Anita Blake 20 - Hit List (26 page)

There was a look in his eyes now, almost a flinching, as if whatever he’d seen, or done, had worn the inside down as much as the outside.

“Well, darlin’, are we staying, or going?” His soft southern accent was deeper than it had been before. I didn’t believe it was because he’d been somewhere the accent existed, more like it was a piece of home they couldn’t take from him.

I didn’t even tell him not to call medarlin’ ; it was nothing personal, and he seemed to need all his down-home charm like a shield against whatever had taken the shine from his eyes.

“Staying,” I said.

He smiled, and gave a small nod. Lisandro, tall, dark, handsome, with his black hair in a ponytail trailing down his shoulders, stepped up beside him. He wasn’t quite as pretty as Bernardo, but he was ballparking. He looked like the proverbial Hispanic leading man. He was married and had two kids. He coached their soccer teams. We’d had sex together once for a sort of emergency feed to keep Marmee Noir from doing bad things. To keep his wife from trying to kill us both, we’d agreed it would never happen again. Actually, we just pretended it hadn’t. Worked for me.

“Why is Raborn against you?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

Lisandro gave me a look.

I smiled. “I’m not lying, I just met the man.” I turned to Edward beside me. “Tell him.”

“He took an instant dislike to Anita.”

“Maybe it’s just being a woman and being better at the job than he is,” Socrates said. His skin was the color of coffee with a little cream added. Hair was short, clipped close to his head, just long enough on top that he could style it, but today he’d chosen not to, so that the hair formed tiny little curls. It looked . . . cuter than his usual, but he’d actually explained that this was natural, and cops didn’t like you styling your hair on the job. He was an ex-cop, so he’d know.

He wasn’t as tall as the other two men, less than six feet by a few inches. He tended to round his shoulders, slumping a little, as if he’d gotten his height early in life and never lost the habit of trying to hide it, even though he wasn’t the tallest kid in the room anymore.

“You think it’s as simple as that? Raborn is a misogynist?”

He grinned at me, filling his dark brown eyes with that spark he could get. “That’s a big word just to say he doesn’t think much of women.”

I grinned back, and shrugged. “Hey, I’m not just another pretty face. I have a vocabulary.”

“You gotta watch the big words there, ma’am, we humble bodyguards don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ares said.

I turned to him. He was just under six feet, blond and brown-eyed. He’d lost the desert tan he’d come to us with. He’d been out of military on medical discharge for a while, but he still couldn’t quite lose thema’am andsir , or the shoulders-back, spine-straight stance. He’d tried letting his hair grow out, but finally he’d cut it short again, keeping the top long, but his hair was as straight as Socrates’ was curly, so the longish top spilled a little over and to one side of his face. He had a habit of pushing it away from his face, as if it bugged him. I was betting next trip to the barbershop he’d be evenly short. Socrates had tried to help him style it when the top was longer so it was in sort of anime spikes, but that just wasn’t Ares. If he hadn’t caught lycanthropy, he’d have probably been lifetime Army.

But the real anime hair was Nicky’s. He was white-bread enough to have yellow-blond hair, shaved short on the sides, but long on top so it spilled out over one half of his face, in a long triangle of straight blond hair. With Ares right beside him it was more apparent that there was some body or wave to Nicky’s hair. Ares’s was straight as the proverbial board. Nicky’s overly long fall of hair had a sort of curve to it. It made the two of them look like they were going out to a club, or to an anime festival, but Ares dyed his hair so he could remind himself he wasn’t in the military anymore, and Nicky grew his out to hide that he was missing an eye.

The woman who raised him, who was technically his mother, had taken his eye when he was fourteen because he tried to say no to her sexual abuse. Women are less likely to be active abusers, but when they are, it’s usually more violent. Nicky’s childhood had been bad. He had one lovely blue eye, but the other was just a smooth empty socket of scar tissue. The hair hid it completely, and managed to look like a fashion statement at the same time. The hair might have made people take him less than seriously, but he was six feet even, and the body that went with the rest of him made certain that anyone who knew what they were looking at wouldn’t underestimate Nicky. All the guards lifted weights as part of their training, but either Nicky hit them harder or genetics made him bulk up, because even in jeans, T-shirt, and a light jacket, the swelling of his shoulders and biceps showed. He wasn’t the tallest guy waiting for me in the hallway, but he was the biggest.

