Bullet ab-19

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  28

  WHEN I OPENED the door, Nicky right behind me, I saw that he’d been sharing guard duty with Graham. Tall, broad-shouldered, he wore his straight black hair cut a little too long through the bangs, so that his eyes stared out through the hair like a cat watching from the grass. Though cat wasn’t accurate. He was a werewolf. Other than a little uptilt at the edges of his eyes and the straight black hair, his mother’s Japanese heritage seemed to have passed him by; most of him came from his tall, Nordic father. His parents were still the only ones to ever come down to Guilty Pleasures to visit their bouncer son at work. Graham had missed the orgy because he lived off-site and he was usually being a bouncer at the strip club rather than muscle here. He was wearing a bright red T-shirt, which meant he was available for blood donations or sex. So far I’d managed to keep him off my menu, and I was planning to keep it that way.

  He grinned at me. “I can’t believe I missed last night.”

  “Be happy you did,” I said.

  He looked stricken and way younger than his early twenties. “It was an orgy. You fucked people that you’ve never touched.”

  I glanced at Nicky, who was at my side. “Does he know everything that happened last night?”

  Nicky nodded.

  “You guard this door, and if anything happens to Nathaniel because you failed at your job I will kill you.” My voice had just a little inflection at the end, but only a little.

  Graham looked at me. “What’d I say to piss you off ?”

  “That you have to ask that question, Graham, is why I don’t sleep with you.”

  He still looked totally lost. It was Nicky who said, “She feels bad about Noel and Haven being dead.” His voice was pleasant as he said it, and I realized that his inflection never changed, either, but it wasn’t numb, just pleasant like nothing he had just said moved him.

  “We need another wereanimal to bunk with Nathaniel.”

  “You told me to stay on the door,” Graham said.

  “Sorry, just thinking out loud.” My head felt buzzy and full of static. The shock was beginning to wear off, which was both good and bad, apparently.

  “If you want more people to sleep with Nathaniel while he heals, the infirmary is the best place. People are on rotating shifts.”

  I opened that part of me that was connected to so many people. I just threw it wide to see who was close. Nicky hit the radar first because he was right beside me, but the energy went out and out. I knew that Jean-Claude was here, and he felt my urgency and my confusion and started walking this way. I found Jason, and felt sorrow from him. I wondered what was wrong. I found Damian still up, still awake. Apparently none of the vampires who woke early were going to sleep at all today. Crispin’s and Domino’s energy came and with that one brush I knew there were more tigers here. They flared brighter in my head. They shouldn’t have been brighter on my metaphysical radar than the shapeshifters I was closest to. I narrowed down my search, leaving that bright energy out of my search pattern. I brushed a lot of people’s energy inside the Circus, but one person I didn’t find was Richard. He wasn’t here. Crap.

  I started dialing his number. Inside the Circus was like an underground bunker, almost impenetrable, but outside it all bets were off, and Richard was the least capable of the three of us to watch for this kind of danger. He was still too trusting, and too tied to trying to be “normal.”

  Stephen came down the hallway. He should have been at the apartment he shared with Vivian. No, wait, it was daylight out and since he worked nights he often spent the day here being snack food for vampires among other things. He wasn’t on my food list. Stephen was cute enough but just not that kind of friend. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His curly blond hair was loose around his shoulders. He always looked younger in his street clothes. He took one look at my face and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  The phone went to voice mail. “Shit.” I waited for the beep. “Richard, it’s Anita. Come back to the Circus. We have assassins in town with a contract to kill you, me, and Jean-Claude. You aren’t safe. Call me back, damn it.” I hung up.

  “Text him,” Graham said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Text him. Some people check their texts a lot more than they do their voice mail.”

  I hadn’t had the phone that long. I handed it to him. “I don’t know how to text. Help me.”

  Normally, he’d have said something smart, but wisely he just started working the phone. “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Assassins in town. You’re in danger. Come back to the Circus.”

  “How do you spell assassins?”

