Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

She jerked away from me. "We found another vampire after Nolan got the others. Pearson . . . all of us wanted to keep this one. They were fixing up a cell that wouldn't expose it to light. It's just a dead body until dark. It should have been safe."

"Inspector Sheridan, what happened?"

She looked at me as if she didn't like me much, but I didn't care. "The storage room had a lock on it. It was supposed to keep people from walking in on the body, not to keep it in, but Logan must have come to check on it, and it woke up early and it killed him."

"Jesus," I said.

"They're tracking it. Santana could smell the vampire, so they went that way." She pointed down the hall away from us. Her gaze had slid to the side again, as if she couldn't bear to focus on anything for too long. Her reaction could have been from just the violence of it to someone she knew, but I didn't think it was just that. Yeah, Logan had been an ass, and it had been a mistake to date, but she'd cared for him. I wondered if she'd known just how much she cared for him until now. Fuck.

"Anita, we need to move," Nicky said.

I nodded. "Can you track them?"

"Yes," Jake said. We'd worked it out that whichever wereanimal had the best nose was just supposed to take the lead on things like this, rather than debate it. Wolf beat tiger and apparently jackal, and we hadn't brought any wererats, which actually had one of the best noses in the wereanimal kingdom.

"Do it," I said. Jake moved a little ahead of us with Echo still strapped in her bag to his back. Kaazim dropped back to the rear, putting Damian and me in the middle with Nicky and Jake ahead. I glanced behind us at Sheridan leaning against the wall by the door where maybe the off-again, on-again almost-love-of-her-life was lying dead. I'd give her a hug later, if she'd let me, but right now we had to find Domino and Edward and the vampire that had already killed one Garda. I prayed that it wouldn't kill anyone else before we found it, and then I realized that Edward was ahead of us on the hunt. As I followed Jake and Nicky, I kept waiting to hear gunfire. If I were the vampire, I'd have been running.

65

"THERE'S A MAN screaming up ahead," Jake said.

"Stack and move," I said.

We stacked up on Jake, one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us, gun in the other hand ready but pointed down. Except for Damian, who hadn't trained with us; the rule was if you didn't train for stacking and moving, then you kept your gun holstered until we weren't standing on top of each other. I put my hand against Nicky's back, because his shoulder was a little high to hold and move at the shuffle-jog. Damian didn't have any trouble putting his hand on my shoulder. Getting the rhythm of the shuffle step was a little harder for him, but he was more graceful than I would ever be, so he managed not to step on me. It was a formation that worked well in crowds, and if we were going into a dangerous situation. Logan was dead, so dangerous it was.

I was pretty certain that the screaming man wasn't Edward, and it was unlikely to be Domino, but it was somebody. Saving somebody would be good. We came out into a larger opening; it wasn't exactly a room, but it seemed too big to call it a hallway. Did police stations have entryways like a house? I just didn't know enough about architecture to know what to call it. But whatever it was, I heard Edward's voice ahead.

"Don't do it, pardner."

"She's calling," a man's voice said.

"If you step out there you will burn," Pearson said.

Damian whispered to me, "She is calling. She wants us to come to her."

"Why? Why would she want all her vampires to go out into the sunlight?"

"Maybe it amuses her," he said.

"Is she really that crazy?" I asked.

"Maybe."

We widened our formation to something that looked like the point of a spear, with Jake still at the head of it. Now we all had better views of what was happening at the door, and if we had to use our guns we wouldn't shoot each other. Pearson, Edward, and Domino were near the outer door with a small group of other police persons. I could only glimpse the vampire by the door around everyone in front of us. He was tall, dark-haired, and had dark eyes. His face was almost pink with the rush of the blood he'd drunk. If we didn't want to be shooting into someone's back we needed to move up closer; of course, if we did that the vampire might move out into the daylight. The crowd moved enough for me to see that the vampire was clutching Logan's suit jacket to himself like he was cold. I knew just how to warm him up.

