WE STOOD IN front of a modest suburban house in a street full of other modest suburban houses. There were enough streetlights that we had a good view even in the dark. People forget that Las Vegas’s famous Strip with its casinos, shows, and bright lights is only a small part of the city. Other than the fact that the house was set in a yard that ran high to rocks, sand, and native desert plants, it could have been one of a million housing developments anywhere in the country.
Most of the other houses had grass and flowers, as if they were trying to pretend they didn’t live in the desert. The day’s heat was browning the grass and flowers nicely. They must have a limit on how much they can water, because I’ve seen yards in deserts as green as a golf course. These yards looked sad and tired in the cooling dark. It was still hot, but had the promise that as the night wore on it would get cooler.
“A high priestess lives here?” Bernardo said.
“According to the phone book,” I said.
He came around the car to stand on the sidewalk beside us. “It looks so . . . ordinary.”
He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I guess I did.”
Edward walked to the back of the car and opened it. He reached into his own bag of tricks and got out one of the U.S. Marshal windbreakers.
“It’s too hot for that,” I said.
He looked at me. “We’re armed to the teeth, and it’s all visible. Would you let us in your house if you weren’t sure we were cops? But I am running low on them. Someone keeps getting them all bloody.”
I tapped my badge on its lanyard around my neck. It was what I wore in St. Louis when the heat was too hot for a jacket. “See?” I said. “I’m legal.”
“You look more harmless than we do,” Edward said, and started handing out jackets to the other men.
Bernardo took his without comment and just slipped it on, pulling his braid out of the back with a practiced flip. Some gestures are not about being a girl or a boy, but just how long your hair is.
Olaf had his badge on a lanyard around his neck, too. It bugged me that we’d both done it, but where else are you gonna put a badge when you’re wearing a T-shirt? I did have one of the clips and had put the badge on my backpack a couple of times, but I’d run into situations where I took off the backpack, and got separated from it and my badge. I had the badge on my belt by the Browning, because you always want to flash a badge when you flash a gun. Just good survival skills, and saves the other cops from being called by some panicked civilian who spotted it. You want your badge in the middle of a fight with police and bad guys. It helps the police not shoot you. Yeah, being a girl and looking so uncop helped the good guys know what I looked like, but accidents happen when you’re drowning in adrenaline. Badge visible, at least the accident wouldn’t be my fault.
Edward clipped his badge to his clothes so that he’d be doubly visible, and Bernardo followed suit. There were still moments when Edward could make me feel like the rookie. I wondered if there’d ever come a time when I truly believed we were equal. Probably not.
I wasn’t really a fan of desert landscaping, but someone with an eye for it had arranged the cacti, grass, and rocks so that everything flowed. It gave the illusion of water, dry water, flowing in the shape and color of stone and plant.
“Nice,” Bernardo said.
“What?” I asked.
I looked up at him and had to give him a point for noticing.
“It’s just rocks and plants,” Olaf said.
I took a breath to say something, but Edward interrupted. “We’re not here to admire her gardening. We’re here to talk to her about a murdered parishioner of hers.”
“I don’t think they call them parishioners,” Bernardo said.
I took a step toward him, and suddenly I felt it, too. It was a faint hum up the skin, down the nerves. I looked around the door and finally found it on the porch. It was a mosaic pentagram in pretty colored stone, set in the concrete of the porch itself. It was charged, as in spell charged.
I touched Edward’s arm. “You might want to step off the welcome mat.”
He glanced at me, then where I was pointing. He didn’t argue, just stepped a little to one side. A visible tension lifted in the set of his shoulders. Maybe Edward only thought he couldn’t sense things. Being a little psychic would explain how he’d managed to stay alive all these years while hunting preternatural creepy-crawlies.
“I didn’t see it until you acted too tense,” I said.
“She’s good,” he said, as he rang the doorbell.
I nodded.
Olaf was looking at both of us, as if he didn’t know what the hell had just happened. Bernardo said, “A hex sign on the porch. Step around it.”
“It’s not a hex sign,” I had time to say before the door opened.
A tall man answered the door. His dark hair was shaved close, and his eyes were dark and not happy to see us. “What do you want?”
Edward slid instantly into Ted’s good-ol’-boy persona. You’d think I’d get used to how easily he became someone else, but it still creeped me.
“U.S. Marshal Ted Forrester; we called ahead to make sure Ms. Billings would be home. Or, rather, Marshal Anita Blake called ahead.” He grinned as he said it and just exuded charm. Not that slimy charm that some men do, but that hail-fellow-well-met kind of energy. I knew some people who did it naturally, but Edward was the first person I’d known who could turn it on and off like a switch. It always made me wonder if long before the army got hold of him, he’d been more like Ted. Which sounded weird, since Ted was him, but the question still seemed worth poking at.
The man glanced at Edward’s ID, then looked past him at us. “Who are they?”
I held up my badge on its lanyard so it was even more visible. “Marshal Anita Blake; I did call and talk to Ms. Billings.”
Bernardo said, in a voice as cheerful and well meaning as Ted’s, “U.S. Marshal Bernardo Spotted Horse.”
Olaf sort of growled behind us all. “Otto Jeffries, U.S. Marshal.” He held up his badge so the man could see it over everyone’s shoulders. Bernardo did the same.
The man, Michael presumably, scowled at us but unlatched the screen door. But before he let us cross the threshold, he spoke in a low voice. “Don’t upset her.”
“We’ll do our best not to, sir,” Edward said in his Ted voice. We went in through the door, but there was something about Michael at my back that made me turn so I could keep him in my peripheral vision. With everyone inside, I could put him at a little over six feet, which put him taller than Bernardo but shorter than Olaf. I had a moment as we all bunched into the foyer to see just how much smaller Edward was than the other men. It was always hard to remember that Edward wasn’t that tall, at five foot eight. He was just one of those people who seemed taller than he was; sometimes physical height isn’t what tall is about.
The living room was probably as big a disappointment to Bernardo as the outside had been because it was a typical room. It had a couch and a couple of chairs and was painted in a light and cheerful blue, with hints of a pinkish orange in the cushions and some of the knickknacks. There was tea set out on the long coffee table, with enough cups for everyone. I hadn’t told her how many of us were coming, but there they sat, four cups. Psychics, ya gotta love ’em.
Phoebe Billings sat there, her eyes a little red from crying, but her smile serene and sort of knowing. My mentor Marianne had a smile like that. It meant she knew something I needed to know, or was watching me work through a lesson that I needed to learn very badly, but I was being stubborn. Witches who are also counselors are very big on you coming to your realizations in your own time, just in case rushing you would somehow damage your karmic lesson. Yes, Marianne drove me nuts sometimes with the lack of direction, but since one of the things she thought I needed to work on was patience, it was all good for me. Irritating, but good, so she said. I found it mostly irritating.
“Won’t you sit down. The tea is hot.”
Edward sat down on the couch beside her, still smiling his Ted smile, but it was more sympathetic now. “I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Billings.”
Michael had taken up a post near her, one hand on the other wrist. I knew a bodyguard pose when I saw it. He was either her priest or her black dog—though most covens didn’t have one of the latter anymore. The covens that still had it as an office usually had two. They were bodyguards and did protection detail magically when the coven did work. Most of their work was of a spiritually protective nature, but once upon a time, the black dogs had hunted bogeys that were more flesh and less spirit. Michael had the feel of someone who could do both.
Phoebe looked from one to the other of us, then finally came back to Ted. “What do you want to know, Marshals?” There was the slightest of hesitation before she called us by our titles.
She poured tea into our cups. She put sugar in two, and left two plain. Then she handed them to Michael and directed where they should go.
Edward took his tea, as did the others. I got mine last. Neither she nor Michael got cups. I had absolutely no reason to mistrust Phoebe Billings, but unless she drank the tea, I wasn’t touching it. Just because you’re a witch doesn’t mean you’re a good witch.
She smiled at us all as we sat with our untouched cups, as if we’d done exactly what she’d known we would do. “Randy wouldn’t have taken the tea, either,” she said. “Police, you’re all so suspicious.” She dabbed at her eyes and gave a ladylike sniff.
“Then why did you give us the tea if you knew we wouldn’t drink it?” I said.
“A test of what?” I asked, and I must have sounded a little more unfriendly than was called for, because Edward touched my leg, just a nudge to let me know to bring the tone down. Edward was one of the few people I’d take the hint from.
“Ask me again in a few days, and I’ll answer your question,” she said.
“You know, just because you’re Wiccan and psychic doesn’t mean you have to be mysterious,” I said.
“Ask me your questions,” she said, and her voice was sad and too somber to match the bright room we sat in, but then grief comes to every room, no matter what color its painted.
Edward sat back a little more on the couch, giving me the best view of her he could give without changing seats. It let me know he was letting me take the lead, like he’d said in the car. Fine.
“He was as competent at magic as he was at everything he did,” she said. A woman appeared from farther into the house. She carried a tray with another cup and saucer on it. She had the priestess’s long brown hair, but the body was slender and younger. I wasn’t surprised when Phoebe introduced her as her daughter, Kate.
“Then if Sherman started to say a spell in the middle of a firefight, he’d have a reason to think it would help?”
The woman poured tea for her mother from the pot and handed it to her. “Randy never wasted things, neither ammo, nor physical effort, nor a spell.”
She drank from the cup. Bernardo followed suit and did a pretty good job of not leering at the daughter as she walked back toward the kitchen with the empty tray. Edward sipped his tea, too.
Phoebe glanced from Olaf to me. “Still don’t trust me?”
“I do not like tea,” Olaf said.
“I’d rather just ask our questions, if that’s all right.” I meant that, but it’s also been my experience that tea drinkers make bad coffee.
I glanced at Edward, and he took over. I just wasn’t sure how much to tell her. “We can’t really share too much information on an ongoing investigation, Phoebe. But we have good reason to think that Randy was saying a spell in the middle of a fight.”
“Saying?” she asked.
“Randy was very good; he could have simply thought a blessing in the middle of a fight.”
“What kind of spell would he have had to say out loud?” I asked.
She frowned. “Some witches need to speak aloud to help focus; Randy didn’t. So if he was chanting aloud, then it was something ritualistic and old. Something he’d memorized, like an old charm. I don’t know how much any of you know about our faith, but most ritual is created for the purpose of an individual event. It’s a very creative, and fluid, process. When you’re talking about set words, then it’s more ceremonial magicians then Wiccans.”
“But Randy was Wiccan, not a ceremonial magician,” I said.
“What would he have known, or thought, to say in the middle of a fight? What would have prompted him to think of an old chant, a memorized piece?”
“If you have a recording of what he said, then I can help, or even some of the words, and I can give you some hint.”
I looked at Edward.
“We don’t have anything we can let you listen to, Phoebe; I’m sorry.” It was neatly done, not that we didn’t have a recording but that we couldn’t let her listen to it. I’d have just told her we didn’t have one, which is why I’d let Edward answer.
She looked away from all of us and spoke in a voice that was shaky. “Is it that awful?”
Shit. But Edward moved in smoothly, even touching her hand. “It’s not that, Phoebe. It’s just that it’s an ongoing investigation, and we have to be cautious what information we let out.”
She looked at him from inches away. “You think someone in my coven could be involved?”
“Do you?” he asked, in a voice that was not the least surprised, as if to say, yes, we had suspected it, but we’d let her tell us the truth. I’d have sounded surprised and spooked her.
She looked into his eyes from inches away, and his hand on hers was suddenly more important. I felt the prickle of energy, and knew it had nothing to do with wereanimals or vampires.
He smiled, and pulled back his hand. “Trying to psychically read a police officer without permission is illegal, Phoebe.”
“How can you be sure of that?” he asked, with a smile.
She smiled and put her teacup on the coffee table beside the rest. “I’m psychic, remember. I have information that you need, but I don’t know what it is. I only know that if you ask the right question, I’ll tell you something important.”
I turned to the men with me and tried to explain. “Most psychic ability is pretty vague. Phoebe knows she has information that will be important, but there’s a question we need to ask to spark that knowledge in her.”
“And she knows this, how?” Bernardo asked.
I shrugged. “She couldn’t tell you how, and I couldn’t either. I’ve just worked with enough psychics to know that this is as good as the explanation gets sometimes.”
Olaf scowled. “That is not an explanation.”
I shrugged again. “The best we’ve got.” I turned back to the priestess. “Let’s go back to Marshal Forrester’s question. Could anyone in your coven be involved?”
She shook her head. “No.” It was a very firm no.
I tried again. “Could anyone here in the magical community be involved?”
“How can I answer that? I don’t know what spells were used, or why you believe that Randy was trying to say something. Of course, there are bad people in every community, but without more information, I can’t tell you whose talents this could have been.” She sounded impatient, and I guess I couldn’t blame her.
I looked at Edward.
She smiled. “Yes, the Supreme Court upheld that we are truly priests, so what you tell me is covered under the law.”
He looked at Michael’s looming figure. “Is he a priest?”
“We are all priests and priestesses if we are called by Goddess,” she said. It was a very priestess answer.
I answered for her. “He’s her black dog.”
Both Phoebe and Michael looked at me, as if I’d done something interesting. “They come here pretending not to know anything about us, but they’ve checked us out. They’re lying.”
“Now, Michael, you should know not to jump to conclusions.” She turned those gentle brown eyes to me. “Have you checked us out?”
I shook my head. “I swear to you that other than finding out you are Randy Sherman’s priestess, no.”
I licked my lips and thought about it. How had I known? “There’s a bond between most of the priests and priestesses I’ve met. Either they are a couple, or the magical working as a team just forms a bond. There’s no feel of that between you and him. Also, he just screams muscle. The only job in a coven that is all about muscle, either spiritual or physical, is the black dog.”
“Most covens don’t have them anymore,” she said.
I shrugged. “My mentor is into the history of her craft.”
“I see the cross, but is it your sign of faith, or merely what the police make you wear?”
“I’m Christian,” I said.
She smiled, and it was a little too knowledgeble. “But you find some precepts of the Church limiting.”
I fought not to squirm. “I find the Church’s attitude toward my own flavor of psychic ability limiting, yes.”
I started to answer, but Edward made a motion and I stopped. “It doesn’t matter what Marshal Blake’s gifts are.”
I didn’t know why Edward didn’t want me to share with her, but I trusted his judgment.
Phoebe looked from one to the other of us. “You are very much a partnership.”
“We’ve worked together for years,” he said.
She shook her head. “It’s more than that.” She shook her head as if shaking the thought away. Then she looked back at me, and the eyes were no longer gentle. “Ask your questions, Marshal Blake.”
“If Michael leaves the room, then we’ll talk more freely,” Edward said.
“I will not leave you with them,” the big man said.
“Does my grief make me blind?” she asked him.
His face softened. “I think, it does, my priestess.”
He turned dark eyes on us. He pointed at Olaf. “That one’s aura is dark, stained by violence and evil things. If you could not feel him at your door, then you are head-blind with grief, Phoebe.”
“Then be my eyes, Michael,” she said.
He turned to Bernardo. “I don’t see any harm in that one, though I wouldn’t trust him with my sister.”
She smiled. “Handsome men are seldom trustworthy with people’s sisters.”
He skipped me and went to Edward next. “That one’s aura is dark, too, but dark the way Randy’s was dark. Dark the way some people that have seen combat are dark. I would not want him at my back, but he means no harm here.”
I have to admit that my pulse was up. Michael looked at me, and I fought not to look down but to meet those too-perceptive eyes.
“She is a problem. She is shielding, very tightly. I cannot read much past those shields. But she is powerful, and there is a feel of death to her. I don’t know if she brings death, or if death follows her, but it’s there, like a scent.”
“Destiny lies heavy on some,” Phoebe said.
He shook his head. “It’s not that.” He stared at me, and I felt him pushing at my shields. After what had happened with Sanchez, I did not want my shields down again.
“Sorry,” and he looked embarrassed, “but I don’t find many who aren’t Wiccan who can shield from me.”
“I’ve been trained by the best,” I said.
He glanced at the men with me. “Not by them.”
“They aren’t cops; there’s something unfinished, or wilder, about you all. The only other cop I’ve met who felt close to you was one who had been undercover so long he’d almost become one of the bad guys. He got out, he got the job done, but it changed him. It made him less cop and more criminal.”
“You know what they say,” I said, “one of the things that makes us good at getting bad guys is that we can think like one.”
“Most cops can, but there’s a big difference between thinking like one and being one.” He studied us all. “The badges are real, but it’s like putting a leash on a tiger. It never stops being a tiger.”
And that was a little too close to home.
56
MICHAEL WOULDN’T LEAVE. He thought we were too dangerous. We asked questions, but Edward didn’t want to tell about the crushed jaw, and other things, so it was like walking in a pitch-black room. You knew what you wanted was in there somewhere, but without a little light, you might never find it.
I believed that Phoebe knew something, but we needed the right question to unlock it. She couldn’t tell us what she didn’t know we needed to know, or something like that. It was one of the most frustrating interrogations I’d ever done, though I let Edward take over before I completely lost patience. If I’d been alone, would I have told her everything I thought she needed to know? Maybe. I’d almost certainly have told her things that the other police wouldn’t want a civilian to know. Did that make me a bad cop? Maybe. Did that make Edward a better cop? Probably.
I was actually pacing the far side of the room. She was a magical practitioner; for all we knew, she or Michael there could be involved. It wasn’t likely, but . . . and yet I would have spilled the beans to her. I was second-guessing myself about everything. It wasn’t like me, so if it wasn’t like me, then who was it like?
Then I felt it: vampire. I just knew one was out there; I could feel it. “There’s a vampire outside,” I said.
I heard the guns clear the holsters. I had my hand on my Browning out, too, but . . .
“Is it a good vampire, or a bad vampire?” Bernardo asked.
Edward came close to me, where I stood next to the big picture window and its pulled drapes. He whispered, “Can you tell who it is?”
I put my left hand against the drape, hard enough to press it into the glass behind it. I concentrated, just a little, and thought at that push of energy. I had a choice of pushing back or simply opening enough to taste it. I was pretty sure it was Wicked, because whoever it was hadn’t tried to hide his presence from me. Vittorio was able to hide not just from me but from Max, and if he could hide his energy signature from the Master of the City, then he sure as hell could avoid my radar.
But it was better to be sure, so I reached out a little more to that cool, wind-from-the-grave power. I touched that energy, found a taste of Jean-Claude’s power. All the vampires bound to him had a flavor of him, like a spice that had touched all their skins. Then my power touched Wicked, and him I could feel, like the word should be in bold letters. I felt him look into the air, as if he should be able to see me hovering. If it had been Jean-Claude, I could have used his eyes to look where he was looking; with Wicked it was just a feeling.
“It’s him,” I said, low to Edward. I started to say, louder, “It’s okay, he’s on our side,” but stopped in midbreath, because a different power had pushed through the opening in my shields. The opening I’d had to make to sense the vampire. I’d forgotten about Michael. I’d forgotten that he was a psychic and that his priestess had ordered him to sense my abilities.
There was a moment where I was caught between sensing the vampire outside and trying to push the witch out of my shields. It should have been simply a matter of closing the door that I’d opened, but something about Michael’s power made the door wider. It was like I’d opened a door, and he turned it into a tunnel mouth big enough to drive a semi through. The door I could guard, but the other opening was too large. And all tunnels are dark.
Darkness boiled toward me. I could see her in my mind’s eye like a cloud of night, ready to pour into that opening. Michael stood in that vision with me, if vision was the word for it. He could see it, too. He didn’t waste time asking, What is it? He acted. He was the black dog, the black man, and he did his job. It is an old, old custom that no guest be harmed in your house.
A golden glow appeared in his hand and grew like lightning to form a sword. He faced the coming dark with that burning sword in his hand. There was a second shadow over him, if a shadow could glow with light; it was larger than the man, and as the blackness framed him, rising up and up to eat the room I knew we had to be standing in, the glowing figure was more clear, and I saw for a moment the shadow of great, burning wings.
My first thought was demon; then I knew that was just the front of my brain. I knew what the demonic felt like, and this was not it. It was power, raw and real, and destruction was in that fire, but it was holy fire, and only the unholy need fear it. But it takes faith to stand that close to the flame and not be afraid. How strong was my faith? What did I believe in as the darkness swept upward and Michael stood there with his sword and the shadow of angels at his back? I had a heartbeat to think, Oh, Michael, I get it.
The man stood there between me and the dark, and I could not let him stand alone. I moved to stand with the man, Michael, and that glowing shadow, reciting as I moved, “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle”—the fire burned brighter against the dark—“be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.” It was like the fire in holy objects that came when faith was all you had against the vampires. “May God rebuke him, we humbly pray: and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host . . .” It was as if I were seeing the source of every glowing holy object I had ever seen, burning before me. “By the power of God, cast into hell Satan . . .” I was at the edge of those burning wings, and for a moment I hesitated. The darkness swept up and over the man and the glow, and I knew that I had seconds to decide. What was I; whose side was I on? Was I holy enough to step into that light?
Marmee Noir’s voice spoke in my head, or maybe the darkness all around us spoke. “A piece of me is inside you, necromancer; if you step into the fire of God, you will be destroyed like any vampire.”
Was she right?
Then Michael the man stepped back, to put himself in harm’s way again. He faced that overwhelming ocean of darkness, when it had given him the chance to be left out of it. It wasn’t even thought; I moved forward, because he was trying to take my harm, my blow, my fate, and I couldn’t let him do that. I stepped into that fire and expected to be blinded by the light, but it wasn’t like that. It was as if the world were light, and I could only see the light, flickering and real around me. The man in front of me was real, and the fire was real, but . . .
“Necromancer, help me!”
I didn’t understand what she meant, but it didn’t matter. Evil always lies. I finished the prayer: “And all other evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”
It was as if the power around us took a breath, the way you’d do before blowing out a candle. The power took a breath, then let it out, but this breath was like standing at ground zero of a nuclear bomb. Reality blew outward, then re-formed. I half-expected the house to be destroyed around us, but we were left blinking in the living room of Phoebe Billings’s house. Not so much as a teacup had moved.
Edward was standing very close to us, but Phoebe was holding him back. Telling him, “Wait, Michael knows what he’s doing.”
I was standing behind Michael, as I had been in the “vision”; there was no burning sword in his hand, but somehow I knew, if he needed it, it would be there.
He turned around and looked at me with dark brown eyes, but there was a glimmer in them, a hint of fire, down in their depths. Not the light of vampires but of something else.
“Anita, talk to me,” Edward said.
“I’m okay, Edward, thanks to Michael.” And I meant the double entendre. I’d find a church and burn a candle for the Archangel Michael. It was the least I could do.
“Someone explain what just happened,” he said, and he sounded angry.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“You looked up and saw something, something that scared the hell out of you. Then he”—and he shoved a thumb in Michael’s direction—“went to stand by you. I tried to go to you, but she told me it wasn’t a matter of guns.”
“She was right,” I said.
“Then every holy object in the room burst into flame.”
“You mean they glowed,” I said.
“No, flame, they burned.”
“Bernardo panicked,” Olaf said, “and threw off his cross.”
I looked at the big man. I almost asked him how he justified faith in God with being a serial killer, but didn’t. Maybe later if I wanted to piss him off.
“Once I lost the cross,” Bernardo said, and I realized that he was the only one not standing close to us, “I saw . . . things.”
“What?” I asked.
“Light, darkness.” He stared at me from the edge of the couch. “I saw . . . something.” He looked pale and shaken.
I started to ask What? again, but Michael touched my arm. I looked at him. He shook his head. I nodded. Okay, let Bernardo’s vision alone. It had scared the shit out of him, and that made it private. He’d tell, or he’d get drunk and try to forget it. It’s not every day you see demons and angels. Marmee Noir wasn’t technically a demon, but she was an evil spirit.
“What is it that hunts you?” Michael asked.
“You saw it,” I said.
“I did, but I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
I stared up at him. “You stepped in her way, twice, and you didn’t know what she was, or what she could have done to you?” I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice.
He nodded. “I am the black dog, the circle guardian. You are our guest, and no harm shall befall anyone in my care.”
“You have no idea what she could have done to you.”
He smiled, and it was the smile of a true believer. “It could not have touched me.”
“Is he talking about . . . ,” and Edward hesitated.
“Marmee Noir.”
“Mother Dark,” Phoebe said.
I nodded.
“The dark goddess is not always fearful; sometimes she is restful.”
“She isn’t a goddess, or if she is, there’s no good side to her; trust me on that.”
“This was not goddess energy,” Michael said.
“Couldn’t you see it?” I asked.
“I could feel it, but I concentrated on repairing the damage to our wards so that more would not follow her. I trusted Michael to chase out that which had crossed our borders and to keep you safe.”
“That’s a lot to trust someone with,” I said.
“You’ve seen him armed for battle, Marshal; do you believe my trust is misplaced?”
I flashed back on the image of Michael with the burning sword and that shadow of wings over him. I shook my head. “No, it’s not misplaced.”
“Someone talk to me,” Edward said, “now.”
“I lowered my shields to see if the vampire was ours, and Michael here tried to taste my power by making the opening a little bigger.”
“You mean like what happened with Sanchez earlier,” Edward said.
I nodded.
“I did not damage your shields deliberately,” he said.
“I believe you,” I said. “And the Mother of All Darkness tried to eat me again. But Michael stopped her, cast her out.”
“To hell?” Bernardo asked, still looking haunted.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, just out of here.”
“How did it get through our wards?” Michael asked.
“I think I carry a piece of her inside me all the time now,” I said. “Once you let me inside your wards, she had an in.”
“You don’t taste evil, Marshal.”
“She did something to me earlier today. It’s messed with my psychic abilities, opened me up, somehow.”
“I think we can help there, and I would love to hear more about what she is and how you came to her attention.”
“We don’t have time for this, Anita,” Edward said.
“I know,” I said.
“The Darkness has tried to eat her twice in the same day,” Olaf said. “Eventually, if Anita doesn’t learn how to guard herself better, she will lose.”
Edward and I stared at the big man. “How much did you see or feel?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said.
“Then why are you the one encouraging me to get all metaphysical?”
“Marmee Noir wants you, Anita. I understand obsession.” He stared at me with those cave-dark eyes, and I fought not to look away. I couldn’t decide which was more unsettling, the intensity in his gaze or the lack of any other emotion. It was as if, in that moment, he was simply pared down to the need in his eyes. “She’s chosen you for her victim, and she will have you unless you can fix what she damaged inside you, protect yourself better, or kill her first.”
I gave a harsh laugh. “Kill the Mother of All Vampires? Not likely.”
“Why not?” Olaf asked.
I frowned at him. “If she can do all this to me from thousands of miles away, then I do not want to see what she’s capable of if I’m physically closer. All vampire powers grow with proximity.”
“A bomb would do it, something with high heat yield.”
I searched his face, trying to read something in it that I could really get a handle on and understand, but it was almost as bad as staring into the faces of the shapeshifters in their half-human forms. I just couldn’t decipher him.
“I’d still have to get to the city she’s in, and that would be too close. Besides, I don’t know anything about bombs.”
“I do,” he said.
I finally got a clue. “Are you offering to go with me?”
He just nodded.
“Damn it,” Edward said.
I looked at him. I shook my head. “I won’t ask you to go.”
“I can’t let you go off alone with him to hunt her.” He said it as if it were a done deal, a given.
I shook my head, and waved my hands as if erasing something in the air. “I’m not going either. None of us is getting any nearer to her.”
“If you do not kill her first, she will surely kill you,” Olaf said.
“Should we be talking about this in front of witnesses?” Bernardo asked. He had finally moved closer to us.
We looked at Phoebe and Michael as if we’d forgotten them. I almost had. Edward never forgot anything, but as he looked at me, I realized that there was guilt in his eyes. I’d never seen that for anyone but Donna and the kids.
I reached out and laid fingers on his arm, a gentle touch. “You dying trying to kill Marmee Noir would not have helped me now. You’d be dead, and I’d be alone with these two.”
That almost earned me a smile. “Or she’d be dead, and you’d be safe.”
I gripped his arm, tight. “Don’t second-guess yourself, Edward, you’re not good at it. Certainty is all we have on shit like this.”
He did smile, then. “Look who’s talking, Ms. Doubting-All-My-Choices.”
“Are you saying that thing has a physical body, on this plane, right now?” Michael asked.
I thought about the question, then nodded. “I’ve seen where her body lies, so yeah.”
“I thought you’d never been physically close to her.”
“Only in dreams and nightmares,” I said.
Music started—“Wild Boys” by Duran Duran—and it still took me a minute to realize it was my cell phone. I fumbled it out of my pocket, vowing to pick a different song for Nathaniel to put into the phone so I could get rid of this one.
“Anita,” Wicked said, “are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you being coerced?”
“No, no, I’m fine, really.”
“I cannot get inside. I cannot even step on the doorstep.” Wicked’s voice sounded afraid; other than for his brother’s life, I’d never heard him afraid.
“You don’t have to, Wicked, just wait outside. I’ll come to you in a little bit.”
“I felt the Mother of All Darkness, and then I felt . . .” He seemed at a loss for words.
I almost helped him out, but he was a vampire, and it had been angels. I wanted to know what he’d sensed.
He finally spoke again, “When I first arrived, I could have entered the house with an invitation, but now I wouldn’t dare. It glows like something holy.”
“The priestess had to redo the shields,” I said, “to keep out Marmee Noir.”
“If anything goes wrong in there, I cannot help you.”
“It’s covered, Wicked, honest.”
