Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

"I was thinking the same thing."

She smiled, and it took her face from severe to truly beautiful. I understood why she didn't use that particular smile much at work. Customers would have begged her to dance with them, even as dressed down as she could manage. I basked in the warmth of that smile, because I was on a very short list of people that got to have it aimed at them. It made me smile back, and blush, which was a habit I couldn't seem to break entirely.

The blush made her smile broaden enough to flash a delicate hint of fang and show that there was a dimple in that classically beautiful face. She touched my face and leaned in for a very unprofessional kiss. I knew how to French-kiss a vampire without nicking myself on the fangs, but her mouth was smaller than that of anyone else I'd kissed so it was more of a challenge, but it was worth it. She drew back first, leaving me a little breathless.

"Enjoy as much of tonight as you can, Anita."

"It's Jean-Claude. What's not to enjoy?"

She smiled. "Very true. I look forward to the next time we can share our king."

I blushed and couldn't stop it. "Me, too."

She turned and looked at Ricky and Roger; I'd sort of forgotten about them. Echo could have that effect on me.

Roger was staring at the floor as hard as he could. Ricky was looking at us as if we were something to eat. I glared at him. "You got something to add?"

"You can't blame a man for enjoying the show."

"Yes, actually I can."

"I am your superior and she is your queen. Both are people you should not be leering at," Echo said.

"I can control what I say and what I do around beautiful women, but I can't control involuntary body responses."

"We don't care about your erection," Echo said. "It's not important to us."

His anger slid across my skin like the smell of well-cooked meat. I'd acquired the ability to feed on anger the way that Jean-Claude could feed on lust. He'd shared that ability with me, but so far siphoning off people's anger was something only I could do.

I sniffed the air, making a big deal out of it. "Calm the fuck down, Ricky. You're starting to smell like food: yummy, yummy anger."

"Fuck you."

"You wish."

"You just can't behave respectfully, can you?" Echo asked.

"Anita just seems to bring out the worst in me, I guess," Ricky said.

"You are officially on probation, Ricky," she said.

"That's not fair."

"Life isn't supposed to be fair."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that only children whine, That's not fair. Grown-ups understand that fairness is rare and good treatment must be earned."

"I'm good at my job."

"You are. That's why I'm not going to fire you tonight. But remember this, Ricky: If you disrespect Anita, or any of the female employees again, you will be out of a job."

"How can I not look at them and do my job?"

"You can look, but don't leer."

"I don't understand the difference."

She sighed. "I think you mean that." She frowned and turned to me. "Go to our king and shared lover. I will see that Cardinale does no harm and try to explain the difference between a look and a leer to this one."

"Good luck on that last part," I said.

"Perhaps I will enlist some of the other male guards to explain the masculine niceties of looking but not being lecherous."

"Good idea," I said.

She opened the door for me, and the music engulfed us so that I could barely hear her as she told me good-bye, with her face back to its super-serious head-of-security expression. I found myself a little sad to leave her without one more kiss. I'd had other female lovers, but never one that made me think words like girlfriend. Was Echo my girlfriend? I wasn't sure what to call her, but I was beginning to want to call her something. I'd never had a woman make me feel like I wanted to hang a title on her. I'd had one who had demanded it, but I hadn't wanted to call her my girlfriend. This time it would be my idea, and ironically, I wasn't sure Echo would want the title. She'd take it if I wanted to give it to her, but she didn't need it to feel secure, and maybe that was part of why I wanted to give it to her. Romance can be very confusing.

I left my girlfriend behind to make sure the live-in girlfriend of my ex-lover and current vampire servant didn't harm anyone, while I went to have a date with our shared lover. I would have said shared boyfriend, but Echo really only had one person she dated, and that was Fortune, the love of her life and afterlife. Fortune was my girlfriend's girlfriend, or maybe Fortune was my girlfriend, too. So did that make either of them my girlfriend's girlfriend or just my girlfriend? Was Jean-Claude their girlfriend's boyfriend? Or since everyone had at least occasional sex with each other, were words like boyfriend and girlfriend too old-fashioned to cover it? I was beginning to get a headache, and it wasn't from the dance music.

