I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. I fought not to look as relieved as I felt. But she noticed. She’d had centuries to watch adults and to manipulate them.
“I’m sorry for that,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m not sorry you were locked away while the
ardeur
went through us, no,” I said.
“At Belle Morte’s court, when the
ardeur
was unleashed they’d give me someone to play with while they had sex.”
I blinked at her, not sure what to say to that.
“She doesn’t mean
play
, Anita,” Damian said.
I turned to him. “What does she mean?”
“They would give her someone to torture in a private area where no one could reach her, or her victim.”
“I thought you only visited the courts once,” I said.
“Once was enough,” he said. He was looking at the little vampire, and even through the black eyes and the blankness of the very old vampires there was still something.
“You weren’t her victim,” I said.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“His friend was, though,” Valentina said. “I heard your master shoved him into sunlight and burned him all up later.”
Damian stiffened beside me, and I touched his hand. The death of his best friend and brother in arms was one of his worst memories.
“We need to use the room, Valentina.”
She hopped off the chair, fluffing out the skirt of her pink dress. She came to us, her dark curls framing that forever face. She stopped looking up at Damian. “I liked your friend. It was a waste to kill him like that. I would have kept him safer than that.”
Damian’s hand tightened in mine. I said, “What did Bartolome do after he locked you in your coffin?”
She looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “Why are your eyes all dark?”
“New power,” I said.
Either that satisfied her or she didn’t really care. “Bartolome did what he always used to do. He went to find a woman.” She rolled her eyes, which was more teenager than the rest of the act. “He’s with her now. She seems quite besotted with him.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know her name, and I don’t care. She won’t play with me.” She wrapped her tiny hand around one of Nicky’s fingers. “You don’t play with me anymore, either.”
“That’s because you cheated,” he said.
“But we could have such fun,” she said, pulling on his hand and swinging a little the way children will.
“Did I miss something?” I asked.
“You knew the rules, and you broke them.” He held her shoulder so he could take his hand out of hers without her falling.
She stomped her little foot, hands on hips; it might have been cute, except that her eyes drowned in brown fire like any vampire’s when their power comes on them or they lose their control. “There are plenty of wereanimals that enjoy pain. You could help me do it.”
“They enjoy pain for pleasure, but you don’t get off on that. You need them to really hurt before you’re satisfied.”
I looked from one to the other of them. It must have shown on my face, because she said, “If I’d known you hadn’t tattled to Mommie, I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“Now I will have to tell her,” he said.
“Someone tell me,” I said.
“You know she was Belle Morte’s torturer,” Nicky said.
“I know,” I said.
“She found out that I was an interrogator before I came here. She wanted to compare notes.”
“
Interrogator
is a euphemism for
torturer
, right?”
“Right, but I saw it as more of a job. For Little V here, it’s a passion. Her only passion.” Just saying it showed that he understood her more than most people did. He got the true brokenness of her.
“Yeah,” I said.
“She wanted me to help her by seducing some of the other wereanimals into some bondage sex and then she’d help me play with them, but her idea of play is something that even a pain slut wouldn’t be able to enjoy.”
“They’ll heal, Nicky. They’ll heal if I don’t use silver metal,” she said, hands still on her waist, face in that perfect little-girl scowl.
“When she found out I wouldn’t help her lure the wereanimals in for torture, she tried to mind-fuck me.”
“I take it that she couldn’t roll you.”
“There’s too much of you in him,” Valentina said. She stamped her foot again. “There’s no room for anyone else in his mind, or in most of their minds. You’re like Belle Morte was, Anita. You fill them up so that they think of only you, but she would give them to me when they disobeyed her or made her mad. I had more fun there.”
“I didn’t make you stay here,” I said.
“No, we have to help Stephen and Gregory. We have to make up for scaring them.” Her face went from pouting to serious. She and Bartolome had tried to take blood from the twins, but feeding for Belle’s line is a kind of sex, and the thought of the child vampires feeding on them had terrified Stephen and Gregory. It had been too close to their past with their sexually abusive father. When they’d discovered why the twins were so frightened of them, they’d stopped tormenting them and stayed in St. Louis to make it up to the men somehow. We were going on two years and the child vampires were still trying to find a way to cleanse their honor with the brothers. Now, of course, they couldn’t go back to Belle’s court, because she was on the run with her court.
