Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10

by Laurell Hamilton

I could feel the stuff clinging to my bare back where Damian had touched me. My pants were soaked with it from the knees down. The clothes would have to be burned or at least thrown away. This was one of the reasons I kept a pair of coveralls in my Jeep to put on over my clothes at crime scenes and some zombie raisings. Of course, I hadn’t expected to get this messy before I’d even left the damn cabin.

  “Showers sound great,” I said. “You first.”

  “May I suggest that you go first. A hot shower is a wonderful luxury, but for Damian and me it is a luxury, not a necessity.”

  “Good point,” I said. My hair had kept the stuff from soaking to my scalp, but I could feel it when I touched my hair.

  It. I kept saying, “it.” I was shying away from the fact that “it” was Damian’s body rotted and leaked out upon the floor. Sometimes when it’s too horrible you have to distance yourself from it. Language is a good way to do that. Victims become an “it” very quickly, because sometimes it’s too horrible even to say, “he,” or “she.” When you’re scraping pieces of someone’s loved one off your hands, it has to be an “it.” Has to be, or you run screaming. So, I was covered in black, greenish it.

  I washed my hands thoroughly enough so I could dig through my suitcase without contaminating the clothes. I’d picked out jeans and a polo shirt. Asher appeared behind me. I looked up at him.

  “What?” I asked. It sounded rude even to me. “I mean, what now?”

  Asher rewarded me with a smile. “We will have to meet Colin tonight.”

  I nodded. “Oh, yeah. He is definitely on my dance card for tonight.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “We cannot kill him, Anita.”

  I stared at him. “You mean we can’t, as in it’s too hard a job or we can’t, as in we shouldn’t do it?”

  “Perhaps both, but certainly the latter.”

  I stood. “He sent Nathaniel to us to die.” I looked into the suitcase, not seeing it, just not wanting to look up. There was a rim of blackness at the base of my fingernails that the scrubbing at the sink hadn’t lifted. There had been a moment when the power broke between us, and I knew it would work, but until that second . . . I had tried very hard not to think about it. It was only after I’d gone into the bathroom to clean my hands off that I started to shake. I’d stayed in the bathroom until my hands were steady. The fear was under control, all that was left was anger.

  “I do not think anyone was meant to die, Anita. I think it was a test.”

  “A test of what?” I asked.

  “How much power we truly have. In a way it was a compliment. He would never have contaminated Nathaniel if he thought we had no hope of saving him.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because, to kill a pomme de sang of another master vampire is a mortal insult. Wars have begun over less.”

  “But he knows we can’t make war on him without the Council hunting us down.”

  “Which is why we cannot kill him.” Asher held up his hand, which stopped me with my mouth open. I closed it. “The last master you killed was threatening your life directly. You killed her to protect yourself. Self-defense is allowed. But Colin has not offered us personal violence.”

  “That is cutting it pretty damn close, Asher.”

  He gave a graceful nod. “Oui.”

  “So if we kill him the Council comes back to town and cleans our clock.”

  Slight frown lines showed between his eyes. I don’t think he understood the slang. “They will kill us,” he said.

  I’d met some of the Council, and I knew he was right. Jean-Claude had enemies on the Council and now so did I. No, I did not want to give the nightmares of all vampirekind an excuse to come back to St. Louis and wipe us out.

  “What can we do? Because, mark me on this, Asher, they will pay for what they did to Nathaniel.”

  “I agree. If we do nothing to avenge the insult, it will be viewed as a sign of weakness and Colin may come against us and kill us.”

  “Why is everything so damned complicated with you guys?” I asked. “Why couldn’t Colin just believe we’d come down here to rescue Richard?”

  “Because we didn’t leave town.” Nathaniel’s voice came thin but steady from the bed. He blinked lilac eyes at me. Cherry had bandaged his chest and the neck wound was covered with a large piece of taped gauze. I assumed the thigh wound was similarly covered, but the bedspread covered him from the waist down.

