“This is my favorite for shooting them in their coffins. All you need to do is destroy the brain and the 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.”