Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

Nathaniel looked at me from the other side of our vampire third, and he was as calm as I was; we were both working through our fears. No, we were both working through Damian's fears.

"First, the three of you need to clean up. I will have the bed stripped and see what can be done with it."

"How come you're not bloody?" the brunette guard asked.

"Because I noticed it starting and got out of the way."

"Why didn't you wake us?" I asked.

"I felt it was important to see it play out."

"Thanks a lot," I said, as I started crawling across the bloody sheets toward the edge of the bed. Nathaniel was crawling to join me.

"Ma petite, you are forgetting someone."

I stopped and looked where he was nodding. Damian was still staring at himself as if he were trapped in another nightmare, but this one he couldn't wake up from. I wanted to help him, but if I was choking on his fear from here, touching him would make it worse.

I said out loud, "If I touch him I'm not sure I can stop his fear from overwhelming me."

"Try. Just try, ma petite."

I swallowed hard, and so didn't want to, but Jean-Claude was right: I had to try. I crawled back to Damian and reached out to him. He jerked back from me. "No, don't. I'm unclean. Can't you see that there's something wrong with me?"

Nathaniel had crawled back with me. "You aren't unclean, Damian."

"We aren't vampires. We won't catch anything," I said, as I reached out slowly, the way you approach a skittish animal.

"Anita . . ."

"Let me try, Damian."

"Let us both try," Nathaniel said.

His eyes looked so green in their mask of blood, like a macabre Christmas image, but he sat still and let me touch his arm. The moment I did, my pulse slowed, and so did his. It was like touching him calmed us both. Nathaniel touched his other arm and it was like a circuit completed; we'd plugged in the last thing and with that sense of completion there was a peacefulness that I hadn't thought possible while we were sitting in the blood-soaked sheets.

I looked back over my shoulder at Jean-Claude. "How did you know that would happen?"

"I did not know for certain, but in the past Damian has been your calm center in the midst of emotion. I thought it might work both ways."

Damian took my hand in his and the last of the fear receded like the sea pulling back from the shore. He blinked at me. "Thank you. Thank you both."

"What now?" I asked Jean-Claude.

"Now, you need a shower. For such as this, the bathtub attached to this room will not do."

"I mean after the shower."

"Come back here and if the bed is fit to sleep on we will try. If not, we will use one of the guest rooms for the rest of the day."

"I don't want to sleep again," Damian said. "Did you see the nightmare I shared with Anita and Nathaniel?"

"No," he said.

"Then you don't understand."

"I can see the aftermath of the dream, Damian. I understand that it was terrible enough to make you sweat blood."

I started pulling Damian by the hand toward the edge of the bed. Nathaniel helped me tug him toward the edge of the bed. "Let's clean up and then we'll talk about what comes next," I said.

Jean-Claude took pictures of us with his cell phone before we left to shower. "If we find a doctor to consult, we can show them pictures of this," he'd said, and it made sense, though it felt like being part of a crime scene evidence collection.

Jean-Claude sent with us the two guards who had come through the door. "They are not to be left alone," were his orders.

"What does that mean?" I asked, as I stood there holding Damian's hand.

"It means we do not know what is happening, ma petite, and it would be beyond careless of me to send you and Nathaniel off alone with Damian without other eyes to watch over you."

"You think I'm a danger to Anita?"

"Are you not ravenous?"

"Hungry, no."

"After losing so much blood, mon ami, you should be."

Damian nodded. "I learned to control all my needs centuries ago, Jean-Claude. She-Who-Made-Me used every need and want against us. It was better to feel nothing, want nothing, than to give her that opening."

"I have known very few vampires that could control their bloodlust to that degree."

"She would deny us blood until we felt crazed with the need for it. She liked letting the starved vampires free on prisoners. It was . . ." Damian shook his head. "I both witnessed such feedings and partook in them. I thought I had control of that part of me until a few years back when I lost myself and attacked those people."

I squeezed his hand. "That was my fault. I didn't know I was your master and if I did, I didn't understand what it meant."

