Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [184]
Yet I didn’t want to kill Zane if I didn’t have to. It wasn’t mercy. It was the thought that he might force me to do it in public. I didn’t want to go to jail. The fact that the punishment worried me more than the crime said something about my moral state. Some days I thought I was becoming a sociopath. Some days I thought I was already there.
I carried silver-plated bullets in my gun at all times. Silver worked on humans, as well as on most supernatural beings. Why keep switching to normal ammmo that only did humans and a very few creatures? But a few months ago I’d met a fairie that had damn near killed me. Silver didn’t work on fairies, but normal lead did. So I’d taken to keeping a spare clip of regular bullets in the glove compartment. I peeled off the first two rounds of my silver clip and replaced them with lead. Which meant I had two bullets to discourage Zane with, before I killed him. Because, make no mistake, if he kept coming after I’d pumped him full of two Glazer Safety Rounds, which hurt a hell of a lot even if you could heal the damage, the first silver bullet was not going to be aimed to wound.
It wasn’t until I was going through the doors I realized that I didn’t know Nathaniel’s last name. Stephen’s name wasn’t going to help me. Damn.
The waiting room was packed. Women with crying babies, children racing through the chairs belonging to no one, a man with a bloody rag around his hand, people with no visible injury staring dully into space. Stephen was nowhere in sight.
Screams, the sound of breaking glass; metal clanked to the floor. A nurse ran out of the far hallway. “Get more security, now!” A nurse behind the admittance desk punched buttons on the phone.
Call it a hunch but I was betting I knew where Stephen and Zane were. I flashed my ID at the nurse. “I’m with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. Can I help?”
The nurse clutched my arm. “You’re a cop?”
“I’m with the police, yes.” Prevarication at its best. As a civilian attached to a police squad you learn how to do that.
“Thank God.” She started to pull me towards the noise.
I pulled my arm free and took out my gun. Safety off, pointed at the ceiling, ready to go. With normal ammo I wouldn’t have pointed at the ceiling, not with a hospital full of patients above me, but Glazer Safety Rounds aren’t called safety rounds for nothing.
The back area was like every emergency area I’d ever been in. Curtains hung from metal tracks so you could make lots and lots of little individual examining rooms. A handful of curtains were closed, but patients were sitting up, staring through the curtains, watching the show. A wall divided the room down the middle to the corridor, so there wasn’t much to see.
A man wearing green surgical scrubs went flying through the air from around that wall. He smacked into the opposite wall, slid down it heavily, and lay very still.
The nurse with me ran towards him, and I let her go. What lay beyond, what was tossing doctors around like toys, wasn’t a job for a healer. It was a job for me. Two more figures in surgical scrubs lay on the floor, one male, one female. The woman was awake, eyes wide. Her wrist was at a forty-five-degree angle, broken. She saw my ID clipped to my jacket. “He’s a shifter. Be careful.”
“I know what he is,” I said. I lowered the gun just a touch.
Her eyes flinched, and it wasn’t pain. “Don’t shoot up my trauma center.”
“Try not to,” I said and moved past her.
Zane stepped out into the corridor. I’d never seen Zane before, but who else could it be? He was carrying someone in his arms. I thought at first, a woman, because the hair was long and shining brown, but the exposed back and shoulders were too muscular, too male. It had to be Nathaniel. He fit easily into the taller man’s arms.
Zane was about six foot, stretched tall and thin. He wore only a black leather vest on his thin, pale upper body. His hair was cotton-white, cut short on