Obsidian Butterfly ab-9

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "My, you do catch on quick."

  "I take it that's a no."

  "He's missing," Edward said.

  "So why come after Donna and her kids?"

  "Because the kids were with her when she and her group formed a protest line protecting a site that was on private land that Riker had gotten permission to bulldoze. She was their spokesperson."

  "Stupid, she should not have taken the kids."

  "Like I said, Donna didn't understand how bad a man Riker was."

  "And what happened?"

  "Her group was manhandled, abused, beaten. They fled. Donna had a black eye."

  "And what did Ted do about this?" I was watching his face, arms crossed over my stomach. All I could see was his profile, but it was enough. He hadn't liked it, that Donna had gotten hurt. Maybe it was just that she belonged to him, a male pride thing, or maybe ... maybe it was more.

  "Donna asked me to have a talk with the men."

  "I take it that would be the two men that you put in the hospital. I seem to remember you asking Harold if two guys were still in the hospital."

  Edward nodded. "Yeah."

  "Only two in the hospital, and none in a grave. You must be slipping."

  "I couldn't kill anyone without Donna knowing, so I made an example of two of his men."

  "Let me guess. One of them would be the man who gave Donna the black eye."

  Edward smiled happily. "Tom."

  "And the other one?"

  "He pushed Peter and threatened to break his arm."

  I shook my head. The air had begun to cool, and it raised goose bumps even through my jacket, or maybe it wasn't the cold. "The second guy has a broken arm now?"

  "Among other things," Edward said.

  "Edward, look at me."

  He turned and gave me his cool blue gaze.

  "Truth, do you care for this family? Would you kill to protect them?"

  "I'd kill to amuse myself, Anita."

  I shook my head, and leaned close to him, close enough to study his face, to try and make him give up his secrets. "No jokes, Edward, tell me the truth, Are you serious about Donna?"

  "You asked me if I loved her and I said, no."

  I shook my head again. "Dammit, don't keep evading the answer. I don't think you do love her. I don't think you're capable of it, but you feel something. I don't know exactly what, but something. Do you feel something for this family, for all of them?"

  His face was blank, and I couldn't read it. He just stared at me. I wanted to slap him, to scream and rant until I broke through his mask into whatever lay underneath. I'd always been on sure ground with Edward, always known where he stood, even when he was planning to hurt me. But now suddenly, I wasn't sure about anything.

  "My God, you do care for them." I slumped back in my seat, weak. I couldn't have been more astonished if he'd sprouted a second head. That would have been weird, but not this weird.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Edward, you care for them, all of them."

  He looked away. Edward, the stone cold killer, looked away. He couldn't or wouldn't meet my gaze. He put the car in gear and forced me to buckle my seat belt.

  I let him pull out of the parking lot in silence, but when we were sitting at the stop sign waiting for the traffic to clear on Lomos, I had to say something. "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't love Donna."

  "But," I said.

  He turned slowly onto the main street. "She's a mess. She believes in every new age bandwagon that comes along. She's got a good head for business, but she trusts everyone. She's useless around violence. You saw her today." He was concentrating very hard on the driving, hands gripping the wheel tight enough for his knuckles to be white. "Becca is just like her, trusting, sweet, but ... tougher, I think. Both the kids are tougher than Donna."

  "They've had to be," I said, and couldn't keep the disapproval out of my voice.

  "I know, I know," he said. "I know Donna, everything about her. I've heard every detail from cradle to the present."

  "Did it bore you?" I asked.

  "Some of it," he said carefully.

  "But not all of it," I said.

  "No, not all of it."

  "Are you saying that you do love Donna?" I had to ask.

  "No, no, I'm not saying that."

  I was staring so hard at his face that we could have been driving on the far side of the moon for all the attention I gave the scenery. Nothing mattered more right that second than Edward's face, his voice. "Then what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying that sometimes when you play a part too long, you can get sucked into that part I and it becomes more real than it was meant to be." I saw something on his face that I had never seen before, anguish, uncertainty.

