Cherry glanced once at Zane, then crawled out from among the chair legs. She stayed low until she got to the pantry closet. She had to make Caleb move, scooting at him, gently, with her feet. He finally unwound from his tight fetal position and crawled about a foot away so Cherry could get the kit.
Cherry went to Igor first. She was a wereleopard; her hearing was just as good as Nathaniel’s, but she went through all the motions, then turned to Claudia. Claudia tried to push her away with her left hand, gun still in it.
“Claudia, let Cherry help you,” I said.
“Damn it!”
Cherry took that for a yes and started inspecting the shoulder. Claudia didn’t fight her anymore, and I was glad. Shock can make you do and say funny things. I didn’t really want to arm wrestle the wererat, wounded or not. Of course, Micah was here and he could probably arm wrestle Claudia and win, at least while she was wounded.
I was still keeping a peripheral sense of the open spaces, but as the time dragged on quietly, there was only the wind in the trees, the noise of summer locusts thrumming through the open living room door and the splintered glass of the back door. I began to relax by inches. That tension in my shoulders that I always get during a fight and never really notice until the adrenaline lets down, let me know that I thought we were safe, for now.
Then I heard something over the summer silence—sirens. Police sirens wailing, getting closer. I didn’t have any near neighbors. You heard gunshots in Jefferson County pretty regularly, so who the hell reported the gunshots?
Micah turned that strangely rounded face towards me. “Are they coming here?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but it seems likely.”
We both glanced down at the bodies on the floor, then looked at each other. “We don’t have time to hide the bodies,” he said.
“No, we don’t,” I said. I looked at everybody. Merle was still watching the kitchen window, the borrowed shotgun in his big hands. Zane had crawled out from under the table to play nurse for Cherry, handing her things as she asked for them. She had packed Claudia’s arm.
Cherry looked up at me. “She could partially heal herself if she shapeshifted, but she’d still need medical attention.”
“The police tend to shoot shapeshifters in animal form,” I said.
“I’ll stay,” Claudia said, teeth gritted just a little. “The more wounded we have on our side, the better the police will like it.”
She had a point. I looked at Micah. The sirens were very near now, almost in front of the house.
“You better go, Micah.”
“Why?”
“The police are about to burst in here, see a lot of bodies, a lot of blood. Anything in animal form stands a good chance of getting shot.”
“That’s not a problem,” he said. The fur began to recede, like water pulling back from the shore. As human skin was revealed, his bones slid out of sight into it, like hard things thrown in wax, covered, melted. I’d never seen anyone change so casually, so easily. It was almost as if he were merely changing clothes, except for the clear fluid that ran down his body like a liquid sheet, the sound of bones popping, reforming, even the sound of flesh boiling over him. Only his eyes remained the same, unchanging, like two jewels fixed in the center of the universe. Then he was suddenly human again, body covered in that thick, watery fluid. I’d never seen so much of the liquid before from only one change. I was standing in a pool of it and hadn’t noticed.
He slumped suddenly, trying to catch himself on the cabinet, but I was in the way and had to grab him around the waist to keep him from falling to the floor. “Rapid change comes with a price.”
“I’ve never seen anyone change back that quickly,” Cherry said.
“And he won’t fall into a coma-sleep either,” Merle said. “Give him a few minutes and he’ll be fine, messy, but fine.” There was admiration in the big man’s voice, and something else—almost jealousy.
The sirens wailed to a stop outside the house, then silence. “Everybody put the guns down. Don’t want to get shot by accident,” I said.
Nathaniel did as I asked, instantly. I had to press Micah closer into my body, one-handed, so I could put my own gun back on the cabinet. Micah’s body shuddered against me. I looked at him, about to ask if he was alright, but the look in his eyes stopped me. It wasn’t pain I saw in his eyes. I slid my other hand around his waist so that I held him more securely against me. His skin was slick under my hands. He managed to put a hand on the cabinet behind us. I stared into his eyes from inches away, and there were worlds to drown in, in those eyes, needs and hopes, everything.
