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By Root 1234 0

I simply hadn’t had the training. My way of doing it would have been to do a front entry and kill everything that moved. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to get a diagram of the condo’s interior, or have the landlord of the building there tell us what he knew of the woman who owned the apartment. They’d already evacuated the condos adjoining ours, and they had the nearest neighbor, again, give us information about the interior and the owner. It was useful to know that there was almost no furniture in the condo, because the owner, Jill Conroy, was waiting for a shipment that had been delayed twice. That she worked as a lawyer in a large downtown firm and had just made partner. Fascinating, but I didn’t see that it was useful. They were still trying to find someone who would answer the phone at her job, to find out when she was last at work. No one at work at nearly two in the morning, fucking slackers. It was all interesting, but our victim was in there, alone with vampires who had murdered at least ten people in three states. I wanted to get her out, and I was having trouble concentrating on the trivia. It must have shown, because Sergeant Hudson said, “We boring you, Blake?”

I blinked up at him, from where I’d finally curled up on the street. I was tired and didn’t see a reason not to sit down, some of the Mobile Reserve guys were kneeling. “A little,” I said.

The two men closest to me, Killian of the white, buzz cut, and Jung, who was the only green-eyed Asian American I’d ever met, both moved away from me, as if they didn’t want to be too close when the blood started to fly. I noticed that Melbourne stayed where he was next to Hudson, as if he expected the blood flow to be one-sided.

“There’s the street, Blake, start walking.”

“You asked the question, Sergeant. If you didn’t want an honest answer, you should have warned me.”

Someone laughed, low enough that I wasn’t sure who’d done it, and neither, apparently, was Hudson, because he didn’t try to find out who’d laughed, he just used it as an excuse to be more pissed at me.

Hudson took a step toward me. I stood up.

“If we’re boring you, Blake, then go home. We don’t need your attitude, we got enough of our own.” His voice was low and even, and every word was very carefully enunciated. I knew that oh-so-careful tone. It was the voice you used instead of screaming or hitting something.

“Dawn Morgan may still be alive in there,” I said. “But every minute we wait cuts her chances of survival. You can hate that your captain let me come, you can fucking hate me, I don’t care, but let’s get this done. I’d like to get to Dawn before it’s too late, Sergeant Hudson. Just once, I’d like not to be the cleanup crew and be there early enough to have something left to rescue.”

He blinked solid brown eyes at me that matched the mustache and close-cropped hair. My own hair was back in a ponytail. They had handed me a helmet, and hair nearly to your waist just didn’t fit in helmets without being pulled back in some fashion. I’d have cut my hair months ago, but Micah said if I cut mine, he’d cut his, the threat had left me with the longest hair of my life. I looked like a short, curvy hippie among the militaryesque haircuts and very masculine figures around me. Even stuffing me into one of their vests couldn’t hide that I so didn’t match everyone else. There are moments when I suddenly feel awkward again, not a cop, not a man, not part of this great brotherhood. Just a girl, just a voodoo dabbler, who no one trusts at their back. It had been years since I’d felt this bad about it. Maybe it was the borrowed equipment, which didn’t really fit, or maybe it was Arnet and Dolph being mad at me, or maybe it was just that I believed what was in Hudson’s eyes. I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t a tactical anything. I didn’t know how they did business. I wasn’t part of their team, and part of me understood that no matter how many friends I had that were cops, and no matter that I had a badge, that there would always be more cops that thought I didn’t belong than ones who did. I would always