Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17)

Chapter 35

EDWARD'S VOICE IN my ear said, "We've got Max's son, Victor, out here with bodyguards. We're letting Victor through, but we're keeping the bodyguards."

"We've got another half-dozen tigers in here with us. They came out of the far rooms," Bernardo said.

"This just keeps getting better," Edward said, and the sarcasm came through the earpiece loud and clear.

The blue tiger inside me pressed closer to the surface of me. I had an image of her face against mine, trying to get closer so she could sniff the air.

The doors opened and a tall, broad-shouldered man in an expensive tailored suit strode through. His white hair was cut very short, and in one of those cuts that looked like it had been done one hair at a time. He actually wore those pale yellow sunglasses over his eyes. The glasses weren't dark enough to do a damn thing against the Vegas sun. Was he trying to pass for human? If that was the idea, then he needed to tone down the energy that boiled off him.

That wash of energy turned the blue tiger snarling toward him. I would have fallen forward if Domino and Crispin hadn't caught me.

"You're going to bring her beast, Mother," he said, and he kept coming toward us. The blue tiger didn't like that. The white one did. Black was just content to cuddle Domino. The blue tiger tried to turn me toward the boy. The white liked Victor. The black was fine. It was like having three different roommates inside me, and all of them liked different guys.

"You have no right to interfere," Bibiana said.

"Father warned you against this," he said, and he was at our side. He knelt in the dark suit, his eyes hidden behind the glasses, but no amount of colored glass could hide the power spilling off him. The power was enough that the white tiger knew what we'd find behind the glasses.

I came to my knees. Crispin had to let go of my hand, but he touched my shoulder. Domino slipped lower down my body like a reluctant piece of clothing. My hands went to those glasses.

Victor caught my hands in his. He stared into my face as if he were trying to see through me. He raised my hands to his face and sniffed my skin. "Impossible."

"I told you, Victor, she carries them all," Bibiana said.

He rose up from my skin. I could see his eyes clearly, but the pale yellow lenses stole what I needed to see. My voice sounded like a stranger in my head when I said, "Take them off."

He blinked at me. "What?"

I repeated it. "Take them off."

"Why?" he asked, and let go of my hands.

I shook my head because I wasn't sure, and then the answer came, "I have to see your eyes."

"Why?" he said, again.

I reached upward, and this time he didn't stop me. I touched the thin wire frames of his glasses and pulled them gently down, until I was looking into pale blue tiger eyes. They were a deeper blue than Crispin's eyes, but still a color and a shape that you wouldn't mistake for human unless you wanted not to see what was there.

I knelt in front of him, with his glasses in my hands, and stared up into those eyes. But it wasn't just the eyes; they were only a sign of what my tigress needed. It was the power in him. I hadn't understood until that moment how weak every other weretiger I'd touched had been.

Victor stared down at me with those perfect eyes. He swallowed hard enough that I heard it. His voice was a little shaky as he said, "You really are another queen, aren't you?"

I leaned in toward him. I wasn't aiming for a kiss. It was more as if there were gravity to his power, and it drew me in.

He stood up, stumbling a little. I reached for him, and it was Crispin who drew me back. He and Domino pulled me back into their arms, but it was like I could hear music in my head that I'd never heard before. Victor's power drowned out their touch.

Victor put the glasses back on and turned to his mother. "Father expressly forbade you from calling her power until he had met with her."

"I am Chang here, not you," she said.

"You rule the clan of the white tiger. I have never disputed that, but Father has put me in charge of other parts of his domain. When you put the tigers' power above the good of this city and the other citizens, then you have broken your master, my father's, rules."

"Would you deny Domino and Cynric the only queen of their clan they may ever meet?"

"I would never stand in the way of another clan's destiny, Mother, but you cannot feed Cynric to her. Look at what she has already done to Crispin and Domino."

