Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10

by Laurell Hamilton

  He looked at me, and his eyes softened. “Okay.” That was male shorthand for apology and apology accepted. Though truthfully if one of the parties involved hadn’t been female, the shorthand would have been shorter.

  I stepped away from both of them and changed the subject. “Amazing how many bad guys and monsters will talk to me and not the police.”

  He nodded, face still serious. “Amazing. That’s one word for it.” The look he gave me was so studied, so searching, that I wondered if he’d been checking me out as well as Baco.

  I didn’t ask. I didn’t really want to know. But he was right about Baco. If he was what people said, then he wouldn’t want the police anywhere near his home or his work area. They were not kidding about the automatic death penalty. The last execution in this country of a spell caster had been two months ago. It had been in California, which is not a death penalty state for any other crime.

  They’d tried and convicted a sorcerer, or would that be sorceress, of trafficking with the demonic. She’d used a demon to kill her sister so she’d inherit the parents’ estate. They suspected she’d also killed her parents, but they couldn’t prove that. And who cared? They could only kill her once. I’d read some of the trial transcript. She’d been guilty. I had no doubt on that point. But it had been three months from arrest, to conviction, to the carrying out of the sentence. It was unheard of in the American justice system. Hell, it usually takes longer than that to get a hearing date, let alone a full-blown trial. But even California had learned its lesson a few years back. They’d arrested a sorcerer for very similar crimes. They’d tried to give the sorcerer the usual wait for a trial because some congressman or other was arguing that the death penalty shouldn’t be allowed even in cases of magical assassination.

  That sorcerer had called a greater demon in his cell. It killed every guard on the cellblock, and some of the prisoners. He’d finally been tracked down with the help of a coven of white wiccans. The death total had been forty-two, forty-three, something like that. He was killed during the capture attempt. He took thirty slugs, which meant people had emptied their clips into his body once it went down. For none of the police to get caught in the crossfire, they must have been standing over him, pointing down. Overkill, you bet, but I didn’t blame them. They never did find all the body parts of the guards at the prison.

  New Mexico was a death penalty state. I was betting that they would be able to beat California’s three months turn-around from arrest to completion of sentence. I mean, after all, in this state they might actually put you to death for a good old-fashioned murder. Add magic to it, and they’d be scattering your ashes to the wind faster than you could say Beelzebub.

  The actual method of execution is the same for everyone. America does not allow burning at the stake for any crime. But after you’re dead, they burn the body to ash if you were convicted of a crime involving magic. Then they scatter the ashes, usually into running water. Very traditional.

  There are parts of Europe where it’s still legal to burn a “witch” at the stake. There’s more than one reason that I don’t travel outside the country much.

  “Anita, are you still with us?” Ramirez asked.

  I blinked. “Sorry, just thinking about the last execution in California. I don’t blame Baco for being worried.”

  Ramirez shook his head. “Me, either. Be very careful. These are bad people.”

  “Anita knows about bad people,” Bernardo said.

  The two men looked at each other, and again I got that hint that Ramirez didn’t like him. Bernardo seemed to be teasing him. Did they know each other?

  I decided to ask. “Do you guys know each other?”

  They both shook their heads. “Why?” Bernardo asked.

  “You guys seem to have some sort of personal shit going on.”

  Bernardo smiled then, and Ramirez looked uncomfortable. “It’s not personal with me,” Bernardo said.

  Rigby turned away, coughing. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was covering a laugh.

  Ramirez ignored him, all attention for Bernardo. “I know Anita knows how to handle herself around the bad guys, but a knife blade in the back doesn’t care how good you are. The Lobos pride themselves on using blades instead of guns.”

  “Guns are for sissies,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  I had the black suit jacket on over the navy blue polo shirt. If I buttoned two buttons, the jacket hid the Firestar in front and still left me plenty of room to reach for it, and the Browning. In fact the slender cell phone swinging in the right side pocket was more noticeable than the guns. “I just love taking a gun to a knife fight.”

