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I finally let her, and even pulling them only part way up my body turned my back into one great big hurt. I leaned against the bed when they were on, and didn’t even argue when she bent down to put on my socks. She never argued that I was too hurt to be leaving. It was too obvious to argue about it.

“I’d worked with Vicki for two years. It was Meg’s first job.” Her eyes were dry, wide, and I noticed the dark circles under them like purplish smudges, as if she hadn’t slept much in the last three days.

I remembered the body that had blocked the door into the nursery, and the nurse that had been thrown through the window. Vicki and Meg, though I’d probably never know which had been which, not that it mattered. They were dead and didn’t care, and the nurse helping me slip into a pair of black jeans looked too fragile for questions. My job was to listen, and make encouraging noises where needed.

I slipped the jeans over my butt without help, buttoned them and zipped them all by myself. Things were looking up. I’d tried tucking the shirt into my pants out of habit, but that required more back movement than I thought. Besides, untucked, my braless state would be a little less noticeable. I was really too well endowed to go without, but my modesty wasn’t worth the pain, not today.

“Every time I close my eyes, I see the babies.” She was kneeling with one of my shoes in her hands, when she looked up. “I keep thinking I should be dreaming about my friends, but I only see the babies, their little bodies, and they cry. Every time I close my eyes, I hear the babies screaming. I wasn’t there, and I hear them, every night.” The tears were finally there, sliding soundlessly down her face as if she didn’t know she was crying. She slid the shoe on my foot and looked down, paying attention to what she was doing.

“See a councilor or a priest or whoever you trust,” I said. “You’ll need help.”

She got my other shoe off the bed, and gazed up at me, the tears drying in tracks down her pale cheeks. “I heard that there’s some sort of witch making these corpses, causing them to attack people.”

“Not a witch,” I said. “What’s behind all this isn’t human.”

She slipped the shoe on me, frowning. “Is it immortal like a vampire?”

I didn’t do my usual lecture about how vamps aren’t immortal, only hard to kill. She didn’t need that particular lecture. “I don’t know yet.”

She laced my shoe solid, but not too tight, as if she did this regularly. She looked up at me with those strange empty eyes of hers, tear tracks still visible on her face. “If it’s not immortal, kill it.”

Her face held that absolute trust that is usually reserved for small children or people that are not quite all there. There was no questioning in her shocked eyes, no doubt in that pale face. I answered that trust. Reality could wait until she was ready for it. I said what she needed to hear. “If it can die, I’ll kill it.”

I said it because she needed to hear it. I said it because after what I’d seen it do, that was the plan. Maybe it had been the plan all along. Knowing Edward it probably had been. He said solve the case when what he usually meant was kill them, kill them all. As a plan, I’d heard worse. As a way of life, it lacked a certain romance. As a way to stay alive, it was just about perfect. As a way to keep your soul intact, it sucked. But I was willing to trade a piece of my soul to stop this thing. And that was perhaps my biggest problem. I was always willing to compromise my soul if it would take out the great evil. But there always seemed to be another great evil coming down the road. No matter how many times I saved the day and took out the monster, there was always another monster, and there always would be. The monster supply was unlimited. I was not. The parts of myself that I was using up to slay the monsters was finite, and once I used it all up, there would be no going back. I’d be Edward in drag. I could save the world and lose myself.

And staring down into the woman’s face, watching that perfect