Burnt Offerings - Laurell K. Hamilton [115]
“Day of Cleansing, okay.”
“If you talk to any vampires, don’t call it that. Call it the Inferno. The other phrase is like calling the Jewish Holocaust a racial cleansing.”
“You’ve made your point,” he said. “Remember while you’re out there doing police work that you’re still on someone’s hit parade.”
“Gee, Dolph, you do love me.”
“Don’t push it,” he said.
“Watch your own back, Dolph. Anything happens to you, Zerbrowski’s in charge.”
Dolph’s deep laughter was the last thing I heard before the phone clicked dead. I don’t think in the nearly five years I’d known Dolph that he’d ever said goodbye on the phone.
The phone rang as soon as I put it down. It was Pete McKinnon. “Hi, Pete. Just got off the phone with Dolph. He told me you wanted me down at the main branch of the Church.”
“He tell you why?”
“Something about Malcolm.”
“We’ve got nearly every human member of his Church screaming for us to make sure their big cheese didn’t get toasted. But we opened the floor up to check on some vamps on the west side and they weren’t in coffins. Two of them went up in smoke. If we let Malcolm get cooked, trying to save him…Let’s just say I don’t want to do the paper work.”
“What do you want me to do?” I seemed to be asking that a lot lately.
“We need to know if it’s safe to leave him alone until he can rise on his own, or if we need to figure out how to rescue him. Vampires can’t drown, can they?”
I thought the last was a strange question. “Except for holy water, vamps don’t have any problem with water.”
“Even running water?” he asked.
“You’ve been doing your homework. I’m impressed,” I said.
“I’m big into self-improvement. What about running water?”
“To my knowledge, water isn’t a deterrent, running or otherwise. Why do you ask?”
“You’ve never been to a building after a fire, have you?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Unless the basement is airtight, it’ll be full of water. A lot of water.”
Could vampires drown? It was a good question. I wasn’t sure. Maybe they could, and that was why some of the folklore talked about running water. Or maybe it was like saying that vampires could shapechange, not true at all. “They don’t always breathe, so I don’t think they’d drown. I mean, if a vampire woke with his coffin underwater, I think they could just not breathe and get out of the water. But, truthfully, I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
“Can you tell if he’s okay without going down there?”
“Truth is, I’m not sure. I’ve never tried anything like that.”
“Will you try?”
I nodded, realized he couldn’t see it, and said, “Sure, but you’re second on my list, not first.”
“All right, but hurry. The media is all over this thing. Between them and the Church members, we are not having a good time.”
“Ask them if Malcolm is the only vamp down there. Ask them if the basement is steel-reinforced.”
“Why would it be?”
“A lot of the basements where vamps sleep have concrete ceilings reinforced with steel beams. The church’s basement doesn’t have any windows, so it could mean that the lower area was specially designed with vamps in mind. I think you’d need to know that even if you decide to open the floor up.”
“We do.”
“Take some of the bitching faithful aside and ask them questions. You need to know the answers either way, and it’ll at least give them the illusion that something’s happening until I can get there.”
“That is the best idea I’ve heard in two hours.”
“Thanks. I’ll be there as soon as I can, promise.” I had a thought. “Wait, Pete. Does Malcolm have a human servant?”
“A lot of the people here have vampire bites.”
“No,” I said. “I mean a true human servant.”
“I thought that was just a human with one or two vampire bites.”
“So did I once,” I said. “A human with just a couple of bites is what the vamps call a Renfield, as in the character from the novel Dracula.” I’d asked Jean-Claude what they called them before the book came out. He’d said, “slaves.” Ask a silly question.
“What’s a human servant, then?” Pete asked. It reminded me of Dolph.
“A human who’s bound to the vampire by something called marks.