Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (49 page)

I looked at that huge, furred side and waited for it to breathe. I didn’t realize that I was holding my own breath waiting for it until the tiger breathed, and I let my own out, and had to take another quick breath to sort of catch up.

Nicky took its pulse inside the leg, near the armpit, the way you do on dogs. He nodded. “He’s unconscious, but pulse is good.”

“Thank you, Richard, thank you so much.”

“I’m glad I could help. Domino is a nice guy. I’ll look forward to hearing how he got hurt tonight after the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“Rafael and Micah called a meeting of the local leaders. I’ll be over after my last class.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Busy day,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got to run, hitting the gym before my first class.”

“Thank you again, Richard.”

He smiled and it was a good smile, if not quite the one that used to melt me into my socks and out of my clothes. “You’d have figured it out.”

“But maybe not in time.”

“This is part of what the triumvirate is supposed to be for, Anita. I’m sorry that I didn’t understand that for so long.”

I heard someone say, “Oh my God, it’s beautiful.”

“Company,” I said, “gotta go.”

“Tonight,” he said.

“Tonight,” I said, and cut the connection at the same time he did, so it was almost disorienting. It felt odd to be on the grass, covered in wereanimal goop again, and not standing in Richard’s driveway—though I was left wondering about tonight, and exactly what he might expect. We hadn’t seen each other much lately. Which probably meant he was dating someone seriously, and I had plenty to keep me busy.

Susannah was standing gazing down at the gigantic tiger with a look of awe on her face. She started to drop to her knees and reach out, but Nicky interfered. “Not a good idea; when he wakes up he may not know where he is for a few seconds. You don’t want to startle him.”

She looked at Nicky, blinking, uncomprehending.

I said, “Think of him as a combat vet; they don’t startle awake well.”

She nodded, looking serious, because I knew that one of her ex-boyfriends had let his post-traumatic stress disorder ruin their relationship and his life. I’d heard too much about that failed relationship, too, come to think of it. There was a reason that Susannah and I had never gotten together for drinks and girl talk; I didn’t want to know more about her love life than I already did.

“That is a damn big cat,” Zerbrowski said.

I nodded. Nicky offered me a hand up and I took it, though I was shaking gunk off my hands and scraping it off my clothes again. Jesus, I was going to need another shower. Nicky was almost untouched except for the knee of one pant leg where he’d knelt to check Domino’s pulse.

“How come you’re clean and I’m covered in it?”

“I was almost two feet farther away,” he said.

“Far enough, I guess,” I said as I flung the goopy stuff from my hand onto the grass.

Zerbrowski was grinning at me.

“Oh, just say it, before you bust trying to keep it in,” I said.

“This has got to be a fetish, it’s like clear bukkake.”

I gave him a dirty look. “It’s thicker, lasts longer, and doesn’t break down as quickly.” I scraped more of it off my arms and onto the grass.

“Wow,” he said, still grinning so hard it looked like he’d hurt himself.

“Do you need help getting him into your SUV?” Manny asked, gazing down at the tiger.

The air flexed, almost like heat over a summer highway, and then the enormous tiger seemed to shrink in upon itself, and Domino’s human body appeared like an insect melting out of an ice cube, until the only thing left was him.

“Wow,” Susannah said, and she wasn’t remarking on the stuff I was scraping off my face. She was looking down at the still-unconscious Domino almost the same way she’d looked at his beast, like it was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen, except this time there was good old-fashioned lust mixed in with the nature-admiring awe.

It was a bad sign that he’d shifted back so quickly and been unconscious through both changes; it meant he was very hurt. Nicky and I exchanged a look between us. We were the only ones standing there who knew it was a bad sign. But two of the people with us knew my face well enough to know it was bad.

“He going to be all right?” Zerbrowski asked.

Manny just studied my face and Nicky’s.

I nodded. “Eventually.”

“He’s easier to carry like this,” Nicky said, as he knelt down and picked up the unconscious man. Domino’s long legs trailed over his arms, but the rest of him was tucked in close to Nicky’s chest, the way you’d carry a child.