  “Let me, faster if I type and spell,” Stephen said, and took the phone. He typed in what I said. “Sent.” He put that cornflower-blue gaze on me. “Now back up and tell me, why are there assassins in town and how do you know?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have time to explain. I need to find Richard and get him back here.”

  “I’m supposed to be your replacement for Nathaniel’s healing, but if you need me . . .”

  I started to dismiss him. I didn’t think of him as a fighter, but the first time I’d met him he had waded into a giant snake gone amok in the Circus of the Damned. He’d risked his life to help kill it. Funny how I’d begun to think of him as someone who helped me do my hair and makeup for Jean-Claude’s fancy events, but not as a fighter. He was about my size, as delicate in his own way as Vivian, but he was also a werewolf and that meant something.

  “Thanks, Stephen, but I think staying with Nathaniel will be great. I need to find Richard and bring him back here; after that we’ll have a meeting or something.” I was already moving down the hallway. Nicky followed me. I almost told him to stay at the door, but truthfully I would eventually have to go outside the Circus, and of our guards he wasn’t a bad choice. He might be creepily overattached to me, but his fighting skills were excellent and the only thing that kept his killing in check was my conscience. He didn’t seem to have one of his own. I couldn’t stay in here forever. I had a job. I’d taken last night off, but I had clients to see this afternoon. Of course, all it would take was one of the assassins signing up as a client and they’d get to be alone with me. Or would have; now I’d need guards with me. Shit.

  A small screaming part of me was saying something in my head that I was trying really hard not to listen to. Richard is in danger. The only comfort about him not answering his phone was that if he was really hurt I’d know it, the same way I’d known that Nathaniel got shot in the shoulder. I’d feel it. Richard was okay. He was safe, for now.

  Then I realized I was being slow. I hit the phone screen and got my contacts list back up. I’d call Jamil, or Shang-Da. They were his main bodyguards, his Sköll and Hatí. One of the three would pick up their damn phone.

  Nicky was already on his own phone. I heard him talking to Bobby Lee about the assassins. He was right. I should have told our men first. I had to pull myself together and work this emergency. I’d fall apart later.

  Jamil’s number was first alphabetically, so I hit it. He picked up on the second ring. “Anita, what’s up?”

  “You need to bring Richard back to the Circus, now.”

  I heard his voice twice, like a weird echo, as he said, “That’s going to be a problem.”

  I turned to find him coming down the hallway with Shang-Da by his side. “Why aren’t you with your Ulfric?” I asked.

  “He’s on a late lunch date. We don’t go on the dates.”

  I pushed the whole date thing away. I’d worry about it later, if at all. I told them what was happening. “Well, shit,” Jamil said.

  “That about covers it,” I said.

  “If he’s with the doc, he won’t answer his phone,” Jamil said. I wanted to say, Richard is dating a doctor? but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like we were monogamous.

  “Contact him mind-to-mind,” Shang-Da said.

  “I’ll try. He’s been keeping me out the last few
months.”

  “Maybe, or maybe you both quit trying,” he said.

  I didn’t try to argue. We’d decide who was right and wrong once I knew Richard was safe. I felt Jean-Claude coming toward me. He didn’t try to shut me out. I pushed the thought away. I opened that link between Richard and me. Shang-Da was right; I’d stopped trying a while back. It was just easier that way.

  I smelled trees, leaves, pine, forest. It was how I always found him by scent, as if wherever he was he smelled of the wolf pack’s land. I felt him behind the wheel of his four-by-four. I saw him glance up, as if somehow I were hovering near the roof of his truck. We always looked up to see each other—the way we had for the council, come to think of it. That made me lose focus for a moment, and I had to fight to see him. I knew he was already close to his house, because of the trees by the road. I had a moment of seeing him looking up at me, and of seeing the road through his eyes.

  He pushed me out a little, so that he was driving with only himself in his head. “Sorry,” he said to the empty air, “but hard to drive that way.”

