Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [74]
“Well, the great Edward, afraid at last,” another voice said.
We both turned to see Olaf standing in the far doorway. He was wearing black dress slacks, and a black polo-style shirt, the shirtsleeves a little short for his long arms. I guess there just aren’t a lot of choices when you wear Jolly Green Giant sizes.
He glided into the room, and if I hadn’t spent so much time around vampires and shapeshifters, I’d have said he was good at gliding. For a human, he was very good.
Edward stood as he spoke. “What do you want, Olaf?”
“Has the girl solved your mystery?”
“Not yet,” Edward said.
Olaf stopped at the edge of the table closest to us. “Not yet. Such confidence you have in her. Why?”
“Four hours and that is the best question you can come up with,” I said.
Olaf turned to me with a snarl. “Shut up!”
I took a step forward, and Edward touched my elbow. He shook his head. I stepped back, gave them some room. Truthfully, I wasn’t up to arm wrestling Olaf, and I couldn’t really shoot him just for yelling at me. It kind of limited my options.
Edward answered Olaf’s question. “When you look at her, Olaf, you see just the surface, just the small, attractive packaging. Underneath all that prettiness is someone who thinks like a killer, and a cop, and a monster. I don’t know anyone else who bridges all three worlds as well as she does. And all the preternatural experts you find are specialists; they’re witches, or clairvoyants, or demonologists.” He glanced at me as he said the last, then back to Olaf. “But Anita is a generalist. She knows a little about most of it and can tell us whether we need to find a specialist, and what kind of specialist we need.”
“And what kind of magical specialist do we need?” He put a lot of sarcasm into that question.
“A witch, someone who works with the dead.” He’d remembered my earlier request about finding out what I’d sensed on the road. “We’re making a list.”
“And checking it twice,” I said.
Edward shook his head.
Olaf turned to me. “Was that a joke?”
“A little one, yes.”
“Perhaps you should not try to make jokes.”
I shrugged.
He turned back to Edward. “You told me all this before she came. You waxed eloquent about her abilities. But I have worked with your magical people in the past, and you never talked about them as you speak of her. What is it about her that is so goddamned special?”
Edward glanced at me, then back to Olaf. “The Greeks believed that once there were no male and female, that all souls were one. Then the souls were torn apart, male and female. The Greeks thought that when you found the other half of your soul, your soul mate, that it would be your perfect lover. But I think if you find your other half, you would be too much alike to be lovers, but you would still be soul mates.”
I was fighting hard to keep my face from showing the growing surprise at this little speech. I hoped I was succeeding.
“What are you trying to say?” Olaf demanded.
“She is like a piece of my soul, Olaf.”
“You are mad,” Olaf said, “a lunatic. Soul mates, bah!”
I kind of agreed with Olaf on this one.
“Then why is the thought of giving her a gun while I hunt her one of my greatest fantasies?” Edward asked.
“Because you are mad,” Olaf said.
Hear, hear, but I didn’t say it out loud.
“You know that I have no greater compliment to give than that,” Edward said. “If I wanted to kill you, Olaf, I would just do it. The same with Bernardo because I know that I’m better than both of you. But with Anita I’ll never be sure unless we do go up against each other for real. If I die without knowing which of us is better, I’ll regret the not knowing.”
Olaf stared down at him. “You cannot mean to say that this girl, die Zimtzicke of a girl is better than Bernardo or me.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Die Zimtzicke meant a quarrelsome or bitchy woman. Couldn’t really argue with that one. I sighed. Olaf had hated me before. Now he was going to feel forced to be competitive. This I did not need. And compliment though it was, it was not reassuring