Crimson Death (13 page)

I
'D MANAGED TO
ask the two guards' names by the time we were walking past the group showers. Brunette was Barry, Barry the Brunette, and pale brown was Harris. I wasn't sure if it was his first or last name, and I didn't ask. They both felt like a lot of the new guards, interchangeable, as if someone had hired them from the same pool of tall, athletic, younger men, mostly white, though not all, and unfinished in a way that the guards that Rafael's people hired weren't. In an effort to get a greater variety of wereanimals into our personal guards, we'd let other groups besides the wererats offer up candidates for guard duty; so far no one was better than Rafael's rats, some of the werehyenas, and the Harlequin. They were the personal guards of the old queen of vampires and they were the best of the best, but then they'd had hundreds, sometimes thousands of years to practice their skills. It was hard to compete with that when you were under thirty like most of the new guards; but still Barry and Harris didn't fill me with the same confidence that some of our longer-term guards did.

I had no intention of us using the group showers. We'd use the shower in the room that Nathaniel and I shared with Micah. We could
hear the noise from the group showers down the hallway. Men laughing, calling out to each other, and just the energy of so many athletic and professionally competent violent men contained in good-natured rivalry, because that was always an underlying energy to the guards. The type of men who are good at the job description are always speculating who's the best, the fastest, the strongest; who will win. Add that they were all wereanimals, and the testosterone level could be enough to drown in; normally I was okay with that, but not today.

I felt Nathaniel flinch on the other side of Damian, and that was about how I felt, too. It was like it was too much energy to deal with while all three of us were still raw from the dream.

We were almost past the showers when I realized the noise inside was a lot less. It was reduced from a rollicking noise fest to almost silence. It was like being in the forest when the birds and crickets stop singing—you know something's wrong. I had left the bedroom with only my Browning in my hand, because lingerie sucks for places to put weapons. I fought the urge to point the gun at the door, and the fact that the two guards with us didn't react to the sudden silence made me take points away from them.

The guards inside the shower spilled out of the doorway in front of us, some low to the ground on their knees, others standing; some of them took cover around the edge of the doorway, and others just filled the hallway, weapons in hand and mostly nude. There was a moment when you almost felt them hesitate as they saw us, and then the weapons steadied—all pointing at Damian. It was interesting that they just assumed Nathaniel and I were innocent of whatever carnage had happened.

“Ease down,” I said.

They all ignored me; not good.

“It's Damian's blood, not mine.”

That made some of them glance at each other, as if looking for a clue, but most of them stayed with their guns nice and steady. One gun moved a fraction and was pointing at me; how could I tell? When you've had enough guns pointed directly at you, you get very sensitive to that kind of thing.

It was Ricky again. He'd used up all my goodwill at Danse Macabre
last time I saw him. “Unless you're going to shoot me, move the gun off me, now,” I said in a low voice.

“If that's Damian's blood, then you're more dangerous than he is.” His voice was as steady as his hand, but there was an edge of anger to that calm.

One of the other guards, naked in the doorway, said, “Ricky, are you pointing your gun at one of our main protectees?”

Harris moved in front of us to act as a meat shield. Barry had his gun out, but neither of them wanted to draw down on this many of their fellow guards. I sympathized, but I also knew I'd be reporting their lack of enthusiasm for protecting my life. Since that was one of their main jobs, it wasn't reassuring.

I called out over the broad shoulders of my meat shield. “Ricky, the last time I saw you, Echo was telling you you'd fucked up, and now you've pointed a gun at me. You just don't want this job, do you?”

“You show up covered in blood and tell us it doesn't belong to the vampire—what are we supposed to think?” he asked. He even sounded like he might believe it. Maybe I had scared him more the first time we met than I realized. Sometimes, once you've used basically vampire powers on someone and let them keep the memory of what you did, they never get over it. I know I've held grudges against real vampires for shit like that.

I heard other sounds and knew the guards were closing around Ricky. They'd report what he'd done, because the only thing that hurts a bodyguard's reputation worse than having a client die on their watch is one of their own security specialists killing the client.

“You all smelled the fresh blood, but we were right on top of you before you reacted to it.”

“Yeah.” It was Bobby Lee wearing a pair of boxers and holding a Smith & Wesson M&P loose in his hands. His body was lean and muscled in that way that long-distance runners get sometimes; there was almost no body fat to him, so he looked impressively cut, each muscle showing under his skin, but it was a little too lean, and I wondered if he was eating enough. Bobby Lee was one of the men most likely to be sent out of country on mercenary work for the wererats that had nothing to do with us, and everyone deals with the stress of that kind
of work differently. His short blond hair was still on end, but his gold-framed glasses showed that his medium-brown eyes were steady. He was always steady, was Bobby Lee, but I'd be talking to some of the other guards I trusted to see if he was doing okay.

