Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton [81]
“Hi, Anita, this is Ronnie. I got a meeting set up for tomorrow with the guy from HAV. My office, eleven o’clock. If the time is bad, leave a message on my machine, and I’ll get back to you. Be careful.”
Click, whirr, and Edward’s voice came out of the machine. “The clock is ticking, Anita.” Click.
Damn. “You like your little games, don’t you, you son of a bitch?” I was getting grumpy, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about Edward. Or Nikolaos, or Zachary, or Valentine, or Aubrey. I did know I wanted a shower. I could start there. Maybe I’d have a brilliant idea while I was scrubbing goat blood off my skin.
I locked the door to the bathroom and laid my gun on the top of the toilet. I was beginning to get a little paranoid. Or maybe realistic was a better word.
I turned the water on until it steamed, then stepped into it. I was no closer to solving the vampire murders now than I had been twenty-four hours ago.
Even if I solved the case, I still had problems. Aubrey and Valentine were going to kill me once Nikolaos removed her protection from me. Peachy. I wasn’t even sure that Nikolaos herself didn’t have ideas in that direction. Now, Zachary, he was killing people to feed his voodoo charm. I had heard of charms that demanded human sacrifice. Charms that gave you a whole lot less than immortality. Wealth, power, sex—the age-old wants. It was very specific blood—children, or virgins, or preadolescent boys, or little old ladies with blue hair and one wooden leg. All right, not that specific, but there had to be a pattern to it. A string of disappearances with similar victims. If Zachary had been simply leaving the bodies to be found, the newspapers would have picked up on it by now. Maybe.
He had to be stopped. If I hadn’t interfered tonight, he would have been stopped. No good deed goes unpunished.
I leaned palms against the bathroom tile, letting the water wash down my back in nearly scalding rivulets. Okay, I had to kill Valentine before he killed me. I had a warrant for his death. It had never been revoked. Of course, I had to find him first.
Aubrey was dangerous, but at least he was out of the way until Nikolaos let him out of his trapped coffin.
I could just turn Zachary over to the police. Dolph would listen to me, but I didn’t have a shred of proof. Hell, the magic was even something I’d never heard of. If I couldn’t understand what Zachary was, how was I going to explain it to the police?
Nikolaos. Would she let me live if I solved the case? Or not? I didn’t know.
Edward was coming to get me tomorrow evening. I either gave him Nikolaos or he took a piece of my hide. Knowing Edward, it would be a painful piece to lose. Maybe I could just give him the vampire. Just tell him what he wanted to know. And he fails to kill her, and she comes and gets me. The one thing I wanted to avoid, almost more than anything else, was Nikolaos coming to get me.
I dried off, ran a brush through my hair, and had to get something to eat. I tried to tell myself I was too tired to eat. My stomach didn’t believe me.
It was four before I fell into bed. My cross was safely around my neck. The gun in its holster behind the head board. And, just for pure panic’s sake, I slipped a knife between the mattress and box springs. I’d never get to it in time to do any good, but . . . Well, you never know.
I dreamed about Jean-Claude again. He was sitting at a table eating blackberries.
“Vampires don’t eat solid food,” I said.
“Exactly.” He smiled and pushed the bowl of fruit towards me.
“I hate blackberries,” I said.
“They were always my favorite. I hadn’t tasted them in centuries.” His face looked wistful.
I picked up the bowl. It was cool, almost cold. The blackberries were floating in blood. The bowl fell from my hands, slow, spilling blood on the table, more than it could ever have held. Blood dripped down the tabletop, onto the floor.
Jean-Claude