Strange Brew by Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, Karen Chance, P. N. Elrod, Rachel Caine, Faith Hunter, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclane, Jennifer van Dyck, Christian Rummel, Gayle Hendrix, Dina Pearlman, Marc Vietor, Therese Plummer, Karen Chapman Page B

runs.
    Bodyguarding was completely different. For one thing, it was likely to be long-term, much longer than a disposable ever lasted. Days. Weeks. Months, even. “Wait a minute,” I repeated. My voice was loud enough to ring off the morgue steel. “What the hell? Since when did the resurrected join the force? This is something any cop in Kevlar could do, right?”
    Prieto gave me another look. This one was blank and cool. “We’ve tried that,” he said. “Didn’t go so well, which is why we decided to go with somebody with nothing to lose, like your friend here. Our intel says the attack’s going to come in the next few days. Fact is, when we booked the job in the first place, we were planning to protect a completely different person. While you’ve been preparing , we lost two more of the targets, and the teams of cops assigned for protection. So I don’t give a shit about your problems, lady. I lost four of my own officers protecting these—people. Least you can do is your job.”
    “But you can’t—”
    Andy interrupted me. “Who’d I be protecting?” Prieto had been waiting for the question, and he seemed to take a special kind of pleasure in saying, “It’s her. Holly Anne Caldwell. These fucking freaks are taking out witches.”
     
    We left the viewing room to go down the hall to a small airless conference room, where Prieto had set up shop for the night. He had folders.
    He had a lot of folders.
    I knew every one of the victims. Shayle Gallagher had been the first—he’d been taken right out of his flower shop (like me, he only moonlighted at the resurrection business), and there had been signs of a vicious struggle. Could have been robbery or a hate crime, so that hadn’t raised too many unusual flags at first, especially with no body found.
    Two weeks ago, though, Harrison Wright had failed to show up to work at his medical practice, and his multimillion-dollar estate showed signs of the same brutal attack as at Gallagher’s store.
    Lottie Flores had been the next victim, and she’d disappeared the day after I’d taken the case from Sam.
    “We kept it out of the news,” Prieto said. “Wasn’t easy. Oh, and Sam agreed we shouldn’t interrupt you while you were working.”
    Sam agreed ? I was going to have a talk with Sam. One involving a punch in the mouth.
    “You said there were dead officers,” Andy said.
    Prieto nodded. “My guys had missed a scheduled check-in. When backup arrived, their car was empty. They were found in the Flores house.”
    “Why not bring one of them back, find out just what went on?”
    Prieto looked grim. “We thought about it, but the families wouldn’t sign off, and by then, we were knee-deep in missing resurrection witches. Didn’t think we should waste the time trying to convince anybody.”
    I looked at the photos of the two dead police officers, and felt my stomach twist. They’d been beaten to death. That wasn’t easy to do with any cop, but you could at least see how the five-foot-five, petite woman could have been overpowered. Not her partner, six-foot-four and big enough to intimidate pretty much anyone. He looked like he chewed nails as vitamins.
    “Neither one got a shot off,” Prieto said. “No sign of Flores in the house, but we found blood and the same smash-up indicating a struggle. Blood in the bedroom turned out to be hers.”
    Lottie’s house was neatly kept. Most of the damage was confined to her bedroom—bed pulled sideways, covers wrenched half off, blood smeared on the sheets and floor, leading down the hall. She’d been dragged out.
    I hated Lottie. I had good reason; I’d been her apprentice for three resurrections, before I’d transferred to Marvin Jones, my permanent instructor. I’d hated every filthy second of being around Lottie and watching her work. I’d lodged a complaint against her with the Board of Review; nothing had come of it, of course. There weren’t so many resurrection witches running around that