Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

I felt the vampire behind me before she spoke, and knew it was Echo before I heard her voice. "They are speaking mind to mind, sharing emotions, memories, pieces of their heart and soul."

"No," Cardinale said, "no, no one gets a piece of his heart but me."

"You are only his love. She is his master. It is a closer bond."

I turned and looked at her then, because that last part was rubbing salt in Cardinale's wounds. Was my new head of security at Danse Macabre here to make things worse, or better?

Echo was shorter than me tonight, because I was wearing heels and she was in flat boots, but then she was security tonight and I was hoping to have a date. Her hair was a brown so dark, it was almost black. It even looked black until you got her too close to Jean-Claude's hair, or mine, but whereas we were curly she had waves that helped hers fall in a more orderly fashion to her shoulders, framing one of the most delicate triangles of a face I'd ever seen. She was one of the few women who made me think dainty, but once you looked into her dark blue eyes you stopped thinking dainty and started thinking dangerous. She wore no makeup when she worked security, which would have made most women's faces look plain, but Echo's natural black lashes and brows framing deep, rich blue eyes, and all that dark hair, well . . . plain was just never a word you thought of when looking at her. Beautiful maybe, but never plain. She did her best to dress down for the job, with a looser black T-shirt over a tighter-fitting black tank top. I couldn't see the tank top under her T-shirt, but I knew it was there, because she didn't like the weapons at her waist digging into her bare skin, so there'd be a layer of clothing to protect her bare skin. She'd had a business jacket thrown over all that, so that she hid as much of the trim figure underneath as she could, but you never forgot that Echo was a beautiful woman for very long, no matter how she tried to hide it. Since I was sleeping with her, that should have been a good thing, but she made me strangely nervous, like I was fourteen again and had my first crush.

"You don't know anything! No bond is closer than true love! No bond!" Cardinale screamed it, and started walking stiffly toward us all.

"I think you are too emotionally overwrought to work tonight," Echo said, her voice very calm.

"That is not your decision. It's Damian's. He's the manager, not you!"

Echo looked past the tall, redheaded vampire who was still stalking toward us, to the tall redheaded vampire standing behind his desk, though since Ricky and Roger were the ones who would be in the line of her anger first, I guessed Echo and I could stay calm a little longer. I wasn't sure I was capable of calm with all of Damian's emotions boiling through my head. My mouth was dry, which meant his was, because he was afraid, so afraid. Afraid of losing Cardinale, afraid of not having enough of a relationship with me to take up the slack, afraid of giving up too much, to gain too little. I started to say aloud that he couldn't use me as his next relationship, that I was booked up, but Echo touched my arm as if she'd read my mind, or my heart, or my intentions. Whatever it was, that one slight touch on my arm kept me from saying that bit of truth, and the moment passed and we were on to other things.

"Damian is a fine manager, but I'm the head of security here, and if I think you're a danger to the peaceful workings of this club tonight, then you will not work tonight."

"You have no right to treat me like that!" She turned and looked at Damian. "Tell her that I'm working tonight. Tell her that you want me at your side in the dance tonight."

He looked at her, and then past her to Echo, and then at me. I felt his gaze like a weight, as if he'd touched me.

"Tell her, Damian! Tell her that she can't treat me this way!"

"Echo is head of security at Danse Macabre, Cardinale," he said, in a voice as empty and neutral as any I'd ever heard from him.

"But you're the manager."

"I am."

"Then tell her she's wrong. Tell her she can't send me home like a child." She was standing in front of him now, so tall that she blocked my view of Damian's face and most of his body, but I could still feel him. He wasn't sad anymore. He felt nothing, as if he'd locked all his emotions away along with his body movement; without seeing him clearly I knew he was standing there in that utter stillness that the older vampires could do. It was that stillness that made me want to stare at them harder, as if once I looked away they would just sink into that stillness and vanish. I'd thought it was a way of hiding what they were thinking, but now I could feel that it was more than that, that it was a way of being still all the way to the core of their being. It was like the quiet place I went in my head when I knew I had to pull the trigger and kill someone; in that moment, I felt nothing but the gun in my hand, thought about nothing but how best to use the gun and get the shot. It became very analytical, cold physical logic. I felt that from Damian now and knew he was either hiding away his feelings so the next few minutes wouldn't hurt that much, or he was hiding them away so he could do what needed doing, or maybe both?

