I sounded casual about it, even in my own head. But my fingers traced along my back as if I could feel the scars through my skirt. Had to be casual about it. Had to be. Or you start screaming, and you don’t stop.
“The hospital doesn’t know Nathaniel’s a shapeshifter, do they?” I said.
He lowered his voice. “They know. He’s healing too fast for them not to know.”
“So why whisper?”
“Because I’m out in the waiting room on a pay phone.” There was a sound on the other end like he’d had to take the receiver away from his mouth. He muttered, “I’ll be off in just a minute.” He came back on. “I need you to come down, Anita.”
“Why?”
“Please.”
“You’re a werewolf, Stephen. What are you doing baby-sitting one of the kitty-cats?”
“I’m one of the names in his wallet in case of emergencies. Nathaniel works at Guilty Pleasures.”
“He’s a stripper?” I made it a question because he could have been a waiter, but it wasn’t likely. Jean-Claude owned Guilty Pleasures, and he would never have wasted a shapeshifter off-stage. They were too damned exotic.
“Yes.”
“The two of you need a ride?” It was my day for it, I guess.
“Yes, and no.”
There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. An unease, a tension. It wasn’t like Stephen to be cagey. He didn’t play games. He just talked. “How did Nathaniel get hurt?” Maybe if I asked better questions, I’d get better answers.
“A customer got too rough.”
“At the club?”
“No. Anita, please, there’s no time. Come down and make sure he doesn’t go home with Zane.”
“Who the hell is Zane?”
“Another of Gabriel’s people. He’s been pimping them out since Gabriel died. But he’s not protecting them like Gabriel did. He isn’t alpha.”
“Pimping them out? What are you talking about?”
Stephen’s voice rose high and far too cheerful. “Hello, Zane. Have you seen Nathaniel yet?”
I couldn’t really hear the answer, just the buzz of all the people in the waiting room. “I don’t think they want him to go just yet. He’s hurt,” Stephen said.
Zane must have stepped very close to the phone, very close to Stephen. A low, growling voice came through the wire. “He’ll go home when I say he goes home.”
Stephen’s voice held an edge of panic. “I don’t think the doctors will like that.”
“I don’t give a shit. Who are you talking to?”
For his voice to be that clear he had to have Stephen pinned against the wall. Threatening him, without saying anything specific.
The growling voice was suddenly very clear. He’d taken the phone from Stephen. “Who is this?”
“Anita Blake, and you must be Zane.”
He laughed, and it sounded too low, as if his throat were sore. “The wolves’ human lupa. Oh, I’m so scared.”
Lupa was the word the werewolves used for their leader’s mate. I was the first human so honored. I wasn’t even dating their Ulfric anymore. We’d broken up after I saw him eat somebody. Hey, a girl’s got to have some standards.
“Gabriel wasn’t scared of me either. Look where it got him,” I said.
Zane was quiet for a handful of heartbeats. He breathed over the phone like a dog panted, heavy, but not like he was doing it on purpose, more like he couldn’t help it. “Nathaniel is mine. Keep off of him.”
“Stephen isn’t one of yours,” I said.
“Does he belong to you?” I could hear cloth moving. A sense of movement on the other end of the phone that I didn’t like. “He is sooo pretty. Have you tasted these soft lips? Has this long yellow hair swept over your pillow?”
I knew without seeing it that he was touching Stephen, caressing him to match the words. “Don’t touch him, Zane.”
“Too late.”
I gripped the phone tight and forced my voice calm, even. “Stephen’s under my protection, Zane. Do you understand me?”
“What would you do to keep your pet wolf safe, Anita?”
“You don’t want to push that button, Zane. You really don’t.”
He lowered his voice to an almost painful whisper. “Would you kill me to keep him safe?”
I usually have to meet someone at least once before threatening to kill them, but I was about to make an exception. “Yeah.”
He laughed, low and nervous. “I see why Gabriel liked you. So tough, so sure of yourself. Sooo dangerous.”
“You sound like a bad imitation of Gabriel.”
He made a sound that was somewhere between a hiss and a bah. “Stephen shouldn’t have interfered.”
