I stood there holding Nicky’s hand and feeling better than I’d felt in days, or was that just my imagination? I wasn’t sure, and the fact that I couldn’t tell said something, too. Shit.
“I’ll sit in front because I want to touch you. It’s like I’m more than just hungry for the ardeur, it’s like the metaphysical tie is making you more touchable than normal.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but just let me sit up front and get to the hotel. We’ll go from there.”
“I don’t understand, Anita.”
“Neither do I,” I said, and we left it at that. But I sat up front with Lisandro, though when Nicky touched my shoulder, I put my hand up to his and we held hands all the way there.
34
LISANDRO DROVE INTO the parking lot. I said, “Park in front of the office. I’ve got to see if they have enough rooms for everyone.”
He didn’t argue, just turned in the opposite direction from the rooms. Nicky leaned against the back of my seat, his hand still in mine, but now he could lean his face around the headrest and nuzzle the side of my face. I leaned in against that touch, as if I couldn’t help myself, but I said, “Car’s still moving. You need your seatbelt on.”
He spoke low, mouth buried in my hair. “We’re going ten miles an hour, Anita. I’ll be fine.”
I fought the urge to tell him to put it on anyway, because I was sort of fanatical about seatbelts staying on until a car came to a complete stop, but Nicky was right. Hell, as a shapeshifter he could go through the windshield full speed and survive. I had a moment to think, if my mother had been a shapeshifter she wouldn’t have died when I was eight. I had one of those moments of clarity, and wondered if I dated only preternatural men because they would survive.
Lisandro found a parking space in front of the banked windows of the office area. I had to pull away from Nicky to get out of the car, but the moment we were both free of the car, he took my hand in his. It was my right hand and my main gun hand, but since he was right-handed, too, one of us was going to have to compromise their gun hand. I had to force myself to do what I normally did automatically, which was to pull my hand out of his, and play a few minutes of who was going to complicate their ability to draw their weapon. I just knew it wasn’t going to be me. It was one of the reasons that Nicky and I didn’t hold hands much in public, because he was my bodyguard, among other things. The fact that we were both willing to have his right hand occupied, when we were out hunting dangerous things, was another clue that something was wrong with my need to touch and be near my metaphysical men. I promised myself to call Jean-Claude after he woke for the day and see if he had a clue.
But good idea or bad idea, Nicky and I followed Lisandro through the door to the office hand in hand. The moment we stepped inside, the rich, dark scent of coffee was everywhere. I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had coffee. How had I let that happen? It had been a busy day, but still . . . The desk clerk who had worried about losing his job at the crime scene turned from the full coffee carafe, smiling. His short, dark brown hair was neatly combed this time, and almost didn’t match the oversized superhero T-shirt, jeans, and well-loved jogging shoes, as if his mother did his hair, but he dressed himself.
“Fresh coffee, if you want it?” he said, and pushed his silver-framed glasses up his nose in one of those automatic gestures people with glasses make.
“It smells like real coffee,” I said, pulling Nicky with me toward the tempting scent. Yes, we had bad guys to catch, but even crime fighters need coffee.
He grinned at me. “Boss says I have to keep coffee in the pot all day. He doesn’t say it has to be bad coffee.”
“I like the way you think,” I said.
He set out three cups and started pouring very dark, very rich coffee into them.
“You like coffee,” Lisandro said, from just behind us.
“None for me, thanks,” Nicky said.
The clerk, whose name completely escaped me, stopped in midpour, spilling a tiny bit down the side of the cup. “Sorry.” He put the pot back on the coffeemaker and reached for napkins and wiped off the side of the second cup. “I’m just glad some of you are drinking it. I hate wasting good coffee.”
Lisandro and I both took the cups. Nicky went back to being alert, as if someone might jump out of the walls and attack. He was right, though; he and I had to get a handle on whatever was making us be so touchy-feely, or I’d have to send him home. The real test would be if I was as bad around Domino, because he was the only other man from home who had a metaphysical tie to me. If it was both of them, then, well, that would mean something was wrong with the metaphysics, and that would be bad.
I breathed in the scent of the coffee, letting myself close my eyes for a moment and just enjoy it. I could tell by the smell alone that it wouldn’t need sugar or cream, it was good just the way it was.
“How can I help you, Marshal?” the clerk said.
I opened my eyes and smiled. “Sorry, got distracted by the coffee.”
He smiled back and shrugged thin shoulders. “Glad I could make your day a little better. I’m so sorry about the other marshal getting hurt.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We’re actually here to get clothes from her room to take back to the hospital.”
“So she’s okay?”
I shrugged and smiled noncommittally. I doubted the marshal service wanted the media to learn about Karlton being a werewolf, and I knew Karlton didn’t.
Lisandro said, “We also need rooms.”
I nodded, and he was right to get me back on track. What the hell was wrong with me? I was losing focus in the middle of a case, that wasn’t like me. Not to this degree anyway.
The clerk went behind the desk and said, “How many people, and are they comfortable with sharing rooms?”
