Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

"They aren't certain since they've never done anything like this," Damian said, "but they think maybe until dark."

Jake was looking off in the distance, but whatever had caught his attention was hidden from the rest of us by the open ambulance door. "Nolan and Forrester are coming this way."

Kaazim looked that way, too. "They are moving with purpose."

"Ed . . . Ted always moves with purpose, and probably so does Nolan," I said.

Domino moved so he could see around the door. "You know how Ted is Clark Kent?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"It's serious Superman face coming this way."

"If Superman needs me to play Batman for him, then I'm going old-school Bat."

"What does that mean?" Domino asked.

Jake answered, "Batman originally used a gun and shot people rather than using gadgets and kung fu. I would have thought you would be too young to know that, Anita."

"My dad had a comic book collection, and he liked Batman," I said.

"Ah, of course."

I looked down at my arm. "Good thing I practice shooting with my left arm."

"This is why we practice with our off hands," Kaazim said.

"Your groupings on the range are as good left-handed as they are right-handed," Nicky said.

"Yeah, but my speed for drawing and finding my target in a dynamic training exercise is a little slower," I said.

"It's our job to shoot the bad guys and protect you," Domino said.

"Not when I'm working with the police," I said.

"You have your own version of Clark Kent, Anita. It complicates things," Jake said.

I didn't even try to argue, because he was right. "If I had shot the vampire inside the building as soon as I saw him, there'd be two less wounded, and one less dead police officer."

"But Superman wouldn't have done that anyway," Domino said.

"That is so not my superhero alter ego."

"You and Ted are both more Batman than Superman," Nicky said.

"Agreed." And then Edward and Nolan were with us, and since it was just my people we didn't have to pretend we were mild-mannered anything; we could just be what we were, which was the good guys who worked like bad guys, because to catch the villains sometimes squeaky-clean doesn't do it. Sometimes to clean up the dirt, you have to get dirty yourself. If I'd shot when I first wanted to, I wouldn't be hurt. If I'd shot then, I know that Edward and my people would have joined me. There might have been only two casualties today, Logan and the vampire. I'd have been good with that. I was pretty sure the families of the injured and fallen officers would have been good with that, too.

69

FOUR HOURS LATER my arm was wrapped in bandages, and they'd even insisted on putting it in a sling. Since it was my right arm, I'd had to have Edward help me adjust where all my weapons were so I could get to them with my left arm. This was why I practiced off-hand weapons practice, from guns to blades and hand-to-hand. I couldn't remember the last time I'd hurt my right arm this badly, maybe never. If it had been a wound caused by almost anything else, I'd have already been healed, or at least starting to heal without a trip to the emergency room, but a wound caused by something preternatural or magical healed slower. Now that the piece of vampire was out of my flesh I would start to heal faster than human-normal, but because of what made the injury I probably wouldn't heal like I normally did. In fact, what I really needed was to find someplace private and use some of my metaphysical healing abilities, but since almost all of them either were sex based or looked like they were sex based, it didn't seem like the thing to do when I was surrounded by the Irish police and medical personnel. Saying, "Excuse me while I take my lover off for a quickie. No really, it'll help me heal"? Nope, just nope.

Besides, the local painkillers they'd given me had stopped working before the doctor finished sewing up the wound. Only pride had kept me from throwing up, and if it hadn't been Edward holding my hand my pride might have lost. One of the reasons he had been holding my hand was his insistence that I'd be tougher with him than with one of my lovers. He'd been right, and it had freed Nicky up to get a ride back to Nolan's headquarters, where he could change into his lion form and heal the damage to his hearing that he'd taken for me. I was still determined to keep Domino off the menu for me, so that had left me with Damian for sexual healing, but I was still surrounded by police and doctors. Besides, my stomach hadn't settled completely, so sex didn't seem like the best idea. Nausea was one of the few things that ruined even my mood for sexy naked time. Nathaniel, Dev, and the rest of our party hadn't gotten back to us until all the cursing at Edward and the hazmat-suited doctor and nurses was over. Yes, the doctor and nurses who actually helped treat me had taken one look at my medical alert card and treated me like a contagious plague victim. It had been like being sewn up by an astronaut, or abducted by bulky aliens.