“Nathaniel’s his friend.”
“I am all the friend he needs.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I am taking Nathaniel with me, Anita. If Stephen tries to stop me, I’ll hurt him.”
“You hurt Stephen, I hurt you.”
“So be it.” He hung up.
Shit. I ran for my Jeep. I was thirty minutes away, twenty if I pushed it a lot. Twenty minutes. Stephen wasn’t dominant. He was a victim. But he was also loyal. If he thought Nathaniel shouldn’t go with Zane, he’d try and keep him. He wouldn’t fight for him, but he might throw his body in front of the car. I had no doubts at all that Zane would drive right over him. Best case scenario. Worst case scenario was Zane would take both Stephen and Nathaniel. If Zane acted as much like Gabriel as he talked, I’d rather have taken my chances with the car.
4
MY SECOND EMERGENCY room in less than two hours. It was a red-letter day even for me. Good news was that none of the injuries were mine. Bad news was that that might change. Alpha or not, Zane was a shapeshifter. They were able to bench-press medium-size elephants. I was not going to arm-wrestle him. Not only would I lose, but he’d probably pull the arm out of my socket and eat it. Most lycanthropes liked to try and pass for human. I wasn’t sure Zane sweated little details like that.
Yet I didn’t want to kill Zane if I didn’t have to. It wasn’t mercy. It was the thought that he might force me to do it in public. I didn’t want to go to jail. The fact that the punishment worried me more than the crime said something about my moral state. Some days I thought I was becoming a sociopath. Some days I thought I was already there.
I carried silver-plated bullets in my gun at all times. Silver worked on humans, as well as on most supernatural beings. Why keep switching to normal ammmo that only did humans and a very few creatures? But a few months ago I’d met a fairie that had damn near killed me. Silver didn’t work on fairies, but normal lead did. So I’d taken to keeping a spare clip of regular bullets in the glove compartment. I peeled off the first two rounds of my silver clip and replaced them with lead. Which meant I had two bullets to discourage Zane with, before I killed him. Because, make no mistake, if he kept coming after I’d pumped him full of two Glazer Safety Rounds, which hurt a hell of a lot even if you could heal the damage, the first silver bullet was not going to be aimed to wound.
It wasn’t until I was going through the doors I realized that I didn’t know Nathaniel’s last name. Stephen’s name wasn’t going to help me. Damn.
The waiting room was packed. Women with crying babies, children racing through the chairs belonging to no one, a man with a bloody rag around his hand, people with no visible injury staring dully into space. Stephen was nowhere in sight.
Screams, the sound of breaking glass; metal clanked to the floor. A nurse ran out of the far hallway. “Get more security, now!” A nurse behind the admittance desk punched buttons on the phone.
Call it a hunch but I was betting I knew where Stephen and Zane were. I flashed my ID at the nurse. “I’m with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. Can I help?”
The nurse clutched my arm. “You’re a cop?”
“I’m with the police, yes.” Prevarication at its best. As a civilian attached to a poli
ce squad you learn how to do that.
“Thank God.” She started to pull me towards the noise.
I pulled my arm free and took out my gun. Safety off, pointed at the ceiling, ready to go. With normal ammo I wouldn’t have pointed at the ceiling, not with a hospital full of patients above me, but Glazer Safety Rounds aren’t called safety rounds for nothing.
The back area was like every emergency area I’d ever been in. Curtains hung from metal tracks so you could make lots and lots of little individual examining rooms. A handful of curtains were closed, but patients were sitting up, staring through the curtains, watching the show. A wall divided the room down the middle to the corridor, so there wasn’t much to see.
A man wearing green surgical scrubs went flying through the air from around that wall. He smacked into the opposite wall, slid down it heavily, and lay very still.
The nurse with me ran towards him, and I let her go. What lay beyond, what was tossing doctors around like toys, wasn’t a job for a healer. It was a job for me. Two more figures in surgical scrubs lay on the floor, one male, one female. The woman was awake, eyes wide. Her wrist was at a forty-five-degree angle, broken. She saw my ID clipped to my jacket. “He’s a shifter. Be careful.”
