[Anita Blake 18] - Flirt

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  There was another moment of that eye flicker.

  I put power into the words, all the power I had, and willed it to work. I called the dead to me. I called them with the power that had made my dog rise from the grave when I was fourteen. I called them to me with the power that had put a suicidal professor in my dorm room in college. I called them with that part of me that made vampires hover around me like I was the last light in all the darkness. I called the dead to me, and bade them to rest and walk no more.

  I shoved my power into them, and felt something else in there. Something else that shoved back, but the bodies were too much mine. Too much of my power animated them, and one by one their eyes emptied and they stood like shells waiting for orders.

  “Rest and walk no more; by steel, grave, and will, I command thee.” They shambled back to their graves in a silent mass; the only sounds the shuffling of feet and the brush of cloth. Ilsa Bennington came to stand in front of us. She was still the lovely flirt that her husband had been willing to kill for, but her blue eyes were as empty as all the rest. Her mouth was smeared with redder things than lipstick.

  Nicky whispered, “God.” But when I moved to the side of the grave, he and Jacob moved with me. Ilsa lay down on the grave and the dirt flowed over her like water. I’d never had so many zombies lay to rest at once. The dirt made a sound like waves crashing as it covered them all back up.

  We stood in a silence so deep I could hear the pulse in my own body thundering in my ears. Then the first night insect called, then a distant frog, then the wind blew through the clearing, and it was as if the world had been holding its breath. We could all breathe again.

  “You almost got us eaten alive,” Jacob said.

  “You kidnapped me, remember?”

  He nodded, and he was pale even by moonlight. Ellen made a small moan in his arms. “She’ll be all right,” he said, as if someone had asked the question.

  He looked at the gun that was still in his other hand underneath her body. I watched the thought run through his eyes. “Don’t do it,” I said.

  “Why not? You don’t have any more zombies to eat me.”

  “Jacob,” Nicky said, “don’t.”

  “You’ll kill me for her, won’t you?”

  He just nodded.

  Jacob looked at me. “I wish I’d turned down this job.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  He looked at Nicky, then back to me. “They tortured our lions to get this location.” I didn’t know who he was saying it to.

  “We’d have done the same,” Nicky said.

  “You’ve destroyed my pride,” he said.

  “No, Jacob,” I said, “you destroyed it when you put yourself on the wrong side of me and mine.”

  He looked at me then, his eyes so wide there was a flash of white to them. “I’m going to try to leave before your people get here. Oh, yeah,” he said, “I feel them like something hot riding closer, so much power coming to your rescue, as if you need rescuing.” He laughed, but not like it was funny.

  “Go, Jacob,” Nicky said.

  Jacob looked at me. “If your name ever comes up in connection with another job, I’ll turn it down.”

  “No matter how much money they offer you?” I asked.

  He nodded. “There isn’t a price big enough to get me to come near you again.” He actually looked at the gun in his hand under Ellen’s body. I watched him think about it. “I’ll make you a deal, Anita Blake. You don’t come near me, and I will leave you the fuck alone.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  Nicky hugged me. “I don’t think I’m leaving, Jacob.”

  “I know that.” He looked at me then, his eyes so wide there was a flash of white to them. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to leave. I’ll gather everyone up, and we’ll leave you and your men alone. I’d put a sign above St. Louis for all the hired thugs, if I could.”

  “What would it say?” I asked.

  “Here is a bigger motherfucker than you are.”

  Jacob returned my weapons and trusted me not to shoot him in the back. He walked to the edge of the cemetery with Ellen in his arms and only when he was about to enter the trees did he turn and look at me. Maybe I should have shot him, but my lioness was content with beating his ass and letting him go. In the world of lions, he wouldn’t be back. Here was hoping my lion knew what she was talking about.

  THE FIRST HINT of dawn showed above the trees, making them look even blacker against the growing light. I felt Jean-Claude’s frustration. He could not come for me, but there were others who could. Others that daylight worked just dandy for, and as if I’d called them just by thinking of them, Micah and Nathaniel came out of the woods with guns, and other dark figures came with them. The cavalry had arrived.

