Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Jean-Claude touched my hand. It made me jump, and turn startled to him. “What is wrong, ma petite?”

  I gave him a look, and rolled my eyes back to our other third. “Ah,” he said.

  I gripped Jean-Claude’s hand tight, and tried to head this fight off. “Richard?” I made his name a question.

  He turned those smoldering brown eyes to me. “What?” That one word was so angry that even he flinched. “I’m sorry, what is it, Anita?”

  “You don’t have to pick a fight with me to leave.” There, that was as honest and as calm as I could make it.

  He frowned at me. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that ever since we started talking to Samuel about his sons and their problem, your tension level has done nothing but rise.”

  “And if we were talking about me having sex with three new women, two of them seventeen years old, wouldn’t you be angry?”

  I thought about it, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “Then don’t expect me to be happy about it.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Richard, apologize? I wouldn’t even be sure what I was apologizing about. Anyway, I’ve told you that my answer was no on the seventeen-year-old.”

  “I think, Jean-Claude, Sampson and I will leave you all for the night.” Samuel stood. “You seem to have much to discuss.”

  Sampson stood alongside his father. He was about two inches taller than Samuel, as if he’d gained height from his mother’s genetics. I wondered what else he might have gained. I really didn’t know much about mermaids, or sirens. I probably needed to remedy that before I got too up close and personal with any of them.

  “Not yet, my friend, please,” Jean-Claude said. He looked at Richard, giving a peaceful face to the unhappy one. “We need some riddles answered before we dare take ma petite among our brethren tomorrow night.”

  Samuel nodded, and sat back down. “You’re wondering, if you take her among nearly a dozen Masters of the City, whether the night will be even more interesting than this one.”

  Jean-Claude nodded. “Exactement.”

  “Are these questions that only a vampire can answer?” Sampson asked.

  “It is from a master like your father that I need advice,” Jean-Claude said.

  “Then, I could go back to the hotel and check on Mother and the twins.”

  “I think they have enough watchdogs, Sampson,” his father said.

  Sampson gave his father a look like he was trying to say something with his eyes, and his father wasn’t getting it.

  “You’re leaving because you think it will make me less upset,” Richard said.

  Sampson looked at him, with that open, honest face, and nodded.

  “That’s…” Richard’s face struggled with his emotions, because a friendly gesture, honestly given, always touched him. “That’s really…good of you.”

  “You obviously don’t like sharing Anita, and now here I am asking you to share her again. We need her to help us. I don’t want to lose my mother and one, or both, of my little brothers.” Sampson shook his head, eyes staring off into space, but not seeing anything in this room. The look in his eyes was haunted as if he, like his father, had given up on avoiding the tragedy. As if he’d been picturing it all in his head for months, trying to make peace with it, and failing.

  He looked up at Richard. “I won’t give up this chance to save my family, but I am sorry that it’s causing you pain.” He came out into the middle of the room, facing Richard. “If my going will make you feel better, I can do that.”

  Richard hung his head, his newly long hair hiding most of his face. When he raised it again he looked like a man coming out of deep water, shaking his hair back from his face. “Insult to injury, damn it.”

  “Did I say something wrong?” Sampson asked.

  “No, nothing wrong,” Richard said. He sighed, and his arms started to unfold, stiffly, as if it hurt him to let go of the anger. “No, I just didn’t want to like you.”

  Sampson looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  “If I can hate you, I can get angry, and storm out. If you’d acted like some kind of lustful asshole, I could have just gone. Wrapped my injured righteousness around me, and gotten the hell out of here.”

  I stood up and faced him; Jean-Claude kept my hand lightly in his. “I’ve already told you, Richard,” I said, “you don’t have to pick a fight to leave.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I do. Because I know that I cripple us as a power by simply not being here when you need me. If I’d been here, Auggie wouldn’t have rolled you. I have no one but myself to blame that you and Jean-Claude fucked Auggie.” His voice held the edge of warmth, and the first bite of his power flickered through the room.

  I took a few steps, leaving Jean-Claude’s hand behind. “Why are you responsible for everything?” I asked. “I deal with more undead than you do; I should have been able to protect myself. And maybe I should have seen it coming, but I’m not beating myself up about it. It happened, and now we deal with it.”

  “Is it really that easy for you, Anita? It happened, now we deal with it, we move on?”

  I thought about it, then nodded. “Yes, it is, because it has to be. My life wouldn’t work if I wallowed in every disaster, every moral quandary. I can’t afford the luxury of self-doubt, not to that degree.”

  “Luxury,” Richard said. “This isn’t luxury, Anita, it’s morality. It’s your conscience. That’s not a luxury item, that’s what separates us from the animals.”

  Here we go again, I thought. Out loud I said, “I have a conscience, Richard, and my own set of morals. Do I ever worry that I’m a bad guy? Yeah, sometimes I do. Do I wonder if I’ve traded away pieces of my soul, just to survive? Yeah.” I shrugged. “It’s the price of doing business in the real world, Richard.”

