Things Pick Up

Things stay idle and keep going south between me and the rest of the Paladins. One of them convinces himself that I’m the vampire who slurped his wife and takes a swing. Like I said, my strength was still above average and when I swing back I end up doing more damage than is fair. So they send me and the kid to Ferris’s office to think about what we’ve done. The kid asks me when he’s going to be strong enough to hit like that and I finally snap. “When you quit fucking calling it murder and slurp someone, dipshit!” His face turns red and he stares at the floor, Ferris scowls at me and goes back to the paperwork we were doing before we got dumped in her office. For a second I feel like apologizing to the kid, to Jacob, but I’m just too damned angry to do anything but smoke a cigarette. This whole situation, babysitting and teaching people to kill vampires, it was just having an effect on me. I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand it. The phone rings and I’m relieved that the wait for anything is over. Ferris answers and curtly replies that she’s babysitting the both of us at the moment. Then her eyes get wide and I can tell something she isn’t happy about has just gone down. “Fucking military pigs! Tell Mills I said, no, tell Mills that I ORDER THEY HOLD THEIR POSITION! No raids, no gun fights, not a goddamn thing. I don’t want the last fuck-up repeating itself. What for? What the fuck did we start this whole goddamn civilian operation for in the first place?” she’s screaming and pounding her first on the desk like an animal. Which she used to be. The kid looks scared out of his gourd but personally I’m still finding myself a bit turned on by Ferris. My brain again warned me that it was going to get me in trouble one of these days. She slams the phone down and pulls a revolver out from the desk. “You two got your guns?” she asks. We both nod and I pat mine with a growing fondness. “Good. We just got a call that there’s been a sighting. A huge one. Maybe a whole nest. And I need you two there,” she barks before shoving us toward the door.