Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I’d also thought him one of the most powerful vampires in St. Louis once; now as he moved toward me, he seemed somehow diminished. Or maybe I was just shielding too well now for his power to creep over me. Maybe.

  He held out one of his big hands, which always seemed like they should belong on a beefier body. He held it out sort of in between Zerbrowski and me, as if he wasn’t sure who was in charge and didn’t want to offend anyone. The last time I’d seen Malcolm he hadn’t offered to shake hands. He’d known I wouldn’t take it.

  Tonight, I took his hand, because Zerbrowski was only human, and whatever I was, only human didn’t cover it.

  Malcolm hesitated in the middle of the handshake, as if I’d surprised him, but he recovered, smiling, his blue eyes glowing with pleasure at the opportunity to help the police. It was a lie. He didn’t want us here. He certainly didn’t want a murder involving his church. I felt nothing as our hands touched, except that he was cool, so he hadn’t fed recently. Other than that, I felt nothing, because I was shielding. I’d gotten really good at shielding lately. I realized that I’d been shielding almost as hard as I could since Jean-Claude, Richard, and I had bound ourselves together in that bed. It wasn’t just guilt that had made me afraid. So Malcolm’s hand was just a hand, cooler than human normal, but just a hand. Good.

  I think we would have been fine if Malcolm hadn’t tried a little vampire power on me. Maybe I was shielding too much, hiding too much of what I was, or maybe he was simply that arrogant. Whatever, he pulsed a little power down his hand into mine.

  I was dizzy for a second, and he got an image of the dead girl in the apartment before I pushed back. I was still a little fuzzy on the whole psychic thing. I tend to overcompensate when I feel attacked. Yeah, I know, of course I overcompensated. It was so terribly me.

  Malcolm stumbled back, and only my grip on his hand kept him on his feet. His eyes were wide, his mouth open in a little O of surprise. If he had just been some powerful vamp that tried to mind-fuck me, then I’d have taught him his lesson, and we’d have gone on about our investigation, but he was their master. I learned something in those few seconds, something I hadn’t guessed. Every human in the church had a mentor, and I’d assumed their vampire mentors were the ones that would bring them over when the time came. I knew the mentors took blood from their human trainees, but when push came to shove, Malcolm did those last three bites. Malcolm had brought over most of those hundreds, personally. Which meant when I shoved my power into him, it went through him like some huge sword. Through him and into the rest.

  It was as if I could suddenly touch them, as if my hand shot through Malcolm’s palm, through him, and into their bodies. I felt their pulses, some hearts, some wrists, some necks. I felt the pulse of all those vampires, felt it sluggish and oh, so slow. So long, so long since some of them had fed as they were meant to feed. He didn’t let them hunt. He didn’t even let them go to the clubs and take willing food there. I saw an endless stream of church members garbed in white, like virgin sacrifices, offering their necks. Only taking a little blood, just enough blood, never enough to be satisfied, just enough not to die.

  I saw the thick viscous punch in the parish hall, and I knew that it contained just a little blood from at least three different vamps. Malcolm made sure of that. He didn’t want to accidentally blood oath them to someone else. But he never used his own blood, for fear of what it would mean.

  Malcolm jerked away from me, but it was too late. I didn’t need him anymore.

  I looked past him at a girl with long dark hair and glasses. It was the first vampire I’d ever seen with glasses. She grabbed her chest, and I knew why. Her heart was beating. But I saw other things. I saw that once she’d been human here, and she’d knelt and given herself over, but it was a thing of chaste hands on her covered shoulders. No one had ever held her close, gripped her against their bodies, fed so powerfully that her body bucked against them, and sex was a pale thing compared to it.

  “Stop it,” Malcolm said, “stop it, let them go!”

  I turned slowly to look at him, and whatever he saw in my face made him take a step back. “You gave them to me,” I said, and my voice had a slow, honeyed feel to it. Power, such power. I’d learned only last night that vampires could act as a sort of witch’s familiar to me. I’d thought it needed to be a vampire that I had some connection with, but I was wrong. I could feed on them all, use them like some kind of giant undead battery.