“If you would just let us kill their father,” she said.
“Stephen’s therapist says that he needs to handle his father personally. That you killing him might actually cause more damage.”
“I know”—she sighed—“and so we are trapped here. At least Bartolome will have a lover now and I still have nothing.”
“I never know what to say to you, Valentina. I can’t give you people to torture.”
“You could, but you won’t,” she said. She threw her tiny hands in the air in a gesture years beyond her size and stomped to the door. Her hands were a little small for the door handle, but she opened it hard enough for it to slam the wall.
“Nicky, find out what she was hiding on the computer.”
He walked over and started hitting keys as the fat cartoon sheep bobbed around the screen.
Damian hugged me, burying his face in my hair. I hugged him back, my face pressed against chest. Nicky made a soft whistle. I turned in Damian’s arms so I could see the screen.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Just keep looking at it, your eyes will make sense of it.”
Damian put his hand in front of my face so I couldn’t see. “And then you’ll never be able to not see it.”
“Damian, move your hand.”
“I have to do it, because you ordered me, but don’t look, Anita.” He moved his hand, and I looked.
Nicky was right, my mind did see it eventually, and Damian was right, too. It was one of those images that once you see it you’ll remember it. I’d seen cut-up bodies in person, but it was still gruesome even by my standards.
“Does she have a file of this kind of thing?” I asked.
He hit more buttons. He started opening files and all the pictures were like that. Images from actual war casualties, crime scene photos that had made it onto the World Wide Web, bondage images, but only ones that were serial-killer bad. Image after image flickered across the screen.
“It’s all like this,” Nicky said. “Even I have pictures of other things; women, weapons, online cartoons. There’s nothing but this on here.”
“You should kill her,” Damian said.
We were both standing behind Nicky, staring at the screen. I noticed that Damian’s eyes had gone back to their normal green. Mine felt back to normal, too.
“She hasn’t done anything here to earn an execution, Damian.”
“I didn’t say execute her, I said kill her. The baby vampires always go mad, Anita. I don’t know any as young as her that didn’t have to be put down.”
“
Put down?
You make her sound like a rabid dog. She’s not an animal.”
He motioned at the screen. “Yes, she is. She looks like a little girl, but that’s what’s inside her head. That’s all that’s inside her head. Eventually, she’s going to find a way to make what’s inside her come outside, and then people are going to get hurt.”
“I like Little V, but he’s right, Anita. The fact that she’s been able to control herself this long is impressive, but the pressure is building up. Eventually, she won’t be able to stop herself.”
“So you agree with Damian we should kill her?”
He nodded. “You can do it now, or you can do it after she’s cut someone up, but eventually one of us will have to do it. She talked to me about what she wanted to do to someone, and trust me, it’s all she really thinks about. I think the longer she can’t act on the urge in smaller ways, the bigger the urge gets, the more it’s going to take to quench her . . . bloodlust.”
“I can’t kill her for something she hasn’t done,” I said.
“Like you couldn’t let me kill Haven for you, because you felt sorry for mind-fucking me and not fucking Haven enough.”
I glared at him. “Thanks, that makes me feel so much better.”
“Either you need to send Little V to another master who will let her hurt people, or you need to kill her to make sure she doesn’t hurt any of your people. But either with permission or without, eventually she’s going to do this to someone.”
“I saw what she could do to people, Anita,” Damian said.
“We can’t kill her for what she might do,” I said.
Nicky hit some more buttons and the images began to cycle on the screen one bloody mess, one frightened tied-up person after another. “She was sitting in the dark looking at this, Anita. The only real question is, was she just watching, or was she masturbating to it?”
I stared at him instead of the computer. “That’s . . . that’s sick. That’s . . . I did not want to think that, or know that. Fuck, Nicky, why . . .”
“I want you to understand, Anita, this is her passion. I wasn’t joking. This is either sex for her, or as close as she comes.”
“Turn it off,” I said.
“You’re not going to kill her because you feel sorry for her. Nathaniel talks to her, too, Anita. They don’t talk about the same things. He’s a bottom to her top, but he lets her talk about hurting him. He lets her talk some of her fantasies out with him, because he understands that she only looks like a kid. What would you do if she got Nathaniel alone? What would you do if she did that to him?”
“Don’t do this,” I said.
“I like Nathaniel, and it would kill you if something happened to him. Regrets are about decisions that you know you should have done different. Don’t make this one of them.”