  "Are you saying that you are going to marry Donna? You're going to be a husband and a father? PTA meetings, and the whole nine yards?"

  "No, I'm not saying that. You know I can't marry her. I can't live with her and two kids and hide what I am twenty-four hours a day. That good an actor I'm not."

  "Then what are you saying?" I asked.

  "I'm saying ... I'm saying that part of me, a small part of me, wishes I could."

  I stared at him opened-mouthed. Edward, assassin extraordinaire, the undead's perfect predator, wished he could have not a family, but this family. A trusting new age widow, her sullen teenage son, and a little girl that made Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm look jaded, and Edward wanted them.

  When I trusted myself to be coherent, I said, "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know."

  I couldn't think of anything helpful to say, so I resorted to humor, my shield of last resort. "Just please tell me they don't have a dog and a picket fence."

  He smiled. "No fence, but a dog, two dogs."

  "What kind of dogs?" I asked.

  He smiled and glanced at me, wanting to see my reaction. "Maltese. Their names are Peeka and Boo."

  "Oh, shit, Edward, you're joking me."

  "Donna wants the dogs included in the engagement pictures."

  I stared at him, and the look on my face seemed to amuse him. He laughed. "I'm glad you're here, Anita, because I don't know a single other person who I'd have admitted this to."

  "Do you realize that your personal life is now more complicated than mine is?" I said.

  "Now I know I'm in trouble," he said. And we left it on a lighter note, on a joke, because we were more comfortable that way. But Edward had confided in me about a personal problem. In his way he'd come to me for help about it. And being who I was, I'd try to help him. I thought we would solve the mutilations and murders, eventually. I mean violence and death were our specialties. I was not nearly so optimistic about the personal stuff.

  Edward did not belong in a world with a woman who had a pair of toy dogs named Peeka and Boo. Edward was not now, nor ever would be, that cutesy. Donna was. It wouldn't work. It just wouldn't work. But for the very first time I realized that if Edward didn't have a heart to lose, that he wished he had one to give. But I was reminded of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and the Scarecrow bang on the Tin Man's chest and hear the rolling echo. The tinsmith had forgotten to put in a heart. Edward had carved his own heart out of his body and left it on a floor somewhere years ago. I'd known that. I just never knew that Edward regretted the loss. And I think until Donna Parnell came along, he hadn't known it either.

  16

  EDWARD DID TAKE ME through a drive-up window, but he didn't want to stop. He seemed anxious to get to Santa Fe. Since he was rarely anxious about anything, I didn't argue. I requested we go through a carwash while I ate my French fries and cheeseburger. He didn't say a word, just drove into one beside the highway that let us ride through in the car. When I was little, I'd loved watching the suds slide down the windows and the huge brushes roll by. It was still nifty, though not the thrill a minute it had been when I was five. But the carwash did mean that I had a clear view out all the windows. The
dirty windows had made me feel ever so slightly claustrophobic. I'd finished my food before we left Albuquerque. I sipped on my soda as we drove out of town and towards the mountains. These were not the black mountains, but a different range that looked more "normal." They were jagged and rocky looking, with a string of glittering light near their base.

  "What's with the light show," I asked.

  "What?" Edward asked.

  "The glitter, what is it?"

  I felt his attention shift from the road, but he was wearing his sunglasses, and I couldn't really see his gaze shift. "Houses, the sun is hitting the windows on the houses."

  "I've never seen sunlight on windows glitter like that."

  "Albuquerque is at 7,000 feet. The air is thinner than you're used to. It makes light do strange things."

  I stared at the sparkling windows like a line of jewels imbedded in the mountains. "It's beautiful."

  He moved his whole head. This time so I knew he was really looking at it. "If you say so."

  After that we stopped talking. Edward never did idle chatter, and apparently he had nothing to say. My mind was still reeling from Edward being in love, or as close as he would probably ever get. It was just too weird. I couldn't think of a single useful thing to say so I stared out the window until I thought of something worth saying. I had a feeling it was going to be a long quiet drive to Santa Fe.

