My heart twisted. Stupid to pity the crazed and dead, but I did. On some level, I sympathized. I remembered what it had felt like to be empty of memories, lost and alone, stuck in a body I didn't remember, among humans. Of course, I'd still been alive. I strangled a sigh, but the vamp must have heard. Her eyes darted up, into the limbs. She hissed. And dashed toward me.
Instead of taking the trunk as I had, she scrambled through the branches directly below me, huffing in hunger, her fetid stink rising. Almost lazily, I dropped from the branches, landing behind her, vamp-killer blade up, stake ready.
She whirled, snarled, reached for me. I stepped into her putrid embrace and touched her chest with the stake. Jaws wide, she rushed into the point. I rammed it home. It was so easy to kill the young. Too easy. The vamp paused as if frozen, her eyes on mine in the night. Humanity bled back into her gaze, puzzled and afraid. "No," she whispered on her last breath. "No . . ." She crumpled at my feet, landing between two tree limbs, her legs splayed.
I knelt beside her and pulled a miniflashlight. The beam caught her full in the face. Under the filth, snot, tears, and dried blood, she was pretty, or had been. Curly brown hair, greenish brown eyes, short, needle-thin vamp canines, traces of makeup over very white skin. They always took the beautiful ones. I had never seen an ugly vamp. Like pedophiles, they liked them young and charming and pretty.
I set the flash on a limb, the light falling over the girl, and sheathed the vamp-killer, pulling a camera. I took photos from several angles, including a close-up of her face showing her new little fangs, and another of the stake through her heart. Photos were nice, but I needed more. I never trusted stakes. Lore says that a stake to the heart is fatal unless the sire is close by; he can sometimes heal a scion if he gets there in time. I pulled a knife with a slightly curved blade, and lay the edge against the girl's neck, and put my back into it, cutting. Cold blood gushed over my gloves. A beheading was both final and proof for bounty. Newly risen, newly dead again.
When I was done, I set the head and the flashlight aside and grabbed the rogue by the heels. I pulled her far from the paths, and even farther from her burial site, and left her body for the vamp council's cleanup crew to dispose of her. If humans got to her first, she'd be hard to identify unless she had prints on file. Besides, the vamps would make sure she disappeared before an autopsy was performed. Since vamps came out of the closet, there had been no reports of vamp postmortems. The bloodsuckers liked it that way.
Until recently this vamp had been human--a daughter, mother, wife, girlfriend, coworker, somebody important to other humans. Now she was dead and gone. Hundreds of people simply disappear each year in the U.S. because they walk away and find another life, or because they're killed and their bodies never found. I had often wondered how many of the disappeared were vamp kills--wondered and never asked. The humans she left behind deserved closure of some kind, but I was betting that the vamp council wouldn't give them that. Another dead rogue so soon after the brouhaha of the last one would be bad press. This girl would become one of the state's missing and never found.
When the body was hidden, I scuffed away the drag marks with a leafy branch, and carried the head to Bitsa. I stuffed it into an oversized Ziplock bag and dropped it into a watertight carryall, which I slung over my shoulder. I didn't have far to go, but if I was stopped by a cop, the head would be hard--though not impossible--to explain. I carried a copy of my contract with the vamp council in a pocket, and the vamp fangs were a dead giveaway (vamp humor) that I hadn't murdered a human. Plus, there was a certain cop I knew who would back up my story. Rick LaFleur owed me a favor--a big one. I had saved his sorry butt two times.
I powered Bitsa up and tooled out of the park. Parts of the city--those close to city service buildings, hospitals, and other needed locales--were already back on the power grid, windows bright, doorways spilling light into the streets, and the party that never stopped in the city that was built for partying was back on go. Music and the rich scents of cooking food filled the air. Sirens wailed in the distance, with the sharp pop-crack of gunshots. Cars slid through the half-dark streets, slowing at the streetlights that were functioning, ignoring the rest. Other parts of the city were still pitch-dark, and would take a lot longer to return to life as usual.