Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

“I’m not a vampire. God as my witness, I’m not a vampire,” I said. I had to turn my face more toward Barry and Sam to keep Phoenix away from my mouth.

“Then let Phoenix go!” Barry said.

I moved my arm from around her waist, putting both arms out to my side. I managed to say, “I’m trying,” before she kissed me so hard and so thoroughly that I couldn’t breathe, let alone talk.

“Put the bat down. I won’t tell you again,” Newman said.

I prayed, Please, God, don’t let Barry die because I screwed up, and suddenly I had an idea. I broke the kiss and said, “Phoenix, take the bat away from Barry.”

She stopped trying to kiss me and launched herself at Barry. She went for the bat as completely and wildly as she’d tried to kiss me. Barry tried to fight her off without hurting her or letting her take the bat from him. He had his hands full, and now Newman wouldn’t shoot him because Phoenix was in the way.

Sam, the other guy, was shaking his cross in his hands as if he thought the battery wasn’t working.

“Your faith is fine,” I said. “It just doesn’t work on me.”

“Phoenix, stop. Stop! I don’t want to hurt you,” Barry was saying.

Newman came up beside me with his gun pointed at the floor. “What did you do to her?”

“I’m not sure,” I whispered because it was true.

“Can you undo it?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have to do something, Blake.”

Newman was right. I drew my own cross out from under my T-shirt, and I prayed again. “God, please help me free her from whatever I’ve done to her.” My cross started to glow—not the hot white glow that happened when a vampire was trying to eat my face, but a soft blue-white glow. Sam’s cross started to glow with mine. We were both true believers.

I prayed out loud. “Please, God, help me undo whatever I did to her.”

Phoenix stopped trying to drag the bat out of Barry’s hands. She went very still, arms going to her sides. I knew without seeing her face that her eyes would be empty, face slack. I’d seen it on other vampire victims. God, I hated that I had done that to her.

The crosses started to glow brighter, but it was blue light, and it didn’t hurt to look at it the way white heat could. I’d been in fights with vampires where my own cross had blinded them and me with its light. This was different, gentler. It felt peaceful, the way praying can when you get that soft touch, as if you can feel God listening.

Phoenix started to fall. Barry dropped the bat, and it clattered on the floor as he caught her. She blinked in his arms, looking around the room as if she’d just woken up. Her dark makeup was smeared over her face almost like bruises, but she wouldn’t remember how that had happened. I wondered what the last thing she did remember was.

The glow of the two crosses started to fade, and I got that sense of peace that I sometimes get when a prayer gets answered. Sam had tears on his face trailing past an almost beatific smile. I knew then that he felt it, too.

“What’s happening?” Phoenix asked. “Did they spike my drink?” So she remembered we’d bought her a drink. Good. She hadn’t lost too much time.

“No, Phoenix,” Barry said, “they didn’t spike your drink.” He was staring at me as if he didn’t know what to make of me. That made two of us.

“Come on, Blake, let’s get out of here,” Newman said. He had holstered his gun.

I grabbed my fries off the table as I went toward the door. I wanted to make sure that I had enough food in me until I went home and had real vampires around me to help me control this shit, or at least had Nicky with me or someone who was already on my approved menu for metaphysical munchies.

62

MY PHONE RANG just as Newman hustled us through the door and out into the sunlight. Somehow, I knew it was Nicky before I answered it. I don’t think it was metaphysics or at least not the vampire kind—more the couple kind.

“Anita, what just happened?”

“I’m okay.”

“If by okay you mean whatever was happening stopped, then yeah, but what caused the ardeur to rise like that?”

“I don’t know.” I ate another French fry while I waited for him to respond.