I expected Larry to be sitting in his car. He wasn't. He was leaning against it. Even from a distance I could tell he was in pain, back stiff, trying not to move any more than necessary. I pulled in beside him. Up close he looked worse. His white dress shirt was smeared with black soot. His summer-weight dress pants were brown, so they'd survived a little better. A black smudge ran across his forehead to his chin. The blackness outlined one of his blue eyes so that it seemed darker, like a sapphire surrounded by onyx. The look in his eyes was dull, as if the pain had drained him.
"Jesus, you look like shit," I said.
He almost smiled. "Thanks, I needed that."
"Take a pill, get in the Jeep."
He started to shake his head, stopped in mid-motion and said, "No, if you can drive, I can go to the next disaster."
"You smell like someone set your clothes on fire."
"You look pristine," he said, and he sounded resentful.
"What's wrong, Larry?"
"Other than my back feels like a red-hot poker is being shoved up it?"
"Besides that," I said.
"I'll tell you in the car." Underneath the sulkiness, he sounded tired.
I didn't argue with him, just started walking for the Jeep. A few steps and I realized he wasn't keeping up. I turned and found him standing very still, eyes closed, hands in fists at his sides.
I walked back to him. "Need a hand?"
He opened his eyes, smiled, "A back, actually. Hands work fine."
I smiled and took his arm gently, half expecting him to tell me not to, but he didn't. He was hurting. He took a stiff step, and I steadied him. We made slow but sure progress to the Jeep. His breath was coming in small, shallow pants by the time I got him around to the passenger side door. I opened the door, wasn't sure how to get him inside. It was going to hurt any way I could do it.
"Just let me hold your arm. I can do it myself," he said.
I offered my arm. He got a death grip on it and sat down. He made a small hissing noise between his teeth. "You said it would hurt worse the second day. Why are you always right?"
"Hard to be perfect," I said, "but it's a burden I've learned to cope with." I gave him my best bland face.
He smiled, then started to laugh, then almost doubled over with pain, which hurt more. He ended up writhing on the seat for a few seconds. When he could sit still again, he grabbed the dashboard until his fingers turned colors. "God, don't make me laugh."
"Sorry," I said. I got the aloe-and-lanolin Baby Wipes from the trunk of my car. They were great for getting blood off. They'd probably work on soot. I handed him the wipes and helped him buckle his seat belt. Yes, his wounds would have hurt less if he hadn't had the belt, but no one rides with me without a seat belt. My mom would be alive today if she'd been wearing a belt.
"Take a pill, Larry. Sleep in the car. I'll take you home after this next scene."
"No," he said, and he sounded so stubborn, so determined, that I knew I couldn't talk him out of it. So why try?
"Have it your way," I said. "But what have you been doing that you look like you've been trying to hide your spots?"
He moved just his eyes to look at me, frowning.
"Rolling in soot," I said. "Don't you ever watch Disney movies or read children's books?"
He gave a small smile. "Not lately. I've had three fire scenes where I just had to confirm the vamps were dead. Two of the scenes I couldn't find anything, just ashes. The third one looked like black sticks. I didn't know what to do, Anita. I tried to check for a pulse. I know that was stupid. The skull just exploded into ashes all over me." He was sitting very stiff, very controlled, yet his body gave the impression of hunching from pain, avoiding the blow of what he'd seen today.
What I was about to say wouldn't help things. "Vamps burn to ashes, Larry. If there were skeletal remains left, it wasn't vampire."
He looked at me then, the sudden movement bringing tears to his eyes. "You mean that was human?"
"Probably -- I'm not sure, but probably."
"Thanks to me we'll never know for sure. Without the fangs in the skull you can't tell the difference."
"That's not entirely true. They can do DNA. Though truthfully I'm not sure what the fire does to DNA sampling. If they can gather it, they can at least know if it's human or vamp."
"If it's human, I've destroyed any chance they have of using dental records," he said.
"Larry, if the skull was that fragile, I don't think anything could have saved it. It certainly wouldn't have stood up to dental imprinting."
"Are you sure?" he asked.
I licked my lips and wanted to lie. "Not a hundred percent."
"You'd have known it was human. You wouldn't have touched it, thinking it was alive, would you?"
I let silence fill the car.
"Answer me," he said.
"No, I wouldn't have checked for a pulse. I would have assumed it was human remains."
"Dammit, Anita, I've been doing this for over a year, and I'm still making stupid mistakes."
