her eyes and smiled a slow, tight spread of lips. She actually tried to move backward, as if ten feet were suddenly too close to me. I smiled a little more, and she made a small sound in her throat, as if she were trying not to whimper, or scream.
"Please," she said, and held her hand up to the officer who was keeping her on her knees. "Please, please, I don't want to see her cut Justin up. Please don't make me watch!"
"Tell us where the vampires are that killed the officers and you don't have to watch," Zerbrowski said.
I had cut through the shirt, just the collar being upright and the way it fitted through the shoulders keeping it closed over the chest - well, that and the blood. The cloth was sticking to that. I laid the scissors down and began to peel the cloth off the wounds, slowly, letting the sound of it sucking away from the skin fill the silence. I knew the sound would be so much louder to the vampire than to the rest of us. I made it last, made it peel and hiss as I pried the cloth out of the drying blood and the cooling flesh. Some of the cloth was actually sucked into the wounds in the chest, riding along on the force of the bullets, so that I used my fingertips to pick the cloth from the wounds. I didn't have to; I usually just pulled the cloth away in one big movement like tearing a Band-Aid off a cut, but I was pretty sure it would bother Shelby the vampire to do it this way. I was right.
"Please, please, don't make me watch this." She held her hands out to Zerbrowski.
"Tell us where they are, honey," he said, "and the nice officers will take you out of here."
"They'll kill me if they know I told," she said.
"We discussed this; they can't kill you if we kill them first," I said, forcing myself to look at the wounds I'd put in the body, rather than at her. I was hoping she'd think I was gazing longingly at the dead chest, and since I wasn't sure my acting was up to looking sexy, since I totally didn't feel that way, I kept my expression down where she couldn't see it.
"You can't kill them all," she said.
"Watch me," I said, and I did look at her then; I let her see my expression, because I knew it was cold, and empty, and yet a smile started across my lips. I knew the smile; I'd seen it in mirrors. It was most unpleasant. It was the smile that I had when I killed, or felt justified in it. It was a smile that left my eyes cold and dead. I wasn't sure why I smiled sometimes when death was on the line, but I did, and it was involuntary, and it was creepy, even to me, so I let the vampire see it. I let her make everything there was to make of it.
She screamed a short, choked sound. Her breath came in a choked sob. "All right, all right, just get me out of here before she... get me out of here! I don't want to watch. Please, don't make me watch." She started to cry, her thin shoulders shaking with the force of it.
"Tell us where they are," I said, "and then the nice officers will take you away from the big, bad executioner." I made my voice low, and deep, with a sort of purr underneath it. I'd used the voice before. It worked both for real sex and for threats. Funny, how some things worked for both.
Shelby gave up her friends. She told us three different daytime retreats. She told us where all the coffins were, all the places where they hid from the sunlight, and where we could find them once the sun rose and they lay helpless.
I asked her one last question. "Are they all as newly dead as the vampires here tonight?"
She nodded, and then wiped pink-stained tears against her jacket with a swipe of her cheek, as if she'd been chained before and knew how to wipe tears away without using her hands. It made me wonder just how horrible her undead life had been up to this point.
"Except for Benjamin, he's older. He's been dead a long time."
"How long?" I asked.
"I don't know, but he's old enough to remember the council in Europe