“I know you have Edward with you, but I am your bodyguard, Anita. Jean-Claude charged me with your safety. If I let you die here, Jean-Claude would kill me and my brother. He’d probably kill Truth first and make me watch, and then he’d kill me. And right this second, I can’t reach you. Shit.”
“Isn’t that usually my line?” I said.
“Don’t make a joke of this, Anita.”
“Look, I’m sorry you can’t enter past the wards, but we are all right, and you couldn’t have kept me safe from Marmee Noir even if you’d been with me.”
“And that is another problem. I could see her like some black storm towering over the house. She ignored me as if I didn’t exist, but I felt her power, Anita. All the weapons training in the world won’t stop her.”
“Apparently, magic does,” I said.
“Would the wards you are behind keep her out?”
“Maybe.”
“But they would also keep out every other vampire, and Vittorio has wereanimals to send for you, so Jean-Claude tells me.”
“I’m pretty sure of that, yeah.”
“Then we need to be with you,” he said.
“Agreed.”
“But we need to keep the Mother of All Darkness from you, too. How do we do both?”
That he was asking me was not a good sign. “Wolves,” I said, finally.
“What?”
“Wolf, she can’t control wolf, only cats.”
“What about the werehyenas?”
“I don’t know, I’ve only made wolf work for me.”
“We have Graham.”
“Any other wolves would be helpful,” I said.
“I’ll call Requiem and see what we can find.” Then he hung up. I was left to turn back to the room and say, “Um, nope, no idea how to explain it, so I’m not going to try.”
Phoebe said, “You are wearing something that was supposed to help you against the Darkness.”
I almost touched the medallion on its chain with the cross, but stopped myself in midmotion.
She smiled.
“Fine,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, since it seems to have stopped working.”
“If you will permit me to look at it, I believe it only needs to be cleansed and recharged.” There must have been a look on my face because she added, “Surely whoever taught you to shield well enough to keep Michael outside taught you this as well.”
“She tried, but I don’t put a lot of stock in jewelry.”
She smiled again. “Yet you believed in the piece of metal around your neck.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the cross or the medallion, but either way, she had a point. “You’re right, my teacher has talked to me about stones and stuff. I just don’t believe in it.”
“Some things don’t require your belief to make them work, Marshal.”
“I’ve got stuff on me,” Bernardo said, “that just works, Anita.”
“Stones?” I made it a question.
He nodded.
Phoebe said, “It is supposed to help you see your prey, but when you removed your cross, you had only things that made you see more into the spirit world and nothing to protect you from it.”
He shrugged. “I got exactly what I asked for; maybe I just didn’t know what I needed.”
I looked at him. He’d put his cross back on, but there was still a tightness around the eyes. Whatever he had seen of Marmee Noir had spooked him. “I didn’t see you for the mumbo-jumbo type,” I said.
“You said it yourself, Anita; most of us don’t have your talent with the dead. We get what help we can.”
I looked at Edward. “Do you have help?”
He shook his head.
I looked at Olaf. “You?”
“Not stones and magic.”
“What then?”
“The cross is blessed by a very holy man. It burns with his faith, not mine.”
“A cross doesn’t work for you, personally?” I asked, then almost wished I hadn’t.
“The same man who blessed the cross told me I am damned, and no amount of Hail Marys or prayers will save me.”
“Everyone can be saved,” I said.
“To be forgiven, you must first repent your sins.” He gave me the full weight of those eyes again.
“And you’re unrepentant,” I said.
He nodded.
I thought about that, that his cross burned with the faith of a holy man who had told him he’d go to hell unless he repented. He didn’t repent, but he still wore the cross that the man had given him, and it still worked for him. The logic, or lack of it, made my head hurt. But in the end, faith isn’t always about logic; sometimes it’s about the leap.
“Did you kill him?” Bernardo asked.
Olaf looked at him. “Why would I kill him?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
Olaf seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, “I didn’t want to, and no one was paying me to do it.”
There, perfectly Olaf, not that he didn’t kill a priest because it would be wrong, but because it didn’t amuse him at the moment, and no one had paid him. Even Edward at his most disturbing wouldn’t have had the same logic.
“We’re talking in front of you too casually,” Edward said. “Why?”
“Perhaps you simply feel at ease.”
He shook his head. “You’ve got a permanent spell of some kind on the room, or house.”
“All I have cast is that people may speak freely if they desire to. Apparently, your friends feel the need, and you do not.”
“I don’t believe confession is good for the soul.”
“Nor do I,” she said, “but it can free up parts of you that are blocked, or help soothe your mind.”
He shook his head, then turned to me. “If you’re going to have her do something with the medallion, do it. We need to go.”
I fished the second chain from underneath the vest and all. I’d tried carrying the cross and the medallion on the same chain, but there were too many times when I needed the cross visible, and I got tired of people asking what the second symbol meant. The image on the metal was of a many-headed big cat; if you looked just right on the soft metal, you could discern stripes and symbols around the edge of it. I’d tried to pass it off as a saint’s medallion, but it just didn’t look like anything that tame.
I held it out to Phoebe. She took it gingerly by the chain with only two fingers. “This is very old.”
I nodded. “The metal is soft enough that it bends with pressure, and some with just the heat of the body.”
She started walking toward the door that her daughter had come through with the tea. I expected us to go all the way to her altar room, but she stopped us in a small, bright kitchen. Her daughter, Kate, was nowhere to be seen.
Phoebe answered as if I’d asked out loud, “Kate had a date tonight. I told her she could go after the tea was served.”
“So she missed the metaphysical show.”
“Yes, though many gifted in the area might have felt something. You do not call down such evil and such good without alerting those who can sense such things.”
“I don’t usually pick up stray stuff,” I said.
“But you are not trained for it. Tonight’s show would have attracted either the untrained, who cannot block it out, or the trained, who are open to the alert.”
I shook my head. “Are we here for me to get lectured or to cleanse the charm?”
“So impatient.”
“Yeah, I know, I need to work on it.”
She smiled, then turned to the sink. “Then I will not waste more of your time.” She turned the water on and waited a few moments for it to run, while her eyes were closed and she looked upward at nothing that I could see or feel.
She passed the charm and chain under the running water. She turned the water off, then held the charm in her hands and closed her eyes again. “It is cleansed, and ready for use.”
I gave her a look.
She laughed. “What, you were expecting me to put it on the altar and take you out to dance naked in the moonlight?”
“I’ve seen my teacher cleanse jewelry, and she does the four elements: earth, air, water, fire.”
“I thought I would see if I could cleanse it doing something that you might actually do yourself.”
“You mean just wash the bad stuff off?”
“I let the water run for a few minutes, as I thought, ‘All water is sacred.’ Surely you know that running water is a barrier to evil.”
“I’ve actually never found that a vamp couldn’t cross water to get to me. I’ve had ghouls run through a stream.”
“Perhaps the stream, like your cross, needs you to believe.”
“Why isn’t the water like the stones, and works on its own?”
“Why should water be like stone?” she asked.
It was one of those irritating questions that Marianne would ask occasionally. But I’d learned this game. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
She smiled. “I see why you worked so quickly and seamlessly with Michael. You both have a certain exasperating quality to you.”
“So I’ve been told.”
She dried the medallion carefully on a clean kitchen towel, then handed it to me. “This is not like your cross, Marshal. It is not an item that automatically keeps the bad things at bay. It is a neutral object; do you understand what that means?”
I let the medallion and chain pool into the palm of my hand. “It means that it isn’t evil or good; it’s more like a gun. How it’s used depends on who’s pulling the trigger.”
“The analogy will do, but I have never seen anything like this. You do not know me, but I don’t say that very often.”
I looked at the dull gleam of the metal in my hand. “I was told it would keep Marmee Noir out of me.”
“Did they tell you anything else about it?”
I thought, then had to shake my head.
“They may not have known, but I think as it keeps the Dark Mother out of you, it may also call things to you.”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
“There’s something very animalistic, almost shamanic, to the energy of the piece, but that’s not quite it, either.”
I wanted to ask, did it call the tigers to me? Was it the medallion itself that was causing me to be drawn to them? Would asking be giving her too much information?
“Why did you ask how good a witch Randy was?”
I felt the compulsion to simply tell her. She was right, I wanted to tell her, felt we should enlist some help from the local talent, but it wasn’t my call. Edward was senior on this, and I bowed to his expertise. What could I say?
“The bad guys, or things, didn’t go in for a killing blow. Their first strikes were to keep him from talking. He was a fully armed, fully trained, special teams guy. That’s dangerous enough to just kill, but whoever struck the blows saw his ability to speak as more dangerous than the weapons.”
“You asked me about a spell, but I can’t think of anything that would force Randy to speak out loud. You saw Michael and what he did. His invocation was soundless.”
“Yeah, but it takes concentration to do that kind of summoning, doesn’t it? Could Randy call up that kind of energy in the middle of a firefight?”
She seemed to think about it. “I don’t know. I have never tried to do a working in the middle of combat. We have other brothers and sisters who are soldiers. I can email them and ask.”
“Just ask if they’ve tried doing magic in the middle of a firefight. No details.”
“I give you my word.”
Had I said too much? It didn’t feel like I had. “Let’s say for argument’s sake that your people tell you they can’t do magic, silent and normal, during combat. What would come up against an armed unit, a SWAT unit, that Randy Sherman would have thought words, a spell, would be more effective against than silver-coated bullets?”
“Are you certain it was silver bullets?”
“It’s standard ops that tac units like SWAT have silver-coated ammo to be carried at all times, in case one of the bad guys turns out to be a vampire or shapeshifter. They were backing up a vampire hunter; they’d have silver ammo.”
“But you didn’t check,” she said.
I nodded. “I will, but I’ve seen these guys work, and they wouldn’t make that big a mistake.”
She nodded. “Randy would certainly not have made such an error.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Phoebe.”
“I was thinking,” she said. She frowned, rolling her lip under just a little. It looked like an old nervous habit that she’d almost lost. I wondered if it was her tell. Did it mean she was lying, or more nervous than she should be? Could she have some tie to what was happening? Well, yeah, duh, but it didn’t feel right. But then, how much was her magic and the house itself with all its wards affecting my reaction to her? Shit, I wished I hadn’t thought of that, or that I’d thought of it sooner. That I hadn’t thought sooner meant I was being messed with again. Shit.
“The demonic, some evil spirits, as you saw with your Mother Dark.” She frowned.
“You’ve thought of something,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, it’s just, it could be almost anything. You haven’t even told me how they stopped Randy from speaking. I assume it was some kind of gag or damage that made speech impossible.”
Honestly, for her to really be a worthwhile information source, she needed more clues, but Edward had expressly told me not to give her any. Crap.
“I know you don’t trust me, Marshal.”
“Why should I? You’ve got this house so wired with magic that you’ve taken most of our natural cynicism away. We’ve talked more openly around you than we should have already.”
“Cynicism is not always conducive to studying and performing magic.”
“But for cops, it’s essential.”
“I did not ward my house with the idea that police would come and question me.”
“Fair enough, but how can we tell what was on purpose and what wasn’t? I can’t even tell if we were talking too much before you redid the wards, or only after. If it was after, you did it on purpose to try to get us to tell you more about Randy Sherman’s death.”
“That would be a very gray thing for a Wiccan priestess to do, Marshal.”
I smiled, and it was a real smile. “You did, didn’t you? You used the emergency to tweak the spells so we’d be more chatty.” I shook a finger at her. “That’s illegal. Using magic on police in the middle of an investigation is automatic arrest. I could charge you with magical malfeasance.”
“That would be an automatic jail sentence of at least six months,” she said.
“It would,” I said.
We stared at each other. “Grief makes me foolish, and I apologize for that, but I want to know what happened to Randy.”
“No,” I said, “you don’t.”
She frowned, and then her face clouded over. “Is it that awful?”
“You don’t want your last”—I hesitated—“image of your friend to be the crime scene photos, and definitely not a visit to the morgue.” I reached out to lay a comforting hand, but stopped myself. I was a little fuzzy on human psychic abilities. Did they grow with touch, like a vampire’s? Mine didn’t, but mine were pretty specialized. I let my hand fall back. “Trust me on this one, Phoebe.”
“How can I trust you when you’re threatening to put me in jail?” There was a thread of anger in her voice now. I guess I couldn’t blame her.
I actually hadn’t said I’d put her in jail. I’d just mentioned that I could put her in jail. Big difference, actually, but if she assumed it was a threat, fine. If it got me more information on the killings, or Randy Sherman, or anything, then even better. I wasn’t here to win popularity contests; I was here to solve crimes.
There was movement in the doorway from farther inside the house. My gun was suddenly in my hand. Thought and action are one, grasshopper.
“It’s my daughter,” Phoebe said, but she was staring at the gun. Staring at it like it was a very bad thing. I wasn’t even pointing it at anyone, and already she was scared. From powerful priestess hooked up to deity and magic to frightened civilian in one move.
“Can I talk to you, or do you just want to shoot me?” Kate’s voice held fury. A nice red wave of anger, tinged with fear, came off her. It made my stomach clench tight, as if I were still hungry, but I knew it wasn’t that kind of hunger.
I stepped back from both the mother and the daughter. I put myself so that my empty hand would open the door, and I could get away from that tempting anger, if the hunger rose too fast and too hard to control. I had Wicked outside, and if I had to choose between the ardeur with him or psychic rape on a witch, then I’d choose sex and the vampire. At least he was willing.
“Are you afraid of me?” Kate asked, as she stepped carefully into the room. She’d added a short jacket over her jeans, and she had her hands stuffed in her pockets.
“Let me see your hands,” I said, voice low and even.
She made a face, but her mother said, “Do what she says, Kate.”
The girl couldn’t have been much younger than me, five years or less, but she’d lived a different life. She didn’t believe I’d shoot her, but her mother did.
“Kate, as your priestess, I tell you to do what she says.”
The girl let out a breath, then took her hands, carefully, out of her pockets. The hands were empty. Her anger welled off her like some rich, thick scent, as if her rage would taste better than most.
“I won’t let her put you in jail,” she said, dark eyes all for her mother, as if I weren’t standing there with a gun in my hand. I hoped I didn’t have to shoot her; it would be like winging an angry Bambi. She just didn’t know any better. The very naïveté of her helped me regain control of the hunger. I took deep, even breaths and thought soothing, empty thoughts.
“Kate,” Phoebe said, “I let my grief get in the way of my better judgment. That is not the marshal’s fault.”
Kate shook her head hard enough for her brown ponytail to whirl around her shoulders. “No.” Then she turned those angry eyes to me. “If I gave you a name of someone who could have done this, would you leave my mother alone?”
“Kate, no!”
“We don’t owe him enough for you to go to jail, and what if he did have something to do with this? Then the next time he killed someone, it would be part of our karma, too. I don’t owe him that.”
“I was his priestess, Kate.”
She shook her head again. “I wasn’t.” She turned back to me. “I’m dating a cop. He said something about the bodies being torn up, and not all of it was wereanimal. I mean, that always makes the news anytime you get a mutilated body. They always blame the local wereanimals first.”
I just nodded. She was in a mood to talk, if I didn’t spoil it somehow.
“But he said that some of the bodies were cut with blades. That the ME had never seen anything like it, and neither had you guys.”
Her boyfriend was way too talkative, but if she’d give me the name, I wouldn’t tell. I might try to find out who it was and tell him to keep his mouth shut, but I wouldn’t rat him out. If she’d just say the name.
“Is that true?” she asked, at last.
“I’m not free to discuss an ongoing investigation. You know that.”
“If it’s true, then you need to talk to Todd Bering.”
“He’s off his meds again,” Phoebe said. “You have to understand that. He’s a good man when he takes his meds, but when he goes off . . .”
“What’s he on meds for?”
“He was diagnosed with schizophrenia because he heard voices and saw things. He may have been mildly ill, but he is also one of the most powerful natural witches I’ve ever met.”
“What does that mean, ‘natural witch’?” I asked.
“Like you,” Kate said, “your power just came, right? You didn’t have to study, you could just do it.”
“I had to have training to control it,” I said.
“And that’s what we tried to do for Todd.” Kate didn’t sound angry now, she sounded a little sad. I was happy about the sad; it made the receding edge of anger less yummy.
“It didn’t work?” I asked.
“It worked,” Phoebe said, and she sighed, “but when he started getting sick again, he called up things that are never to be touched on our path. There are some things you cannot do and be a good witch.”
I nodded. “So I’ve heard.”
“He called a demon. It felt so awful, like you couldn’t breathe past the evil of it,” Kate said; she was looking at the ground, but her eyes were haunted, as if she could still feel it.
“I’ve felt the demonic before,” I said.
“Then you know,” she said, raising those haunted eyes to me.
I nodded. “I know.”
“It had these big blade-like hooks for hands. As far as I know it’s still inside the circle in his house, but if he gained control of it . . .” She shrugged.
I looked at them both. “The most likely scenario is that when it gets out of the circle, it just kills him and goes back to where it came from. How likely is it that this Todd Bering is powerful and sane enough to control something like this?”
Phoebe nodded. “He would be capable.”
“You should have reported this to the authorities as soon as you saw it,” I said.
“I thought, like you, that it would escape the circle and kill him. It would be instant karma. I didn’t dream that he would be able to control it, or that he would attack policemen. Rumor says that it was that vampire serial killer and wereanimals. No one said demon or blades. The news reported that the police had been torn apart by claws and fangs.”
We had a serious leak at the Vegas PD, and I would have to report it. Talking to your girlfriend is one thing; talking to the press is another. I couldn’t take the chance that her boyfriend wasn’t our Mr. Chatty.
“Blades, Mom, blades.”
I didn’t correct her that it was both. No need for me to share, too. “I appreciate the information.”
“If you had simply told me that he was cut with blades—Randy, I mean—I would have told you about Todd.”
“I know, but it’s hard to know who to trust. I need his address.”
They exchanged a look, then Phoebe got a notepad by the telephone and wrote it down for me. “May Goddess forgive me if he did these terrible murders.”
I holstered the Browning and took the paper from her with my left hand. “I can’t hide where I got the information from.”
“They’ll investigate us all!” Kate yelled, and took a step toward me. Her anger was just suddenly so there, so close, so . . .
I felt the door behind me opening, and moved so Edward could come through. “You guys all right in here?”
I shook my head, then nodded. “We have a crazy witch who raised a demon with blades for hands. The last time they saw it, it was inside the summoning circle. We need to see if it’s still there.”
“If it’s still there, then he didn’t do it,” Kate said.
I gave her a look, and then had to look away, but sight wasn’t what was sending her anger toward me like some sweet scent. My stomach clenched again, and I eased around the edge of the open door. “Just because it’s in the circle now doesn’t mean he didn’t let it out and put it back,” I said.
“You’ll ruin our reputation. You’ll ruin everything we’ve built; every good thing my mother has done will be lost in the news that one of our coven members raised a murdering demon!” Kate was yelling again and advancing on me.
I couldn’t let her touch me because I wanted to feed. I wanted to suck all that anger off her. “I’ve got the address, and I need some air.”
Edward gave me a look.
“It would be wicked of me to stay inside right now,” I said softly.
“Go,” he said, equally softly, then turned to calm the enraged girl and her sad mother.
Michael was being kept out of the kitchen by Olaf and Bernardo. No one was in handcuffs, yet.
I said as I walked past them all, “You should have told us about Bering and the demon.” I handed the piece of paper to Bernardo as I moved past.
He took it and said, “What is it?”
“The address to a demon with claws for hands.”
“Anita,” Olaf called.
I shook my head and was at the door. I felt the wards like a physical presence, almost like warm water or some thick bubble that clung to me as I moved. But it was designed to keep things out, not in, and I slid out of that warm, protective barrier to find the cool, desert night, and Wicked leaning against our car.
57
WICKED PUSHED AWAY from the car, almost coming to attention. Every inch of height was suddenly there, making the broad shoulders look even more impressive. He had a tan trench coat on over a suit of similar color. His blond hair was silvered with moonlight, the edges of it trailing over the shoulders of the coat. His face was almost painfully masculine, the moonlight and streetlights cutting the high cheekbones and dimpled chin into angles and planes, sharper and even more masculine than I knew was true. His eyes were blue and gray; in this light they were silver and gray. Those eyes widened as he felt me coming for him.
It didn’t matter that he’d never been food before; it didn’t matter that we’d never had sex. All my good intentions were gone by the time I crossed the yard and hit the sidewalk.
I heard the sound the key made to unlock the doors of the car, and glanced back enough to see Edward on the porch. He’d unlocked the car. Always practical, my Edward.
I turned back to the vampire, and he spoke in a voice that was already rough with the edge of my hunger. “Anita, what’s wrong?”
I wanted to simply fall upon him like some beast. It was as if all the hungers I carried through the vampire marks, and my own magic, had surfaced in one huge swirling, drowning need.
I looked at that tall, handsome body and thought food. I thought flesh and I thought blood—and, only distantly, sex. I closed my eyes and tried to crawl into something resembling control. If I touched him like this, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to try to fuck him or take a bite out of him—a real one.
The thought of sinking teeth into flesh until that hot, red liquid burst into my mouth . . . But vampire was cold food for that. The wind blew against my back, and I could scent Edward still on the porch. That was warmer. I started to turn around and stopped in midmotion.
I whispered, “Wicked.”
“I’m here.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“I feel your hunger. If you were a vampire, I’d take you to hunt now.”
“Help me feed.”
“Can you turn the bloodlust into the ardeur?”
“I don’t know.” And that was the truth. It scared me enough that I started taking my weapons off and dropping them on the ground. I called back, “Edward, get them after we’re in the car.”
“Done,” he said.
I slipped the vest off last, and once its weight was removed, it was as if I could breathe better. My skin was running with heat, as if I’d burn when touched. Some lycanthropes spike a temperature before they shift.
“Anita,” Wicked’s voice said from much closer.
I opened my eyes and he was standing in front of me. This close the light fell full upon him, and I could see every line, curve, of his face. I could stare into those silvered eyes. Staring full into that face, inches from his body, and my gaze dropped to his neck, where the collar and tie kept it safe and neat. I stared at the side of his neck and searched for that pulse, but the skin was quiet. His heart didn’t beat. I stepped back; this wasn’t right. This wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted something . . . hot.
I turned back to the house, the porch, the warmth. He grabbed my arm, pulled me hard in against his body. Something about the abruptness of it, the strength of it, startled me. I could think for a second. “Get me away from them, Wicked. Take me somewhere. Make me think of sex and not meat.” I put my hands in the front of that button-down shirt and pulled, sending the middle buttons flying. I tore at his shirt until I could wrap my arms around his naked skin. The touch of that much muscled flesh helped me think of other things than what the blood in my friend’s veins would taste like.
“Your skin runs hot tonight.” He wrapped his arms around my waist, lifting me off the ground, and my arms slid to a part of his chest too wide for me to encircle. The next moment we were skyward. I felt the force of it like a solid push of something invisible against the ground, and my feet dangled in empty air.
Fear helped clear my head and tone down the hungers. I’d never flown by vampire, and I found that my fear of flying worked just fine this way, maybe worse than on a plane. I dug fingers into the shirt I’d ripped, hanging on for dear life. My pulse was choking me, and a scream bubbled in my throat. I pressed my face to his bare chest and fought that awful, perverse urge to look down.
I finally lost the fight, and did it. The desert stretched under us like some moving carpet. It wasn’t as far down as I’d feared. I’d pictured tiny cars and toy houses, but we weren’t that far up. Far enough that if he dropped me, I might only be crippled for life, not dead. Not a good thought. Then I realized the ground was getting closer.
“It’s hard to land when you’re carrying someone,” Wicked said, his voice rumbling up through his chest and against my ear. “I’ll roll to take the momentum.”
“What?” I asked.
“Keep your arms where they are,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
The ground was coming very fast now, and I had seconds to decide what to do. I started to wrap my legs around him, but he said, “Don’t tangle my legs!”
I stopped, but it left me with only my fear, and seconds to decide what to do with it. I closed my eyes to the rushing ground and held on to him.
I felt the jolt as his feet hit ground, and then he was rolling forward, letting the momentum carry us down and over. We ended on the ground, on our sides, with his arms wrapped around me, so that he took the impact. I lay there, trying to relearn how to breathe, wrapped in his arms, trapped against his body.
“Anita, are you all right?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer it, but managed, “Yeah, yes.” My voice sounded breathy and scared.
He eased off me, drawing away until he could look down at me. He studied my face, then smiled and laid his big hand against my face. “It has been a long time since I did that. I’m out of practice.”
“Most vampires can’t carry someone,” I said, still in that frightened voice.
“I told you, Truth and I are very good at flying.” He smiled again, and this time I knew what kind of smile it was. It helped that he leaned in toward me.
I stopped him with a hand on his chest. “I don’t think I need to feed the ardeur now. You’ve scared it out of me.”
He laughed, a deep masculine sound. Everything about him and his brother was so male. I tended to like my men with a little more feminine energy to them, but it was still a good laugh.
“Your skin is still hot to the touch, as if you’re running a fever. Whatever happened back at the house has not left you. When the fear fades, the hunger will return.” His face sobered. “You need to feed before that happens again, Anita.”
My voice squeezed down again. “I wanted to go back to the house and feed, Wicked. I wasn’t thinking that it was Edward, or people, just that they were warm.”
He nodded, still above me, propped on one elbow, while his other hand traced the edge of my face. The touch was more comforting than sexual. “I need you to release the ardeur before the other hungers rise. You must feed.”
“What’s wrong with me, Wicked?”
“I don’t know, but if you feed the ardeur, the other hungers will be satisfied.”
“For a while,” I said.
He smiled, but it was sad around the edges. “It’s always for a little while, Anita. No matter what you need, you will need it again.” He cupped the side of my face and leaned in again. He laid his lips against mine and kissed me for the first time. It was the most gentle of kisses, a bare touch.
He drew back, just enough to whisper against my mouth, “Release the ardeur, Anita, feed, so you can get back to your police friends.”
I thought about Edward and the rest going into a house with a demon, and me not being there to have his back. I would guard the back of any policeman that I went in with, but let’s face it, it was only Edward that I’d never forgive myself for.
I stared up into Wicked’s face. “How did you know that would make me do it?”
“You are loyal and honorable, and you would not leave your friends to find danger without you. Feed, and we will see you back to them.”
“We?”
“I called Truth to join us.”
I frowned at him, and it was so suspicious that he laughed again. “Why?” I asked.
“Because if we do it right, I won’t be able to walk right away, let alone fly.” The look in his eyes made me blush and drop my eyes, which put me looking at his bare chest where I’d torn his shirt. That embarrassed me more, and I was left pushing away from him. He let me sit up, but stayed on his side on the rough ground. I realized there was nothing but bare earth, sand, and rock as far as I could see. The side of a hill loomed over us, behind his back, and that was all. Well, not all, because above us was the night sky. It stretched perfectly black above us, with stars, so many stars. They seemed to burn with white light in a way that they never did in the city.
“How far out are we?”
“You mean from the city?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know; it’s hard to judge miles from the air.”
“We’re far enough that there’s no light pollution.”
He turned to gaze up at all that sparkling sky. “It is pretty, but then I remember when most of the sky was like this, almost anywhere you went. There wasn’t enough light at night to hide the stars, no matter how big the city.”
I stared up at the glittering blanket of stars and tried to envision a world where the night sky always looked like this, but couldn’t do it. This was the sky over far desert, over open water, over places where people were not.
He touched my hand, a tentative play of fingers. I looked down at him. He looked at our hands, where he traced fingertips over my skin, a light, exploring touch. I could not see his eyes or much of his expression. “Drop your control of the ardeur, Anita, please. I am not powerful enough to force the ardeur to rise, and you are not attracted enough to me for it to happen by accident.”
“It’s nothing personal, Wicked. I see that you’re handsome.”
He looked up at me, and there was something I hadn’t expected to see on his face: uncertainty. “Do you, Anita?”
I frowned at him. “I’m not blind, Wicked. I see what you look like.”
“Do you?” He looked back down, his fingers tracing up the line of my arm. He found the hollow where the arm bends and traced a single fingertip around that soft, warm spot. It made me shiver, and my breath shook on its way out.
He smiled then. “Maybe you do.” He kept playing over that spot until I wriggled and told him, “That tickles now.”
“I don’t think it tickles,” he said, and sat up. Sitting beside me, he was still much taller. He put his hands on both of my arms, and smoothed his hands up my skin. “Let me in, Anita, let me inside.”
The double entendre made me frown again, but his hands on my arms distracted me from being unhappy with it. He’d accused me of being squeamish on the phone; with his hands playing on my skin and the weight of him so close, I realized he was right. I’d fallen back into the habit of fighting the ardeur. I could go longer between feedings, so I kept pushing it. I was still fighting it, even though I knew that Edward would be calling the local police. They’d set up a raid on Todd Bering’s house. They’d go in, and there’d be at least a demon, maybe vampires, and they’d only have someone like Sanchez with them for magic backup. Sanchez was a powerful psychic, but he didn’t know the dead, and I was pretty sure he didn’t know demons. If I wasn’t there and it all went to shit, I’d always believe that I could have stopped it. I’d always believe that I could have saved some lives.
All I had to do was have sex with the man beside me and feed the ardeur, and then I could go save the day. It sounded simple enough when you said it like that. Sex, feed ardeur, then hunt one demon, some vampires, and try to keep everyone alive. Yeah, simple.
