Anita Blake 18 - Flirt (10 page)

“You want me to raise your wife as a zombie,” I said, and my voice was utterly empty. I’d started to fold away inside myself, going to that quiet place I went to when I killed someone not in a firefight, but when I stared down the barrel of a gun and pulled the trigger with thought and time to change my mind. It was the quiet inside my head when I had decided to take a life even if there was opportunity to save it. When I had decided that someone deserved to die, and my conscience was clear. I had one of those moments now, and it helped chase back the heat of the lions. It was a cold place, the place I went when I killed.

I pictured Bennington dead with my bullet in his forehead and it gave me comfort. It helped me smile and be calm.

Nicky let go of me. “She’s calm.”

“Yeah,” Jacob said, “calm the way Silas gets.” He was studying my face, and it wasn’t metaphysical abilities that let him understand my expression and the peacefulness in my eyes.

“You’re comparing her to Silas,” Nicky said. “Shit.”

I didn’t know who Silas was, and I didn’t care. I probably should have, but I didn’t. I forced myself to see the room beyond Bennington’s face. When in danger, exits and entryways become important. The room was white: white carpet, white leather furniture, a slightly different shade of white wall. It was like they hadn’t been able to decide on a color so they didn’t choose one. The only color in that white room was a life-size portrait of Bennington’s wife. She was still blond and beautiful, but the photograph showed that she was model thin, which meant too thin for my tastes, but no one had asked me. She was wearing a bright blue ankle-length dress that made her eyes a brilliant blue. She lounged on a rattan couch that was surrounded by lush tropical plants, some of them in crimson and pink blooms. It was the only color in all that whiteness. It loomed over the room like some kind of goddess on high, or maybe a shrine. Jesus.

As for the exits, there were huge glass doors on one side of the fireplace, and more of them scattered throughout the bottom half of the open great room. There was one hallway that led deeper into the downstairs, and a huge-ass staircase leading up.

Nicky leaned in and whispered, “Don’t bother scouting the room, Anita.”

I didn’t even look at him, as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I didn’t like how alert both lions were to my actions. It was going to limit my chances.

“Did your man acquire what we need for tonight?” Bennington asked, looking at Jacob.

“Silas will.”

“I’m paying you a great deal of money, Mr. Leon.”

I decided to go for smart-ass; when in doubt, it’s always a possibility. “Leon,” I said, “that is so not your real last name.”

He gave me an unfriendly look out of his pale eyes.

I smiled at him, able to do it because I’d calmed myself with images of violence. It had emptied my mind enough to scout the room, and to think. It’s not a technique that they teach you in business school, but it works for me.

“It’s my name today.”

“What’s wrong with Leon as his name?” Bennington asked.

“It’s based on the Latin word
leo
, which means ‘lion.’ Don’t you think that’s funny? Because I think it’s freaking hilarious.”

“I think I liked it better when you weren’t talking,” Jacob said.

“They come highly recommended, Ms. Blake.”

“You’ve had them watching me and my boyfriends for a few days, before you came to my office. You hired them before I turned you down.” The anger tried to flare back up, and I had to slow my breathing a little, concentrate on my pulse. I pictured him dead again, but the anger wanted him dead sooner, and that was the beast talking.
Kill it now, eat it now, why wait?
Animals are very into instant gratification.

“I told you, Ms. Blake, I’d researched you. Everything I had learned about you said that you would turn me down, so I had a contingency in place.”

“A contingency. Is that what they’re calling kidnapping and murder for hire these days?”

He flinched a little around his eyes, as if it were all too blunt for his sensibilities. “I’m truly hoping it doesn’t come to that, Ms. Blake. If you raise my wife for me, then no harm comes to the men you love. You go back to your life and I go back to mine.”

I looked at Jacob. “He may be an amateur, but you aren’t. How are you going to make it safe for us all to go back to our lives?”

“Why don’t we all sit down,” he said.

Bennington stammered, “Of course, of course, how rude of me, I mean . . .” He trailed off as if he’d just heard himself, or didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Always hard to know how polite to be to your victims, isn’t it, Tony?”

