Jason Read online

  "Yep," I said. My own gun was at three o'clock on me too, but I'd had my suit jacket tailored so that it flared out enough to hide the gun from the clients at my other job. Civilians spooked so easily sometimes. I'd also started getting belt loops added to my skirts so I could wear a belt that would stand up to the weight of a gun and holster. I'd come straight from Animators Inc., where our motto was, "Where the Living Raise the Dead for a Killing." Bert, our business manager, didn't believe in hiding the fact that raising the dead was a rare talent, and you paid for talent. But lately my job as a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch had been taking more and more of my time. Like today.

  The other very special agent, Mark Brent, was tall, thin, looking barely old enough to be out of college. He was bent over the portable computer they'd brought with them and set down on the room's only desk. He was dressed in a suit almost identical to Manning's, except his was brown to match his holster, but his gun was still a startling black bump against his white shirt. We were in the office of our head honcho, Lieutenant Rudolph Storr. Dolph was currently somewhere else, which left me alone with the FBI and Sergeant Zerbrowski. I wasn't sure which was more dangerous to my peace of mind, but I knew Zerbrowski would mouth off more. He was my partner and my friend, so he was entitled. I'd just met Special Agent Manning and I didn't owe her my life story.

  "The article I read made the proposal sound amazing, like something out of a fairy tale," Manning said. She smoothed her shoulder-length hair back behind one ear and it stayed put, because it was straight as a board. My own curls would never have behaved that well.

  I fought the urge to sigh. If you're a cop and a woman, never date a celebrity; it ruins your reputation for being a hardass. I was a U.S. Marshal, but ever since we'd gone public with our engagement, I'd become Jean-Claude's fiance, not Marshal Blake, to most of the women I met, and a lot of the men. I'd really had hopes that the FBI would be above such things in the middle of fighting crime, but apparently not.

  The real problem for me was that the story we told publicly was both true and a lie. Jean-Claude had done the big gesture, but only after he'd proposed in the middle of shower sex. It had been spontaneous and wonderful and messy, and very real. I'd said yes, which had surprised him, and me. I'd figured I just wasn't the marrying kind of girl. He'd told me then that we'd need to do something to live up to his reputation, for the media and the other vampires. They expected their king/president to have a certain flair, and the real proposal had been too mundane. I hadn't understood that flair would include a horse-drawn carriage--yeah, you heard me, he actually picked me up in a freaking horse-drawn carriage. If I hadn't already said yes, and loved him to pieces, I'd have told him not only no, but hell no. Only true love had gotten me to play along with a proposal so grand that trying to imagine a wedding that topped it sort of scared me.

  "Oh, yeah, Anita is all into that princess stuff, aren't you, Anita?" Zerbrowski called from the chair he was half tipping against the wall. He looked like he'd slept in his suit, complete with a stain on his crooked tie. I knew he'd left his home freshly washed and tidy, but he was like Pigpen from the Peanuts comic; dirt and mess just seemed to be attracted to him within minutes of his walking out of his house. His salt-and-pepper hair was getting more salt and less pepper, and had grown out enough to be all messy curls, which he kept running his hands through. Only his silver-framed glasses were square and gleaming clean around his brown eyes.

  "Yeah, I'm all about that princess shit, Zerbrowski," I said.

  Agent Manning frowned at both of us. "I'm getting the idea that I stepped in something. I was just trying to be friendly."

  "No, you were wanting the princess to talk about how wonderful the prince is, and how he swept her off her feet," Zerbrowski said, "but Anita is going to disappoint you like she's disappointed the last dozen women to ask questions about the big romantic gesture."

  I wanted to say it wasn't a big romantic gesture, it was a freaking epic romantic gesture and I had hated it. Jean-Claude had loved being able to finally pull out all the stops and just do what, apparently, he'd wanted to do for years while we dated--the whole princely "sweep you off your feet" shit. I liked to keep my feet firmly on the ground unless sex was involved, and you can't really have sex in a horse-drawn carriage; it scares the horses. No, we didn't try, because we were on freaking camera the whole time. Apparently, there are now engagement coordinators just like there are wedding coordinators, so of course we had a videographer. It had been all I could do to keep from scowling through all of it, so I'd smiled for the camera and so I wouldn't hurt Jean-Claude's feelings, but it's not my real smile and my eyes in a few frames have that wait-until-we're-alone-mister-we-are-so-talking-about-this look.

