Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (44 page)

For the first time, there was no pain to giving my beast, because I wasn’t fighting it. There was warmth and power, and a feeling of something pulled out of me, like an extra body part that I hadn’t known I had, and suddenly it was there and I could feel it and use it, and it was gone again. It pushed into Jason, and I could feel it, going deep inside him. I could feel that part of me seeking a matching part of him. I found his beast, and what had been gentle and loving was suddenly explosive. I needed file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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him to change now. The beasts seemed to sense my urgency, or maybe his wolf didn’t want to die either.

Jason’s body jerked under my hand. He gave a sound, a cry, and fur flowed under my hand. His body shrank and re-formed. Once, feeling Richard shift and change against my body had frightened me to death; now it was the most wonderful thing in the world. It had worked. I kept my hand on him while the power of it danced across my skin like the kiss of something electric and alive. When it was done, a gray wolf lay on its side, panting. The heart under my hand now was thick and steady. He opened wolf eyes the color of new spring leaves. For a moment he saw me, and he gave me that look that no real wolf will ever give, and then the eyes fluttered shut, and the body under my hand began to flow and move again. His human body flowed up and around the wolf, and I was left with my hand on Jason’s side.

I put a hand on the middle of his chest, and his heartbeat was there, thick and steady. His skin was still cool to the touch, but his heart felt better. I wiped my hand on my jeans, trying to get the blood and wet goo off of it. I put my hand back on his neck. I searched for his pulse, and found it this time.

His naked body was free of blood, so that it looked like he’d just been laid down in the middle of the carnage. Now the wounds that hadn’t healed were clear on his skin. He was covered in knife cuts like evil red mouths; from shoulders nearly to ankles he was covered in wounds. They began to bleed again as I watched. I’d bought us some time, but this wasn’t going to heal by magic; we needed doctors.

I picked up the gun from the floor and reached for the cell phone. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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54

I DIALED 911
. A woman’s voice said, “Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?”

“Anita Blake, Federal Marshal.” I gave my ID number, then said, “Female, five-foot-three, long black hair, T-shirt, jeans. Two down. Officer-involved shooting. Partner wounded.” Technically, Jason wasn’t my partner, but he was mine, and they’d come faster for a wounded cop than a civilian. I’d sort it out later, after we survived.

“Address.”

“Shit, I don’t know.” I got up and looked out a window. There was nothing but trees. “They drugged us and we woke up here. I don’t know where here is, can’t you trace me by the phone?”

“Is there a landline?”

I looked around the room. “I don’t see one.”

“Try another room.”

“I don’t want to leave him alone.”

“We need a location to send help, Marshal.”

She was right, but I hated leaving him like that. I touched his hair, laid my cheek against his, and whispered, “Don’t die on me.” I walked back down the hallway past the bodies and tried the first door. It was a bedroom. No phone. The second door I tried was a kitchen, and there was a phone on the wall. “I see a phone, let me see if it’s working.” I had to put my gun down to pick up the second phone. “I’ve got a dial tone.”

“Call us back on that line, and we’ll be able to trace it to you.”

“Okay.” I clicked the cell phone shut, and dialed 911 again. It was a different woman’s voice, and I told an even shorter version.

“We have your location, Marshal, help is on the way.”

“How long?”

“You’re pretty isolated. We’ll try to get a chopper up, but there’s no place close to you to land it.”

“Okay. We’ll wait.”

“I can stay on the line with you if you want,” she said.

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“No, I need to try to stop the bleeding on my friend, and I need my hands for that. Thanks though.” I hung up before she could say anything else. I clicked the safety on the gun and tucked it down the front of my belt. I’d bring Jason in here. I wasn’t sure how to stop the bleeding from so many wounds, but I knew keeping him warm was better.

Help was coming. We just had to hold on until they got here.