"Not stupid, just mistakes."
"What's the difference?" he asked.
I was thinking that what he'd done to get his back ripped up was a stupid mistake, but decided not to say it out loud. "You know the difference, Larry. When you get over feeling sorry for yourself, you'll know the difference."
"Don't be condescending, Anita."
The anger in his voice stung more than the words. I didn't need this today. I really didn't. "Larry, I'd love to soothe your ego and make it all better, but I am all out of sugarplums and puppy-dog tails. My day hasn't been exactly a barrel of laughs either."
"What's wrong?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"Come on. I'm sorry. I'll listen."
I wasn't even sure where to start, and I wasn't ready to tell anybody about what had happened in the hospital room, least of all Larry.
"I don't even know where to start, Larry."
"Try," he said.
"Richard is being nasty."
"Boyfriend trouble," he said; he sounded almost amused.
I glanced at him. "Don't be condescending, Larry."
"Sorry."
"It's not just that. Before this emergency came up, they wanted me at the Church of Eternal Life. Malcolm is bedded in the basement. His followers want him to be rescued. The firemen want to know if they can leave him until nightfall when he'll rise on his own."
"So?" Larry asked.
"So, I don't have the faintest idea how to find out if Malcolm is alive or dead."
He stared at me. "You're kidding."
"Wish I was."
"But you're a necromancer," he said.
"I raise zombies and an occasional vamp, but I can't raise a master vamp of Malcolm's power. Besides, what if I could? Would that prove he was alive or prove he was dead? I mean if I could raise him, it might just mean he was ready to be a zombie. Hell, Jean-Claude's awake for the day, maybe Malcolm is, too."
"A vampire zombie?" Larry said.
I shrugged. "I don't know. I'm the only person who can raise vamps like zombies, that I know of. There aren't a lot of books on the subject."
"What about Sabitini?"
"You mean the magician?"
"He raised zombies as part of his act, and he had vampires that did his bidding. I've read eyewitness accounts of it."
"First, he died in 1880. A little before my time. Second, the vampires were just dupes who went along with him. It was a way for vampires who would have normally been killed on sight to walk freely among the people. Sabitini and his pet vampires, they called them."
"No one's ever proved that he was a fraud, Anita."
"Fine, but he's dead and he didn't leave any diaries behind."
"Raise him and ask," Larry said.
I stared at him long enough that I had to hit the brakes fast to keep from ramming a car in front of me. "What did you say?"
"Raise Sabitini and find out if he could raise vampires like you can. He's just a little over a hundred years dead. You've raised zombies a lot older than that."
"You missed the case last year where a vaudun priestess had raised a necromancer. The zombie got completely out of control and started killing people."
"You've told me about it, but the priestess didn't know what he was. If you knew going in, you could take precautions."
"No," I said.
"Why not?" he said.
I opened my mouth, closed it, because I didn't have a good answer. "I don't approve of raising the dead for curiosity's sake. You know how much money I've been offered to raise dead celebrities?"
"I'd still like to know what really happened to Marilyn Monroe," he said.
"When her family comes and asks, maybe I'll do it. But I am not raising the poor woman because a tabloid waved money at our boss."
"Waved a lot of money at our boss," Larry said. "Enough money that he sent Jamison out to try it. He couldn't raise her. Too long dead without a bigger sacrifice."
I shook my head. "Jamison is a weenie."
"Everyone else at Animators Inc. turned it down."
"Including you," I said.
He shrugged. "I might raise her and ask how she died, but not in front of cameras. The poor woman was hounded alive. Dead, she's still being hounded. Doesn't seem fair."
"You're a good guy, Larry."
"Not good enough to know that vampires burn to ash and skeletal remains are human."
"Don't start, Larry. It's just experience. I should have told you before you went out today. Truthfully, you're getting so good at the job, I didn't think to tell you."
"You assumed I knew?" he said.
"Yeah."
"I have noticed the daily lectures have been in short supply lately. I used to take more notes at work with you than I ever did in college."
"Not so many notes lately, huh?" I said.
"No, I hadn't really thought about it, but no." He grinned suddenly and it lit up his eyes, chased away the horrors of the day. For a moment he was the bright-eyed, optimistic kid who had first shown up on my doorstep. "You mean I'm finally learning how to do the job?"