A man’s voice yelled, “Police!”
I yelled back, “Don’t shoot, the bad guys are gone. We’ve got wounded.” I moved Micah so he could prop himself against the cabinet, then put my hands on my head and moved carefully into the doorway. I had to step over the bodies in the kitchen door to come into the line of sight of the two officers crouched in the doorway. If I’d been a large imposing man, they might still have fired, not on purpose exactly, but you don’t see three bodies in a doorway in Jefferson County, Missouri, every day. But I was small, female, and looked fairly benign, unarmed. But I kept talking as I moved anyway. Things like, “They attacked us. We’ve got wounded. We need an ambulance. Thank God you guys came when you did. The sirens scared them away.” I kept babbling until I was sure that they weren’t going to shoot me, then the really hard part started. How do you explain five bodies in your kitchen, some of which even in death didn’t look very human? Beats the hell out of me.
41
TWO HOURS LATER I was sitting on my couch, talking to Zerbrowski. He looked, as he usually did, like he’d dressed in a hurry, in the dark, so that nothing quite matched, and he’d grabbed the tie with the stain on it, instead of the one that he probably meant to wear. His wife, Katie, was a neat, orderly sort of person, and I’d never figured out why she allowed Zerbrowski to leave the house dressed like a walking disaster. Of course, maybe it wasn’t a matter of allowing him to do anything; maybe it was just one of those battles you just gave up on after a few years.
Caleb sat on the far end of the couch huddled in a blanket we’d gotten off the bed. The paramedics that had taken Claudia away had said he was in shock. I was betting that this was the first time he’d been on the wrong end of a shotgun. Only the top of his curls and a thin slit of brown eyes showed above the blanket. He looked about ten years old, huddled like that. I would have offered comfort but Zerbrowski wouldn’t let me talk to him or anyone else. Merle stood against the wall at the end of the couch, watching everything with unreadable eyes. The cops kept giving him little eye flicks as they moved around the room. He made most of them uncomfortable for the same reason he made me uncomfortable; he wore the potential for violence like an expensive cologne.
Zerbrowski pushed his glasses more firmly on his nose, shoved his hands in his pants pockets, and looked down at me. He was standing, I was sitting, the looking down part was easy. “So let me get this straight, these guys just burst in here, and you don’t have the first idea why.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He stared at me. I stared back. If he thought I was going to break under the pressure of his steely gaze, he was wrong. It helped that I really didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. I sat. He stood. We stared at each other. Caleb shuddered on his end of the couch. Merle watched all the people scurrying back and forth.
There were a lot of people. They moved around the house behind Zerbrowski, going in and out of the kitchen, like huge, ambitious ants. There’s always too many people at a crime scene, not gawkers either. You always have too many cops around, way more than you need. But you never know which pair of eyes or hands will find that vital clue. Frankly, I thought more evidence was probably lost with all the traffic than found with the extra help, but that was me. I’m just not the social type.
We stood in our own little well of silence. The bedroom door opened b
ehind us. I glanced back to see Micah come out of the room. He was wearing a pair of my sweatpants. Since they were men’s sweats anyway and we were the same height, they fit perfectly. I’d never had a boyfriend that I could trade clothes with before. You just didn’t find that many grown men my size.
The police hadn’t let him shower, so his long hair had dried in messy clumps to his shoulders. The drying liquid was beginning to flake off in patches. His chartreuse eyes flicked towards me, but they stayed neutral. Dolph came right behind him, looming over Micah the way he loomed over me. Dolph’s eyes weren’t neutral; they were angry. He’d been angry since he stepped through the door. He’d separated us all into different rooms. Nathaniel was being questioned by his friend from the police station, Detective Jessica Arnet. They were in the guest room upstairs. Detective Perry had questioned Caleb and was still questioning Zane. Dolph had done Merle and Micah. Zerbrowski hadn’t so much questioned me as simply stood there and made sure I didn’t talk to any of the others. Call it a hunch, but I was betting Dolph planned on questioning me personally.