But first, I had to let go. First, I had to be willing to be vulnerable with yet one more man. That part I didn’t much like; in fact, I hated it. I didn’t like being vulnerable, not to anything or anyone.
“I’m not powerful enough to get through your shields, Anita,” he said in a quiet, neutral sort of voice.
Even now, I was back in control. I could just make him take me back to Edward and the others. But . . . what if I lost control in the middle of the raid on the sorcerer’s house? What if the hunger rose in the car with Edward and Bernardo and Olaf? There were worse things I could do than have sex with my friends. I could tear their throats out and bathe in their blood, which was exactly what I might have done if Wicked hadn’t taken me far away from them.
No, whatever was wrong with me, feeding the ardeur really was the lesser evil. A quick feed, and then back to solving crime. I looked at the tall, handsome man beside me and said what I was thinking. “I’m sorry that our first time has to be quick. You’re worth taking the time, Wicked.”
He smiled, and it softened his face. “That is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
I smiled, too. “Once I release the ardeur after not feeding for this long, it can be a little rough.”
“I’ll be careful,” he said.
“I don’t mean that.” I shook my head, and just took off the T-shirt that we’d gotten at Trixie’s. I sat there in just the bra, in the strangely hot night.
Wicked gave me wide eyes.
“I mean we might end up ripping our clothes enough that we won’t have anything to put back on.”
He shrugged and started undoing his tie. “I’d have preferred a more sensual reveal, but you’re the boss.”
I sighed. “I wish that were really true.”
“You say Get undressed, and I’m doing it; trust me, that makes you the boss.” He had the tie off, and the trench coat went next.
“You wanted to get undressed eventually, right?” I asked, hands hesitating on my belt.
“I did.” He took off the torn remnants of the shirt, and just seeing him bare from the waist up made me have to look away. That first nudity with someone I didn’t know well always made me uncomfortable.
My rule used to be that if I was uncomfortable stripping, then maybe I should stop, get dressed, and go home. I’d told Jason, in St. Louis, that I was losing myself. Here I was, far away from home, and it wasn’t the men in my life stealing me away from myself, it was the power inside me. And that, I couldn’t run away from. It was like that old joke: everywhere you go, there you are. I couldn’t leave myself behind, so I couldn’t get away.
Hands came from behind to slide over my ribs, to hesitate at the base of my bra. I reached for the straps, to move them down my shoulders, but his hands got there first, and he lowered the straps, slowly, laying kisses on my shoulders as he bared them. His hands slid to the back of my bra, and unsnapped it. The underwire gave, and the whole thing slid down my arms, so that my breasts spilled out.
Wicked’s hands slid over them, cupping them in his big hands, squeezing them, kneading them, exploring them. I felt myself grow damp, just from that. Those practiced hands drew a small sound from me. My hands slid to the unbuckled top of my pants, but his hands were there first, sliding down from my breasts, to unzip my pants and ease them open, so that his hand slid down the open front to brush the hair between my legs and reach for lower.
I laughed. “Your hand is too big, and the pants are too tight.”
“We can fix that,” he said, voice low and rough next to my ear. He pulled the pants down my hips in a harsh jerk that bared me to the tops of my thighs. My underwear had come down with the pants, so I was bare to the night.
His hand touched my bare ass, caressing, cupping, exploring. It sped my breath and put my pulse in my throat. “Wicked,” I said.
“That’s the way I want to hear you say my name.” And his hands slid to the front of me as I knelt on the ground. His fingers slid between my legs, brushing that most intimate part, tickling, teasing, until I cried out. His other hand pushed the jeans down until he could spread my thighs wider, and those knowledgeable fingers could reach more, touch more, caress more.
He tried to reach farther between my legs, but the angle wasn’t quite right. His hand was too big for the space he’d made. He made a low, frustrated sound in his throat and moved his hand to put a hand on either side of my jeans and jerk them down to my knees. Then he pulled me against the front of his body, and I could feel how large, how hard, how ready he already was, but his other hand went back between my legs. His finger slid inside me, and I cried out again. He pushed his fingers inside me, then slid them out, so he could play my own wetness against that small, sweet spot, near the front of me. His other arm tightened around my waist, pressing me against the hardness of him. It made me grind myself harder against him. His fingers played between my legs, caressing, teasing, until I felt the building weight of pleasure.
I breathed, “Close.”
He changed the rhythm of his fingers, faster, over and over and over, until I gasped, “Wicked!” And his fingers spilled me over that edge, drove a scream from my throat, sent me spasming against the front of his body while his fingers played, and coaxed, and kept the orgasm coming, until I couldn’t decide if it was all one big orgasm or if he was bringing smaller ones so fast, one after the other, that they blurred into one.
I screamed my pleasure to the shine of stars, and only after I collapsed in his arms did his hand stop moving, only then did he move me a little from his body, and I felt the head of him begin to push against me. My legs weren’t working yet, so he held my weight with one arm around me, while the other helped him find the angle he was looking for. I said his name again, “Wicked.” Then he laid me on the coat he’d spread on the ground and moved away from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, “absolutely nothing.” I lay there waiting for more of my body to work again, and watched him. He was fumbling through his clothes until he found a condom. I was on the pill, but the rule was that any of the men who weren’t my main sweeties had to use a condom. If there was going to be an accident, it needed to be with someone I loved. That I’d forgotten that rule, and he’d had to remember it, said just how far gone I was tonight.
Wicked crawled back to me, the condom already spread down the length of him. He put his arm around my waist and lifted me off my stomach, so I was almost on my hands and knees. He went back to searching for that perfect angle; the feel of him brushing against me tentatively brought small eager noises from me. I said his name again. Then he found my opening and began to push his way inside, and I had no more air for words.
He spilled me forward onto the coat he’d spread, with my cheek pressed to the coat and the ground beneath, and the rest of me up, with him inside me. He pushed his way inside me until he couldn’t go any farther, his body and mine meeting, stopping, wedded together. He hesitated like that for a moment, then he began to find a rhythm, in and out, pushing himself in long, slow, deep sweeps of his body, plunging into me until he couldn’t go any farther, but gently, as if he were afraid of hurting me, then pulling out again.
I managed to say, “You won’t hurt me.”
“I’m bumping your cervix; I will hurt you unless I’m careful.”
“I like it.”
“What?”
“You’ve done the prep work, Wicked, it feels wonderful.”
“Let the ardeur out, and I’ll go faster.” He kept that careful rhythm going, though I could feel the tension in his body as he fought himself.
“Harder,” I said.
“Ardeur,” he said, in a voice that showed the strain, like the trembling of his muscles, as he fought to be so careful of me. I didn’t want him to be careful.
I did what he wanted, I did what I needed, I reached into that part of me that was the ardeur, and it wasn’t a shield that came down, it was more like I simply stopped fighting it. The ardeur broke over us both in a rush of heat that made us both cry out.
“Fuck me, Wicked, just fuck me.”
He stopped being careful, and used all that length, all that width, hard and fast, pounding himself into me until the sound of flesh hitting flesh was loud, and I screamed for him, shrieked for him, orgasming from the feel of him hitting that spot deep inside me, and having to stop, and still he wasn’t done. He started again, this time a little more shallow, a little different twist of hips, and I felt the warm, heavy weight growing inside me again. I started to say his name, over and over, my words growing in the ryhthm of my body and his, “Wicked, Wicked, Wicked, Wicked. God!” The orgasm screamed out of my mouth, left my hands scrambling at his coat and the ground underneath. If I could have reached him, I would have cut my pleasure on his skin, but I was left scrambling to find ways to get all that passion out.
He cried out above me, and his body lost that practiced rhythm and suddenly he was fucking me as hard and fast as he could. I’d thought he’d already done that, but he proved that even there he had been careful. I felt the impact of his body inside me, and without the ardeur, it might have been something besides amazing, but the ardeur took away anything but lust and the joy of it. He brought me one more time, and only then did he lose control. Only then did his body thrust that one last time deep into mine so that we cried out together, and I felt his body shudder inside me, and only then did I feed.
I fed on the thrust of his body deep inside mine, I fed on the feel of him spilling inside me, I fed on the strength of his body as he rose above me on his knees. I fed on his hand as it gripped my shoulder and braced him for one last shuddering thrust. It made me cry out again, and then he collapsed against my back. He caught himself with his arms, and was tall enough that he could bridge his body over mine, the dampness of his naked chest pressed to my bare back, his body still deep inside me, so that we knelt on all fours together, pressed as close as bodies could touch, our breathing thundering in our ears, and his heartbeat thudding against my back. His heart was beating for me now.
He pulled himself out of me, with a laugh and a shudder. I gave one last, soft cry, and collapsed to my side, with him curled around me. We lay there, relearning how to breathe, and only then did I look out into the night and see Truth standing in the starlight.
58
TRUTH STOOD THERE with his serious eyes, and his dark hair in contrast to his brother’s. He stared at us with gray eyes and a face that was a match for his brother’s under the partial beard that hid that nice jawline and let him be a little more invisible than Wicked.
I expected him to look away, our modest Truth, but he didn’t. He looked at us, his face cold and pale in the starlight with that edge of dark hair. He looked at us, and there was something I’d never seen on Truth’s face: hunger. He looked at us like a starving man, or maybe a drowning one.
Wicked ran his hand down the front of my body, uncurling my legs so that the front of me was bare to his brother’s eyes.
I started to tell him to stop teasing his brother, but the words died unspoken because Truth was walking toward us. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, and his black T-shirt followed. Their upper bodies were almost identical, broad and strong; only a long curving scar, shiny with age, showed a difference. His hands were at his belt when I tried again to say something. It was when he dropped his gun, holster and all, on the ground without a backward glance that I knew something was wrong. Truth and Wicked were always careful of their weapons, always.
I started to say something, but his hands were at his belt and the pants were peeling back, and I found that it wasn’t just their upper bodies that were almost identical.
I said, “Truth,” and I felt it then. The ardeur wasn’t gone. When I fed, it went back to sleep, always, unless it had spread to others in the room. But I had to touch someone to have it spread like that. Truth had been too far away, but even as I tried to think that logic all the way through, he was balancing on one leg to pull off first one boot, then the other, and he was in front of us, spilling his pants over his ankles and stepping out of them.
Still lying on the ground, held against his brother’s body, I stared up at him. I had a moment to decide how I felt about that, and then he was kneeling beside us, reaching for me.
I managed to say, “Truth,” and then he pulled me away from Wicked and spilled me to my back. I was left gazing up at him. He fell on top of me, putting his mouth to mine, and kissed me as if he would climb inside and flow down my throat. I kissed him back, kissed him with mouth and arms around his back, tracing his spine, spilling down to the swell of his body where waist ended and other things began. I couldn’t reach beyond that; he was too tall.
He kissed me, long and hard, until soft, protesting noises spilled out of his lips, then he rose off me, too tall to both kiss me and make love to me. He spread my thighs with the strength of his hands. I had a moment to see all that hard, thick length, and then Wicked’s hand was there, holding a condom.
Truth made a sound, low in his throat, but he took it and put it on. By the time he was finished he was making a sound that was almost a growl, low and persistent. Eagerness did not begin to describe that sound in a man’s throat. He pressed all that safely sheathed length against me. I watched him push himself inside me, one inch at a time. Just watching him slide inside me threw my head back and made me cry out. I could see the night sky and a million stars dancing overhead as Truth pushed his way inside me.
He kept himself propped above me, back on his knees, so that almost the only thing that touched me was the long, slide of flesh that kept going in and out of me.
I cried his name to the stars, and he began to pound himself inside me, harder, faster, his breathing growing ragged as he began to lose his rhythm. I stared up at his body above mine, his eyes looking out into the night and not at me. I started to tell him to look at me, but the orgasm caught me unawares, and I was left screaming, shrieking, hands reaching for any part of him I could, tracing my pleasure in his flesh. He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted my lower body off the ground as he made that last hard, shuddering thrust, burying himself as deep inside my body as he could, as he spilled inside me and the ardeur fed.
I fed not just on the sex and the soft sweat of him, but on the fear in him. He’d been afraid of the ardeur since Belle Morte gave him a taste centuries ago. So afraid, yet it had caught him again, caught him in the desert night under a shine of stars and the sweet scent of naked bodies. He collapsed forward, still on his knees, his hands locked around my body, his head falling forward against my breasts. I managed to touch his hair; it was finer than Wicked’s, fine and silky under my hands.
I petted his hair while I learned how to breathe again, and my pulse climbed back into my throat, so that the clean, desert air was like champagne, cool in my throat.
His body started to shake, and I realized he was crying. I stroked his hair and said, “Truth, Truth, are you all right?”
He raised his face to me, tears glittering in the hard light of the stars. “I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. I could not resist you naked in the moonlight.”
“Oh, Truth, I’m sorry,” and I meant it. I knew what it was not to have a choice.
Wicked came to us, putting an arm across the other man’s shoulders. “It’s all right, she’s not like Belle.”
Truth pulled back from both of us. “The ardeur makes them all monsters in the end.”
I sat up and, very carefully, very gently, went to him. He actually looked scared, and I wiped his tears away with my hands. He let me, but his eyes were wide, showing too much white, like a horse about to bolt. “Help me not to turn into the monster, Truth.”
He frowned and looked at me, not like I was something to fuck, or something to be afraid of, but as if he were seeing me—whatever that meant.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked, voice still thick with tears.
“I mean, you tell me if I’m becoming a monster. You tell me if the power is turning me into something else.”
“Jean-Claude will tell you that.”
“He told me once that he trusted me to kill him if he became as heartless as Belle Morte. That he counted on my not letting him be a monster.”
“Are you telling me to kill you if you lose control?” he asked, slowly.
I thought about it. “Not yet, but if the Darkness takes me, and there’s no more me left, then yes.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Wicked said.
“I know that everyone else loves me too much, but if all that’s left of me is the ardeur, then I’m already gone.”
The brothers exchanged a look, then gave me almost identical looks back. “How do we know when you’re gone?” Truth asked.
I thought about that. “I don’t know.”
Truth touched a finger to my cheek and came away with a single trembling tear. “You mean it.”
I nodded, and curled my arms around my knees, clutching me to myself. “I thought that it was the men. That living with Jean-Claude and all the others was making me lose control of myself, but they aren’t here. It’s me. It’s me, Truth, don’t you see? I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I don’t know how to control it.” I laid my head on my knees and cried. Knowing that I should get dressed, and there was a demon waiting, and I didn’t know where Edward was, but all I could think of in that moment was that I didn’t trust myself anymore.
Truth wrapped his arms around me, and Wicked came at my back, so that they held me between them while I cried. They held me while I confessed to them something I wasn’t sure I could say to Edward, or any of the men I loved. How do you ask someone you love to kill you if you grow too powerful, too evil? Jean-Claude had asked it of me once, and I had cursed him for it. Now I let the two brothers hold me, and gave them my darkest fear.
Truth whispered against my hair, “If the ardeur takes you and you become as evil as Belle Morte, I promise . . .”
Wicked said, “We promise.”
“We promise,” Truth said, “that we will not let you be that evil.”
“You’ll kill me,” I said softly.
They were quiet for a few breaths, and then their arms tightened around me, and they said in one voice, “We’ll kill you.”
And that was the best I could get, that if the ardeur or the Darkness took me, that Wicked and Truth would kill me before I could do whatever it was that either of the evil bitches of the West wanted me to do. It didn’t matter that it might kill anyone metaphysically tied to me, because if Marmee Noir possessed me, or I became nothing but a vessel for the ardeur, whatever was inside me would spread to them eventually. The thought of what we could all do, if we became truly evil, truly without pity, was too awful to contemplate. We could rule the vampires and most of the wereanimals in this country, and then we could move on Europe. If Marmee Noir took me over and possessed all that belonged to Jean-Claude and me, there’d be nothing to stop us unless the two vampires holding me now could stop it early, stop it with me.
I sat there in the starry night, held in the arms of the only two people who I thought might be good enough, ruthless enough, and honorable enough to kill me if I asked. I’d once thought that Edward would do it if it needed doing, but I knew now that even he would hesitate. He loved me too much. But Truth and Wicked didn’t love me, not yet, and if we were careful, they never would. I needed them to keep this promise. I needed to know that if I failed, utterly and completely, I had a fail-safe. A fail-safe made of swords and bullets, and two of the finest warriors that had ever walked the planet. As fail-safes went, it wasn’t bad.
59
WE GOT DRESSED, because strangely, when the ardeur left and the grief left, the desert night was cold. Truth gave me his leather jacket; when I protested, he said, “I don’t really feel the cold like a human.” Duh, I so knew that, but the emotional revelations had shaken me a little. When he held the jacket out to me, I saw his arms. His lower arms had nail marks on them, some bleeding. I’d even managed to bleed the back of his right hand.
“God, Truth, I’m sorry.”
He glanced down at the scratches as if he’d just noticed them, too. “It’s nothing.”
“I’m still sorry I didn’t ask how you felt about nails.”
He gave a small smile. “We didn’t have much time to negotiate.”
“I guess not.”
“I count it as a mark of my service to you and Jean-Claude,” he said.
I flinched a little. “Don’t call it service, that sounds too much like . . .”
“Don’t make more of what he said than there is to make, Anita,” Wicked said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
I let the conversation die because it was all too confusing for me. Truth’s jacket was large enough that my hands kept vanishing in the sleeves, and the bottom of the leather hung down to midthigh. I looked like I was five and playing dress-up in my dad’s clothes, but I was warm. The fashion police could ticket me later.
I called Edward on Truth’s cell phone. Mine was probably in Phoebe Billings’s yard. I hoped Edward had found it. I called to find out where he was, and if I was too late to help him hunt demons.
“Anita,” and he sounded half relieved and half frightened, not something you hear from Edward often.
“Are you okay?”
“I should be asking you that,” and he lowered his voice, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “Last I see, you’re carried off by a vampire, and I let him do it, and it’s an hour and a half later, and you’re not back. I’d think if you had to feed the ardeur, a quickie would have done it.”
I fought not to glance at the two vampires. “Trust me, Edward, it was a quickie. Did I miss it? Was there a demon at Bering’s house?”
“You haven’t missed anything. Did you ever try to get a warrant based on a possible demon being in a house?”
I almost said yes, then had to stop and think about it. “No, actually.”
“Well, we got a judge who thinks that demons are just evil spirits. He’s arguing that demons couldn’t possibly have killed our cops.”
“Normally, he’d be right, but it doesn’t matter. Our warrant of execution should get us in Bering’s house,” I said.
“Shaw didn’t think so, and he’s the undersheriff.”
“Let me guess, Bering is rich, or connected, or something.”
“His family has been a big deal around here for as long as Max has been in charge. He’s the last of the family unless he breeds, which doesn’t seem likely if we can ever get into the house.”
“You can just press the warrant; it’s federal, and that outranks local.”
“I wanted to give you time to get back,” he said.
“Shit, Edward, you didn’t have to delay the investigation because I’m having a metaphysical breakdown.”
“Put it another way, have you seen anyone else but you and me that you’d want backing you against a demon?”
I thought about that. “Lieutenant Grimes and his men are good,” I said.
“They’re some of the best, but I haven’t seen them pray to the angels and have everything glow.”
Oh. “Okay, tell me where you are, and Wicked will drop me nearby.”
He was back at SWAT headquarters. “We’ve had the briefing about Bering’s house. We’re just waiting for the warrant, or for me to push the one we have.”
“My weapons are stashed there; could you change out some things? I didn’t pack with demon in mind.”
“I’ve already repacked for you, and I found your phone in the yard with your weapons. I can list what I packed for you,” he said.
“That’s okay, I trust you to pack for me. Though, frankly, most of the time a demon isn’t solid enough for normal weapons of any kind to work. The rare ones that do get solid enough to attack may only be solid for the second of that attack, so we’ll have to be shooting around each other if it goes bad.”
“See, none of their practitioners knew that, and neither did the priest they’ve got here that’s been blessing our bullets.”
“The priest has been doing what?” I asked.
“You heard right.”
“Hmm, I’ve never tried that.”
“Me, either,” he said.
“I wonder if the bullets will glow?”
“We’ll find out,” he said.
I sighed. “Yeah, we’ll find out.”
“You don’t sound so good,” he said.
I opened my mouth, closed it, then said the only thing I could think of. “I’m tired of being a victim to my own metaphysical powers, Edward.”
“Are you okay now?”
“I’ve fed the ardeur. I should be good for twelve hours at least, maybe twenty-four.”
“Why double up?” he asked.
“Let’s just say it was a good meal, okay.”
“Okay,” he said, “get here as soon as you can.”
“So what, I walk in and play the Fed card and piss everyone off, so that you come off as reasonable and I’m the bitch?”
“I’d play the heavy if I could, but I’ve been too reasonable. I can’t explain the change.”
“So I am the bitch.”
“Picture Shaw’s face when you do it.”
I smiled, and knew it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Well, there is that. Fine, I’ll be the bad cop, but it’s your turn next time.”
“You don’t damage your rep by doing this.”
“And you might,” I said.
“Ted is a very nice guy,” he said.
“You know, it always creeps me when you talk about Ted in the third person.”
He laughed, and it was a good Edward laugh. “Just get here as soon as possible. Do you have a badge?”
My hands went to my belt and found that the belt, badge, and empty holster had survived the night. “Surprisingly, yes.”
“Then flash it, and come explain to everyone why we don’t have to wait on Shaw and the judge.”
“Isn’t this going to make you and the other marshals look weak?”
“They already think we’re pussy-whipped; why disappoint them?”
I shrugged, realized he couldn’t see it, and said, “Okay, but please warn Bernardo and Olaf what we’re doing so that they don’t blame me.”
“I’ll tell them. Just get here.” I heard noise on the other end of the phone, and his voice trailing away, “Hello, Detective Morgan, yes, it is Marshal Blake.” Movement, then, “Ask nicely, and maybe I will.”
Apparently, he asked nicely. “Where the hell are you, Blake?”
“Following up a lead,” I said.
“What kind of lead?”
“Vampires,” I said.
“And what kind of vampire lead would that be?”
“One that didn’t lead anywhere.”
“So you just wasted an hour and a half of our time,” and his voice was hostile.
“Most leads don’t pan out, you know that. Besides, it’s not me that’s trying to double-paper my ass.”
“Just get your ass back here.”
“You aren’t my boss, Morgan. Put Ted back on.”
“Is he your boss?”
“Closest thing Vegas has to one, yeah.”
There was more noise, and movement, and then Edward came back on. “Sorry, about that, Blake,” he said in his cheerful Ted voice. I heard him walking, cowboy boots hitting some hard surface, and then he spoke in his normal voice. “Morgan didn’t agree with Shaw going to a judge. He thought we should throw Bering to the wolves.”
“So he’s taking his mad-on at Shaw out on us?”
“Yelling at us won’t get him fired or demoted.”
“I’m getting really tired of being everyone’s whipping girl, Edward.”
“Yeah.” He stopped walking. “Get here, Anita. We need this done.”
I was left with a buzzing phone. Actually, I’d have rather tackled the demon in the daylight, but two problems with that. One, some demons didn’t show up in daylight, so if you wanted to kill it or send it back, you needed it to be dark. Two, if the vampires were in there, again, I’d rather wait until daylight, but while we waited and played it safe, they might kill someone else. Not acceptable. So much of my job, lately, was just a choice of disasters. I guess that was true of a lot of police work, though.
I turned back to the vampires. “I need to get back to Vegas and help us push our warrant for a house.”
“I thought your warrant covered any house you needed,” Wicked said.
“It does, but we’ve got a pissy undersheriff and a judge who doesn’t like the execution warrants. A lot of judges don’t.”
“Why would they not like it? It’s only a nearly perfectly legal excuse to kill anything in your path,” Wicked said.
“You sound like you don’t approve.”
“Not my job to approve or disapprove.”
“Fine, Truth, you take me to Vegas.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” Wicked said.
“Then stop bitching. I’ve had enough of that from the locals.”
His face softened. “I’m sorry, Anita, but I am a vampire, and the executioners could kill me tomorrow with almost no proof of a crime and no trial.”
“Hey, at least you guys can’t be killed on sight in this country; better than most of the rest of the world.”
Wicked and Truth came to stand in front of me, giving me that mirrored look as if they were thinking the same thought. “We’ll take you where you need to go,” Truth said.
“Aren’t you afraid to touch me?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I studied that serious face. “Aren’t you afraid of the ardeur?”
“Yes.”
Wicked answered, “He’s not afraid of you, Anita. We know you meant what you said. Belle would never ask that of anyone. She likes being the monster.”
I shivered, and it wasn’t pleasure this time. “I’ve felt her touch.” I thought about her dream visit. I was almost sure that she’d kept Victor the weretiger from doing something to me in the dream, but in return she’d done something to the ardeur. Had it been her who caused the ardeur to spread to Truth from a distance? I didn’t know, and if I asked her, she’d lie.
“Whoever’s up for it, let’s fly me to Edward.”
“She’s afraid of heights,” Wicked said.
“How afraid?” Truth asked.
“Pretty,” he said.
Truth looked down at me, considering. “We would never drop you.”
I waved the thought away. “It’s a phobia, not logic. Just decide who’s taking me before I lose my nerve.”
They laughed, and it was like hearing it in stereo. Wicked said, “You may lose a lot of things, but you’ll never lose your nerve.”
“Pretty to think so; now who’s pilot for the return trip?”
“Why don’t you just order one of us?” Truth asked.
“Because I can’t fly, and I don’t know if Wicked is tired from carrying me here and then feeding the ardeur. So I trust you two to decide who’s up for it.”
Wicked smiled at me. “I’m almost more honored that you trust us, rather than order us, than I am about the sex.”
I shrugged. “You’re welcome, I guess. Now, whoever, but I need to get back to town.”
“I’ll take her,” Truth said.
“I’ve had more recovery time,” Wicked said.
“I’ll take her,” Truth repeated. The brothers looked at each other for a long moment. One of those unreadable moments that you can simply feel on the air like a weight of unspoken things, and you suddenly feel like a voyeur in someone else’s life. I realized why Bernardo had said something similar earlier about Edward and me. He was right.
Finally, Wicked said, “As you like.”
“I do,” he said.
Again, I felt like I was listening to shorthand, and that there were a dozen things going on below the surface of those few words, but you’re never supposed to let people know that you hear the unspoken things. It makes them nervous. I scare people enough without going all girl-intuitive, too.
Truth looked at me. “Are you ready?”
I took in a deep breath, let it out slowly, fighting to keep it from trembling, then nodded.
He closed the distance between us. He hesitated, then said, “I need to carry you.”
I nodded again. “I know.” My voice sounded just the tiniest bit unhappy. I could do this, damn it. It was just heights, and flying, and . . . Oh, hell, I did not want to do this, but we were too far out for driving, even if we had a car. This was the quickest way, and Edward had stalled for me long enough.
Truth picked me up in his arms, as if he meant to walk with me. Something must have shown on my face because he said, “It’s the most secure way for you.”
“It’s just that Wicked carried me differently.”
Wicked said, “I was afraid you might’ve started struggling with the hunger on you. Carrying you against my body, I had more control if you had gone . . . mad while we were flying.”
Truth turned with me in his arms and asked, “You said hunger, not ardeur.”
“The first hunger that came to her was blood and flesh. She had turned toward the humans when she asked me to take her someplace where she would not be tempted.”
Truth looked down at me, his face blank and serious, which I’d begun to realize was his blank face. It was what he hid behind when he didn’t want anyone knowing what he was thinking.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I will take you to your friends, but if the other hungers are rising more than the ardeur, then you need to be even more careful to eat solid food, and . . .” He faltered.
“What he’s trying to say is that to make certain you don’t try to attack your human friends, you need to feed the ardeur more regularly, as well as eat more real food.”
“You think I should eat before I go to sleep tonight?”
“I think a midnight snack wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Wicked said.
“Agreed,” Truth said.
“Crap,” I said, “I really didn’t want to do some of the people you brought from St. Louis.”
“I think a little sex with willing men is the lesser evil here, Anita.”
I nodded. Let’s see, sex with more men, or trying to tear the throats out of Edward, Olaf, and Bernardo. Let me think . . . out loud I said, “I know it’s the lesser evil, but I still don’t have to be happy about it.”
“If you were happy about it, you wouldn’t be you,” Truth said.
“But if you were a little more happy about it,” Wicked said, “you’d have better control of the ardeur in the first place. You have to embrace your vampire powers to truly use them well.”
“You know, if we’re just going to chat, then put me down.”
“I think the lady is tired of talking,” Wicked said.
“Then to action,” Truth said, and I felt that push of energy skyward. The sand and tiny gravel swirled upward from the force of it so that we left the ground in a cloud of it.
I had a dizzying glimpse of the ground falling away beneath his boots. A wave of nausea tried to crawl up my throat. I closed my eyes tight and leaned in against his chest. The nausea was less, though my pulse was still trying to crawl out the side of my throat, my heart beating so fast it hurt my chest. I fought not to tighten the arm around his neck too much. But I couldn’t keep myself from getting a handful of his shirt, as if the thin T-shirt would really help if everything went to hell. But sometimes, when you’re really scared, illusion is all you’ve got. Cling to it, baby, cling to it.
60
I WAS ACTUALLY able to open my eyes before we got to Vegas. I just had to keep my gaze very steady on Truth’s shoulder or the sky. I could even admit that being up in the dark, surrounded by stars, was beautiful. It was the ground being so far away that spoiled it for me.