  Zerbrowski came up close to me, though even he shivered when he was close enough to whisper, “Anita, what’s happening?”

  “He tried to use vampire powers to find out what I knew,” I said in that same slow, luxurious voice. It was as if my voice was something you could hold in your mouth and suck, like candy. Jean-Claude’s trick, and the thought was enough. He was suddenly aware of me, and what was happening. But most of what was happening, he needed to know. He was the Master of the City, not Malcolm. He had tolerated the treaty that the old master had made before her death, but now . . . well, we’d see. But that was for another night. This night was about murder.

  “Are you hurt?” Zerbrowski asked. He sounded like he didn’t think so, but knew something was wrong.

  “No,” I said, “no, I’m not hurt.” I thought, if I can feel some of their emotions, if I can look into their faces and see memories, what else can I do?

  I thought, Avery, Avery, where are you? I felt an answer, like a small play of wind against my face. I turned toward that wind, and the left-hand side of pews. “Avery, Avery, Avery.” I spoke his name, each time a little louder, not yelling, but with force in it.

  A vampire stood up in the middle of a row. He was average height, with short brown hair, and a face that was handsome in a soft, unfinished way, as if he’d been barely legal when they killed him.

  I held out my hand to him. “Avery, come to me, come to me, Avery, come to me.”

  He started to push his way through the crowd of other people. A hand grabbed his wrist, a human woman shaking her head, saying, “Don’t go.”

  He jerked away from her, and I heard his voice as if he’d been standing next to me. “I have to go, she’s calling me.” And he turned eyes to me that were lost in vampire light, burning like brown glass in the sun, but the look on his face was one I’d only seen on humans. Humans that were bespelled by vampires. Humans that couldn’t say, no.

  Malcolm’s rich voice filled the room. “Children, stop him, stop him from answering her call. She’s is the Master of the City’s whore. She will corrupt our Avery.”

  I have to say the whore comment pissed me off. I turned to Malcolm, and I let my anger fill my voice. “I’ll corrupt them? My God, you’ve ruined them all. You stole their mortal lives, for what, Malcolm? For what?” I yelled the last, and the words held heat like the wind from some great fire.

  All those little vampires that were still held on the lines of my power cried out. I’d hurt them, and I hadn’t meant to. I tried to make it up to them, and the problem was that the anger was mine, but I wasn’t very good at comforting people. But Jean-Claude was, in a way. It was that old, old problem of his and his line of vampires. If the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems begin to look like nails. If the only tools you have are seduction and terror, and you’re trying to be nice . . . well, there you go.

  65

  I COULD TASTE their pulses on my tongue. Not just one, but hundreds, as if I’d suddenly had a truckload of candy shoved in my mouth. Candy that was hard and sweet and melted slow across my tongue, but it wasn’t just cherry, or grape, or root beer. It was like a thousand different flavors filled my mouth, so that instead of being delicious, it was overwhelming.

  I couldn’t pick one flavor, one pulse to follow. I literally couldn’t pick just one, because I couldn’t sort them out. I was choking on too many choices. Until I could choose one thread to follow, I couldn’t swallow any of them. I collapsed to my knees, drowning in a thousand different scents, different skins. I c
ould smell their skin, that wonderful smell at the side of the neck where the skin smells sweetest when you’re in love. But it was a different scent for each neck: aftershave, perfume, cologne, soap, sweat. It was as if I’d walked up to each of them and put my face just above their skin—close enough to kiss—and breathed in the scent of them.

  Zerbrowski was beside me, his gun out, but not pointed at anyone, sort of ceilingward. “Anita, what’s wrong? Did he hurt you?”

  Who, I thought? Who was he? There were so many “hes.” Which one did he mean?

  I tried to swallow past all those pulses in my mouth, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get this bite down. It was too much.

  Jean-Claude’s voice was in my head. “Ma petite, you must choose.”

  I managed to think, “Can’t.”

  “Who did you go there to find?” he asked.

