Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (42 page)

I laughed, an abrupt, not exactly happy sound. “I know people who would argue I have no selfcontrol at all.”

“They’re just jealous,” he whispered.

Hadn’t I thought something like that earlier? I did not want or need another man tied to me metaphysically. I just seemed to keep collecting them. I didn’t mean to. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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“Let’s get dressed,” he said, kissing the side of my face and beginning to untangle himself from me.

I laughed, and this time it was real. “You suggesting we get dressed? Usually, having someone be my animal to call makes the physical stuff more compelling, not less.” I turned in time to catch his grin, as he stood fastening the towel more securely around his waist.

“I promised my dad that we’d see him yesterday. I don’t know what excuse I can give him, but I want to see him.”

“You seem…” I didn’t know what word to use.

“I feel”—and he seemed to search for a word, too—“more solid.” He grinned down at me. “You are one of the most certain people I know; maybe that’s what I’m getting from you. Oh, God, me with actual ambition and goals. Too weird.”

“You have goals,” I said, kneeling.

He shook his head. “No, Anita, I float. I went to college because you’re supposed to. Once my folks wouldn’t let me major in drama, college didn’t really matter to me. Then I met Raina, and she showed me the kinkiest sex I’d ever imagined, and she made me a werewolf. I said yes, because she was beautiful and insatiable. Not because I wanted to be a werewolf. I worked at Guilty Pleasures because it pissed my family off and helped me have some money of my own. I didn’t say as a little boy, ‘I want to grow up to be an exotic dancer.’” His face fell into serious lines, so rare for Jason. “I let Jean-Claude feed on me the first time because Raina gave me to him. Giving him donors from the pack was part of the bargain between Jean-Claude and the wolves.”

That I had known, because it was how Richard ended up with Jean-Claude, though he had refused him blood. You can give a vampire a werewolf, but you can’t make the werewolf cooperative.

“I knew that part,” I said.

“I think part of the appeal to being Jean-Claude’s
pomme de sang
was that it would bother my dad so much.” He smiled, quick and so him. “Besides, Jean-Claude is sooo hot.”

I frowned at him. “You are not as bisexual as you pretend to be.”

He grinned at me. “And how do you know?”

I frowned harder. “I think Jean-Claude is an exception to your rule, just like Belle Morte is…”

And then I stopped. I hadn’t meant to say that.

Jason gave me a look. “Are you telling me that you did Belle Morte?”

I started concentrating on picking up the trash that we’d knocked onto the floor when the trash can fell over. “It was a vision. She shared enough energy with me to keep Jean-Claude and Richard from dying when the”—and I had to stop myself from saying
Harlequin
, and finished with—“the scary guys with no name came to town.”

Jason knelt with me and helped me pick things up and drop them in the small container. The bedside trash cans are always too small in hotels.

“But, that you mentioned it out loud means something.”

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I shook my head. “I know that Jean-Claude loves her still. I know that to once love Belle Morte is to always love her. It’s like an addiction; you can stop taking your drug of choice, but you’ll always crave it.”

“Do you crave her now?”

I shook my head. “No, but, I know if I ever saw her in person and she wanted me, I wouldn’t be able to say no. She’s not…she’s Belle Morte.” I shrugged. How do you explain someone who simply is sex? Sex and power were merged for her, and thanks to Jean-Claude’s memories I was sort of preaddicted. I wasn’t even embarrassed about it, which wasn’t like me. I got embarrassed about every damn thing.

I put the trash can back in its place with all the little bits of debris back inside it. Jason said,

“You’ve missed something.”

I looked at the floor. “No,” I said.

He pointed at a spot on the carpet. “Right there.”

“There’s nothing there, Jason.”

He picked up something from the floor. The moment he held it, I could see it, but up to that moment I had not. He held his hand out with the charm on his palm. “Can you see it now?”

I nodded, trying to swallow past the sudden choking of my pulse. I knew Marmee Noir had mind

-fucked me, but it should have passed by now. This proved it hadn’t passed. How royally screwed was I? But the fact that she didn’t want me to see the charm meant she feared it. That was a good thing to know.

I held out my hand and Jason gave me the charm. The moment it touched my skin, it was as if the world shifted, or at least the inside of my head did. A moment of nausea, dizziness, and I wrapped my hand tight around the charm. God help me, what was she trying to do to me?

Again, Jason echoed me, almost. “What does she want from you, Anita?”

“She wants me as her human servant, I think.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I think it’s more than that.”

“What could I do for her, Jason? She’s the most powerful vampire on the planet.”

“You’re the first real necromancer in the last several hundred years, Anita. Whoever has you as their human servant gains a lot of power.”

“You haven’t felt her yet, Jason. She is scary powerful. She doesn’t need more.”

“All vampires need more power, Anita, even I know that. They’re always afraid that someone else with more will come into their territory and take it all away from them.”

“The vampire council has declared it illegal for masters to fight in this country until the whole legal thing is more secure.”

“Then she’s breaking her own laws.”

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I nodded. He was right. The vampire who had given them their laws was breaking them. Why?

Then I made a mistake. I thought, “What do you want from me?”

I smelled jasmine.

Jason grabbed my arm. “I smell perfume.”

The moment he touched me the scent of jasmine faded, like perfume when you come into a room, and the woman who wore it has just left. Some women are like that; just their scent can make you walk from room to room until you put a face and body with that perfume. I shook my head, and tried to shake the thought with it. That didn’t sound like my thought. I looked at Jason, with his hand still on my arm. “Who wore perfume that you liked so much that you followed her from room to room?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and then a look came over his face. He seemed to be staring at something in the room, but his eyes said he was seeing a memory. That look of staring at far, far away things filled his blue gaze.

