other officer dead with a host of vampire bites on his torn and bloody clothes. They'd take bite impressions of the surviving vampires, and if their bite marks matched the wounds it was an automatic death sentence. They'd be morgue stakings, which meant they'd die at dawn, be chained down, hung with holy objects, staked and beheaded while they were "dead" to the world. They were already caught, so there was no need for a hunt. I wondered if they understood that they were as good as dead; I doubted it, or they wouldn't have given up. They'd have fought, right? I mean if you're dying anyway, wouldn't you go out fighting?
Once we had more police on site than we knew what to do with, I found a spare room to change and put on all my vampire hunting gear. I trusted Zerbrowski to alert me in case the captured vampires got out of hand, but I had to change in order to keep the Preternatural Endangerment Act in effect. Another U.S. Marshal of the Preternatural Branch had ended up on trial for murder because he invoked the act, but then didn't change into his gear when he had the opportunity. The idea behind the act is that the Marshal can, in effect, create his own warrant of execution on the fly in the middle of the action. The act came into law after lives were lost because several Marshals who had been trying to get a warrant of execution, but hadn't been granted one yet, had hesitated to kill vampires for fear of being brought up on charges. They could have faced serious charges, or at least lost their badges, for killing legal citizens who just happened to be vampires without some judge telling them it was okay. With the vampires shooting at us, and a hostage, we would probably have been in the clear on the shootings, eventually, but while the investigation was ongoing we might have had to turn in our badges and guns, which meant that I wouldn't have been able to do any monster hunting or executions for the duration of the investigation.
There weren't enough Marshals in the Preternatural Branch to spare us every time we had to kill someone; it was, after all, our job. But more than that, the Preternatural Endangerment Act covered the police with me just like a warrant of execution. As long as I invoked, and was with the police, then it was green-light city for all the bad guys. They'd tried to enact it so that only the vampire executioner, personally, could kill without a warrant, but that had made local police reluctant to be backup for the Marshals, and since most of us work solo a lot, that got people killed, too. Law is almost always made by people who will never see that law in action in a real-world situation; it makes it interesting.
One of the first cases to test the use of the act in the field had come down to the fact that the Marshal involved had not put on all his gear, which he was legally forced to wear once he was actively hunting monsters with a warrant of execution in effect. The lawyers had successfully argued that if the Marshal had truly believed the situation merited a warrant of execution, then why hadn't he geared up appropriately once he had time and access to his gear? He obviously hadn't felt it was the same as a real warrant of execution; he had simply invoked the act so he could play Wild West and kill everything in the room. The police with him had also been charged, but were declared free before the trial started, because they had acted in good faith, believed the Marshal's judgment to be sound, and didn't have the preternatural expertise to make any other choice. The Marshal had been found guilty and the case was in appeals, but he was in a cell while the lawyers argued.
It did mean that I always had a change of clothes with me - pants, T-shirt, socks, jogging shoes, underwear, and bra. The undies were for those moments when I got enough blood on me that it soaked my clothes to the skin. I had a coverall, too, but that was more for official morgue stakings. I put the protective vest on over the T-shirt, because otherwise it rubbed. The vest had MOLLE attachments, because the weapons came next. The 9mm Browning BDM