“I didn't make Damian bleed. I just woke up in the mess with him.”

“Well, darlin', if you didn't hurt him, who did? Because this is too much blood to be losing.” He always had a slight Southern accent, and every woman was
darlin'
; when he was under stress, the accent got thicker and he started adding
honey chile
and
sugar
.

“It's a long story, Bobby Lee, but if you want to help these two walk us to Nathaniel and Micah's room so we can use the shower, I'll fill you in.”

“Happy to help, ma'am. Can you give me a minute to get dressed and rearmed?”

“Sure.”

He smiled, and then his brown eyes swam to black. His rat eyes in his human face. “Just so you know, darlin', the blood doesn't smell like vampire. It smells warmer than that.”

I felt the jump of energy through the guards as their beasts flashed through them. I was suddenly looking at amber, orange, red, brown, and more black—wolf, lion, hyena, rat. I fought with everything I had not to shiver or show any sign of fear. Damian had gone so still that if I hadn't been holding his hand I wouldn't have been able to feel him there at all. I felt more from Nathaniel on the other side of him, even though we were both holding hands with the vampire and not each other.

The guards' energy whispered through me and I could see my own beasts inside me the way you see dreams in your head. My wolf, my lion, my hyena, my leopard, and my newest beast, rat, all looked up and their energy ran over my skin and spilled out toward the energy in the hallway. I had enough control now to make sure that was all that happened, and I was happy for that as I looked at them all, because smelling like fresh blood around a bunch of wereanimals isn't always good for your health, even if you had your own monster to throw back at theirs.

“And just like that, we don't know whether to fight you, fuck you, or
eat you.” Ricky again, though he was unarmed now with other guards on either side of him in a way that they usually reserved for bad guys.

“Two out of three isn't happening, Ricky boy, but that first one, maybe we should meet on the practice mats and see what happens.”

“And when I start to win, you'll use your magic and cheat.”

“If we meet on the mats, I promise not to eat your anger, or raise the
ardeur
.”

“You'd fight me fair?”

“You're six feet plus to my five-three, so I'm not sure there's any way to have a fair fight between us, but if you mean I won't use any preternatural abilities that we don't both have, then yeah—a fair fight.”

“Yeah, I'd like that, a lot.” He gave me a look that held something close to hate. I'd humiliated him the first time we met. Yes, he'd started it, but I might have taken it too far, and if I did, then his reaction to me today was my fault. I was supposed to be his boss, so I'd try to fix it the only way I knew how, by letting him win. He was a big guy, and he was training with our guards, so I didn't expect to win; and because I didn't expect it, losing in a match with someone to call it before he hurt me didn't risk any ego on my part, and it might restore some of his. But this was the last chance for Ricky; if he ever stepped out of line after I saw him on the practice mats, either he was gone or he'd keep pushing until he got dead, and that was about as gone as you could get. I felt vaguely like it was my fault for messing with him the first time, so I'd literally go to the mats with him.

“Let me get this thing with Damian fixed, and we'll set something up,” I said.

“Tomorrow?” Ricky asked.

“I don't think my problem will fix that soon,” Damian said, and he managed to sound disdainful and sad at the same time.

“No,” Nathaniel said, “it won't be tomorrow.”

Ricky frowned at us, and just like the first time I'd met him, I wasn't sure he was the brightest bulb in the box. It was one of the things that had contributed to our misunderstanding. I had overestimated how much he understood of what I was saying until it was too late.

“It may be a few days,” I said, “but you'll get your chance on the practice mat with me.”

“You promise?” he said.

“I already did.”

Ricky nodded and for the first time I saw something on his face besides fear, or hatred. I wasn't sure that his being eager to beat the shit out of me was really an improvement, but some days you take what you can get.

B
OBBY
L
EE CAME
back out minutes later with his still-wet hair combed in place. He was all in black, which was the unofficial uniform for the guards. Fully armed, he had on a black T-shirt, black tactical pants, a good leather belt with a black-on-black buckle, and matching boots laced up so that his pants were inside the tops of them. Most former military I knew wore their pants that way. Hell, I had all the same clothes and had started wearing them when I was out in the field serving a warrant of execution with the Marshals Service. I'd never been in the military but a lot of my friends had been, and a lot of the police I worked with had been, and I was always willing to learn from other people's experience. I still wore jeans a lot, but more and more tactical pants were becoming my go-to. It was partially the extra pockets, so damn useful.

