Anita Blake 22 - Affliction (43 page)

Nicky grinned at him. ‘Every once in a while.’

‘Naw,’ Dev said, ‘she’s usually protecting us.’

Bush looked up at the taller man, as if waiting for the joke, but something in Dev’s face stopped him and made him frown instead. He might have asked if we were kidding, but someone came up behind us who made Bush stand at the cop’s version of attention. MacAllister was suddenly all serious. The other officers cleared out around us as if we were all suddenly contagious. Whoever was behind me was someone in charge. They weren’t in charge of me, but I was in their house, and that meant …

‘Marshal Blake, Detective Rickman, I need to see you both in my office, now.’

With a serious face, MacAllister leaned over and whispered, ‘Called into the captain’s office first time you step inside; fast work.’

‘About par for me,’ I said, and then turned with a professional face, but a hand going up to the blossoming bruise on my cheek. I’d let Rickman hit me so that everyone wouldn’t get all hysterical about Dev and Nicky being wereanimals, because nothing undercuts someone’s accusations like being made to look unprofessional and a bully. It had worked, but a sympathy bruise is a sympathy bruise, and I was going to see if this one could be multipurpose. I was going to milk it, just in case the captain was upset about me breaking one of his detectives.

Captain Jonas was a large African American man who looked like he’d probably played high school ball, maybe college, but the desk job had started to round out his middle to the point where I wondered if he had to pass the same health standards as his patrol officers. He sat behind his desk glaring at us. The ‘us’ didn’t include Rickman. He was on the way to the hospital. The ‘us’ was U.S. Marshal Susan Hatfield, Edward, and me. Apparently my doing something bad enough to get called on the carpet by Jonas had renewed Hatfield’s fighting spirit and she was trying to get me kicked off the case again.

Hatfield was about five foot six, which made her almost as tall as Edward. He gained about two inches from his cowboy boots and she was in the same flat treaded boots as I was, so she seemed shorter, or he seemed taller. Her chestnut-brown hair was back in a small, neat ponytail. She moved her head as she gesticulated angrily, and the overhead lights picked out deep red highlights in her hair. She was about two tones off from going from chestnut to a nice deep auburn. She was thin, but it was a thinness that came from genetics and working out, not starving herself. Her forearms had lean muscle on them as she gestured, and what I could see of her upper arms wasn’t bulk. She was all long, lean muscle, almost mannish hips, and small breasts. She was one of those women who managed to look delicate and feminine without having the curves to go with the triangular face. Her chin was a little sharp for my tastes, but then I wasn’t shopping to date her, I was just noticing things while she ranted. She was basically accusing me of being too close to the monsters to make good choices. I wasn’t really listening, because I’d heard it all before, and I was a little tired of hearing it from anyone. I just stood there and let her words wash over me like white noise.

It was Edward saying, ‘Anita, Anita, the captain is talking to you,’ that made me blink and pay attention again.

I looked at Edward standing a little behind and to the other side of Hatfield, and then I looked at Jonas behind his desk. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I didn’t hear what you said.’

‘Are we boring you, Blake?’ he asked.

‘I’ve heard the song and dance before, sir.’

Edward stepped forward in his best good-ol’-boy Ted persona. ‘There’s a beaut of a bruise blossoming out on Anita’s face. I think she got her chimes rung pretty good when Rickman hit her.’

‘Are you making excuses for her?’ Jonas asked.

‘No, sir, just pointing out that she just got released from the hospital and she may heal like a son of a bitch, but the healing isn’t perfect or instantaneous. I’m just wondering if she’s more hurt than she’s letting on.’

Jonas narrowed his eyes at Edward and then looked back at me. ‘You hurt, Blake?’

‘My face hurts,’ I said, but my voice was as empty of emotion as Hatfield’s had been full of it.

‘I can’t see the bruise from here. Turn so I can.’

I turned to give him the right side of my face where the throbbing was beginning to spread into the beginnings of a really nice headache. It put me looking at Hatfield, who glared back at me.

I heard Jonas’s chair slide back. ‘It’s swelling a lot for just a bruise.’ He’d come around the desk so he could see it better. He pursed his lips, scowling. ‘Ricky hit you just on the bone there. You think he cracked the bone?’

‘I didn’t hear it break,’ I said.

‘How bad does it hurt?’

