[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “No, but yes.”

  “Just look at me, Anita.” Edward’s pale blue eyes were staring at me upside down. I’d never have said his face was kind, but now there was sympathy where I’d never thought to see it.

  Hands began to clean the wound with something cold and stingy. “Crap,” I said.

  “I was told that she isn’t to be scarred. If she moves this much, I can’t promise that.”

  “Who made you promise that?” Victor asked.

  “You know who,” he said, and sounded frightened enough for me to catch it.

  Edward pressed my face a little harder, “Anita, you need to hold still.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Can you do it?” he asked.

  “Who?” Victor asked the doctor.

  “Bibiana.”

  “We need to hurry,” Victor said, “my mother knows. Someone has talked to her. I’d rather not have Anita here when she arrives.”

  “Hold still,” Edward said.

  The doctor cleaned a little too deep, and I moved again, my hands convulsing on the table. “I can’t not move,” I finally admitted.

  “Bernardo, Olaf,” he said.

  “Shit,” I said. I did not want to be held down, but . . . there was no way I wasn’t going to fight some. I couldn’t not.

  It was funny how none of us argued that we didn’t want to be here when Victor’s mom arrived. She’d almost rolled me under her power when I was well; this weak, this hurt . . . I didn’t know if I could keep her out of my head.

  Bernardo took my right arm and held it in two places. Victor took my other arm with the IV drip still in it. When I felt a hand on either of my thighs, I knew whose hands were left to touch me: Olaf.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Just look at me, Anita. Talk to me.”

  “You talk to me,” I said.

  I felt hands on my stomach.

  “What are you doing?” And I hated how high and frightened my voice sounded.

  “I’m going to start stitching. I am sorry to cause you pain.” Then I felt the prick of the first needle pass, but it would not be the last. To avoid scars they’d use a finer needle, a finer thread. It would take more time, more stitches all together. I wasn’t sure my vanity was worth it.

  Edward talked to me, while the others tried to hold me still. He talked about Donna and the kids. He whispered about missions in South America where I’d never gone with him, and he’d killed things I’d never seen outside books. It was more personal details than he’d ever given me. If I could just lie still, he’d keep whispering his secrets.

  I kept waiting for the pain to dull, but some pain doesn’t. This stayed sharp and nauseating, and the sensation of my skin being pulled together was more than my stomach could take.

  “Going to be sick,” I managed to say.

  “She’s going to be sick,” Edward said, and the hands moved away. I tried to roll too fast onto my side, and lost the food I’d tried to keep down at the last murder scene. Vegas was turning out to be a real fun town.

  The pain in my stomach was fresh and cutting somewhere in the middle of vomiting. The doctor wiped my mouth for me, then laid me back on my back. “She’s pulled some of the stitches out.”

  “Sorry,” I managed.

  The doc sounded angry now. “I need her held down; she’s still moving, and if she keeps throwing up from the pain, the stitches may not hold.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Victor asked.

  I was just happy that he wasn’t sewing me up. They could talk forever if he just didn’t start again. I realized it wasn’t just the pain, but the sensations.

  “Hold her,” the doctor said.

  The fluids had helped clear my mind and my vision, so that I could see him clearly now. He was African American, hair cut close to his head, medium build, small sure hands. He was wearing a green surgical gown over his clothes, along with the gloves to match.

  Edward’s hands went from my face to pressing my shoulders to the table. Victor took my legs and let Olaf have the arm he’d been holding; when the man protested, Victor had said, “I am a weretiger; no human, no matter how strong, can match me.”

  Olaf didn’t like it, but he put a hand on my arm, above the elbow, and Victor climbed onto the table to pin my lower body. He was strong. They were all strong, but thanks to Jean-Claude’s vampire marks, so was I.

  Edward pressed down hard enough to hold my shoulders still, but I couldn’t help but move as the needle began to move through my skin again.

  “Scream,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Scream, Anita, you have to let it out one way or another. If you scream, maybe you won’t keep moving.”

  “If I start screaming, I won’t stop.”

  “We won’t tell,” Bernardo said from the arm he was pressing, sort of desperately, into the table.

  The needle bit into my skin, and tugged. I opened my mouth and screamed. I put all the fear, all the fight-or-flight into that sound. I screamed as fast as I could draw breath. I screamed loud, long, and let myself sink into it. I screamed and wept and cursed, but I stopped moving so much.

  When the doctor was finished, I was shaking and sweat covered, and nauseous, unable to focus my eyes, and my throat hurt, but we were done.

  The doctor switched out the empty bag of clear fluid with a fresh one. “She’s in shock again. I don’t like that.”

  Someone brought a blanket and covered me with it. I managed to say, in a voice that sounded so rough it wasn’t mine, “We need to go. Bibi will be here, and Paula Chu needs looking at.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere until you have another bag of fluids in you,” the doctor said.

  Edward was back at my head, smoothing down the edge of my hair, where the curls had stuck to the side of my face. “He’s right. You can’t go out like this.”

  “We will go and make sure Paula Chu does not get away,” Olaf said.

  “Yeah,” Bernardo said, “we can do that.”