“Sit down, Anita,” Jacob said, and his tone implied that if I didn’t sit down, he’d help me do it.

“She’s tensed up again. She wants to fight. We can’t afford to posture, Jacob,” Nicky said.

It was Jacob’s turn to count to ten.

“Am I missing something?” Bennington said.

“Loads,” I said, smiling sweetly.

“Let’s all sit down and discuss how we’re going to live through this,” Jacob said in a voice that was reasonable, even pleasant. I wondered what visual he used to gain control. Had he pictured injuring me, killing me?

But we all sat down in the huge great room that most modern houses have for living rooms. I don’t like them, they’re too open. They are absolutely indefensible and seemed designed to make a burglar’s job easier. This room was particularly so, with the large stairway sweeping up one side with an open-railed hallway that cut across the entire length of the huge space. With all the talk of snipers it made me particularly not happy with the floor plan. I knew no one was up there, but it was just not a comfortable room when you knew that people really were out to get you. Of course, the people out to get me were sitting down on the white leather furniture looking at me. There was the mysterious Silas and his errand that he hadn’t finished, but right now there were enough enemies in front of me; I didn’t have to borrow.

“We’re just going to wait here until Silas phones, and then we’ll pack up and head for the cemetery,” Jacob said.

Bennington added, “I had her reburied because I found that most animators needed a grave rather than a mausoleum.”

“Very thoughtful,” I said, and didn’t try to keep the anger out of my voice.

“I am being reasonable, Ms. Blake. I could have had them kill your first boyfriend, Callahan, as an incentive for cooperation. You, unlike me, have spares.”

“They’re people, not extra tires in case of emergency.” The anger rose another notch, and I had to control my breathing again, count again. The lioness was getting impatient in the long grass.
We could kill him before they could stop us.
She was probably right, and if we killed him then the money went away. That was an interesting idea.

“You’ve thought of something, Anita. I can see it in the set of your shoulders, the way you went still. Whatever it is, don’t do it,” Jacob said.

The trouble with wereanimals that were also professional bad guys was that it’s very hard to surprise them. The only way to do it was to take action before you really think about it, the way you do in martial arts. You see your opening and you react, because you’ve already made your decision to hurt them before the fight starts. If I killed Bennington, would they be professional and just stop all this, or would they kill at least one of my lovers as an object lesson? Until I had an answer to that question, did I dare kill Bennington if the chance came?

Jacob sat down on the couch beside me, arm on the back of it, like we were a couple. I leaned just out of touching of the arm. He could think I was being unfriendly, but I didn’t want him to feel the knife hilt under my shirt. Thanks to the lions being overly friendly I had one weapon left; I didn’t want to lose it.

He leaned in and spoke low. “Whatever you are thinking, it won’t work. We have a sniper on all three of them. They’ll call in as each man goes outside for the first time today. They’ll follow them and if we don’t call in periodically, they’ll kill them.”

“I understand that,” I said, but part of me filed away the fact that he’d said
we
. Jacob didn’t have to be the one to make the phone calls to the shooters. Nicky could do it. I only needed one of them alive and on my side. I tried to breathe past the anger and that edge of fear that wanted to scream through me. I had to think, which meant neither anger nor fear was my friend. Fear will keep you alive, and anger will help you in a fight sometimes, but when it came to planning action you needed no emotions. Be empty, be still, and think.

“I am sorry, Ms. Blake, to force you, but I want the woman I love back, you understand that.”

“I’ll do my best, but it will still only be a zombie. No matter how lifelike she looks when you first see her, it can’t last, Mr. Bennington.”

“I’ve been told that there is one set of circumstances where the recently dead can be raised as a zombie but stay intact.”

“If so, it’s news to me.” I was leaning forward a little, trying not to let Jacob touch me. For some reason that made him move closer to me so that our hips touched on the couch. Great, it was like one of those dates where the guy doesn’t respect your personal space.

“Mr. Bennington,” Jacob said, “I wouldn’t overshare with Anita. She’s cooperating, and once Silas does his part we’ll head to the gravesite. We don’t need to talk about the details.”