“How you doing, Bobby Lee?” I asked.

He gave me a look, and then he smiled; the smile lines around his eyes seemed deeper, but his brown eyes shone with humor. “Darlin', you are covered in blood, holding a naked gun in one hand and a blood-soaked vampire in the other one, with your blood-covered boyfriend holding the vampire's other hand. Shouldn't I be asking you that question?”

He had a point. I laughed. “I'll stop throwing stones at your glass house until I get mine in order. I get it.”

His smile widened into a grin. “Thank you, sugar. Now, let's get
you to some showers that aren't full of shapeshifters that think all this fresh blood makes you smell good enough to eat.”

I frowned at him, studying his face. Bobby Lee never flirted with me, so either the double entendre was unintentional, or it was just a statement of fact. Looking into his eyes, I thought the latter. “I've been around most of the guards with blood on me, or they've been around each other when they've been hurt in practice. Why is this more of a temptation?”

“Let's walk and talk,” he said, still smiling, but now it didn't reach his eyes. They looked tired suddenly, as if he couldn't hide it all.

I narrowed my eyes a little, but said, “Okay.” I trusted him to explain later when we had more privacy.

He looked at Harris and Barry and nodded toward the hallway. “You need to report back to Claudia. She's got another assignment for you.”

“Hey, we didn't do nothin' wrong,” Barry the Brunette said.

“Nobody said you did.” But something in the way that Bobby Lee looked at the other man made Barry flinch.

Harris touched his arm. “Come on, Barry, we've been ordered to report to Claudia, so that's what we do.”

Barry glared at Bobby Lee, then visibly swallowed his anger and said, “Fine. Let's go report to the Amazon.”

“That is not Claudia's name,” I said.

Barry looked at me and he did that up-and-down look, not sexual, but disdainful. I was a short woman in a bloody nightie, holding another man's hand. Even the gun in my hand couldn't offset the rest, at least not for Barry.

“I know her name.”

“Then use it,” I said.

He sneered at me, raised his lip like he didn't care if I saw. “Fine. We'll go report to . . . Claudia for reassignment.”

“Ma'am, or sir,” I said.

“What?” he asked, frowning.

“Say
yes, ma'am
, or
yes, sir
, when you address me, Barry.”

“I don't . . .”

Harris said, “Yes, ma'am, we will do so in the future. Come on, Barry, we gotta go.”

Barry still looked sullen, but Harris looked worried. It made me think better of Harris. He was smart enough to be afraid for his future here; Barry wasn't. Barry needed to go, along with Ricky.

“You all the guard we need, Bobby Lee?” I asked.

“Compared to those two, I am an improvement.”

“I hear that,” I said.

“But no, I was going to include Kaazim.”

As if his name had conjured him, Kaazim spilled around the corner of the door behind us like liquid made solid and alive. He was one of the most graceful men I'd ever seen when he moved. I knew and dated dancers, dancers who were wereanimals, but none of them made me think of water poured from long-necked, widemouthed jars to spill and shape itself to everything, except for Kaazim.

He looked tall, dark, and slender until he stood beside Bobby Lee, and suddenly the illusion of height disappeared because you had Bobby Lee's height to compare to. Kaazim was five-six, or a smidgen under. He and I had been paired together on the practice mat more than once, because of our sizes. Like I'd told Ricky, size matters in a fight. Especially if it's a fight where we can't maim, cripple, or kill our opponent quickly. When you're equally well trained, the only hope a smaller person has is to end the fight as quickly and violently as possible. The rules that would keep Ricky from hurting me too badly in combat training also kept me from hurting him badly, and in a long fight, the bigger person usually wins.

“Kaazim,” I said, and smiled.

He gave that faint smile of his, almost lost in the blackness of his facial hair and dark skin. His hair was the exact same color as his beard and mustache, and his skin so dark; even his eyes were a brown so dark they looked black most of the time. He was all monotone so that your eyes had trouble seeing details, and he always dressed in black, which contributed to the lack of contrasts in his coloring. There were sections of the world where he would have vanished into any crowd, the perfect spy, perfect assassin, because they wouldn't remember him.
Here in St. Louis he stood out, because he was too far from the desert sands and the spired cities of his original homeland.