  “When Richard got out of jail, Colin expected us to leave town. When we didn’t, he thought we meant to take over his territory.”

  I went to stand by the bed. “Zane said you went off with one of Verne’s werewolves. How did the vamps get hold of you?”

  “Mira,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “The werewolf’s name is Mira.” He looked away from me as if he didn’t want to look me in the face while he talked. “She took me home. We had sex. Then she left the room. When she came back the vampires were with her.” He looked up at me. I found myself staring down into his eyes and the need in them was so raw it made me flinch.

  “There were too many of them for you to fight, Nathaniel,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “Fight?” He laughed, and it was so bitter it hurt just to hear it. “There was no fight. I was already chained down.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  He let out a long sigh. “Anita, Anita, God.” He put one arm across his eyes.

  Zane came to the rescue, sort of. “You know that Nathaniel is a submissive?”

  I nodded. “I know he likes to be tied up and . . .” The light dawned. “Oh, okay. I get it. Mira invited you home for some S and M sex.”

  “D and S, dominance and submission,” Zane said, “but yeah.”

  I took a deep breath, mistake. The room still stank of bodily fluids, the unpleasant kind. “So she wrapped you up like a present and gave you to them?”

  “Yes,” he said, softly. “The sex had been good. She was a good top.”

  “Top?” I asked.

  “Dominant,” Zane said.

  Ah.

  Nathaniel curled onto his side, drawing the bedspread around him. “The master, Colin, paid her to bring one of us to them. Anyone of us. It didn’t matter who. It could have been Jason, or Zane, or Cherry. One of their animals, he said.” He huddled down into the blankets, eyes fluttering shut, then open, then shut.

  I looked at Cherry. “Is he alright?”

  “I gave him something to help him sleep. It won’t last long. Our metabolisms are too fast, but he’ll get maybe half an hour, an hour if we’re lucky.”

  “If you’re not going to take a shower, I’d like to,” Damian said.

  “No, I’m getting in.”

  “But you can’t wear what you’ve picked out,” Asher said.

  I frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Jean-Claude sent a trunk of clothes just for this occasion,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “no more leather and lace shit.”

  “I agree with you, Anita,” Asher said. “If we were simply going to kill them it wouldn’t matter what we wore, but we are putting on a show as much as anything. Appearance will matter.”

  “Well, shit,” I said. “Fine, I’ll dress up, we won’t kill anyone, but you better come up with something that we can do to them. They can’t abuse our people like this and just walk away.”

  “They will expect retribution, Anita. They are waiting for it.”

  I looked at Nathaniel cuddled so deep in the blankets that only the top of his head showed. “This retribution better be good, Asher.”

  “I will do my best.”

  I shook my head. “You do that.” I went into the shower without any clothes to put on because the trunk was in the other cabin. I figured with both coffins in my room I didn’t need the trunk. I’d really hoped we wouldn’t be opening the damn thing. I hated dressing up in normal dressy clothes. Jean-Claude’s idea of dressing up was always
worse.

  15

  IT TOOK THREE rounds of shampoo to get my hair clean. The stuff on my body didn’t seem to want to come off unless I scrubbed. There is that point in the middle of the back that you just can’t do yourself. It is one of the few areas that married people have an edge on us single folk. I finally had to turn the shower on as high as it would go and just let it pound the middle of my back. The stuff finally sloughed off and floated down the drain.

  The stuff clung like nothing I’d ever had to clean off before. That included real rotting corpses and zombies. None of it had ever been as tough to get rid of as Damian’s . . . fluids.

  Cherry was the one who knocked on the door and brought in a pile of clothes. I didn’t like any of them. Too much leather for my taste. It took two trips back and forth, wrapped in nothing but a towel, to find clothes that I was willing to wear. There was one red leather bodysuit that seemed to be nothing but straps. It might be interesting for private use just between Jean-Claude and myself, but wearing it in public was definitely out.

