Crimson Death

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "Let's walk and talk," he said, still smiling, but now it didn't reach his eyes. They looked tired suddenly, as if he couldn't hide it all.

  I narrowed my eyes a little, but said, "Okay." I trusted him to explain later when we had more privacy.

  He looked at Harris and Barry and nodded toward the hallway. "You need to report back to Claudia. She's got another assignment for you."

  "Hey, we didn't do nothin' wrong," Barry the Brunette said.

  "Nobody said you did." But something in the way that Bobby Lee looked at the other man made Barry flinch.

  Harris touched his arm. "Come on, Barry, we've been ordered to report to Claudia, so that's what we do."

  Barry glared at Bobby Lee, then visibly swallowed his anger and said, "Fine. Let's go report to the Amazon."

  "That is not Claudia's name," I said.

  Barry looked at me and he did that up-and-down look, not sexual, but disdainful. I was a short woman in a bloody nightie, holding another man's hand. Even the gun in my hand couldn't offset the rest, at least not for Barry.

  "I know her name."

  "Then use it," I said.

  He sneered at me, raised his lip like he didn't care if I saw. "Fine. We'll go report to . . . Claudia for reassignment."

  "Ma'am, or sir," I said.

  "What?" he asked, frowning.

  "Say yes, ma'am, or yes, sir, when you address me, Barry."

  "I don't . . ."

  Harris said, "Yes, ma'am, we will do so in the future. Come on, Barry, we gotta go."

  Barry still looked sullen, but Harris looked worried. It made me think better of Harris. He was smart enough to be afraid for his future here; Barry wasn't. Barry needed to go, along with Ricky.

  "You all the guard we need, Bobby Lee?" I asked.

  "Compared to those two, I am an improvement."

  "I hear that," I said.

  "But no, I was going to include Kaazim."

  As if his name had conjured him, Kaazim spilled around the corner of the door behind us like liquid made solid and alive. He was one of the most graceful men I'd ever seen when he moved. I knew and dated dancers, dancers who were wereanimals, but none of them made me think of water poured from long-necked, widemouthed jars to spill and shape itself to everything, except for Kaazim.

  He looked tall, dark, and slender until he stood beside Bobby Lee, and suddenly the illusion of height disappeared because you had Bobby Lee's height to compare to. Kaazim was five-six, or a smidgen under. He and I had been paired together on the practice mat more than once, because of our sizes. Like I'd told Ricky, size matters in a fight. Especially if it's a fight where we can't maim, cripple, or kill our opponent quickly. When you're equally well trained, the only hope a smaller person has is to end the fight as quickly and violently as possible. The rules that would keep Ricky from hurting me too badly in combat training also kept me from hurting him badly, and in a long fight, the bigger person usually wins.

  "Kaazim," I said, and smiled.

  He gave that faint smile of his, almost lost in the blackness of his facial hair and dark skin. His hair was the exact same color as his beard and mustache, and his skin so dark; even his eyes were a brown so dark they looked black most of the time. He was all monotone so that your eyes had trouble seeing details, and he always dressed in black, which contributed to the lack of contrasts in his coloring. There were sections of the world where he would have vanished into any crowd, the perfect spy, perfect assassin, because they wouldn't remember him. Here in St. Louis he stood out, because he was too far from the desert sands and the spired cities of his original homeland.

  "Anita. Nathaniel. Damian." Almost any other guard would have at least remarked on Damian and me covered in blood, but he wouldn't ask. He was one of the least talkative people I'd ever been around, but his dark eyes seemed to see everything.

  He was dressed in flowing robes, with loose, soft trousers underneath. It wasn't what he wore on duty, and he must have noticed me noticing, because he said, "I can change if you wish."

  "One glance and you knew I was taking in the robes?"

  He gave a small nod.

  "As long as you can move and fight as well in the robes as you can in regular guard gear, I'm fine with it."

  "I fight well no matter what I am wearing."

  I grinned. "Of that, I have no doubt."

  He flashed me a smile almost big enough to be called a grin, one that left his dark eyes shining.