“I know what he is,” I said. I lowered the gun just a touch.
Her eyes flinched, and it wasn’t pain. “Don’t shoot up my trauma center.”
“Try not to,” I said and moved past her.
Zane stepped out into the corridor. I’d never seen Zane before, but who else could it be? He was carrying someone in his arms. I thought at first, a woman, because the hair was long and shining brown, but the exposed back and shoulders were too muscular, too male. It had to be Nathaniel. He fit easily into the taller man’s arms.
Zane was about six foot, stretched tall and thin. He wore only a black leather vest on his thin, pale upper body. His hair was cotton-white, cut short on the sides with the top long in moussed spikes.
He opened his mouth and snarled at me. He had fangs, upper and lower, like a great cat. Sweet Jesus.
I pointed the gun at him and let out the air in my body until I was still and quiet. I was aiming for a line of shoulder above Nathaniel’s still form. At this distance I’d hit it.
“I’ll only ask once, Zane. Put him down.”
“He’s mine, mine!” He took striding steps down the hallway, and I fired.
The bullet spun him halfway around, and staggered him to his knees. The shoulder I’d hit stopped working, and Nathaniel slid out of his arms. Zane got to his feet with the smaller man tucked under his good arm like a doll. The flesh of his shoulder was already reknitting, rebuilding itself like a fast-forward picture of a flower blooming.
Zane could have tried to rush past me, to use his speed, but he didn’t. He just came walking towards me as if he didn’t believe I’d do it. He should have believed.
The second lead bullet took him square in the chest. Blood exploded out of his pale skin. He fell onto his back, spine bowing, struggling to breathe with a hole the size of a fist in his chest. I went for him, not running, but hurrying.
I walked wide around him, out of arm’s reach, and came up a little behind him, and to the side. The shoulder I’d shot was still limp, his other arm trapped under Nathaniel’s body. Zane gasped up at me, brown eyes wide.
“Silver, Zane, the rest of the bullets are silver. I’ll make it a head shot and blow your freaking brains all over this nice clean floor.”
He finally managed to gasp out, “Won’t.” Blood filled his mouth and spilled down his chin.
I pointed the gun at his face, about eyebrow level. If I pulled the trigger, he was gone. I stared down at this man I’d never met before. He looked young, nowhere close to thirty. A great emptiness filled me. It was like standing in the middle of white noise. I felt nothing. I didn’t want to kill him, but I didn’t care if I did. It didn’t matter to me. It only mattered to him. I let that knowledge fill my eyes. That I didn’t give a damn one way or the other. I let him see it, because he was a shapeshifter, and he’d understand what I was showing him. Most people wouldn’t. Most sane people anyway.
I said, “You are going to leave Nathaniel alone. When the police arrive, you are going to do everything they tell you to do. No arguments, no fighting, or I will kill you. Do you understand me, Zane?”
“Yes,” he said, and more blood flowed in a heavy line from his mouth. He started to cry. Tears welled down his bloodstained face.
Crying? The bad guys aren’t supposed to cry.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said. “I tried to take care of them, but I couldn’t. I tried to be Gabriel, but I couldn’t be him.” His shoulder had healed enough that he covered his eyes with his hand so we couldn’t see him cry, but his voice was thick with tears, as well as blood.
“I’m so glad you’ve come to us, Anita. I’m so glad we’re not alone anymore.”
I didn’t know what to say. Denying that I was going to be their leader seemed a bad idea with bodies littering the area. If I refused his offer, he might get nasty again and I’d have to kill him. I realized suddenly with something like a physical jolt that I didn’t want to kill him. Was it the tears? Maybe. But it was more than that. It was the fact that I’d killed their alpha, their protector, and never given a thought what that might do to the rest of the wereleopards. It had never occurred to me that there was no second in command, no one to fill Gabriel’s place. I certainly couldn’t be their alpha. I didn’t turn furry once a month. But if it would keep Zane from tearing up any more doctors, I could play along for a while.
By the time the cops arrived, Zane was healed. He’d curled around Nathaniel’s unconscious body like it was a teddy bear, still crying. He stroked Nathaniel’s hair and muttered over and over, “She’ll keep us safe. She’ll keep us safe. She’ll keep us safe.”
