Dead Ice

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  J.J. was tall, slender, her body honed down to a work of art by years of being a professional ballerina. She was with one of the most prestigious dance companies in the country, which happened to be all the way in New York. Jason, Nathaniel's best friend and my werewolf to call, had started spending more and more time with her there; he was there this week, visiting. There was serious talk about him getting a tryout with her dance company someday. If he made it, then he would be the first shapeshifter to ever become a member of a human company. There were all-shapeshifter dance troupes, all-vampire ones, and even mixed ones that were just all preternaturals, but humans didn't like trying to compete with people who were faster, stronger, and just physically better by virtue of a disease they'd caught like lycanthropy, that no amount of human practice or gym work could compete with. Jean-Claude and I weren't sure we could do without him since he was the assistant manager at Guilty Pleasures and one of the headline dancers, but we both wanted him to be happy. He and J.J. were stupid happy with each other. She was also my second-ever female lover, and I liked her better than the one who was pushing me to put a ring on her finger.

  "I can't argue that, and if J.J. were a weretiger I'd consider it, but she's human; awesome, but it doesn't help us find a tiger that we all like well enough to commit to."

  "We all like Cynric enough."

  Unless Micah had told him, Nathaniel didn't know about my revelation about my feelings for Cynric, so I wasn't sure what to say. Either he knew and was pushing, or he didn't know and it was just an honest remark. I couldn't ask without having to share the trauma, and I wasn't ready to talk about it, not so soon, not even with Nathaniel. I agreed to look at more tigers, because it would stop him from asking about Cynric; probably not one of my smarter ideas, but sometimes you do the stupid thing to avoid the traumatic one.

  I said, "True, but you said it yourself: neither you nor Micah has sex with him, it's just another lover for me. You're right; I should at least look at some of the other weretigers."

  "You mean the female weretigers?"

  "And some of the male ones; who knows, maybe one of them will work better than Dev or Cynric, but yes, I'll look at some of the women, too."

  "Really?" he asked, and he suddenly looked and seemed even younger than he was.

  "Yes, really, and you just drove past the cemetery entrance."

  He slammed on the brakes and only my seat belt kept me from hitting the dashboard. "Sorry, really sorry," he said.

  I swallowed past my heart as it tried to climb out my mouth. My mother had died in a car accident; it made me less than thrilled about moments like this. "Maybe I'll drive home," I said, in a breathy voice.

  "At least it's a country road and there's no traffic," he said, the car still skewed across most of the road, headlights aimed at the low stone wall, but not at an entrance.

  "Yeah, there's that; now just back up slowly, carefully, and go like five miles an hour once we get into the cemetery. The roads are gravel and very narrow."

  "I'm really sorry, Anita."

  "Nathaniel, get us out of the middle of a dark road at night before someone comes over the hill and hits us."

  He stopped arguing and just backed up, slowly, carefully, and eased the nose of my SUV gingerly through the narrow opening in the wall. I wondered how Nicky and Dino had gotten a truck and the trailer complete with cow through the opening. It must have been a damn narrow fit, but they'd made it or Nicky would have called me by now. I trusted Nicky, and he was the only other man I was actually in love with, but that didn't help any of the men in my life feel the same about him. Why did we have to have a weretiger? Because I'd killed the Father of Tigers, also known as the Father of the Dawn, and I'd killed the Mother of All Darkness, just like the weretigers' prophecy had said the next vampire that could control all the tigers would do. Funny thing about prophecy: After a few thousand years, if it seems to come true it gains strength, belief, power. The fact that Jean-Claude's human servant (me), his queen (again me), had killed two such powers didn't mean I had killed them; the vampires counted both kills as belonging to my master, to Jean-Claude, so we had to include a weretiger in our ceremony, because the rest of the prophecy was all confusing about marrying the tiger to the king and queen. The metaphysical community had decided that meant that if we married one weretiger, the prophecy would be fulfilled and that would put the final nail in the coffin of the Mother of All Darkness, but if we didn't marry a weretiger there was a loophole in the prophecy that allowed her to come back from the grave. Funny how there's always a loophole when it comes to the really scary shit. I'd swallowed her essence while she tried to take over my body; the immovable object met the unstoppable force and I won, but all the good little vampires and wereanimals believed that for the victory to be complete, Jean-Claude and I had to "marry" one of the tigers who'd helped us kill Mommie Darkest. It wasn't the hurt feelings of our lovers, current or ex, that made us agree to add a weretiger; it was the belief of an entire country that wanted Jean-Claude to be their triumphant king. Even being the one who had slain the metaphorical dragon, I was still relegated to queen. I was still the one who got picked up in the carriage and swept off my feet by the prince, even if it was me holding the bloody sword in one hand and the head of the Gorgon in the other. To the vampires, especially the really old ones, I was the princess, and the princess didn't get to rescue herself, let alone rescue everyone else. They so had me confused with someone else.

