Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17)

Chapter 7

HIS POWER FLOWED through the hole in my shields like something warm and alive. Shapeshifter energy was warm, but it held an edge of electricity, like your skin couldn't decide if it felt good or hurt. Shapeshifters rode that edge of pain and pleasure, but this power was just warm, almost comforting. What the hell?

His hands felt warmer in mine than they had been a moment ago, as if his temperature were rising. Again, I kept trying to equate it to a lycanthrope, because it was so not the cool touch of the grave.

I realized I was staring at our hands. I was treating him like a real vampire. You don't look one of them in the eye, but that was years ago for me. I hadn't met a vampire that could roll me with its gaze in a long time. One very alive, psychic vampire wasn't going to be able to do it, was he? So why didn't I want to meet his eyes? I realized I was nervous, almost afraid, and I couldn't have told you why. Short of someone trying to kill me, or my love life, my nerves were rock steady. So why the case of nerves?

I made myself look away from his hands on mine and meet his eyes. They were just the same almost black, the pupils lost to the color, but they weren't vampire eyes. They hadn't bled their color into shining fire across the whole of his eyes. They were human eyes, and he was only human. I could do this, damn it.

His voice seemed lower, soothing, the way you see people talk when they're trying to hypnotize someone. "Are you ready, Anita?"

I frowned at him. "Get on with it, Sergeant; the foreplay's getting tedious."

He smiled.

One of the other psychics in the room, I didn't know their voices well enough to pick who, said, "Let him be gentle, Marshal; you don't want to see what he can do."

I met Cannibal's dark, dark eyes and said the truth: "Yeah, I do want to see what he can do."

"Are you sure?" he asked, voice still low, soft, like he was trying not to wake someone.

I spoke low, too. "As much as you want to see what I can do."

"You going to fight back?"

"You hurt me, and I will."

He gave that smile that was more fierce than happy. "Okay." He leaned in, drawing down all that extra height from his much longer waist to bring our faces close, and he whispered, "Show me Baldwin, show me the operator you lost. Show me Baldwin, Anita."

It shouldn't have been that easy, but it was as if the words were magic. The memories came to the front of my head, and I couldn't stop them, as if he'd started a movie in my head.

The only light was the sweep of flashlights ahead and behind. Because I didn't have a light, it ruined my night vision but didn't really help me. Derry jumped over something, and I glanced down to find that there were bodies in the hallway. The glance down made me stumble over the third body. I only had time to register that one was our guy, and the rest weren't. There was too much blood, too much damage. I couldn't tell who one of them was. He was pinned to the wall by a sword. He looked like a shelled turtle, all that careful body armor ripped away, showing the red ruin of his upper body. The big metal shield was crushed just past the body. Was that Baldwin back there? There were legs sticking out of one of the doors. Derry went past it, trusting that the officers ahead of him hadn't left anything dangerous or alive behind them. It was a level of trust that I had trouble with, but I kept going. I stayed with Derry and Mendez, like I'd been told.

I was left gasping in the chair, staring at Cannibal, his hands tight on mine. My voice was strained as I said, "That wasn't just a memory. You put me back in that hallway, in that moment."

"I needed to feel what you felt, Anita. Show me the worst of that night."

"No," I said, but again, I was back in the room beyond the hallway. The one vampire that was still alive cringed. She pressed her bloody face against the corner behind the bed, her small hands held out as if to ward it off. At first it looked like she was wearing red gloves, then the light shone on the blood, and you knew it wasn't opera-length gloves-it was blood all the way to her elbows. Even knowing that, even having Melbourne motionless on the floor in front of her, still Mendez didn't shoot her. Jung was leaning against the wall, like he'd fall down if he didn't concentrate. His neck was torn up, but the blood wasn't gushing out. She'd missed the jugular. Let's hear it for inexperience.

I said, "Shoot her."

The vampire made mewling sounds, like a frightened child. Her voice came high and piteous, "Please, please, don't hurt me, don't hurt me. He made me. He made me."

"Shoot her, Mendez," I said into the mic.

"She's begging for her life," he said, and his voice didn't sound good.

I peeled shotgun shells out of the stock holder and fed them into the gun as I walked toward Mendez and the vampire. She was still crying, still begging, "They made us do it, they made us do it."

Jung was trying to hold pressure on his own neck wound. Melbourne's body lay on its side, one hand outstretched toward the cringing vampire. Melbourne wasn't moving, but the vampire still was. That seemed wrong to me. But I knew just how to fix it.