  Damian drew me in against his side. "Please, Anita, I need to get clean."

  I looked up into those green eyes and saw the pain, so raw. Nathaniel and me touching him was helping him control it, but it was like water tension, and once that tension broke, the emotion was going to pour out; we needed to get cleaned up before that.

  "Sorry, Damian. You're right. We'll use the shower in our room." I meant the room I shared with Micah and Nathaniel. It was funny that even after dating Jean-Claude for seven years, I still thought of his bedroom as his, but I thought of bedrooms with the other two men as ours. I wasn't sure why, but I knew it was true.

  "There's a shower in my room," Damian said.

  "Cardinale will be in there," I said.

  "But she won't care, Anita. It's after dawn, so she'll be dead to the world."

  "She will so care when she wakes for the night," I said.

  Bobby Lee said, "Taking you three near Cardinale right now, like this, is against my job parameters."

  "Cardinale is unstable and dangerous," Kaazim said, and for him to say anything at all let me know things were worse with Cardinale than even I knew.

  "No, she won't care when she wakes up, because when I told her I was sleeping with you and Jean-Claude last night, she left me."

  "What?" I said.

  "You didn't tell us that," Nathaniel said.

  "She said that if I wanted to sleep with other people she couldn't be with me anymore. That I had to choose."

  "Did you tell her you were just sleeping, not having sex?" Nathaniel asked.

  "Yes."

  "What did she say to that?" I asked, because I had to ask.

  "She didn't believe me, and she told me that if I was buggering Jean-Claude and Nathaniel and fucking you, she hated me and never wanted to speak to me again."

  "That's not what she said. I mean, not really."

  "No, but it's the cleaned-up version."

  "If that's the cleaned-up version, I'm okay not hearing the other," I said.

  "Are you sure Cardinale won't be in the room?" Bobby Lee asked.

  "Even if she is, it's daylight. She'll be passed out."

  "You aren't," Kaazim said.

  "Neither is Jean-Claude," Damian said.

  "Yes, just you and he of all the vampires are awake now," Kaazim said, and he was looking at Damian now, as if trying to see something in him that he'd missed.

  I jiggled Damian's hand in mine and said, "He's with me, Kaazim."

  "Of course," he said.

  "Stop sizing him up for the kill, then."

  He blinked and looked very steadily at me with his dark eyes. "You are very observant."

  "Not as observant as you are."

  He gave a small self-deprecating smile. "I have had more practice at it."

  "Yeah, a few centuries more," I said.

  "By the grace of my vampire master, I have lived long past my expected time."

  "If we keep talking, we're going to use up all our time," Bobby Lee said. "Let's get moving."

  It was unusually abrupt for him, but something about the way he gripped his AR and stood there in all his gear made me not argue with him. Whatever had happened on his last out-of-town assignment had been bad, because I'd never seen Bobby Lee like this when he got home.

  "Let's move," I said.

  Bobby Lee took point leading the way. Kaazim took rear guard. Damian, Nathaniel, and I stayed in the middle, where we belonged. I had my gun in my hand, but in that moment it didn't matter. Armed or unarmed, I was their protectee
, and that was that; with Bobby Lee this high-strung, my best move was to let him do his job. Besides, I only had one gun; he had several.

  I could feel tension starting in Damian again. It telegraphed through his hand into mine.

  "You okay?"

  "If Cardinale is dead to the world in our bed, then we still have a chance, but if she's not in there, then it's over. I can't live like this anymore."

  Nathaniel touched his head against the other man's shoulder lightly as they moved. "I'm sorry, Damian."

  We were still holding hands, but somehow I felt like I needed to touch him more, so I put my arm around his waist. It took a second for all of us to adjust our walking together, but we managed. "I'm sorry, too, Damian."

  "So am I," he said, and we followed Bobby Lee's overly armored and armed back down the hallway. Bodyguards are great at saving your life, but they can't help at all when someone is trying to break your heart.

