“Yes.”
“Do I ask what flavor, or just let it drop, before you have to threaten me with the old if-I-tell-you-then-I-have-to-kill-you routine?” I tried for a joke, but Shaw didn’t take it that way.
“You’re making a joke. If you can do that, then you don’t get what’s happening.”
“You’ve got three operators dead, one vamp executioner dead and cut up; that is bad, but you didn’t send just three operators in with the marshal, so most of your team got away, Sheriff.”
“They didn’t get away,” he said, and something in his voice made that tight, black pit of fear rise a little higher in my gut.
“But they’re not dead,” I said, “or you’d say so.”
“No, not dead, not exactly.”
“Are they badly hurt?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
“Stop beating the bush to death and just tell me, Shaw.”
“Seven of our men are in the hospital. There’s not a mark on them. They just dropped.”
“If there are no marks on them, why did they drop, and why are they in the hospital?”
“They’re asleep.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You mean comas?”
“The doctors say no. They’re asleep; we just can’t wake them up.”
“Do the docs have any clues?”
“The only thing close to this is those patients in the twenties who all went to sleep and never woke up.”
“Didn’t they make a movie years back about them waking up?”
“Yes, but it didn’t last, and they still don’t know why that form of sleeping sickness is different from the norm,” he said.
“Your whole team didn’t just catch this sleeping thing in the middle of a firefight.”
“You asked what the doctors said.”
“Now, I’m asking what you say.”
“One of our practitioners says it was magic.”
“Practitioners?” I made it a question.
“We’ve got psychics attached to our teams, but can’t call them our pet wizards.”
“So operators and practitioners,” I said.
“Yes.”
“So someone did a spell?”
“I don’t know, but apparently it all reeks of psychic shit, and when you run out of explanations that make sense, you go with what you got.”
“When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” I said.
“Did you just quote Sherlock Holmes at me?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you still don’t get it, Blake. You just don’t.”
“Okay, let me be blunt here. Something about my reaction wasn’t what you expected, so you’re convinced that I don’t get the seriousness of the situation. You’re ex-special teams, which means to you, women are not going to measure up. You’ve called me a beautiful woman, and that, too, makes most cops and military underestimate women. But special teams, hell, you don’t think most other military men are up to your level, or most cops. So I’m a girl; get over it. I’m petite and I clean up well; get over that, too. I’m dating a vampire, the master of my city; so what? It has nothing to do with my job or why Vittorio invited me to come hunt him in Vegas.”
“Why did he run in St. Louis? Why didn’t he run here when he knew we were coming? Why did he ambush our men and not yours?”
“Maybe he couldn’t afford to lose that many of his vampires again, or maybe he’s just decided to make his last stand in your city.”
“Lucky fucking us.”
“Yeah.”
“I called around, talked to some of the other cops you’ve worked with, and some of the other vampire executioners, about you. You want to know why some of them thought this vampire ran in St. Louis?”
“I’m all ears.”
“You, they thought he ran from you. Our Master of the City told me that the vampires call you the Executioner-that they’ve called you that for years.”
“Yeah, that’s their pet name for me.”
“Why you? Why you, and not Gerald Mallory? He’s been around longer.”
“He’s been around years longer than me, but I’ve got the higher body count. Think about it.”
“How can you have the higher body count if he’s been doing this for at least ten years longer than you?”
“One, he’s a stake-and-hammer man. He refuses to go to silver ammo and guns. That means he has to totally incapacitate the vampires before he can kill them. Totally incapacitating a vampire is really hard to do. I can wound one, bring it down from a distance. Two, I think his hatred of vampires makes him less effective when hunting them. It makes him miss clues and not think things through.”