floor and didn’t get back up.

  “Jesus,” one of the uniforms said, “Jesus, you broke his neck.”

  Had I? I stood there for a second with my right hand covered in blood, and I realized that my hand hurt. I’d cut myself on his teeth. “He’s not dead,” I said, and my voice was hoarse.

  Everyone was staring at me, and not in a good way. More like I’d sprouted a second head, and it was a big, scary one. I looked at Malcolm. “Does this work while he’s unconscious?”

  Malcolm just nodded.

  I knelt beside the fallen vampire. I touched his hair and tried not to look at what I’d done to his face. I hadn’t literally punched a hole through him, but I’d split the skin away from his teeth, as if I’d used a dull blade. I closed my eyes, and thought, Daytime retreat, where is the daytime retreat?

  He couldn’t fight me now. His thoughts came like smooth silk, and I knew in that moment that Malcolm could read people easier in their sleep. I let the thought go and followed Cooper’s thoughts, images. It was a big building, a condo. A fucking modern condo. I wanted to see the front of the building. I saw it. I had the address. Wait, number and name on the condo, and I was looking at the little boxes with all the names and numbers. I was looking at it from higher up than I would have seen it. Street, I thought, what street are we on?

  I said the address out loud, street and name that the condo was under. “Got it,” Zerbrowski said.

  I opened my eyes and took my hands off of Cooper. His eyes fluttered open. He made a sound, a low groan. The look he flashed up at me as I stood over him was one of surprise and fear. I was as surprised as anyone, but I couldn’t let anyone see that. I’d known that joining with Jean-Claude and Richard would up the metaphysics, but hadn’t thought what it would mean to the physical. If Cooper had been human, my punch would have snapped his neck. Shit.

  Zerbrowski was already on his phone.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked.

  “Mobile Reserve. We’ll want the fire power.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  Zerbrowski hit the button on his phone, killed it. “Wait for what?”

  “If we give them the address, they may go in tonight. We don’t want that.”

  “We want to catch these bastards,” Smith said.

  “Yeah, but they’re out hunting now. They won’t be home, or at least most of them won’t be. We’ll miss some of them, or all of them, and once we’ve got that many police around the place, they’ll know it. They’ll never come back to the place again, and we won’t know where to look for them.”

  “We can’t withhold the address,” Roarke said, “not if we’re asked.”

  “If the address leaves this room, more women are going to die. If the address leaves this room, maybe cops are going to die. His master is someone so powerful that no master vamp in this city sensed him. That means he’s really, really good. Mobile Reserve is who I want in a firefight, but they aren’t immune to vampire powers. They go in at night when he’s at his best, and they may all die.”

  Everyone was looking at me, except Zerbrowski. He had already moved on and didn’t need convincing. Marconi would be cool, it was the uniforms and Smith I had to convince.

  “Zerbrowski, call Mobile Reserve, get me Captain Parker.”

  Zerbrowski raised an eyebrow at me. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No, but he knows me. And he’s the man in charge of Mobile Reserve. Get him for me.”

  Zerbrowski made a face. “Your funeral.”

  “Let’s hope not,” I said.

  I looked down at Jonah Cooper, vampire, ex-vamp executioner. He blinked up at me. He’d have probably had something to say to me, but a broken jaw cuts down on the chit-chat.

  Zerbrowski clicked his phone shut. “I’ve left a message. He’ll get back.”

  I nodded. I looked down at Jonah again. I had everything he knew, all of it. I’d seen him helping murder women. I’d seen his own memory of it. I sighed.

  “While we wait for the call back, help me move our prisoner outside.”

  Zerbrowski gave me a look. I gave him one back. It was his
turn to sigh. “Smith, take his other arm. We’re going to escort him outside.”

  Smith was looking at us sort of funny, but he helped Zerbrowski lift the vampire to his feet. Cooper made small protesting noises and hissed curses under his breath. Maybe I hadn’t broken his jaw, or at least not badly.

  Zerbrowski and Smith got him on his feet and started him for the door. I got my gun out and followed them. One of the uniforms said, “What are they going to do?”

  “Go outside if you want to see the show,” Marconi said, “I’ve seen it.” He sounded tired.

