Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [352]
“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.”
“To some of the vampires, it is.”
He shook his head, hands on hips, and started to pace in a tight circle, but the open door of the van stopped his pacing. “It’s the right number of vamps. They had one dead stripper, and one that they nearly killed. That’s good enough.”
“They took her and left a state trooper as a witness, so we’d know. They wanted us to come here tonight. Why?”
“They ambushed us in the hallway, Blake. I think we were just better at killing them than they planned for us to be.”
“Maybe, but what if it wasn’t a trap to kill us? What if it was a trap to kill the vampires?”
“That’s just . . . that makes no sense.”
“You’re ready to close the case. You’re ready to declare them dead, defeated. We kill a few vampires, find a few dead humans in the condo, and you’re ready to believe it’s our serial killers.”
“And who else would it be? Are you saying we’ve got copycats?”
“No, I’m saying that if we close this case, then they can just move on to the next town. They can start over.”
“You’re saying they left us some of their baby vampires so we’d kill them and think it was them? They sacrificed their own people for this?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“You know what I think, Blake?”
“No, what?”
“I think you just can’t let it go. I think you want it not to be over.”
It was my turn to try to pace, but I was smaller, and standing a little farther out from the doors, so I got almost a full circle out of my pacing. It didn’t help. “I want this over with, Hudson, more than you do. Because if these vampires were left up there as sacrificial lambs, then they used me to kill them. They used all of us as a sort of a weapon, their weapon.”
“Go home, Blake, go home to your husband, or boyfriend, or fucking dog, but go home. Your job is done here. Do you understand that?”
I looked up at him and tried to think how to explain it. I finally tried something I didn’t like admitting to the police at large. “I saw inside the memories of one of the vampires at the church earlier tonight. I saw some faces. I got some names. Those faces aren’t up there. Those names aren’t going to belong to any of the dead.”
“This case is closed, Blake, which means your warrant has been fulfilled. You’re done.