I had the shotgun reloaded, but I let it swing down at my side. At this range the sawed-off was quicker; no wasted ammo.

Mendez had glanced away from the vamp to me, then farther back to his sergeant. "I can't shoot someone who's begging for her life."

"It's okay, Mendez, I can."

"No," he said, and looked at me; his eyes showed too much white. "No."

"Step back, Mendez," Hudson said.

"Sir..."

"Step back and let Marshal Blake do her job."

"Sir... it's not right."

"Are you refusing a direct order, Mendez?"

"No, sir, but-"

"Then step back and let the marshal do her job."

Mendez still hesitated.

"Now, Mendez!"

He moved back, but I didn't trust him at my back. He wasn't bespelled; she hadn't tricked him with her eyes. It was much simpler than that. Police are trained to save lives, not take them. If she'd attacked him, Mendez would have fired. If she'd attacked someone else, he'd have fired. If she'd looked like a raving monster, he'd have fired. But she didn't look like a monster as she cringed in the corner, hands as small as my own held up, trying to stop what was coming. Her body pressed into the corner, like a child's last refuge before the beating begins, when you run out of places to hide and you are literally cornered, and there's nothing you can do. No word, no action, no thing that will stop it.

"Go stand by your sergeant," I said.

He stared at me, and his breathing was way too fast.

"Mendez," Hudson said, "I want you here."

Mendez obeyed that voice, as he'd been trained to, but he kept glancing back at me and the vampire in the corner.

She glanced past her arm, and because I didn't have a holy item in sight, she was able to give me her eyes. They were pale in the uncertain light, pale and frightened. "Please," she said, "please don't hurt me. He made us do such terrible things. I didn't want to, but the blood, I had to have it." She raised her delicate oval face to me. "I had to have it." The lower half of her face was a crimson mask.

I nodded and braced the shotgun in my arms, using my hip and my arm instead of my shoulder for the brace point. "I know," I said.

"Don't," she said, and held out her hands.

I fired into her face from less than two feet away. Her face vanished in a spray of blood and thicker things. Her body sat up very straight for long enough that I pulled the trigger into the middle of her chest. She was tiny, not much meat on her; I got daylight with just one shot.

"How could you look her in the eyes and do that?"

I turned and found Mendez by me. He'd taken off his mask and helmet, though I was betting that was against the rules until we left the building. I covered my mic with my hand, because no one should learn about someone's death by accident. "She tore Melbourne's throat out."

"She said the other vampire made her do it; is that true?"

"Maybe," I said.

"Then how could you just shoot her?"

"Because she was guilty."

"And who died and made you judge, jury, and ex-" He stopped in midsentence.

"Executioner," I finished for him. "The federal and state government."

"I thought we were the good guys," he said.

"We are."

He shook his head. "You aren't."

And through all of it, I could feel Cannibal's energy like a song that you can't get out of your head, but I could feel that this song was feeding on the pain, the terror, even the confusion.

I pushed at the power, shoved it away, but it was like trying to grab a spiderweb when you run through it. You feel it on your skin, but the more you pull off, the more you find, until you realize that the spider is still on you somewhere making silk faster than you can get it off you. You have to fight the urge to panic, to simply start screaming, because you know that it's on you, crawling, ready to bite. But the memory receded like turning down a radio, still there, but I could think again. I could feel Cannibal's hands in mine, and I could open my eyes, look at him, see the now. Through gritted teeth, I said, "Stop this."

"Not yet." His power pushed at me again; it was like drowning, when you think you've made it to the surface, only to have another wave hit you full in the face. But the trick to not drowning is not to panic. I would not give him my fear. The memory couldn't hurt me; I'd already lived through it.

I tried to stop the memory, but I couldn't. I pulled on my hands, still in his, and got a flicker of image, like flipping channels on a televison. The briefest image of him, his memory.

I pulled on my hands and got more, a woman under his hands, him holding her down. She was laughing, fighting not for real, and I knew it was his wife. Her hair was as dark as his, and curled like mine. It flung across the pillow, and her tan looked wonderful in the red silk. Sunlight spilled across the bed as he leaned down for a kiss.

I was suddenly back in that other bedroom, in the dark with the dead. I turned my hands in Cannibal's, caressed a finger across his wrist, just where the skin is thinnest and the blood flows close. We were back in the sunlit memory, and red silk on cotton sheets, and a woman who looked at him as if he were her world.

I felt her body underneath him, felt how much he wanted her, how much he loved her. The emotion was so strong, and just like that, I fed. I drew in the emotion of the moment.

