Anita Blake 20 - Hit List (31 page)

You’ve got some very tough people working for you. I could kill them, but if I can’t kill them, they could hurt me, badly, so I don’t fight.”

“You spar,” I said.

He looked out past the cars, as if he were counting to ten. “It’s not the same thing, Anita. It’s so not the same thing.”

“Are you saying that you want to fight Bernardo so you can hurt or kill him?”

“I want to hurt someone, yeah.” His big hands folded into fists and a tightness ran across his shoulders and upper body like a coiled spring waiting for the switch to release all that pent-up power.

“Why?” I asked.

Nicky gave me a look that wasn’t friendly. It was the look you see sometimes in the zoo from the beasts behind the bars. No matter how much land they have to run in, how many toys they have to play with, there’s always one big cat that seems to remember running free, and knows no matter how big the cage is, it’s still a cage, and he wants out. Nicky’s lion filled his one good eye with amber, and then he blinked and it was back to his human color, but I knew it had been there, his lion peeking out from the cage that I’d forged for it; a cage that it, and Nicky, resented. How had I not seen it? I hadn’t wanted to see it, hadn’t wanted to understand that no matter how tame he seemed, Nicky was still the sociopath that I’d met a year ago. I hadn’t changed him; I’d just broken him to my will. Crap.

Nicky hung his head enough that the long triangle of bangs spilled forward from his face, so that the scars over the other eye socket showed stark in the sunlight. He didn’t actually like to show the scars much, so I knew he was just too upset to care. His entire body posture had changed, no longer belligerent, no longer violence waiting to happen, but something softer.

“You feel bad now, and I can feel it. You’re a little sad. I know you feel bad for what you did to me, Anita. I don’t want you to feel bad.” He raised his face and looked at me. There was something of pain in his face, a frowning effort to understand what he was feeling.

I reached out to him, and he moved closer so I could touch his face. He nestled his cheek against my small hand, and he let out a breath; something hard and unpleasant went out of him. He was my Nicky again, or what I’d begun to think of as mine. He pressed his hand against mine, pressing it closer against his face. “God,” he whispered.

“That was creepy,” Bernardo said.

“You have tamed him like a pet cat,” Olaf said.

Nicky and I both turned to him, and the tension was just back in Nicky. His beast vibrated like heat down my hand and arm. He kept my hand pressed to his face as he glared at Olaf. It’s hard to be tough when you’re cuddling, but it didn’t seem to occur to Nicky to let go of me, or maybe the desire to be near me was stronger than his desire to look tough?

“I heard you had reformed Nick, a good woman reforming a bad man, but it’s not that at all.

Nick had to make you feel better. He could not abide you being even a little sad.” Olaf looked at me, and there was something I’d never seen on his face before, a soft horror.

“Do the two of you know each other?” I asked again.

Nicky moved my hand from his face and held it. I wondered, had it bothered him that I hadn’t touched him more when he first got to town? He was looking at Olaf; even as he began to rub his thumb across my knuckles, he was staring at the other man.

“Ofeach other, yes,” Nicky said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means,” Olaf said, “that we know each other’s work. Jacob’s pride of werelions had a reputation in some circles for handling things that other mercenaries would not attempt. They were as good as their reputation until they came up against you, Anita.”

I wondered how much Olaf actually knew about what Nicky’s people had tried to do last summer, and how badly they’d failed.

“Did you truly kill Silas with a blade?” Olaf asked, and that said he knew some real details.

Truth was I’d only hurt him with a blade, and then he’d knocked me unconscious and damn near killed me. I’d gotten another chance at him with a blade only after he got shot by somebody else.

I don’t know how much I would have shared, but Nicky answered for me. “Yeah, she did.”

“Silas was good with a blade. That you killed him with one is impressive,” Olaf said.

I squeezed Nicky’s hand; he squeezed back. Was he telling me to just agree? “It wasn’t as easy as it sounds,” I said. Nicky squeezed my hand again, and that was yes, enough. He didn’t want me to overshare with Olaf. Probably the smart thing to do, so I did it; I could be taught.

