Skin Trade

“Or what?” he asked.

“I can’t shoot you, but if you ever touch me and do that again, I will figure out something very unpleasant to do to you that will be just as legal as what you just did to me.”

We glared at each other. Grimes came beside us. “Okay, what went wrong, Ca

“She caught my power and turned it on me. I got it back, but I had to fight for it.”

Grimes’s eyes widened, then he looked at me. He looked at me the way he might look at a new weapon, or another shiny new truck to put in his garage from testosterone hell. “How good is she?”

“Good,” Ca

Grimes continued to look at me, as if he’d only just seen me, but he talked to Ca

“Yes, sir.”

“Is she as good psychically as she is with a gun?”

“Better,” Ca

Grimes looked pleased. “Better, really.”

“You know, Grimes, it’s a little u

“I’m sorry, really, that was inexcusable, but I’ve just never seen anyone take Ca

“Yeah, I bet he’s hell on wheels at an interrogation.”

“He gathers information that helps us save lives, Marshal Blake.”

“Yeah, I’ve felt how he gathers his information, Grimes, and I don’t like it.”

“I told you if you fought me, you might get hurt,” Ca

“No, you said if I fought to keep my shields up so you couldn’t get through, it might hurt me. I let you in, and frankly, I consider what you just did the equivalent of having an invited guest steal the silver.”

“Am I missing something?” Grimes asked.

“No, sir.”

“You’re missing the fact that you aren’t psychic and you’re trying to be in charage of men who are. Nothing personal, Lieutenant, but if you don’t have abilities, then you are going to miss things.”

“I’m not a doctor either, Marshal, which is why each team has one, plus a med tech that goes out on every run. Since we added practitioners to our teams, we’ve saved more lives with no injuries to anyone involved than any unit in the country. I may not understand everything that just happened between you and Ca

I didn’t know what to say to that. He was so sincere. He might even be right, but that didn’t change the fact that Ca

She’s tired of killing, Ca

I’d pushed it all back in that part of myself where all the other ugliness gets shoved, but whatever Ca

“We have to take you to Sheriff Shaw now, Marshal,” Grimes said, “but we want to take you to the hospital, let you see our men. All our practitioners, and all our doctors, have come up empty on what’s wrong with them. I trust Ca

“I’d be happy to go to the hospital and look at them. If I can help, I’ll do it.”

He gave me the full weight of his sincere brown eyes, but there was a weight to them. It wasn’t psychic power, but it was power. The power of belief, and a sort of purity of purpose. This unit of SWAT was Grimes’s calling, his religion, and he was a true believer. One of those frightening ones whose faith can be contagious, so you find yourself believing in his dreams, his goals, as if they were your own. The last person I’d met who had that kind of energy to him had been a vampire. I’d thought Malcolm, the head of the Church of Eternal Life, had been dangerous because he was a master vampire, but I realized as I met Grimes’s true-brown eyes that maybe it hadn’t all been vampire powers in Malcolm either. Maybe it was simply faith.

Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren’t sure which side you’re on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn’t make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing?

8

I’D BEEN RIGHT about the beige cabinets against the one wall, and now I was kneeling in front of the open weapons lockers, going through the three bags to decide what to keep with me. I was back to just Grimes, Hooper, and Rocco. The other practitioners had been dismissed, but they hadn’t gone far. Most of them had simply moved to the weight-lifting area and started working out. I dug through the bags to the clink of weights and the small noises that people make when they do the work. The large open space seemed to swallow the noise more than most gyms, so it was very subdued.

Hooper spoke over my shoulder. “Wait, what is that?”

I looked down into the open bag and said, “What are you looking at, and I’ll tell you.”

He squatted beside me and pointed. “That.”

“Phosphorus grenade.”

“Not like any one I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s based on the older models.”

Now I had their attention. They all squatted or knelt by the bag. “How old is that thing?” Hooper asked.

“It’s not old; it’s actually newly manufactured. It comes from a specialty weapons house.”

“What kind of specialty weapons house?” Grimes asked; he looked positively suspicious.

“One that understands that the older idea of phosphorus works better for the undead.”

“How is it better?” Hooper asked.

“I don’t want them to be able to run into water and put it out; I want the bastards to burn.”

“Has it got the same radius as the real old ones?” Rocco asked, and he studied me with those too-dark eyes.

I fought to keep that gaze but wanted to look away. I didn’t like him much right at that moment. “Actually, no. You don’t have to try to be fifty feet away so you don’t get fried with your target. It’s a ten-foot danger zone, easier to set it and get the fuck away.” I reached in and drew out an even smaller one. “This is only five feet.”

“Phosphorus were never grenades, they were markers,” Hooper said.

“Yeah, a marker that if you were fifty feet or closer, you would be vaporized, or wished you were. Let’s call a spade a spade, gentlemen. This is a weapon.”

Grimes said, “It was decommissioned. You shouldn’t be able to get new tech with that material in it.”

“The government has made an exception for the undead and shapeshifters.”

“I didn’t hear about that.” Grimes sounded like he would have, if it were true.