Now I was standing in a large, long room that had its lights so dim it was almost dark, but when they raised the light levels, the unconscious vampires had squirmed, or even cried out, though the monitors hadn't registered any more brain activity, as if whatever made them react to the brightness wasn't them. Did the Wicked Bitch of Ireland dislike light? She could walk out into full sunlight, so why did the hospital's indoor lighting bother her puppets?

Nathaniel squeezed my other hand; normally I wouldn't have let him hold my only working hand in a room full of potentially hostile vampires, but he had bandages on both his wrists where he'd voluntarily helped feed some of the undead in this room. We'd already had our fight that had been all about my fear for his safety and nothing to do with logic, or the fact that I was hurt far worse than he had been. I wanted to feel the solid reality of his hand in mine more than I wanted to keep my hand free for weapons; besides, all the vamps in this room had calmed after they'd taken blood. They'd calmed enough that Fortune and Flannery had been able to reason with them. Some of them had been burned in the sunlight, but none as badly as the one that had left his bone in my arm, because Fortune had grabbed a heavy tablecloth and put out the fire on the first one that staggered out into the light near their sightseeing. She'd let that one feed on her own wrist, and it had come back to itself. Maybe it wasn't the exact person it had been before someone made it into a vampire, but it was still a reasoning, thinking person once it fed. Most of the vampires that they'd either saved from the sun or found before they staggered out into it had been reasonable after they took blood, but not all of them. Griffin was in surgery now because one of the vampires had damn near torn through his wrist. The vampire had taken Griffin's blood and still tried to kill him, and when the others had gotten him to safety the vampire had attacked them, too. It just wanted to hurt people like the one at the police station had. They had had to kill three vampires but had managed to save dozens.

Some of them were lying in the beds now with IVs sending fluids to their burned, or just undead, flesh. Others in the room had called ambulances when they "woke" to themselves and found that they'd tried to rip out a friend's or family member's throat. Others had turned themselves in to the police after waking up covered in blood, with no memory of what was happening. If other of the new Irish undead had hidden after their first murder of the day, then we'd find them later by the bodies they left behind. They'd given drugs to the vampires to put them out of their pain, and some just a sedative in case the craving for blood returned. Most of them had volunteered for anything that would keep others safe.

Nathaniel's bandaged wrists had been the hospital's insistence. He hadn't thought either vampire bite needed the a

ttention. To me later he'd whispered, "I get more hurt at home from sex with Asher than this." Wisely, he hadn't tried explaining that to the doctors.

Devereux and Damian stood behind us. Fortune and Jake were off with Nolan's people to try to answer more questions about vampires and how to take care of them. Edward and Nolan himself were off trying to get their/our group more powers of authority. There was some talk that killing the two vampires we had was going to get us kicked out of Ireland, but there were too many dead people and too many vampires waiting for nightfall for most of those in power to want to lose their experts on the undead. They'd keep us around until the crisis was over, but after that I wasn't sure. I'd hoped to sightsee around Ireland for a few days when it was all done, but I was beginning to wonder if they were just going to escort us to the airplane and tell us, Don't ever come back. Yeah, they were scared and they had a right to be scared, but fear makes people look for someone to blame. I was a necromancer and sleeping with the monsters; it made me an easy target for hatemongers.

The room was very quiet with just the rush and whir of the machinery and monitors to break the silence. That, combined with the dimness, made it all unreal, or like a scene from a bad dream. They'd isolated all the vampires in their own area; even the burn victims weren't being taken to the burn unit. The doctors had cut away the tissue that had to be excised, but they would heal even less than a human patient would. Fire was one of the few things that the supernatural could not heal from. I knew that burns from holy water scarred over eventually, but I didn't even know if burns from actual fire would do that much. Would the open skin, so raw and painful, be where they were trapped for all eternity? God, I hoped not.

"There are other rooms full of vampires; how did just your group give enough blood for all of them?" I asked. It was something I hadn't thought to ask before. My stomach was settling down and the pain in my arm was just a dull ache, so I was thinking better.

"People started coming up to us and offering themselves for feedings," Dev said.

I looked back at him. "You're joking."

"He's not joking," Nathaniel said. "At first we thought the Irish were some of the bravest people on the planet, and some ordinary citizens did help us put out the flames, and even donated a wrist or two."

"We stopped letting civilians help once Griffin got hurt," Dev said.