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heart, but don’t just shoot them in the head and chest and think you’ve got the job done. You need to make sure the brain is leaking out on the floor, or the head is completely detached from the body, and then you need to see some daylight through the chest. The older the vampire, the more completely you need to destroy the heart and head.”
    “He said just staking the heart was enough.”
    “If I see daylight through the chest and the heart is completely destroyed, you’re probably okay, but if I have time I destroy the brain, too, just to be safe, and I want you to know that’s safer in the field. I’d still go back and shoot them in the head after the heart was taken out in a field situation.”
    “You mean on a hunt,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “This is my first hunt.”
    In my head, I thought, Well, fuck . “You mean you have never participated in a hunt?”
    “No,” she said.
    “I know you said you’d only done morgue stakings, but I thought you’d gone on at least one hunt as the junior marshal. You’ve never even seen a vampire hunted and killed in the field?”
    “I can handle myself.”
    I shook my head. “Now I need to ask you something without you getting insulted,” I said.
    She sat on the side of her bed. “That’s fair; what do you want to know?”
    “This is a bad case, Karlton. It’s not a hunt for a first-time field agent.”
    “I know it’s a bad one,” she said.
    “No, you don’t, not yet.” I sat on my bed and faced her. “I want you to sign the warrant over to me, please.”
    She was angry and didn’t try to hide it. “I can’t. I’m the girl, and if I back down on this the other marshals will never trust me again.”
    “It’s not about being a girl, Karlton, it’s about being new and inexperienced.”
    “I’ll have your back, Blake.”
    “I’m not worried that you’ll get me killed.”
    She frowned again. “Then what are you worried about?”
    I looked into those dark brown eyes, that earnest face and said, “I’m worried you’ll get yourself killed.”
    There was no more girl talk after that. We just got ready for bed. I went into the bathroom to get dressed. I had packed my weapons, but not my clothes. Nathaniel, one of my live-in sweeties, a wereleopard and my leopard to call, had. He was the most domestic of us all, and I was fine with the jeans, T-shirts, boots, and jogging shoes, but the pajamas, well, I’d be talking to him about the pajamas. It was a camisole and boy shorts except they were both black lace and stretchy fabric that fit like a second skin. There was enough lift to the fabric that the camisole actually supported my breasts enough for it to fit right. The skimpy pj’s looked great on me, but were so not appropriate marshal jammies. But they were the most appropriate of what he’d packed. Soooo going to talk to him about that.
    When I came out, Karlton said, “Nice pajamas. Sorry to disappoint that you’re not bunking with the boys.”
    I didn’t bother to glare at her. “My boyfriend packed my clothes while I packed the weapons.”
    “You let a man pack your clothes?”
    “He’s usually pretty good at it, but I think he picked the pajamas for what he wanted to see.”
    She snorted. “That’s a man.”
    I sighed. “I guess so.”
    The oversized T-shirt she was wearing had someone I didn’t recognize singing into a microphone stand. I slid between the covers, and the sheets were the cheap cotton that had been in every hotel or motel on this trip. I missed the silk sheets of Jean-Claude’s bed, and the highthread-count cotton of the bed that Micah and Nathaniel and I shared. I was sheet spoiled.
    “Do you always sleep with that many weapons?”
    “Yes.” It wasn’t entirely true. I always slept with a gun close at hand, but I didn’t normally sleep in the wrist sheaths with their slender silver-edged blades. They weren’t that comfortable for sleeping in, but if the Harlequin were faster than normal vampires and