Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  Bernardo touched my arm again, and I nodded. “I am Anita Blake”—I hesitated—“girlfriend of Jean-Claude, Master Vampire of the City of St. Louis, Missouri, and U.S. Marshal.”

  “Ava said you come on a social visit.”

  “I do, but I would ask questions about the crime we are here to investigate. Solving it helps both your people and the humans.”

  “Have you come here to visit with me, Anita, or to interrogate me, as a marshal?”

  I licked suddenly dry lips. Why was I having such trouble concentrating? What was she doing to me? I’d never had this kind of trouble around a wereanimal that wasn’t one of the men in my life.

  “I . . .” Why couldn’t I think?

  Bernardo touched me again. That helped. I moved around so that I could take his right hand in my left one. It left both our gun hands free. He raised eyebrows at me, but didn’t take his hand back. I was just glad it was Bernardo; anyone else on our little team, and one of us would have had to compromise their gun hand. The moment his hand was warm and real in mine, I could think a little more clearly. Interesting. I hadn’t even had to call up the ardeur, just another human hand to touch, and Chang-Bibi’s fascination was less.

  “I am honored that you agreed to see me, but would you honor me with answering some questions that are more my job than social? I beg your indulgence, but it is a most . . . frightening crime.”

  “It is most sad that our good policemen have been so slaughtered.” Her face showed distress, and she hugged Crispin’s arm a little tighter to her. She moved first, and he escorted her to the couch opposite us. She sat down, smoothing her skirt out.

  Crispin took a step toward me. I let go of Bernardo and held out my hand. Crispin started for me with a smile.

  “Crispin,” she said, “sit by me.”

  His face looked less happy, but he did what she told him. He sat beside her, and the moment she laid her hand on his thigh, I was fascinated again. I could almost feel the weight of her hand on my own thigh.

  “Shit,” I whispered, and took Bernardo’s hand again. The touch helped steady me, but I was beginning to realize what was wrong.

  “What’s wrong?” Bernardo asked.

  “I think she’s using Crispin to get to me.”

  “Very good, Anita. I am his queen, and though he is your tiger to call, I am still his queen. Through your tie to him, I am your queen, too, so it seems.”

  I shook my head. “I need your help to solve these crimes. Your husband, Max, told the police here that I’d help sort things out.”

  “Max wanted you here, and so did I,” she said. She began to trace small circles on Crispin’s thigh. I could feel it on my leg. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “She’s not going to help us,” I said, and turned for the far door, Bernardo still hand in hand with me.

  “I have every intention of helping you, Anita,” she said.

  I turned back, putting my other hand higher on Bernardo’s arm. The reality of his muscled warmth helped me think. I wasn’t sure why, but it was almost as if anyone and anything that wasn’t tiger was useful. Then I had a thought: was it tiger, or was it white tiger?

  “Then stop the mind games.”

  “I needed to know if Crispin was more yours than mine. But not only can he not resist my touch, but through him, I also have a door into you. Very nice.”

  “Why do you want a door into me?” I asked.

  “Because it is there,” she said, and looking into her face, there was nothing there to talk to. It was a human face, but the expression in it gave me the feeling I’d gotten a couple of times when I stared into the face of a wild animal. There was that same neutrality. Bibiana didn’t want to hurt me, but she didn’t not want to hurt me either. It didn’t move her either way. It’s not the same thing as being a sociopath, but it’s close. It meant that she wouldn’t think like a human being. She’d think more like a tiger with a human brain. It changed everything about this interview. It meant that I couldn’t reason with her the way I could have with Max. It might mean I couldn’t reason with her at all.

  “What’s happening, Anita?” Edward said in my ear. It startled me, made me jump.

  “If your friends wish to join us, by all means bring them in. Listening devices are so impersonal,” she said.

  I licked my lips again and tried to fight down my rising heartbeat. “The other marshals are holding our weapons for us. Rick didn’t want us to bring in an arsenal.”

