“This just keeps getting better,” Edward said, and the sarcasm came through the earpiece loud and clear.
The blue tiger inside me pressed closer to the surface of me. I had an image of her face against mine, trying to get closer so she could sniff the air.
The doors opened and a tall, broad-shouldered man in an expensive tailored suit strode through. His white hair was cut very short, and in one of those cuts that looked like it had been done one hair at a time. He actually wore those pale yellow sunglasses over his eyes. The glasses weren’t dark enough to do a damn thing against the Vegas sun. Was he trying to pass for human? If that was the idea, then he needed to tone down the energy that boiled off him.
That wash of energy turned the blue tiger snarling toward him. I would have fallen forward if Domino and Crispin hadn’t caught me.
“You’re going to bring her beast, Mother,” he said, and he kept coming toward us. The blue tiger didn’t like that. The white one did. Black was just content to cuddle Domino. The blue tiger tried to turn me toward the boy. The white liked Victor. The black was fine. It was like having three different roommates inside me, and all of them liked different guys.
“You have no right to interfere,” Bibiana said.
“Father warned you against this,” he said, and he was at our side. He knelt in the dark suit, his eyes hidden behind the glasses, but no amount of colored glass could hide the power spilling off him. The power was enough that the white tiger knew what we’d find behind the glasses.
I came to my knees. Crispin had to let go of my hand, but he touched my shoulder. Domino slipped lower down my body like a reluctant piece of clothing. My hands went to those glasses.
Victor caught my hands in his. He stared into my face as if he were trying to see through me. He raised my hands to his face and sniffed my skin. “Impossible.”
“I told you, Victor, she carries them all,” Bibiana said.
He rose up from my skin. I could see his eyes clearly, but the pale yellow lenses stole what I needed to see. My voice sounded like a stranger in my head when I said, “Take them off.”
He blinked at me. “What?”
I repeated it. “Take them off.”
“Why?” he asked, and let go of my hands.
I shook my head because I wasn’t sure, and then the answer came, “I have to see your eyes.”
“Why?” he said, again.
I reached upward, and this time he didn’t stop me. I touched the thin wire frames of his glasses and pulled them gently down, until I was looking into pale blue tiger eyes. They were a deeper blue than Crispin’s eyes, but still a color and a shape that you wouldn’t mistake for human unless you wanted not to see what was there.
I knelt in front of him, with his glasses in my hands, and stared up into those eyes. But it wasn’t just the eyes; they were only a sign of what my tigress needed. It was the power in him. I hadn’t understood until that moment how weak every other weretiger I’d touched had been.
Victor stared down at me with those perfect eyes. He swallowed hard enough that I heard it. His voice was a little shaky as he said, “You really are another queen, aren’t you?”
I leaned in toward him. I wasn’t aiming for a kiss. It was more as if there were gravity to his power, and it drew me in.
He stood up, stumbling a little. I reached for him, and it was Crispin who drew me back. He and Domino pulled me back into their arms, but it was like I could hear music in my head that I’d never heard before. Victor’s power drowned out their touch.
Victor put the glasses back on and turned to his mother. “Father expressly forbade you from calling her power until he had met with her.”
“I am Chang here, not you,” she said.
“You rule the clan of the white tiger. I have never disputed that, but Father has put me in charge of other parts of his domain. When you put the tigers’ power above the good of this city and the other citizens, then you have broken your master, my father’s, rules.”
“Would you deny Domino and Cynric the only queen of their clan they may ever meet?”
“I would never stand in the way of another clan’s destiny, Mother, but you cannot feed Cynric to her. Look at what she has already done to Crispin and Domino.”
Something about the way he said it made me look at the two weretigers still beside me. Crispin had looked at me with that devotion before, but to see it in Domino’s face was just wrong. A look of puppyish devotion in that angry, arrogant face; it hurt my heart to see it. Not because I cared for him, because you can’t care for someone you’ve just met, but because no adult should look at anyone like that. It was a look I’d seen before, on the faces of vampires. I was a true necromancer and called to all the dead, but I wasn’t supposed to call to the wereanimals like this, not like this.
“Oh, God,” I said, and tried to stand up. Domino clung to me, and I fought the urge to slap at him in a kind of panic. “I fed on your anger, damn it. I fed on your anger so you wouldn’t look at me like that!”
He gave me calm eyes, and he shouldn’t have.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Talk to me, Anita, Bernardo. What’s happening?” Edward asked.
“Wait, Edward, just wait.” I turned to Victor. “Can you fix this?”
Bernardo said, “Anita has it under control.” The look on his face didn’t match the surety of his words, but he was giving me the benefit of the doubt.
Victor looked where I was pointing, at Domino. “You mean undo your possession of him?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You are queen,” Bibiana said, “you do not ask any male for such help.”
“Fine, can you undo it?” I asked.
Victor studied me some more. “You said you fed on his anger. I thought the ardeur was all about sex.”
“I can feed on anger, too. I thought if I didn’t feed on lust, or love, for your people that I wouldn’t bind them to me. I don’t want any more men, damn it.”
“Jean-Claude can’t feed on anger, can he?” Victor asked.
