Mother of All Darkness
Author's note: Chapter 33 took quite a bit more effort to write and polish that I thought it would. I've taken some content from Chap 59 of Cerulean Sins for this chapter and I've also taken content from Chapter 76 and 77 from Incubus Dreams. This is for flashback purposes and to better show the reality of Anita Blake (and maybe convince you to go read the actual books). And a bit of a comparison of writing styles to see if I'm writing Anita in character.
Part 34a: Decisions… decisions
Thankfully it takes less time to get out of the chem/bio bodysuit then it takes to put one on, although Tammy and Larry did take more care then I did. One side affect of having the Lycanthropy virus is that you really can't catch most other diseases due to the physiological changes caused by the virus... and neither can vampires. Agent Romanova likewise was rather casual, but I think that might have been because she might have never done this before?
I got a mental communication from Jean-Claude as I was doing this.
(Ma Petite, Asher would like to discuss tonight's healing ritual with Illyana.)
Odd. (Okay by me.)
And the reason for the odd request was shown. (There is a problem, she refuses to answer any of his requests.)
(I haven't had any issues. Why would she not…) I recalled what I had told her yesterday. (Ahh…)
(Yes Ma Petite, the social rules you laid down. Rules that she appears to be most diligently obeying.)
I repeated that little rule. (Don't talk to my guys without my presence.)
(Oui, mon ami. Précisément)
(And Asher is pissed…?)
(Again oui. Asher is not want to take being ignored with calmness.)
Sigh… (Crap. I take it that he's being a drama queen.)
(Oui… a most correct description. Although to use a vulgarity that you have employed, he is being a bit of a shit as you have said.)
(And he did not contact me directly because…?)
I could sense the irritated dismay from Jean-Claude. (He dislikes not being the center of all things.)
Of course. Asking me for assistance would just be acknowledging that I racked higher then him with her. (Okay... I'll talk to her.) With that my connection to Jean-Claude closed and I sent a thought to her.
(Jean-Claude says you won't talk to Asher.)
A neutral feeling thought from her. (Per your direction and desire.)
(It's okay to speak to Asher about tonight… um… this time.)
A hint of a mental grin from her, which irritated me as she sent (Okay.)
My thought of (Don't get any ideas.) Generated the feeling of confusion from her.
(About what?)
(Talking to my guys without me.)
(Okay… it's not really the guys I want to talk to.)
Ooops… forgot that she's more focused on me then on the guys. I'm… really used to the reverse, meaning other women being interested in my guys.
Once done changing, and after a quick restroom break, oh the joy of bladder relief, we reconvened in a small warehouse conference room that had been taken over by the police. Present was Larry, Tammy, Agent Romanova, Zerbrowski, Dolph, Marshal Faulk (the local head of the Federal Marshals and incidentally Larry's and my boss), and me.
Marshal Faulk, was direct and to the point, as he asked the two of us. "Is this a mystical killing? Meaning was magic involved in the killing, not just who was killed."
Larry and I gave each other a look, then we both glanced at Tammy and at Agent Romanova respectively. Seeing no arguments, we both answered at same time.
"Yes."
A nod from Marshal Faulk at us. "Judge Clark is on his way. Based upon the severity of the crime scene I'm going to request an expedited, open Warrant of Execution, covering any and all involved in this mess."
Zerbrowski and Dolph greeted this statement with nods of agreement and started bringing out some paperwork for the two of them, and Marshal Faulk, to fill out and sign so they could present it to the incoming judge.
Faulk turned to Larry and I. "I'm calling for additional Marshal support. Any suggestions?"
Yep, and that's how Edward, I mean Marshal Ted Foster, got the call to come to St. Louis to play. And by play I mean Edwards use of the word. He'd be here in the morning.