  They left, and another blanket went over me because my teeth had started to chatter. Edward touched my face again. “Rest, I’ll be here.”

  I didn’t mean to sleep, but once I stopped shaking, it just seemed so hard to keep my eyes open. Bibiana was coming, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I slept and let my body start to heal. The last thing I saw was Edward pulling up a chair so he’d be beside me and able to see all the doors at the same time. It made me smile, and then I was gone to the warmth of the blankets and the tiredness of my body.

  50

  I DREAMED, AND in the dream I walked down a white hallway with doors on either side. I knew there was something behind the doors, but I didn’t know what. One of the doorknobs rattled, and it frightened me. I started to move faster down the hallway and realized I was wearing some long, white dress. It was heavy and hard to move in. I’d never owned anything like it. Mirrors showed between the doors, and I caught glimpses of myself in them. Pale oval face, black hair piled high on top of my head, curls artfully around my shoulders. There was a feather in my hair, and jewels around my throat. This was not my dream.

  The next mirror showed a second figure keeping pace with me. She wore red, the color of crushed velvet and rose petals. Gold flashed here and there as she moved. She’d put me in white and silver, with the flash of diamonds. She wore gold and rubies.

  I forced myself to stop running down the hallway that never seemed to get any shorter. I faced one of the mirrors, and there she was looking back at me, standing just over the shoulder of my reflection.

  “Belle Morte,” I whispered, and it was as if her name conjured her, because I felt her hand slide around my shoulders, draw my back against her front. She was a touch shorter than I was, but heels gave her height. Our hair was nearly the same shade of black, but where my eyes were deepest brown, hers were almost amber.

  “Ma petite, you have been a very busy girl.” She whispered it, and laid crimson lips against the w
hite of my neck.

  “No,” I said.

  She left only a perfect print of her lipstick on my skin. She smiled at me over my shoulder, putting our faces together. “Didn’t you enjoy our time together, ma petite?”

  I wanted to say no, but her ego was too large, and too strangely fragile for truths. If it was a truth. She’d come to me when I was unconscious, near death, and we’d had sex. She’d fed me enough energy to come to, and feed in the real world and save myself and Jean-Claude and Richard, though I wasn’t sure how much she cared about our wolf king. But she had wanted to save me and Jean-Claude. I still wasn’t entirely certain why she’d done it. Belle never did anything without a gain for herself.

  Her hand slid down the white front of my dress until her fingers started to slide into the bodice. I grabbed her wrist to stop the movement. “If you’d wanted sex, you’d have put us in a bed. What’s behind the doors?”

  She pouted at me, that soft mouth, bowed and petulant. Through Jean-Claude’s memories I remembered loving that pout. I remembered thinking that she had the most kissable mouth in the world.

  “Open a door and see.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “They are parts of yourself, Anita. Why be afraid of them?”

  They were my beasts. “I just got sewed back together from one of them. I’d rather not repeat it.”

  She wrapped her arms tight around my waist; at least she wasn’t trying to grope me. “You know why you couldn’t heal it, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t have enough energy.”

  “You have been feeding the ardeur barely, just enough to keep it sated but not enough to grow it stronger.”

  “I don’t want it stronger.”

  “But I do, ma petite.”

  “I am not your ma petite.”

  “You are anything I say you are,” and her eyes were drowning in amber fire.

  I closed my eyes like a child hiding under the covers from a monster, but vampire gaze really can be avoided by just not looking.

  Her voice whispered in my ear. “The Mother of All Darkness is trying to turn you into her instrument by raising your tigers. I don’t know why that is so important to her, but I’ve felt what she’s been doing to you. You must embrace the ardeur because it is a power she does not understand. You must grow strong in the parts of your power that are my bloodline, ma petite, or the Darkness will win you from me and from Jean-Claude.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because She is trying to use your body as her vessel. I want her dead here and now, not escaped into you. She must die here, so you must be strong enough to keep her out. Embrace the ardeur, Anita, and you will have power such as you have never dreamt. I will help you.”

  “I don’t want . . .”

  She breathed in my ear. “I hear you thinking. You don’t want to feed on your friend. I don’t understand that; he’s handsome enough. I think he would be skilled.”

  The thought made me open my eyes. “No”—my anger flared, and it felt good—“he’s family; you don’t do family.”

  “So prudish, but very well, the tigers will do.”

  “No,” and I could look her in the sparkling eyes because my anger helped push that soft, insistent power back.

  “You really can feed on anger, how interesting. It does not come from my bloodline.”

  The first spurt of fear washed through me and drowned the anger. That was something we hadn’t wanted anyone else to know.

  “It is dark, and the vampires rise where your body sleeps, ma petite.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “The tiger queen was kept away from you by your friend and her son, but now the vampires rise, and they will be naughty. If they are as naughty as I think they will try to be, I will give you the ability to fight back.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, and the fear was real. I needed to break the dream before she finished whatever she had planned.

  “You cannot slip away unless I allow it, Anita, please. You are powerful, but you have not had even a lifetime to practice your skills. You cannot win against me, and without my help, you cannot hope to win against the Mother of All Vampires.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked again.