  The hills were very round, covered in dry brownish grass. I had the same feeling I'd had when I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque -- desolate. I'd thought the hills were close until I spotted a cow standing on one. The cow looked tiny, small enough for me to cover with two fingers held up, which meant the "hills" were really small mountains and not nearly as close as they appeared to the road. It was late afternoon or early evening depending on how you looked at it. It was still daylight, but you could feel night looming even in the brightness. The day had worn away like a piece of candy sucked too long. No matter how bright the sunshine, I could feel the darkness pressing close. Partly it was my mood -- confusion always makes me pessimistic -- but it was also an innate sense of the coming night. I was a vampire executioner, and I knew the taste of night on the breeze just as I knew the feel of dawn pressing against the darkness. There had been times when my life had depended on dawn coming. Nothing like near death experiences to hone a skill.

  The sunlight had begun to fade to a soft evening gloom when I'd finally had enough of the silence. I still had nothing helpful to say about his personal life, but there was the case. I'd been asked here to help solve a crime, not to play Dear Abby, so maybe if I just concentrated on the crime, we'd be okay.

  "Is there anything about the cases that you've withheld from me? Anything I'm going to be pissed that I didn't know beforehand?"

  "Changing the subject?" he asked.

  "I wasn't aware we were on a subject," I said.

  "You know what I meant."

  I sighed. "Yeah, I know what you meant." I slumped in my seat as far as the seatbelt would allow, arms crossed over my stomach. My body language was not happy, nor was I. "I don't have anything to add to the Donna situation, or nothing helpful."

  "So concentrate on business," he said.

  "You taught me that," I said, "you and Dolph. Keep your eye and mind on the important stuff. The important stuff is what can get you killed. Donna and her kiddies aren't a threat to life so put them on the back burner."

  He smiled, his normal close-lipped, I-know-something-you-don't-know smile. It didn't always mean he knew something I didn't. Sometimes he did it just to irritate. Like now. "I thought you said you'd kill me if I didn't stop dating Donna."

  I rubbed my neck against the expensive seats and tried to ease a tension that was beginning at the base of my skull. Maybe I had been invited here to play Dear Abby, at least in part. Shit.

  "You were right, Edward. You can't just leave. It would screw up Becca for one thing. But you cannot keep dating Donna indefinitely. She's going to start asking for a date for the wedding, and what are you going to say?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "Well, neither do I, so let's talk about the case. At least with that we've got a solid direction."

  "We do?" he glanced at me as he asked.

  "We know we want the mutilations and murders to stop, right?" I asked.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Well, that's more than we know about Donna."

  "Are you saying you don't want me to stop seeing her?" he asked, and that damn smile was back. Smug, he looked smug.

  "I'm saying I don't know what the hell I want you to do, let alone what you should do. So let's leave it alone until I get some brilliant idea."

  "Okay," he said.

  "Great," I said. "Now back to the question I asked. What haven't you told me about the crimes that you think I should know, or rather that I think I should know?"

  "I don't read minds, Anita. I don't know what you'll want to know."

  "Don't be coy, Edward. Just spill the beans. I don't want any more surprises on this trip, not from you."

  He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn't going to answer. So I prompted him, "Edward, I mean it."

  "I'm thinking," he said. He moved in his seat, shoulders tightening and loosening as if he were trying to get rid of tension, too. I guess, even for him, this had been a stressful day. Odd to think of Edward letting anything truly stress him. I'd always thought he walked through life with the perfect Zen of the sociopath, so that nothing truly bothered him. I'd been wrong. Wrong about a lot of things.

  I went back to watching the scenery. There were cows scattered close enough to the road that you could make out color and size. If it wasn't a Jersey, a Guernsey, or a Black Angus, I didn't know it. I watched the strange cows standing at impossible angles on the steep hillsides and waited for Edward to finish thinking. Twilight seemed to last a long time here, as if the light of day gave up the fight slowly, struggling to remain and keep the darkness at bay. Maybe it was just my mood, but I wasn't looking forward to darkness. It was as if I could sense something out there in those desolate hills, something waiting for the night, something that could not move during the day. It could be just my own overactive imagination, or I could be right. That was the hard part about psychic abilities: sometimes you were right, and sometimes you weren't. Sometimes your own anxiety or fear could poison your thinking and make you, almost, literally see ghosts where there were none.