Truth had asked only once if I was all right. When I’d answered yes, he had let it go. I knew he felt the fear in my body. There was no way to hide my heart rate and pulse from him. But before we landed, those had both quieted. I was still scared, but I guess I couldn’t stay at that level of fear without either a full-blown panic attack or fainting.
The stars began to fade, and at first I thought it was daylight, even though I knew the time was completely wrong for it; then I realized it was the lights of Vegas. They rose against the sky like a false dawn, draining the light from the stars, turning the black sky pale. The city rose above the night like a permanent dawn, always pushing against the dark, keeping the stars at bay.
Truth had to go higher just to keep above the buildings. Some of the roofs were so close, I think if I’d leaned out I could have touched them. As afraid as I was of heights, I still had that perverse urge to reach out. I made my hands cling tighter to Truth, and he seemed to think that meant I was more afraid.
“We will be there soon,” he said, and his voice sounded strained.
I looked at him and almost asked if he was all right, but if he wasn’t, what could I do? We left the tall buildings of the Strip behind and flew over normal houses and shops. We were flying over Anywhere, USA. Then the land began to open up, and the first thing I saw was the twinkling runway lights at the airport. For one moment, I thought Truth was going to use them, but then he began to angle toward buildings that were on the edge of it. I wouldn’t have recognized the building from the air, in the dark. I was a little worried about that whole rolling-on-the-ground part, with concrete and buildings to hit. The ground rushed up, and I had to close my eyes or be sick. Then I realized it wasn’t just the visual but the swooping feeling in my stomach. I opened my eyes to find a building at our side, and Truth hit the ground running. He stumbled slightly on impact, but kept moving forward, with me in his arms. The run slowed, and finally he was able to stop, still hidden in the shadow of the building. I had a glimpse of the street with a spattering of cars driving by, their headlights cutting the electric-kissed dark. Truth moved us back a short way into the shadow of the building, so we’d be less visible from the street. At our back was the open area that surrounded the airport.
He leaned his back against the building, as if he were tired, hugging me closer the way you would a child.
“You can put me down, Truth,” I said.
He opened his eyes and blinked at me, as if he’d been far away in his head. He put me down and let me slide out of his hands. He leaned against the building, his chest rising and falling as if he’d been running. Vampires didn’t always breathe, or have to, so the fact that he was breathing heavily meant either he was tired or something else.
I touched his bare arm with my fingertips. His skin was warm to the touch. “You’re warm.”
“Touch me where I wasn’t holding you against me,” he said, voice breathy.
I reached up and touched the side of his face. His skin was cool. “So it was just my body heat warming you up?”
He nodded.
“Why are you breathing like that? How much energy did this use up for you?”
He swallowed hard enough for me to watch his throat work. “Enough.”
“Shit, you should have let Wicked bring me.”
He shook his head, still leaning shoulders and arms against the building. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You fed more deeply than I thought, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked at me with those gray eyes that almost never looked as blue as his brother’s. “Just as we can take less blood, or more, in a feeding, so with the ardeur. You were like a vampire that had not fed in too long. You needed more.”
“But a vampire can only drink as much blood as his stomach can hold,” I said. “The ardeur doesn’t work like that, does it?”
He just looked at me.
Shit. “How hurt are you?”
“Not hurt, just tired.”
“Fine, how tired are you?”
“You need to go to your police friends,” he said.
“I can’t leave you on the street this weak. You can’t even stand up. If Vittorio’s people found you now, you’d just be a victim for them.”
His eyes went all vampire on me, gray light shining in his gaze. “I am no one’s victim,” and he was angry when he said it, and then his eyes went back to normal and he began to slide down the wall. I caught him, steadied him. He put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt his body fight to stay upright.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s me that’s sorry.”
“Flying takes a great deal of energy, and carrying someone takes more. I had forgotten how much more.”
“So it’s not that I fed, but that you did something strenuous afterward,” I said.
“Yes, it would have been good to simply sleep afterward, or feed myself.”
“Would feeding help?” I asked.
He nodded, while his body trembled in an effort to stay leaning against the wall. Even with my hands to steady him, he was still in trouble.
“I can’t leave you like this, Truth. Either you have to come with me, and let the cops keep you safe, or . . .” I did not want to open a vein for him. I’d done it once before to save his life when he’d been stabbed with a silver blade trying to help me and the police catch a very bad vampire, but I didn’t like playing walking blood bank. But there was no way that Grimes and his men would want a vampire inside their place. How would I explain him to the other cops, and how did I explain what was wrong with him? When opening a vein is the lesser evil, you need to rethink your priorities.
“Take blood from me,” I said.
“You don’t donate to anyone.” His voice was rough, and his legs began to give. I helped ease him to a sitting position, with his back solid against the building.
“Not usually, but this is an emergency, just like me needing to feed the ardeur on you.”
He gave me fluttery eyes.
I held his face between my hands. “Damn it, Truth, don’t you dare pass out on me!”
His eyes opened wide, and I watched him fight to do what I’d ordered. I did the only thing I could think of; I offered him my left wrist. It would hurt more than the neck, but it would be easier to hide from the other policemen.
“I am not vampire enough to cloud your mind. I can only hurt you.”
“Feed, damn it,” I said.
He raised shaky hands and wrapped one of them around my wrist at the hand, and used the other to scoot the sleeve of his jacket away from the wrist. The sleeves were big enough on me that he had no problem pushing the leather out of the way and baring my lower arm.
I braced for the bite, then blew out a breath and tried to relax into it. If I tensed up it would hurt more, just like a shot.
Truth opened his mouth wide, so I had a glimpse of fangs before he struck. I tensed at the last minute; I just couldn’t help it. I was caught between the sharp immediacy of the pain and the sensation of his mouth locked around my wrist, forming a tight seal, while the fangs dug in deeper. The deeper part hurt, but his mouth on my wrist, and the sucking, felt good. I’d been feeding Jean-Claude and Asher more often in the last few months, and apparently my body had started translating feeding into pleasure. I’d started associating it with sex, because with Jean-Claude and Asher, we’d made the blood part of our foreplay, and sometimes part of our intercourse. I hadn’t realized until this moment how much that had colored how I felt about this whole thing.
I stood there, caught between pain and pleasure, while my body tried to decide which box to put it in. Truth sat up, away from the wall, his hands so strong around my arm, his mouth feeding harder, his throat swallowing, swallowing me down.
I had to put a hand on the wall to keep me kneeling and not falling over, because my head had finally decided that it felt good. Good enough that I was getting weak-kneed.
It was Truth who stopped, pulling his mouth away from my wrist. He kept his hands on my arm and laid his forehead against my skin. I leaned into the cool concrete of the wall, heavier, fighting not to give into that weak-kneed feeling. I was wet, my body prepped for what usually came afterward. When was the last time I’d let a vampire take blood when sex wasn’t involved? I couldn’t remember. I didn’t donate blood outside sex. Shit.
Truth’s voice was still rough but not breathy, a little deeper. It wasn’t sickness or tiredness that deepened his voice. “You taste . . . your energy . . . You didn’t taste this way when you fed me last.”
“You were dying. You just don’t remember.”
He raised his face and looked at me. His eyes glowed flat silver-gray in the dimness. “A vampire doesn’t forget the taste of blood, Anita. Something has changed in you since we first met.” He licked the wound on my arm, one long, sensual movement. He closed those shining eyes and licked his lips, as if to catch every drop of blood. The wound was still bleeding, and would for a while, because of the anticoagulant in vampires’ saliva.
“Let go of my arm, Truth,” I said, and my voice was a little uncertain. He wasn’t acting like himself, and I didn’t like the idea that my blood tasted different. What did that mean?
He opened his eyes but didn’t move his hands. He stared up at me with his eyes gone blind with vampire powers. “I feel amazing, Anita. Your blood has more kick to it than a shapeshifter’s does.”
“Let go of me, Truth, now.” My voice was firmer this time.
He smiled and let me go.
I pushed away from him, using the wall to stand. I’d never seen Truth smile, not like that.
He just sat there against the wall, smiling up at me.
“Are you drunk?” I asked.
“Maybe.” He smiled happily.
I’d seen only one vampire react like that, and that one had taken a feeding from both Jason and me. Werewolf with a chaser of necromancer had made Jean-Claude giggling drunk.
“I need to go, Truth.”
“Go,” he said, his smile wide.
“I need to know you’re all right before I leave you.”
“Oh,” he said, and he stood, in one of those too-fast-to-see movements. One minute on the ground, the next standing. Vampires are quicker than human-normal, but for the standing trick, they have to use vampire mind powers to appear that fast. If I’d had a gun, I’d have tried to aim it, just out of habit.
I had moved back out of reach, but after that speed, I knew that it did me no good. “Shit,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you, but as you can see, I’m very all right.”
My heart was in my throat. “That wasn’t mind tricks,” I managed to say.
“You mean the speed?” he asked.
“Yeah, the speed.”
“No,” he said.
“I’ve never seen a vampire that could move quite like that.”
He gave a little bow from the neck. “High praise from you, but it was a trait of our bloodline.”
“You mean the speed without mind tricks, all of your bloodline could do it?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder you were the warrior elite. That’s faster than most lycanthropes.”
“Once, if the vampire council wanted shapeshifters killed, they sent our bloodline.”
“But now you and Wicked are the last, right?”
He nodded.
“I’ve seen you fight; you weren’t this fast.”
“I haven’t felt this good in a long time.” He stretched his arms skyward, making the muscles in his arm bunch and move. “I feel made new. I feel”—he looked at me, as his eyes drained from silver glow to normal—“like I did before we killed the head of our line.” He frowned. “You bound me to Jean-Claude with your blood and his power. What have you done, or what has been done to you, since that last feeding?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said.
He was frowning harder, thinking harder. “I mean, Anita, that I feel born again, as if our old master should walk down the street and greet us.” He moved toward me, and I moved back, keeping our distance. It made him stop. “Are you afraid of me?”
“I don’t know what just happened, so let’s just say I’m being cautious.”
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense to him. “I will see you safely to your friends, and then I will go back to the hotel.”
“Good,” I said, and then because it was me, I couldn’t leave it alone. “No offense, but you don’t seem bothered that I’m nervous about you now.”
He shrugged those broad shoulders. “I startled you, and I don’t know what happened just now, either. Until we know whether it was your blood, your power, or mine, caution is not a bad thing.”
“Okay,” I said, “then just watch me walk around the corner, and you can go.”
“Agreed.” He gestured me forward. I walked wide around him, and we sort of circled each other until we got to the corner of the building. All I had to do was walk around the corner, and a few yards away were Edward and all the rest. A cluster of cars whirred by on the street, oblivious to what we were doing. It was almost startling to see the cars and know there were people just over there, as if we’d been in some little pocket world of our own for the last few minutes.
One thing I noticed in the circling dance we were doing was that Truth’s gun in its belt holster showed without the leather jacket. The black T-shirt wasn’t long enough or wide enough to hide the gun.
Did he have a carry permit for this state? I didn’t know, but I did know that being a big guy all in black, flashing a gun, could make some eager cop stop him. Being a vampire would not help him when it happened.
I took off the leather jacket and held it out toward him.
He shook his head. “I told you, I don’t feel the cold like you do.”
“It’s to hide your gun,” I said, “I’d rather not have you stopped by a cop for brandishing.”
He almost touched the gun at his back, but stopped himself in midmotion. He took his jacket, being careful not to touch me while we made the exchange. That let me know that the fact that I was still spooked showed. Oh, well.
He took the jacket and slipped it on. He hugged the leather around him. I thought he was cold for a moment, then realized he was smelling the coat. Smelling me on it. Again, it was more a shapeshifter gesture than a vampire one. I stared at him in the stronger light of the streetlights, and he looked rosy cheeked and healthy. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, even I might have said human. What the fuck?
I stood on the sidewalk and asked, “Did your bloodline have any other superpowers?”
“We could pass for human, even to witches.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“A few, why?”
“Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“Aren’t you planning to be home before dawn?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I feel torn, Anita. I should be by your side, guarding you, yet I must let you go into danger without me. It seems backward.”
“It’s my job, Truth.”
He nodded. “I will await you at the hotel. I hope you get home before dawn.” He turned and said over his shoulder, “You’re still bleeding.”
I looked down to find blood trickling down my hand to drip on the sidewalk. I put pressure on the wound and held it up. How had I not felt that?
“How are you going to explain the wound?”
“I’ll think of something. Now go, Truth, just go.”
Classical music played, a little high-pitched but recognizable as Beethoven. Truth reached into his jacket pocket and drew out his cell phone. He answered with, “Yes.”
I waved good-bye and started for the corner.
Truth called, “Anita, it’s for you.”
I stopped and looked back at him. “Who is it?”
“Your marshal friend, Ted Forrester.”
I went back to him, taking the phone he was holding out to me. “Ted, I’m just around the corner from you.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. I heard noises.
“Are you in your car?”
“We got a call out.”
“What’s happened now?”
“Club invaded by vampires. They let some of the customers go but kept all the dancers. The released hostages described a vampire that fits the holy water scars that you described on Vittorio.”
“Shit,” I said.
“You said he’d up the body count tonight, Anita. You were right.”
“Believe me, Edward, I didn’t want to be right on this one.”
“I’ll give you the address.”
“Is there anyone home to drive me?” I asked.
“It was an all hands, Anita.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t you have transport?”
“Yeah, Truth is still here. I’ll let him bring me to you.”
“Make sure he sets you down well behind the police barriers. I wouldn’t want the uniforms on the barriers to see a vampire flying with a woman in his arms tonight.”
“I understand.”
“We’re here, but I can’t wait for you, Anita. They sent the ear of one of the dancers out with the customers they released. The vampires are threatening to send the rest of the dancer out, a piece at a time.”
“I will be there ASAP, Edward.” But I was talking to empty air. He’d hung up.
“Fuck,” I said, and put a lot of feeling into it.
“I heard most of it. What’s the address?”
I told him. He asked for his phone back, and did some things on the screen. I peered at the screen and found a little map. He studied it for a few minutes, then said, “I’ve got it. Are you ready?”
“I can’t feed you again this soon, Truth.”
“I feel fine, Anita; trust me, I won’t need to be fed when we land.”
I just had to take his word for it. I let him pick me up again, and I had to keep pressure on the wrist bite instead of holding on to him. I was hoping if I kept pressure on it, the bleeding would stop before we landed. If it did, it would be the only thing that had gone right tonight.
61
I TUCKED MYSELF in against Truth’s body as hard as I could without being able to hold on to him, but finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I stopped pressing on my wrist and wrapped my arms around his neck. I held on and buried my face against him. He felt warm now, warm with my blood, my energy. There was a pulse in his neck to move against my cheek as if the beat of his heart were calling to me.
The bend of his neck smelled clean, fresh, like clean sheets that had been dried outdoors in the wind and sun. It was almost like his skin held a hint of all the sunlit days that he would never see again.
I felt something change in the way Truth held me. It made me move my face so I could see. There were flashing lights and a lot of cops down below, but not too close. Truth took us down on the far side of a darkened strip mall. He had to run a little to take up momentum, but it was smoother than the last landing. Either he was getting in practice, or he just felt better.
He stepped into the thicker shadows by the darkened store and looked up the street toward all those flashing lights.
“The police barricades are just up ahead.”
“You can put me down now,” I said.
I got a flash of his smile in the dimness. He put me down without a word. “Are you still bleeding?”
I looked at my hand and found the blood drying. “No.”
“Good.”
We stood there for a moment awkwardly. There was a tension like you get on a first date, where you don’t know if you should kiss or just hug. This was wrong; I’d never felt like this around him before. He leaned down toward me, and I stepped back. “I’m sorry, Truth. I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t think it’s voluntary on either of our parts.”
He stood straight, looking at me, his face still mostly in shadow. “You think I’m bespelled by you.”
I shrugged.
“But it’s not just me, Anita; you feel the pull, too.”
I remembered something Jean-Claude had told me once. “A lot of Belle’s line of vampire powers cut both ways, and it only cuts as deep as the vampire is willing to be cut.”
“Then you must be willing to be cut to the heart,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I hid behind work. “I have to go. You have to go.” I shook my head. “Go, Truth, just go, be somewhere else.”
One moment he was there in the shadows; the next he was skyward, blowing my hair across my face.
I turned toward the crowd and the police barriers. I’d have to get through all that before the uniforms would let me through to talk to SWAT. I wanted to find Edward, not for police work or practical reasons, but because I needed a friend. I needed a friend who didn’t want to fuck me or fall in love with me. I needed someone who didn’t want anything from me. The list was getting smaller every night.
62
I WAS ALMOST to the edge of the crowd when a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt turned and blocked my way. I opened my mouth to say, Excuse me, sir, but I got a glimpse of the face in the hood and the words froze on my lips.
I had a glimpse of dark brown eyes, black hair, skin darkly pale, a handsome, masculine face, until he turned into the light and the burn scars on his right side showed.
My hand reached for the Browning, but it wasn’t there, nothing was there. I was unarmed, and he was standing in front of me.
“Do not contact your vampires via mind; I will sense it, and I will tell my vampires to kill the temptresses inside the club. And, yes, I knew you were unarmed. I did not think you would ever be that careless, but it gives us a chance to talk.”
I licked suddenly dry lips and did the only thing I could think of: stepped back, gave myself room, for all the good it was going to do me.
“Why take the club? Why give the police time to trap your vampires?” I asked, voice still calm. Point for me.
“It was bait, for you, Anita.”
“Gee, and most men just send flowers,” I said.
He looked at me with solid brown eyes. I couldn’t read his expression completely, but I think my reaction wasn’t what he expected, or maybe not what he wanted. “If you call for help in any way, I will have the vampires that I control start killing the harlots.”
“They’re dancers, not prostitutes,” I said, “but I get it, you’re master enough to contact your people mind to mind,” I said.
He nodded. “As are you,” he said.
I took a deep breath and fought to get some control over my pulse and heart rate. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let it go. I rarely got in trouble keeping my mouth shut.
He was staring me up and down, not the way a man will a woman, but like he was looking over a car he planned to buy. It was definitely more purchase than date, that look.
I tried to get him talking, “Fine, you want to talk to me, let’s talk.”
“Come with me, now.” He actually held one large, long-fingered hand out to me. It was a big hand, bigger than I liked, but graceful, like his voice.
“No,” I said.
“I will have them kill the whores we have taken unless you come with me.”
I shook my head. “You’ll probably kill them anyway.”
“If I give my word?”
“I know you mean that, but you’re also a serial killer and a sexual sadist; sorry, but that makes me not trust you.” I shrugged and started thinking furiously in Edward’s direction, not magic, just that wish in my head that he would look this way, come this way, notice. But I was too short and the crowd blocked the view. I realized that the vampire in front of me was blocking the view even more. I doubted it was an accident.
“I see your point,” he said. He moved the hood more from his right side. “Take a good look, Anita. See what the humans have done to me.”
I tried not to look, because I wasn’t sure if it was a distraction technique, but some things are hard to look away from. Asher’s facial scars were just on the side of one cheek, trailing down to the chin. The entire right cheek of Vittorio’s face, from where the hood hit it to the edge of his mouth and the tip of his chin, was all hardened scar tissue.
He let the hood drop back to hide his face, and I realized he had his left hand held out to his side, for all the world as if he expected someone to come take his hand. A young girl reached for him. I thought for a moment she was another vampire, but one look into those wide, gray eyes and I knew better. She was dressed in tramp chic, skirt too short, midriff showing, small breasts as mounded as she could get them. Before it became the style I’d have said hooker, but so many of the teenage girls were wearing this kind of shit, it made me wonder what the real hookers were wearing.
He smoothed her straight brown hair back from her face. She smiled dreamily up at him.
“Leave her alone,” I said.
He caressed her cheek, and she cuddled into it like a kitten. He turned her face to me, so I could see how young the face under the makeup was: fourteen, maybe fifteen, no more. It was hard to tell in that much makeup and the clothes. It tended to make you add years that the girls hadn’t earned.
“I said, leave her alone.” My voice wasn’t shaky anymore; it held the first edge of anger. I embraced that, fed the anger with sweet thoughts of vengeance and what I’d do to him when I had the chance.
“If your beast rises, I will tear her throat out.” He drew her in against his body as he said it.
I had to master my anger then, swallow it down, because he was right; I couldn’t guarantee with this much stress that anger wouldn’t tip me into some kind of lycanthrope problem. If I could have shifted for real, it would have given me weapons, but it wasn’t a weapon for me, it was just one more problem.
He reached his other hand out, and a man came to it. He was tall, taller than the vampire. His gray eyes were almost a match for the girl’s; even his short hair was the same shade of brown. He gazed forward, seeing nothing.
Vittorio began to unzip his sweatshirt, exposing his chest. I knew what it would look like, because that was the worst of Asher’s scars. But again, it was worse. The holy water hadn’t just scarred the skin, it had eaten into the deeper tissue, exposing ligaments and the bones of his ribs. It looked like his body had tried to regrow some tissue over it, but the right side of his chest and stomach looked like a skeleton with a hard covering of scars. His stomach was a little concave, where there’d been no bone to support the healing.
If he had wanted to hurt me in that moment, he could have, because I was mesmerized with the damage and that he’d survived it.
“If I could have died of infection, I would have, for there were no antibiotics when they did this to me.”
“If you want to die, wait here, I’ll get a gun and help you out.”
“There was a time when that was what I sought, but no one was powerful enough to slay me. I took it as a message that I was death, because death could not touch me.”
“Everything dies, Vittorio,” I said, and I couldn’t keep my gaze from flicking between the daughter and the father.
“So fragile, humans, aren’t they?”
“Did you bring them with you to use as hostages?”
“I found them in the crowd. I thought at first”—he hugged the girl—“she was a whore, but she is only pretending.” He kissed the top of her head, and she snuggled against him. “She reeks of innocence and untried things.”
“What—do—you—want?” And I let each word hold the anger that I was really having trouble fighting off. I’d have given almost anything in that moment for a gun.
He stared down at the girl as she cuddled against him, her arms deep inside the sweatshirt, wrapping her arms completely around him. She gazed up at him like he was the best thing since sliced bread.
“She sees what I was before. I was beautiful once.”
“Then you do the big reveal, and that’s part of the thrill for you. I get it.”
He spoke looking at me, not her. “I can leave this place with this family or with you. Will you trade your freedom for theirs?”
“Don’t do this,” I said, voice softer.
“You will come with me to save them?”
I looked at the man, with his unseeing gaze, and the besotted girl. “You don’t kill children or men. Unless the men are strippers. These aren’t your victims of choice. Let them go.”
“Should I wake the father up enough to see and know what we do to his daughter?”
“What do you want, Vittorio?” I asked.
“You,” he said.
We stood staring at each other. He had a slight smile on his face; I didn’t. “Me, in what way?”
He laughed, and it was a bitter sound. “Oh, your virtue is safe, Anita; the Church took care of that long ago.”
“Is it about your vampires in St. Louis? Is that why you wanted me here?”
“Revenge is for the small-minded, Anita. You will learn that I think larger thoughts, grander ones.”
The girl began to kiss the ruined side of his chest. She began to make small eager sounds in her throat.
He’d done something else to her, mind to mind, and I hadn’t felt it. I was standing feet away from him, and I hadn’t felt a damn thing. I hadn’t met a vampire in years that could do that to me.
“I have spies in Maximillian’s camp. He knows, and I know now, that Jean-Claude has not given you the fourth mark.”
I fought to keep my face blank and knew I failed by a widening of the eyes, a catch of the breath, a speed of pulse.
“Your master has left the door open for others, Anita. Bibiana wants Max to walk through that door. She believes that if you loved Jean-Claude you would have allowed it and married him by now. She sees your indecision as proof that you haven’t found your true love.”
“She’s old-fashioned that way,” I said, because what else could I say? He’d know if I was lying. Vampires and wereanimals are like walking lie detectors if they’re powerful enough, and he was.
“But do not worry about Max and his bride, for I have decided it is my door to open, not his.”
I blinked up at him, the anger dying under the confusion. I’d thought of a lot of things this nut-bunny could have wanted from me; that hadn’t been one of them. “You want to make me your human servant?”
“I do.”
“Why?” I asked, “Everyone knows what a pain in Jean-Claude’s ass I am. Why do you want to deal with that?” I couldn’t call for help in any way, or someone else died. I couldn’t go all lycanthrope, because it wouldn’t help me. What could I do? What the fuck could I do without a gun?
He laughed again, but this time it was lower, more attractive, more seductive. “The power, Anita. You are the first necromancer in centuries, and with so many other powers.” He moved a little closer, drawing the girl with him. The man followed a step behind like some kind of robot.
Vittorio reached out with the hand not wrapped around the girl. I stepped back. All vampire powers increase by proximity, and especially touch. He’d done things that were almost impossible; I did not want to find out what his touch could do.
“Anita, you will make me the most powerful Master of the City in all of the new world.”
“So you take me, and then we take Vegas from Max?” I was thinking furiously, going over my options. There didn’t seem to be a lot of them. I only knew I wasn’t leaving the area with him. One rule with serial killers: make them kill you in public, because whatever they’ll do to you in private will be worse. I also couldn’t let him leave with the girl and her father. But he couldn’t fly with two people; he’d have to simply walk away. I could stop that, couldn’t I? Shit. Think, Anita, think.
“Tiger is my animal to call, Anita. We slay Max and his wife, and it is over.”
“Victor, you’d have to kill their son, too,” I said.
He smiled, and he moved toward me again. I moved out of reach again.
“Yes, of course. What a queen you will make for our empire of blood and pain.” His voice was cheerful, as if we weren’t talking about murder.
“Allow me but a touch, just to lay these fingers alongside your cheek.” He held the hand up, like a magician; nothing up my sleeve. Riiight.
“Don’t move.” It was Edward’s voice. It took almost everything I had not to turn and search for where he was, but I kept my eyes on the vampire in front of me. Help was here, if I didn’t fuck up.
The father moved up beside Vittorio, and I’d have bet everything I had that he was blocking Edward’s shot.
“The man’s bespelled, Edward,” I said, and again had to fight not to look for him, but Vittorio was too powerful to look away, for even a second. I wasn’t sure what his touch would do to me. Maybe nothing, or maybe something bad. I was faster than human-normal, thanks to Jean-Claude, so if I just kept looking at him, I could stay out of reach, or that was the plan.
“My friends, come to me,” he said, and this time I felt the smallest tug of power. The crowd at the barrier turned toward us and spilled out toward him.
“He’s bespelled the crowd!” I started to turn to run, but the girl was still in his arms. It made me hesitate. The crowd spilled around us. They shielded him from any gunfire, but they also tried to grab me. It was as if they were zombies, sightless eyes, reaching hands, no thought. How had he mind-rolled this many people? How the fuck had he done it?
I tried not to hurt them, at first, but when I realized they were trying to hold me down by sheer numbers, I stopped being nice. I kicked a knee and felt it give. A man screamed and then said, “What’s happening? Where am I?”
I hit the nearest face, seeing my target as the opposite side of that face, the way you’re taught in martial arts. He simply went down and vanished in the crowd. I brought down two more with joint hits and one bloody nose. The pain brought them out of it, and they crawled away, no longer a threat, but I’d waited too late, and there were just too many.
I yelled, “Pain, they snap out of it when they hurt!” I wasn’t sure anyone heard me, until I heard cries of pain from the outside of the mob. Someone was coming, someone on my side. But the hands held me down, the sheer weight of all the people, and I couldn’t move.
Vittorio knelt by my head. He laid his hand on my face. I tried to keep moving, but there was nothing I could do. His eyes filled with brown fire. I knew what he was going to do.
I screamed, “Edward!”
One moment I heard bodies hitting the ground, the next there was nothing but the touch of the vampire and his eyes, like brown glass flame, hovering in front of my face. They pressed against my face. I closed my eyes and screamed.
63
I WAITED FOR that flame to sink into me, to take me over, but nothing happened. The hands were still holding me down, I could still feel the press of power, of that brown flame, but that was it. I opened my eyes a slit, and the brown-gold of the flame was dazzling, but it wasn’t coming closer.
A gunshot sounded so close that I was deaf for a second. Then the flame was gone, and Vittorio’s face was above mine. I thought he meant to kiss me, but realized from the way he held himself that he was ducking. Another shot sounded, and then the people who’d been pinning me let me up and moved to form a human shield by the kneeling vampire.
“Another night,” he said, and he was suddenly standing and running in a movement that I couldn’t follow with my eyes. I sat up, watching him go, my heart in my throat. I’d seen only one other vampire that could move like that without mind tricks: Truth.
Men were yelling, “Fuck, where’d he go! There! Did you see that!”
Edward was suddenly standing above me, his hand held out. I took it, and he lifted me to my feet. I swayed a little, and he steadied me.
“You all right?” he asked.
I nodded.
He gave me a look.
“He tried to mark me, but he couldn’t get past my shields in the time you gave him.”
Olaf loomed over us. “Is she hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and forced myself to let go of Edward’s hand, when what I really wanted to do was collapse into his arms and hold on.
Green uniformed SWAT guys were there now, moving the crowd around as the people began to wander around, asking what happened.
Hooper was there, his face the only pale thing in the outfit. “What the hell happened, Blake?”
“The hostages, the club, it was a trap.”
“A trap for what?” Hooper asked.
“Me.”
Georgie came up beside his sergeant. “Nothing personal, Blake, but then why didn’t he kill you?”
“He doesn’t want me dead.”
“What does he want?” Hooper asked.
“Me, as his human servant.”