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “No,” I said.

  “After I saved you and my Jean-Claude, still you doubt me?”

  “I’m afraid of you.”

  She was suddenly in front of me, pressing us together, coming for her kiss. “Good, that’s good. I would rather you love me, but if not love, fear will do.”

  “Machiavelli,” I said.

  “Where do you think he got it from?” she laughed, as she pressed her mouth to mine. Her voice eased through my head, or maybe it echoed in the hallway. “If they do not attack you, then my gift lies dormant. I can be no more fair than that, ma petite.”

  It was a kiss, but it was also heat. Vampires are supposed to be a cold thing, but she was not. She burned with all the life she had fed on for centuries, and she pushed that fire inside my mouth, into my body. One minute I was kissing Belle Morte, the next I was awake, gasping, staring up at a ceiling I didn’t know, and had an arm across my shoulders. For a moment the dream and reality met, and then I saw the muscles and that it was male. It wasn’t Belle, but what the fuck?

  Edward was standing over me and whoever belonged to the arm. “You started to go into shock, and they said being close to the aura of another wereanimal like yourself would help.”

  I turned my head to find Victor blinking at me, as if he, too, had slept. From the feel of things, I wasn’t sure he was wearing any clothes. “And this seemed like a good idea to you, Ed . . . Ted?”

  “It helped, Anita. The moment he touched you, like this, it helped.”

  “See, you are one of us, Anita.” It was Bibiana’s voice.

  Edward handed me the Browning BDM before he took the blankets off me, which let me know that things were not good. Victor tightened his body around me, where he’d curled into place. The sudden tension let me know that he might not have known his mom was there either. Me in a drugged sleep was one thing, but why had Victor slept through it all?

  Edward helped me sit up. “How does it feel?”

  I waited for it to hurt. “Not bad.” It felt way too good, actually. “What time is it? How long?”

  “It’s been four hours.”

  Victor’s arm wrapped around my waist, and I had to admit that it felt solid and real and not bad. But then when I was channeling my beasts, touch was always good.

  I could see more of the room now. Bibiana sat on a little couch that was to one side of the room. This was the first time I’d really seen the room. It was a little apartment complete with a round bed that would have looked fine in a red velvet whorehouse. The couch was the same red velvet. There were chairs and cushions and a small kitchenette. The table I was lying on was the dining table, with carved chairs pulled back from it to make room for the doctor and everyone else.

  The doctor was still there. He came forward to check me out, and Edward let him check my pulse. I was shirtless, so checking the stitches was easy enough. He had to move Victor’s arm to move bandages aside. “It’s almost healed.” He looked at me. “I saw that the claw marks had come from inside you, like it was clawing its way out; you’re not human, are you?”

  “I shared my energy with her,” Victor said. He sat up on his side of the table, drawing the blanket around the bareness of him.

  “But if she had not had her own white tiger for you to share with, it would not have worked,” Bibiana said.

  “Whatever,” I said. I let Edward help me stand. I could stand. Yea!

  Edward looked at me, then moved his hand away. I stood on my own. “Good, we’re out of here then.” He put my backpack over his shoulder.

  He’d already added some of my weapons to his visible arsenal. We started for the door.

  Then I felt it, like a cold breeze down my back. I
said, “Vampire.”

  Edward grabbed my arm and hustled us for the door, where Rick and some of the other white tigers blocked the way. We aimed our guns at them in unison. “We’ll just say you jumped us,” I said. “With all the dead cops in this town, they’ll buy it.”

  “Anita Blake, so good of you to visit my little family.”

  I didn’t even turn around. “Hi, Max. Thanks for the hospitality.” Then I screamed at the men blocking the door. “Move, or bleed!”

  Max’s voice. “Move out of the marshals’ way. She’s a federal cop; you don’t mess with the Feds. It’s bad for business.”

  The tigers at the door looked to another part of the room. They were looking at Bibiana.

  “I am master of this city, and I say get the fuck out of the marshals’ way.” His voice had gone ugly with rage.

  The weretigers moved, a little.

  “Keep going,” I said, and we waited for them to move well away from the door. As they moved, I moved sort of with them, so I had my back to Edward and my empty hand on his back, so I could feel his movement and still watch the room. Edward would know that left him the door and the room beyond.

  He opened the door with an audible click, and we eased through it. I looked away from the weretigers long enough to see Max in a doorway on the other side of the big bed. He was dressed in 1940s gangster chic, mostly bald, tall, but solid. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d say fat, but it was all hard and muscled. Bibiana was glaring at him.

  “Thanks, Max,” I said.

  “Tell Jean-Claude that I know the rules.”

  “I’ll do that.” And Edward was through the door, and my hand on him took me with him. We were into the other room; all we had to do was get the door shut.

  Bibiana had to have the last word. “You have slept with my son. Tell me, what did you dream?”

  The question was so odd that it made me stumble at the doorway. “Anita,” Edward said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I concentrated on the gun in my hand and watching the room. I kicked the door shut behind us, and we were suddenly in the dimness and noise of the club beyond.