"Yeah," I said, "you are. In fact, if you were quicker on the trigger, I'd say you were good at it. It's just hard to learn everything, Larry. Something comes up and you find out you really don't know what the hell's going on after all."
"You, too?" he said.
"Me, too."
He took a deep breath and let it out. "I've seen you surprised a time or two, Anita. When the monsters get so strange that you don't know what's going either, it usually gets real nasty, real fast."
He was right. I wished he wasn't, because right now I didn't know what the hell was going on. I didn't understand what had happened with Nathaniel. I didn't know how the marks worked with Richard. I didn't know how to find out if Malcolm was still among the undead, or if he'd crossed into that more permanent state of true death. In fact I had so many questions and so few answers that I just wanted to go home. Maybe Larry and I could both take a pain pill and sleep until tomorrow. Surely tomorrow would be a better day. God, I hoped so.
The house was still smoking when we got there. Thin greyish wisps of smoke rose from the blackened beams like miniature ghosts. Some trick of the fire had left the high cupola on top of the building intact. The lower stories were gutted and blackened, but the cupola rose like a white beacon above the wreck. It looked like a black-toothed giant had taken a great bite out of the house.
The fire truck took up most of the narrow street. There was a spread of water seeping along the street like a shallow lake. Firefighters waded through the water, rolling up miles of hose over their shoulders. A uniformed police officer stopped us well back from the action.
I eased down my window and flashed my ID. It was a little plastic clip-on card and looked official, but it wasn't a badge. Sometimes the uniforms would let me through, and sometimes they had to go ask permission. Brewster's Law was going around Washington and would give vamp executioners what amounted to federal marshal status. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. It takes a hell of a lot more to make a cop than just a badge, but for me personally I'd love to have had a badge to flash.
"Anna Blake, Larry Kirkland, to see Sergeant Storr."
The officer frowned at the ID. "I'll have to clear this with someone."
I sighed. "Fine, we'll wait here."
The uniform went off in search of Dolph, and we waited.
"You used to argue with them," Larry said.
I shrugged. "They're just doing their job."
"Since when has that stopped you from bitching?"
I looked at him. He was smiling, which saved him from the scathing comeback I had ready. Besides, it was nice to see him smiling about anything right now. "So I'm mellowing -- a little. So what?"
The smile widened to a grin, a shit-eating grin, my uncle would have called it. It was like the next thing out of his mouth was almost too funny to say. I was betting I wouldn't think it was funny at all.
"Is it being in love with Jean-Claude that's mellowed you or the regular sex?"
I smiled sweetly. "Speaking of regular sex, how is Detective Tammy?"
He blushed first. I was happy.
The uniform was walking down the wet street towards us with Detective Tammy Reynolds in tow. Oh, life was good.
"Well, if it isn't your little sugarplum now," I said.
Larry saw her then. The red flush brightened to something the color of raw flame, redder than his hair. His blue eyes were a little bulgy with the effort to breathe. The soot had been wiped away, which saved his face from looking like a reddish bruise. "You won't say anything, will you, Anita? Tammy doesn't like to be teased."
"Who does?" I said.
"I'm sorry," he said, speaking very fast before they could get to us. "I apologize. It will never happen again. Please do not embarrass me in front of Tammy."
"Would I do that to you?"
"In a hot second," he said. "Please don't."
They were almost at the car. "Don't pull my leg and I won't pull yours," I whispered.
"Deal," he said.
I eased down the window, smiling. "Detective Reynolds, how good to see you."
Reynolds frowned because I was seldom glad to see her. She was a witch and the first police detective ever with preternatural abilities beyond psychic gifts. But she was young, bright, shiny, and tried just a little too hard to be my friend. She was just sooo fascinated with the fact that I raised the dead. She wanted to know all about it. I'd never had a witch make me feel like such a damned freak. Most witches were nice understanding souls. Perhaps it was the fact that Reynolds was a Christian witch, a member of the Followers of the Way. A sect going back to the Gnostics, who embraced almost all magical ability. They were all but wiped out during the Inquisition due to the fact that their beliefs don't allow them to hide their light under a bushel, but they survived. Fanatics have a way of doing that.
Reynolds was tall, slender, with straight brown hair falling around her shoulders, and eyes that I would have said were hazel but she called green. Greyish-green with a large circle of pale brown around the pupil. Cats have green eyes. Most people don't. She'd tried to be my friend, and when I wouldn't tell her about raising the dead, she'd turned to Larry. He'd been reluctant at first for the same reasons I was, but she hadn't offered me sex. It pushed Larry over the edge and into her arms.