“You really are as strong as you look,” Susannah said.

“Stronger,” he said, and turned to me. “We ready to go?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m past ready to get out of this cemetery.”

Manny helped me pack my bag up and carried it for me so I wouldn’t get gunk all over the nice leather. I carried two of the long guns, and Zerbrowski carried the second shotgun. Eddie told me that he had a call in to the company that ran this and several other cemeteries in the area.

“Hopefully we’ll get a contract for the ghouls, before nightfall,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah, we can hope.”

Susannah kept looking at Domino, still very nude in Nicky’s arms. She’d catch herself staring and then look away, but her gaze kept going back to him. It was a nice sight, but it was still a little rude. I started to tell her to keep her eyes in her head, but then I remembered Domino asking if I’d be all right if he dated Susannah, so I kept my mouth shut. If they dated, she’d be doing more than just looking at him nude. It wasn’t my business, really, honestly, it wasn’t, so why did her staring at him like it was a peep show bother me so much? That was the question, wasn’t it? Damn.

T
HE THREE OF
us that were conscious put on sunglasses against all the morning sunlight. I called Special Agent Manning from the car; let’s hear it for Bluetooth actually working. “You want to watch the videos using your ability with the dead, is that what you said?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you use your expertise with the dead the first time?”

“My expertise, but not my ability.”

“Explain the difference to me.”

“I looked at the videos like a cop who can raise the dead. Now, I want to watch them with my psychic ability actually active, to see if I can pick up any clues I couldn’t see with just my eyes; does that make sense?”

“Actually, yes.”

“I’d like to include a second animator for this second viewing, Manny Rodriguez.”

“He’s the animator who trained you originally; we’re familiar with him.” She said it like the words meant more, like she’d checked into him in a more than typical way. I let it go with him sitting in the car with me, since I hadn’t mentioned that I was making the call on the Bluetooth so that everyone in the car could hear it. I would ask later, though.

“Can he be my second set of eyes on the viewing?”

“No, Marshal Blake, he can’t be.”

“If I asked why not, would you answer me?”

“You know that he was an intimate of Dominga Salvador, whom you’ve described as one of the most evil people you’ve ever met.”

It was hard not to look at Manny, but I managed. “I’m aware of Manny’s past.”

“Then you can understand why we don’t want him involved on this case.”

“Once a bad guy, always a bad guy, huh?”

“In my experience, Marshal Blake, yes.”

I patted Manny’s shoulder as I drove, just to let him know I didn’t agree. “We don’t have time to argue about it, Agent Manning, so I’ll just go it alone, psychically speaking, through the videos again.”

“You can have another psychic with you, Blake, just not Rodriguez.”

“There’s no one else at Animators Inc. that I’d want to share the duties with,” I said.

“How about Kirkland?”

“Like I said, no one at Animators Inc.”

“He’s full time with us and the Marshals Service now, so he doesn’t work there anymore,” she said; the tone in her voice was trying to get me to share information, though I couldn’t have explained how: I think she’d just been on the job so long that everything was a potential interrogation. I wondered if she’d ever had teenage kids; they must have loved it, in that I-hate-you kind of way.

“Larry and I have a fundamental difference of methodology,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“He thinks I’m a cold-blooded, murdering sociopath, and I think he’s a weak-willed rule lover who flinches at the hard shit.”

She laughed, which was interesting since I hadn’t meant to be funny. “You and he do seem to have a very different approach to your jobs, that much is true.”

“I think what I said was more accurate, but have it your way.”

“Is he powerful enough psychically to help you spot things on the videos?”

I thought about it, and I tried to be fair. “Is he powerful enough? Yes. Is he willing to embrace his gifts enough to see everything he can? I don’t know.”

“You think he doesn’t embrace his gifts with the dead fully?”

“I just said that, so yeah.”

“We at the bureau have found Kirkland to be fully integrated with his abilities.”

“Fully integrated? I’ve never heard that phrase used like that before.”

“Bureau-speak, you know how it is.” She made light of it, but her voice gave something away; I wasn’t sure exactly what that something was, but she was hiding something, or maybe wished she hadn’t given me the phrase.

