Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

Olaf glanced back at Nicky and asked, “How did you know what upset her?”

“I felt her thoughts.” Nicky said it as if his doing so was totally normal.

Olaf kept looking at Nicky and not at the road. He wasn’t drifting out of his lane or anything. There were no cars in sight, but . . .

“Driving,” I said, “you’re driving. Looking at the road would be good, Olaf.”

He stared at Nicky for a heartbeat more and then looked back at the road. “Did the car divert from its course?”

“No.”

Nicky said, “Anita’s nervous in cars.”

Olaf nodded. “I remember.”

The mechanical voice on my phone, which tried to sound vaguely like a British lady, gave us the next turn, which was coming up soon. Olaf slowed down to look for the next road, but all I could see were trees and more trees. It was beautiful, but I suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if another road or house would have been comforting.

“Can you hear Anita’s thoughts?” Olaf asked.

“Sometimes, but her feelings, those’re constant,” Nicky said.

“Do you experience the feelings with her?”

“No, but I’m still impacted by them.”

“Impacted how?”

“Anita is uncomfortable with us discussing her like this, so I need to ask if she’s okay with me elaborating.”

“Elaborating? I don’t remember you knowing words that large once,” Olaf said.

“I read more now.”

I sat there debating how I felt about the conversation, other than it making me uncomfortable. I finally said, “Answer Olaf’s question, and I’ll see how I feel about it.”

“I’m her Bride. Apparently that means my main job is to keep her happy and safe. The happiness is the hard part.”

“Because you do not understand what makes her happy?”

“No, I understand exactly what makes her happy, or I do now. If I make her unhappy, it literally hurts me emotionally and almost physically until I fix it. Like right now she’s uncomfortable hearing me say that, but she told me to answer you, so it can get tricky.”

“It sounds . . . terrible,” Olaf said. He slowed to let a car turn out onto the road from the turn we were supposed to make.

“I’ve never been happier in my life,” Nicky said.

“But it’s Anita’s happiness, not yours.”

“Is it? I can’t really tell sometimes, but I know I feel happy. I feel loved. I feel safe. I feel like you’re supposed to feel in a family when you’re a child, or how they make it look on TV movies and family events at school. I always felt like an outsider or like other families lied better in public than mine did. Until I hooked up with Anita, I didn’t believe in family or love.”

“We are both sociopaths. You can’t feel those things,” Olaf said.

“That’s what I thought, too, but something about the connection with Anita opened me up to feel things.”

“Nicky tells me I’m his Jiminy Cricket, like in Pinocchio,” I said.

“I know Pinocchio,” Olaf said.

“Sorry. You don’t always get the cultural references I use.”