  Bernardo had thrown a black short-sleeved dress shirt over his white T-shirt. It fanned in back and covered the Beretta 10 mil on his hip. “Me, too,” he said and smiled. It was a fierce smile, and I realized that this may have been the first time in weeks that he was going up against something flesh and blood and killable.

  “We’re going in for information, not to do the OK Corral. You do understand that?” I said.

  “You’re the boss,” he said, but I didn’t like the way his eyes looked. They were anticipatory, eager.

  I’d felt paranoid this morning when I slipped the knife in its spine sheath. Now I moved my head a little back and forth feeling the handle against my neck. It was comforting. I almost always carried the wrist sheaths and their matching knives, but the spine sheath was optional. One minute you’re paranoid and packing too much hardware, the next you’re scared, and underarmed. Life’s like that, or my life’s like that.

  “Do you know what los duendos are?” Ramirez asked.

  “Bernardo said it meant the dwarves.”

  Ramirez nodded. “But around here it’s folklore. They’re small beings that live in caves and steal things. But they’re supposed to be angels that got left suspended between Heaven and Hell during Lucifer’s revolt. So many angels were leaving Heaven that God slammed the gates shut and los duendos got trapped outside of Heaven. They were suspended in limbo.”

  “Why didn’t they just go to Hell?” Bernardo asked.

  It was a good question. Ramirez shrugged. “The story doesn’t say.”

  I glanced at Rigby standing behind Ramirez. He was standing so easy, ready, prepared like a grown-up Boy Scout. He didn’t seem worried about anything. It made me nervous. We were about to go into a bar that was thick with bikers, bad guys. There was a necromancer inside so powerful that it made my skin crawl from blocks away. The rest of us looked confident, but it was a confidence born of having been there and done that and survived. Rigby’s confidence struck me as false, not false confidence, but based on a false assumption. I couldn’t know for sure without asking, but I was betting that Rigby had never really been in any situation where he thought he might not come out the other side. There was a softness to him despite the lean muscles. I’d take a few less muscles and more depth to the eyes any day. I hoped that Ramirez didn’t have to come in with Rigby as his only backup. But I didn’t say it out loud. Everyone loses their cherry sometime, somewhere. If things went wrong, tonight might be Rigby’s night.

  “Did you tell us that little story for a reason, Hernando? I mean you don’t really think that Baco or this biker gang are los Duendos?”

  He shook his head. “No, I just thought you might want to know. It says something about Baco to name his bar after fallen angels.”

  I opened the driver’s side door of the Hummer. Bernardo took the hint and went for the passenger side door. “Not fallen angels, Hernando, just caught in limbo.”

  Hernando leaned into the open window of the car. “But they’re not in Heaven anymore, are they?” With that last cryptic comment he stepped back and let me raise the window. He and Rigby watched us drive off. They looked sort of forlorn standing there in the abandoned, broken parking lot. Or maybe it was just me feeling forlorn.

  I looked at Bernardo. “Don’t kill anyone, okay?”

&nb
sp; He slid back in his seat, snuggling against the leather. He looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in hours. “If they try to kill us?”

  I sighed. “Then we defend ourselves,” I said.

  “See, I knew you’d see things my way.”

  “Don’t start the fight,” I said.

  He looked at me with eager brown eyes. “Can I finish it?”

  I looked back at the road searching for a parking space. Whatever spell Baco had been working was over. The atmosphere was a little easier to breathe. But there was still something in the air like close lightning waiting to strike. “Yeah, we can finish it.”

  He started humming under his breath. I think it was the theme from “The Magnificent Seven.” To quote an overused movie line, I had a bad feeling about this.