  9

  DAMIAN HAD WANTED to know if he was a suddenly single vampire or if he still had a relationship. He felt like he needed to know, so we went to his room first. If Cardinale was in the bed we'd go back to Nathaniel's and my room for showers. The five of us stood in Damian's room. A bedside lamp shone beside a perfectly made-up bed. It had a flowered coverlet, and lace draped from the bed frame. There was a large rug on the floor that was covered in huge daisylike flowers. There were pictures on the walls of flowers in vases, flower-filled meadows, a small girl holding flowers. In all that flower-filled, overly feminine room, there was no sign of Cardinale. I knew her coffin was in one of the coffin rooms, so there was no hidden place for her here. She was either in the bed, under the bed, or sleeping in the bathtub. No vampire I knew willingly slept in a tub, so . . . "I'm sorry, Damian." It seemed so inadequate, but it was all I could think to say.

  Nathaniel hugged him and Damian hugged him back as if he wasn't really seeing him.

  Bobby Lee and Kaazim just stood there, taking up positions in the room so they could watch the door. They were as empty as they could make themselves, taking themselves away from the emotion of the moment. Normally, Bobby Lee was more helpful, but I think he was full up on his own emotional shit, no energy left for anyone else.

  I expected Damian to break down, or scream, or go looking for her, but he didn't do any of that. Instead he said, "I hate what she did to my room. I hate the bedspread." He stalked into the room and dragged it off the bed and threw it on the floor. "I hate these paintings!" He grabbed the one that looked like a bad imitation of Van Gogh's Sunflowers and threw it across the room like a Frisbee. "I hate these rugs!" He picked the biggest one up and pulled it behind him like the train on some impossible formal gown. He opened the door, shoved it through, and brought the bedspread out to join it. The sheets underneath were pink, but I refrained from saying anything that might add to the emotion of the moment.

  He slammed the door behind him and ranted, "I hated the colors she chose, the mess she made of my closet, and how her clothes were more important than mine." He went for the closet in the far wall and slid the door open. I think he was going to throw her clothes out beside the rug and bedding, but when he got the door open, he froze in front of it.

  "Oh God," he said.

  I came to his side, wondering if he'd found Cardinale "asleep" in the closet. Maybe she'd just hidden to see what he'd do; I'd known humans who did stuff like that, so why not vampires? But when I could look into the closet, there was no body in it, but there weren't many clothes either. I realized her clothes were missing.

  "She's really gone," he said, and the anger was replaced by sorrow, loss, remorse maybe, all those emotions that hit you after a breakup, especially right after a breakup. Though I guess this was in the middle of it.

  "I'm sorry, Damian."

  Nathaniel echoed me. "We're both sorry, Damian."

  "So am I, but I really do hate what she's done to my room, my space. It's like it's all about her, and I didn't matter."

  "You mattered to her, Damian."

  "Would either of you have let anyone turn your bedroom into some flowered nightmare?" He looked at me when he asked, and his expression let me know that lying wasn't an option.

  "No, I wouldn't have."

  "When I was younger, I would have, but not now," Nathaniel said.

  "So why did I let Cardinale do it?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't either," he said, still staring into the nearly empty closet.

  "Where are the rest of your clothes?" I asked.

  "In a room further into the underground. I had to get dressed for work in a storage area, because she needed room for her things." He touched the empty hangers.

  "We'll go wash up in our room. Give you some privacy."

  "Don't, Anita."

  "Don't what?"

  "Don't go. Please don't go. It's daylight and I'm awake and I'm afraid to sleep again. I'm covered in my own blood, and . . . I'm afraid of what's happening to me. Even if Cardinale were here, she couldn't help me. That's why I went to you and Jean-Claude, because something is wrong with me, and if we don't figure out what it is soon, I'm afraid of what will happen."

  Nathaniel hugged him first, but I came and added my arms to his. "I know you're afraid you'll lose control like you did before, but that time was my fault. I'll never cut you off from me metaphysically again, I promise."

  "We're both here," Nathaniel said.

  He grabbed our arms a little more forcibly than I'd touched him. "Last time I slaughtered innocent people. I don't remember doing it, but I remember being covered in blood like this, and I remember trying to kill people who were my friends. And now I'm covered in blood again, and I don't know why!"