  Who did I go there to find? That was a good question. Who? It all went back to who.

  Zerbrowski grabbed my arm, hard. “Anita! I need you here. What’s happening?”

  He needed me. I saw Smith and Marconi both with weapons drawn. They needed me, because they couldn’t feel it. I had to function, to think, to speak, or things were going to get out of hand. I was a federal marshal tonight, I had to remember that. I remembered something else, something that had been washed away in all that scent.

  Avery, I needed Avery. I thought the name, and just like that, it was his pulse on my tongue. His skin smelled like cologne, something expensive so that it was powdery and sweet, almost like good perfume, but underneath that was sweat. He hadn’t showered tonight. The thought made me wonder what else besides sweat he hadn’t washed away. It was as if I was close to him again, as if my face passed down his body just above his skin. My breath was warm against his skin and helped blow the scents back from his skin to my nose, my mouth. I didn’t simply smell the scents down his body, I tasted them. A faint taste, as if smell was the more important, but smell and taste were aligned differently than ever before. More intimately, somehow. That part wasn’t Jean-Claude’s power, but Richard’s and I fought not to think of him, not to open the links between us farther than they were already. I did not want Richard in my head right now.

  Jean-Claude let me know without words, or if with words, it was too quick to register, like a kind of telepathic shorthand, that he would guard me from Richard. He would not let me drown in still more sensation. But it was thanks to closer ties with Richard that I could smell and taste my way down Avery’s body and enjoy it, or rather not be disgusted by it. Wolves, like dogs, do not think of scent and taste as a human does. They like it when we smell like live things. Avery had had sex and hadn’t cleaned up afterward. I wasn’t disturbed by that, more curious, because, thanks to Jean-Claude’s marks and my own power, I knew Avery was as neat and meticulous in his person as he was in his housekeeping.

  Zerbrowski squeezed my arm hard enough to bruise. “Anita, damn it, we can’t shoot him. The warrant doesn’t have our name on it. We’re not executioners. Anita, wake up!”

  I blinked at him and saw Avery standing just on the other side of him. Marconi had stepped up and had his gun pressed against Avery’s chest. Avery wasn’t doing anything threatening, just standing and trying to walk forward against the press of the gun. He was trying to come to me. His face wasn’t empty like a zombie’s, in fact he was smiling, and so very present in his skin, but I’d called him, and even a gun barrel against his heart hadn’t stopped that order.

  “Stop,” I said.

  Avery stopped trying to move forward and just stood there, waiting. He stared down at me with a look that only your best boyfriend should have given you, but I didn’t mind. I wanted to pull his shirt out of his pants and rub his skin along mine. It was sexual, true, but it was also that urge that makes dogs roll in smelly stuff. It just smelled so good, and I could carry the scent with me and explore it at my leisure. I knew in that moment that wolves and dogs collect scents the way people collect rocks or houseplants—just because they like them, and they think they’re pretty. Some smells just make you happy like a favorite color; the fact that sweat and stale sex was “pretty” to that part of me that was Richard was a puzzle for another day. Now, I just tried not to question it too closely and not to do physically what I’d already done metaphysically.

  “I’m alright, Zerbrowski.” But my voice was distant and lazy with power. That I couldn’t help, but when he pulled me to my feet, I was able to stand. Yea for me. I took a step forward and said, “It’s okay, Marconi, I told him to come to me.”

  Marconi had a funny look on his face. “Not out loud you didn’t.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry about that.” But I wasn’t looking at Marconi, I was looking at Avery. I was looking at him like you’d gaze on a lover, but it was all tied up with food, and smell, and things that were so nonhuman that I was having trouble processing them. I wanted to scent mark him. He was mine. I wanted to wrap his scent on my body and think about those smells and what they meant. It was as if scent was like a photograph of a murder scene. I could carry it around and “look” at it over and over again, think about it. The sense of smell had jumped from somewhere near the bottom of my sensory list to just behind visual, and the only thing that kept it lower than sight was that I was too much a primate to trust my nose that much.

