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teenagers?” I asked.
    “Maybe; they’re not much older than my oldest,” he said.
    “Good that I was in front, then,” I said.
    He glanced down at the dead kids. “Yeah,” he said, but not like he was sure.
    I walked away to get closer to our prisoners, one, to help watch them better, but two, to stop the talk with Zerbrowski about my decision to shoot the vampires when I thought they were flesh-and-blood teenagers. I didn’t regret my choice in that split second of life and death, but a small part of me wondered how I could be all right with the choice. It bothered me that it hadn’t bothered me to gun down two kids neither of whom could have been more than fifteen. It didn’t bother me as I looked at the kneeling figures, and I knew without doubt that if any more of the vampires tried to attack us I’d kill them, too, regardless of apparent age, race, sex, or religious affiliations. I was an equal-opportunity executioner; I killed everybody. I let them see that in my face, in my eyes, and watched fear leak through the toughness on their faces. One of the women started to cry softly. What does it mean when the monsters are so afraid of you that you make them cry? That maybe
monster
depends on which end of the gun you’re on, or that I was just that good at my job. Looking at the twenty or so frightened faces staring at me, I felt bad that they were afraid of me, but I knew that if they attacked us, I’d kill them. They should have been afraid—of me.

3
    T HE AMBULANCE TOOK Perry away with his arm as immobilized as they could get it. We’d found the other officer dead with a host of vampire bites on his torn and bloody clothes. They’d take bite impressions of the surviving vampires, and if their bite marks matched the wounds it was an automatic death sentence. They’d be morgue stakings, which meant they’d die at dawn, be chained down, hung with holy objects, staked and beheaded while they were “dead” to the world. They were already caught, so there was no need for a hunt. I wondered if they understood that they were as good as dead; I doubted it, or they wouldn’t have given up. They’d have fought, right? I mean if you’re dying anyway, wouldn’t you go out fighting?
    Once we had more police on site than we knew what to do with, I found a spare room to change and put on all my vampire hunting gear. I trusted Zerbrowski to alert me in case the captured vampires got out of hand, but I had to change in order to keep the Preternatural Endangerment Act in effect. Another U.S. Marshal of the Preternatural Branch had ended up on trial for murder because he invoked the act, but then didn’t change into his gear when he had the opportunity. Theidea behind the act is that the Marshal can, in effect, create his own warrant of execution on the fly in the middle of the action. The act came into law after lives were lost because several Marshals who had been trying to get a warrant of execution, but hadn’t been granted one yet, had hesitated to kill vampires for fear of being brought up on charges. They could have faced serious charges, or at least lost their badges, for killing legal citizens who just happened to be vampires without some judge telling them it was okay. With the vampires shooting at us, and a hostage, we would probably have been in the clear on the shootings, eventually, but while the investigation was ongoing we might have had to turn in our badges and guns, which meant that I wouldn’t have been able to do any monster hunting or executions for the duration of the investigation.
    There weren’t enough Marshals in the Preternatural Branch to spare us every time we had to kill someone; it was, after all, our job. But more than that, the Preternatural Endangerment Act covered the police with me just like a warrant of execution. As long as I invoked, and was with the police, then it was green-light city for all the bad guys. They’d tried to enact it so that only the vampire executioner,