Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

"I'm trying to convince the police that you won't start slaughtering people in the streets and you really will be useful to the investigation."

"I thought we'd settled all that before I got on the plane."

"So did I," he said, and he sounded tired and frustrated, and underneath that was anger. Eventually, if they kept pushing him, they'd get to his anger and stay there.

Nicky's phone rang. He listened and then hung up. "Donahue and Brennan are downstairs to escort us where we need to go."

"How did they get your number?"

"I told Edward to give it to whoever needed it."

"Good thinking." I looked around the room. Everyone looked dressed and ready to go. Jake, Kaazim, Ethan, and Domino were waiting out in the hallway for us. Fortune stuck her head out of her room long enough to kiss Nathaniel and me good-bye, and then she went back to sleep. She had Echo in her room still waiting for nightfall. She couldn't leave Echo unprotected, and we didn't need the whole crew for this. Magda and Socrates were still at Nolan's compound trying to make friends with the rest of his people. After what she'd done to one of their new superstrong cells, I really hoped Nolan had a plan B.

Donnie met us in the lobby, smiling. Brennan, a lot less happy, was behind her. Honestly, I was surprised to see him, but I did my best to just take it in stride. Apparently, medical had cleared him, and Nolan thought he could handle the assignment. "Forrester says you need an escort," he said.

"Actually, he said babysitter," Donnie said, grinning.

"I appreciate you keeping us legal," I said, and kept walking toward the door. They fell in behind and to the side of me.

"What's the emergency?" she asked.

"We may have inadvertently let the bad guy know we were contacted by a local today." Jake and Kaazim did the bodyguard thing at the door, checking for safety and holding the door for me.

"Unless you know something we don't, we don't know who the villain of the piece is yet," Brennan said.

"Let me rephrase, then: the suspected bad guy."

"Who do you suspect?" he asked.

"Where are you parked, and will it hold all of us?" I asked.

"Not far and yes," Donnie said.

"Lead us to the car."

"You do know that you don't outrank us, right?" Brennan said.

Donnie went to the left and kept walking. We followed her with Brennan keeping up, but not happy about it. "Are you deliberately ignoring my questions?" he asked.

"I'll answer them in the car on the way, Brennan, but I'd really like to find our local informant before he ends up tortured and killed."

"Tortured and killed? What are you talking about, Blake? You're here to help us with our vampire problem, not to get involved in another crime."

"I'm hoping to stop another crime from happening--if that's okay with you?" I walked past him with Nicky at my back. Brennan stopped asking questions and just caught up with Donnie. I fought the urge to start jogging down the sidewalk. We didn't need to attract that much attention yet. It was still daylight. Riley would probably be safe until nightfall. Of course, Damian was awake already, and about the time I had decided to jog, Donnie had stopped at a van. I could save the running for later.

53

WE COULDN'T FIND Riley. We couldn't find his girlfriend. It was like the harder we tried to locate them, the more lost they became. Our last hope was that Flannery's aunt would come through, but the last info from him was that Auntie Nim didn't have much to do with the Roanes, because they weren't her creatures. It was as if people refused to do business with the werewolves in St. Louis because wolf was Jean-Claude's animal to call, and their Ulfric was his moitie bete. I still thought it was interesting that Flannery's Fey relatives had known about the vampires in Ireland all this time, but they hadn't shared the news with him, not even after vampires had started showing up in Dublin. I actually asked him why they didn't tell him sooner. His answer: "I asked them if they knew anything about the new vampires in Dublin. I didn't ask them if there were other vampires in Ireland outside the city." Apparently the Irish Fey answered direct questions, but what you didn't ask, they didn't answer, even if logically it was connected. An important safety tip to remember if I had to question any of them on this trip.

I'd set my phone alarm to the time when Jean-Claude typically woke for the night in St. Louis, but I didn't need an alarm. I felt him wake for the night, thousands of miles away. I knew when his eyes opened for the first time to stare at the ceiling, felt the warmth of the body curled beside him, one arm flung across his stomach. I knew by the size and weight of the arm that it was Richard, because I had the only other men in his life who had that kind of size and muscle. He knew I was sitting in the back of the van with Nathaniel beside me. I saw, felt, smelled the warm darkness of his bed and Richard's body fever warm beside him. His shoulder-length hair in a wild tangle hiding the handsome face. I couldn't remember the last time Richard had slept over with any of us. Jean-Claude's voice whispered through my head, "Ma petite, what have you been doing while I slept?"