  I ended up in a short-sleeved, black velvet, midriff top with such a low neckline that it took a special bra under it just so the bra didn’t show. Jean-Claude had kindly packed the bra. It was one of those uplifting ones, and if there was one thing my chest didn’t need, it was more lift; but it was also the only bra I had access to that plunged low enough that it didn’t show with the shirt. There was a velvet dress that would have needed the bra for its neckline, too. Jean-Claude had been a busy little vampire.

  Everything fit perfectly, if you were willing to wear it. I picked a leather skirt as the lesser of evils. There was a pair of thigh-high black boots that zipped in the back. The tops of the boots were wide and stiff and open at the back. The fronts of the boots came up to the absolute limit of my legs, brushing my groin at odd moments if I walked wrong. The boots had to have been custom-made for me. I didn’t remember Jean-Claude ever measuring me for shoes. He’d held pretty much every inch of me in his hands at one point or another. Apparently, that had been enough.

  But the leather skirt had belt loops for my shoulder holster, and the velvet midriff had enough sleeves that the shoulder straps didn’t dig into any bare flesh. The side straps felt a little strange against my bare sides when I moved, but it was doable. Of course, there was no way to wear an inner-pants holster in the skirt.

  I had added the spine sheath down my back and both wrist sheaths. The spine sheath showed underneath the midriff, but hey, they expected us to be armed. Frankly, I wanted a second gun with me. One of the good things about flying on Jean-Claude’s private jet as opposed to an airline was that I had several guns to choose from.

  It was a mini-Uzi on a shoulder strap. It had a clip that attached to the back of the skirt so it didn’t swing around too much, but you could pull it out into the open with one hand.

  When I put it on, Asher’s only comment had been, “We can’t kill them, Anita.”

  I looked at the weapons that I’d laid out on one of the last clean spaces of floor. There was an American Derringer, a second Browning Hi-Power, a sawed-off shotgun, and one pump-action shotgun.

  I looked up at him. “I didn’t bring everything I had.”

  “So glad to hear it,” he said. “But the machine gun is a killing weapon, nothing more.”

  “The reason I’m in this outfit is because you said we need to make a good show. Well, we can’t cause harm from a distance. We can’t spread corruption with any of your bites. What the hell are we going to do, Asher? What can we possibly do that will impress them?” I swung the Uzi into my left hand, pointing it at the ceiling. “If there’s anyone with him tonight that we can kill, I’ll kill them with this.”

  “And you think that will impress or frighten Colin?”

  “Have you ever seen a vampire cut in half by one of these?” I asked.

  Asher seemed to think about that for a few seconds as if he’d seen so many horrible things that he just wasn’t sure. Finally, he shook his head. “No, I have not.”

  “Well, I have.” I let the gun swing back to the small of my back. “It impressed me.”

  “Did you do it?” he asked, his voice soft.

  I shook my head. “No, just saw it done.”

  Jamil knelt beside me. He was wearing something that had started life as a black T-shirt but had been cut so severely at the neck, arms, and midriff that it looked more like a wishful thought than a shirt. It covered his nipples, and that was about it. But his upper body was muscular and impressive nearly bare. We were going for impressive tonight. He’d gotten to keep his black jeans and I was jealous. But Jamil didn’t belong to Jean-Claude, so there’d been no time to have some piece of leather specially made. Truthfully, I hadn’t been a hundred percent certain Jamil was even going to come with us. Not only was Jamil coming but so was Richard. Surprise, surprise. Jamil took an armload of clothes for Richard to choose from. Shang-Da was coming along as well, and he needed to change. Though he, like Jamil, had never belonged to Jean-Claude intimately enough to have specially made clothes. So it was whatever they could find in his suitcase. Happy hunting.

  16

  DAMIAN HAD REFUSED to share a shower with Asher, even though they were both dirty and would need someone to help scrape the stuff from the harder-to-reach places. I’d suggested they share a shower because they were both guys. I knew that Asher was bisexual, but I still had a hard time wrapping my Midwestern upbringing around the fact that it didn’t matter what sex Asher shared a shower with, he saw both as sexual objects. I knew it, and it didn’t really bother me, but every once in a while, the knowledge surprised me. I don’t know why.

