The other vampire half sat up, trying to push farther away from me. He gasped and fell back on the bricks, his face contorted in pain. He was suddenly doing much less well.
"Shit," I said, "bullet's still in there, and he's shifted it." The girl vampire's flame wavered as my emotions did, and her spark was a candle in a strong wind, almost out, but now his was guttering in the "wind."
I yelled, "Medic!"
One of them was running our way with his case, leaving his partner to keep the IV going for another victim. Seconds, just seconds, minutes, and there'd be more help.
I grabbed the boy's cold hand. I shoved power into him, and he yelled, "No! No, I won't be another of your slaves!" I was so startled, I let go of him.
He settled back into the bricks, coughing blood the color of black syrup. The EMT hesitated between the two. "Girl, she's fading faster." He took my word for it, kneeling down, beginning to work on the girl. He got one of the uniforms to help hold things. I was left with the man, a boy physically, maybe seventeen when he had died the first time.
"Let me help you."
"No." He coughed harder, and it looked like it hurt.
I put more energy his way, but he screamed, "NO!"
I couldn't concentrate on both of them, because my emotions were getting in the way. I fought to hold the girl's spark steady as the IV went in, and they began to put something in her veins that would help more than my power. I offered my wrist toward his face. "Feed then, if you won't take energy."
"Then I'll be bound to Jean-Claude."
The police didn't really understand how deeply tied I was to Jean-Claude with the whole human-servant thing, so I had to be careful what I said next. "Would you rather die?"
"Yes." He coughed again, and writhed in pain as Smith tried to keep him still.
"Why?" I asked.
When he could speak past the pain, his voice came thick with the blood spilling from his lips, "Freedom; we don't want to belong to a master. We want to be free, not belong to another council. They're gone; let them stay gone."
The girl's spark clicked into place, the plasma keeping her "alive." I sent all my energy into him. His flame flared so that I had to fight not to close my eyes against the brightness that was all inside my head.
"No." He rolled on his side, and the blood drained faster from his mouth. "I refuse medical or metaphysical aid. I refuse."
The EMT said, "I don't know what you're doing to him psychically, but you've got to stop now. He's refused aid; legally you have to stop."
"He'll die," I said.
"I'm already dead, I'm a vampire."
"You're not dead," I said, "you're undead; it's not the same."
"I die for the cause." His voice sounded rough, almost painfully deep. A gout of black blood welled up and spilled from his mouth.
"What cause?" I asked.
"Freedom," and it was the last thing he said before his eyes glazed over; his body gave one last convulsive movement and I watched his flame flicker and go out, as if some great breath had blown it away.
I grabbed his hand, and it was too late to save him, but not too late to feel him go. It didn't feel the same as a human dying in my arms; there was a difference to what went out of a vampire when they died. Was it a difference of souls? Were they evil? Were they lost like the Church maintained? I didn't know the answers to any of that. All I knew was he wasn't much older than his physical body looked, and he'd forced us to kill him, and I didn't understand why.
Chapter Seven
IT WAS AN ongoing police investigation, but these vampires had been willing to die rather than risk being in Jean-Claude's power. If you're willing to die to avoid being part of someone's power structure, it's only a small step to being willing to kill to destroy that power structure. I normally don't share information on investigations with my boyfriends, but... if I didn't share and something bad happened to Jean-Claude, or one of my other lovers, or friends, I'd never forgive myself. They could have my badge, if it was a choice between losing it or losing one of the people I loved.
Was I trying to justify what I was about to do? Yes. Was I going to do it anyway? Yes.
I moved to the side of the courtyard, out of the way of the crime scene techs and the dozens of extra cops that always seem to flock to a murder scene. I found a little piece of alley between two of the buildings. Admittedly the "alley" was big enough to drive a beer wagon through, back in the day when the brewery was built for just that, but it was shadowed, and away from everyone. I leaned my shoulder against the cool bricks and had what privacy I was likely to get.
I didn't have to pick up a phone and call Jean-Claude; all I had to do was drop the shields I kept in place between him and me. It was like opening a door that I kept bolted shut, because without real effort to block it, we invaded each other's emotions; thoughts, even physical sensations could be shared. At the most extreme the boundaries between where one of us ended and the other began blurred; it got confusing as hell, and frankly, scary as hell. I didn't like being that far into another person's mind, body, and heart, and I sure as hell didn't want him seeing that far into me.
But it didn't mean that all I had to do was unlock that "door" in my head, and then knock on the shields that kept me from falling too far into Jean-Claude's head, because we'd found that it wasn't enough for only one of us to block. If only one of us did it, then we got echoes back and forth at odd moments. Mostly strong emotions, strong sensations, but not always; it could be very random.
Jean-Claude opened to me, and I knew he was sitting in his office at Guilty Pleasures. I could feel the sweat on his skin as he wiped his na**d upper body down with a towel. He'd danced, which was rare, since he was owner and manager of the club. On the nights when he danced, the club would be full to bursting with women and men who wanted to see the sexiest vampire in St. Louis take off some of his clothes onstage. He never stripped down as far as his other dancers. Nothing as common as a G-string for my main squeeze, but he had some pants with enough lacings and holes that they didn't hide much more. I'd learned that most of the time the more dominant personalities liked to keep more clothes on, and the submissive ones were more comfy getting naked. The days when Jean-Claude had been anyone's submissive little bloodsucker were years in the past. Outside the bedroom neither he nor I was very fond of stripping down, or at least not first.
He looked down the line of that long, lean, finely muscled body, so I could see that the leather pants were the ones with the very open ties that went from waist to ankle, so that it was more like he had the fronts and the backs of the pants on, but the sides were sort of missing-in-action. They were mostly the white, perfect skin of his long legs revealed through the black laces of the leather.
Just his looking down his body, so that I could see, tightened things low in my body and made me have to let out a deep, shaking breath. I even put a hand out to steady myself against the cool bricks of the wall. Jean-Claude had affected me that way almost from the moment I'd seen him.
He spoke to the empty office, "Ma petite, I love that you react to me so."
I whispered, my face close to the bricks, "You just got offstage; everyone reacted to you that way."
"But that is the lust of strangers, that first flush of desire where all is possibilities and fantasy. To have someone react as you do after seven years of being together, that means more."
"I can't imagine anyone ever not reacting to you like that," I said.
He laughed, and it was that touchable, caressing sound, as if his laughter spilled down my skin, underneath my clothes, and touched all the naughty places.
"Stop that," I said, "I'm still working."
"You do not usually contact me until after work. What is wrong?" We had been dating long enough for him to understand that when I was on the job, I was a Marshal, not anyone's girlfriend. Other men had had a problem with that division of mind-set; not him. Jean-Claude understood compartmentalizing your life, your emotions, and your people. Vampires that are successful at living for hundreds of years are the ultimate compartmentalizers. They have to be, or they'd go crazy. You can't dwell too much on the bad stuff, because after a few lifetimes, there's too much of it. I had found enough bad stuff in just one lifetime that I'd had to do it; I couldn't imagine nearly six hundred years' worth.