I started to answer, but Bernardo and Olaf came into the office. Olaf was almost too tall for the drop ceiling. I had a moment to wonder how it would feel to be so tall that ceilings were too short. It was so not the problem I had.
“Fresh coffee,” the clerk called out cheerfully as he typed on his keyboard. “How many rooms do you need?”
I counted in my head while I sipped the coffee. It was as good as it smelled; yum. “Three, with two beds apiece.”
“Thanks, Ron,” Bernardo called out and went toward the coffee. It made me think better of Bernardo that he knew the clerk’s name. If the clerk had been female I’d have expected it, but that he remembered the man’s name to be friendly made me wonder if some of the flirting from Bernardo was just a level of social enjoyment that I didn’t have with strangers.
“So, room for six,” Ron said, typing on the keyboard.
“Yeah.”
Olaf came to stand near the desk.
Ron gave him a nervous flick of eyes that seemed to take in the top of his bald head that was ever so close to the ceiling tiles. “Coffee machine is over there.”
“No, thank you,” Olaf said, in that deep rumbling voice.
“He doesn’t drink coffee or tea,” I said.
“Good to know,” Ron said, and his effort not to look all the way up to Olaf was almost painful.
“We just drink the blood of our enemies,” Nicky said.
Ron stopped in his typing and looked at Nicky. “What?”
“He’s teasing you,” I said, and glared at Nicky. The glare said, clearly, for him to stop it.
“We have two rooms upstairs near your original rooms, and one downstairs. Is that okay?”
“We need to be close to Anita’s room,” Nicky said.
“Anita, oh, you mean Marshal Blake.”
“Yes,” Nicky said.
Ron typed some more. “I’m sorry, that’s the best we have until someone checks out.”
Lisandro was near the door, looking out and drinking the yummy coffee. Bernardo trailed over to join us. He seemed to be enjoying the coffee, though he’d added enough cream to make it tan,
probably added sugar, too. I thought about calling him a pussy, but decided it wasn’t worth it, I’d actually started adding cream and sugar to some coffee myself. Never throw stones if you think they’re going to come back and hit you.
A wave of dizziness rolled over me. I steadied myself against the desk and Nicky grabbed my arm. “Are you all right?”
“Dizzy,” I said. My knees began to slide out from under me and the coffee spilled down the side of the desk. Nicky caught me. “Anita!”
Lisandro collapsed. His empty coffee cup rolled across the floor. I thought, Oh shit, the coffee, but I couldn’t seem to form the words out loud. I tried to reach for a gun, but I couldn’t make my arms move enough. Nicky was holding all my weight in one arm, tucking me against his body, because he had his gun out; so did Olaf.
Bernardo collapsed to the floor with his gun in his hand. The damned coffee spilled about half of a cup into the worn carpet.
Ron, the clerk, was holding his hands out from his body, “I didn’t know . . .” Olaf shot him in the chest. The shot was like an explosion. I fought to focus through the dizzy, tilting world, and had a moment to see the door behind the desk open black and empty, but somehow I knew it wasn’t empty. The black cloak and white mask were clear for a second as it moved in a blur so that it wasn’t there when Olaf and Nicky fired.
I heard the bell on the door, and the last thing I saw before the dizziness ate the rest of the world was a blurring wave of black cloaks coming toward us. My last clear thought was, Please, God, let that be the drug, and not their real speed.
I heard Nicky yelling my name in the dark.
35
IT WAS COLD. Cold and hard. I was lying on something hard and cold, my cheek pressed to the rough chill of it. My hand spasmed and my hands were tied behind my back. My eyes opened wide, pulse shoved into my throat, heart thudding. I could see a darkly stained stone wall. I pulled at the ropes behind my back, but the rope was tight, biting into my wrists when I tugged on it. I moved my legs and realized my ankles were bound together, too. My boots protected my ankles, so the rope didn’t bite into the skin, but they were tied just as tight. My heart was threatening to choke me, as if I needed to swallow it back down into my chest. I was so scared my skin ran cold with it, and it had nothing to do with the concrete floor.
I tried to think through the panic. Was there anyone to see me move? Had the movements been small enough that my captors hadn’t noticed, or was I alone? There was nothing against the one wall I could see. The wall was water stained, which was probably one of the things that made the floor damp. I forced myself to notice things; there just wasn’t a lot to notice. But just taking the time to try had slowed my pulse, helped chase back the panic. I was tied up, but I wasn’t hurt as far as I could tell. I’d come to in worse places, with lots worse happening to me.
I felt movement behind me. Maybe I heard it, but it was as if the air currents stirred behind me and I just knew that someone was behind me, and that they were close. I fought not to tense more than I already had, but it’s almost impossible not to tense when you’re tied up and you have no idea who or what is coming up behind you. Being completely helpless makes you tense.
“If you had just come with me and my master, things would have been so much simpler.” The deep growl of voice was the shapeshifter from the motel, the one that had stabbed Karlton and made her a werewolf. So at least I knew his flavor of shifter; that was something, not much, but something.