  Roarke and the other uniform, whose name I couldn’t remember, followed me. It was like a parade. I’ve got over eighty kills. Most of them actually legal. But I usually whack the bad guys when they’re dead to the world. I usually haven’t had to question them, touch them. I usually don’t know who they were in life, or if I do, I feel like I’m putting them out of their misery, or did once, when I believed vampires were truly dead. Jonah Cooper had been what I am, and he had betrayed everything he stood for. He’d sacrificed law enforcement officers that had gone in as his backup. He’d murdered innocent women for kicks. I knew all that, but I’d have liked it better if I didn’t know that his hair had nice texture, or that he’d gotten a hero’s funeral. There’s a reason that executioners through history usually only come in at the end when it’s time to kill. If he’d run for it or fought, then the other cops could have shot him, killed him for me. But he wasn’t going to run now, and no one else here had the legal authority to do what I was about to do.

  We were outside in a small side area near the far parking lot. Cooper had figured out what was happening, because even with an injured jaw he was trying to talk to me. The words started out stiff, but got faster as he talked. Fear will override pain. “You’re Jean-Claude’s human servant. How is what I’m doing any different from that?“

  “I haven’t killed innocent civilians because my master doesn’t like strippers.”

  “I killed more people as a hunter than I’ve killed as a vampire,” he said. He tried to turn around and look at me, but apparently that hurt too much.

  We were on a plot of grass, with flowers to one side and the parking lot to the other. “Good enough,” I said.

  Zerbrowski turned, and Smith moved with him. They turned the vamp around so I could see his face. “I kill because the law says I can, not because I want to,” I said.

  “Liar.”

  “Knees,” I said.

  He fought them, and I didn’t blame him. I shot him in the leg, and he collapsed to the ground. I hadn’t expected to have to shoot him so soon, or for wounding. The echo of the gun up my arm thrilled through my body, like the gun was where all the adrenaline came from, tingling up my arm.

  Smith looked pale. Zerbrowski grim. But they still had his arms, even with him on the ground.

  “I can make this quick, Cooper, or I can make it slow. Your choice.” My voice was empty. Nothing showed on my face. I just looked at him and knew that if he struggled I would shoot him by inches, until he was too wounded to get away, and I could let Zerbrowski and Smith move away without risking Cooper getting away.

  He struggled, and I shot him again.

  Smith let go of the arm. “I can’t do this. This isn’t right.”

  “Then get the fuck away from him,” I said, and there was anger in my voice now, because I agreed with Smith. “Zerbrowski.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was very careful.

  I had the gun on Cooper, and my body had gone quiet, the anger sliding away on the nice white static in my head. “Move.”

  He moved. Cooper tried to levitate. I figured he would. I put two shots into the center of his body, and he collapsed back to earth. He hadn’t been able to fly in the church when he was healthy, I hadn’t expected him to get better wounded. He didn’t.

  I walked up to him, gun in a two-handed grip, aimed on the center of his forehead. “You’re enjoying this,” he said, and he made a sound in his throat. There was blood on his lips, his blood.

  “No,” I said, “I’m really not.”

  “Liar,” he said again, and tried to spit blood at my feet, but apparently his jaw hurt too much, and it made him writhe on his knees.

  “I don’t want to kill you, Cooper, and I don’t enjoy it.”

  He looked up at me, puzzled. “You feel empty inside. I enjoyed killing.”

  “Bully for you,” I said, and I knew I should have pulled the trigger, should have ended it. Never let them talk.

  “You really don’t enjoy this, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, looking into those brown eyes.

  “Then how do you stay sane?”

  I let all the air ease from my body, as the world narrowed down to the center of his forehead. But I could still see his eyes, so alive, so… real. I answered him, “I don’t know.” I squeezed the trigger, and the impact knocked him backward. He fell on his side, and I moved up on him, gun still held two-handed, because whether he was dead or whether he wasn’t, I wasn’t done.

