Crimson Death
Page 180

   Sheridan was standing outside a closed door. She was so pale her brown eyes looked black and stranded in her face like islands in the middle of a milk-white ocean. Even her lips were bloodless; the light lipstick she’d had on in the other room was gone. She raised one hand up to push at her hair, and I saw the pinkish shine of it as if she’d rubbed her lips a lot in the few minutes since we’d seen her. What the hell had happened?
   “It’s in the room,” Nicky said.
   “What is?” I asked.
   “The blood.”
   Sheridan looked at us then, her eyes looking like burned-out holes in her head. I’d thought she was beautiful and now she looked haggard, as if every hour of sleep she’d ever lost had all caught up with her at once.
   “Sheridan,” I said.
   She looked at me but didn’t see me, not really.
   “Rachel, can you hear me?”
   She nodded. “I’m keeping the crime scene intact until forensics gets here.”
   “Where are the others?” Jake asked.
   “Looking for him.”
   I grabbed her upper arms and gave her a little shake. Her eyes focused on me; she even blinked. “Inspector Sheridan, I need you to focus. Report, damn it.”
   She jerked away from me. “We found another vampire after Nolan got the others. Pearson . . . all of us wanted to keep this one. They were fixing up a cell that wouldn’t expose it to light. It’s just a dead body until dark. It should have been safe.”
   “Inspector Sheridan, what happened?”
   She looked at me as if she didn’t like me much, but I didn’t care. “The storage room had a lock on it. It was supposed to keep people from walking in on the body, not to keep it in, but Logan must have come to check on it, and it woke up early and it killed him.”
   “Jesus,” I said.
   “They’re tracking it. Santana could smell the vampire, so they went that way.” She pointed down the hall away from us. Her gaze had slid to the side again, as if she couldn’t bear to focus on anything for too long. Her reaction could have been from just the violence of it to someone she knew, but I didn’t think it was just that. Yeah, Logan had been an ass, and it had been a mistake to date, but she’d cared for him. I wondered if she’d known just how much she cared for him until now. Fuck.
   “Anita, we need to move,” Nicky said.
   I nodded. “Can you track them?”
   “Yes,” Jake said. We’d worked it out that whichever wereanimal had the best nose was just supposed to take the lead on things like this, rather than debate it. Wolf beat tiger and apparently jackal, and we hadn’t brought any wererats, which actually had one of the best noses in the wereanimal kingdom.
   “Do it,” I said. Jake moved a little ahead of us with Echo still strapped in her bag to his back. Kaazim dropped back to the rear, putting Damian and me in the middle with Nicky and Jake ahead. I glanced behind us at Sheridan leaning against the wall by the door where maybe the off-again, on-again almost-love-of-her-life was lying dead. I’d give her a hug later, if she’d let me, but right now we had to find Domino and Edward and the vampire that had already killed one Garda. I prayed that it wouldn’t kill anyone else before we found it, and then I realized that Edward was ahead of us on the hunt. As I followed Jake and Nicky, I kept waiting to hear gunfire. If I were the vampire, I’d have been running.
 
 
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   “THERE’S A MAN screaming up ahead,” Jake said.    “Stack and move,” I said.
   We stacked up on Jake, one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us, gun in the other hand ready but pointed down. Except for Damian, who hadn’t trained with us; the rule was if you didn’t train for stacking and moving, then you kept your gun holstered until we weren’t standing on top of each other. I put my hand against Nicky’s back, because his shoulder was a little high to hold and move at the shuffle-jog. Damian didn’t have any trouble putting his hand on my shoulder. Getting the rhythm of the shuffle step was a little harder for him, but he was more graceful than I would ever be, so he managed not to step on me. It was a formation that worked well in crowds, and if we were going into a dangerous situation. Logan was dead, so dangerous it was.
   I was pretty certain that the screaming man wasn’t Edward, and it was unlikely to be Domino, but it was somebody. Saving somebody would be good. We came out into a larger opening; it wasn’t exactly a room, but it seemed too big to call it a hallway. Did police stations have entryways like a house? I just didn’t know enough about architecture to know what to call it. But whatever it was, I heard Edward’s voice ahead.
   “Don’t do it, pardner.”
   “She’s calling,” a man’s voice said.
   “If you step out there you will burn,” Pearson said.
   Damian whispered to me, “She is calling. She wants us to come to her.”
   “Why? Why would she want all her vampires to go out into the sunlight?”
   “Maybe it amuses her,” he said.
   “Is she really that crazy?” I asked.
   “Maybe.”
   We widened our formation to something that looked like the point of a spear, with Jake still at the head of it. Now we all had better views of what was happening at the door, and if we had to use our guns we wouldn’t shoot each other. Pearson, Edward, and Domino were near the outer door with a small group of other police persons. I could only glimpse the vampire by the door around everyone in front of us. He was tall, dark-haired, and had dark eyes. His face was almost pink with the rush of the blood he’d drunk. If we didn’t want to be shooting into someone’s back we needed to move up closer; of course, if we did that the vampire might move out into the daylight. The crowd moved enough for me to see that the vampire was clutching Logan’s suit jacket to himself like he was cold. I knew just how to warm him up.
   “Move up. We don’t want to risk being friendly fire,” I said.
   “He may be afraid of us,” Damian said.
   “He should be,” I said.
   No one else questioned it. We moved up so we’d have a clean shot if it came to that. The vampire did look at us. The fear showed on his face. Apparently, we looked more threatening than anyone nearer to him. Since one of those was Edward, the vampire just didn’t know how to do a good threat assessment.
   Pearson turned enough to see us, but not enough to give the vampire his back. Good for him. “Marshal Blake, please stay back.”
   “We talked to Sheridan,” I said.
   “This is still a citizen of Ireland who deserves a chance at a trial.”