I DECIDED TO BE cranky when I saw how small the manager’s office was; there would barely be room for Dolph’s and McKinnon’s shoulders, let alone the manager and me. I smiled and told him, “We’ll be right back.” Then I motioned Dolph and McKinnon down the hallway so we wouldn’t be overheard.
“What’s up, Anita?” Dolph asked.
“The room is tiny. I don’t want to be in that tight a space with McKinnon’s charm.”
“You haven’t had another reaction to it,” McKinnon said.
“Because I have very carefully not used any psychic abilities since it went off on me. Some of my psychic abilities are almost automatic, which means I do them without thinking; what happens if I use them while you’re accidentally brushing against me? How much worse would the effect be if you were touching me?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“Then take the charm and lock it in your glove box, and don’t bring it out again while you’re in St. Louis.”
“Is it just too powerful for you to be around, or is it a failure as a defensive tool?” McKinnon asked.
“It’s a small sample, but it stripped me of my control, my protection against vampires. What would happen if you used it on me near a cemetery and I accidentally raised zombies and I couldn’t control them? What if a vampire attacked the three of us and Dolph was depending on my abilities to save our asses, but your charm made me just another victim?”
“Would it do that to a vampire?” Dolph asked.
“You mean make them lose control?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I thought about it before answering. “Jean-Claude doesn’t tease me with his powers like he did just now. We’re getting married, he doesn’t have to use his vampire wiles anymore, so I think the charm used the connection between us to strip us both of some of our control.”
“We were told that it would protect us from a vampire’s secondary powers,” McKinnon said.
“As far as I can tell, all it does is guarantee the vampire will be even more uncontrolled; maybe if it’s less than a master vampire it will do what the makers of the charm advertised, but if the vampire is a master I think it will actually make them more dangerous. Hell, if you take away the gaze, that still leaves them with super strength and speed.”
“No, that’s the gaze, it makes people think they’re faster and stronger.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Shapeshifters are faster and stronger, but vampires have to cheat by using their secondary abilities.”
I looked at Dolph and made a little go-ahead gesture.
“You’re the vampire expert,” Dolph said.
“He’s your friend.”
“I thought we were at least work friends,” McKinnon said.
“How would you feel if I forced you and your wife to harm each other, as an experiment just to see what would happen? Would we still be friends after that?”
Expressions chased across his face like clouds on a windy day as he tried to process, or maybe he was just buying time to frame an answer that would make him the good guy here. That’s what most people do, they reframe things so that they are the hero and not the villain. I hoped McKinnon was better than that.
“If you did it without understanding that it would hurt us, I’d hope I’d listen to you explain and accept a heartfelt apology.”
“I don’t trust you as much as I did before, but skip it, let’s get back to the fact that you are part of a government think tank committee and you all think that vampires are not faster and stronger than human normal. How the hell did the experts on your panel decide that bit of misinformation?”
“I’m not at liberty to share the names of our experts.”
“If it was Gerald Mallory, he hasn’t done anything but morgue stakings in decades. Maybe he doesn’t remember the truth, but if you take this charm into the field and come up against someone who’s not chained down with holy items for a morgue staking, you could strip the vampire’s control away. This magic could turn them back into a killing machine that just slaughters everyone it sees, because you’ve taken their ability to control their hunger for blood away from them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure I’m following you.”
“She means that even if the vampire wasn’t planning to hurt anyone, the charm could force them to attack.”
“We were told the charm just strips away the human mask and reveals the true monster inside.”
“Whoever told you that knew exactly what the charm would do.”
“You can’t know that it wasn’t just an honest mistake, Blake.”
“I bet you a hundred bucks that they knew, and that they believe that the only good vampire is a dead vampire.”
“We would never take advice from someone who thought that,” McKinnon said.
“And they know that, so they’ll keep the worst of their prejudice to themselves, so they can further their agenda.”
“I don’t believe that the people who made this charm understood what it would do.”
“Most witches don’t know that much about vampires, not really; their magic is all about life, so they had to turn to a vampire expert on what went into the charm, right?”
He looked away then, so we wouldn’t see his eyes. I think he was out of steely cop gaze that would hide what he was thinking. That meant I’d made him doubt one or more of the experts on his oversight committee. Good.
“If it’s Gerald Mallory, then he’d do anything to change the laws back to the bad old days when vampires could be killed on sight. He hates them with the kind of hate you see in hardcore white supremacists, or men who despise women at the same time that they’re obsessed with them. It’s that kind of obsessive hatred that I saw in Mallory the last time I worked with him.”
“I’m not admitting that Gerald has ever spoken with our committee, but he’s not very flattering about you either.”
“He’s told me to my face what he thinks of me.”
“I doubt that.”
“He thinks I’m sleeping with the enemy, and that Jean-Claude basically used vampire wiles to seduce me and that I’m not in love with him, I’m just mind-fucked or possessed, or I’ve gone completely over to the other side because he found out I’m a necromancer and that makes me as evil as a vampire.”
“He did not say that to you,” McKinnon said.
“No, he called me fucking coffin bait, fucking fur-banger, whore of Babylon, and an evil slut who betrayed my humanity to be in league with the devil.”
“Did he call you all that in front of witnesses?” Dolph asked.
“Not unless you count the vampire that he was trying to kill, and that was so long ago that the vampire was just glad to live through it all. No way was he going to testify against a vampire hunter, and back then no one would have believed him anyway.”
“How long ago was that?” McKinnon asked.
“God, eight, nine years ago now. I haven’t been invited back to Washington, DC, since then, at least not to hunt vampires.”
“You went to DC to speak in front of two committees. One on zombie rights and one on vampire rights,” Dolph said.
“Yeah, the first one went pretty well, but by the time I was invited to speak about vampires the antivampire lobby had blackened my name so that they decided not to have me speak after all.”
“You never mentioned it to me,” Dolph said.
“You were still anti-supernatural-everything back then, Dolph.”
“I’m sorry that you couldn’t come to me back then.”
“You’ve had me and all my sweeties over to your house. We’re good,” I said, and then I looked at McKinnon. “You and I are not good.”
“What can I do to make this right between us?” he asked.
“Start with taking the charm to your car, and we’ll go from there,” I said.
He just turned on his heel and went for his car. When he was out of earshot, Dolph said, “That charm isn’t just aimed at vampires, Anita.”
“It’s aimed at anyone who works with death magic.”
“I don’t think that McKinnon knew that before he brought it with him,” Dolph said.
“You know him better than I do, but if that’s true then his bosses sure as hell knew.”
“You think they sent him to test vampires out in the field, or you?”
“Both.”
“They used him to get to you,” Dolph said.
“I believe they know exactly where he is and used him like a Trojan horse.”
“Do you think that the Oversight Committee on Supernatural Affairs is trying to find a way past your defenses?”
“I think they’re either covering their bases in case I go rogue someday, or they’re actively working on ways to take Jean-Claude and me down.”
“In case he goes rogue, or do you think that the committee that’s supposed to be working to protect the supernatural citizens of this country is planning to do just the opposite?”
“I don’t know, but you prepare for what your enemy can do, not what they will do.”
“McKinnon is headed back,” Dolph said.
I put a smile back on my face and watched McKinnon walk this way. Was he my enemy or my friend? The fact that I had to ask myself that question was answer enough. I would be friendly with McKinnon, but we weren’t friends anymore.