Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

“Marshal Jeffries, thank you for helping me remember.”

“You are welcome.”

“Now that we don’t need an ambulance,” Duke said, “what next, Marshals?” Again, I got that glimpse of the good lawman I would have seen if things had been different.

“I’ve done everything I can until someone calls me back,” Newman said.

“If we have all the pictures and samples we need from Bobby, I think he needs clothes and maybe a chance to clean up,” I said.

Livingston said, “Kaitlin, have you collected everything we need?”

“Yeah. He can clean up,” she said.

Duke shook his head, pushing back through the doorway so the rest of us had to adjust farther down the hallway to give him room. “Clothes we can do, but if you mean a shower, I can’t sign off on that. It’s too big a security risk.”

“Not your call,” I said.

“It’s my jail,” he said.

“If my vote counts, it would be awesome to wash all this blood off me, though I’m not sure about my face. That may hurt in the shower.”

“Don’t put your face directly in the water,” I said, “because that will hurt.”

Bobby touched his nose gingerly. “Did you really have to break it?”

“I could have just killed you.”

“You don’t have a mark on you, so it couldn’t have been that bad,” he said.

I pulled my pants leg out enough that I could put a finger through some of the holes his claws had made.

“Jesus, did I cut you?”

“A nick here and there, nothing major.”

Bobby closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay, I remember now.”

Something unhappy passed across his face, and since his eyes were still closed, it was like watching someone have a bad dream. You always had to debate whether you should wake them and end the nightmare. Of course, when Bobby opened his eyes, the nightmare was real.

“I’ve trained for years to remember what I do in animal form, but it’s always harder when it’s a memory that makes you look bad or frightening,” he said.

“I thought the amnesia was something that shapeshifters couldn’t help,” Newman said.

“At first, but later it’s like any traumatic memory or a memory that makes you feel bad about yourself. People edit it to make themselves look better or block it if it’s too painful. Shapeshifters aren’t any different.”

“You have a disease. It doesn’t make you into a different person,” Kaitlin said.

It was weird that I could hear her, but the others had moved, so I couldn’t see her. I wondered if that was how I was in a crowd, just a voice. Since I was about three inches shorter than she was, probably. Of course, everyone else in the hallway was tall enough to see her, so maybe it was just she and I who couldn’t see each other.

Bobby looked toward her voice, but I think from the cell he couldn’t see her either. “Yes, it does, because you’re not all human anymore.”

Kaitlin pushed her way in between the men so she could see him. “Of course you are. Don’t let anyone tell you that just because you have lycanthropy—Therianthropy—that you’re not human. That’s just prejudice.”

Bobby shook his head, then winced and stopped the movement. I think more than just his nose hurt. At least he was alive, and he’d heal if we didn’t have to kill him first. The more we did to take care of him, the harder it was going to be if we did have to pull the trigger.

“It’s not just prejudice,” Bobby said. “I carry a leopard inside me, and that’s not metaphorical. That’s just true. I become that leopard once a month or more, and while I’m in that form, I am that cat, just like I’m me now. I’m not a human being in a costume. I become something else that isn’t human.” He was so reasonable, with the blood, both old and new, spread across his face and into his hair. He looked like an accident victim trying to calm down a doctor.

“But you’re still yourself,” Kaitlin said.