Chapter 9

“WHAT DO YOU want me to do, Jimmy?” Bobby asked from the driver’s seat.

“Kill the lights and find a place to park for a little bit.”

“Any suggestions for that? This isn’t exactly the most inconspicuous vehicle, and I’m not used to driving around trying not to be noticed.” I looked in the mirror at him, and saw the little grin tweaking the corners of the big man’s chocolate face.

I shook my head, and a slight chuckle escaped despite the situation. “Go to our place. Just park in the driveway. Greg’s looking for more information on the murder, Sabrina’s doing paperwork and waiting for the techs to process the scene, and Abby’s at the Angel. Nobody’s home to get worried about an ambulance parked on our lawn.”

“Sounds good, boss.” He pulled the ambulance into traffic, and I sat on one of the benches that ran the length of the ambulance’s interior, looking at the black plastic-wrapped form of the girl. I took a deep breath and opened the body bag. The big industrial zipper made a ripping sound as it pulled down, and Julia’s face and body slowly came into view.

She was a pretty girl. Not model gorgeous, but not bad looking, either. Cute, I guess you’d say. Her dark hair framed her face well, and her skin was smooth. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone, and I could barely see the impressions of knuckles on her flesh. So the asshole that killed her beat her up a little, too. Nice.

I unzipped the bag all the way, then looked up at Bobby. “You didn’t cuff her? I sent word—”

“Yeah, you sent word, but I can’t exactly handcuff a dead body with a dozen uniforms around, Jimmy. And I don’t work for you, remember? I gotta do my job before I can help you do yours.” The recrimination was heavy in his words, and I flinched a little. He was right, though. Keeping the vampire and other supernatural creatures in line was my job, and I failed. I failed this girl, and she was dead because of it. Master of the City didn’t mean shit tonight.

Fuck. I slammed my hand into the padded bench beside me, and felt the metal crunch beneath my fist. “Yeah, that makes sense,” was all I said. “Can you toss me the silver cuffs?”

A pair of handcuffs flew back into the ambulance, and I picked them up. Then dropped them immediately as the silver seared my skin. “Sonofabitch! Can I get a pair of gloves?”

“Over your head,” Bobby called, not turning around. I couldn’t see the little smile on his face, but I knew it was there. I extended a middle finger to the back of his head, then stood up and pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a bin on the wall. I slipped on the gloves, then clicked the cuffs around the dead girl’s right wrist, securing her to the gurney and making sure that if she did wake up before I was ready for her, she’d at least be weakened by the silver. Baby vamps usually aren’t that strong, but they’re almost always batshit crazy from blood-hunger, and I didn’t fancy wrestling in the back of a moving ambulance.

“What do you have on time of death?” I asked.

“It’s a little hard to tell, because it’s cold out tonight, but I’m guessing anywhere from four to twelve hours.”

“Shit,” I said.

“What?”

“It usually only takes about eight hours for a new vamp to wake up. I wanted to get a chance to check her for smells or trace before she—” I was going to say “woke up,” but that’s exactly what Julia did, right in the middle of my sentence. Eight hours it is. That put the time of death right around eight o’clock. Good to know. Except I now had bigger problems on my hands. Like a wide-awake baby vampire, out of her mind from dying and hunger.

Except she wasn’t. I mean, for all I could tell, she was out of her mind, but she wasn’t doing any of the stuff I’d come to expect from newborns. Or newdeads, I guess. She wasn’t screaming, thrashing around, trying to rip the cuffs off, or trying to bite me or Bobby. She just lay there on the gurney, her eyes open, looking up at me.

I watched her watch me for a few seconds, but patience has never been my strong suit. “Julia?”

“Yes,” she said. Okay, she’s awake and aware. That’s weird. “Am I dead?”

“That’s a bigger question than you might think,” I said. “Let me check a couple of things, okay?” I found a stethoscope in another bin on the wall and pressed it to her chest. Nothing. I pressed it to the side of her neck, with the expected identical results.

I sat back down, out of reach of her left arm but between her and Bobby in case shit went sideways. “Yeah, you’re dead,” I said. I watched for any of the expected reactions, but nothing came. No tears, no yelling, and still no thrashing around.

“I thought so,” she said. “I mean, why else would you be asking about time of death? Who are you? Are you . . . an angel?”

Bobby’s snort of laughter from the front seat cut any kind of tenderness out of the moment, right there. “Yeah, not so much.” I looked at the girl, all of eighteen years old and now doomed to stay that way forever. This was not how her life was supposed to go. Of course, it’s not like she was the only person in the ambulance who could say that. Bobby was supposed to be a third-round draft pick and career NFL backup. Instead he ends up with a hurt knee, three years of Arena Football, and a gig driving an ambulance and selling blood out the back door of the hospital to a vampire.