  "I'm not the princess they're looking for," I said, and didn't realize I'd said it out loud until Nathaniel asked, "What did you say?"

  "Nothing. There are the cars. Park and it's time for me to work some magic and earn a really obscene amount of money."

  "More for you to spend to sweep me off my feet," he said, as he eased the car forward, trying to park without hitting one of the old graves that huddled near the road.

  "You're really not going to let that go, are you?"

  "Nope," he said, and parked.

  10

  I WAS SITTING half inside the dark open back of the SUV, changing out of the heels and into hiking boots. I'd changed the automatic car lights so that they needed to be switched on, because the light framed you like a target at night. It also spoiled your night vision, but it was mainly the "target" issue that had bothered me.

  Nathaniel stood next to the open hatch, leaning one shoulder against the side of it. He'd already texted Micah the news that I was willing to look at more tigers as prospective lovers and more.

  "You didn't have to text Micah. It could have waited until we got home," I said.

  "You gave me your word that you'd look at more tigers, including females; did you mean it?"

  "Yes, I meant it," I grumped at him.

  He smiled. "Then why not tell Micah?"

  I couldn't think of a response that didn't include me whining that now that Micah knew, I couldn't back out of my newfound willingness to shop for more tigers, but to say that would have meant admitting I hadn't meant it, and I did mean it. If I really wanted Cynric to go off somewhere and have a life without us, then I needed another tiger to take his place, or join our domestic arrangement as well as he had. Either way, I needed more tigers.

  "Nicky is walking this way," Nathaniel said.

  "He's probably coming for a covert kiss; we made an agreement, no kissing and stuff in front of the clients."

  "No kissing and stuff, really, and here I am and here he comes, and you can't kiss either one of us." He grinned suddenly, far beyond his usual come-hither smile.

  "You are not going to tease from a distance and mess with my concentration."

  "I'm not," he said, but he made it a question with uplift in his voice at the end of it, so that the statement was all question. His eyes might look gray by moonlight, but the shine of humor was clear enough.

  I frowned at him. "You've been hanging around Jason too much. He's usually the one who can't leave well enough alone."

  "He's my best friend, we're supposed
to hang out, but he would never be able to distract you from a distance as well as I can." He crossed his arms over his chest, flexing just a little, so that I wondered for a second if the fitted T-shirt would hold. It did, of course, but he'd had to stop lifting so much in the gym, because genetically he bulked more than his dancer's body needed. He'd started to lose some of his flexibility, and he had enough muscles for dancing onstage without trading away some of that amazing mobility. He was double-jointed, among other things.