“Hey,” he said, softly.

I smiled at him. “Hey.” That was it, not the most romantic, but there was more emotion in those little words than in anything I’d said to anyone else. Nicky was my lover, and my Bride, in that Dracula, Prince of Darkness way. It made us closer than just dating ever would have. Thanks to my having to have private time with Olaf, and then uniformed cops arriving on the scene, I hadn’t gotten to really greet him. It had been a wave, and a hi, and oh, cops.

Domino stepped away from the wall so I had to look at him. I think I’d left Nicky and Domino for last because they distracted me. Domino’s hair was black and white curls, mostly black today, with just a few white, which meant that the last couple of times he’d shapeshifted he’d done black tiger. His hair tended to reflect whether he’d last shifted into his white tiger or black tiger form. I wondered if Ethan’s hair would change color with his shift. Domino had sunglasses that hid his eyes, because his eyes were always tiger eyes. They were deep reddish orange with spirals of gold through them, which was actually more black tiger than white genetically. He was only about an inch shorter than Nicky, but he tended to like boots with heels, so that added a couple of inches. Nicky was more a jogging-shoe kind of guy, but then he wasn’t insecure about his height, not in the least. Domino wasn’t insecure either, he just liked boots. He was one of my tigers to call. It was a different bond than with Nicky; Domino had free will. He could argue with me, fight, and tell me I was wrong. Nicky could do those things to a point, but if I gave him a direct order he’d do it. Domino followed my orders, but he had a choice.

With the jacket on, Domino looked much less muscled than I knew he was, but then clothes can hide a lot of good things, and I knew that what lay under his clothes was very good.

I was in the midst of giving Domino the smile he deserved when Ares said, “I feel ignored.”

I glanced at him. “Sorry.”

He grinned at me and took a breath to say something, but his eyes went behind me. Everyone looked behind me and it wasn’t entirely friendly. I turned to find Raborn coming up behind us.

He’d closed the door to Clark’s office and she was on the phone.

“What do you want, Raborn?” I asked.

“Who’s in charge of the muscle?” he asked, and he made sure his tone was offensive.

Nicky shoved a thumb in my direction. “Anita is.”

Raborn gave him a look that said clearly,I don’t believe you .

“It disappoints me, too,” Ares said with a grin, “but she’s it.”

“What does ‘it’ mean?” Raborn asked.

“The boss, the big cheese, the head honcho, or honchette,” Ares said. “She’s it.”

“Why would you listen to her?”

Ares looked at me. “Do we have to explain ourselves to him?”

“No,” I said, “we don’t.”

Ares gave Raborn a big grin that filled his olive-green eyes with glee. “You heard her.”

“You all fucking her?” Raborn asked.

I felt Edward tense beside me. “That was over the line, pardner.” His Ted voice was a little strained around the edges. But it was the other men who were scary in that moment. They went quiet, but it was the quiet that a predator will use when it hunkers down in the long grass beside the trail. It was a tense, waiting quiet, and the energy coming off all of them raised the hair on my arms and tickled down my spine.

“Easy, guys,” I said.

“He doesn’t get to talk to you like that,” Domino said in a low voice.

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. I sighed and looked up at Raborn. “Do you want me to bring you up on sexual harassment charges?”

“Since when is the truth grounds for harassment?” he asked. His eyes were angry, defiant. I thought in that moment that Socrates was right; it was the fact that I was a woman. Cops usually thought policewomen were only two things: bitches or sluts. I had a reputation for both.

I stood there and thought of several replies, none of them helpful. Raborn said, “So it’s true then?”

I let out a breath, and smiled at him. “Actually, I’m fucking”—I pointed to Nicky and he stepped forward—“and”—I pointed at Domino, who moved up to join Nicky. “I forget anyone?” I asked gazing down the line.

Most of them shook their heads, faces very serious. Bobby Lee just stared at Raborn; it was not a good look, or rather it was a very good look if your sense of self-preservation was low.