I'd have complained about his choice of sweeties if I'd any moral high ground to stand on. It wasn't the witch part that bothered me or the cop. It was the religious-fanatic part. But when you share the sheets with the walking dead, you don't get a lot of room to bitch.
I smiled sweetly at her.
Reynold's frown deepened. I'd never been this happy to see her before. "Good to see you, too, Anita." Her greeting was cautious, but seemed sincere. Always willing to turn the other cheek. A good little Christian.
I was beginning to wonder if I was still a good Christian. I didn't doubt God. I doubted me. Having premarital sex with a vampire had shaken my faith in a lot of things.
She bent her five foot ten frame to peer in the window past me at Larry. "Hi, Larry." Her smile was genuine, too. Her eyes sparkled with it. I could feel the waves of lust, if not love, going from her to him like a warm, embarrassing current.
The blush had left Larry's face milk-pale with the sprinkling of freckles like brown ink spots. He turned large blue eyes to her, and I didn't like the way he looked at her. I wasn't sure it was just lust on Larry's part. Maybe it wasn't for Reynolds, either, but I didn't worry about her feelings the way I did Larry's.
"Detective Reynolds," he said. Was it my imagination or was his voice just a touch deeper? Nah.
"Larry." That one word was full of too much warmth.
"Where do you want us to park?" I asked.
She blinked hazel eyes at me, as if for a second she'd forgotten I was there. "Anywhere back here."
"Great."
She stepped back and let me park, but her eyes lingered on Larry. Maybe it was more than lust. Damn.
We parked. Larry undid his seat belt carefully, grimacing. I'd gotten the door for him at the gas station.
"You want me to get the door?"
He turned stiffly towards the door, trying to keep his upper body immobile. He stopped with his hand on the handle. His breath came in little gasps. "Yes, please."
Me, I'd have gotten the door myself, just from pure stubbornness. Larry really was the wiser of the two of us.
I held the door for him and offered him a hand. I pulled, he pushed with his legs, and we got him standing. He started to hunch from the pain, but that bent his back, which made the pain worse. He ended standing as straight as he could, leaning against the Jeep, trying to get his breath back. Pain will leave you breathless.
Reynolds was suddenly beside us. "What's wrong?"
"You tell her. I'll go talk to Dolph."
"Sure," Larry said, voice strained. He needed to be in bed, knocked out on painkillers. Maybe he wasn't that much smarter than me.
It wasn't hard to spot Dolph. Pete McKinnon was standing with them. It was like walking towards two small mountains.
Dolph's dark suit looked freshly pressed, white shirt crisp, tie knotted against the collar. He couldn't have been out in the heat long. Even Dolph sweats.
"Anita," he said.
"Dolph."
"Ms. Blake, nice to see you again," Pete McKinnon said.
I smiled. "Good to know someone's happy to see me."
If Dolph got the dig, he ignored it. "Everyone's waiting for you."
"Dolph always was a man of few words," Pete said.
I grinned at him. "Good to know it's nothing personal."
Dolph frowned at us. "If you two are through, we've got work to do."
Pete and I grinned at each other and followed Dolph across the wet street. I was happy to be back in my Nikes. I could walk as good as any of the men, in the right shoes.
A tall, thin fireman with a grey mustache watched me stride across the street. He was still wearing helmet and coat in the July heat. Four others had stripped down to T-shirts with just the rubbery-looking pants on. Someone had sprayed them down with a water. They looked like an ad for a beefcake wet T-shirt contest. They were drinking Gatorade and water like their lives depended on it.
"Did a Gatorade truck just roll by or is this some arcane post-fire ritual?" I asked.
Pete answered, "It's damned hot in a fire with full gear on. You dehydrate. Water to rehydrate and Gatorade for the electrolytes so you don't pass out from the heat."
"Ah," I said.
The fireman who'd been rolling up the hose came over to us. A delicate triangle of face peered out from under the helmet. Clear grey eyes met my gaze. There was a lift to the chin, a way that she held herself that was a challenge. I recognized the symptoms. I had my own mountain-sized chip on my shoulder. I felt like apologizing for assuming she was a man, but didn't. It would have been insulting.
Pete introduced me to the tall man. "This is Captain Fulton. He's Incident Commander on this site."
