Chapter 31

CLEARING THE ENTIRE stadium and vamp-proofing the corpses took a couple of hours. Lieutenant McDaniel offered us a ride home in various squad cars, but I just led the whole bunch over to my office building, and we took an Uber SUV from there. We needed an Escalade and another car to carry everyone, and it was a somber ride in my vehicle, piled full of baby vamps all trying to figure out their place in a brand-new world while processing the carnage they’d all just seen. Most people in their late teens and early twenties have never seen a dead person outside of TV or a funeral setting, so handling actual corpses was well outside their normal sphere of experience. I felt a little envious of their innocence, thinking back to the days when death wasn’t an everyday companion for me.

We got out of the cars, and Abby and I mojo’d the drivers into forgetting who they dropped off at our place, then we led the newborns into the house and downstairs for a debrief. In addition to Quinn and Shelly, there was a black guy with glasses and a Big Bang Theory T-shirt, and a pretty blond girl who looked like a stereotypical prom queen. Everyone looked around like their heads were on swivels as they went down the stairs. I couldn’t blame them, really. With everything they’d been through since they were kidnapped and turned, it was natural for them to be nervous.

The nerves disappeared for at least two of them when they got downstairs and saw Emily sitting on the couch across from Greg. Quinn and Shelly dashed across the room, then stopped short and looked around in confusion at how quickly they’d crossed the room. These kids had a lot to get used to, and not a lot of time to do it. The reunited trio hugged and cried a little, babbling over each other as they tried to decipher everything that happened to them in the past twenty-four hours.

I cleared my throat, twice, and the whole bunch turned to look at me. “We’ve got a lot of questions, and you five are the only ones with answers. So please pay attention and try to remember everything you can about what happened since you were turned. Greg, will you move that couch over beside the other one so we can talk to everybody at once?”

He stood up and nodded. “Yeah, no problem.” He stepped behind the couch and picked it up one-handed. Showoff.

William tapped me on a shoulder. “Abby and I can work on getting some clean clothes for the newcomers.” I looked at the vamplets and realized just how right he was. The only ones not completely disgusting were Emily and Shelly, because Shelly had swiped a new Charlotte Knights shirt from the stadium, and Emily had cleaned up a bit since we brought her home.

“Good idea. Abby, can you bring some towels for them to sit on, too? I don’t want to replace the couches again this week.”

“Dude, I keep telling you, Ikea sells sofa covers. They aren’t even ugly. But yeah, I’ll be back in a second.”

“Thanks.” I turned to the newcomers. “You guys stay right there and try not to ruin my upholstery. I’m gonna go change into something less bloodstained and make a quick phone call. I’ll be back in a couple minutes. In the meantime, try to remember anything you can about the man that turned you. Anything he said or did, anything distinctive about him, anything that can help us catch him.”

The black kid raised a hand.

“Yeah? What’s your name, kid?”

“Jonathan, sir. Jonathan Williamson. Are you planning to kill us?”

“You did see that the police were cool with me? Would I have brought you into my home if I was going to kill you? I’m not Norman Bates, kid. If I was going to kill you, I’d have done it at the stadium. No, as long as you follow the rules, you’ll be fine. I’ll explain all that to you, and we’ll get you somewhere safe. But we have to find the man who kidnapped you, or he’s going to keep turning people.”

I noted the look of relief on his face, and really hoped I could teach him how to be, if not a productive member of society, at least a parasite that could live in some level of harmony with his hosts. Then I dashed upstairs to my room to clean up a little and call Sabrina.

Five minutes later, I was speed-showered and dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a Pretty Deadly T-shirt. One thing about being Master of the City, it gave me the funds to get back into collecting comics, and that introduced me to badasses like Kelly Sue DeConnick. I sat on my bed and dialed Sabrina.

She picked up in one ring. “Did you get them?”

“How’s Sean?” I asked at the same time, and we both chuckled. “You first,” I said.

