"Come on, Ray, let's go for a walk." Zerbrowski touched his arm, tried to get him to move away from the bodies and the vampires, and me.
Billings, whose first name was apparently Ray, jerked back from the touch and stalked toward the chained and kneeling vampires. They reacted like humans, recoiling, faces showing fear. God, they were all so recently dead that it was like watching human faces.
One of the uniforms on guard stepped in front of him, a little unsure, but trying. "Lieutenant..."
Billings pushed him out of the way hard enough that the smaller officer stumbled. His hand went to his baton, but he couldn't use it on a lieutenant, and with five inches of height and at least fifty pounds of muscle in Billings's favor, short of harsh physical measures the officer was out of options. Fuck.
Billings grabbed one of the closest prisoners in his big hands and dragged him to his feet. It was one of the teenage boys, and Billings didn't believe he was a kid any more than I did. I yelled, "Billings!" If he heard me, he didn't show it. Zerbrowski yelled, "Ray!" There was other yelling, but he didn't seem to hear any of us. His big arm came back, fist cocked, and I was just suddenly there, grabbing his arm. I don't know who was more startled that I'd managed to get there in time to stop the blow - him, or me. I was fast enough to get there before he hit the prisoner, but I wasn't fast enough to get in front of the punch, and I didn't weigh enough to stop him from swinging. I was airborne as I held on to him, moving with the force of his swing the way small children swing on their father's arms. I threw his balance off, so that he didn't hit the boy. He let go of the boy, who fell to the floor, unable to catch himself in the chains. Billings turned, with me still dangling from his arm. His other hand grabbed a handful of my hair as if he meant to fling me across the room, and I just reacted. I let myself do what I'd been tempted to do since the fine, red burn of his rage touched me - I ate his anger. I sipped it through the muscled bunch of his arm under my grip, through the twist of his fingers in my hair, through the bulk of his body, so big and solid beside my so much smaller one. I drank down his anger as he breathed heavy and loud, through the pounding of his heart, the pulse and beat of his blood, and as I swallowed the thick, red fire of his rage, I smelled his skin so close: sweat, and the scent of his fear, which was what lay under all that anger. Beyond that I smelled his blood beating just under the bitter sweetness of his anger, so that Billings was like a piece of cupcake with dark bittersweet chocolate icing that could be licked away, to the warm, moist cake, and then the hot, liquid center where the sweetest, thickest chocolate lay waiting like some hidden treasure that would make the anger even tastier. All I had to do was bite through that sweet, slightly salty skin of his wrist that was just above my mouth, that beating pulse so close to my hands, where they encircled his arm.
His hand let go of my hair, and he lowered me to the ground. His eyes were open wide; his face tried to frown as if he were struggling to remember something. He looked confused as he set me gently on the floor.
"Where are we?" he asked.
I was still holding his arm, though now it was more like holding hands than holding on. "We're at the old brewery," I said, and I didn't like that he didn't know where he was; it made me wonder what else he didn't remember. What had I done to him? I'd fed on anger before and never had anyone forget things.
He wrapped his big hand around one of my small ones, and blinked at the vampire that was crumpled at his feet. "Why are these people shackled?"
Jesus, he didn't remember they were vampires, which meant... "Lieutenant Billings, what's the last thing you remember?"
He frowned at me, and the effort of concentration was visible on his face and in the pressure of his hand, tense around mine. His eyes were a little scared, and he just shook his head. Shit.
Zerbrowski was there with Smith and some uniforms at his back. "Ray," Zerbrowski said, "we need to go for a walk."
"A walk?" Billings made it a question.
"Yeah," he said, and touched Billings's arm where he was still holding my hand.
Billings just nodded, but he didn't let go of me.
Zerbrowski pulled on his arm, just a little, to get him to come along, and Billings moved, but he also kept my hand in his. "Can she come with us?"
"Not right now," Zerbrowski said, and he looked at me; the look said, clearly, what had I done to him? I shrugged, and I knew he understood my expression, too. He might even believe that I didn't know what I'd done to the big lieutenant.
Billings was reluctant to let go of my hand, and that wasn't good either. I'd done more than feed on his anger, and way more than I'd intended.
Zerbrowski managed to get Billings to let go of me and go with him, but he mouthed, Later. We'd talk later, I knew we would. Double shit.
The vampire on the floor said, "Thank you."
I looked down at him. His eyes were blue-gray, grayer at the moment. His short blond hair was almost shaggy, as if when it was a little longer it would be wavy, and was struggling to do it even short, so that his hair looked messy when it wasn't exactly. The hair seemed too big for his face or his face too thin for the thick hair. His jean jacket and rock band T-shirt untucked over jeans and jogging shoes made him look like a hundred other teenage boys, except for the odd haircut, and the strangely too-thin face. I realized it seemed hungry, as if he hadn't been eating enough, and then I realized what it was; he hadn't fed tonight. He was so recently dead that his skin hadn't lost the human tan he'd died with, so he didn't look too pale, but I could feel that he hadn't fed on blood tonight. This one, at least, hadn't had a piece of the cop we'd found eaten by dozens of fangs.
I looked past him to the other kneeling vampires and I felt their hunger. None of them had fed tonight. They were all hungry, and they were all very recently dead, their skins still kissed with the sun. Fresh-risen vampires could look like everything from corpse-like to nearly human. The more powerful the vampire that brought you over, the more human you could look, depending on the bloodline that your master descended from. Whoever had brought these guys over was powerful, very powerful. The vampire that had been holding the girl hadn't been, not even close, and all the vampires were hungry. I could feel it; in fact, I'd been picking it up without realizing it. It had made me feed too strongly on Billings. That shouldn't have been able to happen unless someone connected to Jean-Claude had made them. Was their master being of Jean-Claude's bloodline enough, or had one of our people fully blood-oathed to us done this horrible thing? And it was horrible. Six of the surviving vampires were teens, or younger, tweens. They were all children, all too young for that secondary growth spurt. They'd all been brought over before they finished puberty. It was forbidden to bring children over, and their faces staring up at me were all borderline, and all recently dead. Fuck, and double f**k.
I looked beyond the kids in front and found that the grown-ups weren't much better. Some of the women looked like they should be baking cookies for scout meetings and packing for family vacations, not kneeling here in cuffs with fangs. Some of the people were a little out of shape or overweight. It was a myth that being a vampire made you thin. Some low-level vampires stayed the same size they were at death, frozen in whatever shape they'd been forever, so if you were going to become a vampire you should drop that extra few pounds first. Some lines of vampires could change their body after death. I'd seen them put on more muscle in the gym, but I wasn't sure how much they could change after they were dead. Had these people chosen to be vampires, or had they been forced? If forced, then it was a truly horrible crime. I'd cheerfully kill the vampire that made them.
Then my metaphysics got out of the way of my cop brain, and I realized I was being stupid, distracted by the metaphysics - which was why the cops had started partnering one normal with a supernormal, so you had a mundane double check. Fuck!
I turned from the vampires and hurried to the knot of uniforms with Smith. "The vampires are all hungry! They haven't fed tonight."
One uniform looked at me, with all the cynicism you gain in police work. He was about forty pounds too heavy around the middle, but his eyes held the years of experience that can make up for speed and athleticism if you paired him with a rookie who could run. "They have to have fed. You saw what they did to Mulligan."
Smith said, "If Anita says they haven't fed, she'll be right. She knows the undead."