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“Hobby? You call the fact that he’s a serial killer his hobby?”

I shrugged. “I think that’s how he sees it.”

He smiled. “I think you may be right.”

“Don’t you smile at me. Don’t you fucking smile at me. You hinted that you didn’t want to bring him on this job, so why did you?”

His face sobered. “He wanted to come to St. Louis to see you”—he put air quotes around the see—“on his own. I told him if he came near you I’d kill him. He believed me, but he said that if I ever got called to back you up again, I had to include him. If I didn’t, he’d come on his own, and take his chances with me later.”

“Later? Later, after what?”

Edward gave me a look out of those blue eyes that were some of the coldest I ever looked into. “So he’s here to what, kill me?”

“He doesn’t kill women, Anita. He butchers them.”

I shuddered, because I’d seen Olaf at a serial-killer crime scene. Not his own work. He’d been helping Edward and me track down a different killer. But the victim had been just a pile of meat. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen done to a human being. Olaf had looked up from that pile of carnage, and the look in his face had been sexual. As if what lay on that table was the biggest turn-on he’d ever had. He’d looked at me, and he’d been thinking sex, yeah, but he’d been thinking sex not just without my clothes, but as if he wondered what I’d look like without my skin. Most humans didn’t scare me anymore, but Olaf scared me.

Edward said, “Anita, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’d rather see a ghost than him.”

He smiled again. “Rather see a ghost; I keep forgetting that you’re not just a pretty face.”

I frowned at him. “You’re smiling. This fight isn’t even close to over.”

“I had to invite Olaf to play, Anita. This way I have his word that he’ll behave himself.”

“Define behave himself.”

“No serial killing on your turf, period.”

“So I’m off the menu, too?”

“He wants to help you slaughter your victim of choice, vampires. He’ll even help you kill men, he said.”

I shivered, rubbing my arms, squeezing tight so the gun in its shoulder holster dug into my breast a little. I liked the discomfort. I wasn’t helpless. It was just that Olaf was six feet plus of trained muscle. I was stronger and faster than a normal human thanks to Jean-Claude’s vampire marks, but I still knew enough about physical potential to know that Olaf was a very dangerous man. He was crazy and trained to kill; that seemed an unfair advantage to me.

“You think he would have come on his own by now, if you hadn’t given him your word?” I asked.

“Yes.” He wasn’t smiling when he said that last. He was as serious as I’d ever seen him. “I would never have invited him to that last case in New Mexico if I’d thought I would be needing your help. Please, believe that the last thing I wanted was for him to meet you. I knew it would be a disaster. I just didn’t expect you to…charm him. I didn’t know there was a woman on the planet that could have made him feel anything close to…”—he searched for a word—“he wants to help you hunt and slaughter these vampires.”

“I don’t want him here, Edward.”

“I know, but this was the best compromise I could make with him, Anita. Actually I hoped he’d be out of the country, so far away that the fireworks would be over before he could get back to the United States. He took a job with a government agency to help train up some of their new antiterrorist infiltration groups. He took a job that he’s qualified for—he speaks more Middle Eastern languages than I do—but it wasn’t a job that let him exercise his urges.”

“You mean he’s not been allowed to kill anyone.”

He nodded.

“Why would he take a job that didn’t let him slaughter people?”

“Because he knew if he went out of the country, he’d never make it back in time to be in St. Louis when you needed me.”

I stared at Edward. “Are you saying that Olaf took a job that he didn’t want so he’d be closer to me?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying. This last year and some change is probably the longest he’s