I knelt beside him. His hair was strangely clean, except where the side of his face had been on the blood. He looked like Jason again, instead of so much meat. I swallowed past something that tasted like tears. I’d cry later when he was safe. No time now. I rolled him into my arms, and he felt like dead weight. The heart was going and the pulse was moving, but there is a difference in bodies. Even unconscious, a body doesn’t roll like this. Just the way he felt in my arms scared the hell out of me. He rolled, and flopped, like he was already dead. His skin was too cold to the touch. I had to get the bleeding stopped. I had to.

It wasn’t weight, but sheer awkwardness that made me put him in a fireman’s carry across my shoulders. Blood trickled down my body from him. Shit. I tried to think of other things. I was glad that of all the men in my life, it was one my size. There probably wasn’t twenty pounds’ difference in our weight. I could carry him. Not forever, but down the hall. I carried him past the body of the vampire who had tortured him. My only regret in that moment was that I couldn’t kill him again. I laid Jason down on the bed. He lay so still, so horribly still. I folded the coverlet around him, hoping to keep him warmer, and then I went in search of a first-aid kit, something, anything. I’d have traded my skills at killing for a little more first-aid training right then. I knew what was in the bathroom, so I checked the kitchen first. There were towels, but no way to bind them in place. Maybe I could cut up a sheet to use as strips?

I got all the small towels and washrags that the kitchen had and carried them back to the bedroom. The only thing that showed above the coverlet was Jason’s hair, so yellow, so vibrant, but he hadn’t moved. I wanted him to move, so badly.

I put the rags down on the unused side of the bed and searched for sheets. They were in the closet. I had to go back to the kitchen to fetch a clean, sharp knife to cut the sheet up. I was glad the vampire hadn’t used all the knives in the kitchen, because I didn’t want to touch the bloody ones in the living room. It felt somehow like they were cursed. Not for real, but unclean, maybe. I cut the sheet into strips, and then I had to uncover him and start looking at the wounds. They had bled into the coverlet, but no wound seemed worse than the others. It was like any one cut would have been fairly minor, maybe a few stitches. It was the culmination of all of them together that had nearly bled him to death.

I picked a wound in his arm that seemed to be bleeding more than the rest, pressed a rag against it, and started trying to tie it in place. His arm was so limp that I had to trap his lower arm between my knees to get the knot tight enough to put pressure. But not too tight. I couldn’t remember, could lycanthropes suffer from getting their circulation cut off? I mean, if you could grow back a limb, then would too tight a bandage hurt you? I treated him like he was human, because I didn’t know. It had never come up.

It was when I was tying a wound on his thigh that I saw the first burn marks. Tiny, roundish burn marks on his thigh. More of them on the hip, and finally most of them on the groin. How had I missed these? They were smaller, less obvious than the bloody wounds, I guess. I knew I was in shock. I file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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knew that. Shock softens things. It helps you see things in pieces sometimes; a little horror here, a little more when your mind thinks you can handle it. Shock, if you don’t go too far, helps you cope. I knew what had caused him to scream now. Burns didn’t heal on a lycanthrope like everything else. Burns had to heal human-slow.

I found more of the little burns all over the front of his body. The back of his body was untouched because he’d been tied on his back. To bind the wounds on his chest, I had to lift him, and he was still just dead weight. I should have seen the wounds beginning to heal by now. They looked the same. I knew in reason that he’d healed from the first moment I’d seen him. I knew that the shift to wolf form had helped him heal, because he wasn’t bleeding as badly as that carpet…but he wasn’t healing as fast as I was used to seeing lycanthropes heal. I didn’t know if Jason was simply a slow healer, or if there had been that much damage, or if the vampires had done something to the wounds to make them worse.

When I’d bound all the wounds I could figure out how to bind, I lay down beside Jason, with me propped up on the pillows, and rolled him against my body. I held him against me, and I prayed, prayed with that energy that true tragedy gives you. The loudest prayers must be when you hold someone you love and feel him go cold.