  They held me while the other guards made sure there were no more bad guys. They had Nicky at gunpoint, on his knees with his hands behind his head. He looked like he was familiar with the position. I was holding them, and crying, which I never did. “I thought they’d kill you.”

  “When you didn’t come back from lunch, Bert called us to see if you’d gone home,” Micah said.

  Nathaniel put his forehead against mine. “Then we couldn’t find you, and you missed the call from the other marshal about the vampire execution. We went back to the restaurant you had lunch in and Ahsan, the cute waiter, told us about two men and you getting into an SUV with them.” He began to kiss his way down my face. “Then you were gone, all our connections to you were broken. I thought you’d died.” He hugged me so tight I could hear the beating of his heart against my body.

  I hugged him, and Micah kept my other hand. “Jean-Claude kept Nathaniel and Damian going with energy, but we knew you were hurt; that much we felt before it all went black.” He came to us both and Nathaniel opened his arms, so we did a group hug.

  Jason’s voice came. “I almost die for you and I don’t even get a hug?”

  I pulled away enough to see him, and he joined the hug. “Sorry I missed the party but I had to be in charge of finding sunproof housing for the vampires.”

  “I felt his frustration that he couldn’t get here before dawn.”

  “Frustrated is one word for it. Insanely angry is another,” Jason said, and wiped at the tears on my face.

  “What do we do with this one?” one of the guards asked.

  I turned to look at Nicky, still kneeling at gunpoint. “He’s with me,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me. “I needed help to heal from the injuries, and I needed enough power to raise the dead so they didn’t kill you guys. I rolled him. The dead Rex said that he’d seen male vampires that could do what I do; Brides of Dracula.”

  “Brides of Anita?” Jason asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Are you sure you can trust him?” Micah asked, and the look he gave Nicky wasn’t friendly.

  “I don’t know, but I do know that he protected me from his own pride, and almost took a bullet for me.”

  “Would you have survived without him?” Micah asked.

  I thought about it, and then said, “No.”

  Micah went to Nicky and offered him a hand up. The guards didn’t like it, but they knew not to argue with all of us. Micah stared up at the taller man, studying his face. “Thank you for taking care of her for us.”

  “I helped kidnap her, you know,” Nicky said.

  Micah nodded. “I know.”

  “Is he coming home with us?” Nathaniel asked.

  “I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead,” I said.

  Then Nicky looked at me, his eyes stricken. “Don’t leave me, Anita. Please, don’t leave me.” His face seemed to struggle for an expression, but finally he collapsed to the ground and crawled toward me. He extended one hand. “Please, please, Anita, I don’t understand everything, but the thought of you leaving me behind feels like dying.”

  I looked at the other men. Micah nodded. Nathaniel hugged me. Jason said, “I don’t live with you guys, s
o I don’t think I get a vote.”

  I hugged him with the arm that wasn’t around Nathaniel. “They threatened to kill you; you get a vote.”

  He came to stand with us and looked down at the man with his hand still out. “Touch him and let us feel the power.” That was Jason, so much smarter than he pretended he was.

  I reached out and took Nicky’s hand. The moment we touched, the power jumped between us, climbed over my skin in a warm, tingling rush that caressed Nathaniel’s skin and crossed to Jason. Nathaniel made a small sound. Jason said, “Tasty.”

  Micah came to us, rubbing his hand up and down the goose bumps on his arm; the other hand still held the gun. “You mind-fucked him.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  He kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry you had to do that.” And in that moment I realized that he understood what it had cost me to take Nicky the way I did. I kissed him back and moved into the circle of his arms. I buried my face against the warm scent of his neck and let him hold me. The gun dug into my back a little.

  Nathaniel and Jason were helping Nicky to his feet. The bigger man was crying, crying at the thought that I would cast him aside. Fuck.

  I looked at Nicky watching me with frightened eyes while Jason tried to comfort him and Nathaniel came to join us, his gun peeking from the side of his jeans and ruining the line of his shirt.