I offered my hand while he was still thinking about it. His hand was large, big-knuckled. He shook hands like he was afraid to squeeze too hard, and dropped contact as soon as he could. I bet that he was just pleased as punch to have a female fireperson on his unit.
He introduced the fireperson in question. "Corporal Tucker." She offered her hand.
She had a nice firm handshake and eye contact so sincere it was aggressive.
I smiled. "Nice not to be the only woman on the scene for a change."
That brought a very small smile to her face. She gave the barest of nods and stepped back, letting her captain take over.
"How much do you know about a fire scene, Miss Blake?"
"It's Ms. Blake, and not much."
He frowned at the correction. I felt Dolph shift beside me, unhappy with me. His face wouldn't show it, but I could almost feel him willing me not to be a pain in the butt. Who, me?
Corporal Tucker was staring at me, eyes wide, face very still as if she was trying not to laugh.
One of the other firemen joined us. His damp T-shirt clung to a stomach that had required far too many sit-ups, but I enjoyed the view anyway. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and looked like he should have been carrying a surfboard or visiting Barbie in her Malibu dream house. There was a smear of soot on his smiling face, and his eyes were red-rimmed.
He offered his hand without being introduced. "I'm Wren." No rank, just his name. Confident.
He held my hand just a little longer than necessary. It wasn't obnoxious, just interested.
I dropped my eyes. Not out of shyness, but because some men mistake direct eye contact as a come-on. I had about as much beefcake on my plate as I could handle without adding amorous firemen.
Captain Fulton frowned at Wren. "Do you have any questions, Ms. Blake?" He emphasized the
Ms
. so it sounded like three z's at the end.
"You've got a basement full of vampires that you need to rescue without exposing them to sunlight or getting any of your people eaten, right?"
He stared at me for a second or two. "That's the gist of it."
"Why can't you just leave them in the basement until full dark?" I asked.
"The floor could cave in at any minute," he said.
"Which would expose them to sunlight and kill them," I said.
He nodded.
"Dolph said one vamp was covered with blankets, and rushed to the hospital. Is that why you think the others may not be in their coffins?"
He blinked. "There's also a vampire on the stairs leading down. It's ... " His gaze fell, then came up suddenly to grab mine, angry. "I've seen burn victims but nothing quite like this."
"Are you sure it's a vampire?"
"Yes, why?"
"Because vamps exposed to sunlight or fire usually burn completely down to ash and a few bone fragments."
"We doused it with water," Wren said. "Thought it was a person at first."
"What changed your mind?"
It was his turn to look away. "It moved. It was like third-degree burns down to cartilage and muscle, bone, and it held out its hand to us." His face looked pale, haunted. "No person could have done that. We kept coating it with water, thinking maybe we could save it, but it stopped moving."
"So you assumed it was dead?" I asked.
All three of them exchanged glances. Captain Fulton said, "You mean it might not be dead?"
I shrugged. "Never underestimate a vamp's ability to survive, Captain."
"We've got to go back in there and get it to a hospital," Wren said. He turned as if he'd walk back into the house. Fulton caught his arm.
"Can you tell if the vampire is alive or dead?" Fulton asked.
"I think so."
"You think?"
"I've never heard of a vamp surviving fire. So yeah, I
think
I can tell if it's alive. If I said otherwise, I'd be lying. I try not to do that when it's important."
He nodded twice, briskly, as if he'd made up his mind about me. "The arsonist threw accelerant all over the floor that we're going to be walking on top of, and once we're down in the basement that same floor will be above us."
"So?"
"That floor is not going to hold, Ms. Blake. I'm going to make this a strictly voluntary job for my people."
I looked up into his serious face. "How likely is the floor to fall and how soon?"
"No way of knowing. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't caved in by now."
"It's a halfway house for the Church of Eternal Life. If it's like the last basement I saw at a Lifer's place, the ceiling is concrete reinforced with steel beams."
"That would explain why it hasn't fallen in," Fulton said.
"So we're safe, right?" I asked.
Fulton looked at me and shook his head. "The heat could have weakened the concrete, or even weakened the tensile strength of the steel beams."
"So it could still fall down," I said.
He nodded. "With us in it."
Great. "Let's do it."
Fulton grabbed my arm and gripped it too tight. I stared at him, but he didn't flinch and he didn't let me go. "Do you understand that we could be buried alive down there or crushed to death, or even drowned if there's enough water?"