I knew warmth was important to healing lycanthropes. Cold was bad, that much I knew. My body heat was all I could think of. I got the gun out of my belt and laid it on the pillow beside me. I’d done everything I could think of; now we waited for help to arrive. Waited and prayed. Jason didn’t feel like Jason in my arms. The washrags and sheet strips were rough and ruined the smooth feel of his body. My clothes were drying to my skin sticky with his blood. I should have taken them off before I lay down, so that Jason could be closer to my skin, but it had seemed to take so much effort to get him against me. I lay there, too tired, too shocky to move. Why? Why had they tortured him? Why had they taken us? I remembered the man yelling,

“Where’s Lorna?” We didn’t know anyone named Lorna, or I didn’t. Who the hell was she? I was betting that this had nothing to do with Jason, and everything to do with the Summerlands. Had Jason taken another beating for Keith Summerland? Was it that simple, or was something else going on that I didn’t know anything about? In that moment, holding Jason, feeling his blood drying my clothes to my skin, I was willing to believe there were lots of things I didn’t know. I heard the door open. The outside door, because I heard the screen hit. Whoever it was, hesitated in the hallway. They’d seen the body. If it was the rescue crew they’d have called out. I picked up the gun. The safety was already off, a round already chambered. I’d done that before I laid the gun down beside me. If anyone came through that door before the EMTs, they would not be my friend.

I sighted at the doorway and let out my breath. I let my body go quiet, and the gun was the focus of all that quiet. If Jason had moved in that moment I’d probably have screamed. A man’s voice called from down the hallway. “I hear your heartbeats. I smell his blood. I see my men are dead, so I assume you have at least one of their guns. Mr. Summerland, I didn’t think you had it in you to be this dangerous.”

I didn’t say anything. If I was quiet enough, he might come closer for a look. If he came close enough I’d shoot him.

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“Mr. Summerland, why don’t you answer me? If you would simply tell us where Lorna is, then we would let you go. We have no wish to harm the son of a governor.”

He was lying.

“Mr. Summerland,” he said again, “are you in there? Why don’t you answer me?”

I could smell dawn on the air. Not here yet, but close. I wanted to know if this was a vampire, but if I used my necromancy to sense him, he’d know what I was. I think they had thought I was just another of Keith Summerland’s women. It’s why they had left me in the bathroom, with no guard. It’s why this one was assuming that Keith Summerland had gotten away somehow and killed the two vampires. This guy was assuming that because I was a woman I wasn’t dangerous. Was it time to let the last man standing know that he’d made a mistake?

“Mr. Summerland?” His voice sounded a little closer. Did I wait for him to maybe get close enough for a shot, or did I try to get some answers?

Dawn was so close. If he was a vampire he’d been running out of moonlight, literally. If he was human it didn’t matter. I decided to try for information.

“Why would you think Lorna would be with him?”

“Oh, the girl.” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“Yeah,” I said, “the girl.”

“Do you know where Lorna is?” he asked, and there was a hopeful lilt to his voice.

“After what you did to my boyfriend and me, I don’t think I want to answer any of your questions.”

“We were harsh, and I am sorry for that. Genuinely sorry.”

“Liar,” I said.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“You first,” I said.

“They call me George.”

“I want to know your name, not what they call you.”

He laughed then, and he was good. It was a nice laugh, as if he weren’t standing in a hallway staring at the dead bodies of men he’d hired to kidnap and torture us. Of course, maybe he was just a charming sociopath. In that case the laugh was real. When you have no empathy for anyone else, other people dead or hurt don’t mean anything to you.

“Edmond, my name is Edmond. What is your name?”

I decided to try lying. “Katerine.” It was my middle name.

“Now who’s lying?” he said, and he made it sound playful.

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Fine. “Anita, my name’s Anita.”

“Anita, now that is a lovely name.”

“What happens if you don’t find Lorna?” I asked.

He was quiet for a second or two, then said, “Her husband will not be pleased.”