Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

"My mother and sister are still back there with the evil bitch. I can't go to the police unless I can free my family first."

"We can't arrest her without a charge."

"And you can't rescue my family before you arrest her, I know. Don't you think we've thought about going to the human police before?"

"If your family is being held against their will, then that's kidnapping or something, right?" I asked.

"Yes," Flannery said; his whole attitude had changed once he saw the scars.

"She is inside a fortress that has stood for centuries. You cannot rescue all her hostages before you enter her den, and she will kill them."

"I'll find out what we can do," Flannery said.

"No, you must give me your word of honor that you will not tell the other officers."

"You've reported a crime to me, to all of us, and we all have badges."

"I did not come to you as U.S. Marshals and Irish Garda. I came to you as a Fairy Doctor, a vampire queen, and Death, because that is what the vampires call you, Marshal Forrester. If I wanted to sign the death warrant for my mother and sister, I would have walked into a Dublin police station years ago."

Riley finally got Flannery's word of honor that he wouldn't tell any other officers or Gardai but only other Fey. If they could help the Roane, then the Roane would take the help. "I have been too long. I must go," he said, and he left with our cell phone numbers memorized, but he wouldn't give us a number at which to contact him. He was too afraid that his phone could be taken and my name would be found in the contacts list.

The waitress shooed the men out and finally me, and started mopping the floor, because that was the story she'd told her boss: Someone had made such a mess, she had to mop the floor. She didn't want to talk to us anymore, so we went back to the table. The food was waiting for us. The stew was amazing, served with dark, sweet bread. I had three glasses of water, along with two Cokes, so I was hydrated and caffeinated. Life was good.

Edward dropped us all at the hotel to meet up with the others, because we all needed to catch a couple of hours of sleep while we could. "The local police have gotten cold feet about you again, Anita. They seem to think if they let you see all their evidence, you'll use it to go off and start killing vampires."

"Why are they more afraid of my level of violence than yours?" I asked.

"You have a higher kill count."

I leaned in and whispered, "Only legal kills."

He smiled and then chuckled. He'd always be ahead of me if we counted illegal kills, but that wasn't something to share with the Irish cops.

"Are you saying they may not let me help tonight?"

"Get some sleep, Anita."

"Damn it . . . Ted."

"By the time you've had a nap, your fiance may be awake for a phone call."

"Yeah, I'll be talking to Jean-Claude."

He watched Nathaniel and Dev walk past with some of the luggage. The other guard who had checked us in had just dumped the luggage in one room to be sorted later. "And, Anita, actually sleep."

"I'm finally exhausted from the time change. Trust me, I'll sleep."

Nicky went past with more luggage. "Dev is making noises about wanting to bunk with you and Nathaniel for today. I think you'll sleep better if I'm the one with you and Nathaniel."

"I'll agree with that," Edward said, smiling.

I frowned at both of them. "I plan on sleeping, nothing else for the next couple of hours."

"Scout's honor?" Edward asked.

"Yes!"

"Can you give the Scout's honor if you've never been a Boy Scout?" Nicky asked.

"Enough, let's go to bed and sleep."

In the end it was Dev who bunked with us, because Nathaniel voted that way. We really did sleep, but we put Nathaniel in the middle of Dev and me; that wouldn't have worked if it had been Nicky. We got Damian out of his bag, and he fell into our arms with the limp, heavy roll of a dead body. The new technology could say that vampires' brain activity didn't go down to true dead like that of a corpse, but when you were holding them in your arms they felt dead. Maybe if I hadn't had a job where I saw so many people die, it wouldn't have haunted me so much when it was someone I cared for and it was only temporary for the day. We put Damian into the closet for extra sunlight safety. We had to balance him right and keep shoving in arms and legs to keep him from getting caught in the door. It didn't feel like we were tucking our lover in for the night or the day; it felt like we were hiding a body that we didn't want the maid to find.