  37

  BY THE TIME I found a parking space, Bernardo and I had a plan. I was an out of town necromancer wanting to talk shop with one of the only other necromancers I’d ever heard of. If it hadn’t been so damn close to the truth, it would have been a lousy cover story. Even being the truth, almost, it sounded weak. But we didn’t have all day, and besides, I don’t think being sneaky was a strong suit for either of us. We were both more comfortable with the bust-the-door-down-and-start-shooting school, than the concoct-a-good-cover-story-and-infiltrate.

  Bernardo reached his hand out for me just before we crossed the street. I frowned at him.

  He waggled his hand at me. “Come on, Anita, play fair.” He was holding his right hand out to me. I stared at the offered hand for a heartbeat, but finally took it. His fingers slid around my hand a little slower, and a little more proprietarily than necessary, but I could live with it. Lucky for us that I was right-handed, and Bernardo was left-handed. We could hold hands and not compromise either of our gun hands. Usually, I was the only one armed when I was cuddling, so it was only my gun hand we had to worry about.

  I’ve dated men that I couldn’t walk hand in hand with, like an awkward rhythm between us. Bernardo was not one of those men. He slowed his pace to let me catch up to his longer legs, until he realized I was a step ahead of him, tugging on his hand. I have a lot of tall friends. No one ever complains that I can’t keep up.

  The door to the bar was black and blended so well with the building’s facade that you almost missed it. Bernardo opened the door for me, and I let him. It might blow our cover to argue over who got to hold the door for who. Though if he had been my real boyfriend, we’d have had the discussion. Ah, well.

  The minute I stepped inside the bar, no, the second I stepped inside the bar, I knew we were not going to blend in. So many things had already gone wrong. We were not so much overdressed as wrongly dressed. If Bernardo had ditched the black dress shirt and just worn the white T-shirt, and if it hadn’t looked fresh out of the box, then he might have mingled. I was so the only suit jacket in the room. But even the polo shirt and jeans seemed a little much beside what some of the women were wearing. Can you say, short-shorts?

  A girl near us, and I meant girl—if she was eighteen, I’d eat something icky—looked at me with hostile eyes. She had long brown hair that swung past her shoulders. The hair was clean and shiny even in the dim light. Her makeup was light but expertly applied. She should have been deciding who to take to the prom. Instead, she was wearing a black leather bra with metal studs on it and matching shorts that looked like they’d been painted over her narrow hips. A pair of those clunky platform high-heels completed the look. Those platform shoes had been ugly in the seventies and eighties, and they were still ugly two decades later, even if they were back in style.

  She was hanging all over a guy that had to be thirty years or more her senior. His hair and ragged beard were gray. At first glance you’d think he was fat, but he was fat the way an offensive lineman was fat, flesh with muscle under it. His eyes were hidden behind small round sunglasses, even though the bar was cast in permanent twilight. He sat at the table closest to the door, big hands resting on the wood. He was totally at rest, but you still got a sense of how very large he was, how physically imposing. The girl was slender and shorter than I was. I hoped she was his daughter, but doubted it.

  He stood, and a wave of energy moved off of him in a curling, almost visible roil of power. It was suddenly hard to breathe, and it wasn’t the cigarette smoke rolling like a low fog through the room. I’d come in expecting to meet a necromancer. I had not expected a werewolf. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of the type of animal, but call it a hunch—los lobos—had to be werewolves.

  I looked out over that room full of people, and felt their power raise like invisible hackles. Bernardo put his right hand on my shoulder and drew me towards the bar, slowly. It took almost all the restraint I had not to reach for one of the guns. They had not offered us violence. They probably always did this show to unwanted tourists. Almost anyone would get the message and leave. Leaving actually sounded like a really good idea. Unfortunately, we had business, and a really good threat display was not reason enough to stop us. Pity. Because they would not like the fact that we didn’t leave. What if this afternoon’s little display wasn’t the norm? What if they were trying to chase us away because something illegal was going down? Worse and worse.