“I can’t kill her for what she might do, Nicky.”
“I could,” he said.
“You like her,” I said.
“Yeah, and I understand her better than you do. Anita, if you hadn’t mind-fucked me into a Bride I wouldn’t be trustworthy around your people, either. I’m not a sexual sadist. I don’t need pain or fear to enjoy sex, but I enjoyed having power over people. The hurting was more about taking pride in my skill at it and getting information out of people. I got off on breaking the strong until they were weak. That was my kick, but everyone breaks, Anita. If you have the skills and enough time there’s no such thing as someone who won’t break.”
“And you had the skills,” I said.
He shrugged as much as the muscles of his upper body would let him. “Yeah, I did, but she’s better. Do you understand me, Anita? Little V is better, because she’s spent the last eight hundred years practicing.”
“Anita,” Damian said, and he touched my shoulders, making me look at him, as Jean-Claude had earlier, “you know how they say practice makes perfect?”
“Yes,” I said, but that one word was barely a whisper.
“Valentina is perfect.”
I MADE THEM shut up about Valentina, but the thought that Nathaniel had been letting her whisper serial-killer fantasies in his ear to let off some of her pressure was almost more than I could handle for the day. I wanted to scream at them both that I didn’t need this today. That we had enough problems without borrowing. If Valentina hurt him, I would kill her, but killing her after the damage was done would be cold comfort.
But once the video started, none of us were worried about what Valentina might do in the future. We were too worried about what some other vampires had done last night. We sat in the three computer chairs we dragged up in front of the big flat-screen monitor and watched the horror show in nice HD color. Some things are not meant for high-definition detail. It just makes it worse. The vampire’s lair was underground, down a short flight of stone steps. There seemed to be moisture seeping down some of the walls. The first body was at the foot of the stairs with some natural sunlight filtering down from higher up the stairs. The first bodies were obvious vampire victims with neat bite marks at both sides of the throat, wrist, bend of the elbow, inner thigh, bend of the knee. The only thing that made the bites bad was that there were too many of them. No human being could feed that many vampires in one night and live.
“It’s the same number of bites as you and some of the other wereanimals have,” Nicky said. “Why aren’t we dead?”
“Wereanimals are harder to kill, for one thing,” I said, as we watched more bodies simply lying against the walls or in the middle of the tunnel. They lay as they’d fallen. No one had taken any time to reposition the bodies. They’d killed them and left them for the next victim.
“They meant to drain these people dry,” Damian said. He’d gone very still beside me. I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t sure how I’d feel about him touching me while we watched this, or if the sight of all the bites excited him and he didn’t want me to know.
“Why aren’t we dead, again?” Nicky asked.
“Jean-Claude used the
ardeur
to keep feeding us all energy so that the Lover of Death couldn’t feed off our deaths,” I said.
“The bites are getting messier,” Damian said in a voice as still as his body in the chair beside mine.
He was right. The bites weren’t neat little puncture wounds anymore. There was tearing of the skin around the bites. The next man’s neck was torn open on the side; blood had poured out of him. There was a pattern in the dried blood.
“Pause it here, Nicky.”
He used the mouse to pause it.
“They didn’t even try to feed on him,” Damian said.
I leaned forward and pointed at the screen. “Are those the marks of knees, as if whoever tore his throat out knelt and let the blood pour over him?”
“I think so,” Damian said.
“Could be,” Nicky said.
“Start it up again.”
“You mean from the beginning?”
“No, I mean just make it go again.”
The images began to march down the corridor again. Someone’s inner thigh was torn out, blood pooling between the body’s legs in a terrible parody of birth. So much blood, and then the camera moved and I saw the second woman with her own torn neck and thigh so that the blood of both adult women had pooled together in the narrow corridor. There was no way for the police or the crime scene people to avoid stepping in the blood. It was either step in it or stop moving forward.
I watched the camera operator hesitate. The camera pointed downward, then up the corridor where the camera light picked up more pale, naked bodies as far as the light could touch. He, or she, picked their way through the mix of blood and bodies and found more of the same until the corridor went into a wider opening.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I didn’t really want to see the devolution of the vampires’ kills, because that was what we were seeing. It wasn’t going to get any better inside the next room. The only comfort I had was that I wasn’t there in person. As bad as the film was, in person would have been worse. It was nice that the marshals had enough vampire executioners that I was called in for consults rather than being the main shooter. I was very happy to delegate some of this shit.