  She glanced back at Rick. “Are they that dangerous?”

  “Yes, Chang-Bibi, I believe they are.”

  She nodded, and turned back to us. “I trust Roderic’s judgment on such things.” She touched Crispin’s bare hand, and the power jumped like an electric charge through me.

  Bernardo jumped, too. “What was that?”

  “Power,” I said, “her power.”

  “She sent it through the kid, to you?”

  I didn’t argue with Crispin being “the kid”; it wasn’t just his age but the feel of him. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Will you stop the power games long enough to answer some questions?” I asked.

  “I will, if you do one thing first,” she said.

  I knew it was a bad idea, but . . . “What do you want me to do?”

  “Call Crispin to your side. If you can call him away from me, then I will answer your questions with no more games.” She smiled as she said it, but it was like watching the tiger in the zoo smile. You knew it didn’t mean it.

  I squeezed Bernardo’s hand, then let go. He leaned in and whispered, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not,” I said.

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because she’ll keep her word. If I can call Crispin to me, away from her, she’ll answer our questions.”

  “It’s still a bad idea,” he said.

  I nodded. I took the Browning BDM out of its holster and handed it to him. “Bibiana seems to fascinate me like a master vampire, sort of. Just in case she decides to try to see how much control she has over me, I’d rather you have all the guns.”

  “You think she’s going to mind-fuck you that badly?” he asked.

  “I think she’s going to try.”

  Edward was in my ear. “Just get out of there, Anita. We can find this information out somewhere else.”

  I said, “Excuse me” to our hosts, and turned my back to talk out loud to Edward. “Night is going to come, Edward. Whatever killed these cops was deadly in the daylight. When you add their vampire masters to the mix, it’s going to be even worse. There is nowhere else to go for weretigers in Vegas.”

  “Can she roll you, completely?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bernardo,” Edward said.

  “Yeah, boss,” he said.

  “If she goes, don’t be a hero, yell for us.”

  “Don’t worry, Ted, I’m no hero.”

  “Fine, we’ll be listening. Be careful, Anita.”

  “As a virgin on my wedding night.”

  There was a sound, I think it was Olaf. Maybe I had amused him, or maybe he just thought I was being stupid. He might be right on that second part.

  33

  I DIDN’T USUALLY try to call the wereanimals that were tied to me metaphysically. It just sort of happened. My psychic mentor, Marianne, told me that my natural abilities were so strong that I did most things without thinking about it first. That could be good and powerful, or bad and a weakness. But I’d been learning how to be a grown-up psychic and do stuff on purpose. It was the difference between driving really fast on a public street, or driving really fast on a track with professional drivers. One was for kids; the other was for grown-ups.

  I tried simple first. “Crispin, come to me.” I held my hand out.

  He stood up. Bibiana’s hand fell away. He actually took a step my way before her power breathed through the room. It stopped my breath in my throat, made me taste my pulse on my tongue. Crispin’s face was
almost pained. His eyes looked at me with such longing, but he didn’t move closer.

  But the white tiger inside me did move. She began to pad eagerly up along that well-worn path inside me. She began to trot, and I knew once she started running, when she hit the “surface” of my body, it would feel like getting hit by a truck from the inside out. I hadn’t had it happen in months, and I had seconds to stop it, if I could.

  I tried to call wolf, but tiger was too close. The tigress was running full out, a white blur, streaking toward me.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  Rick and Domino had moved closer to us, as if they couldn’t help themselves. Only Ava seemed able to resist, but then she wasn’t the same . . . color.

  I called black tiger, I called it with a scream and a roar inside my head. The black form smashed into the white inside me and sent me spinning across the room. I ended up on the floor near the windows, with the two tigers snarling inside me, trying to tear each other apart, but my body was their battlefield.

  I cried out. I couldn’t help it.

  Crispin yelled, “Anita!”

