and we’re still hearing from their daytime lawyers.”
“All potentially true, but, Finnegan, the Master of the City is a rotting vampire. Taking just their heart and head with a shotgun doesn’t kill them, ever. The only reason he didn’t get up and eat your executioner is that it was daylight and he couldn’t rise from the grave, but if he’s as old as most rotters he will rise in late afternoon underground, and definitely at full dark. Worse yet, some of the intact vampires might not rot unless shot up, so you may have an entire crypt of rotters.”
“You make that sound bad.”
“Finnegan, get your people out of there.”
“You helped write the new law that makes us leave the lesser vampires alive when we can prove that it’s the Master of the City gone apeshit,” he said. “Now you’re telling me that it’s going to get my people killed.”
“I’m saying the apeshit Master of the City is still alive, and when it gets dark enough he’ll rise and all his vampires will rise with him and keep slaughtering people. The new law only works if the Master of the City is really, truly dead.”
“I’ll try to clear the scene. I hope you’re wrong.” He hung up.
“Fuck,” I said. “Who’d he say was the executioner on this?”
“Morgan,” Nicky said.
“I’ve worked with him once, unless we have two of them.” I flipped through my contacts praying that the name was in there. I found it and hit the screen. I was praying as the phone dialed. Please, pick up, please pick up.
“Blake, I take it you saw the tape.”
“Morgan, where are you?”
“Atlanta,” he said.
“No, where are you standing.”
“I’m outside the crypt in case some of the little vampires wake up still crazy.”
“Are there still techs down there?”
“For another hour and then we’ll clear it, except for me.”
“Get them out. Get them out, now!”
“I took care of it, Blake. He ain’t getting up.”
“He’s a rotting vampire, Morgan. They don’t die when you destroy the brain and heart. Even sunlight may not do it. Fire is the only certainty and then the ashes need to be scattered over different bodies of flowing water.”
“He didn’t rot until I shot him, Blake. Once they look like a corpse, they’re dead.”
“He didn’t turn into a corpse, Morgan, he rotted. It’s different. Please, just trust me on this. Get your people out of there and flamethrower everything in the crypt.”
“We’re still dragging bodies out of there, Blake. I can’t fry the evidence. We haven’t even started to identify the dead.”
I fought the urge to scream. “Morgan, just humor me. Just pretend I’m right, and at least clear the crypt of personnel, okay? Just do that and we’ll debate the whole flame thing later. Please, God, please, just do this one thing for me.”
“You really think he’s a genuine rotting vampire. Those are really rare in the United States,” he said.
“They are, but just in case, Morgan. It doesn’t hurt to clear out the techs and the cops.”
“All right, but unlike you, I don’t carry a flamethrower as part of my usual vampire-hunting kit, Blake.”
Truth was, neither did I. “Just clear the crypt and call an extermination team.”
“You mean a bug squad.” That was one name for the exterminators who did everything from cockroaches to rogue wererat infestations and ghouls. They were who you called if you found a zombie just wandering down the street, since fire would destroy it and most animators couldn’t put the zombie back without knowing the grave it came from.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ll ask my superiors if I can call them as backup, but they aren’t going to let me burn everything down there. The lesser vampires may wake up sane and fine now that he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead, Morgan.”
“How do you know that?”
I almost said, Because the Lover of Death was looking for his bloodline last night, but I couldn’t share that without explaining things I couldn’t explain to the cops at all.
“If you’re asking me am I a hundred percent sure, I’m not, but I’m ninety-eight percent sure and I wouldn’t have my people down in that hole this late in the day.”
“Rotting vampires rise earlier than most, though they can’t pass for human until full dark because they look like decayed corpses until then.” He sounded like he was quoting. Morgan was one of the newer executioners who had been recruited for the job, and not grandfathered in like most of us. He was part of a new breed of vampire hunter,