The camera went through the opening, and it was like a mix of
Dracula: Prince of Darkness
meets torture porn, slasher flick. There was so many bodies that it was just a mass of dark shapes at first, as my mind couldn’t make sense of it. It was like Valentina’s pictures; the mind didn’t want to see it. The human mind is pretty good at protecting itself and will sometimes just refuse to compute all the data in a vain effort to save the rest of the mind from what the eyes are seeing. But it was my job to look.
Nicky said a soft, “Wow.”
Damian got up from his chair and walked away from the screen. I couldn’t blame him; if I could have walked away before my mind made sense of it all, I might have. But I kept watching until I could see body after body scattered like broken dolls on the dirt floor. The bodies were torn apart, not by claws and fangs, but strength. The vampires had torn them limb from limb, spraying blood and internal organs like some meaty, bloody jigsaw puzzle. I was happy not to be able to smell it. Because once you perforate the lower digestive system it’s not just blood and that thick hamburger smell, but also the outhouse smell. Death, this kind of death, has no romance to it. It was slaughter.
There were more bodies piled around a central coffin that was on a raised dais between two huge candelabras that were still burning, though the wax was low. They’d set up lights in the corners of the room. The light was pitiless, shining off the blood that was still drying, showing the internal organs in huge bloody strands.
The bodies were piled in pieces almost to the lip of the open coffin. There were bodies lying on the body parts as if they’d been placed there. “Pause it,” I said.
Nicky did what I’d asked. He and I both leaned toward the screen, trying to make sense of it all. “God, I think those are the vampires.”
“How can you tell?” he asked.
I understood why he asked; the intact bodies were covered in as much blood and gore as the pieces. “They’re not torn apart, and see there, one of them has fangs showing in her mouth. It’s like they bedded down on the mound of their dead. Also, if they were victims that intact, they’d have been moved for medical attention just in case they weren’t dead.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Nicky asked.
“No,” I said.
“You want me to hit play again?”
“No, but do it anyway.”
He didn’t even ask me to explain. I think my newest pet sociopath wasn’t enjoying the show, either.
The camera rose and aimed at the figure in the coffin. Blood pooled around it as if the body were floating in the blood. How had they even gotten that much blood in the coffin? It was if they’d hung the dead over it and drained them, but nothing in that room had been thinking enough to do anything that organized.
“Gives a new meaning to
disorganized killer
,” Nicky said, and his voice held a note I hadn’t heard in the year he’d been with us: impressed, and scared.
The corpse in the coffin looked old, like they’d found a badly decayed body to put in the blood. Then I saw the fangs in the gaping skull and knew this was the master. He’d been blown apart with a shotgun so that the top of his head was missing, but the jaws were still intact. His chest had been shot up, too, so that the thickening blood pooled into the ruin of his heart.
“I didn’t think vampires decayed like that just from being shot up, even when they die,” Nicky said.
“Most don’t,” I said.
Damian was behind us. He said, “Only the descendants of the Lover of Death rot like that.”
“When they’re dead,” Nicky said.
Then I had a bad, bad thought. I scrambled my phone out of my back pocket and dialed Marshal Finnegan’s number. He answered on the first ring. “Blake, that was fast.”
“I know that you have to film evidence before you torch the place, but tell me the vampire executioner did torch the place already.”
“Morgan killed the Master of the City. Took his head, took his heart. We’re already hearing complaints from the vampire lobby lawyers that we may have condemned all low-level vampires to certain death. Apparently without their master they may not wake up at dark, but we’ve found out that the lesser vampires that do wake up are usually fine. When the Master of the City goes crazy like this, kill him, or her, and the crazy goes with him. We try to spare most of the murdering vampires, and we’re still hearing from their daytime lawyers.”
“All potentially true, but, Finnegan, the Master of the City is a rotting vampire. Taking just their heart and head with a shotgun doesn’t kill them, ever. The only reason he didn’t get up and eat your executioner is that it was daylight and he couldn’t rise from the grave, but if he’s as old as most rotters he will rise in late afternoon underground, and definitely at full dark. Worse yet, some of the intact vampires might not rot unless shot up, so you may have an entire crypt of rotters.”
“You make that sound bad.”