  I decided to appeal to Manning's sisterhood of the badge, and said, "Sorry, Agent Manning, but ever since the story went live I'm getting treated more like Jean-Claude's girlfriend than a marshal, and it's really beginning to bug me."

  Her face went serious. "I'm sorry, I hadn't thought about it like that. Years of being one of the guys and building your rep, and I ask you about your engagement first thing."

  "I've never seen my partner be so girl about anything as meeting you today, Marshal Blake," Brent said as he unbent from hunching over the computer. He smiled and it made him look even younger. He seemed fresh faced and less jaded than the rest of us. Ah, to be bright and shiny again, when you thought you could actually win the fight against evil.

  Manning actually looked embarrassed, which isn't something you see often in FBI agents, especially not when you've just met them.

  "Knock it off, Brent," she said.

  He grinned at all of us. "It's just that we've worked together for two years, and I've never seen you squee over anything."

  "It's the horse-drawn carriage," Zerbrowski said. "Chicks dig that kind of shit."

  "Not this chick," I said, quietly under my breath.

  "What did you say?" Manning asked.

  "Nothing. Is the video ready, Agent Brent?" I asked, hopeful we could actually do our jobs and leave my personal life out of it.

  "Yes." Then his smile faded around the edges, and I saw the beginnings of the bright and shiny rubbing off. "Though after you see it, we may all be game to talk about carriages and pretty, pretty princesses."

  It was another first, an FBI agent admitting that something bothered them. For him to admit it out loud, it had to be bad. I suddenly didn't want to see it. I didn't want to add another nightmare to the visuals I had in my head. I was a legal vampire executioner and raised zombies as my psychic talent. I had enough scary shit in my head that I so didn't need more, but I stayed in my chair. If Manning and Brent were tough enough to watch it multiple times, I could sit through it once. I couldn't let the other badges think that getting proposed to by the vampire of my dreams had made me one bit less tough. I couldn't let myself believe it either, though a part of me did. How could someone who let a man lead her into a Cinderella carriage carry a gun and execute bad guys? It made even my head hurt, thinking about it.

  Zerbrowski said what I was thinking. "I thought the feds never admitted anything bothered them."

  Agent Brent shook his head, and looked tired. Lines showed around his eyes that I hadn't seen before and made me add between three and five years to my estimate of his age. "I've worked in law enforcement for six years. I'd thought I'd seen it all, until this."

  I did math in my head, and realized he had to be nearly thirty, which was how old I was, but I'd used up my shininess years ago.

  "I thought this was just another big, bad preternatural citizen gone wrong," I said.

  "Not exactly," he said.

  "I don't like mysteries, Agent Brent. I'm only here with this little information out of courtesy to the FBI, and because Captain Storr requested it."

  "We appreciate that, Marshal, and we wouldn't have had you walk into this blind if we didn't feel that the fewer people who know the details, the better off we're going to be," Brent said.
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  "Awesome," I said, "but the foreplay is getting a little tiresome. There's no one in the room but the four of us, so what is on the video?"

  "Are you always this cranky?" Manning asked.

  Zerbrowski laughed out loud, and didn't even try to hold it in. "Oh, Agent Manning, this isn't even close to cranky for my partner."

  "We heard that about her, and you're right, Blake. I did come in here expecting the proposal to have softened that reputation. I didn't think I had that much girl left in me, and if I'm assuming that it softened you up, then your male colleagues must be making your life . . . difficult."

  It was my turn to laugh. "That's one way of putting it, but honestly it's the whole engaged-to-a-vampire thing that's making some of my fellow officers doubt whose side I'm on."

  "Vampires are legal citizens now, with all the rights that entails," she said.