Something about the way he said it made me look at the two weretigers still beside me. Crispin had looked at me with that devotion before, but to see it in Domino's face was just wrong. A look of puppyish devotion in that angry, arrogant face; it hurt my heart to see it. Not because I cared for him, because you can't care for someone you've just met, but because no adult should look at anyone like that. It was a look I'd seen before, on the faces of vampires. I was a true necromancer and called to all the dead, but I wasn't supposed to call to the wereanimals like this, not like this.

"Oh, God," I said, and tried to stand up. Domino clung to me, and I fought the urge to slap at him in a kind of panic. "I fed on your anger, damn it. I fed on your anger so you wouldn't look at me like that!"

He gave me calm eyes, and he shouldn't have.

"Fuck," I said.

"Talk to me, Anita, Bernardo. What's happening?" Edward asked.

"Wait, Edward, just wait." I turned to Victor. "Can you fix this?"

Bernardo said, "Anita has it under control." The look on his face didn't match the surety of his words, but he was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Victor looked where I was pointing, at Domino. "You mean undo your possession of him?"

"Yes," I said.

"You are queen," Bibiana said, "you do not ask any male for such help."

"Fine, can you undo it?" I asked.

Victor studied me some more. "You said you fed on his anger. I thought the ardeur was all about sex."

"I can feed on anger, too. I thought if I didn't feed on lust, or love, for your people that I wouldn't bind them to me. I don't want any more men, damn it."

"Jean-Claude can't feed on anger, can he?" Victor asked.

That was a little too close to truths we didn't want to share with anyone. That I had powers that my master didn't share. I tried to be cool about it, but my pulse had sped. Weretigers are like living lie detectors. They can sense, smell, all those little involuntary body functions.

"Can either of you make it so he isn't"-I waved a hand at Domino-"like this?"

"It may pass on its own," Victor said.

"Are you sure?"

He smiled. "No, but what you've done seems to be a combination of vampire and Chang tiger. You've rolled him. If you leave him alone, he may recover. If it's more vampire than wereanimal, then you know that you'll be able to repossess him anytime you want."

I licked my lips and said the only truth I had. "I don't want to possess anybody."

"I felt your power. I felt you shove it into my mother. I felt it blocks away."

"Would it sound childish to say she started it?"

He gave a quick smile. "It's a little childish, but I know my mother."

"Victor," Bibiana said.

"You know you tried to raise her tigers, Mother. You know you provoked her power. Don't deny it."

"I would never deny it," she said.

Bernardo said, "Chang-Bibiana promised that if Marshal Blake could call Crispin away from her, she would answer our questions."

Bibiana wouldn't look at anyone in the room.

"Did you promise the marshals that, Mother?"

She gave a little nod, still not looking at anyone.

"Then answer her questions, like you promised."

I did my best not to glance at the blue boy. "I think a little privacy would be good before we start discussing an ongoing police investigation."

"I don't want to leave," he said.

Ava tugged on him. "Come on, Cynric."

"No," he said, and pulled away from her. "You're not pure. You don't know how it feels to be part of a clan."

"Cynric," Bibiana said, and her anger cracked like a hot whip through the room, "you will show Ava the respect she deserves. One of our brethren attacked her. He broke the most sacred rule among the clans. She is not one who sought this life."

He looked sullen for a moment, then guilty. "I'm sorry, Ava. I didn't mean it."

She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "It's all right, Cynric, but let's leave the marshals to talk to Bibiana and Victor." He let her lead him through the far door, but he looked back as the doors closed, and the disturbing thing was that I was there to meet his eyes.

Bernardo touched my arm, made me look at him. "You all right?"

Was I all right? That was an excellent question. What I needed was an excellent answer. I said the only thing I could think of. "We have work to do, Marshal Spotted Horse."

He gave me a look that raised one eyebrow, then nodded. "Yes, we do, Marshal Blake."

"Ask your questions, then get the fuck out of there," Edward said, "I do not want Anita in that room when Max joins his wife." Edward was absolutely right. Bibiana had almost rolled me on her own, without her master at her side. There were so many reasons to want this thing cleared up before the vampires rose for the night.

The fact that there was no way on God's green earth to solve this crime before dark was not only disappointing but getting more dangerous every minute.