  I went to Nathaniel and kissed him, thoroughly and completely, so he melted in against me, our bodies, our hands, pressing against each other. He drew back laughing. “I love you, Anita.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  I nodded. “Home sounds great.”

  We started walking toward the woods. Jason jogged to catch up with us. I realized that Nicky was still standing back by the grave. I looked at him, so tall, so muscular, and so lost.

  “What do I do with him?”

  “What do you do with any of us?” Micah asked.

  “He’s a stranger, and he tried to kill us all.”

  “He would do anything you told him to do, Anita,” Jason said. “He seems to have even less free will than the rest of us do.”

  “I did it on purpose, Jason. I took everything from him on purpose.”

  “You did what you had to do, so you could come back to us,” Micah said.

  “I really wanted a puppy,” Nathaniel said, “but I guess we could say he followed us home, too.”

  “I told you we’d think about a dog.”

  “In the meantime can we take the kitten home?”

  “He’s not a kitten,” I said.

  “He looks like one.”

  I looked at Nicky by the grave and knew what he meant. He looked so alone, but he made no move to follow us, as if he’d simply stand there by the grave until I told him to do something else. Had I told him to stay by the grave? I couldn’t remember.

  “We can’t leave him like that,” Micah said.

  I sighed. “Nicky, come on.”

  His face lit up as if I’d told him tomorrow was Christmas, and he jogged toward us. We slept in the motel that Jason had settled Jean-Claude and the other vampires into so that dawn didn’t find them and do something unfortunate. The four of us shared the king-size bed, and Nicky slept on the floor beside us. He’d started to shake at the thought that he couldn’t stay in the same room with me. God help me.

  But in the morning, I woke with Nathaniel’s vanilla-scented hair across my face, and Micah’s warmth pressed against my back. Jason’s arm and leg were across Nathaniel’s body, touching me even in his sleep. I heard movement on the floor and Nicky sat up, rubbing his face clear of sleep. He smiled at me, as if whatever he saw was the most beautiful thing in the world. I knew that was a lie, but with all my men around me in a warm puppy pile I couldn’t be unhappy. I’d taken Nicky’s free will; I’d eaten his life on purpose. He could never be free, never be his own person again.

  Micah moved against my back and laid a kiss on my shoulder. “Good morning,” he whispered, and that was enough. Did I regret what I’d done to Nicky? Yes, I did, but as Nathaniel blinked those lavender eyes up at me through a veil of his own hair, Jason mumbled, “It’s too early to be up,” his hand rubbing along my shoulder. I could live with it.

  Afterword

  WHERE DO I get my ideas? How do I know if an idea is strong enough to support a whole book? How do I write a whole book? How do I write day to day? What helps me get into the mind-set to pull words out of thin air and write books?

  These are some of the questions I get most often from would-be writers or just people who think being a writer must be interesting, or hard, or easy, or just weird. All of that is true, often at the same moment. I love my job. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was fourteen—well, except for being a wildlife biologist, but that was a fling; my heart has and always will belong to the muse. She hooked me at about age twelve, but she set the hook in hard at fourteen when I read Robert E. Howard’s short story collection Pigeons from Hell. That was my moment of decision that I not only wanted to be a writer but I also wanted to write horror, dark fantasy, heroic fantasy, to make up worlds that never existed, and write about our world with just a few scary changes. That was my epiphany and I never really looked back.

  Flirt is my twenty-ninth novel in about fifteen years of time and space. I know something about writing and about how to treat it like a career. It takes a lot of hard work and a very thick skin so all those early rejections don’t crush you. But first you need an idea.

  I’ll state up front that I don’t understand the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I had a woman who was raised just across the alley from me ask me after I had several books out, “How do you come up with ideas like that, when you were raised here?” The implication was that small-town middle of farm country wasn’t the most likely place to find a writer of paranormal thrillers. I asked her the question I really wanted to ask, “How do you not come up with ideas like that, when you were raised here?”