I swallowed and found my voice. “Simpler for whom?”
“Whom, you say, whom, when I have you tied up on the floor, helpless.” I heard the brush of cloth now, and small noises that I couldn’t have told you what they were exactly, but I’d have bet money that he was crawling on the floor toward me.
I felt the heat of him behind me, before the white mask and hood of his face peered over my shoulder. He leaned over my face so I could see that the eyes in the mask were pale green, and not human. He had wolf eyes in his human face, which might mean that the reason his voice was growly was because he’d spent too much time in animal form, either because he liked it, or because he’d been forced as punishment. The eyes usually changed first, and then the teeth, and then internal mouth and throat changes so the voice stayed deeper.
His eyes were so close to me that I could see the edges of them and knew he was frowning. “You aren’t afraid, and you’re thinking something. What are you thinking that has helped you let go of your fear of just a moment before?”
I decided that truth didn’t hurt. “Who kept you in animal shape until your eyes stayed wolf even in human form?”
He growled at me, leaning that smooth, white mask close and closer until I couldn’t focus on his green wolf eyes and all I could see was the white blur of the mask. My pulse sped up again; I couldn’t help it. I was tied up and helpless, and he was looming over me. I wouldn’t have wanted a human to do it, let alone a werewolf, though honestly that wasn’t the part that bothered me. It was the white mask, and the speed I’d seen that first night. He was Harlequin, and being at their mercy, that bothered me.
I heard him draw in a deep breath behind the blur of mask. He pressed that smooth porcelain against my cheek and sniffed. “Now you’re afraid; good.”
He curled himself against the back of my body, pressing that cool, artificial face against mine. My vision was filled up with the blur of that white mask. One of his arms snaked across the front of my body, pressing us close together. He was enough taller than me that it was mostly his upper body that pressed so tight against the back of mine.
I fought to control my pulse, my heart rate. He wanted me to be afraid, and anything he wanted I didn’t want to give him. My pulse quieted, heart rate going down. He growled in a low, heavy line that vibrated through his chest and neck along my body. It hit that back part of the brain that still remembers huddling around a fire with the night pressing close, and when that growl came out of the dark, you knew that something out there was going to kill you. I couldn’t keep my heart from beating faster, couldn’t keep it from sending my blood pumping hard and fast through my body. He growled harder, the vibration of it shivering down my spine, warning me that teeth and fangs came next after that sound.
I caught the faint musk of wolf like a half-remembered perfume, he was pressed so close. Something stirred inside me; a white shape rose in the dark of my mind. My wolf stood up inside me and shook her mostly white fur like any canine rising from a long nap.
He went very still beside me, and his voice was even deeper, so full of the growl that he’d been doing that it sounded like it would hurt for a human throat to talk like that. “What is that?”
“You have a nose,” I said, in a voice that was only a little shaky. “Use it.”
He drew in a deep rush of air, then let it trickle out slowly, the way some people let wine sit on their tongue. Swallowing the wine slowly, so they catch every nuance of it. My wolf sniffed the air back, as if she were catching his scent, too.
“Wolf; you can’t be wolf,” he growled.
“Why not?” I asked, and it was almost a whisper because his face was close enough that much more than a whisper would be shouting.
“She wouldn’t want your body if you were a werewolf,” he growled next to my face.
“Why not?” I asked, again.
“She can’t control wolves.” I felt him tense. I don’t think he was supposed to share that.
“Only cats,” I said.
“Yes.” The growl was beginning to fade a little, and it was more of a bass whisper, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. The Harlequin had bugged all our businesses in St. Louis once, so we were probably being listened to, if not watched, right this minute.
I did my best not to move my lips, and the whisper this time was more just breathing out. I didn’t want them to hear us. “The mother couldn’t control you?” My wolf began to trot up that long, dark path inside me. It was my visual for an impossibility. It was impossible that there
were animals inside me that wanted to come out through my skin, but they were still in there, so I “saw” them as walking down a path, when there was no path, no space between me and them. In a very real way, they were me. Intellectually I knew that; to stay sane I visualized a path.
He sniffed harder, as if he would breathe me into him. He settled more of his body against the back of mine. My hands were in the way, so he couldn’t spoon me completely, and he kept his face next to mine, so that the height difference put only his upper body against my hands. He had a long torso. I fought to keep my hands still where they lay pressed between the two of us. Cuddling was better than being threatened; I just had to not rush, and not do anything to make him remember he was here to scare me.
“No,” he whispered, and used his arm to pull me in tighter to his body.
I breathed, “She forced you into wolf form.”
“She couldn’t; my master forced me.”
I pressed my face into the smooth chill of the mask, letting it hide as much of my face as possible in case the camera could see my face. The scent of his wolf was stronger this way; it made my wolf trot faster up that invisible path. The light was better so that I could see her dark saddle in all that white fur, as she trotted through the light and shadow of the tall trees that lined the path. The trees, like the rest of the landscape, were no place I’d ever been.
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