Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (14 page)

“You were with the local wereleopards here when it happened the first time, though, right? Gabriel, your old leader, may not have been as powerful a dominant as Micah, but he was strong enough to make sure his cats didn’t go out killing people when they shifted. Or do you mean he used the new leopards in some of their snuff films?”

“No, even Gabriel saw his duty as head of our pard better than that. That would have been a betrayal that we could have taken to other wereleopard groups and used as an excuse to ask for sanctuary. One of the few rules all animal groups hold to is that you take care of the fresh meat, so they don’t have anything to regret when they first change shape.”

“Okay, good. Gabriel was a sexual sadist and a lot of bad things, but you told me he got you off drugs before he’d change you into a wereleopard. That made me assume he’d been more careful of you when you first shapeshifted.”

“I know you hated him, and I know you killed him because he was trying to kill you, but he wasn’t all bad. Almost no one is all bad; that’s part of what makes it so hard in therapy. There are so few true villains, just other screwed-up people who pass the damage on. He took care of me, better than anyone had for a long time. Gabriel got me off the streets, cleaned me up, and trained me how to act at fancy hotels, nice restaurants, the kind of places where people take escorts, not whores. Jean-Claude helped him tutor me on the social graces, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

He grinned suddenly, as he merged into a long line of cars waiting to exit. “When Gabriel first introduced me to Jean-Claude I thought I was there to sleep with him, and instead I was there to audition for going onstage at Guilty Pleasures. I thought I knew how to take my clothes off onstage, but Jean-Claude showed me the difference between shaking the moneymaker to the music and getting naked onstage, as opposed to a true striptease. I can still hear him: ‘One is an art, and the other is cheap and tawdry, and nothing cheap dances on my stage.’ God, Jean-Claude was so elegant in everything he did. I’d never seen anyone like him.”

“He is pretty unique,” I said.

Nathaniel laughed. “He was always a perfect gentleman with all the dancers. He said he couldn’t be a good manager if he played favorites, so first he taught me how to be elegantly sexy onstage and then he taught me which fork to use, and not to tuck my napkin into my shirt collar.”

I laughed. “I never knew that Jean-Claude took that much interest in Gabriel’s wereleopards.”

“He didn’t usually, but I wasn’t just one of Gabriel’s wereleopards, I was one of Jean-Claude’s dancers, and he always looked after his people, as much as he could. The power structure limited him while Raina and Gabriel were alive.”

Raina had been the old Lupa, head lady werewolf of the local pack. Technically I still had the job, but only because the Ulfric, or wolf king, Richard Zeeman, hadn’t chosen a new mate who was a real werewolf. I was still the pack’s Bolverk, doer of evil deeds, and would kill pack members if it had to be done for the safety of others. When a wereanimal went rogue, the body count could add up quick; really all I didn’t do as Bolverk that I did do as a legal executioner was wait for the rogue to kill people. I could do a preventive strike out of the sight of the other cops. I hadn’t actually had to kill anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me or someone else yet, and hoped the trend continued.

Nathaniel took the exit, and the darkness was more complete as we went on smaller streets and there were fewer cars. “One of my regular customers was rich, really rich, and it was old money, which meant he couldn’t afford to have people find out I was a hooker. He wanted to take me places besides a hotel room and to the kind of dinners where you have more silverware than you ever imagined anyone needing at one place setting. It wasn’t just using the right spoon, or fork, either, but a whole different way of acting and interacting with the people while you’re at that kind of dinner. Gabriel’s background wasn’t that different from mine, just a street kid who fought his way to management, so he asked Jean-Claude’s advice, and I got etiquette lessons.”

I tried to picture Jean-Claude giving a teenage Nathaniel Miss Manners lessons, and I could picture it. He’d taken me through the confusing silverware lesson so I could eat the kind of meals he’d have eaten if he’d been able to consume solid food. I carried three of his vampire marks, which meant he could taste food through me if he concentrated. We’d had dates where he watched me eat, just so he could taste the food along with me. I guess if I hadn’t been able to eat a steak in over six hundred years I’d be pretty excited, too.

