Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [272]
30
WE PULLED INTO the driveway of my rented house with two wounded wereleopards, two unwounded wereleopards, two very silent werewolves, a partridge in a pear tree, and enough equipment for Richard to rig up a pair of traction splints in my bedroom. Gregory needed to be in traction splints for twenty-four hours according to Dr. Lillian. The hospital was being evacuated. If Fernando was in charge for the day, the evacuation wasn’t just a precaution, it was a necessity. The rat-boy hadn’t wanted to free Rafael, and he’d certainly want revenge on Richard for beating him, so both the wererats and the werewolves were in danger. The thought of what he’d do if he got his paws back on Gregory and Vivian was too scary to think about. The best we could do was keep them with us and try not to be anywhere Fernando would think to go.
I was half-trusting Thomas and Gideon to keep the rat-boy from searching too hard. I don’t usually trust people that easily, but Gideon had called him the petite bâtard. The little bastard. They didn’t like him any better than we did. Hard to believe, but maybe true.
Besides, where could we go where we’d be safe? We couldn’t go to a hotel. That would endanger everyone in the place. Same thing with most houses. One of the main things I’d been looking for in a rental was isolation. Frankly, I liked a little city around me, but my life had turned into a free-fire zone lately. No apartments, no condos, no neighborhoods; something with lots of ground and no neighbors to get shot up was what I’d wanted. I got it. Though the isolation was about all I’d gotten that I wanted.
The house was too big for just me. It was a house that cried out for a family with walks in the woods and a dog running circles around the kiddies. Richard had never seen the house. I would have been more comfortable with him seeing it before we’d had our little make-out, oh, umh, makeup session. Before Jean-Claude had interfered, Richard and I had been engaged. We’d been planning the kind of future that went with this kind of house. I don’t know if Richard had woken up and smelled the blood-soaked coffee, but I had. The future that included a picket fence and 2.5 children just wasn’t in the cards for me. I didn’t think it was in the cards for him either, but I wasn’t going to burst his bubble. Not as long as his bubble didn’t include me. If it did…we had a problem.
The house had a medium-sized rectangular flower bed that got full sun almost all day. It had been a rose garden, but the last owners had dug up the plants and tried to take them with them. It looked like the far side of the moon, complete with craters. It had looked so barren that I’d spent a weekend planting the damn thing. Rose moss for the border just because I loved the bright little flowers. Zinnias behind that because the flower colors echoed each other. It was a riot of color, nothing subtle. Butterflies and hummingbirds were attracted to the zinnias. I’d planted cosmos behind the zinnias, towering, feathery and tangled at the same time, with lovely pale open flowers that the butterflies loved and the hummingbirds weren’t so fond of. The colors of the cosmos were a little too pastel compared with the other colors, but hey, it still worked. In the fall the cosmos would have seed heads for the goldfinches.
The flower bed had been some sort of admission to myself that I might be here awhile. That I couldn’t go back to an apartment or a condo. That my life didn’t allow me the luxury of close neighbors.
Richard had remarked as we drove up, “Nice flowers.”
“I couldn’t just leave it bare.”
He made a noncommittal noise. Nearly three months away from each other and even