“You already belong to the master in St. Louis, right?” It was Cannibal, coming up from the other side of the dispersing crowd.
What was I supposed to say? “Something like that.”
“Then he’s too late,” Cannibal said.
“He thinks he’s powerful enough to take me away.”
Hooper was standing there, not moving but watching my face. “Is he?”
“Not tonight, he wasn’t.”
Hooper’s mouth made a small movement; maybe it was a smile, maybe not. “Let’s not give him another night.”
“Amen to that,” I said.
I turned to Cannibal, alias Sergeant Rocco. “Some heap-big psychic you are. Didn’t you sense Vittorio working the crowd?”
“Sorry, Anita, but I only do memories.”
“Shit, can’t any of you sense this kind of thing? Where’s Sanchez?” I asked.
“Why?” Olaf asked.
“I thought he might have sensed the metaphysics.”
“He’s with the second team. They’re going to scout Bering’s house,” Edward said. “Grimes wanted his practitioners to see if they could sense the demon.”
“Why aren’t you with Sanchez?” I asked Rocco.
“My ability is touch and memories. I’m not touching a demon on purpose, and I don’t want those memories.”
Edward said, “They’re trying to see if they can sense the demon, so we can make entry closer to the targets or farther away from them, depending on what they find.”
“Give me a gun, and let’s get out there.”
Edward was beside me; he handed me my own backup gun from a pocket in his tac pants.
Rocco said, “You have vampires right here; why chase demons?”
“This is a hostage situation. I’m not a negotiator.”
Bernardo came up. He had blood running down his face from a cut on his forehead; apparently someone had hit back.
The people from the crowd who had tried to beat the hell out of police officers were being given blankets and hot drinks by Red Cross workers. The team doctor was checking them out, with his med tech by his side. I heard a man say, “I knew what we were doing was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. I had to do what the voice in my head told me to do. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t.”
I stepped in front of Rocco, and he stopped, looking at me. “If Sanchez and the other practitioners can sense the demon, it can sense them. If it’s what killed the other operators, it could come out and trail them by their own magic.”
“Most demons aren’t that bright,” Edward said.
“We’re aware that some preternatural beings can sense psychic ability, Marshal. We’ve got them warded so their”—he made a waffling motion with his hand—“signature is garbled.”
I was impressed and said so.
“Psychic ability is just another part of the job for us,” he said. His radio crackled to life, and he turned to listen. He started to do a slow jog, and the rest of us just fell into step with him. All right, the men slow-jogged; I had to fast-jog. My legs were shorter. “The vampires have given up. They’ve freed the hostages, and they surrendered.”
“What’s the catch?” I asked. If anyone heard me, they didn’t answer, but I knew there was a catch; with vampires there was always a catch.
64
SOMEONE HAD HIT the lights in the club so that it was bathed in bright lights. Lower-rent strip clubs are not meant to see bright lights; they reveal all the cracks and bad paint patch-up jobs. They show the illusion for what it is: a lie. A lie about sex, and the promise of having it, if you just pay a little bit more money. Nathaniel, my live-in sweetie, had explained to me that dancers make their living on the customer’s hope that real sex is possible. It’s all about advertising but never really selling. Under the harsh overhead lights, the scarlet women looked like even if they were selling, you wouldn’t want to buy.
The dancer who had lost an ear was being rushed to the hospital, with the idea that they might be able to sew the ear back on; the wound was fresh enough. The other dancers were in the back rooms being interviewed, because we had the vampires in the front area between all the little stages. The vampires were chained in shackles with the new special metal that some of the bigger, more well-funded police forces had for preternatural criminals. It was some uber-space-age metal. I hadn’t seen it put to the test yet, so I’d wait before putting my faith in it too completely.
The vampires sat in a sad-looking row, their hands held awkwardly in front of them because the chain went to their waist and their ankles. I had to admit that even if they broke the metal, they probably wouldn’t be able to break enough chain to attack before we could get a shot off. Maybe just shackles were a good idea, though you had to get up close and personal to shackle a prisoner, and to my knowledge, the only person in this room who was immune to vampire gaze was me.
Olaf was circling the chained vampires. He was staying out of reach, but he paced them, like a cattleman looking over a herd that he was thinking of buying. Or maybe that was just me projecting. Maybe.
Edward and Bernardo were interviewing the dancers. Why was I with Olaf? Because the dancers knew a predator when they saw one, and even after an evening of being held prisoner by vampires, some of them spotted him for what he was, and it wasn’t helping to settle their nerves. For a good interview, Olaf needed to be elsewhere. Why didn’t I interview the women? Because I could get as up close to the vampires as possible and not risk being bespelled. My specialty led me squarely to the other room. But Edward had said something to Sergeant Rocco, aka Cannibal, because either he or one of his men were at my side at all times. They were careful not to give the vamps direct eye contact, but they stayed close. Frankly, Rocco made me a little nervous after our encounter at SWAT HQ, but the first time he moved his body between me and Olaf—subtly, but just enough to make the bigger man have to walk wide around me—I just enjoyed that someone had my back.
“Okay, guys, this is the drill. We’re going to escort you one at a time into another room and ask you what happened. Don’t talk amongst yourselves while we’re gone. Marshal Jeffries and some of the nice SWAT operators will still be in the room, so mind your manners.”
They all promised like eager kindergarteners. There wasn’t a vampire in the room that I would have been afraid of, one on one. But there were ten of them, and ten was a lot. Ten of any kind of vampire would have been scary. Hell, ten human beings all rush you at once and you won’t get them all.
Officers helped the first vampire up to shuffle into a small room behind the bar. It was where the liquor was kept, and they put him in a chair that they’d found just for this. I knelt by the first vampire and found myself gazing into the face of a slightly plump man with pale brown eyes and hair to match. He smiled at me, careful not to show fang. He was trying to be all harmless, friendly, helpful, but I knew that of all of them, he was the oldest. I could feel him in my head, like an echo of time. He was three hundred if he was a day. He was dressed neatly, too neatly for the heat, for the town, for what he was pretending to be. He had pale slacks and a slightly darker tan shirt tucked in and buttoned up. The belt was good leather and matched the shoes. His nondescript brown hair had been cut recently and well. The watch on his wrist was gold and expensive, though once it doesn’t say Rolex, I can’t tell you what it is, but thanks to Jean-Claude I know quality when I see it.
I smiled at him. He smiled back. “Name?”
“Jefferson, Henry Jefferson.”
“Well, Mr. Henry Jefferson, tell me what happened.”
“Honestly, officer, I was in the casino, playing poker, and he came to stand by the table, just outside the ropes.”
Ropes meant he’d been at one of the high-end tables, where a hand could start at five hundred, or ten thousand, or more. “Then what?” I asked.
“Then he made me cash out and told me to come with him.” He looked up at me, and there was puzzlement and a hint of fear on his face. “Maximillian is a powerful Master of the City. He protects us, but this guy just came out of nowhere and I couldn’t say no.”
The next vampire was a lot younger in every way. Maybe only a few years dead, and barely legal when he crossed over to undead land. He had healed needle scars at the bends of his elbows. He’d been clean a long time. I had a hunch.
“Church of Eternal Life, right?” It was the vampire church, and the fastest-growing denomination in the country. Want to know what it’s like to die? Ask a church member that’s gone on. That’s what they call it, going on. Church members wear medical ID bracelets, so if they’re in a life-threatening situation, you call the Church and have a vampire come and finish the job.
The man’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened enough to flash fang before he remembered. Boy, he was new. He recovered and tried to do what all the older vampires tell you to do when talking to the police: play human. Not pretend to be human, but just don’t be vampire.
“Yes,” and his voice was whispery, so frightened, “how did you . . .”
“The needle tracks. The Church got you off drugs, right?”
He nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Steve.”
“Okay, Steve, what happened?”
“I was at work. I sell souvenirs just down the street. People like buying from a vampire, ya know.”
“I know,” I said.
“But he came up to the stand, and he said, Come with me, and just like that, I did.” He gazed up at me, his eyes wide and frightened. “Why did I do that?”
“Why does a human being go with you once you bespell them with your gaze?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t do that. The Church rules . . .”
“Say no vampire gaze, but I bet you’ve tried it, at least once.”
He looked embarrassed.
“It’s okay, Steve, I don’t care if you’ve played slap-and-tickle with the tourists with your eyes. Did this vampire catch you with his eyes?”
He frowned up at me again. “No, I would swear it wasn’t his gaze. It was almost as if he said, Come with me, and I had to do it.”
“So, was it his voice?”
Steve didn’t know.
None of them knew why they had done it. They’d left their jobs, their dates, their money on craps tables, and just followed him. Sometimes Vittorio had spoken; sometimes he’d simply stood close to them. Either way, they’d followed him and done what he said.
The girl looked about nineteen, but except for Henry Jefferson, she was the oldest of them. Two hundred years and counting was my guess, and it wasn’t a guess. Her hair was long and dark and had fallen over her face, so she was trying to blink it out of her eyes.
We’d already been through name, rank, and serial number, when I said, “Sarah, do you want me to get your hair out of your eyes?”
“Please,” she said.
I moved the hair carefully out of the wide, blinking gray eyes. She was the first one to ask, “You’re looking me in the eyes; most humans don’t do that. I mean, I wouldn’t roll you or anything, but cops are trained not to look into our eyes.”
I smiled. “You aren’t old enough to roll me with your eyes, Sarah.”
She frowned up at me. “I don’t understand.” Then her eyes went wide, and what little color she had to her skin drained away. You don’t get to see a vampire go pale very often.
“Oh my God,” she said, and her voice held terror.
Rocco stepped up. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s figured out who I am,” I said, quietly.
Sarah the vampire had started to scream. “No, please, he made me. It was like I was some human. He just rolled me. Oh, God, I swear to you. I didn’t do this. I didn’t mean . . . Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. You’re the Executioner! Oh, my God, oh, my God, you’re going to kill us all!”
“You might want to step outside. I’ll try to calm her down,” Rocco said, having to yell above her screams.
I left him to the hysterical vampire and went back out into the main part of the club. Hooper and Olaf were arguing, quietly but heatedly, in the corner of the room away from the prisoners. There were still plenty of guards on the vampires. I walked by them and found them watching me. The looks were either hostile or scared. Either they’d heard Sarah screaming or someone else had figured it out. Of course, there was one other possibility.
I got close to the two men and caught snatches, “You son of a bitch, you are not allowed to threaten prisoners.”
“It was not a threat,” Olaf said in his deep voice. “I was merely telling the vampire what awaits them all.”
“They’re telling us everything we want to know, Jeffries. We don’t need to scare them into confessing.”
They both looked at me and made enough room so I could join the little circle. “What did you tell the girl?”
“How do you know it was a girl?” Hooper asked.
“I’ll do you one better, I’ll tell you which girl. The one with long, wavy brown hair, petite.”
Hooper narrowed his eyes at me. “How the hell did you know that?”
“Otto has a type,” I said.
“He was talking low to her, but he made sure the others could hear. He told her he was going to cut her heart out while she was still alive. He told her he’d make sure and do her after dark, so she’d be awake for it all.” Hooper was as angry as I’d ever seen him. There was a fine trembling in his hands, as if he were fighting the urge to make fists.
I sighed and spoke low. “Did you also mention who I am?”
“I told her we were vampire hunters, and we had the Executioner and Death with us.”
“I know Blake is the Executioner, but who’s Death? You?”
“Ted,” I said. I glared up at Olaf. “You wanted them afraid. You wanted to watch the fear on all their faces, didn’t you?”
He just looked at me.
Hooper asked, “What’s your nickname, Jeffries?”
“I do not have one.”
“He doesn’t leave survivors,” I said.
Hooper looked from one to the other of us. “Wait a minute, are you telling me that these vampires are all going to be executed?”
“They are vampires involved with the serial killer we were sent to destroy. They are covered under the current warrant,” Olaf said.
“The human crowd at the barricades attacked police officers, but when they said the vampire took them over, we believed them.”
“I believe the vampires, too,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Olaf said. “They took human hostages, threatened human life, and are proven associates of a master vampire that is covered under an active warrant of execution. They have forfeited their rights, all their rights.”
Hooper stared at Olaf for a second, then turned to me. “Is he right?”
I just nodded.
“No one died tonight,” he said, “and I want to keep it that way.”
“You’re a cop; you save lives. We’re executioners, Hooper; we don’t save lives, we take them.”
“Are you telling me that you’re all right with killing these people?”
“They aren’t people,” Olaf said.
“In the eyes of the law, they are,” Hooper said.
I shook my head. “No, because if they were really people under the law, I’d have another option. The law, as written, doesn’t make exceptions. Otto is right; they have forfeited their right to live under the law.”
“But they were under the power of a vampire, just like the human crowd.”
“Yes, but the law doesn’t recognize that as a possibility. It doesn’t believe that one vampire can take over another vampire. It only protects humans from the power of vampires.”
“Are you telling me that there’s no other option for these vampires?”
“They go from here to the morgue. They’ll be chained to a gurney with holy objects, or maybe these new chains will do, I don’t know. But they will be taken to the morgue and tied down in some way, where they will wait until dawn, and when they go to sleep for the day, we kill them, all of them.”
“The law does not say we must wait for dawn,” Olaf said.
I couldn’t keep the look of disgust off my face. “No one voluntarily does them while they’re awake. You only do that when you’re out of options.”
“If we do them as soon as possible, then we can move on to help Sanchez and the other practitioners.”
“They radioed in,” Hooper said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“House was empty. The house had been torn up by something, and Bering, or what we assume was Bering, is dead. He’d been dead for a while.”
“So, a dead end, no pun intended.”
Olaf said, “I thought they were only to scout the house psychically, and wait for the rest of us to enter it.”
“They sensed nothing in the house. They radioed in and the lieutenant made the call.” Hooper turned back to me. “If we could prove that these vampires were telling the truth, could you delay the executions?”
“We have some discretion on when to put the warrant into force,” I said.
“Cannibal can get their memories.”
“He’ll be opening himself up psychically to vampires. That’s different from playing around in human brains,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter why they did what they did,” Olaf said. “According to the law, they will be executed, regardless of why.”
“We’re supposed to protect all the people in this city.” Hooper pointed back at the waiting vampires. “Last I checked, they qualify as people.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Sergeant. No jail will take them, and we can’t leave them for days chained to a gurney with holy objects. It’s considered cruel and unusual, so they must be executed in a timely manner.”
“So it’s better to just kill them than to leave them on the gurney?”
“I’m telling you the law, not what I believe,” I said, “Frankly, I think putting them in cross-wrapped coffins for a while would keep them safe and out of the way, but that was considered cruel and unusual, too.”
“If they were human, it wouldn’t be.”
“If they were human, we wouldn’t be talking about putting them in a little box and shoving them in a hole somewhere. If they were human, we wouldn’t be allowed to chain them to a gurney and remove their hearts and their heads. If they were human, we’d be out of a job.”
He stared at me, a slow dawning look that was almost disgust. “Wait here, I’m going to talk to the lieutenant.”
“The law is the law,” Olaf said.
“I’m afraid he’s right, Hooper.”
He looked at me, ignoring Olaf. “If there were another option, would you sign off on it?”
“It depends on the option, but I’d love to have a legal recourse for moments like this that doesn’t include murder.”
“It’s not murder,” Olaf said.
I turned to him. “You don’t believe that, because if it wasn’t murder, you wouldn’t enjoy it as much.”
He gave me those cave-dark eyes, and there was a hint of anger down in the depths. I didn’t care. I just knew that I didn’t want to kill Sarah, or Steve, or Henry Jefferson, or the girl that he’d made cry. But to keep Olaf from being alone with the women, I’d take them myself, but not while it was dark, not while they could see it coming, not while they were afraid.
“You really don’t enjoy killing them, do you?” he asked, and he sounded surprised.
“I told you I didn’t enjoy it.”
“You did, but I didn’t believe you.”
“Why do you believe me now?”
“I watched your face. You’re trying to think of ways to save them or to lessen their suffering.”
“You could tell all that from one look?”
“Not just one look, a series of looks, like clouds passing over the sun, one after another.”
I didn’t know what to say to that; it was almost poetic. “These people are innocent of any wrongdoing. They don’t deserve to die for not being strong enough to resist Vittorio.”
“Ted would say that no vampire is innocent.”
“And what do you say?” I asked, trying to be angry, because it was better than the shaky feeling in my gut. I didn’t want to kill these people.
“I say that no one is innocent.”
Hooper came back with Grimes beside him. Grimes said, “We have a lawyer who’s been wanting to try for a stay of execution in cases like this.”
“You mean like that last-minute call from the governor in the movies,” I said.
Grimes nodded. His so-sincere brown eyes studied my face. “We need an executioner to write it up and sign that he or she thinks that executing these vampires would be murder and not in the public good.”
“Let Cannibal read some minds, make certain we haven’t been fooled, and then I’ll sign it.”
“Anita,” Olaf said.
“Don’t, just don’t, and you stay away from the prisoners.”
“You are not in charge of me,” he said, and there was the beginning of anger. Great.
“No, but I am,” Grimes said. “Stay away from the prisoners until further notice, Marshal Jeffries. I’ll tell the other marshals what we’re doing.”
They walked toward the back room and the ex-hostages and Edward. Olaf said what I was thinking. “Edward won’t like what you’re doing.”
“He doesn’t have to like it.”
“Most women value their boyfriend’s opinion.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and walked away from him.
He called after me. “I thought you didn’t want to.”
I kept walking. The vampires on the floor stared at me as if I were Vittorio, or something else equally scary. There was hatred in a few eyes, but underneath it all was their fear. I could taste it on the back of my tongue, like something sweet that held a bitterness to it, like dark chocolate that’s a little too dark.
The far door opened and Cannibal was helping Sarah the vampire walk through the door. She caught sight of me and started screaming all over again, “She’s going to kill us! She’s going to kill us all!”
Usually she’d be right, but maybe, just maybe, we really could save everyone tonight.
65
IT WAS LESS than two hours before dawn. I was so tired I ached, but the vampires were all still alive. They were chained to gurneys in the morgue, and since the morgue had a room designed for only one vamp at a time, the coroner and all of his people hadn’t been too happy to see ten of them, but Grimes had used his own men to act as extra guards. The guard duty was volunteer only, but his men had looked at him like he was crazy; if he said it was a good thing, it was. Besides, he’d explained it like this: “No one died tonight; if we do this, no one dies tomorrow either.”
Edward hadn’t been happy with me. Bernardo had been amused. Olaf had left me alone, caught in his own thoughts that I wanted no part of. I’d actually let Sergeant Rocco drop me at my hotel because Edward didn’t offer. Normally, it would have hurt my feelings, but not over this.
“I’ve never tried my talent on a real vampire before,” he said in the quiet of the car.
“How different was it?” I asked, still gazing out at darkened buildings on the street. Like most streets in most cities, everything was closed on this street. Just before dawn, even the strippers get to go home.
“They’re still people, but it’s as if their thoughts are slower. No,” he said, and something about how he said it made me look at him. His profile in the light and shadow of the streetlights was very serious. “It was like those insects frozen in amber, as if the memories that were clearest to them were old, and what happened tonight with our killer was mistier for them.”
“I’ll bet that was only true of Henry Jefferson and Sarah,” I said.
He glanced away from the road to me. “Yeah, how did you know?”
“They were the oldest. You know how with some people, when they get old, the past is more clear than the present to them?”
He nodded.
“I think for some vampires, it’s like that, too. The ones who haven’t succeeded but just survived. I think they look back on their glory days.”
“Does your vampire boyfriend do that?”
I resisted the urge to ask, Which one? and played nice. “No, but then he’s the master of his city.”
“You’re saying he’s happy now.”
“Yeah.”
“Henry was wearing a watch that cost more than this truck. He’s not doing bad, so why was his most vivid memory of a time when women wore long dresses and curls, and he was in vest and suit with a pocket watch and a top hat?”
“Did he love the woman?” I asked.
Rocco thought about that, then said, “Yes.” He looked at me again. “I’ve never been able to pick up love images before, Anita. I’m good at violence, hate, the dark stuff, but tonight I got soft images and had to work at the harsh. Did you do something to me when I read you?”
“Not on purpose,” I said, “but I tend to have an effect on vampire powers.”
“I’m not a vampire,” he said.
“We’re alone, Rocco, and you wanted to talk to me alone, so no more lies. You know, and I know, and your men know, that you feed on the memories you gather.”
“They don’t know.”
“Cannibal is your call sign. They know; at some level, they know.” I settled back into the seat, and we turned onto the Strip, and I suddenly knew where everyone was; they were here. The street looked the same at hours before dawn as it had closer to midnight. “I thought New York was the city that never slept,” I said.
Rocco laughed. “I’ve never been there, but the Strip doesn’t sleep much.” He glanced at me again, then back to the bright lights and the animated billboards. “You fed on my memory, too.”
“You showed me how.”
“By me feeding on one memory, you learned how to turn it on me, just like that?”
“Apparently,” I said.
“Where are you staying?”
“The New Taj,” I said.
“Max’s place.” He said it like it was a bad thing.
“Max knows if he lets anything happen to us, it might be a bad thing. He’ll keep us safe to keep the peace.”
“Your boyfriend that big in the vampire world?”
“We do okay,” I said.
“That didn’t answer the question.”
“Nope, it didn’t.”
“Fine.” We were at the light in front of the Bellagio, with the fake skyline of New York close by and the Eiffel Tower in sight. It was like the world had been pared down and squished into one street.
“Ask the question you wanted to ask, Rocco.”
I half-expected him to protest, but he didn’t; he finally asked, “You’re like me. You feed from your power.”
“From raising the dead? I don’t think so.”
“It’s something to do with sex or love. I feed on violence, the memory of it, but you feed on softer emotions, don’t you?”
I debated on how to answer; maybe I was just tired because I told the truth. “Yeah.”
“Am I going to keep seeing softer things?”
“I don’t know. It’s like we traded a little power.” I looked at the pirate ship, the fire, and it was surreal, unreal, like some dream where nothing makes sense.
“Have you ever shared power like that before?”
“I can act as a focus for psychic ability for raising the dead.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can share power with other animators, and combined we can raise more, or older, dead.”
“Really,” he said.
“Yeah, I wrote it up for the magazine The Animator a few years back.”
“Email me the back issue, and I’ll read up on it. Maybe practitioners here can do something similar.”
“Your abilities aren’t very similar.”
“Ours weren’t either.”
“We’re both living vampires, Cannibal; that’s similar enough.”
He glanced at me, and it was a longer look. “The law hasn’t expanded to psychic vampires yet.”
“They don’t want to understand it enough to regulate it.”
He grinned. “Too many politicians would be on the wrong side of it.”
“Probably,” I said.
He gave me that glance again. “You know any?”
“No, just being cynical.”
“You’re good at it.”
“Why thank you, always high praise from a cop.” I had the feeling that he still hadn’t asked all of his questions. I waited in the bright neon silence, punctuated by darkness between the lights, as if the night were thicker anywhere the light didn’t shine. My mood was showing in my head.
He pulled into the big circular drive at the New Taj. I realized I should have called ahead and had some of our people meet us. I’d expected to be dropped off by Edward and the boys, and I would have been safe enough. Now it was just me.
“You want me to walk you up?”
I smiled at him, hand on the door. “I’m a big girl.”
“This vampire has a serious hard-on for you, Anita.”
“You ask all the questions you wanted privacy for?” I asked.
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re blunt?”
“All the damn time.”
He laughed again, but there was an edge of nerves to it. “Do you ever get tempted to feed on more than you should?”
The doorman, or the valet, or someone, was at the door. I waved them off. “What do you mean, Rocco?”
“I can take a memory, Anita. I can take it and erase it from their mind. I did it accidentally a few times. It’s like it becomes my memory, not theirs, and it’s a high. It’s a rush. I think if I let myself, I could take it all, every bad memory they’ve ever had. Maybe more. Maybe I could take everything and leave them blank. I think about how it might feel to take it all.”
“Tempts you, doesn’t it?” I said.
He nodded and wouldn’t look at me.
“Have you ever done it?”
He gave me a look of shock, of horror. “No, of course not. It’d be evil.”
I nodded. “It’s not about being able to do something, Rocco. It’s not even about thinking about doing it. It’s not even about being tempted to go too far.”
“Then what is it about?” he asked.
I looked into that very grown-up, very competent face, and watched the doubt in his eyes. I knew that doubt. “It’s about deciding not to do it. It’s about being tempted but not giving in. It isn’t our abilities that make us evil, Sergeant, it’s giving in to them. Psychic ability isn’t any different from being good with a gun. Just because you could walk into a crowd and take out half of them doesn’t mean you will.”
“I can lock my gun up, Anita. I can’t take this out of me and put it somewhere safe.”
“No, we can’t, so every day, every night, we make the choice to be good guys and not bad guys.”
He looked at me, hands still on the steering wheel. “And that’s your answer: we’re good guys because we don’t do bad things?”
“Isn’t that what a good guy is?” I asked.
“No, a good guy does good things, too.”
“Don’t you do good things every day?”
He frowned. “I try.”
“Rocco, that is all any of us can do. We try. We do our best. We resist temptation. We keep moving.”
“I have to be older than you by a decade; why is it that I’m asking you for advice?”
“First, I think I’m older than I look. Second, I’m the first one you’ve met that you thought might be tempted in the same way. It’s hard when you think you’re the only one, no matter how old you are.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience,” he said.
I nodded. “Sometimes, sometimes I’ve got so much company I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Like that,” and he nodded toward the window. It was Truth and Wicked, patiently waiting for us to finish our conversation. Had they been watching for me, or had they just known I was here? Did I want to ask? Not unless I was ready for the answer.
“Yeah, like that. I turned back to him and offered him my hand. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Thanks for the talk.”
We shook, and there was no magic between us now. We were both tired, our fires dimmed behind use and emotion. He got out and helped us unload the car. The overeager bellman was allowed to touch my suitcase and nothing else. Most of my really dangerous stuff was still locked up at SWAT, but there was enough here that I didn’t want the staff carrying it. Wicked and Truth took the extra bags. Sergeant Rocco offered his hand to them. They were surprised by the offer, though he probably didn’t see the signs of it. They shook his hand. He said good night to me, and “See you tomorrow.”
“We’ll start in the area where he found all his vampire victims tonight.”
“Yeah, maybe his lair will be in the area.” He got in his truck. We went for the doors. I wished I felt more secure that Vittorio only hunted near his lair. It seemed like an obvious mistake, and he didn’t strike me as the kind to make those.
Wicked and Truth didn’t say much until they got to the elevator and we were alone. “You seem tired,” Truth said.
“I am.”
“You fed on both of us, and you’re tired already,” Wicked said. “Should we be insulted?”
I smiled and shook my head. “It was a stressful night, and no, it’s no reflection on either of you. You know just how good you both are.”
“A backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it,” Wicked said.
“I wasn’t fishing, I was just saying you seem tired.”
“Sorry, Truth, sorry, just a long damn night.”
They exchanged a look, which I did not like. “What was that look about?”
Wicked said, “Requiem is waiting in your room.”
“I figured that my room would have the coffins, or the adjoining room.”
“That’s not what he means,” Truth said.
“Look, I’m beyond tired, just tell me.”
“He’s waiting to feed you,” Wicked said.
“I fed on both of you less than”—I squinted at my watch—“less than six hours ago. I don’t need to feed the ardeur.”
“Jean-Claude gave instructions that you needed to have food available more often if you wanted it.”
“Did he now?”
The elevator doors opened. “He’s worried that you’ll lose it with the police as your only food, Anita,” Wicked said.
I thought about that and couldn’t argue that it wouldn’t be very bad. “I do not feel in the mood, guys.”
“We’re just giving you a heads-up, Anita,” Wicked said.
“Did you guys tell him I fed on you both?”
They exchanged that look again.
“What?”
“We came through the door, and he said, ‘She fed on you. She fed on you both.’ ”
“How did he know?” I asked.
They shrugged, and it was like a mirrored gesture. “He said he could smell you on our skin.”
“He’s a vampire, not a werewolf.”
“Look,” Wicked said, “don’t shoot the messenger. But he’s waiting in your bed, and if you turn him down, I don’t know how he’s going to take it.”
I leaned my back against the wall between two doors that were not ours. “Are you saying he’s jealous that I fed on you guys?”
“Jealous may be too strong a word,” Wicked said.
“Yes, he was jealous,” Truth said.
Wicked frowned at his brother. “You don’t have to live up to your name all the time.”
Truth shrugged again.
“And this is exactly why Jean-Claude put you in charge during the night shift, and not Requiem,” I said.
“Because he’s a moody bastard,” Truth said.
I nodded. “Yeah.” I pushed away from the wall and looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour until dawn. Shit.” I stopped walking, because I was in the lead. “Gentlemen, I don’t know what room we’re in.”
Wicked led the way, and Truth brought up the rear, with me in the middle. We got to the room. Wicked used the little key card, pushed the door open, and held it for me.
It was a nice room. Big, a little too red and lush for my tastes, but it was a nice suite. We’d have no complaints about Max’s hospitality on rooms when we got back home. The outer room was a real living room with a table for four near the windows that looked out over the brightness of the Strip. There was a coffin near the door, but only one.
“Where are you sleeping?”
“Our coffins are in the other room for tonight. You have less than an hour; enjoy.” They put my bags by the closed door that had to lead into the bedroom, and then they left.
“Cowards,” I hissed.
Wicked stuck his head back around the door. “He doesn’t like guys, and neither do we.”
