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“Did you go up in that condo by yourself?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Then stop acting like you did. Do you have anyone waiting for you at home?” His voice was gentler than it had been when he’d first told me to go home to my husband or boyfriend.

“Yeah, I got someone waiting.”

“Then go home. Call him from the car, let him know that the officer down calls weren’t you.” They never released names of the downed officers to the media until all the families had been contacted, better for the bereaved, but hell on all the other families with police officers out and about tonight. They were all waiting for the phone to ring, or worse, the doorbell. No one with a police officer in the family wanted to see another cop on their doorstep tonight.

I thought about how I’d left Micah and Nathaniel standing in the parking lot. How I’d told them to take Ronnie home. How I hadn’t kissed either of them good-bye. My eyes were hot, and my throat hurt.

I nodded, maybe a little too rapidly. My voice was only a little shaky. “I’ll go home. I’ll call home.”

“Get some sleep if you can, you’ll feel better tomorrow.”

I nodded, but didn’t look at him. I’d taken a couple of steps when I turned back and said, “I’ll bet you almost anything, Hudson, that the crime lab is going to agree with me. The DNA in the bites from the first vics aren’t going to match most of the vamps upstairs.”

“You just won’t let this go, will you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know how to let go, Sergeant.”

“Take it from someone who knows, Blake. You better start learning, or you’re going to burn out.”

I looked at him, and he looked back, and I wondered what he’d seen in me tonight for him to feel that I needed the “burnout” lecture. Was he right? Or were we all just tired? Him, me, all of us.

80

I DROVE HOME thinking about vampires. Not the fun ones. The ones we’d just killed. It was nearly three in the morning, mine was almost the only car when I pulled out onto the highway. Eight dead vamps, plus one human cohort. My bet was a human servant, because he was the one that had killed Officer Baldwin with a sword. That spoke of long ago skills. Not many modern humans are good enough with a blade to take out a tactical officer armed with an MP5. Eight was enough to account for all of them, but I knew we’d missed Vittorio. He just hadn’t been there.

The night was clear and bright, and as I left the city proper behind, stars studded the sky like someone had spilled a bag of diamonds across the velvet of it. I felt surprisingly good. I wasn’t sure why and didn’t look at it too closely, just in case it was fragile, and too much poking would have broken the mood. I felt good, and I was going home, and I’d saved everyone I could, and killed everyone I could. I was out of it for the night.

There’d been enough dead females to account for Nadine and Nellie, the pair that had seduced Avery Seabrook. There’d even been an extra that could have been Gwenyth, Vittorio’s sweetheart, but I thought it long odds that all three of them would just let us shoot them without much of a fight. By the standards I was used to, it hadn’t been much of a fight. Not for what this group had been capable of. At least one of them, or more, should have tried to fly out a window, to escape. The sniper had had nothing to do tonight.

It wasn’t until I was turning off onto 55 South that I realized the Circus of the Damned would have been much closer, and gotten me to bed sooner. Now it was too late, as long or longer to backtrack as go forward. But I wanted my own bed tonight. I wanted a certain stuffed toy penguin. I wanted Micah and Nathaniel, and right at that moment I didn’t really want to see another vampire. It wasn’t the vampire vics that made me not want to face another vampire tonight, it was my victims. It was the flash pictures in my head of the girl who’d begged for her life, and Jonah Cooper, and the silent crowd watching me at the church. I tried to hide behind the shield of