We did have five bodies on the ground, three of which even in death hadn’t changed back to human form. The three snake things had stayed snakey. Shapeshifters always change back to their original form in death. Always. Which raised the question, if they weren’t shapeshifters, what the hell were they?
“Anita,” Dolph said. One word, but I knew what he meant. I got up and went for the bedroom. Micah brushed his fingertips across my hand as I passed him. Dolph’s eyes tightened, and I knew he’d noticed.
He held the door for me, and I walked past him into my bedroom. I resented them using my house, my bedroom, to question me, but it beat the hell out of going downtown. So I kept my complaints to myself. Dolph had every reason to take us all downtown. We had dead bodies, and I wasn’t even denying I had killed them. Oh, I might have tried to deny it if I thought I could get away with it, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t.
He motioned me to the kitchen chair that had been moved into the bedroom. He stayed standing, all six-feet-eight of him. “Tell me,” he said.
I told him exactly what had happened. I told the truth, all of it. Of course, I didn’t know enough to need to lie. They’d carted Igor’s body away, all those bright tattoos still vibrant, more alive than the rest of him. We had one dead and one wounded. It was my house. It was obviously a case of self-defense. The only difference from the other two times I’d had to kill people in my house was the number of bodies and that some of them were so not-human. Other than that, I’d walked on much more questionable occasions. So why was Dolph treating this one more seriously? I didn’t have a clue.
Dolph stared down at me. He has a much better steely gaze than Zerbrowski, but I gave him calm, blank eyes. I could look innocent this time, because I was.
“And you don’t know why they wanted to take you?”
Actually, I had a thought on that one, but I didn’t share it, couldn’t. They might have come hunting me because I nearly killed their leader. One of the problems with withholding evidence from the police is that later you can’t always explain yourself without confessing that you’ve withheld evidence. This was one of those moments. I hadn’t told Dolph about the half-men half-snakes taking Nathaniel and the fight afterwards. I could have told him now, but . . . but there were too many things that I’d have had to tell him, like that maybe I was going to be a wereleopard. Dolph hated the monsters. I wasn’t ready to share that with him.
I gave him an innocent face and said, “Nope.”
“They wanted you pretty damn bad, Anita, to come in here with this kind of firepower.”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
The anger filled his eyes, thinned his lips to a tight line. “You are lying to me.”
I widened my eyes. “Would I do that?”
He whirled and slammed his hand into the top of my dresser, hard enough that the mirror thudded against the wall. The glass shivered, and for a second I thought it might shatter. It didn’t, but the door opened and Zerbrowski stuck his head in the door. “Everything alright in here?”
Dolph glared at him, but Zerbrowski didn’t flinch. “Maybe I should finish questioning Anita.”
Dolph shook his head. “Get out, Zerbrowski.”
Brave man that he was, he looked at me. “You okay with that, Anita?”
I nodded, but Dolph was already yelling, “Get the fuck out!”
Zerbrowski gave us both a last look and closed the door, saying, “Yell if you need anything.” The door closed, and in the sudden silence I could hear Dolph’s breathing, heavy, labored. I could smell the sweat on his skin, faint, not unpleasant, but a sure sign that he was in distress. What was going on?
“Dolph?” I made his name a question.
He spoke without turning around. “I am taking a lot of heat for you, Anita.”
“Not on this you’re not,” I said. “Everybody that you took out of this house won’t be human. The laws may cover shapeshifters as human, but I know how it works. What’s one more dead monster?”
He turned then, leaning his big body against the dresser, arms crossed. “I thought that shapeshifters changed back to human form when they died.”
“They do,” I said.
“The snake things didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t.”
We looked at each other. “You’re saying they weren’t shapeshifters?”
“No, I’m saying I don’t know what the hell they are. There are snake men in a lot of different mythologies. Hindu, vaudun. They could be something that was never human to begin with.”