So… just what is a Warrant of Execution? Warrants of Execution used to be local to just one state, meaning I couldn't legally execute somebody in another state unless the state chose to recognize the court order. That got replaced with a Federal law after a Senator's daughter got munched by a vampire. The local Washington D.C. vampire community promptly killed the perp, and literally delivered his head in a basket, but that one act really broke loose the Federal legislation involving warrants of execution. Hence vampire executioners like me got the crackerjack prize of being grandfathered into becoming Federal Marshals, Preternatural Branch, so long as we followed the rules. So, state lines are no longer an issue as Federal law trumps state law. Heck, at one point before I was a Marshal, back when I was simply a registered Vampire executioner, it was illegal for me to even have my vampire slaying kit in my car unless I had a signed Court Order of Execution with me, as in, on my person.
How times have changed. These days almost all Warrants of Execution are for a specific crime, and most explicitly name the person or persons to be executed. However, there is lots of legal wiggle room for the executioner as the order is always for the perps who did the crime, so if the executioner determines that another individual or group is responsible then the axe as it were can fall in another direction. Now there is an administrative review afterwards, but in most cases, and in mine every time, if there is reasonable doubt or sufficient cause, then the executioner is in the clear. The worse that can be done is that I can be suspended and/or have my badge taken away. How barbaric some say, and I tend to agree, which surprises most die hard liberals who tend to think I'm just a raving killer.
It used to be that only weres and vampires fell under Warrants of Execution without a trial. Witches and other magic users got a trial first. But there's now an additional clause to the law, all thanks to a sorcerer summoned demons to kill his jury. So, accused of hostile magic gets you a trial. Mass murder with obvious magic usage can get a Warrant of Execution for whomever did the deed, even if the perps are not specifically known (which makes properly carrying out the Warrant… to be challenging, let's say.) Using magic in self defense is still an evolving bit of legal defense; I'm proud to say that was partly my doing. Used to be there was no such thing. Unless you're a Federal Marshal, that is. I really love that little job perk as being a Federal Marshal is a 24/7 kind of thing.
Dead people with vampire bites? Warrant of Execution for the unknown but possible identifiable perp (dental scans vs. bite marks, kids!) People torn apart by what looks like a were attack? Warrant of Execution for unknown put possible identifiable perp, let's hear it for genetics! Usually it takes more then four dead bodies before they authorize an Warrant of Execution for an unnamed person or persons; thank God for civil liberties. And no, I'm not being sarcastic; the kind of authority that a Warrant grants a Marshal freaks me out, but… I understand exactly why these it's necessary.
I'm a member of the Federal Marshals, Preternatural Branch, meaning I'm a killer, a legalized assassin. All Marshals of the Preternatural Branch are. Sometimes that killing is in active pursuit of a perp with an active order of execution…
BEGIN REFLECTION1 (From Cerulean Sins)
…
…
I'd deputized Jamil and Jason. They stayed out of sight, but warned me that he'd smell them sooner or later. I'd already flashed my badge at mall security. I'd made the decision that we wouldn't call the police, and we wouldn't try to evacuate. I had a court order of execution. I didn't have to give him a warning. I didn't have to do anything but kill him.
It was mid-afternoon, so the food court wasn't too busy. That was good. There was a group of teenagers at the table nearest Van Anders. Why weren't they in school? At the table next-closest to him was a mother with a baby in a stroller and two toddlers. Two toddlers, neither of them in baby seats, but running free, while she tried to help the baby eat soft-serve yogurt.
Van Anders was still more than fifteen feet from the rampaging toddlers. The teenagers were frightfully close, but I couldn't figure out how to get them to move. I was working up my nerve to wind my way through the daytime moms and kids, when the teenagers got up, left their trash on the table, and walked away.
Van Anders was as isolated as I was going to get him here in the mall. I wasn't willing to let him escape again. He was too dangerous. I made the decision in that moment that I would endanger all these nice people. That the mother with her yogurt-smeared baby, and the two screaming toddlers were going to have to take their chances. I was fairly certain I could control the situation well enough to keep them out of it, but I wasn't completely certain. All I knew for sure was that I was going to take him, now. I wasn't going to wait.