“You didn’t mind an audience earlier,” I said.
“We don’t, or I don’t, but Requiem does. Good night.” He closed the door, after taking the privacy sign with him. I realized that Jean-Claude hadn’t put Wicked in charge of just the vampires at night but me, too. I guess, in fairness, that Requiem wasn’t the only moody bastard still in the room.
But this kind of thing was exactly what had gotten Requiem moved lower down the food chain for me. He was like one of those boyfriends that the harder you try to break up with them, the harder they hang on. This was also the kind of thing that made me want to go back to my own house and leave most of them somewhere else.
I just wanted to get some sleep before I had to get back up and go out and hunt Vittorio again.
The door to the bedroom opened, just enough to show the line of his body, one hand, an arm, a spill of long, thick, dark hair. In the dimness of the room, with the backlight, the waist-length hair looked very black. It was hard to tell where the black robe he wore ended and the hair began. The skin that showed at chest and neck and face was pale as the first light of dawn, a cold beauty like snow. The Vandyke beard and mustache were black, darker than the hair. They framed his mouth the way you would frame a work of art, so that your eye was drawn to it.
I let my eyes rise higher, because that was my real failing. I was an eye man, or woman. A pretty pair of eyes really did it for me, always had. His eyes were blue and green like Caribbean seawater in the sun, one of the most startling shades of blue that I’d ever seen outside contact lenses, and his were natural. Belle Morte had a thing for blue-eyed men, and she’d tried to collect him, as she had Asher and Jean-Claude, so she’d have the darkest blue, the palest blue, and the greenest blue that was still blue. Requiem had fled the continent of Europe so he didn’t become another of her possessions.
A minute ago, I’d wanted to say, “I’ve been hunting serial killers all day, honey, can’t I take a pass?” Now all I could do was stare at him, and know that there was nothing to do but admire the artwork.
I dropped the bags in my hands and went to him. I slid my hands inside the half-opened robe to caress that smooth perfection of skin. I laid a kiss on his chest and was rewarded with the sound of his breath sighing outward.
“You were angry with me when you first came in the room.”
I gazed up at his six-foot-even frame, hands on his chest. I was still wearing too much weaponry to fall into his arms. “Then I saw you standing there, and I realized that you’d worried all night. You’d wondered where I was, and what was happening, and I didn’t call. You were left wondering if dawn would come and you still wouldn’t know I was safe.”
He nodded, silently.
“I’m a bad husband, Requiem, everyone knows that.”
His hands found my shoulders, traced my upper arms, as he said, “. . . the heart’s tally, telling off / the griefs I have undergone from girlhood upwards, / old and new, and now more than ever; / for I have never not had some new sorrow, / some fresh affliction to fight against.”
“I don’t know the poem, but it sounds depressing.”
He gave a small smile. “It’s a very old poem; the original was Anglo-Saxon. It’s called ‘The Wife’s Complaint.’ ”
I shook my head. “I’m trying to apologize, and I don’t know why. You always make me feel like I’ve done something wrong, and I’m tired of it.”
He dropped his hands away. “Now I’ve made you angry.”
I nodded, and started moving past him into the bedroom. No one was pretty enough for this level of need. I just didn’t know what to do with it. I kept my back to him while I stripped out of the vest, the weapons, all the paraphernalia of my day. It made quite a pile on my side of the bed. It was the side I slept on when there was only me and one man in the bed. Lately, that hadn’t been often. I didn’t mind being in the middle, God knew, but some nights there were too many, and this was one night when just one more was feeling like too many.
I heard the robe on the carpet; silk has such a distinctive sound. I felt him just behind me, felt him reach for me. “Don’t.”
I felt him go very still behind me. “I know you do not love me, my evening star.”
“I have too many men in my life that I love, Requiem; why can’t we just be lovers? Why do you have to remind me constantly that you love me, and I don’t love you? Your disappointment is like a constant pressure, and it’s not my doing. I never offered love, never promised it.”
“I will serve my lady in any way she will have me, for I have no pride left where she is concerned.”
“I don’t even want to know what you’re quoting; just go.”
“Look at me and tell me to go, and I will go.”
I shook my head stubbornly. “No, because if I see you, I won’t. You’re beautiful. You’re wonderful in bed. But you’re also a pain in the ass, and I’m tired, Requiem. I am so tired.”
“I didn’t even ask you how your night had gone. I thought only of my own feelings, my own needs. I am no true lover, to have thought of only myself.”
“I was told you were here to feed the ardeur.”
“We both know that’s a lie,” he said, voice soft and close. “I’m here because it broke my heart to know that you slept with the Wicked Truth.”
I started to say something angry. He said, “Hush, I can’t help feeling the way I feel, my evening star. I have asked Jean-Claude to find me a new city, one where I can be someone’s second-in-command rather than a distant third.”
I turned around then and searched his face. “You’re telling the truth.”
He gave that slight smile. “I am.”
I hugged him then, molding our bodies together the way you do with someone when you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve been together. You know each other’s bodies. You know the music of their breathing when sex perfumes the air. I hugged him to me and realized that I would miss him. But I also knew he was right.
He stroked my hair. “It helps to know that you will miss me.”
I raised my face to look into those blue eyes with their flash of green around the pupils. “You know I find you beautiful and amazing in bed.”
He nodded and gave that sad smile again. “But all your men are beautiful, and all of them are good in bed. I want to go somewhere that I have a chance to shine. A chance to have a woman love me, Anita, just me. You will never love just me.”
“I’m not sure I will ever love just anyone,” I said.
He smiled a little wider. “That is something, to know that you frustrate Jean-Claude, too. I never thought to see anyone who could resist him.”
I frowned up at him. “I haven’t exactly resisted.”
“You are his lover, his human servant, but you are not his.”
I started to step back, and he hugged me closer. “He said almost the same thing on the phone. Do I have you to thank for that little talk?”
“I told him why I needed to leave, and he agreed. That is why I am here in Las Vegas, to see if I would like to visit.”
“I don’t think it’s your kind of town.”
“Nor I, but it is a start. I will see their show, and I will dance, and women will think me beautiful, and they will want me, and eventually I will want them.”
“There isn’t enough of me, Requiem, not to date all of you. I can have sex with this many men, but I can’t be everyone’s lady love; no single woman could.”
He nodded. “I know. Now, kiss me, kiss me like you mean it. Kiss me like you’ll miss me. Kiss me, quick before dawn, because when you finish hunting your killer, I won’t be going back with you. If I don’t like Vegas, then the Master of Philadelphia is looking for a second, and she’s requested a man of Belle’s line if she can get it.”
I looked up into his face and realized this really was it. He meant it. I went up on tiptoe, and he lowered his face to mine. I kissed those lips, gently at first, like you’d touch a work of art, afraid to scratch it, and then I let my hands and mouth kiss him the way he was meant to be kissed. Kiss him the way you kissed someone when the touch of their mouth, the weight of their hands, the rise of their body was like food and drink to you. I couldn’t give him my heart, but I gave him what I could, and it wasn’t a lie. I loved his body, and the press of his sad poetry; I just didn’t love him. God knows I’d tried to love them all, but my heart just didn’t seem to stretch that big.
He drew away first, laughing, eyes bright with the attention. “It is too close to dawn for me to do justice to such a kiss. I know you do not let even our master sleep in your bed once he dies for the day, so I will go to my box. I will send warmer bed partners to you, so that you will not be alone, and you can feed when you wake.”
“Requiem,” I started, but he touched fingertips to my lips.
“She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
I wasn’t sure why, but I felt the first hard, hot tear trail down my face. He moved his fingers from my lips to catch my tears. He kissed them from his skin, then kissed them from my face. “That you would cry for my parting means much.” Then he left, closing the door gently behind him.
I went to the bathroom and started getting ready for bed. I’d wash the tears away. I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. I was just tired. I heard noises and turned off the water, to have Crispin call out. “It’s us, Anita.”
I had a moment to wonder who “us” was, because Crispin didn’t know any of the other wereanimals who had come from St. Louis, or not well enough to bring them to bed with him. I’d found that heterosexual men are very picky about who they bring to bed, boywise. It’s more about friendship than sex. More about trust, than lust. I thought about peeking out and seeing, but it seemed like too much trouble. So tired. Crispin and whoever would still be there when I was done. I came out of the bathroom wearing the robe off the door, which covered me from shoulder to my toes. The two men in my bed were wearing nothing but the bedsheet at their waist. Two naked men in my bed, both cute enough. Problem was, one of them I’d never seen nude.
66
CRISPIN WAS AS lean and muscled as I remembered him. He sat up with a smile, the sheet pooling into his lap, so that I could see the side of his hip, and knew for certain there was nothing between him and my sheets. His short, curly white hair was backlit by the lamp, so that the light played in the curls, forming a shining halo of white. He gave me that crooked smile that dimpled just one side of his mouth. He might look like an angel in my bed with his halo, but if it was an angel, it was fallen.
Domino lay on his back on the other side of the bed, one arm stretched over the pillows, touching where I would have to lie. His black and white curls were framed against the white of the pillow. I realized that his hair was mostly black. Hadn’t it been closer to an even mix before? His eyes were brilliant orange, the color that fire can have, but fire doesn’t have veins of gold running through it. Fire doesn’t blink long lashes at you, and try for a neutral face when its eyes give it away. The eyes held need, longing.
I waited to be mad, but I wasn’t. Suddenly, of all the people in Vegas, I couldn’t think of any two other men that I’d rather have curled up between. I’d told Truth that Belle Morte’s line can only be as powerful as the vampire doing it is willing to be cut, but it was more than that. I could only go as deep into someone’s heart as I was willing to let them dive into mine. I had all this power, and no idea how to protect myself from having that two-edged blade cut me to the bone.
All I could think when I saw them was home. A deep feeling of contentment, that Crispin hadn’t earned yet, and Domino was a stranger to me. But sometimes you meet a stranger, and from the moment you see him there is a connection, almost a memory, as if that skin, that scent, has been on your sheets before, like an echo. I should have fought it, argued with it, but I was so tired. My eyes burned with it.
I said the only thing I could think to say. “I don’t need to feed yet.” My voice sounded small and uncertain. I cleared my throat sharply, tried again. “Nothing personal, but I’m . . .”
“Tired,” Crispin said, “we know. We can feel it.”
I looked past him to Domino. I could feel his uncertainty, and how much he wanted this to be all right. I didn’t have anything left to fight with; it felt fine, good, strangely okay. For once in my life, I didn’t question it. I didn’t ask, Can you both behave yourself if we’re all naked? because they were wereanimals, and naked doesn’t mean sex to them. It just means you aren’t wearing any clothes. It was my human mind that made it dirty.
I undid the robe’s sash and walked toward the bed. Crispin smiled, but Domino watched that thin line of my body that he could glimpse as I moved. Maybe being naked wasn’t just not having clothes for him in that moment?
He spoke, and his voice was rough, so that he had to clear his throat before he finished. “Sex would be wonderful, but I feel your tiredness like some great weight pulling you down, and pulling at us. Let us hold you, Anita, just hold you.”
I studied his face for a breath or two. He lifted his hand from the pillows and held it out to me. I let the robe fall to the floor and crawled onto the bed between them. Crispin helped me slide under the covers, then slid his body along my side, so that I could feel that it wasn’t just Domino who was going to have trouble sleeping.
I stared up at Crispin, where he lay propped up on one elbow, grinning at me. “There’s this beautiful naked woman in bed with me, and I’m a guy.”
That made me smile. Then the bed moved, and it made me turn to see Domino moving toward us. His face was uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure he’d be as welcome. Neither was I.
He had more bulk to his upper body than Crispin, and with them both propped up on elbows, I realized that the few inches of extra height Crispin had were all in the waist. Domino was keeping a few inches of distance between us rather than rubbing his body against me like Crispin. I appreciated the restraint.
I reached up to touch his hair. The curls were soft, but not as soft as Crispin’s white. “Wasn’t your hair more evenly white and black before?”
He smiled. “I’ve shifted to black tiger between then and now; when I come back to human form, my hair reflects the fur color of my last shape.”
I stared up at him. “You can shift to white tiger and black?”
He nodded, rubbing his head against my hand, so that I stroked his curls more, the way you’d pet a cat that rubbed against your hand. It moved my hand from his hair to the side of his face, and he laid his cheek against my hand, pressing, so that I held his face. His eyes closed, and his face went almost slack, as if some weight had suddenly gone from him.
I rose up to kiss him, but it closed that small distance between us, and I could suddenly feel that he was not only happy to be in the bed, but so hard and eager that it made my breath catch in my throat and a small sound of surprise escape me.
He drew away from me. “I’m sorry, Anita, I can’t help the reaction.”
I shook my head. “It’s not . . . Oh, hell, don’t apologize for being male, Domino. I like it.”
He smiled, almost embarrassed.
I found my hand sliding down the front of his body. His eyes closed again, and his head went back, as if it had been a long time for him.
Crispin seemed to read my mind. “The White Tiger Clan prides itself on being pure blooded. Our queen is happy to find black tiger blood, but most of the females of our clan won’t risk bringing a nonpure offspring into the world.”
I stared up at the man who was still looming a little over me. My hand had frozen at his upper stomach. He still had his eyes closed, but he started to turn away, started to roll over.
I stopped the movement with my hand on his shoulder and chest. “There is nothing wrong with you, Domino. You’re beautiful.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Handsome, then,” I said.
He gave me an almost shy look. “I can’t believe that.”
“Why not?”
“Because no one who’s ever mattered has treated me like it’s true.”
In that moment I knew, tired or not, I couldn’t be that tired. “I’m going to say something I will probably never say again.”
He looked at me, all cautious again.
“We only have time for a quickie.”
He grinned in surprise.
I smiled back. “I really do need to sleep before the police call me and we have to hunt the bad guys again, but I want you to know that it’s no reflection on you. You are handsome, and if what I just felt against my hip is any indication, all the body is pretty damn good.”
He actually looked embarrassed, dunking his head. I’d have estimated him at about thirty, but he was acting younger. Maybe in this one area he was, through sheer lack of experience.
I touched his face, turned him to look at me. “Make love to me.”
“Making love takes time to do it right,” he said.
I grinned. “All right, fuck me.”
He looked startled.
Crispin said, “Her pillow talk is usually straight to the point.”
I turned my head so I could frown at him.
He shrugged the one shoulder in the air. “Well, it’s true.”
I frowned harder, then turned back to Domino. “Whatever word you want to use.”
“Just like that?” he asked.
I nodded. “Just like that.”
“Why?”
“Because I want that lost look out of your eyes.”
“Why do you care what look I have in my eyes?”
“Because the wound cuts both ways.”
“What does that mean?”
“Shut up,” Crispin said, “and take the offer, so we can all sleep.”
Domino flashed him a less than friendly look, then looked back down at me. “I’ve spent my life not being able to trust the women around me. Only the survivors would touch me, never my own clan.”
“I’m a survivor,” I said.
He shook his head. “No,” and he leaned down over my hair and took a long, deep breath. “No, you smell like me: dark and light, all at the same time.”
I slid my hand farther down his body and found that he wasn’t trembling as hard as he had been; all the talking had softened things. I wrapped my hand around him and squeezed gently. It fluttered his eyes shut and sent his breath out in a sigh.
“Enough talk,” I said.
He had to swallow before he could whisper, “Okay.”
I continued to work him with my hand as he came down for a kiss, and suddenly he was kissing me. He kissed me as if my lips were food and he were starving. My hands were on his back; my legs slid down his thighs to wrap around his lower legs. He laid his full weight on top of me while we kissed, fiercely, completely. His body was back to that trembling hardness. Just the feel of him on the outside of my body, pressed between us, made me cry out.
Crispin was standing beside the bed with a condom in his hand. “Anita made me promise, after the first time we were together.”
Domino and I came out of the kiss, gasping. I stared up at Crispin as if I didn’t know who he was or what he was saying.
Domino went up on his knees, and I could suddenly see what I’d been touching. It brought an, “Oh, my God” from me.
Domino took the condom and slid it over himself. He went to all fours over me. He glanced at himself, then at my face. “We haven’t done any prep work on you, and I’m . . .”
I finished for him, “Not small.”
He shook his head.
Crispin said, “She’s tight, but she’ll be wet.”
I frowned at him.
“Do you need foreplay for this?” he asked, hands on hips, as if chastising me.
I thought about it. “Foreplay is lovely, but”—I looked down Domino’s body, and all I could think of was—“no, I want that inside me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, not our first time.”
“I’ll tell you if it hurts, but,” and I stopped, because no man wants to hear that you have other lovers more well endowed than he is, especially not at this moment, “Please, Domino, just fuck me. Now.”
He didn’t ask again. He let his body fall on top of mine, spreading my legs a little wider with a movement of his hips and thighs. He had to use his hand to guide himself in, but once he started, he didn’t need any more help. He was wide enough that he did have to work his way in, the first few strokes.
He started above me, on his hands, his lower body pressed between my legs, so that I could look down the line of my body and watch him push his way in and out of me. Just the sight of it made me cry out, again.
“God, you’re right, she’s so tight, but wet.”
Crispin had gone back to his side of the bed, and was simply watching. “I told you.”
Domino’s body worked me a little more open, and he could suddenly find his rhythm. I watched his body slide faster, smoother, deeper, inside mine. This was a position that if the man was of any size, it usually hit the spot, and he was, and it did.
I felt that growing weight between my legs. I whispered, “Oh, God, almost.”
“Almost what?” he asked, but not like he was really listening to the answer. His voice was breathy, and his eyes were shut with concentration.
Then between one stroke and another, that weight spilled up and over, bathing my skin in warmth and pleasure. It tore a scream from my mouth and dug my nails into his lower arms. He froze above me.
Crispin’s voice, saying, “Don’t stop.”
He started again, but he’d lost just that edge of ground. He gasped out. “I thought I’d hurt you.”
“She’s a screamer,” Crispin said.
I might have frowned at him, but Domino was back to that rhythm above me, and I didn’t care about anything else. He fought to keep that rhythm, trying for another orgasm for me, I think, but his body began to lose the smooth motion of it. His breathing grew ragged. He fought, one stroke, two, four. That weight built between my legs again.
I gasped, “Close, close again.”
He fought his body to keep pumping, and forced himself back into a smoother rhythm. I pushed myself up on my elbows, so the view was even better, and the angle a little sharper, and that was it. He spilled me over the edge again, and I screamed the pleasure of it at the ceiling.
He didn’t stop this time. His rhythm changed, but it didn’t matter now, as long as he continued to go in and out of me. The orgasm grew, and flowed from one sensation to another, as his rhythm grew more desperate, his body moving harder, faster, and he finally lowered his body so that he could use all that length and bump the end of me. It was a different pleasure, but he’d worked me enough that it was pleasure.
I gasped, “Harder, deeper.”
He didn’t ask if I meant it this time; he just took me at my word. He pounded himself into me, as hard and deep as he wanted, as I wanted, the weight and strength of him pinning me under him, pinning me to the bed, while his body shuddered above mine. He opened his eyes, suddenly, inches above me, and we stared into each other’s eyes as his widened, and his breathing grew ragged again, and his body began to buck, fighting for one more rhythm. Then he hit me deep enough, and it was just pleasure. I screamed and dug my nails down his back, wrapped my legs around his waist, and painted my orgasm down his body in blood and screams.
He cried out above me, a thick, throaty gasp of, “Oh, yes.” Then he thrust inside me one last time, as deep as he could go. That made me come again, so that our bodies trembled together, and I buried my mouth against his neck, muffling my screams with his flesh.
He lay on top of me, his heart pounding against my body, the pulse in his neck thudding in my mouth. I let go of his neck because I had the sudden urge to bite harder. I could already taste sweet metal and knew I’d bled him.
I lay back on the bed and held him with my arms, my hands, my legs still wrapped around him. I held him inside my body, as close as I could.
He finally rose up, and I unwrapped myself from him so he could spill himself into the middle of the bed, beside me. He lay on his back, trying to relearn how to breathe, having trouble swallowing past his pulse.
“If that was a quickie,” Crispin said, “I can’t wait for a longie.”
Domino smiled, eyes still half-closed. He managed to say, in a breathless voice, “I wanted it to be good. Didn’t want to disappoint.”
I lay on my side of the bed, his side of the bed, unable to move anything below the waist and unwilling to move much else. I managed a shaky laugh. “Disappoint, hell, I can’t wait to see what it feels like to do that with foreplay.”
“So you do want me again?” And his voice was hesitant, his face lost.
I patted his stomach because that was the easiest thing to reach. “If I could move yet, I’d give you a kiss and tell you that every woman who ever turned you down was a fool.”
He patted my thigh. “I think that’s the sweetest thing any girl’s ever said to me.”
For some reason that struck me as sad, but I didn’t say that part out loud. When we were able to walk, we cleaned up and crawled back into bed. They put me in the middle, and that was fine with me. I’d found that heterosexual men who are willing to have sex with another guy in the bed are still not usually secure enough to sleep with one of them in the middle. I valued the men in my life who didn’t sweat stuff like that, but I didn’t fault the others. I didn’t like to sleep naked with another woman right beside me, as I’d discovered with some of the wereleopards in St. Louis. It was just a big naked puppy pile, or rather kitten pile, but still, I preferred to be sandwiched between beefcake, not cheese cake. So, who was I to bitch?
Some men spoon better than others; I’d found that Crispin was a stomach sleeper, so spooning really didn’t work for him. But Domino curled up against my back and wrapped all that tall body around me, as if I were his favorite teddy bear and he couldn’t sleep without me. I thought it would be awkward to sleep with a stranger. I mean, sex is one thing, when it’s a new friend, but sleep . . . that’s helpless. I don’t like being helpless around people I’ve just met. But his body felt like it had been made to fit against mine, his arm tucking me in tight against him, the way Micah did at home. I had a thought for my leopard king. I missed him. I missed Nathaniel. I wondered how Domino would get along with them? I chased the thought away; one problem at a time. I had to kill Vittorio before I could go home. To do that, I had to find him. Later, Rocco and I would start looking for him.
But I didn’t have to find Vittorio; he found me.
67
BUT HE DIDN’T find me first. She found me. I stood in the room where I knew her body lay. She looked small under the silk sheet; no, shrunken. For the first time, she looked like a corpse under a sheet. I waited for her to move or to hear her breathe, see movement, but there was nothing. She was gone.
Then I was in a night long ago, with the scent of jasmine and rain on the air. The air was hot, but not muggy, as if there wasn’t a lot of moisture in it. But there was that edge of rain, and you could almost feel the ground underneath your feet, eager for it, like a lover waiting for an embrace.
She’d stepped into this night as a woman’s figure, and as the night itself, but now she was a voice whispering against my skin. “Necromancer, they are coming to kill me. They are coming with modern weapons and things I do not understand. I have abandoned the shell in the room. That they may have it.”
The smell of jasmine grew stronger, as the rain blew closer, a thick, clean smell. “What do you want?”
“You, necromancer. I want your body.”
“No,” I said.
“No, because you have kept me out. You and your ties to your men. But I need power, enough to survive when my shell is consumed. I cannot take your body, Anita, but I think I can feed through you.”
“Feed how?” I asked, and felt the first tightness in my gut. The first hint of fear.
“The tigers, little necromancer, did you think they found you by accident?”
“No, I knew you had done something to me.”
“Simply feed on all the colors of their rainbow and give the energy to me. It will give me enough strength to survive until I can find a host.”
“Are you asking me or telling me to do this?”
“Would asking make you do it?” the voice asked.
“No.”
“Then I tell you to do it.”
“No,” I said.
“I can make you do it, necromancer, but it will be less pleasant.”
“I won’t help you find another body, just because you can’t have mine.”
“Remember, necromancer, I gave you a choice. You have chosen the path of pain. Now, if you become pregnant, it is too late to help me.”
“What did you say?”
“When I realized I could not get inside you, I tried to have you pregnant by one of the weretigers, but you stayed too far away from them for too long. Now you lie with two of them, and have a blue tiger close at hand. A color even I thought was lost. There are even two kings of two different pure bloodlines within walking distance of you. I would have given you a choice to use your protection when you fed for me, but if you will not do it willingly, then I will do what I did when you first met the white tiger.”
“Wait,” I said, because now I was afraid. I’d met Crispin in North Carolina, when he’d been traveling for a VIP bachelorette party, and I’d been a guest at the same hotel. I’d woken up two days later, naked, bruised, scratched, sore, with three naked men passed out around me. One had been Jason, but the other had been Crispin, who I’d just met, and Alex, who was just an innocent reporter covering the wedding, who also happened to be a red tiger. I could suddenly taste my pulse in my throat.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Either feed on the tigers voluntarily and let me take the power, or I will take you again. I will not make it days, though; as I said, pregnant now does me no good. So the sex will be quicker.”
“Why me pregnant by a weretiger?”
“Because I was a necromancer in life, Anita, like you, and a wereanimal. The tigers are the most powerful cat left on this earth. I thought if the baby was part weretiger and part necromancer, I would have a greater chance of taking it’s body.”
I was still scared, but the first anger was there, too. “You had no right.”
“You’ve been inside my mind, little necromancer; do you really believe I care about right and wrong?”
The scent of jasmine was thick on my tongue. “No,” I whispered. The rain was almost here, the wind cool with it. The night was so dark.
“This is your last choice to make, Anita. Is it willing you are, or is it force?”
“If I help you, you’ll use the energy to escape the assassins and hide in someone else’s body. You’ll take them over and escape.”
“Yes,” she said.
The rain blew the thin dress against my body. I was wearing sandals that I’d never owned. My hair blew across my face. All I could taste was jasmine, as if I’d drunk perfume. The first spatters of rain rode the wind.
“Time grows short, necromancer. Your answer?”
I knew what the jasmine on my tongue meant. It was her power growing in me, like the trigger on a gun with a finger on it, already moving to squeeze.
I swallowed, and it was like it hurt to swallow past the sweet taste of it. “I can’t help you take over another person’s body. I can’t sacrifice someone else to save myself.”
“They would be a stranger to you,” the voice in the dark said.
I shook my head. The wind hit me, and the rain came like a wall, so that one moment I was dry, and the next I was soaked to the skin. The rain was cold, and the world tasted of jasmine.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Oh, you can, and you will, necromancer. You will feed me. You will save me. I am the Mother of All Darkness; I will not die because one stubborn girl said no.”
I stood there in a desert night that had existed longer ago than books or cities. I shivered in a cold rain that hadn’t fallen for thousands of years. I tasted jasmine on my tongue and felt her cut off my breath as she slid her power down my throat.
I managed to say, “No means no, bitch!” Then there were no more words.
68
THE RAIN STOPPED abruptly, like someone had turned a switch. The jasmine retreated from my throat. I drew a huge gasping breath. The world didn’t smell like rain anymore. There was still the scent of flowers, but the rain had gone. The air was dry, and a wind came off the desert that the palm trees hid from view. The desert that I’d always known was there in this vision.
A whirlwind blew in from the sand. The Mother of All Darkness whispered in my ear, “No, it cannot be.”
The whirlwind stopped a few feet way; as the wind died, Vittorio was revealed. But it was not the Vittorio that I’d seen in Vegas. This one pointed a handsome, unmarked face to the moonlight. His clothes were embroidered and rich, but matched the thin dress and sandals I wore. His short hair was long again, and he walked out of the wind, like some fairy-tale magician appearing in the nick of time. He had helped me; why? I didn’t even care how, but why?
“I know you are still here, Dark Mother. I can feel you, hovering in the night, like some evil dream.”
The voice came. “Father of the Day, you look unchanged. I see your little pets are back with you.”
He made a motion and something appeared beside him. It was almost as if I couldn’t see it, but from the corner of my eye, there was a huge man standing behind him. It wavered, and moved like a bad image on a screen that you needed to adjust, but it was there, in the dream, at least.
“Can you only call the people of the wind in dream?” she asked.
“No, the powers that you stripped from me return more every day. As you grow weak, you lose control of that which you stole from me. It returns to me.”
“I should have killed you.”
“Yes, you should have. I would have killed you.”
“I was too sentimental,” the voice said.
“It wasn’t sentiment that saved me, Dark Mother. I remember your words, very well. You said, ‘If I were certain there was a hell, then I would kill you, so you could be tormented for eternity, but since I am not certain, I will leave you alive, to walk this earth, in your own private, powerless hell.’ ”
“It is too long ago; I do not remember my words exactly,” she sighed.
“You were always careful what you remembered of your own deeds.”
I wanted to say something, but was afraid to draw their attention to me. I wondered if I could break the dream and simply wake up?
“Do not go, Anita,” Vittorio said, as if he’d read my mind. “Don’t you want to see what happens?”
I swallowed and said, trying not to sound nearly as afraid as I was, “It sounds like you two have a lot of things to catch up on. I’ll just leave you to it.”
They spoke together. “No, necromancer, you will not go.” “No, Anita, I can’t let you go.”
Shit.
“Does daylight not hold you prisoner?”
“You always did envy me that. You could never do it.”
“As you could not raise the true dead.”
“As you could not call the wind to your hand.”
“We both had our armies of slaves, Day Father.”
“You had your shambling hordes, and I had my army of jinn. I will have my army again, but you will not.” His voice had gone low, and evil, somehow.
I wanted to ask if jinn meant genie, but I didn’t want the answer enough to have him turn on me.
Her voice held that first thread of fear. “You would keep me from saving myself.”
“Oh, yes, my love, I would.”
