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“I was eight when she died, Dad, so yeah, I was probably too young for zombie stories.”
“We didn’t mean to do this to you, Anita, please believe that.”
I stared at him, trying to figure out what to say. “Do what, Dad, make me who I am? If I hadn’t been able to raise the dead I wouldn’t be a U.S. Marshal with the Preternatural Branch. I wouldn’t have ever met Jean-Claude, or Nicky, or Micah, or Nathaniel, or anyone in my life.”
“Jean-Claude is the only vampire on that list, correct?” he asked.
“Yeah, Dad, he’s the only vampire in that list of names.” I didn’t add that Jean-Claude wasn’t the only vampire I was dating. That was what he was really trying to get at, but one hurdle at a time.
“Nicky, are you a wereleopard like Micah and Nathaniel?” Judith asked. Jesus, she really was trying.
“No, I’m not a wereleopard.”
There was that pause while they waited for him to say more, but I knew he wouldn’t. I explained but didn’t answer the question. “Shapeshifters are being encouraged not to share what their animalform is with people outside their community. There’s been a rash of cases where people make false allegations against shapeshifters, trying to get them killed by the police.”
“That’s awful,” Judith said.
“So he doesn’t want to share his animal form with us, because we might use it against him?” Dad asked.
“We, I mean the police, are encouraging shapeshifters not to share their animal half with people they don’t know, so that it can’t be used to frame them.”
“But we’re your family, Anita, we would never do that,” he said.
“Sorry, Mr. Blake, but the way you’re talking about vampires doesn’t make me feel very secure about how you might feel about the rest of us.” Nicky’s voice was neutral, and he kept his eyes on the road, not even a glance back at them.
“I’m a veterinarian. One, I know that it is a disease and that any human can catch it. Two, I find accounts of those in your…community who write articles explaining how their senses and thinking shift with their bodies fascinating. It’s like a chance to know how my patients see the world.”
“Your patients are animals, Dad, Nicky isn’t an animal.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“No, that’s okay, we are as close as you’re going to get to pulling the Dr. Doolittle thing of talking to the animals.”
“Thank you for understanding,” Dad said, then he looked at me.
“You’re a vampire executioner, Anita. How can you be about to marry one of them?”
“I’m aware of the irony, Dad, trust me.”
“You told me once that it didn’t bother you to kill them, because they weren’t human.”
I sighed and rolled my shoulders back because I was already hunched up. I hadn’t been dealing with my family for an hour yet. Sweet Jesus. “I’m aware of the attitude I had back in the days when I first started as a legal executioner for the state.”
“When did your attitude change?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, Dad, maybe when a morgue had a vampire tied down with chains and holy items and I let them bully me into driving a stake through his heart while the vampire was still awake and aware.”
“The vampire had earned a warrant of execution by killing humans.”
“Maybe. I’ll be honest, Dad, I’ve killed so many that I don’t remember the crimes attached to them all, but I remember their faces. I remember the ones who begged for their lives. The ones who cried as I had to pound a sharpened piece of wood up under their ribs with a mallet. It’s not a quick death, and it’s sure as hell not painless.”
“That sounds awful,” Judith said.
“It is. I use bullets and blades with high silver content anywhere the law allows. I try to execute, not butcher.” I heard the tone in my voice that let me know that I was haunted by things beyond a screwed-up childhood.
“I’m sorry that you have to do things that are hard for you, Anita, but the Pope has declared that slaying vampires is a holy cause.”
I turned in the seat so I could see him again. “I know, a get-out-of-hell-free card if you kill enough monsters. You know, that’s part of what’s set off this last round of hate crimes that’s been sweeping the country, encouraging people to drag vampires out into the sunlight to fry during the daylight when they don’t risk themselves at all.”
