[Anita Blake 15] - The Harlequin

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Olaf was beside Edward. He had a can of WD-40 in his hand and a torch made of rags bound to what looked like the end of a metal mop handle. There was a sharp oily smell from it all. He said in that deep voice, “I was going to go for the ordnance in the car, but the janitor’s closet was closer.”

  I almost asked what he meant by ordnance, but was probably glad I didn’t know. Though maybe what they had in their car would have been quicker than what we were about to do to her. Olaf had Edward light the torch. Apparently he’d soaked it in something, because it burned clear and bright.

  Claudia told the people on the far side of the room to clear a space. They parted like a curtain and left Soledad in a clear kill space. The guards formed two lines, one kneeling and one standing. They took their stances, and Edward joined them.

  Claudia yelled, “Head or heart!”

  Soledad leapt, not toward the double line of doors and freedom, or the firing squad, but the thinner line that led back down the hall. The guns all seemed to sound at once. That liquid leap of gold and silver crumbled to the floor. She could heal, but the initial injury was real. They fired into her until she twitched, but didn’t try to rise again.

  Olaf turned so I could see the gun tucked in the back of his belt. “Cover me.”

  I kept expecting my wound to catch up with me, but the adrenaline was carrying me. I’d pay for it later, but right now I felt fine. I wrapped my hand around the gun and pulled it free of the inner pants holster. I’d expected Olaf to go for something big, but it wasn’t. It was an H & K USP Compact. I’d looked at one before I settled on the Kahr. I clasped it in a two-handed grip and aimed it at the fallen weretiger. “Ready when you are,” I said.

  Olaf glided into the circle with his torch and his squeezy can of accelerant. I didn’t glide, I just walked, but I was at his side when he got to her. I was at his side when he sprayed accelerant over her ruined face and chest. The world suddenly smelled thick and oily. She reacted to the liquid or the smell, reaching out at us. I shot her in the face. The gun jumped in my hands, so it was pointed at the ceiling before it came back down to point at her.

  “What the fuck is in this?” I asked.

  He shoved the torch into the wound I’d made, and she started to scream. The smell of burning hair was strong and bitter. It began to overwhelm the scent of the accelerant. He set her afire. He covered her in the thick oily liquid and burned her. She was too hurt to do much, but she could scream, and writhe. It looked like it hurt. It smelled like burning hair, and finally, when she stopped moving, it smelled like burning meat, and oil. She made a high-pitched keening noise for a very, very long time.

  Edward had moved up beside me to aim his gun with the one Olaf had loaned me. The three of us stood there while Soledad died by pieces. When she stopped moving, stopped making noise, I said, “Get an axe.” I think I actually said it in a normal voice. I could hear out of one ear at least. The one that Peter had shot beside was still out for the count. It made sound echo oddly in my head.

  “What?” Edward asked.

  “She heals like one of the vampires that descends from the Lover of Death.”

  “I do not know this name,” Olaf said.

  “Rotting vampires, she heals like one of the rotting vamps. Even sunlight isn’t a sure thing. I need an axe, and a knife, a big, sharp one.”

  “You will take her head,” Olaf asked.

  “Yeah, you can do the heart, if you want.”

  He looked down at the body. She was human now, lying on her back, legs spread. Most of her face was gone, and her lower chest; one breast was burned and blasted away, but the other one was still pale and perky. One side of her hair, the yellow of her tiger fur, was still there. There was no face, no eyes to stare up at us. I might have been grateful for that except that staring into the blackened, peeling ruin of her face wasn’t really an improvement.

  I swallowed hard enough that it hurt. My throat burned as if breakfast might be trying to come back up. I tried a deep breath, but the smell of burnt flesh also wasn’t an improvement. I ended up breathing shallow and trying not to think too hard.

  “I will find her heart for you,” Olaf said, and I was glad my hearing wasn’t quite working right. It made his voice sound flat and lose a lot of the inflection. If I’d heard all the longing in his voice that I saw on his face I might have shot him. I was betting his special ammo would have made a really big hole in a human body. I thought about it, I really did, but in the end I gave him back his gun. He extinguished his torch. Someone brought us an axe and a freshly sharpened knife. I was really missing my vampire kit, but it was at home, no, at the Circus.