  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling myself stories, at least in my own head. I would often tell a true story with just a little embellishment, which is one reason I did not pursue journalism. But most often my ideas were about fairies, monsters, vampires, werewolves—scary but beautiful, or scary but emotionally poignant were always the things that attracted me as a child. I guess I’ve never really outgrown the idea that if it can drink my blood, eat my flesh, and be attractive at the same time, then I am all over it. By fourteen, I wrote my first complete short story. It was a real bloodbath where only the baby survived to crawl away into the woods. The implication was that she would starve to death or be eaten by wild animals. I was always such a cheerful child.

  I have no idea where that first story came from and it wasn’t a great idea, but it was the first complete idea and that makes it valuable. But how do I come up with ideas that are book length and good enough to be book length? Funny you should ask that. Because that is exactly what I’m about to try to explain.

  I am going to tell you where the idea for Flirt first came from. I’m going to tell you the first scene that came into my head, because most books start with a scene for me. I have a little mini-movie in my head or freeze-frame of a visual and that is the peg on which the entire book begins to revolve. That first moment is when I see something or experience something, and I feel that little catch in my stomach, or prickling along my skin. Book ideas are a little bit like falling in love. You’re on a date with someone and they do something, or say something, and you get that little uplift where you think, Yeah, I like this one. Ideas are like that. I’ll tell you the first idea, and I’ll even tell you the fertile ground that that idea found to land on, which happened nearly a year before. Because an idea is like a seed; it needs good soil to grow into a nice big book.

  I’m going to tell you the schedule I kept, the pages I wrote per day, the music I listened to, and the books that I read for extra research while writing the book. I am going t
o lay my process bare before you. I’ll let you see it from inception to completion. Will this help you do the same? I’m not sure. Will it answer the question of where I got this idea and how I knew it was a book? Oh, yes.

  First, what do I mean by fertile ground? I mean a set of circumstances or a mind-set that puts me in a headspace to appreciate the idea and to see almost instantly the possibilities of it. This mind-set has allowed me to write short stories in one glorious muse-driven rush, and this once allowed me to get an idea for a book and weeks later have that book be complete.

  It all began with a party at my friends Wendi and Daven’s house, which is states away, and that is important to this tale, because it meant Jonathon, my husband, and I had to fly in and stay at a hotel and were there visiting for several days. Among their other lovely and charming guests was Jennie Breeden, who does the web comic “The Devil’s Panties,” which has nothing to do with satanic underwear, but more to do with the semiautobiographical life of Jennie, but funnier. Jonathon and I were fans of her web comic, and we’d met her for the first time at Comic-Con 2007. She turned out to be a fan of my books, so it was a mutual squee-fest. Which was very cool. We met and visited with all of them more at DragonCon the following year, but coming to visit Wendi and Daven was the first chance for me to spend some quality time with Jennie.

  I have a lot of friends who are writers. I have friends who are artists from sculpture to woodworking to graphic art and comic books. It’s always fun to be with other artsy types. It can help spark ideas and just give you a new perspective, but Jennie’s comic is funny. She records, or writes down, funny things that people say around her for later comics. She’s doing a daily strip and that takes a lot of funny. I could not possibly do a daily strip. I certainly couldn’t be funny every day.

  Jennie and I would hear the same thing, or see the same event, but she would then speak into her phone/recorder and it would be funny, even funnier than what happened. I began to help her collect funny bits, but all my ideas sparked by similar things were dark. It was as if we walked through a slightly altered version of the same world. Her’s was brighter, happier, even funnier, and there was a lot of genuine funny that trip. My version was darker, more overtly sexual, even aberrant, violent, sometimes violently sexy, and an innocent moment turned into a potential for murder and horror in my head. In Jennie’s head, there was a laugh track, and even when the jokes had a sexual flavor to them, they were still charming, and never crossing that line of deviancy that my ideas always seemed to be on the other side of, waving happily at the less debauched across the line. If she had not been speaking out loud into the recorder, or asking us to repeat phrases, I wouldn’t have realized how much funnier her version of events were than mine. She also would tweak the reality and it would begin to build into something much funnier.