Just hearing him, feeling him inside me like that, felt as if I could finally take a deep breath and let go of some tension that I hadn't known I was holding. Nathaniel gripped my hand tighter. I knew he felt it, too, because we were touching when it happened. Damian reached from the seat behind me, where he'd been out of direct sunlight in the more enclosed depths of the van, but now he reached into the sunlight from the windows so he could touch my shoulder, and there was that jump of connection from him to me, to Nathaniel, and to Jean-Claude, and then Richard stirred in the bed. I knew he was awake, had a moment of seeing the darkened room through his eyes and Jean-Claude's so that it was almost dizzying. I was glad I wasn't driving when it happened. Damian squeezed my shoulder as his other hand found Nathaniel's arm, and the world steadied again. I could still see the ceiling above the temporary bed and missed the old canopy, could feel my head resting on Jean-Claude's shoulder and arm while my other arm was across his body and my only view was silk sheets and the white gleam of the vampire's body. I knew they were both nude, and the moment I thought it, I realized that I had thought it too loudly and that they'd both heard me, and suddenly there was awkwardness in the nudity that hadn't been there before. Why? Because I hadn't just thought nude; I'd thought about the possibilities of them in the bed, wrapped in silk, naked. That was all me, and I tried to make that thought loud, too.

Richard started to get up, spilling the sheets down his chest, baring his upper body, opening up the cocoon of warmth his body had made beside Jean-Claude. Then a sense of calm washed over all of us, as in all five of us. The beginnings of unease in Richard quieted. He lay back down in the sheets, finding the warmth his body had made for him overnight. It put him

back beside Jean-Claude, who lay very still, waiting for the other man to decide what he was doing. I could feel everyone more clearly in my head in that moment than Jean-Claude. He was very carefully neutral, though I could feel the tension in his body through the connection to Richard.

Nathaniel leaned back toward Damian, who leaned forward, his long hair sliding forward like a veil to cover the sides of his face from the sunlight. His hair wasn't much of a barrier, but it was better than bare skin in bare light. He'd kept the sunglasses on; they wouldn't come off until we were in a dark room or night fell. Nathaniel stroked that red hair and then rubbed his cheek along Damian's face like a cat scent-marking. Damian laughed and leaned his face against the other man's so that Nathaniel could hold him as much as the seat belts would allow.

I felt Richard's surprise at the interaction. It was a big change in Damian's comfort level about touching other men. Richard moved up higher on the pillows so that he was taller than Jean-Claude, but he didn't move away from him, just moved his arm so that it lay across his chest and not his stomach. It left Jean-Claude's arm around Richard so that they held each other, though I knew that if Jean-Claude were more certain of his welcome, he'd have held him differently.

Richard said out loud, "Relax, Jean-Claude. Just relax. Cuddle if you want to cuddle, but don't lie here feeling this tense. It's not a trap, I promise," because we'd all heard Jean-Claude's thought, because it was too loud to hide. "It's a trap, a girl trap." Girl traps aren't about genitalia; they're about that more feminine habit of saying, Do this or Don't do that, and punishing the masculine half of the couple for doing what the feminine half asked/told him to do in the first place. There are girl traps and boy stupid, but it's not always women who set the traps, and it's not always men who are stupid. We all take turns.

Jean-Claude relaxed slowly, inch by cautious inch. The way that Richard was lying across his arm, it was more comfortable and natural for him to curl his arm around the other man's back and turn a little into Richard. They were only an inch apart in height, but the way Richard had fixed himself on the bed made him seem much taller, except that I could feel where everyone's legs were, and it was an illusion. An illusion of dominance, and I had a moment to hear, feel, realize that part of the two men's problem with each other was that they were both dominant. I don't mean in a bondage-and-submission way, but just big, athletic, dominant men who were both used to winning. Jean-Claude had spent too many centuries at the mercy of other masters to be as obvious about it as Richard could be, but it was there as they lay as entwined as I'd seen them in a very long time. Who would submit? Who would bend first? Without me there to help them bridge that decision, they were stalemated. Asher helped them, too, sometimes, but if he hadn't been in the doghouse, Richard wouldn't have been there at all.