4

I CALLED EDWARD FROM my Jeep, because I'd finally figured out how to use the Bluetooth so that I could talk and drive at the same time. It was a little bit like being able to pat your head, rub your stomach, and jump on one foot at the same time while chewing gum, but much more useful and less silly looking.

The phone had rung three times before I realized I hadn't done the time zone math and it was probably the wee hours of the morning there. Had I learned anything that couldn't wait until he was awake? No. I hung up, hoping he'd slept through it. I wasn't used to Edward being half a world away from me. We'd never been more than about a five-hour plane ride from each other before. I guess Ireland wasn't that much longer actually, but the time difference made it feel like more.

I wasn't surprised when his ringtone filled the car just moments after I'd hung up. I'd have called him back, too. "Hey, Ed . . . Ted," I said.

"I'm in my room alone; you can call me whatever you want." His voice was thick and rough with sleep.

"I forgot the time change. Sorry."

"Just tell me you found out something that will help."

"Yes and no. There have always been vampires in Ireland, or at least for the last thousand years and change."

I heard the sheets move as he changed positions. "Say again."

I did.

"How do you know?"

"First Jean-Claude told me, and then we had one of the vamps from Ireland in town."

"I didn't know you had any Irish vampires in St. Louis."

"He doesn't consider himself Irish even though he was a vampire there for about a thousand years, give or take a few hundred."

"You don't have that many vampires that old, or you didn't. Is it one of the Harlequin?" See, he really did know most of my business.

"No, it's Damian."

"What? He doesn't sound Irish."

"Like I said, he doesn't consider himself Irish. He said, I just died there. He still thinks of himself as a Viking. He was what history calls a Danish Viking, and that's still how he thinks of himself."

"Even after a millennium in Ireland."

"Yep."

"Okay, I don't have to understand Damian's motives. What did you learn?"

"His old mistress, She-Who-Made-Him, literally, you can't say her name without risking her invading your mind. She can do some of the tricks that the Mother of All Darkness could do, and some of the old vampire council could do."

"He tell you, or you experience it?"

"She's visited us once. She caused fear in Damian and it spread to me and Nathaniel. It was pretty awful. I think that if Richard and Jean-Claude hadn't been able to lend a metaphysical hand, she could literally have killed us with fear."

I heard the sheets move again. I was betting he was sitting up against the headboard. "You mean scared to death, literally?"

"Yes."

"I know you've met other vampires that could cause fear like that."

"Night hags, yeah, but they were amateurs compared to She-Who-Made-Him."

"You really don't want to say her name out loud."

&nb

sp; "No, I really don't."

"She spooked you."

"Let's just say that I don't want a revisit."

"You don't spook that easy," he said.

"Not normally, no."

"Why didn't the Irish know they had vampires?" he asked.

"Damian said that they kept their numbers small, a dozen at the most and usually fewer. They took a little blood here and there, and when they did kill it was easy to blame it on war, wild animals, just the violence of the day. He said there was usually some battle or something to blame disappearances on."

"That makes sense."

"He also said that the jail nearby didn't care if people died a little early as long as they weren't the ones who paid the jailer for better treatment."

"A thousand years ago jails and hospitals would have been perfect for a vampire to feed from, and he's right: no one would have given a second thought to a few more deaths."

"Most of the vampires I've known well wouldn't feed in jail or hospitals. It wasn't elegant enough victims, I guess. I know the vampire council didn't feed like that."

"They were aristocrats, Anita. They could prey on peasants and no one would question it, or no one that mattered. There were enough human nobles who used the common people like their personal hunting ground and no one questioned them either."

"The only two nobles I know that were ever brought up on charges were Elizabeth Bathory and Gilles de Rais, but at least Bathory was caught because she had the bad taste to use a minor noble's daughter as a victim. Only de Rais was actually put on trial without a noble victim."

"I always thought one of them must have had a vampire involved somewhere."

"The vampire community actually thinks that Gilles de Rais sold his soul to the devil after his friend Joan of Arc was burned alive. It sort of damaged his faith in God's goodness."

"I could see that," Edward said.

"You and I both know that even if the devil wanted his soul, the urges that made him a murdering pedophile had to be there all along."