Chapter 18

SEAN JUMPED BACK, at least as much as he could with a hungry newborn vampire hanging onto his arm, and started yelling. “Holy shit! She’s alive! Bobby! Stop the ambulance! The girl’s alive!”

Bobby’s no dummy—he knew she was no more alive than me. He just reached behind his seat, slid the door between the cab and the back closed, and locked it. I faintly heard him shout something about finding a place to pull over, but we were in the middle of town, so even in the predawn hours, it wasn’t going to be easy to find someplace secluded enough to do what needed to be done.

That meant I had to kill this baby vamp in the cramped ambulance, without letting her rip Sean to pieces, and hopefully without getting myself too beat up. Meanwhile, the girl had ripped herself half out of the body bag and was struggling to get free of the straps across her chest and thighs one-handed while she held on to Sean with her other hand.

Sean struggled against her grip, then reached down and tried to help her release the chest strap. I shoved him back and slashed down across the girl’s wrist with my KA-BAR. She shrieked and let go of Fitzpatrick, who slammed back into the bench and glared at me.

“What the hell, Black? You need to help this girl, not get all Friday the 13th on her.” He leaned back in, and I shoved him again.

“Stay back, Sean. It’s not what you think.” I turned to the girl, putting all the force of my mind into my command. “STOP.” Nothing. Just like Julia, she was shielded from my compulsion somehow. I reached down into the heart of Charlotte, felt the Soul of the City wrap me in the strength of its history, in the life force of every person within its boundaries, and fill me with that power. “STOP,” I repeated, slamming the girl with the full weight of my command as Master of the City.

She gave not a single shit. She grinned at me, her fangs on full display, and reached down to the strap across her waist. She ripped it free of the gurney, sending the metal rivets pinging around the back of the ambulance. The girl bent at the waist and yanked the strap off her legs, then ripped the tattered body bag away from herself.

I leapt over her, trying to interpose my body between her and Sean, now giving up completely on compulsion and secrecy and focused solely on survival, mine and Sean’s. The detective struggled behind me, trying to get to the girl. I don’t know if he still wanted to help her, or saw her for what she really was—a bloodthirsty apex predator with a taste for cop.

“Stay still, Sean,” I said over my shoulder, keeping my eyes locked on the girl. It’s not like I had many other places to look in the compact compartment. There was Sean, wedged in the back corner by the door. I was in front of him, my narrow frame jammed into the space between the bench seat and the gurney. The girl was on the stretcher, up on her haunches now, eyes flitting over every surface, looking for some way to get past me, to get to food.

“What the hell is happening, Black?” Sean’s voice had a high, thready quality to it, and I could hear the panic trying to take hold of him.

“It’s a long story, and if we live long enough I promise to explain it to you. But for right now, I need you to do exactly as I tell you.” I kept my eyes locked on the girl, like she was a rattlesnake coiled to strike. I was pretty sure I could take out one newborn vampire, but the way Bobby was weaving through traffic and rocking the ambulance from side to side, I wasn’t sure I’d have the chance before something went terribly wrong.

As if on cue, Bobby took a hard left, probably on Hawthorne heading to Presbyterian Hospital, and everything in the back of the ambulance shifted at once. Everything included me, and I slammed to the right, cracking my head against one of the cabinets on the wall. My vision filled with stars, and I heard a cackle of triumph half a second before a shoulder slammed into my side and bulldozed me out of the way. I sprawled forward and slid off the bench onto the floor, finding myself wedged under the side of the gurney. My knife went flying, but that was the least of my worries. The vampire now had a clear path to Fitzpatrick and all that warm, fresh blood.

“What the—hey, get off me! Dammit, what are you—OW!” Sean started to yell, and I heard him thrashing.

I twisted myself around, wrestling with the stretcher in the tight space, and got myself positioned to see that she had Fitzpatrick down with her teeth buried in the side of his throat. “Dammit,” I cursed. I didn’t have a shot that wasn’t going to go through the girl into Sean, and not only did I have no idea if he was wearing a vest, I couldn’t count on hitting him in the vest if I fired. The bullet was just as likely to go into his neck or head as his torso. I reached into my belt and yanked out a silver stake with a rubberized handle. The silver stake was Sabrina’s idea; the rubber hilt to keep from burning the crap out of my fingers was Greg’s modification.

I dove for the girl, stake out, and buried six inches of silver in her back, slipping the spike right between the ribs. She pulled back from Sean’s throat, the scream cut off by the almost-instant true-death of the stake. Sometimes vampires can come back if a wooden stake is removed and they can heal. But silver wounds take a lot more time and blood to heal, and if you skewer a vamp with a stake made of silver, it’s pretty much game over. It certainly was for this girl.

Just as I pulled her corpse off Sean, Bobby pulled the ambulance over and parked. Sean had a hand pressed to the side of his neck and a glassy look in his wide eyes.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked, right about the time Bobby opened the back doors. Sean more fell out than stepped out, and he staggered a few yards away then dropped to one knee.

“You should bandage him up, maybe get some of the blood off his neck and hands before I try to explain things to him,” I said to Bobby.

“You afraid you won’t be able to control yourself?” the big man asked.

“Nah, I had a good breakfast. But I do think Detective Fitzpatrick might find it a little worrisome if the person explaining about vampires and the world of the supernatural was licking his lips every time he looked at the wound. I’m not hungry, but that much fresh blood that close is a little distracting.”