I had my gun at my side, safety off, round-chambered long before I got to the table with the mother and her children. I had my federal marshal badge hanging out over the pocket of the large T-shirt, just in case some brave civilian decided to try and save Van Anders.
I had the gun up and pointed as I passed the woman's table. I think it was her soft gasp that made him turn. He saw the badge, and he smiled, taking another bite of his sandwich. He talked with his mouth full. "Are you going to warn me not to move, tell me to freeze?" He sounded Dutch.
"No," I said, and I shot him.
The bullet spun him out of his chair, and I fired again before he'd hit the ground. The first one had been rushed; not lethal, but the second one was a solid body shot.
I fired into his body twice more before I got close enough to watch his mouth open and shut. Blood blossomed from his lips, and turned his blue shirt purple.
I circled wide, so I could get a clear head shot. He lay on his back and bled, and managed to cough blood, and clear his throat enough to say, "Police have to give warning. Can't just shoot."
I let out all the breath in my body, and sighted on his forehead just above the eyes. "I'm not the police, Van Anders, I'm the executioner."
His eyes widened, and he said, "No."
I pulled the trigger and watched most of his face explode into an unrecognizable mess. His eyes had been bluer than in the photos.
…
…
END REFLECTION1
…and some times it's a situation where I have an order, but anybody associated with those named in the Order of Execution can also get taken down. Which can so suck as senior vampires can force junior or newbie vampires to do exactly what they want. But wait, you say, it's not their fault. Yep… Mox Nix. Completely sucks.
Sucks for them.
Sucks for me.
But… it would suck even worse for everybody if those like me didn't do their job.
And even worse when folks don't follow our instructions. Vampire and Were situations are not your standard SWAT situation. It took a while for experience to trickle down into formal procedures for local law enforcement. Rules that Marshals already knew. Why you ask? Answer is simple, because the Marshals that don't are all dead.
BEGIN REFLECTION2 (from Incubus Dreams)
…
…
The holy objects had blazed to life, so bright, white and blue like captive stars. They were ruining everyone's night vision. Made it hard to shoot. My cross was safely tucked away, for just that reason. By the thin flashlight beams and the incandescent flare of holy fire I saw what there was to see.
If I'd been there from the beginning, my mind would have been slow and taking it all in with that artificial sense that you have more time to do things, decide things, than you actually do. But sometimes when you step into the middle of it, you see things in strobe effect, an image here, there, but never the large picture, as if to see it all at once would overwhelm you. Hudson yelling, MP5 to his shoulder. Bodies on the ground between him and the big bed. A glimpse of pale, naked flesh on the bed-female. Two other vampires riding two of the men. One rode him to the floor, so he had to be lost to sight from Hudson and Killian's position. The other man was trapped against the wall, still firing his gun into the chest of the vamp, while the body bucked and wouldn't die. The vamp was pressed tight to the white glow of something that looked like a luminous rosary.
Mendez with his rifle, trying to find a shot in the mess. Stepping around giving his back to the bed, so he could pin the gun barrel against the back of the vamp's head. The vamp never lifted from Jung's neck. The gunshot, like all the others, was loud, but not nearly as loud as it could have been.
It was wrong, all wrong. No vamp, except the most powerful, could stand up to holy objects like this. Only revenants, mindless newbies would feed while you pushed a gun to their head and blew their brains out. You can't be ancient and a newbie, which meant, we were missing someone, someone that was standing right fucking here.
I dropped my shields, and I looked not toward the fighting, but away from it. Either he was better than I was, and he was invisible, which meant he was farther into the room, or he was hiding somewhere that the team hadn't gotten to yet, or both.
I found the energy of him in the far corner in plain sight. Even knowing he was there, I couldn't see him. Which meant either I was wrong, or he was good enough that he could stand wrapped in shadows and darkness and be invisible. The only other vamp I'd ever known that was that good had never been human. I think I could have stripped him of it using my necromancy, or Jean-Claude's marks, but I had the Mossberg in my hands. Why waste magic, when you've got technology?
