Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [353]
“Actually, Sergeant, I have sole discretion on whether a warrant is finished or not. Mark me on this, if we don’t get these guys in St. Louis, they’ll move shop. We got some of them tonight, but not all of them, and we sure as hell missed the big guy, and if you don’t kill the main master, he just moves somewhere else and starts making new vampires. It’s like going in for cancer surgery, if you don’t get it all, then it keeps spreading.”
“I thought you were dating a vampire,” he said.
“I am,” I said.
“For someone who’s dating one of them, you have a damned dark view of them.”
“Ask me how I feel about human beings sometimes. I’ve gotten called in on too many serial killer cases, where they want it to be a monster, because they don’t want to believe that one human being could do shit like that to another human being.”
“How long you been doing this, hunting vamps, doing the bad crimes?”
“Six years, why?”
“Most violent crime units rotate their people about every two to five years. Maybe you need to see something a little less bloody for awhile.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I sort of side-stepped it. “Up there, the master vampire that was hiding in the corner, none of you could see him, right?”
“Until you shot him.”
“I could feel him. I knew exactly where he was. He was controlling the others in the bedroom. If he hadn’t died, then the others would have kept attacking, even with the holy objects visible. We’d have lost more people.”
“Maybe, but what’s your point?”
“My abilities with the dead are genetic, it’s like a psychic gift. No amount of training or practice will teach you how to see the invisible. There are less than twenty people in the entire country that have abilities even close to mine.”
“There are a hell of a lot more than twenty people in the new federal marshal’s program,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, and some of them are good. Some of them would have sensed his power, but I don’t know if any of the rest would have known exactly where to shoot.”
“You’re saying that you’re the only one who can do your job?”
I shrugged.
“Look, Blake, take some advice from someone who’s been doing this longer than you have. You’re not God, you can’t save everybody, and the police work in this town has been running just fine without you to baby-sit. You aren’t the only cop in this city, and you aren’t the only one who can do this job. You’ve got to let go of that idea, or you’ll go crazy. You’ll start blaming yourself for not being there twenty-four-seven. You’ll start thinking, if only I’d been there, this bad thing, or that bad thing, wouldn’t have happened. It’s a lie. You’re just a person, with some good abilities, and good judgment, but don’t try and carry the weight of the whole fucking world. It’ll crush you.”
I looked up into his brown eyes, and there was something in his face that said he was giving advice that had been hard-won. If I’d been a girl-girl, I’d have said something like, you sound like you’re talking from experience, but I’d hung around with the boys’ club too long not to know my manners. Hudson was opening up, and he didn’t have to, he was trying to help me; asking him personal shit would have made me an ungrateful wretch. “I’ve been the only one for so long.”
“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