“There was a woman when I was in high school. She was the first crush I had who wore expensive perfume. It lingered on the air, delicate, just a hint, so you could follow her through the school.”

I touched his arm. “I thought just now about that very thing. About how a woman’s perfume could lead you from room to room. It had to be some crush for me to get that image so clearly from you.”

He looked at me then, rather than the memory in his head. “You know that night that my sister Bobbi swears she saw me having sex with a man?”

“I remember the argument.”

“I was with that crush. She was married, and my teacher. I promised her I’d never tell, and I never have.”

“How old were you?”

He smiled, somewhere between his grin and something wistful. “Legal, but barely. She waited until I was legal.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. When I was in high school it would never have occurred to me to approach a teacher. They simply did not exist for me as sexual objects. The taboo was too great. I was in college before I found a teacher who made me, even fleetingly, think of crossing that line.

“So you can prove it wasn’t you that your sister saw, but not without ruining the life and reputation of this woman.”

He nodded.

Ironic
, I thought.

“Ironic is one word for it,” he said.

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I stared at him. “You do know that I didn’t say
ironic
out loud, right?”

Jason looked startled. “I heard it.”

“I only thought it, Jason.”

We looked at each other. “Do I apologize?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, let’s just finish getting dressed and see if the hospital will let us see your dad.”

He stood, and we both kept holding on to each other’s arms as we stood, so it was anyone’s guess who helped who stand.

“I guess it is past visiting hours, but Anita, we need to go home. We need St. Louis, and JeanClaude, while we do this new metaphysical stuff, but I can’t go until we see my dad again.”

“Agreed.” I let go of him, and we stepped apart. I stood still, I think waiting to see if I smelled jasmine again.

“Okay?” he asked.

I nodded and reached up to the gold chain around my neck. I slid the charm onto the chain so that the cross and the charm both touched my skin. There, that was better. It was like I could breathe a little easier. I reached for the T-shirt I’d put on the bed and slipped it on. I was in the process of putting it on when there was a knock at the door.

We looked at each other. He shrugged. I picked my gun up off the bed and walked to the door. I looked through the peephole and found yet another pair of the suited guards with the addition of two of the hotel security guys in their blazers.

“Security,” I said, and looked back at Jason.

A man’s voice called, “Mr. Schuyler, there’s been a problem.”

I opened the door. The suited guard was Rowe. “What’s up, Rowe?” I asked. He looked way too serious for comfort. “The room has been compromised. We need to move you.”

“Compromised how?”

“The vampires who are looking for Keith Summerland have been given this room number. We need to make sure neither of you is here when the vampires arrive.”

I wanted to argue, but there was something about how serious he was, and how serious all the security had been, that made me decide to argue later. There was always time to argue later. Jason went for the suitcases. “Let them in, I’ll change in the bathroom.”

I stepped back to let Rowe and the rest into the room. “Where’s Shadwell?”

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“He’s on a break.” The two hotel guards stayed in the open doorway. I looked at them. They looked human. They had fed on someone to give color to the pale cheeks, but one look and I knew what they were. I started to raise my gun and yell, “Vampires!” Then one of them threw something into the room. Threw it so fast that the movement was seen, but not registered in my head, before the flash-bang grenade went off and the world went away. Oh, I was conscious, but I was also blind, and so disoriented that the next thing I felt was pain. I reached for what hurt and found a dart. A tranquilizer dart from the feel of it. I tried to bring my gun up to where they’d been. I tried to see them, but with the combination of the grenade and the drug, the world was full of swirls of color, and shapes that didn’t hold still. I heard Rowe yelling. I fell to my knees. Someone took my gun and I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t make my body move. I fell to the carpet and the mess of clothes and drying body fluids, and then the world went away, as if someone had turned off the lights. One moment I knew I was on the carpet in our room; the next, nothing. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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53

THERE WAS A
voice in the darkness. I thought at first I was hearing the bad guys, and then I understood the voice, and knew that it was much worse than bad guys. “Necromancer,” the voice whispered.

Fear stabbed through me in the dark, fear like fine champagne. I had a moment of being able to feel my body. A flash of knowing I was lying on a floor, and then I was back in the dark.

“Necromancer.”

Fear, and I was thrown into my body again. A moment of lights, and sensation, then darkness.

“Necromancer.”

I think I opened my eyes, but it could have been a dream. The darkness kept eating the world.

“Necromancer, if you stay in the dark, you will die.”

The room was white, and I knew my hands were tied behind my back. Then the drugs sucked me into the dark again.

“Necromancer!” She reached for me. It was a woman’s hand, small, delicate, and it was the paw of some great beast with claws, and fur, and…The claws struck; pain ripped through the darkness and made it run with blood. I woke, gasping for air, pulse, heart, everything racing. My chest hurt. I looked down and found the front of my T-shirt cut. Blood drops spattered the white tiles I was lying on. I worked to get a better look at the front of me, and finally realized the front of my shirt had been shredded by huge claws.

I remembered her reaching for me in the dark, and I knew she had done this. Somehow Marmee Noir had done this. Mother of God. The last of the drugs washed away on a flood of pure terror. I fought not to panic. The fear had helped me wake up, helped get the drugs out of my head and body; now I had to make sure the fear itself didn’t cripple me. Other than the claw marks, was I hurt? I had a headache, but that could have been the flash-bang as well as the drugs. What kind of vampires used modern grenades and drugs on their victims? The adrenaline was doing its job. I seemed to be thinking faster, everything crystal edged. Had Marmee Noir scared me on purpose to wake me up and get me going? I pushed the thought away for later. Stay alive, and worry about the rest later.