“We both loved power more than anything else. It was not sentiment that kept you from striking the first blow, my love,” and she made the endearment sound like an insult.
He raised his hands and spoke words that I did not understand, but the hairs on my arms rose anyway, as if a part of my brain that I couldn’t understand anymore knew exactly what the words meant.
He touched a ring on his finger.
“You speak the words, but the ring is what makes it happen. You are not strong enough yet to command them without it,” she said.
“Not yet, but thanks to your plans, I will be soon.” He spoke the strange words again, and my body shivered with it.
“They are almost here.”
For a minute I thought she meant the jinn, and then I felt her look backward, as if there were a window I could not see behind where her voice was coming from. I had a moment to glimpse a slender, dark girl, and then the wind hit her. The wind held blades like a silver whirlwind; it surrounded her and cut her to pieces.
She shrieked, “Necromancer, do not trust him!” Then she was gone, but it wasn’t the blades here. I felt an explosion rock in the pit of me, as if my body were the room where it had gone off. I fell to my knees with the sharp, burning pain of it.
“They’ve used modern explosives. She is dead,” and he was triumphant. The wind of blades died down, as if it had never been, but I had another image of a second large figure behind him. There were two of them. Were they genies? If so, it was nothing like the cartoons except that the ring on his finger helped him control them. That was straight out of the old children’s stories.
He turned to me, smiling, but it wasn’t a good smile. It was the kind of smile that snakes would give if they could, just before they eat the mouse.
I decided I had nothing to lose by asking questions. “The jinn killed the policemen, didn’t they?”
“Yes; my daytime servant shares some of my ability through the vampire marks.”
“He just takes the ring,” I said.
“No, the ring never leaves me.”
“If you didn’t have the ring, would they turn on you?”
“They are slaves. Slaves always resent the chains.”
“I’m going to break the dream now, and wake up,” I said, and tried for my voice to sound as sure as I felt.
He laughed, and it was a good laugh, but compared to Jean-Claude’s it wasn’t ordinary. Again it was as if he read my mind, because he said, “Belle Morte’s line has powers that neither she, nor I, possessed. Belle was something new. All the others descend from us, but her and the Dragon. She was never human to begin with, so she was always different from us.”
“So you don’t share Belle’s line of power,” I said.
“I am oversharing, but it has been so long since I’ve had anyone to tell the truth to.”
“It gets lonely,” I said.
“It can, but I have my servants returning to me, and my magic.”
“Bully for you. Now can I go, please?” I hated to add the please, but if it would get me the hell out of here, I’d say worse.
“The Dark Mother was always a good strategist. It’s why she defeated me. It’s a good plan.”
“What plan?” I asked.
“Your feeding on all the colors of the tigers, and a vampire siphoning off the energy. It would have been enough power to save her, and it will still be enough to return me to my former glory.”
“You’re short two colors of tigers in Max’s clan. You need yellow and red,” I said.
“You saw the signs, Anita; there is a red tiger performing in Vegas. He was loaned to Max’s clan for this year.”
“But Max doesn’t own him.”
“I’m not calling only the tigers that belong to Max, Anita. I had many names, but one was Father of Tigers. I will call them to your room, and you, and they, will do what I want.”
“You’re still short a yellow one,” I said, past the pulse that was trying to crawl up my throat.
“Don’t you understand, Anita? You are the yellow tiger. It was a yellow tiger that struck you.”
“But that makes me just a survivor, not pureblood. I’d shapeshift to a normal tiger.”
“No, Anita, you wouldn’t. How do you think the clans began? Do you actually believe the stories of tigers mating with humans and having offspring? No, fairy tales. They were all survivors of different strains of tiger. They have convinced themselves they are better because they breed true, but they have forgotten their own truth. They were once as you are, nothing more. They smell the gold tiger on you, Anita. The gold clan ruled them all, once, and they still respond to the power. If you were not true golden tiger, then they would not react to you, as they do.”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t need you with child; in fact, that would complicate things, so we will make it quicker. I just need you to feed on them and to bring all the lines into their powers. For that we need a full feeding of Belle Morte’s powers.”
“Aren’t you going to give me a chance to cooperate with you?” I asked.
“Why would I do that? I see my death in your mind, Anita. Lucky for you, I need you alive. Now, feed me the power that was once mine before the Darkness stripped me bare.”
I screamed at him, “No!” Then there was nothing but the dark, and this time there was no voice in the blackness; there was nothing.
69
I WOKE UP in the dimness of a bed, sandwiched between warm bodies. I thought I was home, between Nathaniel and Micah. I sighed, content, and cuddled tighter in against Micah, pulling Nathaniel tighter against my front. It was how we usually slept, but the man behind me was too tall for Micah and just felt wrong. The man in my arms was too short, and didn’t have the muscles or shape of Nathaniel.
My eyes suddenly opened wide, my body tensed. I couldn’t see who was behind me, but the man in front had short, dark hair. He had his face buried into the pillow so I couldn’t see his face. I held my breath and started moving my arm slowly away from his waist. I’d still have to move the arm at my waist from the other man, but one problem at a time.
“He won’t wake,” a voice said.
I jumped, and looked around the room. I saw a third man on the far side of the bed, one arm dangling. That one I knew was Crispin, nude sleeping on his stomach above the covers.
“You’ll have to rise up to see me,” Victor said again.
I started easing up, holding the second man’s arm by the wrist so I wouldn’t disturb him.
“Honestly, Anita, they won’t wake. Everyone on the bed will have to sleep off the change. That won’t happen for hours.”
I could see him now, in the big chair in the corner. He’d put on one of the bathrobes that came with the room. His short white hair was tousled, as if he’d been running his fingers through it, or maybe it was bedhead.
Then I had an image, not of sight, but touch. I remembered running my hands through his hair, and forcing him to look in my eyes as we . . .
“Oh, shit,” I said.
He nodded. “That would about cover it.”
I was sitting up now, my back to the leather headboard. I could see the man on the other side now. He had long, dark hair that spilled over his face and went past his shoulders. He was muscled, and tall, and I didn’t know him.
“Who are they?”
“You should recognize one of them.”
I kept my voice low, as if they were just asleep. “I don’t know the one at my back.”
“You’ve probably seen him on the billboard outside the Taj. He’s our guest star for the next month, and then he is to go home. Your Requiem is taking his place for a month.”
I pictured the flashing image of the smiling redhead with the words, “Come watch the beefcake turn into kitty-cats,” and the sign morphed from human to a red tiger.
“Oh, no,” I said.
There was a noise from nearer the door. I couldn’t see anything, but I remembered in North Carolina that there’d been one tiger on the floor. A man sat up, with a groan. He had straight black hair that fell around his shoulders, and a face that had uptilted eyes, like Bibiana’s, but his skin wasn’t pale. He was tanned and looked like the outdoors was his thing. He laid his face in his hands and groaned again. “What happened?” he asked.
“What do you remember?” Victor asked him.
He looked around the room until he saw me sitting in the bed. “Her.”
Victor nodded. “Yes, her.”
“I didn’t do this on purpose,” I said. I was remembering a dream. A dream with Vittorio in it and the Mother of All Darkness. The dream was coming back quicker than whatever had happened in this room.
“The Father of Tigers did it,” the man on the floor said.
I stared at him as Victor said, “Who?”
“Vittorio,” I said, “it’s one of his old names. How do you know that title of his?”
“I was his tiger to call.”
“Was?” I asked.
Victor just suddenly had a gun in his hand, pointed at the man. It was one of my guns.
“He called me from halfway across the world. I had to answer him. He was my master before, and when he regained enough power, I could not resist him.” He seemed to be staring at nothing, but the look on his face said that whatever he was remembering wasn’t anything good. “I thought I was free of him forever, but there’s no escape, not if he wants you.”
“He came into the hotel,” Victor said. “He touched me, and I had to come here. I didn’t even hear him come up to me. I heard nothing until he touched me, and then I just did what he wanted. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t ask for help. I couldn’t say no to him.”
“No, it’s like you’re his slave, or puppet. He can make you do such horrible things, and you can’t stop.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“To him, I’m Hong, but to myself and for centuries, I’ve been Sebastian.”
“All right, Sebastian, you said was, as in past tense, you were his animal to call. What changed?”
“You changed.” He stood up, and he was as unself-consciously nude as all the wereanimals. I had a sudden memory of him above me, his body spasming, head back, lost to orgasm, and the sensation of him inside me. It made me have to take a deep breath and blow it out, slow. He was short, about my size. I looked at his hands; they were small, almost as small as mine.
“He may have fed on the energy of what we did in this room, but the moment we had sex, the moment I felt you feed on me, it was like you broke something in me. You broke his hold on me.”
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“The Dark Mother did it centuries ago. It was one of her specialties to be able to break bonds between masters and servants. She would strip other masters of their power, and keep that power for her own.”
“Victor, toss me a gun,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Just do it.”
He checked for the safety, which I liked, then tossed me my Smith & Wesson. I caught it, clicked off the safety, and pointed it at Sebastian. “Did you kill the SWAT practitioner?”
He just nodded. “I might hate the master, but I gained powers, as of old. I could control the two jinn he had found, and the police wizard knew a very old spell. It would have lost me the control over them. The jinn hate to be slaves, and if they get the chance they will turn on their masters.”
“Like a demon,” I said.
“Yes, sometimes.”
I had my knees up, resting the gun on them, still pointed at him. “I know you murdered a cop. I should turn you in, but I also know you had no choice. He can make you do things. Things you don’t want to do.”
“He smells of the truth, Anita,” Victor said.
“I agree.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know yet. Tell us about the jinn.”
He stood there, his hands at his sides, trying to be very still as we pointed guns at him.
“Tell us about the jinn.”
“Do you mean genies?” Victor said.
“If what I saw at Vittorio’s back was a genie, then the movies and story-books have it all wrong.”
“I take it they don’t grant wishes,” Victor said.
Sebastian and I both laughed, but not like we were happy. We looked at each other, and I realized that his eyes were the same color as Domino’s, like fire carved into eyes. I asked, “Where’s Domino?”
“At the foot of the bed,” Victor said.
I nodded. “Okay, now tell us about the creatures.”
“They can be attached to or trapped in an object, and then they can be forced to do the bidding of a sorcerer or magician. That much of the stories is true,” Sebastian said.
“Like his ring,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“If he lost the ring, would he lose control of the jinn?”
“Yes, until he is restored to full power. Once at his full strength, he can call them out of the air without magical aid. It is his gift.”
“There was wind, and then they appeared,” I said.
“They are a second kind of people, Anita, created from air, as we were created from earth. They are very powerful spirits, so powerful that King Solomon destroyed them as a people and made them slaves to his bidding, and they were reduced to servants, or only spirits, whose greatest abilities lie in whispering evil in our ears to manipulate us.”
“King Solomon had a seal made that he used to imprison most of their race, or something, right?” I said.
He nodded. “Yes. Some stories say that he used them to build his great temples.”
“If we can get the ring from him, then will the jinn turn and kill him?”
“They might, or they may simply flee. He is to their race what the bogeyman is to yours.”
I noticed he said yours, like it wasn’t his. I skipped that and tried to decide what to do with him. He had killed a member of SWAT and helped kill others. But I believed that Vittorio had made him do it, just like the vampires at the club last night and the humans in the crowd.
“We have to kill him before he regains all his powers,” I said.
“Agreed,” Sebastian said.
“How?” Victor asked.
“I know his daytime resting place,” Sebastian said.
I lowered the gun, and Victor followed my lead. “Turn on some lights, find some clothes, and tell me the address. Tell me all the addresses of anywhere he’s stayed in Vegas since you got back with him.”
“Happily, does this mean I’m not going to be executed?”
“Yeah, I think it does.”
“You won’t tell them about me?”
“I’ll try not to.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, help me kill him before he becomes the Father of the Day again.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said. “If he regains his full powers, he will be able to conjure armies of the jinn from the very air we breathe.”
Victor said, “I have pen and paper.”
“Tell him the addresses.” I started to crawl out over the other man in the bed, but crawling let me see his face better. “Oh, Mother of God, no,” I said.
I fell off the foot of the bed, landing on Domino, who gave a grunt and woke up. “Anita, are you all right.”
“You broke her fall,” Sebastian said.
I got to my feet and was staring down at the bed. Crispin was still there, and the red tiger/stripper, whose name I didn’t even know, but the third man wasn’t a man at all. He was a boy. It was the blue tiger, Cynric, who was all of sixteen.
70
THE ONLY THING that kept it from being one of the most socially awkward moments of my life was that the boy didn’t wake up. I got dressed in the bathroom, and told my reflection in the mirror that hysterics would not help the situation. My reflection did not believe me, but I won the argument.
When I came out, dressed in black from head to toe to match my mood, Crispin was awake and so was the redhead. Okay, not red, like human red, or even orangey tiger red, but red. His hair was actually more red than Damian’s, my vampire servant back home. Yes, vampire servant, you heard me. To our knowledge, I’m the first human servant to ever manage that. Damian’s hair was the red of not having seen sun for centuries, but with lamps lit, the tiger’s hair was the red of a Crayola crayon. It was the red that they tell you in school is red, except there was an edge of black to it, like someone had thrown a little bit of extra color into the pot.
The face was a little long for my taste, but he was handsome enough. His eyes were yellow, as if someone had melted autumn leaves into his face. It was when he turned and I saw all that muscled grace walking toward me, that I blushed and turned away. I got busy putting on weapons.
Crispin came up to me and hugged me briefly. “You okay?”
“No.”
“My father and mother are missing,” Victor said.
I turned to him. “What?”
“The Master planned on taking them. I told Victor, but it’s too late, they’re gone.”
“How the hell did he take Max and Bibiana? I mean, your parents aren’t exactly easy pickings.”
“He said he would wait until he was powerful enough to take them both together.”
I looked at Sebastian. “How much has he regained?”
“I do not know.”
The red tiger came over to me. I wasn’t embarrassed anymore. I was too worried for that. “I’m Hunter,” he said.
I nodded. “Good for you, sorry I don’t remember much. It’ll come back to me.”
His face went from arrogant to disappointed. “You don’t remember?”
“Look, Hunter, if that’s your real name and not a stage name, do you understand that the Master of the City and the head of the local tigers are missing? I’m about to call SWAT and go vampire hunting.”
“Sorry, just trying to be nice.”
“We’ll be nice tomorrow. Today, let’s stay alive, okay?”
He looked a little hurt, and I wondered how bright he was—or how unbright. But, again, not important this minute. I asked Victor, “Do you want me to tell the police about your parents, or do you guys want to handle it yourself?”
“Don’t tell them yet. If he’s got them at the daytime lair, great, they’ll be rescued, but we may want to be a little less legal in the search.”
“Okay, it’s got to be your call; I’ll leave it out for now.” Then I called the first number in my phone that I’d put in for SWAT. It was alphabetical, so it was Lieutenant Grimes.
“Marshal Blake, we’ve been trying to call you for about an hour; are you all right?”
“Yes, in fact I’ve got the daytime resting place of Vittorio.”
“Give me the address,” he said.
I did. “We can roll a team now. The other marshals are already here.”
“Shit, I’d rather you wait for me.”
Grimes spoke to someone off the phone, then came back on. “Ted seems confident that we can move without you.”
“Really? Okay. Can you put Ted on the phone for just a second?”
Edward came on. “Forrester here.” He sounded cold and not himself.
Fuck it. “Edward, Vittorio isn’t his real name. It’s the name he took after the Mother of All Darkness stripped him of his powers and cast him out. He’s originally the Father of the Day, or the Day Father. He’s as old as the dark, and he’s been gaining powers as she’s been losing them.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked, and he didn’t sound mad now.
“He visited my dreams last night, and so did she.”
“Anita, are you . . .”
“Okay, for now. Someone else took your job, and I think they blew her up last night.”
“Can he walk in the day?”
“Not last we know, but if he can’t, he’s close, but that’s not the worst part.” I told him about the jinn.
“If he gets all his power back, we’ll have a vampire in this city as powerful as the Mother of All Darkness,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Grimes sent Rocco and Davey to check on you. I wish we had Davey going in with us if the jinn show up.”
“Why, what’s his skill set?”
“He can do weather change, but what he really does is move air.”
“What?”
“He can harden air to make temporary shields that are bulletproof.”
“Well, fuck, that’s nifty,” I said, “like a combination of weather magic and telekinesis.”
“Yeah, but what would happen if he hardens the jinn, if they’re really made of air?”
“Good question, I’ll think on it. When they get here, we’ll head your way.”
“Do that, and Anita . . .”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Edward.”
“See you there.”
“Save some for me,” I said.
“I read the reports from St. Louis. At least one female vamp and a human servant male.”
“Yeah.”
“Gotta run.”
“Bye,” but I was listening to nothing. He’d hung up, but he’d apologized. It might be a first.
I decided to check on my bodyguards next door. I actually called Haven’s number. He answered, “Anita, thought you’d be busy all day. If you wanted a party, we have enough men over here.” He sounded disgusted.
“Some bodyguards you are, I spent the morning being mind-fucked by Vittorio.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you think it was weird, all the weretigers going into my room?”
“You came to the door and told me that it was fine. You invited them all.”
“Didn’t you notice I looked weird?”
“No, you looked fine, normal. I swear.”
“I would not have agreed to everyone that came in here.”
“You mean the teenager,” he said, and so matter-of-fact, it pissed me off.
“Yeah, the illegal one.”
“Hey, first, sixteen is legal in Vegas, and second, as long as it’s legal, what’s wrong with young?”
“Ah.” I handed the phone to Victor. “Tell him the bad news about your family.”
I went to Sebastian, who was still nude. “Does anyone have clothes left?”
“It looks like someone ripped me out of my clothes,” he said.
“Then get a robe.” He turned obediently toward one of the bathrooms. “Wait, is there any other plan, or something you should tell me about Vittorio?”
“The policemen in the hospital who are asleep. Vittorio could see through my eyes when they attacked, and he ordered me to kill the witch, but he said to only incapacitate the others. It gave me enough room to put them to sleep.”
“Is there a way to bring them out of it?”
“Yes, love’s kiss.”
“What?”
“They just need a kiss by someone who loves them.”
“You mean like Sleeping Beauty?”
He nodded. “Yes, it’s the original power that started Belle Morte’s line: a vampire power that was powered by love.” He frowned. “I really thought that someone’s wife would have kissed them by now, just by accident.”
“Does it have to be on the lips?”
“Yes.”
“Does it have to be a thorough kiss?”
“More than a peck, and some emotion to it.”
“Like think of how much you love them, or lust them?”
“Yes.”
Every time I thought I’d heard the weirdest vampire power, I was wrong. I started to reach for my cell phone so I could call SWAT and tell someone, but the door sounded.
I went for it, but Crispin got there first. “Let me check, Anita.”
He was right. So I let him. He turned from the peephole, smiling. “It’s SWAT. Do you want us to hide?”
“Yes.”
They hid. I told them to get dressed and not to leave Sebastian on his own. I opened the door to Rocco and Davey. “We have a daytime lair address for them.”
“Shit, did you call it in?”
“Yes, and we’ll meet them there, but I got other news.” I locked the door behind me, checked to see it closed, and walked off with the two operators listening to me fill them in. I got a glimspe of Haven’s Cookie Monster-blue hair around the cracked door. I nodded at him, and that was the best I could do. Haven had a police record and had been until lately a mob enforcer. You couldn’t play with him and the cops. We’d try legal first; then if that failed us, there was always going outside the law. I kept that thought to myself as I filled in Rocco and Davey on the morning news.
Davey grinned. “For bullets, it’s not a hundred percent reliable yet.”
“What’s your percentage?”
“Eighty.”
“Seventy,” Rocco said.
“Still, in a pinch, nifty.”
He grinned, making that lovely mouth into just a happy smile. It made him look younger, fresher, somehow. “But a monster that is made of air, that I think I can mess with.”
I was happy for him, and seventy percent success was good for some of the rarer talents, but frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go up against a giant that could rip apart someone in body armor, or cut someone to pieces with a whirlwind of blades. Seventy percent sounded like good odds until it was your life on the line; then not so good. But frankly, what else did we have? Then I realized I was being stupid. I knew that the practitioner who had died had had a spell that Vittorio had feared.
I started searching my phone for Phoebe Billings’s number. If her coven member knew the spell, then chances were that as his high priestess, so would she, and I was standing with two other practitioners. If we could all learn it, we had a chance.
71
I WAS SITTING in the passenger seat of Rocco’s car when I got a glimpse of something. I thought at first I’d seen it out the window in the bright Vegas sun, but then it moved across my vision again, and I realized it was in my head.
“I’m seeing things,” I said, out loud.
“What kind of things?” Rocco asked. Davey leaned forward on the backseat. It was a good question; I didn’t have a good answer.
“I don’t know; it’s gone now, but it was bright.”
“Tell us when and what you see.”
“Will do.” I was secretly hoping not to see anything else, but it was just nice to be working with police who didn’t think I was crazy for being psychic.
My phone rang, and it was Phoebe Billings returning my message. She started with, “No police have come to my door. You didn’t involve me and my group.”
“Didn’t see a purpose to it, but I found out what killed Randy, and what he was doing when he died.” I explained.
“Jinn, truly, in America?”
“Honest.”
“Wait a minute, and I’ll look it up. I know the spell you mean, but it’s very old, and it’s in a book here. Randy was always very into the history of our craft. I remember a night that we talked about the jinn and how much of the legend was true.” I heard her moving around. “Here it is. Do you speak Arabic?”
“No.”
“Randy did; it was one of his specialties in the army. Does anyone else on the SWAT team speak Arabic?”
I asked that out loud to the others.
“Moon does, but then his mother’s family is from Iran,” Davey said.
“I can read it,” Rocco said, “and Moon says my pronounciation is okay.”
I handed the phone to him, and Phoebe repeated the spell to him. He repeated it back, and it made the hair on my arms stand up, like in my dream. “She wants you to write the spell down.”
“I can’t write Arabic.”
“Just write it as she tells you, one letter at a time. She’s going to try to give it to you the way it’s pronounced. She wants to see if saying it without knowing what it means will still work.”
“Oh, like a real magic word, that has power even if you speak it by accident,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Those are really rare,” Davey said. “Most spells don’t work at all without some power behind them.”
I was letting Phoebe dictate letters to me, one at a time. It didn’t make any more sense made into mock English than it did in Arabic, but I was willing to try. When I had it all, I repeated it back to her.
“Now, read it faster,” she said.
I read it faster. There was no tingle; it was just noise.
“Tell me what it’s supposed to do,” I said.
“It sends them back through Solomon’s shield. It traps them outside our reality again.”
“It’s a banishing spell, like for a demon.”
“Yes, that will do.”
I tried again; thinking what it was supposed to do, I put intent into the sounds that were supposed to be words, and it still didn’t work for me. I handed the notes to Davey, and again there was that hair-raising energy. “I think you’re not pronouncing here and here right,” he said.
I kept practicing as we drove, hard and fast, trying to catch up with everyone. We had Davey, and we had a spell. Guns wouldn’t stop these things.
“Call Moon,” Rocco said, “give him the words. He’ll know how to pronounce it.”
Davey made the call.
I asked Rocco, as he screeched around a corner and I clutched the door, “What made you learn to read Arabic?”
“I wanted to be able to read the Qur’an and the Bible for myself without translators messing with it. Most people don’t realize that some of the original books of the Bible were written in Aramaic.”
“I knew that, but I don’t read it.”
“I also read ancient Greek for the same reason.”
“You must be a heavy churchgoer,” I said.
“Every Sunday, unless I’m on a call.”
I smiled at him. “Me, too,” I said.
“I’m Lutheran, what are you?”
“Episcopalian.”
He wasted a smile on me. “Fat Henry’s church.”
“Hey, I know my Church history, and I’m okay with it.”
“As long as you know, it’s cool.”
“Yeah, my church exists because Fat Henry couldn’t get a divorce as a Catholic.”
I heard Davey repeat the syllables over the phone. It danced down my spine. “Wizard died trying to say those words,” Rocco said.
“Yes, he did.”
“This one’s for Wizard.”
“For Wizard,” I said, and though I’d never met him alive, I meant it. Of course, I had the weretiger who had cut him up in my room, but he was as innocent as the vampires we were trying to save, and the humans we’d let go last night. Somehow I didn’t share Sebastian with Rocco and Davey. What would I have done if it had been Edward on a gurney, and the wereanimal said he had no choice, he was forced to do it? Easy answer: I’d have killed him.
72
WE MISSED THE party. There were three dead human servants lying on the ground with their hands and feet shackled. You shackle everyone, even the dead, just in case. It’s SOP. Edward, Olaf, and Bernardo came out with more blood on them than on the other operators. But then it’s a bitch to put the coveralls over all the weapons, so you get blowback. Olaf had the most blood on him.
Bernardo said, as he walked past me, “He staked his vampires, and defucking-capitated them. Ted and I shot ours.” He kept walking, as if he didn’t want to be around Olaf right that moment.
Edward said, “Vittorio wasn’t there, Anita. There’s a coffin that’s empty, but he’s not there.”
“Shit!” I got another glimpse of something. I saw someone in white, kneeling.
Edward grabbed my arm. “Anita?”
“Did you have another vision?” Rocco asked.
“Someone in white, kneeling. I’m tall, much taller than I am. I’m seeing through someone else’s eyes, I think.”
“Who?”
“Vittorio,” Edward said.
“What?” Rocco said.
“He messed with you, right? He wants you to be his human servant.”
“Yeah.”
“You know how it is when a vamp messes with you, Anita. The more they play, the more likely you are to acquire their powers, at least temporarily.”
“Yeah, she did that with me,” Rocco said.
Either Edward didn’t catch that the sergeant had implied he was a vampire, or it didn’t matter to him. “Concentrate, Anita, try to see it.”
I closed my eyes and thought about Vittorio. I thought about the look of his face, the depth of the scars on his chest and stomach. The world wavered, and I was looking at Bibiana, chained and gagged on the floor, beside a bed. Vittorio turned his head, and Max was tied spread-eagled on that bed, covered in holy objects. The bed was red velvet and huge. I knew that bed. I knew where they were. I fought not to be excited but to be calm. I fought to break away, without him knowing.
“Don’t go yet, Anita; stay, and see who else I have.” He turned toward the kitchenette area. Rick the guard was chained with his arms above his head. His naked upper body was already bloody. “Don’t feel so bad for Maximillian; they had the hooks in the ceiling. I’m betting that he’s put his share of enemies here.” Beside him was the stripper who had offered to give me a lap dance. Bri-something, Brianna. Vittorio held up a small butane torch. It burned blue-hot.
“She’s nothing to me.”
“Then you won’t care that we ruin her beauty.”
“Why? You know we know where you are now.”
“Are the police with you?”
“Yes.”
“We have one more guest, Anita.” He turned and I saw the big table that I’d slept on with Victor. Someone was tied to the top of it. He walked closer and it was Requiem. My stomach fell into my feet, and only Edward’s hands kept me from my knees.
“Fuck.”
Vittorio moved so I could look down with him at those sea-green eyes. There was tape across the mouth I’d kissed only hours ago. He was bound with chains and holy objects. They’d stripped him of his shirt, as they had Rick, so that he was nude from the waist up. But whereas Rick was already hurting, Requiem was still untouched, pale and perfect against the wood.
I finally whispered, “His coffin was in my room.”
“But did you check to see he was in it this morning?”
Shit. “No.”
“We brought him out in a large bag while he was dead to the world, while the rest of you in the room were very busy. But I woke him up. I used to be able to wake any vampire early. I’m glad it’s returned as a power. So much better when they can scream.” He touched Requiem’s face.
Requiem jerked away, and Vittorio backhanded him, casually. A cut opened on his cheek. Vittorio looked at the big ring on his hand. “This will make a mess of that pretty face, but I wouldn’t want to damage the ring. Not when I have something so much better for the task.” He reached into his suitcoat pocket and drew out a small vial of holy water.
I couldn’t stop myself. “Don’t.”
“Say please.”
“Please.”
“Good, then if you want to see him whole again and the others alive, come into the back room alone, and unarmed. Leave your holy objects behind, too.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you know what I’ll do if you refuse me, and I can feel that you care about him, that it would hurt you to see him burned.”
I repeated what I saw, what he said. Rocco said, “We won’t let her go in alone.”
I repeated, “They won’t let me.”
“The police, I think they might.” He walked to the door that opened into the main part of the club. There were dancers, customers; it was full. “I came last night, and detained them all.” He turned toward the only two doors that led out, and the air shimmered before one, and there looked like there were swords floating in front of the main door. Something moved on the stage, like a shimmer of summer heat. It was a third jinn, and we didn’t know what this one did. Shit.
“If the police do not let you come in alone and unarmed, I will have my servants kill all these nice people. You come to me, and I will release all the customers.”
“You release the customers, and I’ll come in.”
“Not alone,” Edward said.
“Can I bring one person in with me?”
“By all means, but not one of your marshals—one of the SWAT. They seem to die easily enough.”
“No,” Edward said.
“Oh, that’s Death, I know his reputation. He isn’t allowed inside.”
I repeated what he said.
“Pick carefully, Anita; it will simply be another hostage to use against you, but by all means help me torture you more.” He sounded so cheerful about it, and I realized he was; he had a room full of victims. What more could a serial killer ask for than that?
“But you’ll release the customers first.”
“Agreed, as soon as I see you outside with your SWAT friend. Now, I think I will shut this down between us. I thought to control you, and I did peek this morning; quite a show.”