  “This isn’t the real world, Anita. This isn’t the normal workaday world.”

  “No, but it’s our world.” I was facing him now, almost close enough to touch. He was controlling himself, because his power was only a warm pressure in the air.

  He waved his hands around the room. “This is not where I want to be, Anita. I don’t want to live where my choices are sharing you with other men, or having people die. I don’t want those choices.”

  I sighed, and let him see that I was tired, and sad, and sorry. “There was a time when I would have agreed with you, but I like parts of my life a lot, Richard. I hate the ardeur, but I don’t hate everything it’s brought into my life. I’d have liked to try that whole picket-fence thing, but I think even without the ardeur and the vampire marks, that it wouldn’t have been my gig.”

  “I think it would have been,” he said.

  “Richard, I don’t think you see me. I don’t think you see who I am.”

  “How can you say that to me? If I don’t shield I share your dreams, and your nightmares.”

  “But you’re still trying to shove me in a box that I don’t think fit me even when we met. Just like you’re trying to shove yourself into a box that doesn’t fit you, either.”

  He was shaking his head. “That’s not true. That’s not true.”

  “Which part?” I asked.

  “I think we could have made it, our version of the white picket fence, without him,” and he pointed at Jean-Claude.

  Jean-Claude was giving his most peaceful, empty face, as if he were afraid to do or say anything.

  “Don’t try to blame all our problems on Jean-Claude.”

  “Why not, it’s true. If he had left us alone, not marked us.”

  “You’d be dead,” I said.

  He frowned at me. “What?”

  “Without the extra power of the marks with Jean-Claude you’d never have had the power to kill Marcus and keep the pack.”

  “That’s not true.”

  I just stared at him. “Yeah, Richard, I was there, it is true. You’d be dead, and I’d still be living alone sleeping with my stuffed toys and guns. You’d be dead and I’d be
dead inside, dying of loneliness, not just because you would be gone, but because my life was empty before. I was like a lot of people who do police work. I was my job. I had nothing else. My life was full of death, and horror, and trying to stay ahead of the next horror. But I was losing the battle, Richard, losing myself, long before Jean-Claude marked me.”

  “I asked you to give up the police work. I told you it was eating you up.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not listening to me, Richard, or you’re not hearing me.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to hear you. Or maybe I’m right, and you’re not listening.”

  We stood barely two feet apart, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Some distances are made out of things bigger and harder to travel across than mere miles. We stood and stared at each other across a chasm of misunderstanding, and pain, and love.

  I tried one last time. “Say you’re right. Say if Jean-Claude had left us alone you could have your perfect picture. I still wouldn’t have given up the police work.”

  “You just said, it was destroying you.”

  I nodded. “Just because something’s hard doesn’t mean you give up on it.” Somehow I thought I was talking about more than just police work.

  “You said I was right.”

  “I said, say you’re right. Let’s just pretend that without Jean-Claude here, we would have found a way. But we are bound to him, Richard. We are a triumvirate of power. What we would change if life were totally different doesn’t really matter.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “What matters, Richard, is that we deal with the reality of our now, this minute. There are things we can’t undo, and we all have to work together to make the best of what’s true in our lives.”

  His face was cold with his anger. I hated his face like this, because it was both frightening and more beautiful, as if the anger cleaned away something that distracted the eye from realizing just how amazingly handsome he was. “And what is true in our lives?” His power began to flow through the room, hot water, hotter than you’d want in the bath. The guards around the room shifted uneasily.

  “I am Jean-Claude’s human servant. You are his animal to call. We are a triumvirate of power. We can’t change that. Jean-Claude and I both carry the ardeur. We both need to feed the hunger, and that’s not going to change.”

  “I thought you were hoping to be able to feed from a distance at the clubs, the way Jean-Claude did under Nikolaos.”

  “It crippled his power, which is what the ex–Master of the City wanted to do. I’m not going to cripple us magically because I’m squeamish. No more hiding, Richard. The ardeur is here to stay, and I need to feed it.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “No, what?”

  He let down his shields. I don’t know if it was on purpose, or his emotions got the better of him. Whatever the cause I suddenly heard his thoughts like clear bells in my head: he thought that once I got the ardeur under control I’d dump Micah and Nathaniel and live with him. Be with him. He still hoped, seriously, that some day we’d be a nice little monogamous pair.

  It took only seconds for me to get all of it, but his shields coming down had brought mine down, too, and he felt my shock. My disbelief that he still thought, seriously, that that would ever happen.

  I felt the next thought forming, and tried to stop it, tried to keep it half-formed, or to shut him out, but the emotions were too raw, and I wasn’t fast enough. The thought was, Even if I am pregnant, it would never work.

  Richard’s face showed the shock now. He gaped at me, and whispered, “Pregnant.”

  I said the only thing that came to mind. “Fuck.”