  Her spine was brittle from the fire, easiest decapitation I’d ever done. Olaf was having to dig in her chest to find the pieces of burnt and bloody heart. We’d made a mess of her. I kicked the head a little ways from the body. Yeah, I wanted to burn the head and heart and scatter the ashes over moving water, but she was dead. I kicked the head again, so that it skittered across the floor, too burned to bleed.

  My knees wouldn’t hold me anymore. I collapsed where I was standing with the axe still in my hands.

  Edward knelt beside me. He touched the front of my shirt. His hand came away crimson like he’d dipped it in red paint. He ripped my shirt open to my chest. The claw marks looked like angry, jagged mouths. There was something pink and bloody and shiny bulging out of one of the mouths like a swollen tongue.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Does it hurt yet?” he asked.

  “No,” and my voice sounded amazingly calm. Shock was a wonderful thing.

  “We need to get you to a doctor before that changes,” he said, and his voice was calm, too. He wrapped his arms around me and stood, cradling me. He started back the way we’d come at a fast walk. “Does that hurt?” he asked.

  “No,” I said again, my voice distant and too calm. Even I knew I was too calm, but I felt sort of distant and unreal. Let’s hear it for shock.

  He started running down the hallway with me in his arms. “Does it hurt now?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He ran faster.

  33

  EDWARD HIT THE door to the main trauma room with his shoulder. We were inside, but there was no one to pay attention to me. There was a white wall of doctors and nurses, and some of them in civilian clothes, but they were all around one gurney. Their voices held that frantic calm that you never want to hear when you’re on your back looking up at doctors.

  A spike of fear got through the shock—Peter. It had to be Peter. The adrenaline rush of it stabbed through my stomach like a fresh blow. Edward turned, and I could see more of the room. It wasn’t Peter. He was lying on a different gurney, not that far away from the one that had everyone’s interest. Who the fuck was it? We didn’t have any more humans on our side.

  The only person with Peter was Nathaniel. He was holding the boy’s free hand. The other hand was hooked up to an IV. Nathaniel looked at me, and his face showed fear. Enough that Peter fought to turn and see what was coming through the door.

  Nathaniel touched his chest, held him down. “It’s Anita and your…Edward.” I think he’d been about to say your dad.

  I heard Peter’s voice as we got closer. “Your face, what’s wrong with them?”

  Nathaniel said, “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my face.” He tried to make a joke of it, but the noises from the other side of the room made humor sort of hard.

  I couldn’t see past all the white coats. “Who is it?” I asked.

  Nathaniel answered, “It’s Cisco.”

  Cisco. He wasn’t hurt that badly. I’d seen shapeshifters heal throat wounds that bad. Were there more bad guys in here with us? “How did he get hurt?” I asked.

  Peter actually tried to sit up, and Nathaniel kept him down with that hand on his chest, as if he’d been having to pin Peter to the gurney for a while. “Anita,” Peter said.

  Edward put me on the nearest empty gurney, and the movem
ent didn’t so much hurt as let me know that it was going to hurt. It was as if things shifted around that I shouldn’t have been able to feel. I had a moment of nausea and knew that that was just me thinking too hard, or hoped it was. Edward moved me so Peter could see me without moving. It meant that I could see Peter. His jacket and shirt were gone, but bulky bandages were taped across his stomach; more of them were on his left shoulder and upper arm. His weapons and jacket and the remains of his bloody shirt were on the floor under his gurney. It’d be my turn next.

  “What happened to Cisco?” I asked.

  Peter said, “You’re both hurt.”

  “I’m fine,” Edward said, “it’s not my blood.”

  Peter looked at me, his eyes too wide, face sickly pale. “He got his throat torn out.”

  “I remember, but he should be able to heal that,” I said.

  “Not all of us are that good at healing, Anita,” Nathaniel said.

