It was like magic; one moment I was on the floor, the next slamming low into Hermes's body, driving with everything I had. It was like a giant hand smashed him backward. There was a sharp crack, crunching sounds, and a woman's scream. I had a moment to feel Hermes's body give under my push, saw a pale arm sticking out behind him, and then there were men at my back, hands grabbing Hermes's rifle, grabbing him. I was bringing my rifle up to find the body that went with that pale arm when another rifle barrel appeared in my line of sight. I dropped to my knee and turned my head just as the rifle sounded so loud next to my head that I was deafened.
I'd protected my eyes from the muzzle flash, but my ears behind the special earplugs had been on their own. The inside of my head was a mix of strange quiet and muffled-almost-noise. My head rang with the nearness of the shot, and I fought to look around and see what was happening.
The vampire's head was gone, blown away by Montague's bullet. Her body was smashed into the wall, in a crumpled outline like a cartoon. I could see her chest wound clearly now and knew part of what went wrong. The wound was too high and far to the left. Yeah, someone had shot her chest open, but the heart had been missed. There was a larger outline around her body, and I think it had been from Hermes hitting the wall.
Hermes was on the bloody bed with two of the other men on top of him, using twist ties on his wrists. If the vamp wasn't dead, then the mind-fuck was still happening. Montague was bending over me. He was holding my arm and probably saying something, but I couldn't hear him. It was like all sound was on the other end of some cotton-filled hallway, echoes, bits, but nothing I could actually understand.
He ripped off his face mask, and I could see his mouth move. I recognized my name but could only shake my head and try to shrug through all the equipment. I raised a hand and waved it next to my ear, shaking my head at the same time.
I caught him mouthing, "Sorry." He pulled me to my feet, and I let him do it. He screamed next to my ear, "Are you hit?"
Hit, not hurt; it meant shot, or hurt more than just partially deafened. I shook my head. He left me standing there and started using twist ties on the wrists of some of the dead vampires. It was standard to bind everything in a house, even the dead, just in case dead wasn't as dead as it appeared. They'd taken Hermes out of the room, but Hill was kneeling at the foot of the bed. Oh, shit, Brice. Please, God, don't let him be dead his first night out.
Hill was putting pressure on Brice's shoulder, but he was sitting up, blinking - alive. Yay, f**king yay! The distant wail of sirens made it through the lack of clear sound. My hearing was coming back, and I started to get snatches of sound almost as soon as I thought it.
"Ribs broken," and I turned to look down at Hill and Brice.
Brice's voice came tinny, but clearish. "Thanks for saving my... but did you have to..."
I finally got that he was grateful I'd saved him from getting shot in the chest, but that the force of the "save" had probably broken some ribs. I called him an ungrateful baby. We laughed, he winced, and then two men in different uniforms came in with a stretcher and equipment. The medics were here; my job was done. It wasn't my job to heal the sick, only to make the dead lie down and stop moving.
I looked at the bloody bed, the gory pile of sleeping bags beside Brice and Hill. I'd done my job. I moved out of the room and gave the EMTs room to do theirs.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
IF I'D BEEN on my own, or just with another Preternatural Branch Marshal, I could have gone home, but working with SWAT meant that I had to give my version of events, since we had wounded officers.
I sat at the little table, huddled over my umpteenth cup of really bad coffee, feeling the dried blood on my pants crinkle as I shifted my weight in the hard metal chair. Two men in nice clean suits sat across from me, asking the same questions for the dozenth time. I was beginning to resent them, just a little.
Detective Preston said, "How did Officer Hermes get his leg broken?"
I raised my eyes from the tabletop to look at him. He was tall, thin, balding, and wore glasses that were too small and round for his long angular face. "Are you asking the same questions over and over because you think you'll wear me down and I'll tell a different story, or do you guys just have nothing better to do?"
I rubbed my fingers across my eyes. They felt gritty, and I was tired.
"Ms. Blake..."
I looked up then, and I knew it wasn't a friendly look. "Marshal, it's Marshal Blake, and the fact that you keep forgetting that is either deliberate, or you're just an ass**le; which is it? Is it a tactic, or are you just rude?"
"Marshal Blake, we need to understand what happened so we can keep it from happening again."
The second detective cleared his throat. We both looked at him. He was older, heavier, as if he hadn't seen the inside of a gym in a decade or more. His white hair was cut short and precise to his soft face. "What I don't understand, Marshal, is how you moved fast enough and with enough force to break the ribs on both Marshal Brice and Officer Hermes, and break Hermes's leg? Why did you attack your own men?"
I shook my head. "You know the answer to all of that."
"Humor me."
"No," I said.
They both sort of stiffened in their chairs. Owens, the shorter, rounder one, smiled. "Now, Marshal Blake, it's just procedure."
"Maybe, but it's not my procedure." I pushed back my chair and stood up.
"Sit back down," Preston said.
"No, I am a federal officer, so you guys aren't the boss of me. If I were SWAT, I might have to sit here and take this, but I'm not, so I don't. I've answered all the questions, and the answers aren't going to change, so..." I waved at them and started for the door.
"If you ever want to work with SWAT again, you will sit here as long as we want you to sit here, and you'll answer any question we ask," Preston said.
I shook my head, and smiled.
"I fail to see the humor," Owens said.
"Last I heard, Brice and Hermes are both going to heal up just fine."
Preston stood up, using that tall, gangly height to look down on me. I so didn't care. "Hermes is over six feet tall, and you shoved him into a wall, left a f**king imprint of his body, and shoved a vampire halfway through the wall by throwing Hermes into her. That's not standard operating procedure, Blake. We want to understand what happened."
"You have my blood tests somewhere. I'm sure that'll help you figure it all out."
"You carry six different kinds of lycanthropy, but you don't shapeshift, which is a medical impossibility."
"Yeah, I'm just a medical marvel, and I'm taking my marvelous ass home."
"Which home?" Owens said.
I looked at him, eyes narrowing. "What?"
"Your house, or the Circus of the Damned and the Master of the City of St. Louis; which home are you going to tonight?"
"Circus of the Damned tonight, not that it's any of your business."
"Why there tonight?" he asked.
I was tired, or I wouldn't have answered. "Because we're scheduled to sleep there tonight."
"Who are we?" Owens asked, and something about the way he said it made me suspect that it was my personal life more than my professional life they were after.
I shook my head. "I don't owe you my personal life, Detective Owens."
"There are people on the force who believe your personal life compromises your loyalties."
"No one who's ever put their shoulder next to mine and gone into a dangerous situation with me questions my loyalty. No one who went in to that house today with me questions my loyalty, and frankly that's all I care about it."
"We can recommend that you are too dangerous and unpredictable to work with SWAT here in St. Louis," Owens said.
I shook my head, shrugged. It was easier to do now that I wasn't in the vest and all the weapons. "You're going to do whatever the f**k you want to do. Nothing I say will make a damn bit of difference. You've obviously decided to use my sexual orientation against me." I said it that way deliberately; I knew the rules, too.
"We haven't questioned your sexual orientation, Marshal Blake," Owens said.
"I'm polyamorous, which means loving more than one person, and what I heard was you saying that the fact that I wasn't white-bread, missionary-position monogamous compromised my loyalty. Isn't that what they used to say about homosexual officers, too?"