That was a little too close to truths we didn’t want to share with anyone. That I had powers that my master didn’t share. I tried to be cool about it, but my pulse had sped. Weretigers are like living lie detectors. They can sense, smell, all those little involuntary body functions.
“Can either of you make it so he isn’t”—I waved a hand at Domino—“like this?”
“It may pass on its own,” Victor said.
“Are you sure?”
He smiled. “No, but what you’ve done seems to be a combination of vampire and Chang tiger. You’ve rolled him. If you leave him alone, he may recover. If it’s more vampire than wereanimal, then you know that you’ll be able to repossess him anytime you want.”
I licked my lips and said the only truth I had. “I don’t want to possess anybody.”
“I felt your power. I felt you shove it into my mother. I felt it blocks away.”
“Would it sound childish to say she started it?”
He gave a quick smile. “It’s a little childish, but I know my mother.”
“Victor,” Bibiana said.
“You know you tried to raise her tigers, Mother. You know you provoked her power. Don’t deny it.”
“I would never deny it,” she said.
Bernardo said, “Chang-Bibiana promised that if Marshal Blake could call Crispin away from her, she would answer our questions.”
Bibiana wouldn’t look at anyone in the room.
“Did you promise the marshals that, Mother?”
She gave a little nod, still not looking at anyone.
“Then answer her questions, like you promised.”
I did my best not to glance at the blue boy. “I think a little privacy would be good before we start discussing an ongoing police investigation.”
“I don’t want to leave,” he said.
Ava tugged on him. “Come on, Cynric.”
“No,” he said, and pulled away from h
er. “You’re not pure. You don’t know how it feels to be part of a clan.”
“Cynric,” Bibiana said, and her anger cracked like a hot whip through the room, “you will show Ava the respect she deserves. One of our brethren attacked her. He broke the most sacred rule among the clans. She is not one who sought this life.”
He looked sullen for a moment, then guilty. “I’m sorry, Ava. I didn’t mean it.”
She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It’s all right, Cynric, but let’s leave the marshals to talk to Bibiana and Victor.” He let her lead him through the far door, but he looked back as the doors closed, and the disturbing thing was that I was there to meet his eyes.
Bernardo touched my arm, made me look at him. “You all right?”
Was I all right? That was an excellent question. What I needed was an excellent answer. I said the only thing I could think of. “We have work to do, Marshal Spotted Horse.”
He gave me a look that raised one eyebrow, then nodded. “Yes, we do, Marshal Blake.”
“Ask your questions, then get the fuck out of there,” Edward said, “I do not want Anita in that room when Max joins his wife.” Edward was absolutely right. Bibiana had almost rolled me on her own, without her master at her side. There were so many reasons to want this thing cleared up before the vampires rose for the night.
The fact that there was no way on God’s green earth to solve this crime before dark was not only disappointing but getting more dangerous every minute.
36
ONE OF THE white female tigers with hair the color of pale buttermilk, and eyes like a spring sky, came and took Domino deeper into the penthouse. He didn’t want to leave me, but between me and Victor, he did what we wanted. If he got out of my physical presence and started breaking free of the fascination, then I could leave him here to his life. If it didn’t start to wear off at all, then I’d have to take him with me. What I’d do with him after that, I had no bloody idea. Other people pick up stray puppies; I kept collecting men. Crap.
The rest of us settled down on the overstuffed couches. Bernardo and I sat far enough away from each other on our couch that we wouldn’t get in each other’s way if things went south. Crispin sat as close to me as any boyfriend, an arm across the back of the couch touching my shoulders, one hand on my leg. I could have told him to back off because I was working, but it would have hurt his feelings, and I knew enough about lycanthrope society to know that touching was just what they did.
Bibiana sat across from us, with her son and Rick. No one touched her much. Maybe tigers were different from the other animal groups I was familiar with? I’d ask later.
“What do you know about what happened to the police here?” I asked.
“Only what we heard on the news,” Victor said.
Bibiana simply looked at me with those uptilted blue eyes. Her silent scrutiny might have been unnerving, but between the morgue, Olaf, and what had just happened with my inner tigers, her stare just didn’t have enough weight to move me.
If this had been a normal interrogation, there would be rules, methods. I should have volunteered little and asked repetitive questions. But we were burning daylight. Once the vampires rose for the night, and Vittorio added his power to his daytime servants . . . I had no idea what he would do. Slaughtering the SWAT team like that and mailing me the head was throwing down a serious gauntlet. I thought that if it was Vittorio and not someone framing him, or even if it were, then when darkness fell, all hell was going to break loose. We didn’t have time for hours of questions.
Crispin began to move his hand on my thigh in small circles. He’d picked up my tension and was trying to soothe me. It didn’t really work, but I appreciated the effort.
“Anita?” Bernardo said, making a question of my name. He looked at me, trying for blank, and failing to hide some concern around the edges. He’d seen some seriously weird shit from me in the last hour. In fact, he’d been a damn good sport about all of it. Did I owe him, like, flowers? What did you get a coworker for not freaking when you went all metaphysical on him? A card? Did Hallmark make a card for that?