  15

  I SLAMMED EVERY shield I had in place, shut, tight, metal, closed. I thought metal, smooth and thick and impenetrable. I stared at the floor, afraid to meet anyone’s eyes. Afraid of what I’d see in their faces, or what I wouldn’t.

  “Anita,” Richard said, and his hand reached for me.

  I stepped out of reach. I was shaking my head. I didn’t know what I wanted out of this moment, didn’t know what reaction would please me, and which one would piss me off. I’d hoped to keep it secret until I knew for sure. I did not want to open this can of emotional worms until it was a done deal.

  It was Samuel who broke the silence. “Congratulations to both of you. A baby, joyous news indeed.”

  I turned slowly to look at him, because of anyone in the room I cared least what he thought about the news. Him, I could look at. Him, I could be angry with.

  Sampson was already touching his father’s shoulder. “Father, I think we should leave now.”

  Samuel was looking from his son, to me, to Jean-Claude, to most of the people around the room. He looked utterly confused. “But this is wonderful news, and you’re all acting as if someone has died.”

  “Father,” Sampson said, soft and warningly. He was looking at my face, and whatever he saw there made him grab his father’s elbow and try to get him on his feet.

  He stared at his son’s hand until Sampson let it drop away. Samuel then met my gaze. His eyes didn’t look friendly now. They looked older, full of some deep knowledge, and sad around the edges, and angry. “Why such anger, Anita?”

  I started to count to twenty, knew it wouldn’t be enough, and just said it, in a voice that was choking with anger, confusion. “Don’t tell me how to feel, Samuel, you don’t have that right.”

  He stood up, and pushed his son’s hands away from him. “Think how powerful a child you and Jean-Claude could have.”

  “There’s no guarantee it’s his,” I said.

  “The odds are that if you are pregnant, it won’t be any of the vampires,” Richard said. His voice was low and careful, but there was something underneath all that that I hadn’t wanted to hear—eagerness.

  I turned to him, and I don’t know what I would have said, or even done, because Jean-Claude was just suddenly there between us. “Do not do anything rash, ma petite.”

  “Rash, don’t do anything rash!” I pulled away from him. “He’s not unhappy about this and you’re locked down so tight I don’t know what you’re feeling.”

  “I feel that anything I say, or do, in this moment, will upset you.” It was the most diplomatic way I’d ever been told that I was a pain in the ass.

  I fought the urge to scream at him. I managed a voice that was strangled low and tense with the effort not to yell. “Say something,” I said.

  “Are you with child?” he asked in that neutral, pleasant voice of his.

  “I don’t know, but I missed October.”

  Richard came closer and he tried for neutral, failed, but he tried. “Have you ever missed a whole month before?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Emotions fought on his face, and finally he had to turn away, as if whatever expression he had, he was sure I wouldn’t want to see it.

  “Don’t you dare be happy about this, damn it!”

  He turned back, face mostly under control, but his eyes held that look. That soft I-love-you look that once was meant just for me, but which lately I hadn’t seen much of. I’d seen lust, but not this.

  “Would you prefer me to be angry, or sad?” he asked.

  “No, yes, I don’t know.” There, that was the truth. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he looked it around the edges. “Sorry if I’m making this harder, but how could I be completely unhappy if we made a child together?”

  He would pick the very worst way to say it. The way most guaranteed to panic me. “It’s not a child, yet. It’s a bunch of cells smaller than my thumb.”

  His eyes got more careful. “What are you saying, Anita?”

  I hugged myself tight and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. “I don’t know what I’m saying.” But I was beginning to have more sympathy with Ronnie’s idea about just going away and making the choice without any of the men.

  “Would you really be able to kil
l our baby?” he asked, and I didn’t have to see his face to know he looked hurt; I could hear it in his voice.

  “Mon ami, you put the cart before the horse. Let her find out if she is pregnant before we make plans.” Jean-Claude tried to move between us again, tried to block my view of Richard, as if that would help.

  Richard moved around him, so he could still see me. “Anita, could you really kill our baby?”

  I wanted to scream yes, just to see the pain on his face, but on this I couldn’t lie. I already knew the answer, I just didn’t like it. “NO!” I yelled it, and the sound echoed against the stones without the hanging drapes to soften it.

  Richard’s face softened and he started to walk toward me, around Jean-Claude. The look on his face was almost beatific, as if all his dreams had come true. I felt as if I were suffocating in a nightmare, and he looked like that. I had to wipe that look off his face, I had to.

  “What if it’s not yours?” I asked, and my voice was ugly. I wanted it to hurt.

  He hesitated, then got a look that was almost smug. “The odds are in my favor, Anita.” He looked entirely too pleased with himself.

  “Why, just because Jean-Claude and Asher, and hell, Damian are several hundred years old? That doesn’t mean it’s not theirs; look at Samuel. He has three sons, two separate pregnancies.”

  Richard started to frown. He wasn’t walking closer now. Good.

  Jean-Claude sighed, and stepped back as if he’d given up trying to stop the fight.