  He gave a small and very masculine laugh, and I realized I'd just been staring at him with the one hiking boot in my hand. Crap, he hadn't even begun to try to distract me, not really. I went back to concentrating on putting on my boot, but by that time Nicky came around the corner of the car, and I was suddenly sitting with one of them on either side of me. That shouldn't have been a problem, but Nicky bent his nearly six feet of muscled hunkitude toward me. His shoulders almost didn't fit inside the open hatch area, because he was just that big. His blond hair was cut short except for the triangular fall that covered most of the left side of his face. I put a hand on his chest as he leaned in; he wrapped one arm around me, drawing me in tight to all that hard, muscled upper body. If I'd thought Nathaniel was a threat to his shirt seams, it was always miraculous to me that Nicky didn't split his shirts every time he tried to pick up a bottle. I had taller men in my bed, but no one was as massive as Nicky. He was flexible where he needed to be for sex, and hand-to-hand fighting, but the rest was just muscle. He lifted to be stronger, he lifted because he liked it, and genetics made him bulk, but he didn't have a job where he needed to avoid it, so he didn't. All that muscle made him seem bigger than men who were actually taller, but height isn't everything when it comes to size. Men, and some women, seem to think it is, but just as obsession about length in other areas doesn't take into account what width can do for you, the same could be said for Nicky's upper body, and his thighs. He had to buy bigger jeans and then have them tailored through the narrowness of his waist, or he had to wear shorts and split the legs wider.

  He kissed me firmly, but not with a lot of lip movement, because he knew I'd be mad if he sent me to the clients with my lipstick smeared like clown makeup. That one long fall of hair brushed the side of my face as we kissed. His mouth stayed firm but almost chaste against mine, but he breathed out against my skin, opening his lips just enough to let a long, low growl slide out against my mouth. I opened for it as if I could drink in the sound of him. It made me shiver in his arms, and I dropped the hiking boot and just wrapped my arms around his neck.

  He put an arm under my ass and lifted me up, crawling into the back of the car with me half in his arms. I fought free of the kiss, and said, "Work, work, work, I'm at work, damn it."

  He spoke with his face just above mine, the weight of him half pinning me. "It's dark and they're human, they can't see what we're doing."

  I felt the car rock slightly as Nathaniel crawled into the back with us. He was on all fours on the other side of me, and I had a moment of staring up at both of them in the small, dark space of the car. The possibilities of the three of us together caught my breath in my throat and tightened things low in my body. They'd smell that I wanted them, but I couldn't help that. I pushed my way to sitting and said, "No, absolutely no."

  "Absolutely no, what?" Nathaniel said, his smile faint in the darkness of the car.

  I rolled my eyes at him and then began to crawl out of the car. It was actually a little hard to crawl past Nicky's shoulders. He fixed that by lifting me up and sitting me gently on the edge of the open hatch area, where I'd started. He even got out and picked up the boot I'd dropped.

  I took it from him, frowning, and not looking at his face much. I was going to ignore him as much as possible. I was going to ignore them both, damn it. "Work," I repeated, and yes, I did know it was a case of the lady protesting too much. Throwing caution to the wind and having fun in the car like a flashback to high school sounded a lot more fun than raising the dead right now, but then if the men in my life weren't more fun than work, I guess they wouldn't be in my life.

  "Don't the coveralls need to go on before the hiking boots?" Nicky asked.

  "I was going to walk over and make sure they'd read the handouts I sent home with them, or give them a refresher on what to expect. People never listen in the office and then sometimes they freak out during the zombie-raising, and I hate that. The coveralls are hot, even in spring, so I'll talk to the clients and then get changed."

  "And the boots are so you can walk on the gravel," he said.

  "Yeah."

  "Good plan, because I came to tell you that your clients did read the literature you sent home with them, and one of them is having an attack of conscience."

  I frowned at him. "An attack of conscience, what about, disturbing the dead?"

  "No," he said, with a slight smile.

  "Are they upset about the whole voodoo angle? If they read the handouts they know it's not black magic."

  "Not that either."

  "Then what is it?"

  He grinned, shook his head, and said, "It's the cow."

  11

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER I still didn't have the coveralls on, because I hadn't been able to convince our reluctant client that killing the cow was a necessary part of raising the zombie for them. I finally had someone to aim my anger at, except that I wasn't angry anymore thanks to Nicky and Nathaniel. Some nights you just can't hold on to the mad long enough to use it.

  "Yes, Mrs. Willis, the cow does have to die so I can raise the zombie for you," I said.