I was supposed to be a mechanical engineer, laying out air conditioning systems for high rises. Instead, I found myself perpetually twenty-two, drinking blood out of a bag to stay alive, and managing a mildly dysfunctional criminal pseudo-empire. Yeah, Julia had plenty of company in the “this is not how shit is supposed to go” department. But Bobby and I weren’t in high school. We weren’t staring down the barrel of a promising life. And now, neither was Julia.

“This is going to sound weird, and that might be the biggest understatement in the history of history. But I’m a vampire. And now, so are you.”

That’s usually the part where people start to freak out. The realization that monsters are real, then the double whammy that they’re one of them. But this conversation was quickly diverging from the usual, even for my weird-ass life.

“Huh,” she said. “Well, that’s gonna screw my early admission to Duke, then, isn’t it?” She looked around the back of the ambulance. “Am I in a body bag? Oh shit, I guess I would be, wouldn’t I? Oh, I think I gotta puke.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty normal,” I said. I looked around the cramped compartment, found a plastic bag, then handed it to Julia.

She leaned over the guardrail of the gurney, and I held her hair back as she unloaded the entire contents of her stomach into the bag. She handed it back to me, an apologetic half-smile on her face. “Sorry. That was pretty gross.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen worse.” I tied off the bag and dumped it into one of the containers marked “Hazardous Waste”. I looked at the girl, who was tugging at the handcuffs with a quizzical look on her face.

“This thing hurts. Like, it burns a little. Can we . . . ?”

“Yeah,” I said, fishing my keys out of my pocket. Carrying a handcuff key became the norm for me after my girlfriend cuffed me to a bowling alley chair. It was a pain in the ass, dragging the chair around behind me for an hour after I ripped the seat off the base, so I just took to carrying a key.

“Thanks,” Julia said, freeing her wrist and rubbing the burned circle of skin. “What’s up with that?”

“Silver,” I said, pocketing the key as she handed it back to me. “Saps our strength and burns our skin. Most newborn vampires wake up really hungry and kinda nuts. I didn’t want to get in a big fight in the back of Bobby’s ambulance—”

“Again,” Bobby called from the front seat.

“Again,” I concurred. “So I cuffed you. That might be why you woke up more slowly, and less ready to tear my head off.”

“I’m still pretty hungry, though.” She craned her neck around to look at the back of Bobby’s head. “He smells good.”

“Hands off,” I said. I dug a bag of blood out of an overhead container and pitched it to her. “Rip the end off that and suck it down, instead. Not as tasty, but less mess and less chance of wrecking the ambulance.

“On that note,” Bobby said, “we’re here. Gimme your keys. I’m gonna wait inside while y’all figure your shit out.”

“Door code is 021229,” I said. “That’ll unlock the visitor areas and keep you out of anyplace that might kill you.”

“Works for me,” the big man said. I heard the front door open and close as he removed himself from the dinner conversation.

“What was he talking about?” Julia asked.

“What do you mean, what was he talking about?”

“He said we had shit to figure out. What kind of shit do we have to figure out?”

This chick was smart. She knew something was up. “We have to figure out if I’m going to kill you or not. For real and for good this time.”

“Why would you do that?” I could see the fear in her eyes as she sat up and scooted back along the gurney, clutching the bag of blood to her chest so tight I began to fear the bag would explode.

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “It’s your call, honestly. I was just going to check your body for trace evidence, anything that could lead me to your sire, then stake you before you woke up, and go find the asshole that made a vampire in my city without permission and explain to him the error of his ways. Permanently. But then you woke up. And now you’re a problem.”

“Why am I a problem? I haven’t hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to live my life, like normal.”

“And therein lies the problem. Your life isn’t just over as you know it, it’s over. You’re dead. No pulse, nothing. You’re alive by some kind of magical force that nobody I’ve ever found understands, and you will hurt people. You have to. You need blood to stay alive. That’s not an option. Animal blood will do it, for a while, but the desire, the need for human blood, will eventually win out. When that happens, you’ll either make an arrangement with someone like Bobby, you’ll learn to hunt and sip from your victims, or you’ll kill someone. Then I’ll find out, and I’ll have to hunt you down. Then we’re right back here talking about me killing you.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Her voice started to climb, and she started to stand up in the cramped ambulance. “Some kind of vampire police? Some kind of vampire king? Well, I’m not going to—”

“Sit Down.” I clapped both hands on her shoulders and sat her butt back down on the gurney with authority. “Let me clarify. I’m Jimmy Black. I’m no king, but I am the Master Vampire of this city, and you are now my responsibility. So you can sit there, and we can talk about what we’re going to do with you, or we can throw down, and you can end up with a stake through your heart. Your call.”

She sat there staring daggers at me for a long moment, until I finally remembered that there was no way I was going to out-glare a teenaged girl, and broke the silence. “What’s it going to be, Julia? You gonna talk, or you gonna die?”