Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

“You know how you didn’t want me cuddling with Giselle?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me cuddling with you?”

Newman gave me a very long look. “What are you hinting at?”

“I’m saying that I’d rather feed on people I’m already intimate with instead of embarrassing any of us by accident.”

He frowned and looked at me and then at the other two men. “I thought Ethan here was monogamous with his girlfriend back home.”

“Mostly,” Ethan said.

“What does mostly mean?” Newman asked.

I really didn’t want to explain that Ethan was emergency food, and I really didn’t want to say that Ethan had been my lover first and then moved out of my bed not because of Nilda, but because I had too many people in my life I was already in love with. Ethan was a great guy, but . . . he wasn’t my great guy. Luckily for all of us, now he was Nilda’s perfect guy. But he was still on the list of people I could feed the ardeur on without blowing up either of our lives. Nilda understood the metaphysics and treated it like Ethan was a blood donor for one of the real master vampires back in St. Louis.

“It means rather than let Anita accidentally feed on a stranger in a strip club, she can feed on me without my girlfriend getting upset,” Ethan said.

“If what I saw inside the club is the kind of energy Blake needs,” Newman said, “then my fiancée would most definitely be upset.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Nicky said.

“It’s some kind of sexual energy. That’s why there are all the rumors about you having affairs while you’re working,” Newman said.

I fought to keep my face blank. “I do not sleep with the local cops when I travel as a marshal. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

“I believe you.” Newman sounded like he meant it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“We need to meet Livingston and the rest of the locals ASAP,” I said.

Newman nodded. “Let’s go.”

We went, though I risked a quick kiss with Nicky before I hurried to catch up with Newman’s long legs. Ethan and I didn’t kiss because we weren’t lovers. We were closer to friends with benefit

s, which sounded better than food.

66

I CALLED EDWARD from the car to tell him about the missing bagh nakha. I started to explain what it was, but he interrupted, “I know what it is, Anita.”

“Of course you know what a bagh nakha is,” I said, smiling and shaking my head.

Newman asked, “Did they learn anything from looking at the body?”

I asked Edward the question, and he said, “Only that it wasn’t done by a wereanimal, and that whatever was used was only in one hand, and the killer is probably right-handed. We made a list of possible weapons, but I’ll admit I didn’t even put a bagh nakha on the list. It’s too rare.”

“If I told you that the Marchand family had moved from India to here in the eighteen hundreds, would you have put it on the list?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“And if I’d told you that the murder was done in a room full of taxidermied animals from India and Africa and antique weapons of all kinds from all over the world?”

“Yes, Anita, that would have been helpful.”