While Bobby grabbed a bag of gauze and medical tape from the back of the ambulance, I pulled out my phone to text Greg and Sabrina. I looked at the shattered screen and sighed. “Hey Bobby?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I borrow your phone?” He gave me the laugh that all my friends give me when I break yet another cell phone, and tossed his over to me. I sent Greg and Sabrina a quick text to let them know that everything was fine, relatively speaking, and that I was about to completely explode Fitzpatrick’s worldview, then sent William a text telling him where to pick me up and to send a cleanup crew to the same location. We were in a medical office parking lot off Queens Road a little past the hospital, and there wasn’t a car in sight. Beyond the parking lot was a ritzy residential neighborhood; so long as Sean didn’t shoot me, we could probably get this whole mess sorted out with no further interference by other cops or much in the way of nosy neighbors.

I walked over to Sean, who sat on a parking lot divider as Bobby tended the wounds on his neck. The holes didn’t need much tending, mostly just a quick wipe down. The bites were already closed, one of the benefits of being a supernatural parasite. We don’t leave a whole lot of evidence behind. Bobby stood up and walked back to the ambulance as I came over and shot me the “this one’s your party” expression as he passed me.

Fitzpatrick looked up at me, and his eyes flashed wide for a second before he got himself under control. I heard his heart speed up, and I made sure to keep my hands in full view. No point in getting him even more upset. “Hey Sean, you okay?”

“What the hell was that, Black?” The plea in his eyes was for me to give him an explanation. Not necessarily the truth, but a rational explanation that he could hang his hat on. He was about to be seriously disappointed.

“That was a young dead girl being reborn as a vampire, Sean. She woke up hungry and tried to drink your blood. She wouldn’t have stopped with a sip or two, and if left to her own devices, she would have drained you dry. Then in about eight hours, you would’ve woken up the same way, and either killed someone, or wandered out into the sunlight looking for food and turned into a pile of ash.” I didn’t make jokes, I didn’t sugarcoat it. I just told him the straight story. Now it was up to him to decide how he was going to handle it.

“No, what really happened?”

Pretty normal so far. Admittedly, I didn’t have a ton of experience introducing humans to the world of vampires, but Sean wasn’t veering off script yet. “Exactly what I told you. A vampire murdered that girl, and when she came back, she was starving for blood. You happened to have the nearest ready supply.”

“Why didn’t she try to drain you? You were closer.”

Well, he was a detective. I guess that’s why he got to that question quicker than expected. I took a deep breath. “She needed living blood, Sean. I don’t qualify.”

He looked me up and down. “You’re a vampire?” He patted the breast pocket of his jacket absently, then shook his head. “This is when I’d be reaching for a smoke, but I quit three years ago.”

“Good for you. I hear that’s really hard. I never picked up the habit myself.”

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“Was there a question?” I asked.

“Are you standing here in the middle of a parking lot in Charlotte, North Carolina, claiming to be a vampire?”

“No,” I said, and saw his shoulders relax a hair. That wasn’t going to last long. “I’m not claiming anything. I’m telling you that I’m a vampire, and that whoever murdered that girl—and Julia O’Connell before her—was also a vampire. I’m telling you that she woke up crazy for blood, and if I hadn’t put a stake through her heart, she would have drunk every drop you have.”

“You’re an asshole.” He struggled to his feet and stalked back over to the ambulance.

“That’s probably true, but irrelevant,” I said as I followed him. “What are you doing?”

He jerked open the doors of the ambulance and climbed inside. He walked up to the girl and lifted her halfway up into a sitting position. “You’re telling me this girl is a vampire?”

“Was, but sure,” I said. I was willing to give him as much time as he needed, within reason. It was winter, so we still had about an hour and a half before sunrise, but people were going to start waking up around us before that, and I didn’t want to explain our situation to any early birds coming in to grab the first doughnut at the office.

Sean pried her mouth open. “Where are her fangs?” He held the dead girl by the back of her head, all sense of respect for the dead gone in his shock and anger.

I stepped up into the back of the ambulance and laid the body down. “Here,” I said. I opened her mouth open wide, then reached into the roof of her mouth with an index finger. I pressed on her soft palate and felt the bony nub that marked the back of her fangs. I pushed in with my fingertip, and the fang grew out of her gum a little behind her normal teeth. “It’s not like in the movies, where our incisors magically grow when we bite somebody, and they don’t flip down like a rattlesnake. They just stick out a little bit behind our teeth and give us something to tear better with. They aren’t hollow, either. We don’t have a pair of straws in our head. We just tear the artery a little and let the blood spurt into our mouth. She did a really good job on you, for a newborn. Usually it’s a lot messier the first few times. I remember what a mess I made—” I cut myself off. I didn’t need to share the murder of my best friend with Fitzpatrick.

He sat back, staring at me. “You’re serious.”

“Deadly serious.”

“She was a vampire.”

“Yup.”

“And you’re a vampire.”

“Yup.”

Now the shock was really settling in. The adrenaline from the fight was wearing off, and the endorphin rush from the girl’s bite was fading, and Fitzpatrick was actually coming to grips with the fact that he knew a lot less about the world than he did when he reported to work that night. I didn’t envy him the awakening.

“So who killed her?” I watched him shift gears like he was flipping a switch, going from rattled normal human to homicide detective in an instant. It was impressive, the way he compartmentalized all the crap he didn’t understand and circled back to the parts he did.

Then something else shifted in his eyes, and he drew his sidearm, leveling the Smith & Wesson pistol at my face. “You have three seconds to convince me that you didn’t kill this girl, and about that long to tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you in the head.”

Well, shit. That escalated quickly.