Crispin leaned over me, his breath warm against my hair. “Anita, are you all right?”
“Anita,” Bernardo said again, and this time he didn’t try to keep the worry out of his voice.
Edward joined in my ear. “Bernardo, what’s wrong with Anita?”
“I’m fine,” I said, “I’m just thinking.” I turned back to the weretigers on the other couch. “We’re running out of daylight, so I’m going to talk to you like one master’s lady to another.”
Bibiana gave a regal nod. “I am honored.”
“One, I need you to listen to Victor and Max, and not screw with my inner tigers until after this investigation is over.”
“You could tell her just to leave your inner tigers alone,” Victor said. He smiled, but his eyes were just visible behind the yellow glasses. Part of me was really bugged by the glasses, but I was trying to be human here, not all tigerish, so he could keep the glasses.
In the interest of being a little more human, I leaned away from Crispin, putting myself on the edge of the couch. All I had to do was lean back and he’d be there, but I needed to think, and something about a man you’ve had sex with doing little circles on your thigh isn’t always conducive to clear thinking.
“I’m trying to negotiate in good faith here. I’m not going to start by asking Bibiana to promise something she won’t deliver. I don’t understand everything that she wants from my inner beasts, but I heard her say that I may be the only queen of their clan that Domino and the blue boy, Cynric, will ever see. Bibiana isn’t going to let me walk out of Vegas without wanting to explore that again, are you?” I looked at her when I said the last.
She smiled and dipped her head, very demure. “No,” she said, simply.
I smiled. “Good, no denials. I like that. Two, do we all agree that these murders are bad for business for both the vampire and lycanthrope communities?”
They all agreed.
“Then I need to know, honestly, if you know anything about the animal that helped this vampire kill these police officers.”
“You say animal, but you come to us,” Victor said.
Bibiana said, “You think it is one of our tigers.” There was something about the way she said it that made me say the next.
“You think so, too,” I said.
“I did not say so,” she said.
I licked my lips, but not because they were dry this time. “You taste like the edge of a lie,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Olaf asked in my ear.
Edward told him, “Let her work.”
Bibiana smiled up at me. It was almost a flirtatious look. “I am not lying,” she said.
I smiled at her. “Okay, then answer this: Do you suspect that one of your weretigers was involved with these killings in any way?”
She wouldn’t look at me now, but concentrated on her small, neat hands that were clasped so ladylike in her lap. Her ankles were crossed. She was so prim and proper, but I knew it was a lie. She was one of those people that no matter how buttoned up they are, you can simply feel that if you scratch them hard enough, get them in the right place at the wrong time, there would be absolutely nothing proper about them. Women tend to give off that vibe more than men, but I’ve seen men do it, too. Some of them don’t even know how much heat they’re hiding behind the mask of civility. But Bibiana knew; she knew that human and prim was not really what she was at all.
“Do you want me to answer the question, Mother?”
She gave him a look so fierce, so vicious, that it turned that pretty face into something frightening. There, the masks were coming down. “I am still queen here, or do I have to remind you of it more forcefully?”
“Father told us that if asked, we were to answer Marshal Blake honestly and completely.”
“Until he rises for the night, I rule here,” she said.
I f
ought not to glimpse back at Crispin. He wasn’t good at hiding his face. Instead, I glanced at Rick and found him visibly uncomfortable. I got the impression that this squabbling was common, maybe even growing worse. I knew enough about weretiger society to know that they were all run by queens. It was one of the few wereanimal groups that was always female run. Some groups had women that got to be top dog, or cat, but it was the exception, not the rule. So Victor, no matter how powerful, couldn’t rule the White Tiger Clan. But he was certainly acting as if he wanted to be in charge.
“Bernardo reminded you of your promise, Chang-Bibiana. Now I remind you again that I have called Crispin to me from your side. You said if I could do that, that you would answer my questions. Is the word of the Chang of the White Tiger Clan to be depended on, or is there no honor in Vegas?”
I felt the couch move before Crispin put a hand on my back. It was a careful touch, not too sexual, but it was a physical reminder to be careful. I didn’t resent it. If I didn’t take Crispin back with me to St. Louis, this was his pond I was shitting in, and he’d be left alone to swim in it.
Bibiana turned those angry eyes to me. Her power started to pour toward me, in a nearly visible roil of heat. Victor stood up. He moved between that power, her, and me.
It hit him, and his head went back, his arms to the sides, as if it felt good. His breath came out in a long sigh. He shuddered and said, “Your Master of the City gave you express orders not to bring her beasts. I obey his orders, even if you do not.”
She made a snarling sound. Crispin tucked himself up closer to me, as if afraid. Or was he afraid of what I’d do? I fought not to stiffen at his touch or look too nervous. I tried for calm, though I felt anything but at ease.
Bernardo had moved forward to the edge of his piece of couch, too. Rick was still sitting back, but the tension showed in every muscle.
“You are your father’s tool and nothing more.”
“I am my father’s instrument in the daylight. I am his right hand, and I will not betray him.”
“It is not betrayal to seek power for our clan and our people.” I couldn’t see her because Victor was still standing between us.
Skin Trade Page 25