“Did you get the vampires?”

“Yeah, we think we caught them all.”

“Like the world’s worst Pokémon game.”

“Certainly the bloodiest.”

“How many?”

“How many vamps, or how many casualties?”

“Let’s start with victims, then I’ll pretend to give a shit about how many monsters there were.”

“Bobby said there were about thirty DOA. I think most of those were trampled in the panic, but at least ten vampire kills. We . . . had to make sure all the victims stayed dead.”

“Are you sure you got them all? The vampires, I mean.”

“No,” I said. “We couldn’t know for sure. I didn’t get a good count on how many, if any, got away from me in the fight, and I have no idea how many the asshole released into the city. But we did a sweep of the stadium and killed or . . . captured, I guess . . . all the vamps there.”

“What do you mean, you guess?” Her voice took on a hard edge.

“There are four we brought back here. They surrendered, and they weren’t blood-mad anymore, so I couldn’t just murder them.”

“Not like they just murdered those poor people who just wanted to watch a little baseball.”

“Sabrina . . . ,” I started, but she cut me off.

“No, I get it. They woke up starving, and they weren’t in control. But . . . it just doesn’t feel right, you know? That they don’t face some kind of consequences for killing innocents? Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, it does,” I said. “It really does. But there aren’t really consequences for us. There’s dead, or nothing. There is no in-between. ‘Consequences’ are hard. You can’t sentence a vampire to life in prison, because no prison will be able to hold us forever. Eventually somebody will screw up, and then the vamp is loose. And anything else that can be done to us, we just heal from. So it’s tough. And that’s before we even get into the whole level of responsibility thing.”

“Well, the dick that made them is for sure responsible,” Sabrina said.

“And I am for sure going to kill him. Once and for all.” I took a breath. “How’s Fitzpatrick?”

“Pissed. And concussed. He’s going to be fine in a day or two.”

“Yeah, I figured. Between Excalibur and my blood, he should heal without any lasting effects.”

“I’d bet he’s probably fully healed now, but between the doctors and his husband, there’s a whole roomful of mother hens clucking over him right now. So regardless of the fact that after he got a couple of pints of blood and a meal into his body, he felt fine, he’s going to be here for observation for at least another couple of days.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t know Sean was married.”

“Well, since you kinda hated the guy until a day and half ago, I’m not surprised you weren’t exchanging Christmas cards. But yeah, he’s married. Nice guy, a banker or something. Maybe IT for one of the banks. When Sean moved here to be closer to his daughter, Jason got his bosses to relocate him.”

“Is there anybody who moved to Charlotte in the last fifteen years that didn’t come here for a bank job?”

“Nope. But he’s going to be fine. I’ll stick around until the uniform McDaniel was supposed to post gets here, then I’ll be over. I need some sleep.”

“Then just go straight upstairs. It promises to be a long night interrogating these kids.”

“Well get to it. We need to find this son of a bitch before his body count gets any higher.”

“Will do. Tell Sean I hope he feels better. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” She hung up and I flopped backward onto my bed, staring at the ceiling. I expected a certain amount of pain in the ass when I became Master of the City. I figured I’d have to execute bad guys, probably deal with challenges to my leadership, maybe have a couple of exciting coups to quell.

I never thought I’d have five baby vamps in my living room covered in innocent blood, scared out of their minds and wondering how they fit in a world they never knew existed. I never thought I’d have a cop girlfriend and be trying to balance life running an illegal business empire with dating someone in law enforcement. I never thought I’d be trying to balance being a crime lord with being the enforcer of justice.

Of course, way back in the day I never thought I’d be condemned to a life of never walking through the sunshine and perpetually looking like an undernourished scarecrow having a bad hair day, so maybe I just needed to suck it up and go try to save the world, or at least my corner of it. Again.

Internal monologue and pep talk over, I stood up, put on my Batman bedroom slippers, and went downstairs to get all Dark Knight Detective on these kids.