Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10

by Laurell Hamilton

  We sat her down laughing in front of her mother. Donna was composed and smiling. I was proud of her. Becca looked up at me, shining. “Mommy says I’m too big to swing now, but you’re strong, aren’t you?”

  I smiled at her, but I looked at Edward when I said, “Yes, I am.”

  15

  DONNA AND EDWARD DID a tender but decorous good-bye. Peter rolled his eyes and scowled as if they’d done a lot more than a semi-chaste kiss. He’d have had a cow if he could have seen them smooching earlier at the airport. Becca kissed Edward on the cheek, giggling. Peter ignored it all and got in the car as soon as he could as if afraid “Ted” might try to hug him, too.

  Edward waved until the car turned onto Lomos and out of sight, then he turned to me. All he did was look at me, but it was enough.

  “Let’s get in the car and get some air conditioning going before I grill you about what the hell is going on,” I said.

  He unlocked the car. We got inside. He started the engine and the air conditioner, though the air hadn’t had time to cool yet. We sat in the expensive hum of his engine with the hot air blowing on us, and silence filled the car.

  “Are you counting to ten?” he asked.

  “Try a thousand and you’ll be closer.”

  “Ask. I know you want to.”

  “Okay, we’ll skip the tirade about you dragging Donna and her kids into your mess and go straight to who the hell is Riker and why did he send goons to warn you off?”

  “First, it was Donna’s mess, and she dragged me into it.”

  My disbelief must have shown on my face because he continued, “She and her friends are a part of an amateur archeology society that tries to preserve Native American sites in the area. Are you familiar with how an archeological dig is done?”

  “A little. I know they use string and tags to mark where an object is found, take pictures, make drawings, sort of like you do for a dead body before you move it.”

  “Trust you to come up with the perfect analogy,” he said, but he was smiling. “I’ve gone with Donna on weekends with the kids. They use freaking toothbrushes and tiny paint brushes to gently clean the dirt away, or dental picks.”

  “I know you have a point,” I said.

  “Pot hunters find a sight that is already being explored, or sometimes one that hasn’t been found, and they bring in bulldozers and backhoes to take out as much as possible in the least amount of time.”

  I gaped at him. “But that destroys more than they can possibly take out, and if you move an object before its site is recorded, it loses a lot of its historical value. I mean the dirt it’s found in can help date it. What is found near an object can tell all sorts of things to a trained eye.”

  “Pot hunters don’t care about history. They take what they find and sell it to private collectors or dealers who aren’t too particular about how an object was found. A site that Donna was volunteering on was raided.”

  “She asked you to look into it,” I said.

  “You underestimate her. She and her psychic friends thought they could reason with Riker, since they were pretty sure it was his people behind it.”

  I sighed. “I don’t underestimate her, Edward.”

  “She and her friends didn’t understand what a bad man Riker is. Some of the really big pot hunters hire bodyguards, goon squads, to help take care of the bleeding hearts, and even the local law. Riker is suspected of having been behind the deaths of two local cops. It’s one of the reasons that things went so smoothly in the restaurant. All the local cops know that Riker’s a suspected cop killer, not personally, but of hiring it done.”

  I smiled, not a pleasant smile. “I wonder how many traffic tickets he and his men have acquired since it happened.”

  “Enough that his lawyer filed a harassment suit. There is no proof that Riker’s people were involved, just the fact that the cops were killed at a dig that had been partially bulldozed, and an eye witness that saw a car with a partial plate that might have been one of his trucks.”

  “Is the witness still among the living?” I asked.

  “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 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 to the road as they appeared. 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 and limb 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.