Burnt Offerings - Laurell K. Hamilton [105]
I folded the borrowed coat over my arm with the Browning hanging heavy in one pocket. The machine gun I kept on my shoulder like a purse. When the bedroom cleared out, I’d put the machine gun in the closet. The trick about having this many loaded guns is that you don’t dare leave them lying around. Lycanthropes are great in a fight, but most of them don’t seem to know one end of a gun from the other. There’s something about a gun just lying around, especially one as nifty as a submachine gun, that tempts people. There is an almost physical itch to pick it up, point it, go bang-bang. You either make a gun safe, unloaded or locked up, or you keep it on your body where you can control it. Those are the rules. Deviating from the rules is what lets eight-year-old kids blow the heads off their baby sisters.
I went into the living room. Gregory was gone from the couch. I started to assume he’d been carried to the bedroom, then walked into the bedroom to make sure. Be damn silly to let Gregory get snatched from my living room and not notice it.
Cherry and Richard were tucking him into the bed with Zane’s help. Gregory had woken enough that he was whimpering. Richard caught me peeking in the doorway.
“Just making sure Gregory was all right,” I said.
“No, you were making sure that the bad guys hadn’t gotten him,” he said.
I looked down, then up. “Yeah,” I said.
We might have said more, but Gregory woke up as they put his legs in traction. He started screaming. Lycanthropes metabolized drugs incredibly quickly. Cherry readied a needle full of a clear liquid. I fled. I don’t like needles. But truthfully, I didn’t want Richard to lecture me over the guns. His being a lycanthrope wasn’t our only problem. Richard thought I killed too easily. Maybe he was right, but I’d saved his ass more than once with my quick trigger finger. And he’d endangered me more than once with his squeamishness.
I went back down the stairs, shaking my head. Why did we even bother? We had too many important areas that we disagreed on. It wouldn’t work. So we lusted after each other, even loved each other. It wasn’t enough. If we couldn’t find a way to compromise on the rest of it, we’d just end up cutting each other apart. Better to just make the break as cleanly as possible. My head agreed with the logic. Other body parts weren’t so sure.
I followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen. It was a lovely kitchen, if I ever cooked or entertained. It was all dark wood cabinets with a large island in the middle with hooks above it for cooking pots and pans. I didn’t own enough kitchen stuff to fill one whole cabinet let alone the rest of the gleaming expanse. Of all the rooms in the new house this was the one that made me feel most like a stranger. It was so not what I would have chosen.
Ronnie and Louie were sitting at my small two-seater kitchen table. It sat on a raised platform in a three-sided bay of windows. The area was meant for a full-sized dining room table. My little breakfast-nook set looked like a temporary measure. Except for the flowers. The flowers took up most of the small table. The flowers were another addition.
I didn’t have to count to know that there were a dozen white roses and one lone red one. Jean-Claude had been sending me white roses for years, but ever since we made love for the first time there had been a thirteenth rose. Red, crimson, a spot of passion lost in a sea of white purity. There was no card, because there was no need for a card.
Jamil leaned against the wall near Ronnie and Louie, sipping coffee. He stopped talking when I entered the room, which meant he’d probably been talking