  "Legally, yeah, but prejudice doesn't go away just because a law changes."

  "You're right about that," she said. "In fact, some at the Bureau thought we shouldn't include you in this case because of your proclivity to date the preternatural."

  "Proclivity, that's polite. So what made you decide to trust me?"

  "You still have the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the United States, and only Denis-Luc St. John has more rogue lycanthrope kills than you."

  "He raises Troll-Hounds. They're the only breed of dog ever raised specifically to hunt supernatural prey. It makes him the king of tracking through wilderness areas after shapeshifters."

  "Are you implying that the dogs make him better at the job, or that he's somehow cheating by using them?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "Neither, just a statement of fact."

  "Now that Anita has passed muster, and I'm included because I'm her friend, show us some skin, agents, or stop teasing," Zerbrowski said.

  "Oh, you'll see skin," Brent said, and he looked older again.

  "What the hell is on the video, Agent Brent?" I asked.

  "Zombie porn," Brent said, and hit the arrow in the middle of the screen.

  2

  "SORRY, AGENTS, BUT that's not new. It's sick, but it's not new."

  Brent hit the screen and froze the dark cemetery scene in midmotion. It was shaky and dark, and there were no zombies or anyone else in sight yet. The two agents looked at me as if I'd said something bad.

  "Did we pick the wrong animator?" Manning asked her partner.

  "Maybe," he said.

  "I've been approached for years to help people make sex tapes with zombies. Dead celebrities bring out the creeps the most." I shivered, because the whole thought of it was just so wrong.

  "My favorite of your sickos like that are the ones who want you to raise their high school crush," Zerbrowski said.

  "Yeah, now that they have money and success they want one more go at the girl who rejected them in high school, or college." I shook my head.

  "That's sick, as in seek-a-therapist sick," Manning said.

  "Agreed, and I honestly think they don't really believe it's going to be a zombie. Somewhere in their minds they think she'll rise from the grave and he'll be able to prove he's worthy and live happily ever after."

  "Wow, Anita, that's a romantic take on the sick bastards that just want to boff the girl who rejected them in high school." Zerbrowski actually looked surprised.

  I shrugged, fought off a scowl, and finally said, "Yeah, yeah, one epic proposal and I go all girlie on you."

  "Boff," Agent Brent said. "I didn't know people used that word anymore."

  "You young whippersnappers just don't know a good piece of slang when you hear it," Zerbrowski said.

  "Don't listen to him, he's not that old. His hair just went all salt-and-pepper early."

  "It's the last couple of cases, they scared me so bad my hair went white." He delivered it without a grin, deadpan, which he never did, and if they'd known him, they would have understood he was lying, but they didn't know him.

  "Hair doesn't actually do that from fear," Brent said, but not like he completely believed it.

  Manning looked at me, raised an eyebrow.

  I waved her back to Zerbrowski. "It's his story, not mine."

  Zerbrowski grinned at me, and then at the agents. "Just trying to lighten the mood, that's part of my charm."

  "It is, actually," I said, smiling back at him.

  "The sergeant is here because he's your partner when you work with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Squad. Everybody calls it the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team, but officially it's not," Manning said.

  "It's the nickname," I said, "they call us RIPIT, both for the 'Rest in Peace,' and because most of the crimes are violent, things get ripped apart. Other cops and even the media have used RIPIT for so long that people want the T in the actual name of the squad."

  "Are we letting ourselves get sidetracked on purpose?" Brent asked.

  Manning nodded, and sipped her coffee. "I think we are, so back on target. Another reason we're talking to you is that you have made more official complaints to the police than any other animator about illegal or morally questionable zombie-raising requests. Once you had a badge of your own and were officially an officer, too, the complaints went down. I'm assuming that people didn't want to bring their illegal activities to a U.S. Marshal."

  "You'd be surprised how many people think that just because I raise the dead I have to be evil, with a capital E, but yeah, the requests for zombie one-nighters and zombie sex slaves went down once I could do my own arresting."

  "Disturbance of a corpse was a misdemeanor for years," Manning said.

