Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [39]
“It means that a man is courteous. A real man is kind. A real man loves his family and treats them like human beings.”
“I’m dying, I’ve earned the right to be a son of a bitch.”
“I bet you’ve always been a cruel bastard.”
A look I couldn’t read came over his face. “I’m not the bastard.”
“Oh, I think you are. So you’re dying, so fucking what? We’re all dying, Mr. Schuyler, you just know the checkout time and how much the bill will be.”
“Get your little chippie friend out of here. Putting a cross around her neck doesn’t change what she is,” he said.
Jason’s hand tensed on mine, drawing me back a little. I must have moved toward the bed without realizing it. I’d been told wearing my cross was wrong because I raised the dead, but never because I was a whore. It was a new insult. I didn’t like it much.
“You should not have said that,” Jason said.
“Does chippie mean what I think it means?” I asked.
“Yeah, he called you a whore,” Jason said. I couldn’t read his tone, but it wasn’t angry exactly, more shocked, as if even for his father it had been too much.
Julia and Iris were standing openmouthed, as if they too were too shocked to know what to say.
“Franklin,” Mrs. Schuyler said, finally, in a breathy, uncertain voice.
“Stripper is just one step up from whore,” he said, totally unrepentant.
“So now I’m a homo and a whore,” Jason said. He didn’t sound angry, more like tired.
“If the shoe fits,” his father said.
“Franklin, don’t do this.”
“You told him to lie to me, Iris. You told him to bring his little stripper friend, so I’d die in peace. He’s a fucking fairy and fucking coffin bait to boot.”
Jason turned away; the otherworldly energy just stopped, as if he’d put up some big shield that cut off everything. The furry energy, the emotion, all of it. He shut down.
I held his hand, kept him in the room. “If you walk out of this room, that’s going to be it.”
“I know,” he said softly.
“If it’s over, can we go out with a bang instead of a whimper?”
He looked at me, studying my face. Then he nodded. “Why not?”
I smiled at him, and knew it was that smile, most unpleasant. The one that used to scare me in the mirror, but I’d gotten used to it. I knew it was in there now. I turned it on the bed and the man in it.
“Some of my best friends are strippers, Mr. Schuyler, people I love, even. So that’s not the insult you want it to be. I’m Federal Marshal Anita Blake.” I let go of Jason’s hand so I could get my badge out of my pocket with my left hand. I moved close enough to the bed for him to see it.
“I don’t believe it.”
I put the badge back and slipped off the left sleeve of my jacket so I could show him the worst of my scars from my job. “The scar tissue at the bend is where a vampire gnawed at me. The doctors thought I might lose the use of my arm. The cross-shaped burn is from some human servants who thought it would be funny for a vampire hunter to have a scar like a vampire. The claw marks were from a shapeshifted witch.”
“So you’re one of the federal marshals who hunt vampires.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“You know he’s fucking the master vampire of St. Louis.”
“Actually, I know he isn’t. Jean-Claude gets a lot of people thinking he’s sleeping with anyone who’s seen with him in public. One of the downsides of being a beautiful man, I guess.”
Those deep brown caves of eyes stared up at me. “You telling me he doesn’t give him blood?”
“I thought we were talking about sex.”
“Same thing.”
“If you think taking blood is the same thing as sex, Mr. Schuyler, then you’re the pervert, not either of us.”
Iris said, “Anita!” as if she were my mom and that tone had ever worked on me.
He said, “No, no, don’t stop her, I started it.” He gazed up at me. “But you’ll finish it, won’t you?”
“You damn bet I will,” I said.
He smiled, just a little one. “You’re really my boy’s girlfriend?”
“What do I have to do to prove to you and his other sister that we’re dating? We’re lovers and we’re friends, so I guess that makes me his girlfriend. The word just sounds a little too junior high, don’t you