“See, Raborn, I’m only fucking two of them. Does that make you feel any better?”

He blushed, except the color spread past his hairline and didn’t stay red. He was turning a sort of purple. Either it was the darkest blush I’d ever seen, or he was just that angry. Either way, the reaction was sweet and insulting.

“Any other questions?” I asked him.

He glared at me, and then Clark’s voice came from behind us. I guess she’d finished her phone call and opened the door quietly enough that Raborn and I didn’t hear her. “Marshal Raborn, I need you to drive to Oregon for me, right now.”

He glanced back at her, and then moved so he could keep an eye on both her and us, which meant he wasn’t as stupid as he seemed. “We have a serial killer in Seattle and you’re sending me on some trumped-up errand?”

“As your superior I’m telling you that you are driving to the far side of Oregon today; if you question my orders again, I’ll find something for you to do on the far side of Alaska, is that clear?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m tired of your attitude and because I can. One more word and I promise you that you will be seeing so much real estate that by the time you drive back this case will be over.”

He closed his mouth tight, lips thinned with anger. The flush that had been fading began to darken again. If it was blood pressure, eventually he was going to stroke out if he didn’t learn to control himself. He just nodded.

She handed him a piece of paper. “This is where I want you to drive and what I want you to pick up for me.”

His eyes barely flickered over it before he turned on his heel and marched off. I think he didn’t trust himself to keep quiet if he stayed near us all.

Clark looked at me and Edward, but finally settled on me. “Bringing in lovers as deputies won’t help your reputation, Blake.”

I sighed. “I know, Marshal Clark, but neither of them is just a pretty package. They’ll be an asset to the case, or we wouldn’t have flown them in.”

“They better be more than a booty call, Blake. No offense, gentlemen.”

“None taken,” Nicky said.

Domino just looked at her.

It was her turn to sigh. “Prove to me that they’re more than just pretty, or muscle. Prove to me that they can help us catch these things.”

“Things?” I made it a question.

“Whatever is killing the weretigers isn’t human. Whatever injured Marshal Karlton wasn’t human either. What my marshals chased in the woods with you was sure as hell not human. We have a body in the morgue that is charred halfway between human and animal form. Nothing on this case is human, so until I have another word for them, they’re things, perps, monsters. Now get out there and do something useful.” She went back into her office, and we started moving down the hallway like we had a purpose.

“Raborn is going to be trouble,” Lisandro said.

“He’ll try,” I said.

“How do we stop him?” Domino asked.

Edward said, “Execute the warrant; be so good at the job that he can’t come back at Anita.”

“The job is to kill . . .” Ares hesitated, trying not to saythe Harlequin . “The killers, right?”

“Yep,” I said.

Ares smiled, a flash of teeth in his delicate face. “We’ll be good at the job.”

The rest of them just nodded. I realized in that moment we were a pack, a pride, we were a unit.

We were—us. And for the first time since I understood that it was the Harlequin killing the weretigers, I felt . . . hopeful.

EDWARD WAS AT my right as we walked across the parking lot. Nicky came up on my left.

His fingertips brushed mine. I had time to squeeze his fingers before Edward said, “We’ve got company.”

Nicky dropped back a step like a good bodyguard. I knew without looking that Domino was at my back; I could feel him like heat behind me. I was aware of the other men the way I was aware of my surroundings, or men in general, but not the way I was with the other two; they were mine in ways the others were not.

Marshal Newman was leaning against our rental car. He had a nice, noticeable bandage on his forehead. He looked a little pale in the sunlight, so that the few freckles he had stood out against his skin. I hadn’t noticed them last night, or was it two nights ago? I honestly didn’t know what day it was. Newman’s short brown hair looked as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it since he got out of the hospital. He leaned that tall, lanky body on the side of the rental and watched us.

When we were close enough, Edward called out, “How’s the head?” He was back to his happy Ted voice like a new person was walking around in his skin. I was used to it, but sometimes it still creeped me.

“Fine,” Newman said, pushing himself to his feet.

We let it go at that, but Edward and I both knew Newman wasn’t fine. He was functioning, he was well enough to work, but his head probably ached like a son of a bitch. We’d all have given the same answer. He was fine.