"I've let my love for you interfere with my ability to manage the club, or at least my ability to treat you like an employee."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Damian. I love that we work together every night."

"You love keeping an eye on me at work, but you hate the job. You hate watching me flirt on the dance floor, and you hate having to dance with strangers. You've gone from being one of the top moneymakers on tips to making almost nothing, because you're so busy watching me with my partners that you don't pay enough attention to your own dance partners."

"I'll do better tonight," she said, touching his arm.

"People come here to dance with vampires and shapeshifters, Cardinale. They come for the illusion that they can have a romance with one of us. They come for someone to pay attention to them, to really look at them, talk to them, listen. If Guilty Pleasures is about lust and the possibility of sex, then Danse Macabre is about romance and the possibility of a relationship."

"But you and I are each other's relationship," she said, a hand on both his arms as if she were trying to get him to look at her, or shake some sense into him.

"That's what I wanted more than anything else in the world, a real relationship with one person who truly loved me."

"I love you! I love you truly, madly, completely!"

"People come here to be listened to, to feel special, but you're so worried that I'm cheating on you that you don't have any room to even pretend for a few minutes."

"Pretend what?" She yelled it, even though they were inches apart. Her hands dug into his bare arms hard enough that she mottled his skin.

Roger said softly, "Do we need to be here?"

His whisper made Ricky and me jump, as if we'd been frozen by the emotions in the room.

"No," Echo said, stepping back and herding me ahead of her and both male guards, as she got us out of the office and into the corridor that led to the main part of the club. She wasn't leaving me alone with Cardinale, and I couldn't argue, because I wasn't worried about her hurting me anymore. I was more worried that she'd force me to kill her. If Cardinale wanted to do suicide by cop, she needed to find a different cop, someone who wasn't emotionally invested. Of course, that emotional investment had made me hesitate and not shoot her earlier. I couldn't remember the last time I'd let a vampire make my holy objects glow that much and not shot them. If she'd pulled this shit with a regular police officer they'd have shot her a long time before they were blinded by holy fire. I was glad I hadn't shot her, and that would make me hesitate the next time, if there was a next time.

Echo stayed a half step behind me, with Ricky behind her and to my other side. She'd sent Roger ahead to wait by the door at the end of the hallway. That she kept Ricky with her meant she had some faith in his skills, or maybe Roger was just that much worse. I owed him a thank-you for suggesting we leave before Damian finished his talk with Cardinale. One of the things I was working on in therapy was that I had trouble protecting my boundaries from

the people I was close to, but apparently Roger was better at it. I could shoot and fight just fine, but if Roger, Roger Parks, was better at boundary issues, maybe I could just have him follow me around and get me out of awkward emotional conversations all night. It wasn't in security's job description, but it might be damn useful to me.

"If you are in a private area with Cardinale, you must have security personnel with you from this point on, Anita," Echo said.

"Okay," I said.

She gave me a sideways glance. "You aren't going to argue with me?"

"No, if she wants to suicide by cop, I don't want it to be me."

"Suicide by cop: When a person wants to commit suicide but is afraid to do the task themselves, so they threaten police or pose a threat to innocents so that police feel they must kill them to protect others or themselves. Yes?"

I nodded. "Yeah, that's it."

"Do you believe that was what Cardinale intended with you tonight?"

"No, at least not in the front of her head."

"Front of her head?"

"It was a subconscious thought, in the back of her head, not a conscious thought, which would be in the front of the head."

"Ah, I think much more happens in the back of people's heads than in the front."

"Ain't that the God's honest truth?" I said.

"Yes, I think it is," Echo said.

I could feel the bass beating through the still-closed door; I kept walking and Roger opened the door, so well-timed it was like an automatic door. I didn't even have to pause as we walked through. In fact, I hadn't been planning to pause. I was just so used to security opening doors for me I took it for granted now. When did that happen?

There had been a time when I would have known as much about Cardinale's background as possible by now, but I'd trusted that if Jean-Claude thought she was okay, then she was, but what a six-hundred-year-old vampire king would think was okay might not be okay to me. Was it a sign that I trusted Jean-Claude that much, or that I'd grown arrogant?

Echo paused with her hand on the door and turned to say, "I will make certain that Cardinale does nothing unfortunate tonight. If you can put this incident aside and be truly present for the date and its issues, I think that would be best. If you talk of all this first, it may spoil the mood."