Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [211]
“Police.” I flipped the phone open and said, “Hey, Zerbrowski, what’s up?”
“Hey back at you. I’m across the river in Illinois, guess what I’m looking at?”
“Another dead stripper,” I said.
“How’d you guess?”
“I’m psychic. I assume you want me to come down and look at the body.”
“Never assume anything, but in this case, yeah.”
I looked down at my blood-covered chest and the wound that was still seeping. “I’ll be there as soon as I get cleaned up.”
“You covered in chicken blood?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, the body isn’t going anywhere, but the witnesses are getting restless.”
“Witnesses,” I said, “we have witnesses?”
“Witnesses or suspects,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come down to the Sapphire Club and find out.”
“The Sapphire, isn’t that the high end club, the one that calls itself a gentlemen’s club?”
“Anita, I’m shocked, I didn’t know you frequented the titty bars.”
“They wanted to use vampire strippers, and I got to go talk to them about it.”
“I didn’t know that was part of your official job description,” he said.
If it had been Dolph, I would have let it go, but it was Zerbrowski, and he was okay. “The Church of Eternal Life doesn’t allow its members to strip, or do anything else the church considers morally questionable. So the club needed Jean-Claude’s permission to import vamps from the next territory over.”
“He give it?”
“No.”
“And you went with him to help decide?”
“No.”
“You went alone?” he asked.
“No.”
He sighed. “Oh, hell, just get down here. If you said vampires were supposed to stay away from this place, your boyfriend isn’t going to be happy.”
“Just no vamps on stage,” I said, “other than that, not our business.”
“Not on stage, at least not paid,” Zerbrowski said.
“You said witnesses or suspects, and now you say no vamps paid on stage. Shit, are you sitting on some vamps that were in the audience?”
“Come and see, but I’d hurry, dawn’s coming.” He hung up.
I cursed softly.
“I take it a languorous bath is not going to be happening tonight,” Jean-Claude said.
“No, unfortunately.”
“If not a bath for you, then may I offer a quick shower here.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I can’t go see the police like this.”
He looked down at his own blood-spattered body and smiled. “Perhaps for me, as well, tonight.”
“We could conserve water, and share,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow at me and smiled again. The smile said worlds.
“Okay, okay, I guess we’d get distracted.”
“I am not sure I have the strength to be, as you put it, distracted quite so soon.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting boys don’t recover as quick as girls.”
“I am not human, ma petite, with another blood donation I could indeed recover.”
“Really?” I said. My pulse sped just a little bit at the thought. Shit, I was too tired and too sore to be thinking of it again.
“Truly,” he said.
“I think if I donate any more blood to anything tonight, it would be bad.”
“It does not have to be your blood,” he said.
I stared at him, and he stared at me. I said what I was thinking, which I’d almost broken myself of. “So what, you take blood from me, then we fuck, and you have a blood donor standing by, and we fuck. We could like, what, have a room full of donors and just screw until we were so sore, or so tired, we couldn’t move?” I was sort of kidding. The look on his face wasn’t. The look on his face, the expression in his eyes, made me blush.
I had a sudden image so strong, if I hadn’t already been on the floor, it would have put me there. I saw Belle Morte stretched in the big bed, surrounded by candlelight. Asher and Jean-Claude were on the bed, too. There were men tied to the big posts of the bed, nude and pale, they were. Blood glittered in thin lines on their bodies, from neck, chest, the inside of their arms, down their legs. Not one bite apiece, or even two, but more than I could count. One man’s head had slumped forward onto his chest, and he sagged against his bonds. If he breathed, I could not see it.
Jean-Claude pushed me out of his memory, it was almost a physical shove. I came back to myself, on the floor of his