Then Bennington gave me a look. It was hostile. “You know, I wasn’t certain I could go through with it. I actually thought I might lose the first half of the payment and not do this, but then I saw the pictures of your lunch with your lovers. I watched your Mr. Schuyler and your Mr. Graison flirt. My Ilsa liked to flirt; in fact, she loved it. She loved attention and she had a fascination with shapeshifters.”

So he knew she was a fur-fucker. I just looked at him, not sure what emotion he wanted from me. I gave him a blank face and waited for him to talk. He was in that villain speech mode that only the amateurs do.

“I watched them comfort you, and then watched you flirt with the waiter. You wouldn’t give me back my flirt, so I took yours, and if you take my Ilsa away from me again, I will take your men away from you forever.”

I must have tensed forward, not on purpose, because Jacob put his arm across my shoulders just in case, but I’d been too intent on Bennington’s words. I’d forgotten for a second that I didn’t want him to touch my back.

I tried to stand up, and he grabbed me, but I managed to get to my feet, but Nicky was there behind me, arms hugging me from behind, and this time he wasn’t distracted by lion hormones. “What the hell is that?”

“Something big that you missed,” Jacob said.

I forced myself not to struggle in Nicky’s grip, but I couldn’t not tense up, or stop the lioness from not wanting them to manhandle her, us. I had a moment of pronoun loss, and that growl trickled out from between my lipsticked lips. Heat came with it in a rush over my skin like a sudden fever. I was suddenly so hot, so hot, but I wasn’t sweating.

“Her skin is hot to the touch,” Nicky said, and his voice sounded strangled, as if he were fighting off his own growl.

“I can feel the energy,” Jacob said.

Bennington stood up, got close to me, trusting Nicky to keep me from hurting him. Nicky tightened his arms around my body, pinning my arms to my sides. He held on tight enough that it was almost hard to breathe. “You wanted to know what our plan is for us to go back to our lives; well, you will use the energy of a human sacrifice to raise Ilsa from the dead. It will be enough energy to make her beautiful forever, mine forever. And once you use murder to raise the dead, you can’t tell on us without risking the death penalty yourself.”

I found my voice. “That’s the errand that Silas is supposed to finish, isn’t it?”

Nicky tightened his grip until it dug my empty holster into my body, and it began to truly hurt, but I didn’t mind; the pain helped me think. It helped me not give in to the snarling lion inside me. If we killed Bennington, the second half of their money was gone. And they were professionals. I didn’t think they’d kill us for free. It was a plan, and besides, we wanted him dead. It’s hard to fight the inner beast when you agree with it.

The lioness charged out of that long metaphysical or metaphorical grass, and began to run full out up that path inside me. She was a golden blur, moving through me.

“Fight it,” Nicky said in my ear.

I glared at Bennington. “Why?”

Jacob was in front of me, blocking my view of Bennington. “Because if you shift, you can’t raise the dead and you’re no good to us. Don’t make us kill you, Anita.”

Nicky spoke through gritted teeth as if it were beginning to be an effort to hold me. “Don’t make us kill your men.”

“Look at me, Anita!”

But all I could see was that blur of gold, and for the first time I didn’t want to put a wall between her and me. For the first time I needed the help, and I would take it.

Jacob grabbed my face, forced me to look at him, but he also touched bare skin to bare skin. I snarled up at him, and the golden blur slowed. Slowed and screamed through me, so that my body vibrated with the sound of her rage, her need, her hunger.

“God, she smells good,” Nicky said.

“Don’t you start,” Jacob said, but he was still touching my face, and the look in his eyes was uncertain, as if he were listening to things I couldn’t hear. His lion was talking to him, too. Would it help me to force them to change?

Jacob said, “Get out, Bennington, get out until we call you. She’s not safe.”

The lioness screamed again, and the sound came out of my throat. It hurt, as if the sound needed a bigger throat, a different mouth, and it rubbed raw things that should never have held the sound.

Jacob had a look on his face, a lost look. “Maybe you can bring our beasts, but if you do we’ll fall on each other and either fight over you, or both fuck you. Either way we might not hear the other phone calls. We might miss calling off our shooters on your other men. They might kill them not because we want them to, but because we missed the call.”