  I looked at him now. The fact that I hadn’t truly looked at him said clearly how much I was hurt. He was wearing one of his pairs of jogging shorts that left very little to the imagination. His hair was back in a tight braid. I met his eyes, and I still loved him, but for once my body didn’t react to the sight of him.

  Edward came to stand by Peter, and Nathaniel came to me, an exchange of emotional prisoners. Nathaniel took my hand and gave me as chaste a kiss as we’d ever exchanged. His lavender eyes held the worry that he’d been hiding from Peter, or trying to hide from him. He leaned over my body, and I heard him draw in a big breath of air. “Nothing’s perforated,” he whispered.

  Until he said it, I hadn’t thought about it. My intestines could have been perforated, or hell, my stomach. If I’d had to get clawed up, it wasn’t a bad place for it. It wasn’t a fatal hit, not right away, not if things weren’t spilling out of me. They were bulging out, not spilling. There was a difference.

  “Is Peter…”

  “Not perforated either, you were both lucky.”

  I knew he was right, but…The voices had risen in pitch across the room. When the doctors start sounding that panicked, things are very bad. Cisco, shit.

  It was Cherry who peeled away from the crowd around him and came to me. She had thrown a white coat over the usual black Goth outfit. Her heavy eyeliner had run down her face like black tears. She touched Peter’s shoulder as she went past, and said, “Let the drugs work, Peter. You can’t help him by fighting to stay awake.”

  “She was trying for me,” he said. “She was reaching for me. He put himself in her way. He saved me.”

  She patted his shoulder and checked the IV almost automatically, but she also adjusted the little knobby thing on it. The liquid began to drip a little faster. She patted him again and came to the other side of the gurney so that she could look at Nathaniel across me, or maybe so she could keep an eye on what was happening to Cisco. There were so many people around him that it looked like they were getting in each other’s way.

  She said, “Nothing I can do over there.” She said it almost to herself, as if she were trying to convince herself.

  She put on a fresh pair of gloves before she looked at my stomach. There was blood on the sleeve of the white coat she was wearing. She seemed to see it at about the same time I did. She just stripped off the coat, tossed it in the little hamper they had for washables. Threw the clean gloves away, got another pair of clean gloves, and came back to me. Her eyes stared at the wound, not at me. Her face had gone to concentrating on her job. If she just concentrated on her job then she wouldn’t fall apart. I knew the look, I had one like it.

  I tried to do something else while she looked at the wounds. Somehow I didn’t want to see my insides on the outside again. But it was like a train wreck; you couldn’t quite look away. “What is that?” I asked.

  “Intestine,” she said, in a voice that held no emotion.

  I heard someone shout, “Clear!”

  The crowd around Cisco cleared, and I saw Lillian using the crash cart on his chest. She was about to try to jump-start his heart. Fuck.

  Micah was in the crowd. He turned and looked at me, his mouth and chin covered in blood. As if Nathaniel read my mind, he said, “He was trying to call flesh and help Cisco heal the wound.”

  Micah could help a healing wound heal faster by licking it. He’d done it for me once. He wiped the blood off his face as he looked at me across the room. The look on his face was anguish. He’d tried.

  Lillian hit Cisco’s chest three times, four, but that high-pitched alarm sound just kept going. Flatline.

  I didn’t hear the door open, but Richard came through leaning so heavily on Jamil, one of his bodyguards, that he was being half-carried. Jamil put him by the gurney. Their bodies blocked me from seeing what was happening.

  Cherry was swabbing my hand; she had a covered IV needle in her other hand. I looked away. Richard’s power ran over my skin like heat. Nathaniel shivered where he held my hand. I glanced at him. His body was covered in goose bumps.

  “You feel it?” I asked.

  “We all do,” Cherry said, and the needle bit home in my hand. I squeezed Nathaniel’s hand hard and kept staring at Richard’s broad back.

  Micah came to stand at the head of my gurney. He’d wiped most of the blood off, but his eyes held defeat. If I’d had a spare hand I would have offered it. He laid his face against the top of my head. It was the best we could do.