I think the “she” was me, and I was in way over my head.
5
STEPHEN LAY IN the narrow hospital bed. His curly blond hair was longer than mine, sweeping across the white pillow. Angry red and pink scars crisscrossed his delicate face. He looked like he’d been shoved through a window, which is exactly what had happened. Stephen, who didn’t outweigh me by twenty pounds, had stood his ground. Zane had finally shoved him through a wire-mesh safety window. Like shoving someone through a wire cheese grater. If it had been a human being, they’d be dead. Even Stephen was hurt, badly hurt. But he was healing. I couldn’t literally see the scars fading. It was like trying to watch a flower bloom. You knew it happened, but you never got to see it. I’d glance back at him, and there’d be one less scar. It was unnerving as hell.
Nathaniel was in the other bed. His hair was longer than Stephen’s. Waist length, I was betting. Hard to judge since I’d only seen him prone. It was the darkest of auburns, almost brown but not. It was a rich, deep mahogany. The hair lay on the white sheets like the pelt of an animal, thick and shining.
He was pretty rather than handsome, and couldn’t have been more than five foot six. The hair helped the illusion of femininity. But his shoulders were disproportionately broad, part weightlifting, but part genetics. He had great shoulders, but they belonged on someone about half a foot taller. He had to be eighteen to strip at Guilty Pleasures. His face was slender, jaw too smooth. He might have been eighteen, but he wasn’t much over. Maybe someday he’d grow into the shoulders.
We were in a semiprivate room on the isolation ward. The floor that most hospitals kept for lycanthropes, vamps, and other preternatural citizens. Anything they thought might be dangerous. Zane would have been dangerous. But the cops had carted him away, wounds nearly healed. His flesh had pushed my bullets out onto the floor like rejected bits of organ. I didn’t think we needed the isolation ward for Stephen and Nathaniel. I could be wrong on Nathaniel, but I didn’t think so. I trusted Stephen’s judgment better than that.
Nathaniel hadn’t regained consciousness. I’d asked what his injuries were, and they told me, because
they still thought I was a cop, and I’d saved their asses. Gratitude is a wonderful thing.
Someone had pretty much gutted Nathaniel. I don’t mean just cut open his gut with a knife. I mean opened him up and let his intestines fall onto the floor; they found bits of debris on his intestines. There were signs of severe trauma to other parts of the body. He’d been sexually abused. And yes, a prostitute can be raped. All it takes is saying no. No one, not even a lycanthrope, would agree to being raped while their insides were spilling onto the floor. The rape could have been first, then they tried to kill him. It was a touch less sick done in that order. A touch.
There were marks on his wrists and ankles like he’d been chained. The marks were rubbed bloody like he’d struggled, and they weren’t healing. Which meant that they’d used chains with a high silver content so it would hurt and not just hold. Whoever had done this to him knew ahead of time they’d be getting a lycanthrope. They were prepared. Which raised some very interesting questions.
Stephen said Gabriel had been pimping the wereleopards out. I understood why people would want something as exotic as a wereleopard. I knew that sadomasochism existed. Shapeshifters could take a hell of a lot of damage. So the combination even made a certain sense. But this was beyond sex games. I’d never heard of anything this brutal outside of a serial-killer case.
I couldn’t leave them alone, unprotected. Even without the threat of sexual murderers, there was still the wereleopards. Zane might have cried and kissed my feet, but there were others. If they had no pack structure, no alpha, they had no one to tell them to leave Nathaniel alone. Without a leader it might be a matter of having to back down or kill each of them individually. Not a pleasant thought. Real leopards don’t sweat who’s in charge much. They don’t have pack structures, but shapeshifters aren’t animals, they’re people. Which meant no matter how solitary and uncomplicated the animal form, the people half will find a way to screw things up. If Gabriel had hand-picked his people, I couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t come and try for Nathaniel again. Gabriel had been one sick kitty, and Zane hadn’t impressed me much either. Who you gonna call for reinforcements? The local werewolf pack, of course. Stephen was a member of their pack. They owed him protection.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 44
