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 fuck.
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."
I checked the nameplate and said, "Exactly, Urlrich; if these guys didn't feed, then we're missing the ones who did."
"I don't understand," the