  Jamil stumbled away from Richard, leaving him to half-collapse across the gurney. Jamil’s body exploded; one second he was tall, dark, handsome, the next he was the black-furred werewolf that had saved my life once. Lillian fell to the floor, her body writhing, twisting. She was suddenly gray-furred. She lay on the floor with her newly ratty face turned up to the gurney. The other doctors and nurses kept their distance. Richard was trying to bring Cisco’s beast, trying to help him heal by forcing him to shift. But the alarm was still screaming, still letting us know that Cisco’s heart wasn’t beating.

  Richard clutched at the gurney with one hand and Cisco with the other. His power spread through the room as if someone had forgotten to turn off some invisible hot bath, and it was filling up the room. Micah stood up, put his hand against my head. I felt his power spring to life, felt him throw it around the four of us like a shield, keeping Richard’s power out. Most of the time Micah could protect the other wereleopards, but my ties to Richard were too strong. It worked today. Today, Micah held me in the calm of his power along with Nathaniel and Cherry.

  Richard screamed, a long, loud, anguished sound. He collapsed to his knees, one hand still clinging to Cisco’s arm. The arm flopped limp, dead. Richard’s back rippled as if some giant hand were pushing out from the inside. He threw his head back and screamed again, but before the echo had died, the scream turned into a howl. Fur poured over Richard’s body. It was as if his human body were ice, melting to reveal fur and muscle. His human form just melted into a wolf the size of a pony. I’d never seen him in full wolf form, only the half-and-half. The wolf threw its head back and howled, long and mournful. It turned a head as big as my entire chest to look at me. The eyes were all wolf, amber and alien, but the look in them was not a wolf’s look. It held too much understanding of the loss that lay on the gurney.

  One of the other white coats started turning off the machines. The scream of the alarm went silent. Except for the ringing in my one ear the room was deathly quiet. Then everyone began to move. The doctors and nurses started pulling things out of Cisco’s body. He lay on his back, eyes closed. I remembered seeing spine in the throat wound; now the bone was covered. He’d been healing, but not fast enough.

  Jamil climbed to his furry feet and put a half claw, half hand on the wolf’s back. He said in a voice gone to growl, “I’ll take us to feed.”

  One of the doctors helped Lillian to her feet. She seemed more shaken than Jamil was, but then I’m not sure she’d ever had someone rip her beast from her human form. Jamil had been on the wrong end of Richard’s an
ger more than once. “Come with us, Lillian,” he said, and the wolfish muzzle had trouble with the double L sound.

  She nodded and took the hand he offered. The dark-haired man who had turned off the alarm said, “We’ll take care of the other patients, Lillian.”

  Her own voice sounded high-pitched and nasal. “Thank you, Chris.” The three of them walked out together, leaving the others to begin to clean up.

  “Why did he die?” I asked.

  “He bled out faster than his body could heal,” Cherry said.

  “I’ve seen you guys heal from worse,” I said.

  “You hang around with too many big dogs, Anita,” Cherry said. “We don’t all heal like Micah and Richard.” She had the IV on its little metal hat rack. She reached up for the knob that would start the drip.

  “Wait, will that put me out?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then I need to make some phone calls first.”

  “You’re not hurting too much yet, then?” She made it half question, half statement.

  “No, not yet. It aches, but it doesn’t exactly hurt.”

  “It will,” she said, “and when it does you’ll want the painkillers.”

  I nodded, swallowed, nodded again. “I know, but we still have Soledad’s masters out there. We need them dead.”

  “You aren’t slaying any vamps today,” she said.

  “I know, but Ted Forrester still can.”

  Edward looked at me at the mention of his alter ego. His hand was on Peter’s hair, as if he were a much younger boy and Edward had just come in to tuck him in for the night.

  “I need you to take over my warrants,” I said.

  He nodded. His eyes weren’t cold, they were rage-filled. I wasn’t used to seeing this much heat from Edward; he was a cold creature, but what blazed in his eyes now was hot enough to burn a hole through me. “How is Peter?” he asked Cherry.

  “Now that he’s out, we’ll sew him up. He should be fine.”

  Edward looked at me. “I’ll kill the vampires for you.”