Damian called out to him, “Brother, don’t do it. Do not listen to that evil voice in your head.”

The vampire looked at him, and for a minute there was someone in there looking out at him like an echo of who the man had once been. “I wish I could shut out the voice, but she is all I hear. I must go.”

“If you go, you will burn alive. I have seen it before.”

“I’m sorry, brother. I’m sorry for the policeman I killed. I don’t even remember doing it. I came to myself with my mouth at his throat and his blood everywhere. I would never have hurt anyone like that, but I know I did.” He reached behind him for the doorknob. If they’d let him go, that might have been all except for the barbecue outside.

Some of the uniformed officers jumped him as if he were just human, like you’d tackle any would-be suicide, but he wasn’t human. He smashed one man’s head open against the wall in a smear of crimson, and grabbed another one. He was slow by comparison to the vampires I was used to—the newly dead are slower—but he was faster than they were expecting. Fast enough to grab one of them and tear out his throat so the arterial spray showered over his face, the walls, other officers, over Logan’s jacket. Fast enough to grab another officer before they could all scatter and hold him in front of his body like a shield. Seeing all that, a female officer still crawled up, grabbed the fallen man’s arm, and started trying to pull him to safety. Another officer came and took the other arm and they pulled him away from the door and the vampire. I watched them start to try to stanch the blood, but unless they had an emergency room trauma surgeon hiding in the building, it was already too late. It didn’t make the effort a bad one, and it didn’t change that they’d been brave to pull him to safety.

I kept waiting for a holy object to flare to life, holy fire to help save them, but there was nothing. It was as if the vampire didn’t trigger the holy objects even while he was going all vampire on their asses.

Edward and Domino had their custom AR-15 rifles snugged against their shoulders. Nolan had his sidearm out and aimed. We moved up to join them. The vampire’s bloody face didn’t look human or sympathetic anymore. He hissed at us and then his eyes filled with blue light.

“Welcome home, Damian.” It was the man’s mouth moving, but it didn’t sound like the same voice of a minute ago. It wasn’t a woman’s voice, but there was something about the cadence of it that made me think feminine.

“This is not home. This was never my home,” Damian said from beside me.

The vampire gave one of those wild laughs that rise and fall up the scale like something on a Halloween haunted house sound track, except this was real. It raised the hair at the back of my neck and made my gut tense with the madness in it.

He took one step back and a little behind me. “She can’t hurt you, Damian,” I said.

“Are you sure of that, Anita Blake?” the vampire said.

I snugged my own custom AR-15 rifle to my shoulder. “Yeah, pretty sure.”

Edward said, “Can we shoot it now?”

The vampire twisted the officer’s head around. Their eyes locked for a moment. I checked and the officer didn’t have a visible gun. It was the only saving grace as the vampire bespelled him with his gaze and sent him to run straight at us, while he opened the door behind him and stepped out into the thick summer sunshine.

Edward switched his rifle around and smashed it into the officer’s face. He fell to the floor, out cold, and the first screams outside rose to shrieks. The sunlight would do our job for us; all we had to do was wait for the screaming to stop, and then put out what was left.

66

PEARSON WOULDN’T LET the vampire burn. He grabbed a fire extinguisher and went outside. Edward followed him with his rifle still at his shoulder. The rest of us did the same, except for Damian. I told him to stay inside. He wouldn’t burn in the sunlight, but he’d watched his best friend and shield brother burn to death because the Wicked Bitch of Ireland had forced him into the sunshine. I’d shared the memory with Damian and could still hear the evil melodious voice: One to keep, and one to burn.

I wasn’t going to let her add to the trauma she’d already caused him. The vampire was completely engulfed in flames; only Logan’s jacket was slow to burn so that it was almost like a movie effect for the Human Torch, but the body standing screaming in the middle of the street wasn’t fireproof. Pearson had to get right up on the figure to use the extinguisher. Edward and Domino stayed right with him, rifles to their shoulders, just in case. Vampires burn hot enough to melt human flesh and rupture bones from the heat. I didn’t agree with what Pearson was doing, but that close to the flames it was like standing near the door to hell. It was incredibly brave, and I didn’t understand why he was risking his life to try to save someone who had killed one and probably three of his officers. I’d have let the bastard burn. Logan could have been bloodlust, but the others at the door weren’t.

The rest of us stayed out of the way. If they needed backup, we were there. A police officer came out with a second extinguisher and moved to help Pearson in his humanitarian effort. The fire did go out, but a few seconds later the flames started again, because the vampire was still in the middle of the sunlit street.

Jake leaned in to me and whispered, “Do you want us to help get the vampire out of the sunlight so he’ll stop burning?”

“No.”

“As our queen wishes,” he said, and straightened back up to stand at my side and watch the flames flare back to life as new sunlight hit vampiric flesh.