“Ming of Glass just drove up. She deman—requests that you speak with her.”
If the vamps were here, it was now officially night. I bent and picked up my comms gear and my bullet-resistant vest and reseated my ten-millimeter. Occam was watching me as he rose from the ground, not quite all cat grace. His nose was bleeding where I’d hit him. The blood-need reared up in me, almost as if it was a separate consciousness, a demon of deadly desire. I squeezed it down, forced my shoulders to relax. Surprisingly, the lust inside me complied, if only enough not to kill.
Occam wiped his nose on his jacket sleeve. If he reported the blow I’d be in trouble. But he was grinning, a satisfied, intense smile that suggested something I couldn’t interpret. His blond hair hung over his eyes and his jaw was fuzzy with a two-day beard he hadn’t had last time I saw him only hours ago. The beard was a result of shifting to his cat and back to human. His cat was still close to the surface, but not so close that his eyes glowed. Yet.
A thought squirmed in the back of my mind like a worm on a hook, that female cats often fought a male as part of mating rituals. Which was not an idea I wanted to contemplate. I shoved it aside.
“Where did the last shots come from?” Occam asked the uniform as I geared up. Our eyes met and slid away. Met and slid away. Nervous, I reseated my Glock GDP-20 in the hard plastic holster with a faint click.
“Shooter in a car. Drive-by. Handgun. No casualties. They already got him.” To me she said, “If you’ll follow me. And keep your head down.”
I was still fastening my vest as we wove through the lot, our feet silent on the pavement. I caught snatches of conversation between cops as we jogged:
“Twenty-five rounds located so far. Most in the restaurant’s wall.”
“Way more casings in the street than twenty-five.”
“No shit?”
“Way more.”
“Witnesses’re in the empty building next door.”
“Two bottles of perfectly good vodka hit and shattered.”
“I hear the vodka set off a kitchen fire.”
“Singed the hair off a cook but didn’t touch her scalp.”
“Ten-ninety-ones are to stay in place until CSI and the MEs are finished.”
“Medical examiners are here?”
“I know, right? Weird.”
Ten-ninety-ones were dead bodies, in Knoxville PD radio codes. The stink of gunfire and burned hair and scorched building fouled the air. I looked around for fire trucks and decided the trucks must have pulled up to the restaurant from the back, from the street on the other side. EMS units were lined up in the roadway, uniformed officers standing guard at the door to the restaurant, visible in the glaring headlights. Heavily armed SWAT officers were inside and out. Shadows flickered on the walls and the asphalt, oversized, bulked, armed.
“Over here.” The uniformed cop jerked on my sleeve, pulling me against a marked vehicle. She pointed to a black limo across the street. “In that one.” It wasn’t a long limo, but a short one. The vehicle looked heavy, as if armored. “Don’t expect me to get any closer to the fangheads,” she said. “I like the blood in my veins where it belongs. Maintain cover position until we clear the street and the buildings.”
“Thanks,” I said, “and I feel the same way about vampires. But you don’t say no to Ming of Glass.” Crouching, I stepped off the curb into the street and raced over. The chauffeur got out, hunkered down like I was, and opened the back door. I did not want to get in that limo, sit on that leather, touch anything with bare skin. The thought of dead possum and maggots wiggling on my bare feet nearly made me gag as I ducked inside and sat, hands in my lap, my eyes adjusting as the door closed on me with a solid thunk.
“Special Agent Maggot,” a familiar voice said.
“Fanghead Yummy,” I said. Which was totally impolite, not that I cared as much as I might once have. Except that the inside light came on and Ming was sitting beside the blond vampire. “Ming of Glass,” I said, not apologizing, though the words I’m sorry wriggled in the back of my throat like a squirrel in a trap, trying to get out. Mama might fear vampires, but she would be polite to Satan himself. I’d be polite, though I had a momentary vision of Mama meeting the devil in the middle of an ice storm, the Angel of the Morning hovering on bat wings at the end of Mama’s shotgun.
“You find us amusing?” Ming asked.
I blurted a half-strangled laugh. “No, ma’am. I just imagined my mama meeting, ummm, you.”
“Your mother fears Mithrans?”
My laughter died. “My mama survived her worst nightmare. Now she don’t fear nothing. You called me over here?” It wasn’t exactly true, but it sounded good.
“Do you feel maggots in my limousine?”
I thought about lying, since I’d already insulted the chief blood-sucker in Knoxville. “Not through my clothes. I thought you were inside Pierced Dreams when the shooting took place.”
“I was just arriving. I was delayed. If one of my kind was behind this shooting, is there any way you or your fellow nonhuman police officers could tell?”
“The cats aren’t trackers. They’re sight hunters. We don’t have our own K9 paranormal dog. We don’t have a werewolf on the team, and that would be the best nose were-critter.”
“If I flew a werewolf in, could it—could he track this shooter?”
“I doubt it. Too many scent patterns.” I paused.
“You have thought of something,” Ming said.
“Maybe.” I frowned. It would be against regulations. But PsyLED didn’t always go by regs. And Jane Yellowrock had a tame werewolf . . . “Hmmm.”
“Tell me what you are thinking,” Ming said, her voice full of velvet persuasion, a vampire mesmerism.
I looked her in the eye. “Really? You’un gonna try that on me? ’Cause it don’t work.”
“So I see.” Ming sat back against the leather, making it sigh like flesh still alive. She motioned to Yummy. “Go with her. Provide assistance as needed. PsyLED will bring you back before dawn.” Ming looked at me, her eyes intense, giving a final little push with her voice and her mind. “You will bring her back before dawn.”
“I’ll be glad to give Yummy a ride, but if traffic stalls us on the highway and she burns up, you’un’re paying to have my truck fumigated. I hear it’s mighty hard to get out the burned vamp stink.”
Yummy made a strangled sound that might have been laughter.