  Bernardo was beside me, kneeling. I heard Edward yelling in my ear. “Anita, talk to me, or we’re coming in.”

  “Don’t . . . don’t come. Not yet.” My voice held the pain I was feeling. There was nothing I could do about that.

  Crispin was halfway across the room, but she was beside him. I could not force him to me with the white queen beside him. Domino was walking toward me with a scowl on his face. The black tiger and the white hesitated in their battle. They looked up and used my eyes to see him. They both liked him.

  I said, “Domino, come to me.”

  He shook his head, but the black tigress broke free of the fight, and the white tigress let her. The black began to stalk closer to me. I put that energy into the man I could see. I called him with images of dark fur and eyes like fire in the night.

  He came to me as if each step hurt. He came to me with a look on his face that mirrored Crispin’s when Bibiana kept him from me. But I didn’t have time to care or think it through. I had to satisfy the tigers or risk becoming one for real. That was the real danger of what I was, that I might finally pick an animal that wasn’t Jean-Claude’s animal to call. If I did, then I might end up controlled by someone else, like Bibiana and her Max. To keep that from happening, I would mind-fuck Domino. Was it evil to think it all the way through and still do it? Maybe. Was I still going to do it, if it would keep the white queen from mind-fucking me? Oh, hell, yes.

  34

  BIBIANA TRIED TO call his white side, but the black tiger was so hungry. So hungry to find another black-furred side to rub up against. So lonely, so terribly lonely. The black tiger didn’t try to burst out the way the white was trying to with Bibiana’s urging. The black was sniffing the air and making low eager noises as Domino came to us.

  He dropped to his knees beside me, as if someone had cut his strings. He just fell to his knees beside me on the white tiled floor. His face was a mask of anger and fear and longing.

  His voice came out strangled. “You are a black queen. You really are.”

  I held my hand out to him. He reached out to me. Bibiana yelled, “Roderic, stop him!”

  But it was too late. Our fingers touched, and the black tiger made a sound that spilled out of my throat. Domino let me pull him in against my body. He stared down at me, and those fire-colored eyes were still afraid, and still angry, but underneath that was a glimpse of something that felt better.

  He whispered, “You smell like home.” He lowered his face, not to kiss me but to rub his cheeks, his mouth, his nose, against my skin. He drew in the scent of the black tiger inside me, like a cat trying to roll in catnip. Except that this catnip was me, my body.

  I felt the black tiger want to take him. There was sex in there, but also to force him into his tiger form, but the black tiger was content, happy even, just from his closeness. I think I could have calmed things down. It would have been all right, but then the power of the white queen breathed through the room like the wind from the open door of hell. Bibiana’s energy hit us both. It made the white tiger snarl and begin to creep forward.

  “No,” and I yelled it. The white tiger hesitated. I stared up into Domino’s face. “Give me permission to feed on you.”

  “What?” he asked.

  The white tiger leapt onto the black, and they started trying to tear me apart again. I writhed and struggled not to scream in Domino’s arms. I knew if I screamed, Edward and Olaf would come through those doors.

  Domino said, “My Queen, if by my flesh or my seed I can feed you, then feed.”

  I didn’t understand everything he said, but the tigers stopped fighting. They panted and stared up at him, through my eyes. The black tiger growled low and soft, and it spilled from between my teeth.

  I had a few moments to realize that among the tigers, when they said feed, they meant either flesh or sex, or both. Domino had given me permission to take his life. The black tiger understood that, but she and I were in agreement. It had been so long since we’d found another of us. We didn’t want to eat him. We wanted to save him. We wanted to keep him.

  Bibiana sent another wave of power over us, but this time the black and I were ready. We were both angry with her. Angry that she interfered in this. She had no right. He was ours. Ours!

  The anger became rage, the rage became my beast, but I had other uses for anger now. It didn’t translate into shapeshifting for me. I called that part of me that was vampire powers, that was the ardeur, and there was a moment where it could have spilled to sex, but it wasn’t sex I wanted. I was pissed, and now I could feed that anger. I’d tasted Domino’s anger earlier in the casino. I knew it was in there. All I had to do was throw my anger into him.

