Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [264]
He looked at me for a heartbeat or two, then gave the barest of nods. “Okay.”
“Great,” I said. I’d abandoned my purse at the hospital, but I had the key to the front door in my coat pocket along with ID. What else did a girl need?
“You have a key to the front door?” Richard asked.
“Drop it, Richard,” I said.
“You’re right. You’re right, and I’m wrong. I haven’t been paying attention to business for two months. Sylvie told me that. I didn’t listen. Maybe if I had, she…Maybe if I’d been listening, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”
“Jesus, Richard, don’t pull another guilt trip on me. You could be Attila the Hun, and the council would still have come. No show of strength would have kept them out.”
“What would have?” he asked.
I shook my head. “They are the council, Richard. The stuff of nightmares. Nightmares don’t care how strong you are.”
“What do they care about?” he asked.
I shoved the key into the lock. “Scaring you.” The big double doors pushed inward. I drew the Browning out of my pocket.
“We aren’t supposed to kill anybody,” Richard said.
“I remember,” I said, but I kept the gun out. I couldn’t kill anybody, but Jean-Claude hadn’t said I couldn’t maim someone. It might not be as satisfying, but when you need to back up your threat, someone writhing on the floor in pain is almost as good as a body. Sometimes it’s better.
29
I STOOD WITH my back to the closed door, the others fanned out around me. Soft filtered light came down from the high, high windows. The midway looked dark and tired in the morning sunlight. The Ferris wheel towered over the haunted house and mirror maze and the game booths. It was a complete traveling carnival that didn’t travel. It smelled like it was supposed to: cotton candy, corn dogs, funnel cakes.
Two men stepped out of the huge circus tent that took up one entire corner. They walked towards us side by side. The taller man was about six foot, square-shouldered, with hair that was somewhere between blond and brown. The hair was straight, thick, and just long enough to trail the edge of his shirt collar. White dress shirt tucked into white jeans, complete with white belt. He wore white loafers, no socks. He looked like he should have been walking along a beach in a credit-card commercial, except for his eyes. Even from a distance there was something odd about his eyes. They were orangeish. People didn’t have eyes that color.
The second man was about five foot seven, with dark gold hair cut very short. A brownish mustache graced his upper lip and curved back to meet brownish sideburns. Nobody had worn a mustache like that since the 1800s. His white pants were tight and slid into polished black boots. A white vest and a white shirt peeked out from beneath a red jacket. He looked like he should have been riding to the hounds, chasing small furred animals.
His eyes were a nice normal brown. But the first man’s eyes just got stranger the closer he came to us. His eyes were yellow—not amber, not brown—yellow with orange spikes radiating from the pupil like a pinwheel of color. They were not human eyes, no way, nohow.
If it hadn’t been for the eyes, I wouldn’t have recognized him as a lycanthrope, but the eyes gave it away. I’d seen pictures of tigers with eyes like that.
They stopped a little distance from us. Richard moved up beside me, Zane and Jamil at our backs. We all stood looking at each other. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said that the two men looked uncomfortable or embarrassed.
The smaller man said, “I am Captain Thomas Carswell. You must be Richard Zeeman.” His voice was British and upper-crust, but not too upper-crust.
Richard took a step forward. “I’m Richard Zeeman. This is Anita Blake. Jamil, and Zane.”
“I am Gideon,” the man with the eyes said. His voice was almost painfully low, as if even in human speech he growled. The sound was so low that it made my spine thrum.
“Where are Vivian and Gregory?