I tightened my brace of the butt against my shoulder, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The shot didn't kill him, but it brought him stumbling away from the wall. Suddenly everyone could see him. His hands were holding his stomach where I'd shot him. He looked surprised. Tall bastard, I'd been aiming for his chest.
I hit him again, and there was an echo, two echoes. His body slammed back against the wall. I yelled into the mike, "I want to see the wall through his chest."
No one argued. Derry had moved over to help Mendez. I was betting that Hudson had sent him, while I was concentrating on vampire stuff. Hudson, Killian, and I shot the master vampire, until there was a pale smear of wall through his chest. He slid down the wall like a broken puppet, painting the wall dark with blood. Hudson and Killian stopped firing, but I didn't. I put a shot into the head, and had a second shot in before they joined me, but they did join me. With three of us, it didn't take long to explode most of his head like a melon thrown against a wall. When most of his head was gone from his shoulders, I lowered my gun enough to look around and see how everyone else was doing.
Now that the master was dead, the newbie vamps were cringing away from the holy objects, just like they're supposed to. Well, the one vamp that was still alive cringed. She pressed her bloody face against the corner behind the bed, her small hands held out as if to ward it off. At first it looked like she was wearing red gloves, then the lights shone in the blood, and you knew it wasn't opera-length gloves, it was blood all the way to her elbows. Even knowing that, even having Melbourne motionless on the floor in front of her, still Mendez didn't shoot her. Jung was leaning against the wall, like he'd fall down if he didn't concentrate. His neck was torn up, but the blood wasn't gushing out. She'd missed the jugular. Let's hear it for inexperience.
I said, "Shoot her."
The vampire made mewling sounds, like a frightened child. Her voice came high and piteous, "Please, please, don't hurt me, don't hurt me. He made me. He made me."
"Shoot her, Mendez," I said into the mike.
"She's begging for her life," he said, and his voice didn't sound good.
"Shit," I said and started across the room. Something grabbed my ankle. Reflex pointed the shotgun downward. One of the "dead" vampires hissed up at me, with a hole in its forehead, but it still had my ankle, and it was still going to bite me. From less than two feet away, the sawed-off would have been better, but there was no time. I emptied my gun into its head and back, until it let go of me and blood and other things leaked out of the body. "Hudson, dead is at least half their brains spilled, and daylight through their chests."
He didn't argue, just stepped up close to the other vamp and started pegging away at it. I guess making invisible vampires visible had earned me some credits with the sergeant.
I peeled shotgun shells out of the stock holder and fed them into the gun, as I walked toward Mendez and the vampire. She was still crying, still begging, "They made us do it, they made us do it."
The woman on the bed was naked, and her eyes had started to glaze. Shit. But the room had to be secured before we could see to the victim. Secured in my line of work meant something different than for most officers of the law. Secured meant that everything in the room that wasn't on my side was dead.
Killian was moving up by the bed to check on our victim. I hoped he could help her, because it seemed worse to lose people who were trying to save someone that didn't get saved. Jung was trying to hold pressure on his own neck wound. Melbourne's body lay on its side, one hand outstretched toward the cringing vampire . Melbourne wasn't moving, but the vampire still was: That seemed wrong to me. But I knew just how to fix it.
I had the shotgun reloaded, but I let it swing down at my side. At this range the sawed-off was quicker, no wasted ammo.
Mendez had glanced away from the vamp to me, then farther back to his sergeant. "I can't shoot someone who's begging for her life."
"It's okay, Mendez, I can."
"No," he said, and looked at me, his eyes showed too much white. "No."
"Step back, Mendez," Hudson said.
"Sir..."
"Step back and let Marshal Blake do her job."
"Sir... it's not right."
"Are you refusing a direct order, Mendez?"
"No, sir, but-"
"Then step back, and let the marshal do her job."
Mendez still hesitated.
"Now, Mendez!"