  I let my rage spill into him. He screamed, head back, and the rage was so great, so long inside him. His beast began to rise with that anger. I drew him down into a kiss, and I fed through the touch of his mouth on mine, through the bruising grip of his hands on my arms, through the struggling of his body against mine. I held him and I breathed in his rage through his lips, his skin, his body. I breathed in his anger and let it join that seething mass of rage inside me.

  I fed on Domino’s anger, and with that anger came knowledge. I got glimpses of what had filled him with such rage. I saw him as a child, alone in a foster home, crying. I saw the other children making fun of the eyes and the hair. I saw him saved by Bibiana, but even here, he wasn’t white enough. He belonged, and he didn’t. He was like the others, but he wasn’t. Always, he was not quite home.

  He stopped struggling, and by the end of it, he was crying in my arms. I held him, and the black tigress snuggled close, so that we both held him.

  I saw Bernardo standing over us, uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure if I was all right or not. I spoke to the uncertainty on his face. “I’m all right, Bernardo.”

  “Your eyes,” he said, “they’re all brown and black light, like a vampire.”

  I kissed Domino’s forehead and tested the truth of his words. I could taste Domino’s pulse like candy on my tongue. I had that urge to plunge teeth into flesh and see if the candy squirted red. You can’t be a living vampire, but whatever I was becoming was close.

  But I didn’t just taste blood and food. I felt the other tigers. Not just the one lying in my arms. I felt them all. I turned my head, and the moment Bibiana saw my eyes, she was afraid. Her fear appealed to both the vampire part of me and the beast. Fear means food. If something is afraid of you, you can control it, or kill it.

  I called Crispin to me. Not by using tiger powers, but the way a vampire calls its animal to call. “Crispin, come to me.”

  Bibiana tried to hold him by the hand. I said, “Let him go, or I’ll see how many tigers I can call today.”

  “You would not dare try to steal the animal of another master vampire.”

  “You mean, like you didn’t try to steal away the human servant of another master va
mpire.” I sat up, and Domino curled around me, utterly passive, utterly content.

  She didn’t let go, so I reached out to her as a vampire would. A vampire that could call tigers. She let go of Crispin, and held her hand as if his skin had burned her.

  Bibiana’s power reached out, but not to us. Rick came to her hand, and the far door opened, and more of the white tigers came to stand with their queen. But I didn’t care. Crispin had taken my hand. I sat there with his hand in mine, and Domino curled around my waist, and it was nearly perfect, like being wrapped in your favorite blanket at the end of a long day’s work. I’d learned that the ardeur could be about friendship and not just romance. In that moment, it was even more than that. It was about that feeling of belonging, of being home.

  Then I felt a different energy, in all that sea of white tiger power. I felt a thread of something new. Something unique. I didn’t know what it was until the blue tiger inside me stepped from the shadows and started to pace forward.

  She was truly blue with black stripes, a deep cobalt color, almost a black, but it wasn’t. She was true blue, and she’d smelled something that belonged to her.

  He stepped out from the rest, a puzzled look on his young face, because he was young. Young enough to make me start to swim up to the surface of myself. Young enough for me to know that whatever I had just done to Domino might destroy him.

  I stared at the short dark blue hair, a perfect match to the tiger inside me. I stared into his eyes that were two shades of blue, as if Crispin’s eyes had married with Jean-Claude’s, and knew he was mine to call.

  I asked, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” he said.

  “Shit,” I said.

  35

  EDWARD’S VOICE IN my ear said, “We’ve got Max’s son, Victor, out here with bodyguards. We’re letting Victor through, but we’re keeping the bodyguards.”

  “We’ve got another half-dozen tigers in here with us. They came out of the far rooms,” Bernardo said.