"Your power being withdrawn from me drove me mad, yes, but it wasn't your teeth, your strength, that slaughtered that poor couple."

"I thought you did not remember what you had done, mon ami," Jean-Claude said.

"I still don't, but I believe you when you say I did it." He raised my hand back up, waving our clasped hands. "With Anita's hand in mine, I can control myself, and not be the beast that She-Who-Made-Me could reduce me to." He raised his other hand, where Nathaniel was still holding on. "With both their hands in mine, I can be more than I was."

"If I truly believed you dangerous, I would not allow them to leave this room with you, but I would like help to be there if something else unusual happens, that is all."

I wasn't sure I believed it either, but I took it at face value. Though I did ask, "Wait. Does not taking their eyes off us mean they have to watch us in the shower, or can they just stand outside the door?"

The guard with pale brown hair said, "We don't donate blood, or anything else. We just do our jobs."

"I was not volunteering you as food," Jean-Claude said.

"If they can wait outside the door, then it's not a problem," I said.

"I'd prefer a closer eye," Jean-Claude said.

"They can wait outside the showers. We'll be fine," I said, and we led Damian to the door, where one guard opened it and the other followed behind. I was calm enough now that I wasn't happy that Jean-Claude was casually encouraging strange men to watch me shower. Yes, they were shapeshifters, which meant nudity didn't mean much to them, but I wasn't a shapeshifter and I didn't want two new guards that I didn't know at all watching us in the showers. I wouldn't argue with Jean-Claude anymore, but once we were out of his sight, then I'd argue with the two guards he was sending with us. I had a much better chance of winning the argument with them than with Jean-Claude.

7

I'D MANAGED TO ask the two guards' names by the time we were walking past the group showers. Brunette was Barry, Barry the Brunette, and pale brown was Harris. I wasn't sure if it was his first or last name, and I didn't ask. They both felt like a lot of the new guards, interchangeable, as if someone had hired them from the same pool of tall, athletic, younger men, mostly white, though not all, and unfinished in a way that the guards that Rafael's people hired weren't. In an effort to get a greater variety of wereanimals into our personal guards, we'd let other groups besides the wererats offer up candidates for guard duty; so far no one was better than Rafael's rats, some of the werehyenas, and the Harlequin. They were the personal guards of the old queen of vampires and they were the best of the best, but then they'd had hundreds, sometimes thousands of years to practice their skills. It was hard to compete with that when you were under thirty like most of the new guards; but still Barry and Harris didn't fill me with the same confidence that some of our longer-term guards did.

I had no intention of us using the group showers. We'd use the shower in the room that Nathaniel and I shared with Micah. We could hear the noise from the group showers down the hallway. Men laughing, calling out to each other, and just the energy of so many athletic and professionally competent violent men contained in good-natured rivalry, because that was always an underlying energy

to the guards. The type of men who are good at the job description are always speculating who's the best, the fastest, the strongest; who will win. Add that they were all wereanimals, and the testosterone level could be enough to drown in; normally I was okay with that, but not today.

I felt Nathaniel flinch on the other side of Damian, and that was about how I felt, too. It was like it was too much energy to deal with while all three of us were still raw from the dream.

We were almost past the showers when I realized the noise inside was a lot less. It was reduced from a rollicking noise fest to almost silence. It was like being in the forest when the birds and crickets stop singing--you know something's wrong. I had left the bedroom with only my Browning in my hand, because lingerie sucks for places to put weapons. I fought the urge to point the gun at the door, and the fact that the two guards with us didn't react to the sudden silence made me take points away from them.

The guards inside the shower spilled out of the doorway in front of us, some low to the ground on their knees, others standing; some of them took cover around the edge of the doorway, and others just filled the hallway, weapons in hand and mostly nude. There was a moment when you almost felt them hesitate as they saw us, and then the weapons steadied--all pointing at Damian. It was interesting that they just assumed Nathaniel and I were innocent of whatever carnage had happened.

"Ease down," I said.

They all ignored me; not good.

"It's Damian's blood, not mine."