heart, and the head, right now."
"Better a quick death than stuffed full of flowers and beheaded."
"None of this is for you, Shelby. It's for the bodies."
The glow began to leak out of her eyes. "What bodies?"
"The dead vampires; you know, we have to take the head and heart once a vampire is dead to keep it from rising from the grave."
"Why show me all this, then?"
"Help us find the ones who did the killing and maybe you don't get executed with them, but if you don't help us and they kill again, when you could have helped us stop it..." I motioned at the stakes. "This will be for you."
"If I tell you where they are, they'll kill me."
"Not if I kill them first, Shelby. I'll have a whole team of SWAT with me; we will kill them. They won't ever hurt you, or bully you, again."
"Someone else will bully me; I'm too weak."
"Join the Church of Eternal Life; they have foster groups for child vampires. You can be with others like you, and it's all legal, and you can go to college, hold a job, and have a life."
"To join the Church I have to drink the blood of your master, and then he'll own me. I don't want to be anyone's slave."
"The blood oath is to keep vampires from doing exactly what you did - kill humans. A strong Master of the City can keep his followers from acting on their blood hunger."
"He's too powerful, and so are you, Anita Blake! It's not like a blood oath to a regular Master of the City; you lose your will. You turn us into humans blindly following our beautiful leader and his blood whore!"
I smiled. "Sticks and stones, Shelby; call me all the names you want, but you watched two human police officers murdered in front of you, and did nothing to stop it. Under the law you're just as guilty as the vampires that sank fangs into them, and you will be executed for it. Help us find them, and the new laws may have a loophole for you to slip through, and live."
"I'm already dead, Anita Blake."
"No, no you're not. You're alive. You walk, you talk, you think, you're still you - undead isn't the same thing as dead." I went to the door, opened it, and said, "Bring it in." Two officers brought a black plastic - wrapped body. The face was pale and still showing. It was the vampire that had tried to hide behind the human girl. I'd shot him, and now I'd get to finish the job.
"Lay it down in the middle of the tarp," I said.
The two officers laid the body down where I directed. One of them half stumbled, and an arm flopped out of the plastic, limp as only true death can make it.
Shelby gasped, and I thought that one might be genuine.
I unrolled the plastic and looked down at the dead vampire. The wounds in his upper and middle chest had dried black around the edges, but the blood was still red enough that it had darkened his button-down shirt to shades of crimson, brown, and then the last color of most blood - black. They can say that death is the big sleep, but a dead body doesn't act like it's asleep; even the unconscious don't have the loose-boned fall of the freshly dead. Some vampires go into rigor immediately, but this one wasn't old enough for that; he was just like any dead body that was less than two hours old, though the blood wouldn't pool in the body as it did in a human.
"This is dead, Shelby; whatever you are, it's not this."
I got the coveralls out of the other bag, the one that held the equipment I used most often, rather than the government-sanctioned stuff. The government didn't tell me I had to wear the coverall, but then the people making the laws had never had to do my job. They'd never found out how much blood and mess comes out of a body when you remove its head and heart. Until you've been covered in that much blood and gore, you just don't understand. Coveralls kept the dry-cleaning bills down and helped me sleep better at night. There's only so many times you can scrub blood out from under your fingernails before you start going all Lady Macbeth and stop believing the blood is ever gone.
I braided my hair, something that Nathaniel had taught me