“Finnegan, get your people out of there.”
“You helped write the new law that makes us leave the lesser vampires alive when we can prove that it’s the Master of the City gone apeshit,” he said. “Now you’re telling me that it’s going to get my people killed.”
“I’m saying the apeshit Master of the City is still alive, and when it gets dark enough he’ll rise and all his vampires will rise with him and keep slaughtering people. The new law only works if the Master of the City is really, truly dead.”
“I’ll try to clear the scene. I hope you’re wrong.” He hung up.
“Fuck,” I said. “Who’d he say was the executioner on this?”
“Morgan,” Nicky said.
“I’ve worked with him once, unless we have two of them.” I flipped through my contacts praying that the name was in there. I found it and hit the screen. I was praying as the phone dialed.
Please, pick up, please pick up.
“Blake, I take it you saw the tape.”
“Morgan, where are you?”
“Atlanta,” he said.
“No, where are you standing.”
“I’m outside the crypt in case some of the little vampires wake up still crazy.”
“Are there still techs down there?”
“For another hour and then we’ll clear it, except for me.”
“Get them out. Get them out, now!”
“I took care of it, Blake. He ain’t getting up.”
“He’s a rotting vampire, Morgan. They don’t die when you destroy the brain and heart. Even sunlight may not do it. Fire is the only certainty and then the ashes need to be scattered over different bodies of flowing water.”
“He didn’t rot until I shot him, Blake. Once they look like a corpse, they’re dead.”
“He didn’t turn into a corpse, Morgan, he rotted. It’s different. Please, just trust me on this. Get your people out of there and flamethrower everything in the crypt.”
“We’re still dragging bodies out of there, Blake. I can’t fry the evidence. We haven’t even started to identify the dead.”
I fought the urge to scream. “Morgan, just humor me. Just pretend I’m right, and at least clear the crypt of personnel, okay? Just do that and we’ll debate the whole flame thing later. Please, God, please, just do this one thing for me.”
“You really think he’s a genuine rotting vampire. Those are really rare in the United States,” he said.
“They are, but just in case, Morgan. It doesn’t hurt to clear out the techs and the cops.”
“All right, but unlike you, I don’t carry a flamethrower as part of my usual vampire-hunting kit, Blake.”
Truth was, neither did I. “Just clear the crypt and call an extermination team.”
“You mean a bug squad.” That was one name for the exterminators who did everything from cockroaches to rogue wererat infestations and ghouls. They were who you called if you found a zombie just wandering down the street, since fire would destroy it and most animators couldn’t put the zombie back without knowing the grave it came from.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ll ask my superiors if I can call them as backup, but they aren’t going to let me burn everything down there. The lesser vampires may wake up sane and fine now that he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead, Morgan.”
“How do you know that?”
I almost said,
Because the Lover of Death was looking for his bloodline last night
, but I couldn’t share that without explaining things I couldn’t explain to the cops at all.
“If you’re asking me am I a hundred percent sure, I’m not, but I’m ninety-eight percent sure and I wouldn’t have my people down in that hole this late in the day.”
“Rotting vampires rise earlier than most, though they can’t pass for human until full dark because they look like decayed corpses until then.” He sounded like he was quoting. Morgan was one of the newer executioners who had been recruited for the job, and not grandfathered in like most of us. He was part of a new breed of vampire hunter, trained in classrooms with books and guest lectures. It wasn’t a bad way to learn, and you probably had less death in the learning curve, but in this moment I’d have taken an old-fashioned shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later vampire hunter.
“I’ll clear the crypt, Blake, but that’s all I can do until I clear this with someone.”
“I’ll take what I can get, Morgan. Just get your people out of there.”
“I will.”
“Now,” I said.
“I’m walking toward the entrance to the crypt as we speak. Good enough?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit . . .” The phone fell against something loud enough I had to take it away from my ear.
“Morgan, Morgan, you all right?” I heard him moving as if he were standing on gravel and the phone were on the ground. “Morgan, are you still there?”
I heard noises on the phone as if he’d picked it up. “Morgan, talk to me.”
I heard someone swallow as if his throat hurt. It was a wet sound. “I’m afraid Marshal Morgan can’t come to the phone. To whom am I speaking?” The voice was male and thick, as if he had a speech impediment or injury to his mouth.
“Marshal Blake,” I said.