‘Not bad enough to be broken, I don’t think.’

‘You had broken bones?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you know what it feels like,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir, I do.’

He let out a big huff of air. ‘You need some ice on it at least before it swells into your eye. Can’t send you out looking beat to hell.’ He went to his door, opened it, and yelled out at someone. ‘Need an ice bag and some towels wrapped around it.’ He seemed to expect it would get done, because he closed the door and went back to sit at his desk. He steepled his fingers, elbows resting on his stomach, because he’d gained too much weight to use the chair arms for it. It looked like a habitual gesture from before the stomach came on. He looked at us over his fingers.

‘Marshal Hatfield holds the warrant of execution on these vampires, and she wants you and Marshal Forrester to mind your own damn business.’

‘That much I heard,’ I said.

‘Technically, I’m not in charge of the three of you – you’re federal – but we’re the local PD who will be backing your move. Hatfield here is the local executioner. I know her. Why should I give either of you any consideration?’

‘If we just needed to kill the vampires, fine,’ I said. ‘Wait until dawn and then chain them to a metal gurney with some holy objects and stake their asses, but we want information from them, and for that we need them alive.’

‘They aren’t alive!’ Hatfield said, and there was way too much emotion in that sentence. She was one of those, a vampire hater. It was sort of like giving a Ku Klux Klan member a badge and a license to kill the racial group of his choice, and could get just as nasty.

‘Legally, they are,’ Edward said in a friendly, almost joking voice.

Hatfield turned on him with an accusing finger and said, ‘Of course you’d defend Blake; you’re sleeping with her.’

‘Hatfield,’ Jonas said, and the word was sharp.

She turned to the captain, and underneath the anger was uncertainty plain enough for all of us to see.

‘Actually,’ Edward said, ‘I’m defending the law, not Marshal Blake. Legally the vampires in custody have rights as citizens.’

‘The only reason I couldn’t kill them tonight was because of the law that she’ – and she pointed a finger at me without really looking at me – ‘helped create.’

I resisted the urge to grab her finger and break it as it pointed in my face, but her face stayed toward Edward. ‘If you kill the two vampires we have, then what, Hatfield?’

She finally deigned to look at me. ‘Then we’d have two less vampires walking around.’

‘So you’re more about killing the vampires than solving cases,’ I said.

‘Once they’re dead, it is solved,’ she said.

I looked at Jonas. ‘The two vampires in custody only went missing as humans about a month ago, or that’s what the locals have told me. I’d come down here tonight to read over the files, but are they about a month missing?’

‘About,’ Jonas said.

‘So who made them vampires? Who made the rotting vampires that we killed in the woods?’

‘The bastard that runs the bloodsuckers in this city made them!’ Hatfield said, her voice strident and just this side of yelling.

‘They were rotting vampires. That means that your Master of the City couldn’t have made them, because he’s not a rotter.’

‘They’re all walking corpses, Blake; they all rot in the end.’

‘Everyone rots in the end, Hatfield,’ I said.

‘Fredrico has disavowed all knowledge of the vampires in the woods,’ Jonas said.

‘Of course he has,’ Hatfield said. ‘What else could he say? That he lost control of some of his bloodsuckers and they slaughtered people?’

‘Entire families are missing,’ I said. ‘Vampires don’t take out families. It’s illegal to make children into vampires.’

‘I’ve killed kid vampires,’ she said.

‘How many?’ I asked.

She looked sullen and finally muttered, ‘Two.’

‘They were older than they looked, though, weren’t they?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked.

‘I mean they looked like kids, but they weren’t,’ I said.

‘They were kids,’ she said, and sounded so certain.

‘Did you talk to them at all?’ I asked.

‘Talk to them? Talk to them? Who talks to the vampires? Oh, wait, you do, and a hell of a lot more than just talk.’

Edward said, ‘Have you spoken to any of the vampires before you killed them?’

She wouldn’t meet his eyes full on before she said, ‘No, they don’t do much talking during the day.’

‘Have you ever even served an active warrant?’ Edward asked.

‘Once you serve it, it qualifies as an active warrant,’ she said.

‘Have you ever been on a vampire hunt?’ I asked.

She just stood there glaring at us.

‘Have all your vampires been morgue kills?’ I asked.

