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mean?”
    “It means, how many vampires have you executed?”
    “Four,” she said, and it was a little defensive.
    “Hunted them down and killed them, or morgue stakings where they’re chained to a gurney and unconscious while you do it?”
    “Morgue, why?”
    “Talk to me after you’ve killed some of them awake, while they’re begging for their lives.”
    “They beg for their lives? I thought they’d just attack.”
    “Not always; sometimes they’re scared and they beg, just like anybody else.”
    “But they’re vampires, they’re monsters.”
    “According to the law we uphold they’re legal citizens of this country, not monsters.”
    She studied my face. I don’t know what she saw there, or wanted to see, but she finally frowned. I think a blank face wasn’t what she’d been hoping to see. “So you really do believe that they’re people.”
    I nodded.
    “You believe they’re people, but you still kill them.”
    I nodded again.
    “If you really believe that, then it would be like me killing Joe Blow down the block. It would be like me putting a stake through a regular person’s heart.”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    She frowned and turned back to unpacking. “I don’t know if I could do my job if I thought of them as people.”
    “It does seem a conflict of interest,” I said. I began debating on where to put the weapons I’d want easy access to, just in case. Knowing that the Harlequin might be planning to try to kidnap or kill me made me more than normally interested in being well armed.
    “Can I say something without you taking it wrong?” she asked, and sat on the edge of her bed.
    I stopped with one gun and two knives laid out on the bed. “Probably not, but say it anyway.”
    She frowned again, putting that little pucker between her eyes. If she didn’t stop frowning so much she’d have lines there before too many years. “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you.”
    I sighed. “What I mean, Karlton, is anytime someone asks me, ‘Can I say something without you taking it wrong?’ it usually means it will be something insulting. So say it, but I can’t guarantee how I’ll take it.”
    She thought about that a minute, serious as a small child on the first day of school. “Okay, I guess that was a stupid thing to say, but I want to know the answer enough to be stupid.”
    “Then ask,” I said.
    “We had some of the other vampire executioners come and give lectures. One of them said you’d been one of the best before you got seduced by the master vampire of your city. He says that women are more likely to be seduced by vampires than men, and you’re proof of that.”
    “It was Gerald Mallory, the vampire hunter assigned to Washington, DC, wasn’t it?” I said.
    “How did you know?”
    “Mallory thinks I’m the whore of Babylon because I’m sleeping with vampires. He might forgive shapeshifters, but he hates vampires with a depth and breadth of hate that’s frightening.”
    “Frightening?” She made it a question with a upward lilt of her voice.
    “I’ve seen him kill. He gets off on it. He’s like a racist who has permission to hate and kill.”
    “You say race because I’m black.”
    “No, I say racist because it’s the closest thing I can imagine to his attitude toward vampires. I’m not joking when I say after seeing him stake vampires that he scares me. He hates them so much, Karlton. He hates them without reason, or thought, or any room in his mind for a reason not to hate them. It consumes him, and people consumed by hate are crazy. It blinds them to the truth, and makes them hate anyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
    “He also says that you should always stake a vampire. He doesn’t approve of using silver ammunition.”
    “He’s a stake and hammer man.” I knelt by my backpack and came up with the Mossberg 500 Bantam shotgun. “This is my favorite for shooting them in their coffins. All you need to do is destroy the brain and the