“You mean like the naga you pulled out of the river two years ago?” he said.
“The naga was truly immortal. These things, whatever they are, couldn’t stand up to silver bullets.”
He closed his eyes for a second, and when he looked at me again, I saw how tired he was. Not a physical tiredness, but a tiredness of the heart, as if he’d been carrying some emotional burden around a little too long.
“What’s wrong, Dolph? What’s got you so . . . riled up?”
He gave a small smile. “Riled up.” He shook his head and pushed away from the dresser. He sat on the edge of the bed, and I turned in the chair, so I was straddling the back of it and could see him better.
“You asked what woman in my life was sleeping with the undead.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “No, I was being a bastard.” His eyes were fierce again. “I don’t understand how you can let that . . . thing touch you.” His revulsion was so strong that I could almost feel it against my skin.
“We’ve had this discussion before. You’re not my father.”
“But I am Darrin’s father.”
I gave him wide eyes. “Your oldest, the lawyer?” I asked.
He nodded.
I watched his face, tried to catch a clue, afraid to say anything. Afraid I’d misunderstood him. “What about Darrin?”
“He’s engaged.”
I watched the terrible seriousness of his face. “Why do I get the idea that congratulations aren’t in order?”
“She’s a vampire, Anita, a fucking vampire.”
I blinked at him. I didn’t know what to say.
Those angry eyes glared at me. “Say something.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Dolph. Darrin’s older than I am. He’s a big boy. He has the right to be with whoever he wants to be with.”
“She’s a corpse, Anita. She is a walking corpse.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He stood, pacing the room in long angry strides. “She’s dead, Anita, she’s fucking dead, and you can’t get grandchildren from a corpse.”
I almost laughed at that, but my sense of self-preservation is stronger than that. I finally said, “I’m sorry, Dolph, I . . . it’s true that, as far as I know, female vamps can’t carry a baby to term. But your youngest, Paul, the engineer, he’s married.”
Dolph shook his head. “They can’t have kids.”
I watched him pace the room, back and forth, back and forth. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
He sat back down on the bed, broad shoulders slumping suddenly. “No grandchildren, Anita.”
I didn’t know what to say, again. I couldn’t remember Dolph ever sharing this much of his personal life with me, or anyone for that matter. I was both flattered and almost panicked. I am not a natural caregiver, and I just didn’t know what to do. If he had been Nathaniel or one of the leopards, or even one of the wolves, I’d have hugged him, petted him, but he was Dolph, and I just wasn’t sure he was a petting kind of guy.
He just sat there staring blindly at the floor, his big hands limp in his lap. He looked so lost. I got up from the chair and went to stand beside him. He never moved. I touched his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Dolph.”
He nodded. “Lucille cried herself to sleep after Darrin made his little announcement.”
“Is it the vampire issue or the no-grandchildren issue?” I asked.
“She says she’s too young to be a grandmother, but . . .” He looked up suddenly, and what I saw in his eyes was so raw, I wanted to look away. I had to force myself to meet that pained gaze, to hold it and take in everything that he was offering. Dolph was letting me see further inside him than ever before, and I had to honor that. I had to look at him, let him see that I saw it all. If he had been a girlfriend, I’d have hugged him. If he had been most any of my male friends, I’d have hugged him, but he was Dolph, and I just wasn’t sure.
He turned his face away, and only then, when he’d given me all the pain in his eyes, did I try to hug him. He didn’t let me do it. He stood up, moving away from me. But I’d tried, and that was the best I could do.
When he turned back towards me, his eyes were blank, his face set in that mask he usually wore, his cop face. “If you are holding out on me, Anita, I will bust your ass.”
I nodded, my own face falling back into a mask as empty as his. The moment of sharing was over, and he was uncomfortable with it, so we’d go back to familiar ground. Fine with me. I hadn’t known what to say anyway. But I’d remember he let me see inside. I’d remember, though I wasn’t sure what good it would do either of us.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 244