Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(28)

“You’re the vampire expert,” Dolph said.

“He’s your friend.”

“I thought we were at least work friends,” McKinnon said.

“How would you feel if I forced you and your wife to harm each other, as an experiment just to see what would happen? Would we still be friends after that?”

Expressions chased across his face like clouds on a windy day as he tried to process, or maybe he was just buying time to frame an answer that would make him the good guy here. That’s what most people do, they reframe things so that they are the hero and not the villain. I hoped McKinnon was better than that.

“If you did it without understanding that it would hurt us, I’d hope I’d listen to you explain and accept a heartfelt apology.”

“I don’t trust you as much as I did before, but skip it, let’s get back to the fact that you are part of a government think tank committee and you all think that vampires are not faster and stronger than human normal. How the hell did the experts on your panel decide that bit of misinformation?”

“I’m not at liberty to share the names of our experts.”

“If it was Gerald Mallory, he hasn’t done anything but morgue stakings in decades. Maybe he doesn’t remember the truth, but if you take this charm into the field and come up against someone who’s not chained down with holy items for a morgue staking, you could strip the vampire’s control away. This magic could turn them back into a killing machine that just slaughters everyone it sees, because you’ve taken their ability to control their hunger for blood away from them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“She means that even if the vampire wasn’t planning to hurt anyone, the charm could force them to attack.”

“We were told the charm just strips away the human mask and reveals the true monster inside.”

“Whoever told you that knew exactly what the charm would do.”

“You can’t know that it wasn’t just an honest mistake, Blake.”

“I bet you a hundred bucks that they knew, and that they believe that the only good vampire is a dead vampire.”

“We would never take advice from someone who thought that,” McKinnon said.

“And they know that, so they’ll keep the worst of their prejudice to themselves, so they can further their agenda.”

“I don’t believe that the people who made this charm understood what it would do.”

“Most witches don’t know that much about vampires, not really; their magic is all about life, so they had to turn to a vampire expert on what went into the charm, right?”

He looked away then, so we wouldn’t see his eyes. I think he was out of steely cop gaze that would hide what he was thinking. That meant I’d made him doubt one or more of the experts on his oversight committee. Good.

“If it’s Gerald Mallory, then he’d do anything to change the laws back to the bad old days when vampires could be killed on sight. He hates them with the kind of hate you see in hardcore white supremacists, or men who despise women at the same time that they’re obsessed with them. It’s that kind of obsessive hatred that I saw in Mallory the last time I worked with him.”

“I’m not admitting that Gerald has ever spoken with our committee, but he’s not very flattering about you either.”

“He’s told me to my face what he thinks of me.”

“I doubt that.”

“He thinks I’m sleeping with the enemy, and that Jean-Claude basically used vampire wiles to seduce me and that I’m not in love with him, I’m just mind-fucked or possessed, or I’ve gone completely over to the other side because he found out I’m a necromancer and that makes me as evil as a vampire.”

“He did not say that to you,” McKinnon said.

“No, he called me fucking coffin bait, fucking fur-banger, whore of Babylon, and an evil slut who betrayed my humanity to be in league with the devil.”

“Did he call you all that in front of witnesses?” Dolph asked.

“Not unless you count the vampire that he was trying to kill, and that was so long ago that the vampire was just glad to live through it all. No way was he going to testify against a vampire hunter, and back then no one would have believed him anyway.”

“How long ago was that?” McKinnon asked.

“God, eight, nine years ago now. I haven’t been invited back to Washington, DC, since then, at least not to hunt vampires.”

“You went to DC to speak in front of two committees. One on zombie rights and one on vampire rights,” Dolph said.

“Yeah, the first one went pretty well, but by the time I was invited to speak about vampires the antivampire lobby had blackened my name so that they decided not to have me speak after all.”

“You never mentioned it to me,” Dolph said.

“You were still anti-supernatural-everything back then, Dolph.”

“I’m sorry that you couldn’t come to me back then.”

“You’ve had me and all my sweeties over to your house. We’re good,” I said, and then I looked at McKinnon. “You and I are not good.”

“What can I do to make this right between us?” he asked.