Burnt Offerings (Vampire Hunter 7)

He took a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly. I watched him gain control of himself, watched him build his defenses back piece by piece. "I wanted to let it burn when I found out what was inside."

"But you didn't," I said. "You did your job."

"But the job's not done," he said softly.

"Life's a bitch," I said.

"And then you die," Larry finished for me.

I turned and frowned at him, but it was hard to argue. Today, he was right.

42

The two-biter, as Dolph so poetically put it, was a small woman in her thirties. Her brown hair was back in a tight ponytail leaving her neck and the vampire bites painfully visible. Vampire freaks, people who just liked vamps for sexual turn-ons, hid their fang marks unless at one of their hangouts. Human members of the Church of Eternal Life almost always made sure the bites were visible. Hair worn just right, short sleeves if the marks were at wrist or elbow bend. They were proud of the bites, saw them as signs of salvation.

The upper set of fang marks were larger, the skin redder and more torn. Someone hadn't been neat with their food. The second mark was almost dainty, surgically neat. The two-biter's name was Caroline, and she stood hugging herself as if she were cold. Since you could probably fry eggs on the sidewalk, I didn't think she was cold, or at least not that kind of cold.

"You wanted to see me, Caroline?"

She nodded, head bobbing up and down like one of those dogs you used to see in the backs of cars. "Yes," she said, voice breathy. She stared at Dolph and McKinnon, then back at me. The look was enough. She wanted privacy.

"I'm going to take Caroline for a little walk. If that's okay?"

Dolph nodded. McKinnon said, "The Red Cross have coffee and soft drinks." He pointed to a small truck with a camper shell. Red Cross volunteers giving coffee and comfort to the cops and firemen. You didn't see them at every crime scene, but they hit their share.

Dolph caught my gaze and gave a very small nod. He was trusting me to question her without him, trusting me to bring him back any info that pertained to the crime. The fact that he still trusted me that much made the day a little brighter. Nice that something did.

It was also nice to be doing something useful. Dolph had been hot to get me to the scene. Now everything was stalled. Fulton just wasn't eager to risk his people for corpses. But that wasn't it. If there'd been six humans down there, we'd have already been suited up and going in. But they weren't human, and no matter what the law said, it made a difference. Dolph was right, before Addisonv. Clark, they'd have gotten a fire crew in here to make sure it didn't spread to the other houses, but they'd have let it burn. Standard operating procedure.

But that was four years ago, and the world had changed. Or so we told ourselves. If the vamps weren't in coffins and the roof collapsed, they would be exposed to sunlight, and that would be it. The firemen had used an axe on the wall next to the stairs so I could see the second vamp corpse. It was crispy-crittered but not dust. I had no explanation for why the body had remained so intact. I wasn't even a hundred percent sure that come nightfall it wouldn't heal. It-even I still did it. But the body was so badly burned, like black sticks and brown leather, the muscles in the face had pulled away leaving the teeth, complete with fangs, in a grimace that looked like pain. Firemen Wren had explained to me that the muscles contract with the heat enough to break bones sometimes. Just when you think you know every awful thing about death, you find out you're wrong.

I had to think of the body as an "it" or I couldn't look at it. Caroline had known the vampire. I think she was having a lot more trouble thinking of the body as an it.

She got a soft drink from the nice Red Cross lady. Even I got a Coke, which meant it was pretty damn hot for me to pass on the coffee.

I led her to the front yard of a neighboring house where no one had come out to check the scene. The drapes were all closed, driveway empty. Everyone gone for the day. The only sign of life was a triangular rose bed and a black swallowtail butterfly floating over it. Peaceful. For a moment I wondered if the butterfly was one of Warrick's pets, but there was no feel of power. It was just a butterfly floating like a tiny tissue-paper kite over the yard. I sat down on the grass. Caroline joined me, smoothing her pale blue shorts down in back as if she was more accustomed to wearing skirts. She took a drink of soda. Now that she had me to herself, she didn't seem to know how to start.

It might have worked better if I'd waited for her to begin, but my patience had been used up long ago. It wasn't one of my cardinal virtues to begin with. "What did you want to tell me?" I asked.

She sat her can of soda carefully on the grass, thin hands smoothing along the hem of her shorts. She had pale pink nail polish on her short nails that matched the pink stripes in her tank top. Better than pale blue, I guess.

"Can I trust you?" she asked in a voice as fragile and pale as she seemed.

I hate being asked questions like that. I wasn't in the mood to lie. "Maybe. It depends on what you want to trust me with."

Caroline looked a little startled, as if she'd expected me to just say, sure. "That was very honest of you. Most people lie without thinking about it." Something in the way she said it made me think that Caroline had been lied to often, by people she'd trusted.

"I try not to lie, Caroline, but if you have information that'll help us here, you need to tell me." I took a drink of my own soda and tried to appear casual, forced my body not to tense up, not to show how much I wanted to simply scream at her until she told me whatever it was. Short of torture, you can't make people talk, not really. Caroline wanted to tell me her secrets. I just had to be calm and let her do it. If I was overeager or abusive, she'd either fold and tell all, or clam up and let us rot. You never knew which way it would go, so you try patience first. You can always browbeat them later.

"I've been the human liaison for this halfway house for three months now. The guardian who oversaw the younger ones was Giles. He was strong and powerful, but he was trapped in his coffin until true darkness. Then two nights ago he woke in the middle of the day. The first time for him. The one on the stairs has to be one of the younger vampires."

She looked at me, brown eyes wide. She leaned into me, lowering her soft voice even further. I had to lean into her just to catch her voice, close enough that my hair brushed her shoulder.

"None of the younger ones has been dead two years. Do you understand what that means?"

"It means that they shouldn't have risen during daylight hours. It means that the one on the stairs should have been burnt to ashes."

"Exactly," she said. She sounded relieved to finally find someone who understood.

"Was this early waking restricted to your halfway house?"

She shook her head, whispering now. We had our heads together like first-graders talking in class. I was close enough to see the fine red lines in her eyes. Caroline had been losing sleep over something. "Every house and all the churches were suddenly having vampires rise early. The hunger seemed worse on the young ones." Her hand went to her neck and the messy wound. "They were harder to control, even by the guardians."

"Anyone have any theories as to why this was happening?" I asked.

"Malcolm thought someone was interfering with them."

I had several candidates for who might be interfering with the vamps, but we weren't here to get my answers. We were here to get Caroline's answers. "He have any ideas about who?"

"You know about our illustrious visitors?" she asked, voice even lower, as if she were afraid to say the last.

"If you mean the Vampire Council, I've met them."

She jerked back from me then, shocked. "Met them," she said. "But Malcolm has not met them yet."

I shrugged. "They paid their... respects to the Master of the City first."

"Malcolm said they would contact us when they were ready. He saw their coming as a sign that the rest of vampirekind was ready to embrace the true faith."

I wasn't about to sit there and tell her why the council had really come to town. If the Church didn't know, they didn't need to know. "I don't think the council thinks much about religion, Caroline."

"Why else would they come?"

I shrugged. "The council has its reasons." See, not a lie, cryptic as hell, but not a lie.