“Then it must have been difficult indeed, because I worked once with Silas before he joined Jacob’s lions. He would not have been an easy kill before he became a werelion. You are better than you have shown me.”

“Didn’t Anita just break your wrist? How much better does she have to show you?” Lisandro said.

Olaf moved his head to look at the other man. He just looked at him, but apparently it was his signature cave-deep look. Lisandro gave him cold eyes back, and it was a stare that would have given a lot of people pause, but Olaf wasn’t most people, and neither was Lisandro. “Save the scary stares for the civilians.”

Someone’s phone began to go off. It took me a few seconds to realize it was mine. The song was

“Bad to the Bone,” by George Thorogood. I’d managed to figure out how to get the song “Wild Boys” off as my main ring tone, but Nathaniel had chosen a lot of individual ring tones; I hadn’t caught them all yet. Nicky didn’t seem to want to let go of my hand so I could get the phone.

That answered the question about whether it had bothered him that he hadn’t had more attention when I first saw him.

“Yeah,” I said, when I finally answered the phone; I admit it was something of a snarl.

“Anita?” It was Edward’s voice, but he made my name a question.

“Yeah, I’m here, I mean, it’s me. What’s up?”

“Is everything all right on your end?”

“Yes, yes, what’s up?”

“Did you run into Jefferies at the emergency room?” he asked.

“Olaf has a wrist cast, but its not really him that’s causing the problem.” I walked away from the other men. Nicky trailed me. I started to tell him not to, but I wasn’t sure if he and the other guards had decided I wasn’t allowed to be alone, and I didn’t want to argue, I just wanted to talk to Edward.

When the only person who could hear was Nicky, I spoke to Edward. “Olaf was flirting with a nurse at the hospital. She’s petite, long, dark hair, just his type.”

“She looks like you,” Nicky said. He moved closer to me, his broad shoulders probably hiding me from the view of the others.

I glanced up at him, and he was actually too close, so I had to step back a touch to focus on his face. “No, she didn’t,” I said.

“No, she didn’t what?” Edward asked.

“Nicky says the nurse looked like me. I disagree.”

“Did Bernardo think she looked like you?” Edward asked.

“I don’t know.”

Nicky moved close again, putting his hand on my shoulder. I started to move away from him, but two things stopped me. First, he seemed to need to touch me. Second, I’d almost totally ignored him when he got to town. Third, it felt good for his hand to be on my shoulder. It was like that with almost everyone who was tied to me metaphysically; it felt good to touch and be touched.

“If Bernardo says she looks like you, then she does.”

“I don’t know what Bernardo thinks about it, but we already knew I fit his victim profile,” I said.

“You fit it, but not absolutely; if he was flirting with a nurse that looks a lot like you, Anita, that could mean things. Bad things.”

“It isn’t good that he’s looking to date a woman at all, Edward.” Nicky put his hand on my other shoulder. I stayed stiff for a moment, and then let myself sink in against the front of his body.

The moment he felt me relax in against him, he relaxed even more, folding his big arms across my shoulders, going all the way across the front of my body. He could have wrapped me around a second time with all that muscle. I put my free hand over one of his arms, sliding it over the swell of his muscles.

“I don’t give a damn about some stranger, Anita. Either he’s flirting with this woman to see if it bothers you, or he’s trying to find a substitute because you won’t date him.”

“We can’t let him date anyone, Edward. He doesn’t date, he tortures and kills.” I rested my face against Nicky’s arm, wishing that his jacket weren’t in the way. It was leather, and a new jacket that I’d bought him to fit over the extra inches of muscles he’d put on since moving in with us, but even the soft leather wasn’t as good as bare flesh would have been to me in that moment.

Now that I’d given in to touching him, I wanted more skin contact; it was part of the problem with giving in to touching him at all, that once I started I didn’t want to stop. Touching Domino would have been the same; almost anyone I had a metaphysical tie to would have been the same.

I wondered if Ethan would affect me like that eventually, and I him.

“He says he’s willing to date you,” Edward said.

“I know he wants to hurt me, Edward.”

“I don’t mean date you like that.”

“You mean a date-date like dinner and a movie?” I asked.

“I don’t know about dinner and a movie, but he would try something more normal than his usual.”