I cuddled down on the far side of the bed with Nathaniel tucked in at my back, one arm holding me tight to the front of his body like I was his favorite comfort object. His naked body touched as much of mine as possible like we always slept when we were next to each other. Dev's arm came across Nathaniel so that he cupped his bigger hand around my body, tracing Nathaniel's arm so that they both held me as we began to drift off to sleep.

I dreamed about Riley the Roane, though I kept calling him a Selkie in the dream. It was the word I was more familiar with, but he kept correcting me as we walked down one of the streets of Dublin with the tight, neat brick sidewalks and the rougher stones of the road itself. We were walking in the middle of the road at one point; cars had to stop so they wouldn't hit us. I kept saying, "We need to get out of the street or we'll get hit."

"It doesn't matter," he said, and held out his hand to me. I took his hand and the dream changed. We were someplace dark, and he was chained with manacles at his wrists. Even in the dream, I realized they were manacles, not cuffs, because there was no lock, just that metal piece that slipped in and twisted to the side. If you could reach it, you could free yourself, but Riley couldn't.

There was a beam of sunlight coming from somewhere above us like a natural spotlight that showed his face and upper body. The light was bright enough that I could finally see a clear line between his pupils and the black irises of his eyes. He blinked those large, beautiful and strangely inhuman eyes at me. They were human eyes, but the color echoed his seal, and the dream changed again. I was standing beside the Irish Sea at the crime scene, except I had walked down between the narrow houses and was on the rocky shore. The sea was gray and whitecapped, the air cold and smelling of rain and storm. There were seals in the water, riding like surfers waiting for that perfect wave. They looked at me with huge black eyes. I'd always thought that seals were cute, but when one of them looked up at me through the water, it looked like a drowning victim, dead in the water but moving, still looking at me with huge dead eyes. I stared through the cold water into those dead eyes with the wind whipping my hair across my face as the rain started to fall in cold, wet drops. The wind pic

ked up the water, and suddenly I couldn't tell if it was rain or seawater that was drenching me.

The sea was empty except for the storm. Where had the seals gone? And I was back looking down at Riley chained to the floor of that cave with its beam of sunlight that should have been cheerful but wasn't. There was a hand with a long, thin, slightly curved blade cutting through his clothes and baring the pale skin of his untouched stomach. I thought, That's not right. Where are the scars? Then it was like a video that kept jumping from one scene to another--scars, untouched skin, scars, untouched skin. The blade sliced that flawless skin, bright red blood following the line of the blade like a red-ink pen drawing lines across his skin, except it was the "paper" that held the ink, not the "pen." The crimson ink began to spill out of the lines that she carved in his skin, trickling and chasing down his skin while he told her that she was beautiful, that he wanted her, wanted her so much!

She cut his clothes off him until his body lay pale and strangely beautiful against the dark rock with that splash of sunlight. The cuts on his stomach looked like lines leaking bright red ink to spill down the sides of his body and onto the floor. She caressed his body where he lay limp and small, too afraid and in too much pain to hide that he didn't want her, that he didn't want anyone like this. The video jumped again. His body was covered in old scars, but this time the knife moved down lower; this time she would not stop.

I tried to scream, No, don't! But it was my hand holding the knife covered in his blood. Nathaniel's screams woke me.

52

I WASN'T THE only one who had heard Nathaniel's screams, because Nicky damn near took the door off, before Dev could open it. All the guards tried to be in the room at the same time, but it wasn't big enough. We finally had to decide who to kick out and who to keep. Nathaniel and I had had a version of the same dream, except that where my dream had switched between Riley scarred and Riley getting the wounds the first time, Nathaniel's had switched between Riley getting cut up and Nathaniel being the one chained and tortured. There was another knock, and it took us a second to realize the knock came from the closet door. Dev opened the closet door and Damian half fell out into his arms. I thought at first that Damian had shared our nightmare, but he hadn't dreamed anything. He'd been dead to the world until something about Nathaniel and me freaking out had woken him early.