to touch him. It was still way too close if he went apeshit again, but someone was going to have to get that close and I'd picked me for the job. I couldn't have stood there and watched while he hurt someone else, knowing that I'd given him the space to do it. Arrogance had made me uncuff him; guilt made me kneel there and try to get him to hear me.
There was movement behind us. I kept my attention on the vampire in the corner; I knew better than to look away from one danger to another. I trusted the other policemen to have my back. My world had narrowed down to the suspect in the corner. But Dolph spoke low to someone, and then he leaned over me and said, "We found the location, but we've lost contact with the first officers on sight."
"Shit," I whispered. It could be that the officers were having to stay off their radios to search for vampires, or they could be hurt, or dead, or hostages. We were out of time to mess with this vampire; others had our people. I needed him to hear me. I needed him to do what I wanted him to do. "Barney," I said, "hear me." And there was a thread of power in my voice now, a faint vibration of my necromancy. I was a vampire executioner as a job, but I'd started life raising zombies. My psychic gift was with the dead, or the undead. I hadn't meant to, but my desire to control him had found a part of my own natural gifts that might do just that. Was it illegal to use psychic gifts on a suspect? Not after what he'd just done, and not with a fifteen-year-old girl maybe dying at this minute, and at least two officers gone into radio silence. We were out of time, and we needed any help he could give us. The law did allow for psychic force to be used if it would save lives, or if the suspect had proven uncooperative with more normal means. The same new laws that had made it so I couldn't just shoot Barney also allowed me to do things that would have been iffy before they were in place. The law giveth, and the law taketh away.
Barney whimpered, and then his voice came small and almost childlike: "Don't."
"Don't what, Barney?" But my whisper held that echo of power. In the middle of the fight there hadn't been time to think of it, because it took concentration to work with the dead. I could have put the power back in its box, but I wanted him to let me cuff him. I wanted him to talk to me. I wanted it enough that I was willing to go all "witchy" in front of the other cops.
"You aren't my master," he said, "and your master isn't my master. We're free vampires and we won't let you control us."
He was one of the new vampires, ones that didn't want to follow a Master of the City. They wanted to be free like humans were, free to make decisions and be just people, but no matter how many vampires I might love, and protect, what Barney had done in the few minutes he'd been free proved why freedom from the control of the masters was a bad idea. Sometimes you had a bad master and the system went bad, very bad, but you couldn't let people with this level of strength and power out there without a power structure. They needed someone to hold their leashes, because you give most people this kind of power and you find out that they aren't nice people at all; they'd been nice because they were weak. It takes a truly good person to gain power, strength, and mystical abilities and not misuse them. Most people weren't that good, or sometimes they're just too stupid to not hurt someone by accident. Think about waking up one night strong as a superhero. There is a learning curve, and people can get hurt while you learn. How do you balance one section of the population's right to be safe against the freedom of another? We were still struggling for that answer, but today, this moment, I knew my answer. I would take Barney Wilcox's free will in trade for the safety of a fifteen-year-old girl and the officers that his vampire friends were holding hostage. If I could