  “Put up your guns,” Zerbrowski said, “welcome to the wide world of weird vampire shit.” He didn’t sound happy, but I didn’t look to see what face went with the tone, because that would have meant looking away from Avery, and I didn’t want to do that.

  He was a little clean-cut for my taste. His hair was a soft, medium brown, cut short the way a father or grandfather would cut it. The male hairstyle that has never really gone out of style for fifty years. His eyes matched his hair—a soft brown. His eyebrows were darker than his hair and arched in that way that men’s eyebrows will, perfectly, while most women have to pluck for that line above the eye. He didn’t have enough eyelashes, but they seemed thicker than they were because they were dark. His face was a soft oval, only the dark scattering of beard stubble saving him from looking even younger than he was. He was almost six feet, but seemed shorter, though I wasn’t sure why. Everything about him said that here was someone who’d never had anything too bad happen to him. It wasn’t just his face and coloring that was soft and undramatic; it was him. He had that flavor in my head of someone who’d never really been tested. How did you get to be a vampire and not lose that soft edge?

  I got sadness from him, but he didn’t feel like someone who had just killed a woman, on purpose, or by accident. Was I wrong? Or had he not been the only vampire in that spotless apartment?

  Avery stood in front of me with a look that was sad, so sad. Did he know? Had he done it?

  There was a knock on the church doors. The sound startled all of us, I think. You just didn’t knock on the doors of a church. You came in, or you didn’t, but you didn’t knock. A voice called, “Sergeant Zerbrowski?”

  Zerbrowski went to the door and peeked out. When he came back through the door, he had a piece of paper in his hand. It was thicker than it used to be, but most of the additions were things that would keep me out of jail and wouldn’t do a damn thing for Avery’s health.

  Zerbrowski came toward me holding out the paper. I opened it up and read it, though I already knew what it was. It was my warrant of execution. The days when any vampire hunter would kill someone without seeing the warrant first were past, but I’d gotten cautious sooner than some. I’d also never been successfully sued. One of our fellow hunters was still in prison for doing his job before the paperwork came through. Everyone who worked with me knew that without this little piece of paper, there was no vampire hunt. With it, I had almost carte blanche.

  I scanned it. It was pretty standard. I could legally hunt down and execute the vampire, or vampires, responsible for—I read the names of the victims. It helped me focus. Helped me remember why I was doing this kind of work—and any other murder
victims that might follow. I was empowered to use any force necessary to find and stop the murderers of these people. I was further empowered to do anything within my abilities to execute this warrant with all due haste. The bearer of this warrant is allowed to enter any and all buildings in pursuit of the suspects. Any person, or persons, human or otherwise that stand in the way of the lawful execution of my duty, forfeit their rights under the Constitution of these United States and the State of Missouri. There was other legalese, but what it all boiled down to was that I could have turned back to Avery, put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and not only would the police not stop me, but legally, they had to help me carry out my duty.

  The entire idea of warrants of execution was drafted when vampires had first gotten legal rights, and you couldn’t kill them on sight just for being vampires. The warrant had seemed like a step up once, now I looked at it, and thought, Huh. What if Avery hadn’t done it? What if he was innocent?

  I looked at Zerbrowski, and he knew me well enough to frown. “I don’t the like that look. It always means you’re about to complicate my job.”

  I smiled at him and nodded. “Sorry, but I’d like to make sure that I’m serving the warrant on the right vampires.”

  Malcolm came forward. “I would like to see that warrant, if it concerns my church and my followers.”

  I fished it out, flung it open, but held on to it.

  His eyes flicked down the page, and he shook his head. “And you call us monsters.”

  “Don’t take it personally, Malcolm, some of my best friends are monsters.” I folded the warrant up and tucked it away.

  “How can you make jokes, when you have come here to kill one of us?”

  The congregation stirred and started to stand. There were hundreds of them and only a handful of us. This could get out of hand, and I didn’t want that. Legally, if anyone interfered, then I could kill them, too. The last thing I wanted on my hands was a church full of martyrs.