  He had a smallish hole in the middle of his forehead above his surprised eyes. I fired into his forehead until the top of his head exploded in brains and bone. Decapitation was nice, but spilling the brains all over the grass works, too. I switched my aim to his chest, and fired until my gun emptied. Then I got a second clip from my belt, reloaded and fired into his chest until I could see light through his body. Legally I could not carry my vamp executioner kit in the car unless I had a current warrant. I’d left home without a warrant, so my sawed-off shotgun was at home with my stakes and machete. Handguns will do the job, but it takes longer, and it wastes a hell of a lot of ammo.

  The last gun shot echoed into the night. My ears were full of that ringing silence that happens when you’ve fired that many shots from that close a range without ear protection. I was standing over the body, one foot on its shoulder, pinning it to the ground. I must have kicked him over onto his back sometime during the chest shots. I didn’t remember doing it, but shooting into the ground was a hell of a lot safer than shooting out into the night. Not all the bullets would stop in his body, not when you were trying to punch a hole through the person.

  The first sound that came back was the sound of my blood in my ears, the pulse of my own body. Then some sound made me turn. Malcolm had brought his flock to watch, or maybe they had come on their own, and he couldn’t stop them, so he’d come with them. Whatever, they were there held back by the uniforms. The vampires and the few humans among them stood staring at me. There was a little girl in front, and for a second I thought, what the fuck are her parents thinking, then I realized she was a vamp. I had trouble concentrating, but she was old. Older than the woman holding her hand and pretending to be her mommy.

  I popped the clip in my gun and checked how much ammo I had left. I couldn’t remember how many shots I’d fired. I’d only brought two clips with me. Silly me. I needed to load up. I needed my Jeep, or home. I put the clip back in and slammed it home with my hand. Some of the vamps jumped at the small sound it made. Somehow with all of them standing there staring at me, I didn’t want to put the gun up. I didn’t think they’d really rush us, but it was definitely not a friendly crowd.

  Zerbrowski came up to me. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said, and either he whispered, or my hearing wasn’t all the way back. But I didn’t argue. I let him take me to his car, and I let Smith and Marconi watch our backs.

  I saw Avery in the crowd as we moved. He didn’t look happy to see me anymore. Guess the honeymoon was over. Zerbrowski got me into the passenger seat. Movement caught my eye. It was Wicked and Truth. They were by the entrance to the church. They didn’t look upset. Truth gave me a nod, and Wicked kissed the tip of one finger in my direction.

  I buckled my seat belt, raised a hand in their direction.

  “You made some new friends tonight,” Zerbrowski said, as he put the car in gear and drove us slowly forward. We had to ease close to the waiting group of va
mpires. They watched us with blank, empty faces.

  “Yeah, I make friends wherever I go.”

  He gave a small, dry laugh. “Jesus, Anita, did you have to blow a hole clean through his chest?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.” My voice wasn’t the least bit friendly.

  “I’d stay away from the church for awhile, if I were you. They’re going to remember what you did tonight.”

  I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Yeah, me, too.”

  “You alright with this?”

  “No. Did Parker call back yet?”

  “Yeah. I told him you were blowing a hole through a vampire’s chest. He said you could call him back.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at him. “Is that really what you told him?”

  He grinned at me. “Yeah.”

  I shook my head. “Give me your damn phone.”

  He handed it to me. “Just hit this button, it’ll ring him back.”

  I hit the button, and the phone started to ring. I was numb. I felt nothing but a vague shockiness. Parker answered on the second ring, and I started to talk about business. About solving murders, and saving lives. I concentrated on the fact that we were trying to save lives, but my mind kept jumping around. It kept jumping over a vision of Jonah Cooper’s eyes, and his question, how do you stay sane? The answer, the real answer, was, you don’t.

  70

  « ^ »

  An hour later, I was home. I had a date with Mobile Reserve for just after dawn. Captain Parker had told me to get some sleep, as if I sounded like I needed it. He’d even agreed to letting me go in with them. I was to their vampire raids what Haz-Mat was to their meth lab raids. An expert who could help them stay alive and not accidentally blow themselves to hell. Vampires wouldn’t blow up like some of the chemicals used in methamphetamine labs, but lack of knowledge could make you just as dead. I would be their Johnny-on-the-spot expert, and no you don’t want to know how much arguing I had to do to get both the invitation to go in with them and to keep the address until I met them at dawn.