Zerbrowski had picked the vampire he thought was the weakest link, and I trusted his judgment, but it wouldn't have been the prisoner I would have chosen. The vampire was one of the ones that looked like she should be asking Chad to go to the junior high dance. She was thin, body barely starting to have a figure, hands small and very childlike. Her yellow hair was cut short and badly, in one of those feathered cuts that were popular somewhere in the seventies, but her hair was too thick for the cut, so that it didn't quite work. Did she know the haircut looked bad on her, that it made her thin face look even thinner, more childlike, rather than less? If she did, why didn't she cut it? Because if she was like most vampires, she couldn't grow her hair out; once cut, it would never grow longer again. She was dead, frozen forever at that point. Her almost bird-thin arms and legs had stopped at one of the most awkward moments, where you've just hit that growth spurt, and the legs and arms are gangly and your balance is bad, and that was it - forever.
Jean-Claude and some of his vampires could put on muscle, grow their hair out, but I'd learned just a few months ago that it was because he was powerful enough to do it. He was the Master of the City of St. Louis, which meant his power helped all the vampires blood-oathed to him in his territory rise at dusk. His will, his power; and with his death some of them would die at dawn and never rise again, or that was the theory. I knew two vampires that had killed the head of their bloodline and survived. I'd been told that Jean-Claude took power from his lesser vampires and shared it with those he valued. The person who told me had been an enemy, but still... I had asked him about it. His answer, "I am Master of the City, ma petite; that comes with a certain amount of power."
"You told me once that you wasted power to grow your hair out for me, because I like men with long hair, but Asher's hair is longer, too, and the vampire dancers at your clubs have put on extra muscle in the gym. Are you sharing power with them, too?"
"Oui."
"Do you take it from the other vampires?"
"I gain power from every vampire that is mine, but I do not steal from them. Individually they do not have enough power to grow a single hair upon their heads, or add an ounce of muscle to their backs. I do not change their level of power, but I gain from it, and I can share that gain with those I choose to."
So, like a lot of things about vampires, it was true and it wasn't. The girl vampire prisoner's name was Shelby, and she wasn't one of Jean-Claude's chosen few; she was like most vampires stuck with how she'd died - she'd been about fourteen, a young, skinny, barely adolescent girl. None of the new manacles and shackles fit her, so she was in regular cuffs, chained to her waist, but none of the ankle shackles fit her. She was just too small. Which meant she potentially had enough strength to pop the chains, just as the one back at the police station had done, but his body had been six feet of muscled grown man, and Shelby was a very petite, very fragile-looking young girl. I was hoping that meant she didn't have the strength to break free, especially since I was about to scare her within an inch of her undead life.
She watched me with huge eyes, fear plain in them. The older vampires could hide almost any emotion behind centuries of practice, but when you're only about thirty years dead, you're just like someone who's that age, except you're dead and trapped in the body you wanted to leave behind in junior high. Being a vampire doesn't automatically give you great acting abilities. Just like it didn't give you instant martial arts skills, money, or sex appeal, or make you great in bed - that came with practice, and some vampires never learned how to manage money. Shelby the vampire didn't look like she'd gained much from being undead, or maybe it was a trick? Maybe she was playing to her pitiful exterior, and the first chance she got she'd kill us all? Maybe. One of the scariest vampires I'd ever met had looked like a twelve-year-old girl - she'd been a monster and over a thousand years old.
Urlrich had come with me, carrying the second bag, the one I kept for more official executions. When I was on a vampire hunt I killed them any way I could, and didn't worry about the mess, but when the body is already "dead" and we're using property that belongs to a taxpaying citizen, we have to mind the mess. I unzipped the first bag and took out the big folded tarp with its one plastic-coated side. Urlrich helped me spread it on the floor.
Shelby the vampire whispered, "Please, don't"; the soft words echoed in the big room. It was going to be great acoustics for screams.
I knelt by the bag and started getting out the stuff that the law said vampire executioners had to carry but I almost never used. Since the main point of all of this was intimidating the witness/suspect, the contents of the bag were great visuals. The stakes were first. They were in a plastic carrier that folded over and tied; each of the six stakes had a slot where it rode so it wasn't rattling around in the bag stabbing me every time I rummaged around in it. I unfolded the plastic and took each stake out, laying them bare on the plastic in a sinister row of very pointy bits. I almost never used stakes on anything, but the ones I carried were very sharp hard wood, because if I did need them, I wanted them to be ready. You're only as good as your equipment sometimes, so I made sure mine was good.
The girl vampire whimpered, and said, "You can't do this. I haven't hurt anyone."
"Tell that to the officers your friends killed," I said.
She looked up at the uniformed officers on either side of her, raising her small hands as far as the waist shackle would allow. "Please, I didn't know they would kill anyone. We would have brought the girl over, but she wanted to be a vampire until the last minutes. She got scared. We all got scared."
"Who's we?" I asked.
She looked at me again, eyes wide, her fear paling the color to an almost white gray. "No," she whispered.
"No, what?" I asked, and drew out a slender black leather cover. It was tied closed like the stakes carrier had been. I untied it and slowly, lovingly, unwrapped a shiny silver hand saw, the kind they used in surgery for amputations. I'd tried to use it once, and hadn't liked the feel and sound of the blade on the spine. It was supposed to make decapitating the bodies easier, and the law said I had to carry it. I'd never used it for taking the head off a vampire; I never planned on using it, but the sight of it made the girl vampire scream. One brief, piteous sound that she muffled quickly, rolling her lips under, biting on them, as if she expected to be punished for calling out. The automatic gesture made me wonder what her undead life had been like, and how much abuse had gone into it. She'd died when vampires were still illegal in this country, able to be killed on sight, by anyone, just for being undead, so she'd had to hide for decades. It's hard to hide as a child vampire; you usually need an adult to help you pretend. What price had she paid for that pretending?
Did I feel sorry for her? Yes. Would it change what I was about to do? No. The days when my feelings affected my job that badly were long past. Now, if my feelings affected my job it was more serious, but happened less often.
Urlrich knelt down beside me, shifting his equipment belt to one side. He favored one knee as if it were stiff. He spoke low. "I'm not enjoying this like I thought I would."
"She can hear you," I said.
He looked startled, then glanced at the girl and back at me. "Their hearing is that good?"
I nodded and drew out a clear plastic jar of pink rosebuds and red petals, all dried and ready to be made into potpourri.
"Roses, what's that for?" he asked.
"To stuff in the mouth."
"I thought you stuffed garlic in a vampire's mouth."
"You can, and most do, but the garlic makes the bag smell, and the roses don't, and they both work just as well." What I didn't say out loud was that I'd never stuffed a piece of anything into a decapitated vampire head, or into a dead vampire when it was whole. Once I severed the spine, I might burn the body parts separately and throw the ashes into different bodies of running water if the vamp was really old, or really powerful, but as far as I could tell the whole stuffing-crap-in-the-mouth didn't do a damn thing to keep them from rising from the grave. The powers that be had added it as a step in the morgue stakings, but the only thing I'd come up with was that it was quicker and less messy to stuff the garlic, or roses, in the mouth than to stake them. Maybe, if you were close to dawn, the vampire wouldn't be able to bite until they got the plants out of their mouth, or maybe they'd choke? I had no idea, but as far as I knew it didn't do anything metaphysical to the bodies of vampires. But it did make the vampire in the room with us start to cry.