Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

Duke looked surprised and then got his angry, arrogant look back in place. “How the hell would I know who you were going to marry? Contrary to what you might think, Blake, not everyone follows your personal life on social media.”

“Fine, but now that you do know I’m about to marry a vampire, do you want to rethink your comment?”

“Why? It’s the truth,” he said, and he stared at me as if waiting to see if it hurt my feelings.

I laughed. It made him jump as if I’d poked him with a stick.

“That wasn’t meant to be funny,” he said, and his tone had gone from angry to hateful. I don’t think he liked being laughed at, which was fine with me.

“You just called vampires not people. That’s a step up from soulless monster, which is what my grandmother called my fiancé. She told me I’d be damned forever if I married him. My father isn’t sure he can walk me down the aisle, not in good conscience. He’s a devout Catholic, and the Church still considers vampires unconsecrated dead like suicides at best and at worst a type of minor demon.”

The hatred in Duke’s eyes softened a little. Maybe I’d surprised him, or maybe it was sympathy. “I would give anything to be able to walk my Lila down the aisle to someone she loved. I’d hate it if I hated him, but I’d by God walk her down on my arm and be proud to do it.” His eyes seemed to glimmer in the dim light. He shook his head a little too fast and said, “I’m going to go make sure that everyone is doing their jobs. These are the two biggest cases that Hanuman has seen in . . . hell, maybe ever.” He turned his head so that we couldn’t see his face before he turned the rest of him for the door and walked out.

16

“IF HE WASN’T being a pain in our asses, I’d feel sorry for the sheriff,” I said.

“I feel sorry for him anyway,” Newman said.

“Yeah, me, too. I always hate it when people that are making my life difficult turn out to have real emotions and real lives. Makes me feel all conflicted about wanting to kick them in the ass.”

Newman snorted a laugh. “You do have a way with words, Blake.”

“Yeah, sarcasm is one of my best things.” I shone my flashlight around the room. It was a bright light, but the far end of the room just swallowed it up.

“How big is this damn room, and why aren’t there more lights?”

“The floor-to-ceiling windows behind the drapes give plenty of light in the daytime, and there are more lights. You just have to walk through the room and turn them on one by one,” he said.

“Let’s do that.”

“I didn’t think you’d be afraid of the dark, Blake.”

I started to say I wasn’t but then changed my response to “I’m not afraid of normal darkness.”

“What other kind of darkness is there?” he asked.

“Trust me, Newman, you don’t want to know.”

The memory of blackness that had a voice and a mind of its own tried to become a clearer memory, but I chased it away by finding a lamp to turn on near the wall of weapons. That warm golden glow chased back the literal darkness and helped me short-circuit the memory of the Mother of All Darkness. She was dead now, or as dead as we could make her. It’s hard to kill things that have no corporeal body to destroy.

I gazed up at the wall of weapons. There were antique guns, and there were swords of every shape and size with blades that were round, jagged like a lightning bolt, or curved like a wave of the ocean cast in metal. I even saw things that looked like bladed metal whips that I couldn’t even figure out how to wield. The guns started with what I thought were blunderbusses, but they might have just been muskets. I wasn’t the weapons expert that Edward was; he’d have probably known what everything was, along with its historical accuracy or inaccuracy. I knew just enough to confirm that the weapons were certainly not arranged by time period or culture or any other criteria except that they fit on the wall. It was like a museum display designed by a person who had been doing way too many drugs—or maybe it was supposed to be an artistic design?

I tried standing farther back from the wall to see if there was a pattern to the weapons that made sense to my eyes. I’d have settled for just a pretty design, but nope, it was just a wall covered in weapons without any rhyme or reason that I could see.

“They have some weapons that belonged to actual Marchand ancestors going back centuries,” Newman said from behind me.

“How did they hold on to things like this? My grandparents came from Germany, but most of the family heirlooms went to finance the trip,” I said.

“Was your family nobility?”

“No,” I said.

“The Marchands were, and not just land rich and money poor but wealthy and noble. They had enough money to keep the family jewels and stuff together.”

“Did you know all this about the family before the murder, or did you learn it afterward?” I asked.

“Some before. I mean, how often do you see a room like this in real life in America? There may be tons of houses with this kind of stuff in Europe, but you don’t see it here.”