  “Sorry, but there’s a contract killer out for you, me, and Jean-Claude.”

  “The council works fast.”

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t matter who ordered it, Richard, just come back. We stay underground until we have a plan.”

  “I can’t hide forever.”

  “Just for now, please, Richard. I’ve had enough emergencies for one day.”

  He started to do the turn to the last road. He caught a flash in the trees. I had a moment to feel him see it, and then the windshield cracked in front of him, and he was fighting the truck not to go into the ditch.

  I screamed, “Gun!”

  The second shot hit him, and I fell to my knees in the hallway. It didn’t exactly hurt; in fact, my shoulder and half my chest felt numb. I couldn’t catch my breath. It did hurt to breathe. Nicky was holding me. His face was frantic. “Anita!”

  “Shot.” I gasped it out, there was no air. They’d hit his lung, but his heart still beat, strong and thick in my head. I could see sunlight through the trees as the truck went over the side of the road, and there were trees, and we were falling, and there was no air.

  29

  JEAN-CLAUDE’S FACE ABOVE me. “Ma petite, what have you done?” He looked into my eyes and he saw it, felt it, but he dragged me away from it. He shut the link down. He left Richard bleeding and alone.

  I gasped air in with lungs that worked, and said, “No! They’ll kill him. They’ll drag him out of the truck and kill him.” I dug my hands into his white shirt.

  “If he dies, I can keep us from dying with him, but if I open the link between us all to feed him enough energy to heal in time, if it does not work, one or both of us will die with him.”

  “We can’t let him die knowing we didn’t even try. Let me feed the energy; you pull me back if it doesn’t work.”

  I watched the struggle in his eyes.

  “Jean-Claude,” I said.

  He nodded. “What energy will be enough to get him up and moving in time? Nathaniel is still hurt; you cannot give the energy of your own triumvirate. It could kill them both.”

  “He is our Ulfric and we are sworn to protect him with our lives,” Shang-Da said, kneeling all that long, dangerous body down next to us. “If by my life, or my death, I can save him . . .”

  “Do it,” Jamil said, and he was kneeling closer to my face.

  “There isn’t time for sex,” I said.

  “We saw what you did to Chimera. We felt the power you took from that feeding. Do it,” he said.

  There should have been time to look into his handsome face, admire the cornrowed hair and all that he offered, but the one thing we didn’t have was time. I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I put my hands on his arms, bare skin to bare skin, and just as when I’d done it the one and only time to Chimera, there was no time to find the power, or worry over morals, it was a moment of do or die. To raise zombies I put energy into the dead; the more energy the better the zombie, the more completely the dead will rise. This power was almost a polar opposite to that. One second it was just Jamil’s warm skin under my hands, and the next my necromancy spilled down my hands and onto that dark, muscled skin.

  Jamil’s brown eyes widened. His lips parted. He whispered, “God, it hurts.” Then his smooth dark skin began to run with fine lines. I was taking back whatever it was that let me fill out a corpse so it was plump and smooth and rosy-cheeked. I took that from Jamil, and he stayed on his knees and let me do it. The first time I’d done it I’d thought it was watching decades catch up with the man, but watching Jamil’s skin collapse around his bones, I realized it wasn’t time I took from it, but literally life. I fed on the very essence of what made his body move and function. I fed on him, and the rush of power was as strong as and felt better than I remembered it. I think I’d been afraid to remember how good it felt. Afraid that if I remembered, I’d crave it.

  The power poured down my skin and into my body. It spilled into Jean-Claude where his body touched mine, so that rush of life and energy, and everything Jamil was, filled us both. It was as if every fiber of my body filled with his essence, and I spilled that into Jean-Claude, until it felt as if our bodies should have glowed like stars with it. Jean-Claude opened that window inside me, inside us, and I was suddenly back in the truck with half my upper body not working, and one lung gone to a painful emptiness inside me. I could hear the men, at least two of them, crashing through the trees toward the truck. Jean-Claude helped me feed the power into Richard. His body convulsed on the seat of the truck, the energy almost too much for his wounded body to take in. He coughed blood, and so did I, spilling it around Jamil’s withered skin. That spark that was Jamil’s beast reacted to the scent of fresh blood and gave a surge of heat. I felt the balance of it. I could drain all of his life, or I could leave something behind to save later. It made me hesitate.

