"They haven't talked."
"Only to ask for a lawyer. A lot of them ended up dead like yours."
"Humans Against Vampires, or Humans First, maybe," I said.
"Would either of them hit shifters?"
My stomach clenched into a nice tight knot. "What do you mean?"
"A man walked into a bar in the loop with a submachine gun with silver ammo."
For a minute I thought Dolph meant the Lunatic Cafe, Raina's old restaurant, but it wasn't an openly lycanthrope hangout. I tried to think what was up there that was openly shifter. "The Leather Den?" I made it a question.
"Yeah," he said.
The Leather Den was the only bar in the country, to my knowledge, that was a hangout for sadomasochistic g*y men who happened to be shapeshifters. It was a triple threat to any hatemonger. "Geez, Dolph, if it wasn't happening with everything else, I'd say it could be almost any right-wing fruitcake. Did you get the machine gunner alive?"
"Nope," Dolph said. "The survivors ate him."
"Bet they didn't," I said.
"They used teeth to kill him, Anita. That's eating him in my book."
I'd seen shapeshifters eat people, not just attack them, but since most of those were illegal kills, i.e. murders, I let Dolph win the fight. He was still wrong, but hard to show him my proof without getting people in trouble.
"Whatever you say, Dolph."
He was quiet for long enough that I had to say, "You still there?"
"Why do I think you're holding back on me, Anita?"
"Would I do that?"
"In a heartbeat," he said.
His asking about the date had triggered some vague memory. "There is something about today's date."
"What is it?" he asked.
"I don't know--something. Do you need me to come in?"
"Since almost all this shit is preternatural-related, every uniform and his K9 is asking for us. So yeah, we need everybody in the field today. They've been hitting the monster isolation wards of most of the major hospitals."
"Jesus, Stephen," I said.
"He's all right, they all are," Dolph said. "A guy with a 9mm tried for them. The cop at the door got hit."
"He all right?" I asked.
"He'll live." Dolph didn't sound happy, and it wasn't just the hitter or a wounded cop.
"What happened to the shooter?" I asked.
He laughed, an abrupt, harsh sound. "One of Stephen's 'cousins' threw him up against a wall so hard, his skull cracked. Nurses say the shooter was about to put a round right between the uniform's eyes when he was... stopped."
"So Stephen's cousin saved the cop's life," I said.
"Yeah," Dolph said.