Incubus Dreams

Killian was moving up by the bed to check on our victim. I hoped he could help her, because it seemed worse to lose people who were trying to save someone that didn't get saved. Jung was trying to hold pressure on his own neck wound. Melbourne's body lay on its side, one hand outstretched toward the cringing vampire. Melbourne wasn't moving, but the vampire still was: That seemed wrong to me. But I knew just how to fix it.

I had the shotgun reloaded, but I let it swing down at my side. At this range the sawed-off was quicker, no wasted ammo.

Mendez had glanced away from the vamp to me, then farther back to his sergeant. "I can't shoot someone who's begging for her life."

"It's okay, Mendez, I can."

"No," he said, and looked at me, his eyes showed too much white. "No."

"Step back, Mendez," Hudson said.

"Sir..."

"Step back and let Marshal Blake do her job."

"Sir... it's not right."

"Are you refusing a direct order, Mendez?"

"No, sir, but—"

"Then step back, and let the marshal do her job."

Mendez still hesitated.

"Now, Mendez!"

He moved back, but I didn't trust him at my back. He wasn't bespelled, she hadn't tricked him with her eyes. It was much simpler than that. Police are trained to save lives, not take them. If she'd attacked him, Mendez would have fired. If she'd attacked someone else, he'd have fired. If she'd looked like a raving monster, he'd have fired. But she didn't look like a monster as she cringed in the corner, hands as small as my own held up trying to stop what was coming. Her body pressed into the corner, like a child's last refuge before the beating begins, when you run out of places to hide and you are literally cornered, and there's nothing you can do. No word, no action, no thing that will stop it.

"Go stand by your sergeant," I said.

He stared at me, and his breathing was way too fast.

"Mendez," Hudson said, "I want you here, now."

Mendez obeyed that voice, as he'd been trained to, but he kept glancing back at me and the vampire in the corner.

She glanced past her arm, and because I didn't have a holy item in sight, she was able to give me her eyes. They were pale in the uncertain light, pale and frightened. "Please," she said, "please don't hurt me. He made us do such terrible things. I didn't want to, but the blood, I had to have it." She raised her delicate oval face to me. "I had to have it." The lower half of her face was a crimson mask.

I nodded and braced the shotgun in my arms, using my hip and arm instead of my shoulder for the brace point. "I know," I said.

"Don't," she said, and held out her hands.

I fired into her face from less than two feet away. Her face vanished in a spray of blood and thicker things. Her body sat up very straight for long enough that I pulled the trigger into the middle of her chest. She was tiny, not much meat on her, I got daylight with just one shot.

Mendez's voice came over the mike, "We're supposed to be the good guys."

"Shut up, Mendez," Jung said in a voice that was choked and thicker than it should have been.

I knelt by Jung. "Check Mel," he whispered.

I didn't argue with him, though I was pretty sure that it was useless. I reached for the big pulse in his neck and found torn, bloody meat. The carpet around him was spongy with blood. They hadn't even fed on him. They'd just torn his throat out, not to feed, just to kill.

"How is he?" Jung asked.

"Hudson," I said.

Hudson was there, and I got up and let him tell Jung the bad news. Not my job to break the news to the wounded. Not my job. I walked out into the middle of the room. There was movement in the hallway, and it took everything I had not to shoot the medics as they came through. Hudson had had to call on the headsets, but I hadn't heard him. Hell of a night.

They descended on the wounded with their bags and boxes, and I walked farther into the room, because there was nothing I could do. I had no power over human mortality. Vampires, some shapeshifters, but not straight humans. I didn't know how to save them.

"How could you look her in the eyes and do that?"

I turned and found Mendez by me. He'd taken off his mask and helmet, though I was betting that was against the rules until we left the building. I covered my mike with my hand, because no one should learn about someone's death by accident. "She tore Melbourne's throat out."

"She said the other vampire made her do it, is that true?"

"Maybe," I said.

"Then how could you just shoot her?"

"Because she was guilty."

"And who died and made you judge, jury, and ex—" He stopped in mid-sentence.

"Executioner," I finished for him. "The federal and state government actually."

"I thought we were the good guys," he said, and it had that note of a child who finally realizes that sometimes good and evil aren't so much opposites, as two sides of a coin. You toss it one way, and it looks good, another way, and it's evil. Sometimes it just depends on which end of the gun you're on.

"We are."

He shook his head. "You aren't."

I have no excuse for what I said next, other than he hurt my feelings, and he said out loud something I'd began wonder about. "If you can't take the heat, Mendez, get out of the fucking kitchen. Get a desk job. But whatever you do, right now, get the fuck away from me."

He stared at me.

Hudson said, "Mendez, go get some air. That's an order."

Mendez gave us both a glance, then he went for the door. Hudson watched him go, then looked back at me. "He didn't mean that."

"Yeah, he did."

"He doesn't understand what you do."

I sighed. "Sure."

"In the movies, the vampires look peaceful. Nothing here looks peaceful."

"I don't bring peace, Sergeant, I bring death."

"You save more lives than you take."

"Pretty to think so," I said.

He clapped me on the back, the closest he'd ever get to hugging one of his people, but I took it for the compliment it was. "You did good tonight, Blake, don't let anyone take that away from you."

I nodded. "Thanks."

"You don't sound convinced," he said.

"Let's just say that after awhile you get tired of having to shoot people who are begging for their lives."

"They're vampires, they're already dead," he said.

I shook my head and smiled. "I wish I believed that, Sergeant Hudson, I do surely wish I believed that." I watched them start taking out the wounded. They left Melbourne where he lay, but took the girl from the bed. They were triaging, taking the ones they could save; the dead aren't going anywhere. Well, none of the dead in this room.

79

I was having an argument with Sergeant Hudson. We were doing it quietly at the back of the equipment van, so the media that had descended on us wouldn't get us on camera, but it was still an argument.

"It isn't them, Sergeant," I said.

"So there was an extra vamp or two than the bite marks on the earlier victims. They made more."

"The master vamp of this group is strong enough to hide his power from both the Church of Eternal Life and the Master of the City, nothing we killed up there had that kind of power."

"We lost three men up there, I think that's plenty powerful enough."

I shook my head. "Most of these were babies, almost brand-new. What I saw at the earlier crime scenes wasn't a feeding frenzy, it was methodical. The vampires up in that condo were still more like animals than thinking beings. They were too wild to be taken on an organized hunt."

"I don't know what you're talking about, an organized hunt. You make it sound like killing humans is like hunting deer, or rabbit."