  "That's one of the reasons there are tapes of this shit out there, because even if they were caught, it was a slap on the wrist. The money they could make from the tape, because it was a tape back when it started, was worth the risk even if they were caught," I said.

  "The penalties are stiffer now, but still not the same as if a real human were involved," she said.

  I shrugged. "I don't make the laws, just help enforce them."

  "You have done your best to enforce the laws as written, and suggested changes in the laws based on your experience, which is one of the reasons we picked you to bring into our little problem," Manning said.

  "We all know it's out there, agent, so what's the big secret? All the other zombie porn has been either people in good makeup, with no real zombies involved, or one of the zombies that's been raised for fieldwork in California, or in other countries. The zombies in those films are little better than actual corpses."

  "These are different," Manning said.

  "Show us," I said, and added, "please." I added the please because what I really wanted to say was either you're being all wimpy for FBI or something more sarcastic. I'd been a little grumpy lately, even for me, so I was trying to monitor myself and only aim the grumpiness at bad guys.

  Brent hit the screen again and the shaky camerawork continued to be shaky so that you could see it was a cemetery at night, but that was about it. It was like the opening to an amateur horror flick where someone had gotten a new camera for Christmas, and then it steadied. I wondered if someone new was holding the camera, or if the holder had just gotten a handle on it. The answer to that question was the difference between one bad guy and two.

  There was a very abrupt jump in the film from empty cemetery to a blond woman clawing her way out of the grave. At first I thought it was an actress who had been buried in soft earth to about her armpits, but then the camera got a close-up of the eyes and I knew dead when I saw it. The zombie crawled out of the grave the way I'd seen thousands do before. It had some issues with the skirt of the dress it had been buried in, and the clinging grave dirt, which happened sometimes, and then it stumbled free, standing crooked because one high heel had apparently been left in the grave.

  The body was tall, statuesque, with blond hair to her shoulders. Cleavage showed at the plunging neckline of the white dress, which meant the breasts had probably be
en implants. Real breast tissue wasn't going to be that perky without a woman fluffing them back into place, and the zombie didn't know enough to do that. The small spotlight or whatever was attached to the handheld camera showed us the eyes were pale gray that might have been bluer when she was alive. Blue mingled with any color from gray to green or even hazel tended to shift with a person's moods more than most eye colors. Alive, she'd probably been beautiful, but there wasn't enough home for that now. So much of a person's attractiveness is their spirit, their personality. Zombies didn't have much of that.

  The next scene, if that's what you wanted to call it, was of the zombie in a standard bedroom except there were no visible windows in the room, and there was just something off about it. I wasn't sure why I didn't like the room, but I didn't. The zombie was wearing the same clothes as in the cemetery, they hadn't cleaned her up at all, so that she looked horror-movie wrong in the bedroom with its flowered bedspread and tile floor. That was part of the wrong; no one put tile in their bedroom. They did another zooming close-up of the zombie's eyes and this time they weren't empty. This time they were terrified.

  "FUCK," I SAID, softly but with real feeling.

  "You see it, too, then," Manning said.

  "Yeah, I see it."

  Zerbrowski said, "Why do the eyes look scared? Zombies don't feel fear, right?"

  "Normally, no," I said.

  Zerbrowski got up from his chair and moved over closer to where the rest of us were sitting. "Why do the eyes look like that, then?"

  "We don't know," Manning said. "What you're about to see is impossible according to our own experts."

  My skin was already cold, my stomach tight, because I was very afraid that I knew exactly what the "impossible" was going to be.

  A man in one of those all-leather masks so that only his eyes and mouth showed walked into sight. The zombie's eyes followed the movement, but the rest of her stood immobile. Probably she'd been told to stand there, and until told otherwise, she had to just stand there, but they hadn't told her not to move her eyes, so she followed the man's movements like a human victim who had been tied up. She was tied up, tighter than any rope or chain could ever make her. Fuck, I did not want this little film to go where it was headed. I prayed silently, Please, God, don't let them be able to do this to her. God answers all prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.