  "It will be all right, Damian," I said.

  "You can't know that. Whatever this is, it's getting worse, Anita. I sweated enough blood to soak the bed. I've never heard of a vampire doing that." He shook me a little with his hands gripping us too tight.

  I put my hands on his arms, partially just to touch him, and partially to try for some control. "We have a lot of old vampires with us now, Damian. One of them may know something."

  Bobby Lee said, "Kaazim's not a vamp, but he's been with the vampires for centuries."

  We both looked from Bobby Lee to Kaazim where he stood quietly near the door. Damian let go of us enough for me to turn toward the other man. "How about it, Kaazim? Have you ever heard of a vampire sweating this much blood?"

  "From a nightmare, no."

  "But from something else, yes?" I asked.

  I think he smiled again, but it was hard to tell with him in the shadows. He'd picked the perfect place to stand to be as invisible as possible; he'd had centuries of practice. "Yes."

  "Tell us," Damian said.

  "I do not answer to the servant of my queen."

  Damian frowned, and I felt his anger run through us both, and then he went cold, still, the emotion not so much shoved down but gone. I was never sure how he did that, but I knew why he did it. She-Who-Made-Him had used all emotions against people, so to survive he had learned to hide them under an icy calm that he'd shared with me. Sometimes I thought it was his calm that had helped me, as much as therapy.

  "How about your queen's pet? Will you answer it for me?" Nathaniel said.

  Kaazim smiled, just a little. "If that were all you were, then no, I would not answer you."

  "Then answer to your queen," I said, but my voice showed some of my displeasure that he'd slighted the others. I wasn't as good at hiding my emotions.

  He gave a small bow and said, "As my queen commands," but that was all he said.

  "You're going to make me drag it out of you, aren't you?"

  "I will answer any direct question you ask, my queen."

  "I can't say it's Anita when we're working out in the gym and you just answer as a friend?"

  I couldn't quite read his expression from the shadows. I just knew it was one I hadn't seen before. "You would call me friend?"

  "I know we don
't go drinking together, or see the same movies, but yes."

  "We are not friends, Anita, not in that way."

  I nodded. "Okay, then we're work friends."

  He seemed to think about that for a minute, then said, "I know this term. It implies we are friends at work, but how can we be friends if I am your bodyguard?"

  "I'm friends with a lot of my guards," I said.

  He smiled wide enough that I saw the flash of it even in the shadows. "I do not think we will ever be that friendly."

  I laughed with him. "I don't mean that kind of friendly. I mean more like I am with Claudia, or Bobby Lee, or Fredo, or Lisandro, or Pepita, Pepe."

  He nodded again. "Work friends." He said it softly.

  "Yeah."

  "As a queen I would have made you hunt and ask the right questions. It is what my master told me to do if you asked certain things."

  "Why would Billie tell you to withhold things from me?" Billie was short for Bilquees, though she'd informed me that sometimes she went by Queenie. I liked Billie better.

  "My master's reasons are her own."

  Which probably meant he couldn't, or wouldn't, tell me her reasons. Fine. I moved on. "But if we are friends, then will you just help me help Damian?"

  He nodded. "It is a long time since someone has asked me something in the name of friendship, Anita, a very long time."

  "I'm sorry for that."

  "Why are you sorry?"

  "Because everyone should have friends."

  He smiled again, but I couldn't see his eyes at all, so I didn't know if it was a happy smile or a hiding smile. "The Harlequin do not have friends, Anita. The animals of the Harlequin have even less than that."

  "I've done my best to eradicate the double standard that the old vamps feel toward their animals to call."

  "You and Jean-Claude have done much to help us."

  Damian kept my hand in his, but he took a step toward the other man. "Help me, Kaazim. Help me because Anita is your friend, or your queen."

  "You are a servant. I do not answer to servants."

  "Kaazim, what is it with you and so many of the Harlequin? All of you seem to dislike Damian. Why?"

  "I can answer that one," Bobby Lee said.