My phone rang that old-fashioned
brrriiinngg
; I jumped and gave a little squeak. Shit, I was really going to have to find a new main ring tone; this one always made me jump. Nathaniel wisely turned his laugh into a cough. He and Jean-Claude both thought it was cute. Micah thought I should change my ring tone.

I got the phone off its charger in the center console and said, “Blake here, what’s up?” I sounded angry, which was what I usually sounded like when I was scared.

“Did I call at a bad time?” It was Manny.

“No, no, it’s great. I need to talk to you.”

“I’ve known you too long, Anita, what’s wrong?” Manny had been the one who took me on my first vampire hunt, taught me how to stake them and cut off a human head. He had held my hand while I lost pieces of myself learning the ropes of our shared job. He’d helped me refine my zombie-raising ritual, because he raised the dead, too.

“Personal stuff.”

“Jean-Claude treating you badly?” He asked it in that way that older men do, when they feel protective and fatherly toward you.

“No, he’s great, but sometimes the bad parts of my job make the good parts of my life hard to deal with, you know?” That was the truth, and so obscure that it was almost a lie. But Manny took it for what it was: all the truth he was getting.

“I hated it when Rosita made me give up hunting vampires, but my life works better without it. You could just raise the dead, Anita. I know that neither one of us can give that up.”

“Not without raising the dead by accident,” I said. We’d shared stories of our powers affecting the dead by accident. My first had been my dog. His had been a toddler cousin. What did they both have in common? A lot of emotion from us, and for me, I wanted my dog back, so she came back. The college prof who committed suicide and showed up at my dorm room had been harder for me to understand, but good little Catholic that I had once been, I hadn’t wanted him to spend eternity in hell, so . . . another chance to repent.

“Yes, the power will come out one way or another, but hunting monsters isn’t your magic. You could give that up.”

Manny didn’t know anything about the Mother of All Darkness, or the Father of the Dawn, or . . . so much. Rosita had asked me to swear that I wouldn’t involve her husband in any more vampire hunts after he’d nearly died in the last one we’d done together. He still did some of the morgue executions where the vampire was dead to the world and chained down with holy items, but even that made Rosita nervous. He’d been over fifty on that last hunt, and Rosita had said, “He’s too old for this now. Leave my old man alone, and let him live to see his grandchildren.”

What could I say? I did what she asked, and I lost my mentor, my teacher, and my partner in the undead business. Some of my worst injuries had been after I lost Manny at my back. He’d been older, not an old man, but he was currently planning his oldest daughter’s wedding and if he’d stayed at my side he might have missed it.

“Anita, are you okay?”

“I’m sorry, Manny, did you say something?”

“It’s not like you to lose track. Something has shaken you bad.”

“Yeah, it has, and that’s why I called.” I glanced at Nathaniel. It was an ongoing police investigation, but what was I supposed to do, ask him to put his hands over his ears and go
la, la, la
? Of course, come to that Manny wasn’t a marshal either. When he took himself out of the vampire-hunting business he missed his chance to be grandfathered into the preternatural marshal program. I loved Nathaniel, but I wasn’t supposed to talk about ongoing police investigations with him, and certainly the FBI wouldn’t appreciate me oversharing with my lover.

“If I can help, you know I will.”

“I know that, Manny, I’m just debating how much I can share with you since you don’t have a badge.” I realized it was too blunt even as I said it, but I had used up a lot of my control already tonight. It didn’t bode well for raising the dead later.

“Is it just me that doesn’t have a badge, or are you with Jean-Claude?”

“I left him back in town to go to his job. We’re a working couple; we can’t spend every waking minute together.” Again it sounded grumpy, but I didn’t care; I was tired of Manny’s issues with Jean-Claude. It wasn’t personal exactly, but Manny didn’t like my dating a vampire. He’d been the one who taught me that they weren’t just people with fangs; they were monsters. The trouble was that I’d learned that wasn’t true and Manny still believed it. It was ironic that he’d stopped killing vampires but still hated them in that racist sort of way, while I’d gone on to execute dozens more and I thought of them as people.

Nathaniel glanced over at me and cocked his head to one side. It meant a question, like
what?