“He said that to you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see you and Olaf sitting around and talking about girls.”

“I made sure he and I were clear on what he meant by dating you before I’d let him come as backup for me, Anita.”

“So what did he tell you?”

“He’d be willing to have vanilla sex with you.”

I tried to stand away from Nicky, but he curved his taller body over me, so I could stand more upright but he could still wrap himself around me. It felt warm and safe to have his arms around me, so good to have my body against the front of his, held so close. Close enough that I could feel the front of his body begin to swell. Sex had been part of the “magic” that I’d used to bind Nicky to me, to steal his free will. He and his lion pride of mercenaries had kidnapped me and had been threatening to kill three of the men I loved. They’d almost killed me, and in the end they’d stripped me of every power I had except for one. I’d used that one power to make Nicky betray everyone and everything, so he’d help me save myself and the men I loved. Until Nicky I hadn’t understood what I was doing, or what it would mean to the person I was doing it to, but with Nicky I hadn’t been innocent. I let him hold me, not just because it felt good for him to do it, but because I did feel bad about what I’d done to him. Yes, he’d been a very bad man, but no one deserved to be mind-fucked until there was nothing left, not even a sociopath.

“Anita,” Edward said.

“Are you seriously saying you want me to have sex with Olaf? You can’t be serious.”

Nicky tightened his arms around me, laying a kiss on the top of my head. I began to smooth my hand back and forth on his arm, outlining the muscles under the leather of his jacket.

“Do I want you to have sex with him? No.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, what does that mean? You always know what you mean.”

Nicky kissed my hair again. He tucked his body in tighter against mine, and just the feel of his body so hard, so thick against my ass, caught my breath in my throat, made me shiver against him, which made him wrap himself tighter around me, which made all the sensations more intense, which . . . “Edward, sorry, just give me a minute.” I put the phone against my stomach and asked, “Nicky, room, I need a little room. It’s too distracting.”

“What’s too distracting?” He whispered it against my hair and pressed himself a little tighter against the back of my body, giving a slight flex of his hips that made me have to try to step away from his body. He tried to hold on to me, tried to keep himself pressed against me, but I said, “Let me go, Nicky.” And just like that he had to let me go, because I’d told him to do it.

I grabbed his hand in mine, and that small gesture earned me a smile that filled his face with such joy. It was so wrong that he reacted like that to me; you should only act like that around people you love. Nicky didn’t love me, not in a way that should have brightened his face like that from a simple hand holding.

I put the phone back to my ear and tried to ignore Nicky and his too-happy face. “I’m back, Edward.”

“You seem distracted, Anita. We have the . . . people that are killing the weretigers, and Olaf.

You cannot be distracted and deal with either of them.”

“I’m on top of it, Edward.”

“Are you?”

Nicky pulled on my hand, drawing me a little closer. I moved my body to one side so that he couldn’t draw us completely together. I couldn’t afford to be distracted again so soon.

“Look, we’re on our way to get fresh clothes for Karlton. Once she’s suited up we’ll join you in the field.”

“No, there’s nothing out here. Your wererat trailed them to the edge of the woods and then nothing. We think they either flew or had a car waiting.”

“So the brilliant idea to use wereanimals to track the killers isn’t so brilliant.”

Nicky moved closer to me. I kept the side of my body to the front of his. He leaned over and laid his face against the top of my head, resting against my hair as if it were a pillow.

“It was a good idea, Anita, and when we get a fresher crime scene we’ll try again.”

“You’re right, they’ll kill again.”

“They will,” he agreed.

“I hate the idea of having to wait for another crime scene before we catch a break. It’s like we want someone else to be killed.”

Nicky moved his head to lay a kiss against my hair.

“We’ll meet you back at the motel while you’re getting Karlton’s clothes. You need to get rooms for the rest of your deputies.”

I leaned my forehead against Nicky’s chest. “How’s Bobby Lee doing?” I asked, because I knew he was the one who’d shapeshifted to try to scent out the bad guys.

“He’s passed out in the back of the car.”

“So he’s already shape shifted back to human form,” I said. Nicky put his arm across my back, trying to draw me in against his body again.