  The long wooden bar had cleared out as we moved towards it. Fine with me. I didn’t want to be outflanked. The bartender was a woman, surprise, and a dwarf, ah, little person. I couldn’t see over the bar, but she had to have something she was standing on. She had short, thick hair, dark, shot through with strands of white. Her face was the typical rough square, but her eyes were as hard as any I’ve ever seen. Her face was heavily lined not with age, but with wear and tear. One eyebrow was bisected by a heavy white scar. All she needed was a sign above her head that said, “I’ve had a hard life.”

  “What do you want?” she asked. Her tone matched the rest of her, harsh.

  I half expected Bernardo to answer, but his attention was all for the room and the growing air of hostility. “We’re looking for Nicky Baco,” I said.

  Her eyes never flickered. “Never heard of him.”

  I shook my head. Her answer had been automatic. She didn’t even have to think about it. I could have asked to see anyone in the room and the answer would have been the same. I lowered my voice, though I knew most of the things in the room would hear even the barest whisper. “I’m a necromancer. I heard that Baco is one, too. I’ve met a lot of zombie raisers, but never another necromancer.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” She started to rub the top of the bar with a stained rag. She wasn’t even looking at me now, as if I’d become something totally without interest.

  They’d stall for a while, then they’d get impatient and try to kick us out. Unless we were willing to start shooting people, they’d succeed. When in doubt, tell the truth. Not my usual ploy, but hey, I’ll try anything once.

  “I’m Anita Blake,” and that was all I got out before her gaze snapped upward, and she really looked at me for the first time.

  “Prove it,” she said.

  I started to reach inside the jacket for my ID. I heard the gun click underneath the bar, as she pulled the hammer back. Just from the sound I’d say it was an old-fashioned shotgun, sawed off or it wouldn’t have fit under the bar.

  “Slowly,” she said.

  I caught Bernardo’s movement out of the corner of my eye. Turning towards us, maybe going for a gun. “It’s okay, Bernardo. It’s under control.”

  I don’t think he believed me.

  I said, “Please.”

  I didn’t say please often. Bernardo hesitated but finally turned back to watch the gathering werewolves. He hissed, “Hurry up.”

  I did what the lady with the shotgun pointed at my chest said, I moved very, very slowly, and handed her my ID.

  “Lay it on the bar.”

  I laid it on the bar.

  “Hands flat on the bar. Lean into it.”

  The bar top was sticky, but I ke
pt my hands on it and leaned into it, in a sort of push-up position. She could have just asked me to assume the position. It was a leg width away from it.

  “Him, too,” she said.

  Bernardo had heard her. “No,” he said.

  Something passed through her eyes that would have made Edward proud. I knew she’d do it. “Either do what she says or get the fuck out of here,” I said.

  He moved so he could watch the room at large, and see me and the lady behind the bar. He was beside the outer door. One quick move and he could be out in the afternoon sunlight. He didn’t go for the door. He looked at me. His eyes flicked to the woman behind the bar. I think he saw in her face what I’d seen because he sighed enough that his shoulders slumped. He shook his head, but he moved towards the long bar. He moved stiffly, as if each small movement pained him. His posture, his face, all screamed that he didn’t like doing this, but he leaned beside me against the bar.

  “Legs farther apart,” she said. “Lean into it like you want to see that pretty face in the polish.”

  I heard Bernardo take a hissing breath, but he spread his legs and leaned close enough to see the varnish on the scarred bar. “Can I just say now that this is a bad idea?” he said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  The woman opened the ID on the bar top, one hand still hidden under the bar. They had the shotgun attached underneath the bar somehow. I wondered what other surprises they had.

  “Why do you want to see Nicky?” she asked.

  She hadn’t told me to stop leaning, so I didn’t. “I told the truth. I want to talk to another necromancer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me who you were up front?”

  “I work with the cops sometimes. I thought it might make you nervous.” I had to roll my eyes up to see her face. I was rewarded with a smile. It looked almost awkward on her harsh features, but it was a start.

  “Why do you want to talk to another necromancer?”