Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) [Hardcover] Hamilton, Laurell K.

Product Description When a fifteen-year-old girl is abducted by vampires, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Anita Blake to find her. And when she does, she’s faced with something she’s never seen before: a terrifyingly ordinary group of people—kids, grandparents, soccer moms—all recently turned and willing to die to avoid serving a master. And where there’s one martyr, there will be more… But even vampires have monsters that they’re afraid of. And Anita is one of them… Review "Hamilton remains one of the most inventive and exciting writers in the paranormal field." "[A] wildly popular paranormal series." “Long before Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, [there was] sexy, strong-willed vampire hunter Anita Blake.” About the Author Laurell K. Hamilton is a full-time writer. She lives in a suburb of St. Louis with her family. Visit her website at www.laurellkhamilton.org. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One On TV, interrogation rooms are roomy and have big windows so that you can watch everything. In reality, the rooms are pretty small, and there are almost never big picture windows; that’s why real police footage is grainy and black-and-white, rather than Technicolor gorgeous. The interrogation room was painted pale beige, or maybe it was taupe, I’d always been a little fuzzy on the difference between them. Either way it was a bland color described by real estate agents as a warm neutral; they lied. It was a cold, impersonal color. The small table was all shiny metal, and so was the chair. The idea was that the prisoners couldn’t scratch their names, or messages, in the metal like they could have in wood, but whoever thought that had never seen what a vampire, or a wereanimal, could do to metal. There were plenty of scratches in the shiny tabletop, most done with just fingernails, superhuman strength, and the boredom of hours of sitting. The vampire sitting at the small table wasn’t trying to carve his initials on anything. He was crying, so hard that his thin shoulders shook. He’d slicked his black hair back from his face in a widow’s peak that I was betting was a haircut and no more natural than the ink-black color. He was mumbling in a tear-choked voice, “You hate me because I’m a vampire.” I spread my hands flat on the cool metal table. My jacket’s jewel-tone blue sleeves looked too bright against the naked metal, or maybe it was the crimson nail polish. That had been for my date the night before; it looked out of place while I was U.S. Marshal Anita Blake. I counted to ten, to keep from yelling at our suspect again. That was what had started the crying; I’d scared him. Jesus, some people don’t have enough balls to be undead. “I don’t hate you, Mr. Wilcox,” I said, in a smooth, even friendly voice. I had to deal with clients every day at Animators Inc.; I had a customer voice. “Some of my best friends are vampires and shapeshifters.” “You hunt and kill us,” he said, but he raised his eyes enough to gaze at me between his fingers. His tears were tinged pink with someone else’s blood. His putting his hands over his eyes had smeared the tears around so that his face was trailed and marked with the drying pink tears. It didn’t match the perfectly arched black eyebrows, or the eyebrow ring that sat dull blue metal above his left eye. He’d probably done it to bring out the blue in his eyes, but at best they were a watery, pale blue that didn’t work with the dyed black hair, and the dark blue of the eyebrow piercing just seemed to emphasize that his eyes were too pale, and matched the pink traces of blood way better than the artificial additions. I was betting he started life as a white-blond, or maybe pale, nondescript brown. “I’m a legal vampire executioner, Mr. Wilcox, but you have to break the law to bring me to your door.” Those pale eyes blinked at me. “You can look me in the eyes.” I smiled, and tried to shove it all the way up into my own dark