  She peered up at me, which wasn't something that most people had to do. She was tiny, less than five feet, but somehow didn't seem that small; attitude can make up for inches. Her eyes swam behind some of the thickest prescription glasses I'd seen in years. Her eyes glinted behind them in the moonlight. The moon was only two days past full, so there was plenty of light for my night vision. Nathaniel, Nicky, and Dino probably didn't even think it was dark, because wereanimals had a heck of a lot better night vision than I did, even in human form. We hadn't advertised the fact that the only full humans here tonight were the clients. They seemed nervous enough without that. One of the younger men with them kept gazing around the cemetery as if he expected something to jump out and eat him. Some people just weren't comfortable in cemeteries after dark; go figure.

  "I was fine in theory, but now that the animal is standing in front of me, it seems wrong to slaughter it because we want to do historical research."

  "Do you want the zombie raised, or not?" I asked.

  "Of course we do." Mr. Owen MacDougal came up behind her, much taller, much broader, not fat, but solid like an old-time linebacker gone a little heavy around the middle. He looked like an older version of my other bodyguard, Dino, except Dino was darkly Hispanic and MacDougal was Middle America white bread. I knew Dino was six-two, so MacDougal was at least that tall, maybe an inch or so more. Neither of them was as broad through the shoulders as Nicky, but then I knew Dino didn't go for bulk as much as he did, and MacDougal obviously hadn't been keeping up with the gym, but he was still a big, solid guy.

  "Of course we do," he repeated. "Ethel, it's a cow. You eat steak."

  "I eat meat out of the grocery store," she said. "I don't watch the poor animals slaughtered in front of me." She motioned at the brown-and-white Guernsey tied to a nearby tree. It was munching the fresh grass and chewing whatever cows chew contentedly. If it knew why it was here tonight it seemed calm about it, but it was a cow. They puzzle me. I've never looked at one and thought, I know what it's thinking. Cows aren't like dogs, or cats, or even certain birds. Cows are mysterious things when it comes to motives, and this one was no different as she grazed among the weathered tombstones.

  Nathaniel had surprised me by being nervous of the cow. All he would say was, he'd had a bad experience with a cow once. He was standing well away from it by the clients' cars, while we talked business.

  I tried to thi
nk my way past the PETA-esque attack of conscience, and finally said, "Mrs. Willis, I have other appointments tonight"--which was a lie, because raising something this old would exhaust any animator powerful enough to do it, but Ethel Willis didn't know that--"so you need to decide if we're raising this zombie within the next fifteen minutes or I'm calling it, and you can figure out what to do with the live cow."

  "What?" she asked, and MacDougal echoed her.

  "I mean I've made arrangements with a disposal company to come get the cow carcass. It'll be made into pet food since humans aren't allowed to eat anything killed in a religious ritual, but the disposal company does not deal in live animals, so if we leave here and the cow is still alive, then it's your problem."

  I heard Dino chuckle behind me, and try to turn it into a cough.

  "But I don't know anything about cows," Mrs. Willis said. "Whatever would I do with it?"

  "Don't know, don't care. You paid for the animal to be sacrificed when you agreed to the price for the zombie, so in effect it's your cow. If you don't want me to kill it and raise the zombie, fine, but it's still your cow dead or alive. I'll dispose of its corpse, but if it's still alive when I leave here tonight it's no longer my problem, it's yours." I glanced behind me at the narrow road that ran through the graveyard. "The biggest car I see over there is a Cadillac. It's a big car. You could probably get a goat in the backseat, but I don't know about a cow, especially not a full-grown Guernsey. They're a big animal. I don't think it'll fit, and this municipality doesn't let you keep cows except as short term for blood sacrifices or other religious observances, so no just letting the cow loose, because that would be breaking the law and when the police contact Animators Inc. asking why a cow that we purchased is roaming loose, I'll tell them it's your cow."

  "How would they know whose cow it was?" Willis asked.

  "They have serial numbers like license plates. The number tells you the cow's entire history including that it's now your cow, and unless I kill it here and now, you have a very big, very not-house-trained pet." The cow chose that moment to lift its tail and prove just how not-house-trained it was. I think that was the selling point for Mrs. Willis. The nice animal had done something messy and disgusting, and very real. I think it was all a little too real for the older lady. She went to sit in the Cadillac and left the rest of us to get all messy and real.