"Move up. We don't want to risk being friendly fire," I said.

"He may be afraid of us," Damian said.

"He should be," I said.

No one else questioned it. We moved up so we'd have a clean shot if it came to that. The vampire did look at us. The fear showed on his face. Apparently, we looked more threatening than anyone nearer to him. Since one of those was Edward, the vampire just didn't know how to do a good threat assessment.

Pearson turned enough to see us, but not enough to give the vampire his back. Good for him. "Marshal Blake, please stay back."

"We talked to Sheridan," I said.

"This is still a citizen of Ireland who deserves a chance at a trial."

"Logan was one of your men. How can you say his murderer deserves anything?"

"Anita's right. In America we'd have a warrant of execution for all the vampires involved in these crimes," Edward said.

"We do not execute people in Ireland," Pearson said, his voice rising.

"I have to go to her," the vampire said.

Damian called out to him, "Brother, don't do it. Do not listen to that evil voice in your head."

The vampire looked at him, and for a minute there was someone in there looking out at him like an echo of who the man had once been. "I wish I could shut out the voice, but she is all I hear. I must go."

"If you go, you will burn alive. I have seen it before."

"I'm sorry, brother. I'm sorry for the policeman I killed. I don't even remember doing it. I came to myself with my mouth at his throat and his blood everywhere. I would never have hurt anyone like that, but I know I did." He reached behind him for the doorknob. If they'd let him go, that might have been all except for the barbecue outside.

Some of the uniformed officers jumped him as if he were just human, like you'd tackle any would-be suicide, but he wasn't human. He smashed one man's head open against the wall in a smear of crimson, and grabbed another one. He was slow by comparison to the vampires I was used to--the newly dead are slower--but he was faster than they were expecting. Fast enough to grab one of them and tear out his throat so the arterial spray showered over his face, the walls, other officers, over Logan's jacket. Fast enough to grab another officer before they could all scatter and hold him in front of his body like a shield. Seeing all that, a female officer still crawled up, grabbed the fallen man's arm, and started trying to pull him to safety. Another officer came and took the other arm and they pulled him away from the door and the vampire. I watched them start to try to stanch the blood, but unless they had an emergency room trauma surgeon hiding in the building, it was already too late. It didn't make the effort a bad one, and it didn't change that they'd been brave to pull him to safety.

I kept waiting for a holy object to flare to life, holy fire to help save them, but there was nothing. It was as if the vampire didn't trigger the holy objects even while he was going all vampire on their asses.

Edward and Domino had their custom AR-15 rifles snugged against their shoulders. Nolan had his sidearm out and aimed. We moved up to join them. The vampire's bloody face didn't look human or sympathetic anymore. He hissed at us and then his eyes filled with blue light.

"Welcome home, Damian." It was the man's mouth moving, but it didn't sound like the same voice of a minute ago. It wasn't a woman's voice, but there was something about the cadence of it that made me think feminine.

"This is not home. This was never my home," Damian said from beside me.

The vampire gave one of those wild laughs that rise and fa

ll up the scale like something on a Halloween haunted house sound track, except this was real. It raised the hair at the back of my neck and made my gut tense with the madness in it.

He took one step back and a little behind me. "She can't hurt you, Damian," I said.

"Are you sure of that, Anita Blake?" the vampire said.

I snugged my own custom AR-15 rifle to my shoulder. "Yeah, pretty sure."

Edward said, "Can we shoot it now?"

The vampire twisted the officer's head around. Their eyes locked for a moment. I checked and the officer didn't have a visible gun. It was the only saving grace as the vampire bespelled him with his gaze and sent him to run straight at us, while he opened the door behind him and stepped out into the thick summer sunshine.

Edward switched his rifle around and smashed it into the officer's face. He fell to the floor, out cold, and the first screams outside rose to shrieks. The sunlight would do our job for us; all we had to do was wait for the screaming to stop, and then put out what was left.