  Asher came out of the shower with nothing but a towel knotted at his waist. Damian went into the shower. The last of the night. Jason had helped Asher scrape the harder-to-reach places. Jason didn’t tease the vampire. He just went in, helped him clean up, and got out. I’d actually wondered, after Jason’s little confession, if he would tease men the same way he teased women. Apparently not.

  The scars on Asher’s chest were very visible. As he walked, the scars on his right thigh flashed from the towel. The rest of him was a pale golden perfection. He’d once known what it was like to walk into any room and have people gasp at his beauty. People still gasped, but not for the same reasons.

  Zane and Cherry were being very careful not to look at him. They kept their faces blank, but their discomfort screamed how they felt.

  Asher’s face was bland, as if he didn’t notice, but I knew he did.

  Jason didn’t look away. He’d pulled on a pair of leather pants but waited on the shirt and boots because he still had to help Damian flake the gunk off his skin. He sat on one of the coffins, swinging his bare feet, looking at me. His eyes flicked to the vampire, then back to me.

  Oh, hell. Who died and made me den mother? You’d think hanging around with this many preternatural studly guys would mean there was a lot of sex, and sexual tension was in the air a lot, but more than sex, was pain. I don’t know if it was because I was a girl, or what, but I ended up doing a hell of a lot more hand-holding than any of the guys. Maybe it was a girl thing. I certainly didn’t think of myself as particularly compassionate. So why was it me walking across the floor to the vampire?

  Asher was kneeling in front of the trunk. His back was smooth and almost perfect, only a few trailing scars where the holy water had dripped down his side. His golden hair hung thick and wet, water trailing in silver lines down his back. There weren’t enough towels, so the guys were forgoing a second towel for the hair.

  I took the towel I’d used for my hair from the back of the desk chair. I’d put it there so it could dry. I went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, lowering his head, trying to get the wet hair to cover his scarred face. The gesture was automatic, no thinking required, and it hurt my heart to see him do it.

  If we’d been lovers, I’d have licked the water off his chest, caressing my tongue down the deep scars, maybe even slid a
hand under the towel. But we weren’t lovers, and I’d never seen him nude. I didn’t know what was under the towel. He’d told me once that he was still fully functional, but that didn’t really tell me what he looked like under the towel. And as comfortable as I was with him, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If it was as bad as his chest, I was almost sure I didn’t want to see. Yes, I admit there was a small part of me that did want to know for sheer curiosity’s sake.

  I did the best I could. I laid my face against the roughness of his right cheek. “What are you going to wear?”

  He sighed and leaned his face into me. One hand touched my hand, sliding my arm across his damp chest. “I think we shall need to shock them. I shall wear very little.”

  I moved back enough to see his face. He kept my hand pressed to his chest, resting on the smooth perfection of his left side. “You sure about that?”

  He smiled but blinked at the same time so I couldn’t read his eyes. He patted my hand and let me go. “I am accustomed to the effect I have on people, ma cherie. I have had centuries to use it to my advantage.”

  I stood and draped the towel over his shoulders. “You’ll need this for your hair.”

  He grabbed the ends of the towel like a shawl, pressing the cloth to his nose and mouth. “It smells of the sweet scent of your skin.”

  I touched a strand of that heavy, gold hair. “You say the nicest things.” I stared down into that face, into the frosted blue of his eyes, and felt something low in my body tighten. A sudden flexing of lust that made me catch my breath. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it’s just a gesture, a turn of the head, and you catch your breath, your body reacts on a level that you can’t control. When it happens, you pretend it didn’t, you hide it. Heaven forbid that the object of such instant desire should know what you’re thinking. But tonight, I let it show in my eyes. I let him see how he moved me.

  He took my hand and laid a gentle kiss against my skin. “Ma cherie.”

  Jason came to stand near us, leaning against the nearest coffin as he’d leaned against the desk. “Damn,” he said.