"I'm alive, and she's not dead. The vampire didn't even get a scratch. It worked out all right."
I pulled out onto Olive and started creeping towards 270. We needed to head north towards St. Charles. Larry had an apartment over there. It was about a twenty-minute drive, give or take. His apartment looked out over a lake where geese nested in the spring and congregated in the winter. Richard Zeeman, junior high science teacher, alpha werewolf, and at that time, my boyfriend, had helped him move in. Richard had really liked the geese nesting just under the balcony. So had I.
"Larry, you are going to have to get over this squeamishness or you're going to get killed."
"I'll keep doing what I think is right, Anita. Nothing you can say will change my mind."
"Dammit, Larry. I don't want to have to bury you."
"What would you have done? Shot her?"
"I wouldn't have turned my back on her, Larry. I could have probably disarmed her or kept her busy until the other attendant arrived. I wouldn't have had to shoot her."
"I let things get out of control," he said.
"Your priorities were screwed. You should have neutralized the threat before you checked on the victim. Alive, you could help the vamp. Dead, you're just another victim."
"Well, at least I've got a scar you don't have."
I shook my head. "You'll have to try harder if you want a scar I don't have."
"You let a human shove one of your own stakes into your back?"
"Two humans with multiple bites, what I used to call human servants, before I knew what the term really meant. I had one pinned and was stabbing him. The woman came at my back."
"So yours wasn't a mistake," he said.
I shrugged. "I could have shot them when I first saw them, but I didn't kill humans as easily back then. I learned my lesson. Just because it doesn't have fangs doesn't mean it can't kill you."
"You used to be squeamish about shooting human servants?" Larry asked.
I turned onto 270. "No one's perfect. Why did the woman have a hard-on to kill the vampire?"
He grinned. "You're going to love this one. She's a member of Humans First. The vampire was a doctor in the hospital. He'd tucked himself into a linen closet. It was where he always slept the day away if he'd had to stay too late in the hospital to drive home. She just popped him on a gurney and wheeled him down to the morgue."
"I'm surprised she didn't just push him out into the sunlight. The last sunlight of the day works as well as noonday."
"The linen closet he used was on the basement floor just in case someone opened the door at the wrong time of day. No windows. She was afraid someone would see her before she could get him up in the elevator and outside."
"She really thought you would just stake him?"
"I guess so. I don't know, Anita. She was crazy, really crazy. She spit at the vampire and us. Said we'd all rot in hell. That we had to cleanse the world of the monsters. The monsters were going to enslave us all." Larry shivered, then frowned. "I thought Humans Against Vampires was bad enough, but this splinter group, Humans First, is genuinely scary."
"HAV tries to work within the law," I said. "Humans First doesn't even pretend to care. They claimed they staked that vampire mayor in Michigan."
"Claimed? You don't believe them?"
"I think someone near and dear to his household did it."
"Why?"
"The cops sent me a description and some photos of the security precautions he'd taken. Humans First may be radical, but they don't seem very well organized yet. You'd have had to plan and be very lucky to get to that vampire during the day. He was like a lot of the old ones, very serious about his daytime safety. I think whoever did it is happy to let the right-wing radicals take the blame."
"You tell the police what you think?"
"Sure. That's why they asked."
"I'm surprised they didn't have you come down and see it in person."