  There were, of course, ways to find out. "Is there a place where you can I pull over out of sight of the main road?"

  He looked at me. "Why?"

  "I'm ... sensing something, and I just want to make sure I'm not imagining it."

  He didn't argue. When the next exit came up, he took it. We took a side road from the exit. It was dirt and gravel and full of huge dry potholes. The shocks on his Hummer took the road like silk flowing down hill, comfy. A soft roll of hills hid us from the main highway, but the road was very flat in front of us, giving a clear view of the road as it went almost straight towards a distant rise of hills. There were a handful of tiny houses on either side of the road, the major cluster some ways ahead with a small church sitting to one side by itself, as if it were part of the houses and not. The church had a steeple with a cross on top of it, and I assumed a bell inside of it. Though we were too far away to be sure. The town, if it were a town, looked down on its luck but not empty. There were people there and eyes to see us. Just our luck, the land had been so empty and the road we go down has a town.

  "Stop the car," I said. We were as far from the first house as we could get without backtracking.

  Edward pulled over to the side of the road. The dust rose in a cloud to either side of the car, settling over the clean paint job in a dry powder.

  "You guys don't get much rain up here, do you?"

  "No," he said. Anyone else would have elaborated, but not Edward. Even the weather wasn't a topic of conversation unless it affected the job.

  I got out of the car and walked
a little way into the dry grass. I walked until I could no longer sense Edward or the car. When I looked back, I was yards away, Edward was standing on the driver's side door, arms crossed on the roof, hat tilted back so he could watch the show. I don't think there was another person I knew who wouldn't have asked at least one question about what I was about to do. It would be interesting to see if he asked any questions afterwards.

  Darkness hung like a soft silken cloth, hanging against the sky, and the living light. It was a soft comfortable twilight, an embracing dark. A breeze blew across the open land and played with my hair. Everything felt fine, good. Had I imagined? Was I letting Edward's problems get to me? Was the memory of the survivors in their air-compressed hospital room making me see shadows?

  I almost just turned around and walked back to the car, but I didn't. If it were my imagination, then it wouldn't hurt to check, and if it wasn't ... I turned and faced away from the car, away from the distant houses, and looked nut into the emptiness. Of course, it wasn't really empty. There was grass rustling in the wind, it sounded so dry, like corn in autumn just before it's harvested. The ground was covered in a thin layer of pale reddish-brown gravel with paler dirt showing through. The ground ran until it met the hills that continued on and on towards the darkening sky. Not empty, just lonely.

  I took a deep cleansing breath, let it out and did two things at once: I dropped my shields and spread my arms wide, hands reaching. I was reaching with my hands, but it wasn't just my hands. I reached outward with that sense I have -- magic, if you like the word. I don't. I reached outward with that power that let me raise the dead and mix with werewolves. I reached outward towards that waiting presence that I'd felt, or thought I'd felt.

  There, there like a fish tugging on my line. I turned to face the direction of the road. It was in that direction, going towards Santa Fe. It -- I had no better word. I felt its eagerness for the coming night and knew that it could not move in daylight. And I knew that it was large, not physically, but psychically, because we were not close to it, and yet I'd picked it up miles away. How many miles I couldn't say, but far, very far to have sensed it. It didn't feel evil. That didn't mean it wasn't evil, just that it didn't think of itself as evil. Unlike people, preternatural entities are rather proud of being evil. They embraced their malignancy because whatever this was, it wasn't human. It wasn't physical. Spirit, energy, pick a word, but it was up ahead, and it was not contained in any physical shell. It was free floating. No, not free ... Something slammed into me, not physically, but as if a psychic truck had run me down. I was on my butt in the dirt, trying to breathe, as if someone had hit me in the chest and knocked the wind out of me.