I was too scared and too angry to be embarrassed. “Then you know what happened to your other servant.”
“Yes, you broke my hold on him, just like the Darkness could do. Her talents as a human were very similar to yours; I should have thought, but you don’t expect to meet two necromancers of such power in one lifetime.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
“I will leave you with a parting image, to inspire you to do exactly as I’ve asked.” He went back to the other room, and I didn’t want him to, because nothing he was about to do would be good.
He went to Requiem, as I’d known he would. He unstoppered the little vial of holy water. “I’m coming, damn it, you’ve made your point.”
“Oh, I’m not doing this to make my point, Anita. I’m doing this because I want to, and because it will hurt you, and because he is beautiful and I hate him for it.”
“Vittorio!”
He trickled the water along Requiem’s ribs. It smoked instantly, and Requiem’s spine bowed, a scream coming even through the tape.
Vittorio capped the vial. “I will wait on the rest. You have a half hour to arrive, Anita, or I will try a more tender piece of him.”
“I’m coming, you son of a bitch, I’m coming.”
“Temper, temper.”
“This isn’t mad, Vittorio, you haven’t seen me mad.”
“Nor you me, Anita, nor you me.” He pushed me out, closed the link down, and left me blinking in the sunlight, clinging to Edward’s arms.
“Who’s going in with you?” Bernardo asked.
“Cannibal is,” I said. I looked and found Rocco. He met my gaze, no flinching.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Speak Arabic for me, and then we eat these sons of bitches.”
A smile crossed his face, it was pleased and slightly Olaf-ish. I knew that smile, because there’s something about having an ability when you always have to be good that makes you wonder what it would feel like to be bad. I was about to give Cannibal the chance to be as bad as he wanted to be, as bad as he had the stomach to be. There was more than one way to skin a cat; well, there was more than one way to eat a vampire.
73
GRIMES DIDN’T LIKE me going in, and he sure as hell didn’t want Rocco to go in with me. Edward didn’t like me going in without him. But we had the arguments in the cars, so we could argue on the way and make the half-hour deadline.
“Lieutenant,” Rocco said, “I can say the spell that will banish the jinn, and Anita can’t.”
“I know her pronunciation isn’t good enough.”
“I speak Arabic,” Edward said.
“But you’re not a practitioner, and we need a little magic with the words,” Rocco said.
“What aren’t the two of you telling me?” Grimes asked.
We both fought not to look at each other, and it showed. “What are you planning to do in there?”
“The phrase you’re looking for, sir,” Edward said, “is plausible deniability.”
Grimes frowned at us. “Are you planning to do anything illegal?”
Again, we fought not to look at each other. “No, sir,” Rocco said, “everything will be perfectly legal.”
“Promise,” Grimes said.
“It’s legal,” I said.
“But I don’t want to know anyway, is that it?”
“What answer will get me in there with Sergeant Rocco?”
“Well, at least that’s honest. Max’s inner room at Trixie’s interferes with electronics.”
I didn’t ask how he knew that, just accepted it as true. It didn’t surprise me; as Vittorio said, the hooks in the ceiling for hanging people up had been in the ceiling when he got there. I was betting this was where Max did some of his dirty work.
“So you’re going in there with no way to call for help,” Grimes said.
“If we need to call for help, Lieutenant,” I said, “you won’t be able to get to us in time.”
He studied my face. “I think you mean that.”
“I do.”
“You seem calm.”
“I’ve got my goals.”
“Your objectives,” he said.
“If you like.”
“And they are?”
“Rescue my friend before he gets more hurt. Save all the civilians. Send the jinn back to where they belong. Rescue Max and his charming wife, their bodyguard, and any other weretigers who are good guys. Oh, and kill Vittorio before he can manifest enough power to make a nuclear explosion over Vegas look like the better idea.”
“Is he really capable of that much damage?”
“Think of an army of the things that killed your officers loosed on the city. Think of Vittorio able to broadcast his mind control over the populace.”
“You think he’s that good?”
“Not yet, and we have to keep it that way. I believe that we have to do everything within our power to make certain he dies today.”
“You might be interested to know, Marshal Blake, that the governor signed off on the stay of execution for the vampires at last night’s club.”
“That’s good, Lieutenant. I mean that; they don’t deserve to die.”
“Your report carried weight.”
I nodded, but was already looking up the street to the police cars, the barricades, and the next fight.
74
ROCCO AND I were standing outside Trixie’s with our hands clasped on our heads. We’d stripped down to T-shirts, pants, and boots for him, jogging shoes for me. A man who looked human but talked like Vittorio had his hand up his ass was saying, “Turn around, slowly, so we can see.”
We did what he said to do.
The man seemed to be listening to something in his head. He nodded, and walked forward. He patted us down, thoroughly, top to bottom. “You have no weapons, very good,” he said, but it was Vittorio’s inflections. “Now, come join us.”
“Let the customers go first, like you promised.”
“Oh, yes, I suppose I did.” The man was speaking, but it was really Vittorio using his body to do the talking. His ability to manipulate humans had grown more complex, more complete, in less than twenty-four hours. He had to die.
The man walked back through the doors. A few minutes later, people ran out. Dozens of them spilling out into the street into the arms of the waiting police, who hurried them to safety.
The man was in the door. He motioned toward it. “After you, Anita, and Sergeant Rocco, you said.”
“Yes.”
“Come on down,” he said, in a mock announcer voice.
“Let the man go, too,” I said.
“I said customers; he works behind the bar,” the man said, talking about himself in the third person. He even had the smile Vittorio had used in the dream. It was an unsettling echo on the stranger’s face, like a face on the wrong person.
The body he was using held the door for us. “Come inside, out of the heat.”
Rocco and I looked at each other; then we lowered our hands, slowly, and went for the door. Neither of us looked back; we wanted to give our eyes as much time as possible to adjust to the darker interior of the club.
The dancers were huddled in the center of the room, at the chairs where the customers usually sat. They looked up hopefully as we entered, but the jinn with the knives was in front of us, and that got our attention. It was tempting to have Rocco say the words now, but I was certain if we did that, he’d kill some of his other hostages. Our goal was to get them all out, not just part, so we waited for a better moment. I admit that staring into the nothingness that was holding all those blades was hard. Turning our backs on it was harder, but we followed the man.
I felt the air move close to me and jerked back instinctively. I felt the passage of wind. A different jinn had tried to touch me. The man said, “You avoided his touch; not many humans are fast enough or psychic enough for that, but then you aren’t human, are you?”
I ignored the question, but I swear that the jinn’s attention wasn’t as neutral now. I’d almost say hostile, but maybe that was just nerves talking. Maybe.
Rocco whispered, “I don’t think they like you now.”
“You feel it, too.”
“Oh, yes.”
The man opened the door and held it for us, with a smile. I moved ahead of Rocco, as we’d discussed. Vittorio wanted me alive; he didn’t have the same feeling about the sergeant. So he had to bite his pride and let me take the most chances. Besides, we needed him alive to say the words over the jinn.
The back room was as I’d seen it through Vittorio’s eyes. Rick and Brianna were on their feet, arms stretched to the ceiling, where they were chained. Brianna was crying; her robe had come undone, and she was as naked underneath as she had been that first night when Ted and I were here. She stared at me over the tape that cut across her face. I could feel her terror coming off her in waves. It stirred the beasts inside me, and I told them to be quiet. For once, they listened. Rick wasn’t afraid, he was pissed. In fact, he was so angry, I wondered why he hadn’t shifted yet.
Ava was near Rick. She had a knife in her hand and played it along his skin as I watched. She didn’t cut him, just caressed him with it. There were weretigers scattered throughout the room. Their energy hummed through the air like wires stripped down, so you could feel the bite of it if you got too close. Most of them looked blank, as if waiting for instructions. How many people could he control at once, and how well?
I forced myself to see the room slowly, and not go straight to Requiem. I didn’t want to give Vittorio any more reason to hurt him. The more I cared, the more danger Requiem was in.
But Vittorio wasn’t standing by the table; he was sitting on the edge of the bed with Max and Bibiana. He’d stripped from the waist up so that his scars were very, very visible. They’d transferred Bibiana to the bed, she was tied with her hands above her head, around one bedpost, so that her body crossed one of Max’s arms, where his one arm was still tied to the one post. Her feet were chained to one of the bed legs, but she was short enough that her legs didn’t cross her husband’s body at the legs. She looked pale and delicate, a cliché princess waiting for rescue. Max was missing his shirt. Apparently, we’d had a little striptease while they waited, but he had kept his word. There was no new damage to their bodies, just some of their clothes.
“We’re here. Now what?”
“I want what I’ve wanted since I invited you to Vegas with my gift.”
“You mean the human head in a box?”
He smiled happily and nodded.
“Next time, just send a box of chocolates,” I said.
“Oh, but any man can do that. I thought my gift would be unique.”
I smiled, and could feel that it wasn’t a good smile. “Actually, I did receive a head in a basket once, as a gift.”
The smile was just gone, like it hadn’t existed. The old ones could do that—expression, then nothing in the blink of an eye. “Well, then, Anita, I will have to do something to prove myself unique among your admirers.”
I would have given a lot to take back that smart-ass comment. It had been true, but I could still have kept it to myself.
“Oh, trust me, this invitation was unique.”
“No, Anita, you’re right, I must try harder.” He was angry with me, as if I’d insulted him. “Let us play a game.”
“We came here to negotiate for the release of hostages,” Rocco said.
“And so we shall, Sergeant.” He patted Max’s bare stomach. “Come closer so you can see.”
We hesitated.
“Here is the first rule. When you make me repeat myself, something happens to one of your hostages.”
There was a sound from the other side of the room. Ava was carving a new cut down Rick’s chest. He didn’t scream, but a small sound had escaped him. Ava raised the blade to her mouth and licked the blood delicately away.
I turned back to Vittorio.
“You are not frightened or even impressed. I take it you’ve seen something similar before?”
I had, actually, more than once. Out loud, I said, “I don’t know what reaction you want from me; just tell me and I’ll try to give it to you.”
“What is the first rule?” he asked.
“That if we make you repeat your requests, you’ll have someone hurt.”
“Here is the second rule. I will offer you a chance to do something pleasant; if you refuse, then I will do something painful to the person instead. Is that clear enough, officers?”
I said, “Crystal.”
Rocco said, “Yes.”
“Come over beside the bed, both of you.”
We did it this time, no hesitating. We stood at the end of the bed on its raised dais, looking at Max and his wife, and the smiling sociopath beside them.
“Anita, give Max a kiss.”
“If I don’t?” I asked.
He drew a blade out from underneath the covers. “I will bleed him; one cut for one refusal.”
I took a breath in, then out. It seemed a small request, but I was betting that the requests wouldn’t stay small. “Okay, but if we do this, then you release one of the hostages.”
“For a kiss, it would have to be some kiss.”
I shrugged.
“If I refuse to free someone, are you prepared to watch me slice up the Master of the City?”
I thought furiously, and just didn’t know what to do. Vittorio made a shallow cut across Max’s stomach.
“I didn’t say no.”
“You broke rule number one. You hesitated. Now I’ll ask you again: kiss Max or I cut him.”
I just went to the bed, walked wide around Vittorio, and climbed up beside Max. I looked down into his blue eyes and said, “Sorry, Max.” I leaned over and laid a kiss across his taped mouth.
“Well, you did do what I asked, but that is hardly worth the release of a hostage.” He tapped the blade against his leg.
“Do you want me to kiss him better?”
“Take off the tape, and show me some of that talent I know you have.”
Bibiana made a sound through her tape. I looked across at her. “Sorry, Bibiana.” I took the tape off Max’s mouth.
“He’s going to kill us anyway, you know that.”
“Now, Max, what did I say about talking?”
“You said no talking back to you. I’m talking to Anita.”
“True.” Tap, tap, tap went the blade against his leg. “Well, Anita, kiss him like you mean it, and I’ll let your sergeant watch one of the dancers leave.”
I bent over and kissed him full on the mouth. His mouth was still under mine. I looked back at Vittorio. “A dancer, freed.”
“No.”
“What was wrong with this kiss?”
“Kiss him like you mean it.” There was no humor in him now, just a seriousness that I thought was more dangerous.
I stared down at Max. He was mostly bald, and round of face, but his biceps were huge, his shoulders deeply muscled. He’d begun life as an enforcer, and he’d stayed in shape for it. I could see his strength, but he just didn’t do it for me. I liked my men pretty and a little refined. Max was like a bully—big, scary, and nothing delicate about him—but I bent over him one more time. I touched his face, closed my eyes, and kissed him. Delicate, at first, then with more pressure, letting my arms slide over the hard, muscled bareness of him, and putting some body English into it. Max was absolutely still against me. Bibiana was making a high-pitched sound through the tape.
I turned to Vittorio.
“Very well, one dancer, but I want the next effort to be better, or the deal is off. Ava will choose who goes free, and Sergeant—Rocco, is it?—will watch from the door that the dancer gets away.”
Ava went out, Rocco watched from the door, and apparently they let a dancer go because Rocco came back nodding yes.
“I’ll give you a two-for-one deal,” Vittorio said. “Let the little dancer over there give you a lap dance; if it’s good, I’ll free her and another dancer.”
I walked over to Brianna without hesitation, but once I got there, I asked him, “What do you want to learn from making me do this?”
“Maybe I’m just like all men and have my little lesbian fantasies.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Sit in the chair by Ava.”
I sat in the chair; it didn’t hurt me, and I didn’t want to give them another excuse to hurt anyone. “Untie the girl.”
Ava did what she was told. Brianna took her own tape off her mouth, then looked at me. Her makeup had run down her face like black tears. She rubbed at her wrists and took a shaking step toward me in her spike-heeled sandals.
“I’m offering you the best tip you will ever get, Brianna. Give the marshal a lap dance, and if it’s good enough, I’ll set you and another of your friends free.”
Brianna took another staggering step toward me. I thought, She’s not going to be able to do it, she’s too afraid. He must have thought so, too, because he said, “If you refuse, or don’t do a good job of it, I will use the torch on that soft, pink, perfect skin.” He almost sounded bored.
Brianna dropped her robe to the ground and was in front of me. “Wait,” Vittorio said. We both looked at him. “Sergeant, take Anita’s place; let her dance for you.”
Rocco just started walking toward us. I got up, he sat down, and Brianna started to dance. She had no music, but whatever was playing in her head was something with a beat. She started a little jerky, but then closed her eyes and found her rhythm. It was a nice rhythm. She moved her body in waves up and down Rocco—who had a death grip on the chair he was sitting in, because the rules are the dancers can touch you, but you can’t touch the dancers.
Brianna ended up in his lap, straddling him, grinding her most intimate parts over the front of his pants. His face looked grim, and I was betting he was trying to think of baseball, taxes, dead kittens, anything but what the woman in his lap was doing.
I felt both sorry for him and happy it wasn’t me.
With a last writhe, she bowed herself backward, completely, her legs wrapped around Rocco and the chair itself. She bent back in a graceful arch, her high, tight breasts spilling backward, proving yet again that they were real.
Vittorio actually clapped. “Very good, and the sergeant has held his composure admirably. Flee, little dancer. Anita, watch her go to safety; I don’t think our dear sergeant can walk just yet.”
Brianna picked up her robe and went for the door as fast as her high heels could take her. “Pick another dancer to go out with you, Brianna.” She picked up the pace. I kept the door open and watched her go to the nearest dancer, grab her by the hand, and run out the door with her.
I did a quick head count. We had six dancers left. Six, and then we could get rid of the jinn and try to kill Vittorio. Just six more.
“I make the dancers entertain me before I kill them, Anita. I don’t usually let them go, though.”
“So this is part of your . . . usual.” I stopped there because any word I could come up with sounded too much like an insult.
“Yes.” He got up and walked to Rick. “I could control him, but only in part. I can’t control him or Victor completely as I can the others. They are too dominant, too much tiger. I could make either of them my servant through marks, but I cannot own them as I own the ones in the corner.” He moved so fast, it was barely visible.
Rocco said, “He mind-fucked me.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said, “he’s just that fast.”
Vittorio was standing back where he started, by the time the blood started trickling down Rick’s stomach.
“You didn’t ask us to do anything,” I said.
“So I didn’t. Ava, let another whore go.”
Ava just went to the door, and I watched as she tapped another woman. The woman ran out the door in a flashing square of sunlight. Five left.
“Anita, drink blood from the wound I just made on the weretiger.”
I didn’t like this one, but I went to Rick and knelt in front of him. The cut was just above the pants line, so I could reach. I was betting the placement hadn’t been accidental.
I put my hands on his belt to steady myself, then leaned up and licked the wound. It was blood, hot, salty, metallic. I put my mouth against the wound and sucked. It was sweet copper pennies on my tongue. But it was more than that, it was belly meat, soft, above the muscles, and that feeling that just underneath were soft, tender things. My hands locked around the back of his body, and I fought to only suck the wound, not bite down, not take more flesh. I drew back from the wound with a shaky breath. I felt dizzy, disoriented. I realized for the first time that though I’d fed on all the men this morning, Vittorio had taken all the energy of it. Beyond that, he’d taken more of my energy, so I was actually behind the curve. Fuck.
I got to my feet, having to steady myself against Rick’s body as I stood. I wiped my mouth with my hand, and knew I needed a rag or something to get the blood.
“Most people would have hesitated before drinking a lycanthrope’s blood,” Vittorio said.
“If we hesitate, you hurt them.”
“Ava, another dancer.” This time Rocco watched the hostage leave. Only four now.
He paced in a circle, tapping the blade against his leg. “I must come up with things that displease you, or I will run out of hostages before I get to hurt anyone again.” He turned to me with a huge smile. It tugged at the burned side of his face, so that the smile didn’t quite work. “Suck on something else; you can pick any of the men, just bring them. To give you more incentive, I’ll use the holy water on your fair friend again if you refuse.”
I looked from Rick to Requiem. “May I ask a question?”
“You may.”
“Has Requiem fed?”
“No.”
“Then you know he can’t go orally or any other way until he’s taken blood.”
“Then you are left with only two choices unless you wish to include the sergeant.”
I fought not to look as uncomfortable as that extra suggestion made me. “Max hasn’t fed this morning either, so it has to be Rick. You’re only pretending to give me choices.”
“Then do him.” He was standing by Requiem now, and I realized that there was a line of holy water vials on the table above his head.
I went to Rick and started undoing his belt. Rick made a small protesting noise. I took a breath in, and blew it out. I whispered, “It’s not a fate worse than death, Rick.”
He went still in his chains and watched me undo his pants. I wasn’t sure if the patient watching was less uncomfortable to me, or the struggles and noises. I got his pants unzipped and worked his pants down over his ass; I wanted the zipper out of the way both for his safety and mine. I’d kept his underwear in place, and only moved it out of the way once I was kneeling in front of him. He was as lovely below the waist as above, and there were no cuts here yet; I was hoping to keep it that way.
I looked up the line of his body and found him watching me. His blue eyes were angry, yes, but there was something else in them now, too. Apparently, he’d taken my not a fate worse than death to heart, because there was that darkness in his eyes that every man gets at about this time. I took him in my hands and lowered him to my mouth. He was already erect enough that I had to bring him down to me, because he was pressed against the front of his own body. He slipped inside my mouth, as full and smooth and good as any. I liked giving oral sex. I liked the feel of it in my mouth, and the look on a man’s face while you did it. I liked the sounds they made, and the way their bodies reacted. I gave myself completely to the man in front of me, and the sensation of my mouth going over and around him. I kissed and sucked and licked, using my hand on him to guide and caress and squeeze. I let myself spill into the sex, and there was nothing else. I glanced up and found his eyes wide. His breathing quickened. He was so hard now, except for the soft smoothness of the tip of him. His body spasmed in the chains, and it wasn’t pain this time. He closed his eyes, head flung back, and I worked him in and out of my mouth quicker, in and out, in and out, as fast as I could. I tasted the first hint that he was close; the texture changed, ever so slightly, like a preview of what was to come.
Vittorio’s voice. “Two dancers, if you let him go on your breasts.”
I didn’t hesitate. I just yanked my shirt over my head and let it fall. I held him in my hand, working him, keeping him close; I didn’t want to lose ground. I had to let go to undo my bra and throw it over my shoulder to the floor with the shirt. Then I plunged my mouth back over him, cupping, and playing, and teasing until I felt him tighten in my mouth. I moved off him just in time, stroking him with my hand as he spilled upward, outward, in a thick, warm rain of it. It spattered across my shoulders, my breasts, and I threw my head back, thrust my breasts more forward, and it also kept it out of my eyes.
Rick spasmed above me, rattling the chains, making small noises against the gag.
Vittorio was huddled against the counter; he looked at me, at Rick, at the show of it, with a look of eager horror.
I heard Ava and Rocco go to the door to let more of the hostages go. I started crawling toward the vampire, with my breasts hanging down, and the warm liquid beginning to drip. He pushed himself to his feet and screamed, “Kill them!”
My skin ran with that sibilant magic, and I knew that Rocco had said the words, and the jinn were gone. Ava screamed, and I risked a glance to find that Ava had buried her knife in Rocco’s side, but he had her wrist, and I knew what he could do with that seemingly innocent touch.
The glance was a mistake. Vittorio used that blinding speed to be up and at Requiem’s side. I couldn’t move fast enough, but I had one power that was fast as thought. I opened the ardeur and thrust it like a weapon at the vampire. It might not have worked except he’d just had me do one of his fantasies. The idea of me and sex was already firm in his mind. He wanted to look.
I didn’t run. I stalked, I writhed, I made everything work, and he couldn’t look away. He was still staring at me when I wrapped my hand around his and cupped the vial of holy water, sending it to shatter harmlessly on the floor.
“I will ruin him,” he whispered.
“That’s not what you want.”
“I can’t have what I want,” he said.
I put his empty hands on my breasts, and held his gaze with mine. His hands started smoothing the liquid across my breasts, as if he didn’t realize he was doing it. “Your eyes,” he said, “your eyes are full of fire, like cognac diamonds.”
“Say it,” I whispered.
He leaned his face downward, as I leaned upward. “Say it,” I whispered.
“Release, I want release.”
His mouth met mine, and we kissed. One moment it was gentle, the next he fed at my mouth, so hard his fangs cut my lips and filled our mouths with the sweet taste of blood. Blood made my hungers rise, but it was too late for any of the others; all that was left was the ardeur. I had denied it, tried to cage it, control it, but in that moment I understood why kings had offered Belle Morte their crowns, why women had offered everything for one more night with Jean-Claude; I understood what it meant to be Belle Morte’s line. The ardeur wasn’t something I had to feed to stay alive, it was the way I fed. It was my blood.
Vittorio made small eager noises against my mouth, his hands eager on my body. I felt the growing pressure of it build inside him, and I felt the ardeur mingle with the power of the beasts, all of it so warm and alive, so not vampire. His breathing quickened, his body tensed, and I drove the ardeur and the power of the tigers into him, like a seeking hand, and gave him, for a moment, a taste of it. I gave him the shadow of what he had lost, and his mouth tore away from mine in a scream, as his body spasmed against mine, his hands clutching at me. He collapsed to the floor beside the table, taking me, still in his arms, to the floor with him. He was crying and laughing. “How did you do that?”
“I am Belle Morte’s line. I belong to Jean-Claude. We are meant to bring pleasure.”
His hand searched the floor, and I knew what he meant to do before I saw the flash of silver. I rolled away from him, but he came for me, and he was simply too fast.
Then a white blur crashed into his side, and a second joined it. The two weretigers grappled with the vampire, and his speed did no good because they were already touching him. I pushed backward so I could see the bed, and the chains were empty. I didn’t know where Max was, but I knew where his wife and Rick were. The other weretigers spilled out of the corner where they’d been frozen. I thought for one awful moment they meant to attack us, but they went for the fight and Vittorio.
Max appeared by the kitchenette. He handed me a towel. I stood up and began to wipe myself off. We both kept our eyes on the fight, but it was a blur of claws and teeth.
“You mind-fucked him, and that was the weakness I needed. The tigers are mine again.”
Rocco came to me, holding pressure on his side wound. Ava lay behind him on the floor, staring sightless at the ceiling.
“How did it feel?” I asked.
“Good,” he said. “She wasn’t being controlled. She betrayed you, Max.”
“I know. She felt we treated her as a second-class tiger, and she was right.”
Blood sprayed out over the room. “That was arterial spray,” I said.
“Fight’s over,” Max said.
I dropped the towel onto the floor, picked up my shirt and bra from the floor, and went to Requiem. I jumped up on the table and undid his chains. He ripped off his own gag. I hugged him and he gasped. I touched the burns, and felt my eyes grow hot. “I’m so sorry.”
“You saved me.”
I could only nod.
“Get dressed, Anita,” Rocco said. “I’ve got to call the cavalry in and warn them that the tigers are on our side.” I looked where he was looking, and found the white tigers, some in tigerman form, covered in blood. Vittorio was in pieces on the ground. Now that he was dead, they’d stopped feeding. Vampire is bitter meat, so I’m told.
I dressed and promised myself a shower later. Max offered to take Requiem to his own underground resting place until nightfall. I kissed Requiem, and turned toward the police as they spilled in through the door behind Rocco, but it was all over. This time Edward and the guys had missed the party.
Epilogue
REQUIEM SPENT THE rest of the day in the downstairs area with Max. Rocco and I had a lot of ’splaining to do. We left out some things. Ava attacked him and he was forced to use the maximum of his power. He probably could have stopped sooner, but why? She was dead either way because of the warrant.
Bibiana asked, in private, “You gave him his first pleasure in centuries; why did he attack you?”
Max and I exchanged looks, and he said, “He knew he’d do anything to have that feeling again. He knew that Anita owned him lock, stock, and barrel, and he couldn’t have that.”
“He’d rather have power than the pleasure?” she asked.
“He knew it would be a choice,” Max said. “I think Anita’s leash may be shorter than the one you keep me on.” They had laughed good-naturedly and hugged.
Requiem suggested that we cut the burns away the next night, and try to heal it with sex, as we’d done with other fresh wounds in the past. It worked. He’s perfect again. It makes the idea of trying it on Asher possible. But we’ll start with a little piece of skin, just in case the deeper burns make it not work.
Denis-Luc St. John’s sister never gave him my message. He called, upset that he’d missed it all, but his sister wasn’t sorry—he was alive. I kind of agree with his sister.
Lieutenant Grimes said that if I ever get tired of being a vampire hunter, to let him know; I could test and see if I could become their first female member. I was flattered, really flattered. I actually didn’t say no. I can’t see living in Vegas, but I could see working on a SWAT unit like theirs. Their pilot program of using practitioners is successful enough that other cities are talking about it—not St. Louis so far, but I have hopes. Would I really give up hunting vampires? I’d still help hunt them, but the idea of working on a unit where the idea is to save lives and not take them is pretty appealing.
I took Crispin and Domino home with me to St. Louis. The redhead, I sent home to his clan. Their queen has requested a visit in a neutral city, since I keep poaching her males—one of them being her son, the first one, Alex. So far the red tigers don’t seem as affected by me as the white or the black. Sebastian went back to his life. He is drawn to me, but he doesn’t want to go back into servitude to anyone. I don’t blame him.
Cynric was a different problem. Yes, he was legal in Vegas, and yes, his legal guardians, Max and Bibiana, were fine with it, so no court charges, but he is besotted with me. It’s worse than Crispin, because he had fewer internal protections. He was just so young, so open, and because the tigers, or at least the white clan, try for monogamy, I was his first. The thought of a massive ardeur feed, with a group orgy thrown in, as anyone’s first time just makes me ill.
They’re keeping him in Vegas for at least a year, because next birthday he’ll be legal in Missouri. I told Bibiana it doesn’t matter, he’d still be a child, but she said, “You have made him your tiger to call, Anita, you must take responsibility for that.”
“I didn’t mind-fuck him, Vittorio did.”
“But you are who he pines for.”
I made the mistake of asking, “What do you want me to do about him?”
“Let him come visit next year.”
I told her we’d discuss it, but really, not only no, but hell no.
The SWAT operators in the hospital are all awake. They found a girlfriend, or wife, or child, or parent to give them a kiss of love. It all worked, though one operator had never married, parents dead, and so they finally brought his dog in; one good face-licking later and his master was up and around. Ain’t love grand?
Jean-Claude, Asher, and I have talked about what happened in Vegas, with the ardeur and Vittorio at the end. We agree with Max about why he attacked me, but why did sex disrupt all that ancient vampire ability? Jean-Claude finally said, “Everyone believes that Belle Morte’s line is weak because our power is love, but really, ma petite, what is more powerful than love?” I could have argued that I’d seen hate kill love, or violence, or . . . but in the end, maybe he’s right. I know that Vittorio wasn’t beaten by power. He was beaten by the offer of love. “ ’Twas beauty that killed the beast,” the old movie said. ’Twas love that killed this one, or maybe lust, but sometimes I’m not sure there’s as much difference as we like to think between the two. Not if you mean it.
I wasn’t lying when I offered the ardeur to Vittorio. In that moment, I wanted to give him back what he’d lost because I could feel his need, feel the great sorrow of it that had turned to such rage. I wanted to hold him and make it better, and I did, and he tried to kill me for it. Men—who knows what they really want?
A BERKLEY BOOK
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Copyright © 2009 by Laurell K. Hamilton
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamilton, Laurell K.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-05346-1
1. Blake, Anita (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A443357S55 2009
813’.54—dc22 2009006735
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