I remembered the first time I'd gone home and realized I had a piece of a vampire's brain in my hair. I'd stared at myself in the mirror and started to shake and ended up on the floor of the bathroom a lot like Dev was sitting now, but there'd been no one to comfort me. I'd been so alone for so many years that maybe I'd have reached out for someone, too, if there'd been anyone to reach out to.

Would I be less hard now if I'd had someone to turn to, or would I still be me? Maybe I'd just have been a lot happier, a lot earlier? There was no going back, but looking down into Dev's earnest face, I wondered. I wasn't sure I'd ever wondered before, not about that.

'I need to make sure the rotting vampires that were reported on other floors are all executed, and check on Micah and Nathaniel, and then we can go clean up.'

'Showers?' he asked.

I nodded.

'Can you help me make sure I get all of it off me?' he asked, and his eyes looked uncertain again.

'Are you asking me to join you in the shower?' I smiled when I said it, made it teasing.

He smiled back, and the change in his eyes from uncertain to happy anticipatory lust was worth it. Would I normally have maybe moved Dev off the list of lovers after this? Maybe, but for the gloom to lift from his face and eyes, sex in the shower with him was not a hardship.

'Yes, I am,' he said, and this time when his arms went around me it wasn't a desperate grip, but a caress with a promise of more to come. Sex may not be the answer to everything, but it's also not the worst answer to a lot of things. It beat the hell out of anger and killing things.

CHAPTER 49

We stepped off the elevator into a mass of police, medical professionals, and first responders of every flavor. It was as if the hospital population had tripled between the time we went down to the basement and now.

A uniform who I remembered from the hallway earlier that day, though it seemed like a hundred years ago, said, 'What the hell happened to you guys?'

We all looked at each other. The men's hair was plastered to their heads, and even my curls were dripping wet, as were our clothes. I looked down to find that we were making a puddle on the floor. We had to have done the same thing in the elevator, but we just hadn't noticed.

The uniform laughed. 'How did you get that wet and still look like you walked out of a slaughterhouse?'

I blinked at us all and realized that the sprinklers hadn't exactly gotten all of the mess. It was like I was seeing the world in pieces, which meant that though I was handling it better than Dev, I might be a little shocky. Interesting.

'Zombies,' I said.

'What?'

'They were killing zombies,' Hatfield said as she walked up to us.

'We were killing vampires, but none of us look this bad,' he said.

'Zombies are messier,' she said, and then she said, 'Just give it a rest, Lewis. I need to talk to the marshals.'

He started to say something else, but she said, 'Now, Lewis.'

He frowned, but he walked away.

Hatfield was in full gear like we were, though we had more weapons on us, but then Edward and I tended to overpack. A gurney with a covered body on it wheeled between us. There was blood soaking through the covering, which meant it was a very fresh body.

Hatfield watched it being wheeled into the elevator. She kept watching it as the doors closed behind the dead body and the orderly pushing it. Her eyes reminded me of Dev's earlier. He'd rallied, and to strangers he probably didn't look any worse for wear than the rest of us, except for Yancey, who had gone to find the rest of his squad. He still looked fresh compared to the rest of us, but then he'd only helped with cleanup. The real mess had been the dismembering by shooting; he'd missed that part.

'We've got five dead,' she said, and her voice sounded harsh, angry even, but I knew she wasn't angry with us. She was just angry; I knew all about that.

'Did the guard, Miller, make it?' Dev asked.

She shook her head. 'I've never seen anything like these rotting bastards. They don't die like regular vampires.'

I opened my mouth, and Edward must have been afraid that I'd say I told you so, because he touched my arm. 'They're the hardest type of vamp to destroy,' he said.

'The vampires' bodies have already been put in the incinerator in the sub-basement here. The incinerator is designed to destroy medical waste, and I watched each vampire go into the fire. Is that dead enough?'

'It'll do,' I said.

There was a flinching around her eyes, and she said, 'Could they climb back out of an incinerator? Medical waste has to be destroyed completely, so I thought it was enough; if it's not ...' Her voice broke, and she stared down at the floor, one hand resting on the butt of her sidearm. There was a time when I touched my gun like that, like a dangerous teddy bear.

'Fire destroys even the rotting vampires,' I said.

She looked up at me, and the only word I had for her eyes was haunted. She looked haunted. 'I've hunted vampires in the field. I'm not just one of those newbies who's only staked them in the morgue. I know what it's like to hunt them and have them hunt you back, but I've never seen anything like this.'

'Rotting vamps are real rare in this country,' Edward said in his best Ted voice.

She nodded. 'How did they heal the damage to their brains, hearts, and spinal cords? That's supposed to kill anything, even vampires.'

'The rotting vampires are more like zombies,' I said, 'and that means fire is the only certainty.'

'Except daylight, right?' she said.

'I've seen two rotters that could walk in daylight and not burn. Daylight shows them as rotting corpses and they can't pass for human, but they could still walk around and do everything else.'

'Day walkers, that's just legend,' she said.

I shook my head. 'I've known a few other vamps that were powerful enough to walk in daylight. Some are just so damned old that daylight doesn't hurt them anymore; for others it's a power curve, almost like being able to call an animal, or levitate.'

'Every time I think I've seen the worst of these bastards, I'm wrong,' she said, and she wasn't looking at us anymore. She was staring off into space, seeing some horror from the fighting and the dying playing over in her head. How did I know that was what Hatfield was thinking? Because I'd been there, done that, and was tired of collecting that particular T-shirt.

'The rotting vamps are the worst of it,' I said.

She looked at me then. 'Really?'

I met those haunted eyes and said, 'Yeah.'

She gave a laugh, but it was a bitter sound. 'I want to ask you to promise me, like I'm fucking five or something.'

I smiled to take the sting out what I was about to say. 'I wouldn't promise, sorry.'

'You said this was the worst.'

'I did, but there are things that have scared me more. Vampires that scared the fuck out of me.'