“Then if you can’t talk to me about the case, why call me at all?” Manny asked.

“True.” I sighed, and then tried to snake my way through what I needed to share, and what I felt I should hold back. I also didn’t want to give away Manny’s secrets, not even to Nathaniel, not because I didn’t trust my sweetie, but because it wasn’t my secret, and if the police ever found out Manny’s secrets he could go to jail, or if he got the wrong judge he could be executed within a matter of weeks, or days. Some of the things he’d done when he was with Dominga Salvador fell under the magical malfeasance laws, which meant any death caused was grounds for automatic execution, none of that years-on-death-row shit. The laws had been designed to keep the human public safe from beings with so much power there was no way to keep them in jail without risking more death. Manny wasn’t that dangerous, but the law is enforced the way the law is written; it’s not about true justice, it’s about interpretation of the law and who has the best lawyer. Cynical, yes, but the longer I was in law enforcement the more I knew that cynical was often just the truth.

“Remember Dominga Salvador?”

“You know I do.” His voice was suddenly much more serious.

“I’ve run across a case that’s using powers I thought only she had.”

“What kind of powers?” he asked.

“Remember the scheme she wanted my magical help for?”

“Work question, I’ll be right back,” he said, and I heard his footsteps over the phone. Was he at home with his family? Was I interrupting some warm domestic scene with this scary shit?

The next thing he said let me know he was alone. “You mean her wanting you to help her raise zombies to be sold as sex slaves?”

“Yeah, that,” I said.

“There are zombies sold as sex slaves all the time, Anita. The people don’t keep them after they rot, but there’s a niche market for it. You and I both get requests for it.”

“And we both say no.”

“Of course, we say no, but other practitioners of our art are not so choosy.”

“But it’s not that kind of zombie, Manny. It’s one like she raised at the end, the one with scared eyes.”

“Zombies don’t feel fear, Anita.”

“No, they don’t,” I said.

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Think it through, Manny.”

“She raised very good, lifelike zombies, but others do that, as well. Yours are almost alive now.”

“Souls, Manny, souls.”

“I don’t . . .” Then he stopped and I heard his breathing speed up. “Are you saying someone else has figured out how to capture a person’s soul and put it back in their rotting corpse so the zombie doesn’t rot?”

“And her trick of removing it, then putting it back, so it’s a little bit rotted, yes.”

He swore in Spanish. I caught that he asked for the Virgin Mary’s help, though I think it was the Virgin of Guadalupe specifically. When he finally spoke English again, his accent was still thicker than normal.

“It can’t be her, Anita. She is dead; even she could not come back after being torn apart by zombies and eaten.” Manny was one of the few people I’d told about Dominga’s real death. She’d been trying to force me to use an innocent victim as a human sacrifice to raise a very old zombie at the time, and only luck had put her henchmen in the circle so I could kill them, and raise a hell of a lot more than just one zombie with the rush of power those deaths gave me. He’d feared for his safety and that of his family from her, so I’d told him the truth. To my knowledge he’d never repeated it.

“I don’t think it’s her come back from the grave, Manny, but could it be someone who knew her? When I turned her down, did she recruit anyone else?”

“I don’t know; the day I took you to see her was the first and last time I’d seen her in years.”

“Who would know if she’d recruited someone else?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Think, Manny, think; these women are being tortured in a way that no one should have to endure outside of a lower circle of hell.”

“I will think on it, Anita, but I don’t know who would be willing to talk to me now. They know I brought the police to the Señora’s door, and only fear of my own power kept them from trying to retaliate.”

“I’m sorry, Manny; I didn’t mean to endanger you by asking for your help.”

“A good man must help stop evil when he is called, Anita; do not apologize for that.”

“I’m just tired of endangering people. I mean, it’s dangerous just to be around me sometimes.”

“That is not true,” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Anita, I don’t know what part of your past you are fighting, but fight harder, because you are a good person, you fight the good fight.”

“Thanks, Manny.”

“De nada.”

I smiled. “If you think of anyone to ask, or anywhere to look for this bastard, let me know.”