He moved back, but I didn't trust him at my back. He wasn't bespelled, she hadn't tricked him with her eyes. It was much simpler than that. Police are trained to save lives, not take them. If she'd attacked him, Mendez would have fired. If she'd attacked someone else, he'd have fired. If she'd looked like a raving monster, he'd have fired. But she didn't look like a monster as she cringed in the corner, hands as small as my own held up trying to stop what was coming. Her body pressed into the corner, like a child's last refuge before the beating begins, when you run out of places to hide and you are literally cornered, and there's nothing you can do. No word, no action, no thing that will stop it.
"Go stand by your sergeant," I said.
He stared at me, and his breathing was way too fast.
"Mendez," Hudson said, "I want you here, now."
Mendez obeyed that voice, as he'd been trained to, but he kept glancing back at me and the vampire in the corner.
She glanced past her arm, and because I didn't have a holy item in sight, she was able to give me her eyes. They were pale in the uncertain light, pale and frightened. "Please," she said, "please don't hurt me. He made us do such terrible things. I didn't want to, but the blood, I had to have it." She raised her delicate oval face to me. "I had to have it." The lower half of her face was a crimson mask.
I nodded and braced the shotgun in my arms, using my hip and arm instead of my shoulder for the brace point. "I know," I said.
"Don't," she said, and held out her hands.
I fired into her face from less than two feet away. Her face vanished in a spray of blood and thicker things. Her body sat up very straight for long enough that I pulled the trigger into the middle of her chest. She was tiny, not much meat on her, I got daylight with just one shot.
Mendez's voice came over the mike, "We're supposed to be the good guys."
"Shut up, Mendez," Jung said in a voice that was choked and thicker than it should have been.
…
…
"How could you look her in the eyes and do that?"
I turned and found Mendez by me. He'd taken off his mask and helmet, though I was betting that was against the rules until we left the building. I covered my mike with my hand, because no one should learn about someone's death by accident. "She tore Melbourne's throat out."
"She said the other vampire made her do it, is that true?"
"Maybe," I said.
"Then how could you just shoot her?"
"Because she was guilty."
"And who died and made you judge, jury, and ex-" He stopped in mid-sentence.
"Executioner," I finished for him. "The federal and state government actually."
…
…
END REFLECTION2
A lot of the regular cops felt that the special branch Federal Marshals were just killers, which was correct. Some thought we were just legal serial killers, which was frustrating but not entirely false based upon some of the Marshals I knew of and I'm not talking Edward.
Those… recollections had been… vivid I sent Illyana a telepathic question. (Did… you just read my mind?)
(Yes… sorry… your thoughts about Orders of Execution were quite loud, likewise your reminiscing about kills.)
Irritation from me. (I'd appreciate you asking next time.)
She did not sound very contrite. (I'll try.)
(Try?)
(Try. It… doesn't quite work like that. Sometimes a… companion's emotional or mental state can trigger recalls I guess.)
I liked that she wasn't using the word familiars any more. (Guess?)
(Crap… you know more about this then I do. Again, I'll try.) A tone of respect in her thoughts. (The first was a good kill by the way. The second… well… I….)
(Understand?)
(Um… no actually.)
(No?)
(No.)
(So you think I shouldn't have shot her?)
(No, I don't… see the problem with shooting her.)
Ohhhh. That… was a reminder that she wasn't… Human. At least mentally. Really need to remember that regardless of the yummy packaging.
Ah… Yummy? Ah crap. I use yummy to describe her. So ignoring that for now.
And her answer really bothered me as that sense of puzzlement was… disturbing.
Dolph got done signing the paper work and asked a question. "So Anita, what about the Fey?"
Oh-boy. Time to fess up. I reluctantly confessed that… "There are some Fey in St. Louis and… I kind of know how to contact them."
The details were complicated. Which was how Tammy, Agent Romanova, and I ended up driving around St. Louis in Tammy's Toyota Camry in the late afternoon.