  Richard opened the passenger door and fell out into the bushes. We had to get away from the truck before they got here. I felt him crawling through the underbrush, fighting to get farther away, but we could use both arms now. I realized I was afraid to take all I could from Jamil. I knew how to put it back, theoretically, but I’d never done it.

  Jamil was suddenly gone, pulled away, and Shang-Da laid his hands against mine. I didn’t have time to think it was brave of him, I just fed. I fed on him without hesitating. I fed on all that strength and warmth and life, and Richard was on his knees, and then on his feet and moving farther into the trees. If he could get far enough away he could shapeshift and heal the rest of the damage. He was willing to do that, but there would be moments during the shift where he would be helpless, and we couldn’t afford that.

  The power needed to go somewhere, and I found Nathaniel still in his bed, still cuddled with Stephen, and I poured the energy into him. Poured it in until his body ran with fur, and the last of the injury was washed away in a roll of muscle and skin and leopard. The power was so much, so much, as if the two of them together made the same kind of energy that I’d taken that first time. It had been enough to heal so many. I found the lions lying in their beds. Rosamond was very still, with Jesse curled beside her. The power filled her, making her body flow with fur until a great lion filled the bed and chased Jesse out of it. Kelly sat up in bed with Payne naked beside her, her arm in a cast, which meant it was badly broken. I spilled the energy into her and watched her body become the lioness I’d seen in my head, the huge paw cracking the now-useless cast.

  I thought of Claudia and the power found her. I shoved the power into her, too, and her skin ran to black fur, and she cried out as the energy forced her broken body to heal almost too fast. I knew even as it felt good, it also hurt. I was losing the ability to be gentle with it. So much power, so much energy. Jean-Claude helped me reach out for Richard again. He was far into the woods now. Far enough he couldn’t hear or smell them now. He took the ener
gy we offered and his body shifted into a huge, shaggy wolf. I’d always seen him in wolfman form, never this, and I felt him think that in this form he’d be less likely to be reported to the police as a stray werewolf. He’d be able to hunt in the woods and not frighten people. He didn’t say any of it, he thought it, and I thought it, too.

  One minute I was padding through the leaves on all fours, the world alive with smells that I’d forgotten, the next I was in Jean-Claude’s arms. He held me close, rocking me. “Ma petite, ma petite.” And just from the level of emotion in him I knew that what we’d done hadn’t been without risk, that there had been a moment, or two, when he’d felt both of us going.

  I pushed at him, so that I could turn in his arms to see what I’d done to Jamil and Shang-Da. They looked like mummies, shriveled and dead, corpses desiccated in some dry desert, but they weren’t dead. Jamil was making a high keening noise.

  “God,” Nicky said, “they aren’t dead.” He was pressed against the far wall, as if he weren’t sure he wanted to be near me right that moment. Maybe there were things terrible enough that even my hold on him couldn’t make him see it as all right. I found that oddly comforting.

  “No,” I said, “they’re not dead.” I crawled toward Jamil.

  “Ma petite, you gained a great deal of power, but we cannot afford to lose more vitality, or you will kill one of us.”

  “There’s power in raising the dead, Jean-Claude. You should know that by now.” Obsidian Butterfly, the vampire that I’d learned this nasty, useful piece of information from, had thought she was a goddess, for real, and part of what made her think that was that she gained power from taking life and from giving it back. Jamil’s eyes were dried and blind, but as I leaned over him, he screamed, high and buzzy, but louder. Maybe he smelled that it was me, and he was afraid of me now. I didn’t blame him for being afraid, because I could have killed him with this second touch just as easily as helped him. Both would be energy. Both would feel good.