Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [253]
There was enough light from the kitchen, so I, too, left the living room dark. The white couch seemed to give off its own glow, though I knew that was illusion, made up of the reflective quality of the white, white cloth. I was pretty sure the men had both gone to change for the night. Most lycanthropes, whatever the flavor, preferred fewer clothes, and Micah didn’t like dressing up. I walked into the empty kitchen not because I needed to, but because I wasn’t ready to go to the bedroom. I still didn’t know what I was going to do.
The kitchen held a large dining room table now. The breakfast nook on its little raised platform with its bay window looking out over the woods still held a smaller four-seater table. Four had been more chairs than I needed when I moved into this house. Now, because we usually had at least some of the other wereleopards bunking over due to emergency, or, often, just the need to be close to more of their group, their pard, we needed a six-seater table. Actually we needed a bigger one than that, but it was all my kitchen would hold.
There was a vase in the middle of the table. Jean-Claude had sent me a dozen white roses a week after we started dating. Once we had sex, he’d added one red rose, so it was actually thirteen. One red rose like a spot of blood in a sea of white roses and white baby’s breath. It certainly made a statement.
I smelled the roses, and the red one had the strongest scent. Hard to find white roses that smelled good. All I had to do was call Jean-Claude. He was fast enough to fly here before dawn. I’d fed off of him before, I could do it again. Of course, that would simply be putting off the decision. No, it would be hiding. I hated cowardice almost more than anything else, and calling on my vampire lover in this instance was cowardice.
The phone rang. I jumped back so hard that the roses rocked in their vase. You’d think I was nervous, or guilty of something. I got the phone on the second ring. The voice on the other end was cultured, a professor’s voice, but it wasn’t a professor. Teddy was over six feet, and a serious weight lifter. That he also had a very fine mind and was articulate had surprised me the first time I’d met him. He looks like dumb muscle and talks like a philosopher. He was also a werewolf. Richard had allowed the wolves that wanted to help to join the coalition. “Anita, this is Teddy.”
“Hey, Teddy, what’s up?”
“I am fine, but Gil is not. He will be, but right this moment we are in the emergency room of Saint Anthony’s.”
Gil was the only werefox in town. So he depended a great deal on the “Furry Coalition,” as the local shapeshifters and even the local police had started calling it. The coalition had orginally been designed to promote better understanding and cooperation among the various animal groups, but we’d branched out to dealing with the human world, to try and promote better understanding with them, too. One great big love fest.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Car accident. A man ran a red light. We’ve got other victims in the emergency room that are still ranting at the man. If Gil had been human, he’d have been killed.”
“Okay, so he called the answering service and got your cell phone number, and . . .”
“A policeman at the accident site noticed that Gil was healing much faster than he should have been.”
“Okay, why do I think this is going somewhere bad?”
“Gil was unconscious, so someone called the number in his wallet marked in case of emergencies. He has no family, so it was the answering service number. By the time I got to the hospital, Gil was handcuffed to a bed rail.”
“Why?”
“The policeman, who is still by his side, says he’s afraid Gil will be dangerous