“Anita. Nathaniel. Damian.” Almost any other guard would have at least remarked on Damian and me covered in blood, but he wouldn't ask. He was one of the least talkative people I'd ever been around, but his dark eyes seemed to see everything.

He was dressed in flowing robes, with loose, soft trousers underneath. It wasn't what he wore on duty, and he must have noticed me noticing, because he said, “I can change if you wish.”

“One glance and you knew I was taking in the robes?”

He gave a small nod.

“As long as you can move and fight as well in the robes as you can in regular guard gear, I'm fine with it.”

“I fight well no matter what I am wearing.”

I grinned. “Of that, I have no doubt.”

He flashed me a smile almost big enough to be called a grin, one that left his dark eyes shining.

Damian drew me in against his side. “Please, Anita, I need to get clean.”

I looked up into those green eyes and saw the pain, so raw. Nathaniel and me touching him was helping him control it, but it was like water tension, and once that tension broke, the emotion was going to pour out; we needed to get cleaned up before that.

“Sorry, Damian. You're right. We'll use the shower in our room.” I meant the room I shared with Micah and Nathaniel. It was funny that even after dating Jean-Claude for seven years, I still thought of his bedroom as his, but I thought of bedrooms with the other two men as ours. I wasn't sure why, but I knew it was true.

“There's a shower in my room,” Damian said.

“Cardinale will be in there,” I said.

“But she won't care, Anita. It's after dawn, so she'll be dead to the world.”

“She will so care when she wakes for the night,” I said.

Bobby Lee said, “Taking you three near Cardinale right now, like this, is against my job parameters.”

“Cardinale is unstable and dangerous,” Kaazim said, and for him to say anything at all let me know things were worse with Cardinale than even I knew.

“No, she won't care when she wakes up, because when I told her I was sleeping with you and Jean-Claude last night, she left me.”

“What?” I said.

“You didn't tell us that,” Nathaniel said.

“She said that if I wanted to sleep with other people she couldn't be with me anymore. That I had to choose.”

“Did you tell her you were just sleeping, not having sex?” Nathaniel asked.

“Yes.”

“What did she say to that?” I asked, because I had to ask.

“She didn't believe me, and she told me that if I was buggering Jean-Claude and Nathaniel and fucking you, she hated me and never wanted to speak to me again.”

“That's not what she said. I mean, not really.”

“No, but it's the cleaned-up version.”

“If that's the cleaned-up version, I'm okay not hearing the other,” I said.

“Are you sure Cardinale won't be in the room?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Even if she is, it's daylight. She'll be passed out.”

“You aren't,” Kaazim said.

“Neither is Jean-Claude,” Damian said.

“Yes, just you and he of all the vampires are awake now,” Kaazim said, and he was looking at Damian now, as if trying to see something in him that he'd missed.

I jiggled Damian's hand in mine and said, “He's with me, Kaazim.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Stop sizing him up for the kill, then.”

He blinked and looked very steadily at me with his dark eyes. “You are very observant.”

“Not as observant as you are.”

He gave a small self-deprecating smile. “I have had more practice at it.”

“Yeah, a few centuries more,” I said.

“By the grace of my vampire master, I have lived long past my expected time.”

“If we keep talking, we're going to use up all our time,” Bobby Lee said. “Let's get moving.”

It was unusually abrupt for him, but something about the way he gripped his AR and stood there in all his gear made me not argue with him. Whatever had happened on his last out-of-town assignment had been bad, because I'd never seen Bobby Lee like this when he got home.

“Let's move,” I said.

Bobby Lee took point leading the way. Kaazim took rear guard. Damian, Nathaniel, and I stayed in the middle, where we belonged. I had my gun in my hand, but in that moment it didn't matter. Armed or unarmed, I was their protectee, and that was that; with Bobby Lee this high-strung, my best move was to let him do his job. Besides, I only had one gun; he had several.

I could feel tension starting in Damian again. It telegraphed through his hand into mine.

“You okay?”

“If Cardinale is dead to the world in our bed, then we still have a chance, but if she's not in there, then it's over. I can't live like this anymore.”

Nathaniel touched his head against the other man's shoulder lightly as they moved. “I'm sorry, Damian.”

We were still holding hands, but somehow I felt like I needed to touch him more, so I put my arm around his waist. It took a second for all of us to adjust our walking together, but we managed. “I'm sorry, too, Damian.”

“So am I,” he said, and we followed Bobby Lee's overly armored and armed back down the hallway. Bodyguards are great at saving your life, but they can't help at all when someone is trying to break your heart.