‘No, I’ve tracked the bloodsuckers to their lairs and killed their asses in coffins and fucking sleeping bags. I’ve been lucky and found them in daylight most of the time, so there wasn’t a lot of talking happening; besides, they’re not afraid of me. I’m not the Executioner.’

I exchanged a look with Edward. Hatfield wasn’t exactly a newbie, but she wasn’t us. Maybe it showed on our faces, because she said, ‘I am a legal vampire executioner; I do my job, I’m just not the Executioner,’ she said. ‘The vampires haven’t given me some cute pet name yet.’

‘They don’t hand those out to every marshal,’ Edward said.

‘Yeah, I know you’re Death,’ she said.

For a second I thought Hatfield knew about Ted’s big secret identity as Edward, because he’d been Death as long as I’d been the Executioner, but the nickname had been his before a badge and falling in love with Donna had tamed him down some. But the vampires had dubbed Edward Death once as an assassin/bounty hunter and once as a bounty hunter/marshal. It was convenient of them to use the same name twice.

I fought to keep my face blank as Edward drawled in his best Ted voice, ‘If you know I’m one of the Four Horsemen, then you know that Anita has two earned names among the vampires.’

She looked sullen. ‘Yeah, I know she has two pet names.’

‘I don’t,’ Jonas said. ‘Enlighten me.’

We both looked at Hatfield. She glared at both of us, then finally back at Jonas. ‘Forrester is Death and Blake is War.’

‘Who are the other two Horsemen?’

‘Otto Jeffries is Pestilence, and Bernardo Spotted-Horse is Hunger.’

‘I’ve met Spotted-Horse and I know Jeffries by reputation; they’re both ex-military, and so are you, right, Forrester?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then why is Blake “War”? She’s never been military.’

‘She has a higher kill count than I do,’ Edward said, ‘and the vampires see Death as a one-on-one killer, whereas War kills a lot all at one time.’

‘You asked the vampires,’ Jonas said.

‘I did.’

‘But why not Jeffries, or Spotted-Horse?’

‘You’ve met Bernardo, right?’ I asked.

‘I’ve met him, too,’ Hatfield said. ‘He didn’t seem that scary.’

‘He’s Hunger,’ Edward said.

‘I don’t get it,’ Hatfield said.

‘The vampires said Bernardo looks good enough to eat, but no one’s ever tasted him, so he leaves them hungry.’

She frowned.

Jonas seemed to think about it, and then he grinned wide and happy. He laughed. ‘He’s tasty like food, I get it.’

‘Dangerous food,’ Edward said. ‘He has the fifth highest kill count of any marshal.’

‘I’ve met Jeffries once. He had a way of looking at women when he thought no one else was looking, like we were meat, and that was before he caught lycanthropy on the job. Now I guess we really are meat to him.’ She shivered, shoulders hunching a little, and then seemed to realize what she’d done and stood up straight, shoulders back.

The fact that she’d noticed made me think better of Hatfield. I knew Otto Jeffries as Olaf. Olaf’s hobby was being a serial killer, never in this country, and never on government work, so if you could keep him working he was ‘safe.’ The military kept him busy, and since he got a badge he was even busier, and being a part of the Preternatural Branch of the Marshals Service meant he could torture and kill vampires and rogue shapeshifters to his heart’s content, and as long as he killed them in the end, there were no rules to how he carried out the execution or how long he took to do it. Olaf was one of the scariest people I’d ever met, alive or undead, and that was an impressive list to be near the top of. Hatfield was right; he’d been that scary before he got cut up by a werelion and tested positive for lycanthropy. He’d gone AWOL after he got his test results, but he’d resurfaced a few months later. If he’d done anything unfortunate while he was learning to control his beast, the human authorities hadn’t heard about it.

Micah had asked around in the preternatural community, and Olaf seemed to be playing the part of a nomad lion. He had stayed away from any group. Where he’d gone to learn to control himself, no one seemed to know. I actually wondered if he hadn’t gone anywhere, if the serial killer part of him was actually so close to an inner beast that he’d understood how to control both?

Since Olaf had considered me his little serial killer girlfriend because we went out and killed people together, I’d avoided him before he learned to turn furry; now he was avoiding me as hard as I avoided him. He’d known Nicky before he became my Bride, and Olaf was afraid of my taming him the same way. Anything that kept Olaf away from me was fine in my book.