“Yeah, I know how it is,” I said, when of course what I really meant was,
You know you overshared, I know you overshared, and you’re hoping I missed it, but you know I didn’t. You’re hoping I won’t try to chase down what it means, but we both know I will.

“I’ll see if Agent Kirkland is available later today to help you view the videos.”

“I’d really rather not watch them with him,” I said.

“Why, Blake? And it needs to be a good work reason, not a personal one.”

“One, I’m not convinced he’s fully integrated with his powers, so I don’t know that he’ll really be helpful to me. Two, he’s very conservative, and I really don’t want to watch sex tapes with someone who thinks I’m sleeping with the enemy.”

“Come again, Blake? I don’t understand.”

“Agent Kirkland has an issue with me cohabiting with the monsters, Agent Manning.”

“Has he said as much?”

“He sees vampires as walking corpses, so yeah, he’s pretty creeped out that I’m boning one or two of them.”

“Do you really think he’ll let his personal opinion interfere with his job on this case?”

“Maybe, or maybe I just don’t want another lecture about how I’m evil and going to hell.”

“Did he truly say that to you in those words?” Now she sounded serious.

“Not in those exact words—oh, well, he’s called me evil, but he didn’t tell me I was going to hell; it’s just sort of implied.”

“I’ve found Kirkland to be absolutely professional, very by-the-book.”

“Yeah, if you haven’t noticed I’m not really a by-the-book kind of gal.”

She laughed again. Glad I could amuse someone today. “Well, your record does certainly speak to a level of rule breaking that I could see Kirkland disapproving of in a partner.”

“God, you do good polite-speak, Manning.”

The laughter died off in her voice. “I do more paperwork than you do, I have to be more polite.”

“True, and how did Larry keep his marshal’s badge while he went full time for you guys?”

“We made a special arrangement between the agencies so he could carry both badges.”

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest, a man can’t serve two masters and all that?”

“It is a level of interagency cooperation that I’ve never seen before,” she said.

“I know he needed to stay part of the Preternatural Branch so he could keep being a legal executioner. We have some serious loopholes when it comes to violence and killing that straight FBI or even the main-branch Marshals Service doesn’t have. You wanted an FBI pet, but you wanted him to be able to kill like an executioner. Larry isn’t a shooter, Manning; I hope you guys didn’t bring him in thinking otherwise.”

“Kirkland gets the job done.”

“Out in the field, I doubt that.”

“And if you weren’t such a fucking wild card you might have been the first agent with dual badges, but it’s not just Kirkland who mistrusts your allegiances, Marshal.” She was back to serious, bordering on unfriendly.

“I was told a long time ago that the Feds decided they couldn’t control me, so they didn’t want me in their sandbox.”

“Told by whom?” she asked.

“I think I can find fresh clues using my powers if I watch those awful videos again, Manning.”

“Name a time.”

“I have to clean up from the zombie-raising side of my job, but then I’m at your disposal.”

Nicky said from the backseat, “You have to eat and feed before you go back out. Nathaniel and Micah texted me to remind you.”

I flinched, waiting for Manning to ask,
Who is that?
but she didn’t. Let’s hear it for technology actually being aimed at just the driver. I knew it was designed so soccer moms and dads could talk hands-free while kids were screaming in the car, but hey, it was good for my job, too.

“I have to clean up and get food. My sweeties have been complaining I forget to eat when I’m on a case and it makes me . . . grumpy.”

She made a sound that was almost a snort. “Well, eat before you watch the videos, because you know you won’t want to eat afterward.”

“Yeah, not so much,” I said.

“I’m going to try to get Kirkland in on this round of video watching, Blake, just so you know.”

“I figured you were.”

“Will you watch the videos with him?”

“Will you sit in with us and make sure we don’t fight?”

“Like you’re teenagers that need a referee?” she asked.

“No, more like we’re those two officers that haven’t thrown a punch at each other yet, but it’s coming. Think of it as the grown-up version of the teenage thing.”

“I’m not sure I call that grown-up behavior.”