Page 31 of Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 29)

“That was bad,” I agreed. “Thanks again for protecting everyone here in the hotel.”

“I saw it on the news, all those poor people.”

“Yeah.” And then because I was never good at waiting around, I asked, “Did you see someone leave the room ahead of you?”

She shook her head.

“Did you have to open a lot of doors before you hit the right one?”

She blinked and looked at me, frowning. “What?”

“It must have been really scary with the fire alarm going off and everyone rushing to get out and you kept your head and looked for the fire.”

She nodded. “I was very scared, but I smelled the smoke, and I knew we had a vampire in the one room, and all I could think of was what happened in New York. I couldn’t let that happen here.”

I thought there was no way she smelled smoke, the carpet had barely begun to burn, but maybe she thought she smelled smoke because once she saw the flames she expected it. Memory is a funnything, it fills in the gaps with what you expect, not always with what happened. It’s one reason eyewitness testimony is so untrustworthy.

“Did you see the light from the flames under the door?” I asked.

“No, the doors seal tight.”

“I guess it was lucky the New York fire was in your head, so you went right to the vampire’s room.”

“What did you say?”

“The New York fire has been all over the news, so it’s natural that working in a hotel, it would be in your mind.”

She nodded, looking puzzled, or something. I couldn’t read her expression; was she going into shock? It happened sometimes after the emergency was over even if you weren’t hurt. She had been checked for injuries; surely someone had done that.

“Did you get hurt, burned?”

She shook her head, staring at a point in front of her, but I think she wasn’t seeing anything in the room. It was just a direction to stare while she processed what had happened to her.

“Mona, you okay?” I glanced down the hallway, seeing if I could flag another uniform down to send Dolph this way, but everyone was too far away without me yelling. I didn’t want to get Kay in trouble or have to explain why she’d had to leave the area. There might not be a sisterhood among women or even female cops, but I knew how hard it was to be one of the boys when biology meant you’d never really be one. Having a heavy period emergency could ruin whatever street cred Kay had. Or she’d find tampons and pads all over her desk, in her locker, in her squad car, and she’d have to pretend it didn’t bother her, because if she let it show they’d play the joke forever. Hell, they might play it forever anyway. Nope, I would stay here on the door until she got back, or until someone who outranked me joined us, which would be Dolph. As a U.S. Marshal, I wasn’t technically in the chain of command for any local law enforcement. Marshals were sort of like warrant officers in the army; you knew what our rank was, but not where we fit into your powerstructure, and you were never sure who could give us orders and who we’d ignore.

“I thought they weren’t supposed to move while they burned,” she said in a distant voice, almost like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She was definitely going into some kind of shock or postemergency slump. Had an EMT or some medical someone looked her over?

“Most of the time they don’t move, they just burn,” I said.

She blinked and looked at me with her big, brown eyes showing too much white around the edges. “It moved, it reached out all fire and black bones and it still grabbed for me.”

“While you put it out with the fire extinguisher,” I said.

“Before.”

“Before?” I asked.

She nodded.

“The opened drapes caught the last sunlight of the day; when the sun set the vampire woke for the night,” I said.

“He was all burning, flames, and he still moved, screamed. It was awful.”

“You didn’t put the fire out to save the hotel, you put the vampire out because he came alive while he was on fire,” I said.

She nodded. “He was burning alive. I know he’s dead, but he didn’t seem dead when he cried out in pain. He seemed alive, but he’s dead now, they told me he’s really dead.”

“He’s really dead now,” I said.

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