But Cannibal didn't give up; he pushed back, and I was in my bedroom at home. Micah's face was above me, his green-gold eyes inches from mine, his body buried deep inside mine, my hands traced down his bare back until I found the curve of his ass, so I could feel his muscles working, pumping him in and out of me.

I shoved the power back at Cannibal, chased him out of my memory, and found us back in his sunlit bedroom. There were fewer clothes now, and I got a confused glimpse of his body inside hers, and then he threw me out. He jerked his hands out of mine, and the moment he stopped touching me, it was over, done. I was back in my own head, with my own memories, and he was back with his.

He got up too fast and knocked his chair to the floor with a loud clang. I sat where I was, hugging myself, huddling around the feeling of his power inside me, rifling through my head, though that didn't cover how it felt. It felt intimate, and it wasn't about the sex; it was about having his power force its way into me.

Cannibal went to the far side of the room, facing the wall and not looking at me.

"Sergeant Rocco," Lieutenant Grimes said.

I heard Cannibal's voice but wasn't ready to look at him yet, either. "The reports are accurate. She felt the loss of the operators. She's tired of killing."

"Shut up," I said, and got to my feet, but didn't knock my chair over. Point for me. "That was private. That last memory had nothing to do with the deaths of the two men."

He turned around, lowering his arms, as if he'd been hugging himself, too. He looked at me, but I saw the effort of that on his face. "You killed the vampire that killed Melbourne, you killed her while she begged for her life, and you hated doing it, but you killed her for him. I felt it; you took her life because she took his."

"I took her life because I am duty bound by the fucking law to take it."

"I know why you did it, Anita. I know what you were feeling when you did it."

"And I know what you were feeling in that other room, Sergeant. Do you want me to share that?"

"That was personal, not the job," he said.

I strode over to him, past the lieutenant. The men were on their feet, as if they felt that something was about to happen. I got close enough to hiss into Rocco's face, a harsh whisper, "You overstepped the bounds and you know it. You fed off my memories, off my emotion."

"You fed off mine," he said. He kept his voice as low as mine. Technically what we'd done hadn't been illegal, because the law just hadn't caught up to the fact that you could be a vampire and not be dead. By legal definition, neither of us could be a vampire.

"You started it," I said.

"You took my ability and used it against me," he said. He was talking low, but not whispering now. I understood; we needed to talk about some of what had happened.

"If a vampire uses an ability against me, sometimes, I can borrow it," I said.

"Explain, Cannibal," Grimes said.

We both looked at him, then back at each other. I always hated trying to explain psychic ability to people who didn't have it. It never translated quite right.

Cannibal started, "All I can sense, most of the time, is violent memories, fear, pain. When Anita tried to stop me, she drew a memory from me, and it wasn't about violence. How did you do that?"

Grimes asked, "If it wasn't violence, what was the memory?"

Cannibal and I exchanged another look. I shrugged. "It was personal, about my family." He looked from the lieutenant to me and asked again, "How did you do that?"

"In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better." There, that was cryptic enough; one thing I did not want the police to know was that I was a succubus. The only thing that would keep Cannibal from spilling the beans was that he didn't want me to tattle on him. We'd keep each other's secrets, if we were smart.

A look passed over his face, as if he were trying to decide what expression to show me. "She showed me love, tenderness, like the girl version of what I can do." Again, he'd told the truth, but not too much of it.

"You learned fast enough, Cannibal. The last memory you got from me wasn't about violence, either."

He nodded. "So you peeked at mine and I peeked at yours."

"Yes."

"Peeked at what?" Grimes asked.

"The people we love," Cannibal answered.

Grimes frowned from one to the other of us.

"The man in your memory wasn't a vampire," Cannibal said. "I thought you were living with the Master of the City."

"I am."

Then who is he, the man? I saw his eyes; they weren't human."

"He's a wereleopard," I said.

"Don't you have any human men in your life?"

"No," I said.

"Why not?" he asked.

I thought of a lot of answers, but settled for, "Did you plan on falling in love with your wife?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it, and said, "No, she was supposed to be a one-night stand." He frowned, and the look was enough; he hadn't meant to say that out loud. "If you were a man, I don't know what I would do right now."

"What, you'd hit me?"

"Maybe."

"You drag me through one of the worst kills of my recent past, and you stand there and bitch because I made you remember something wonderful. I think I'm ahead on karmic brownie points here. Don't you ever mind-fuck me like that again."

"Or what?" he asked.

"I can't shoot you, but if you ever touch me and do that again, I will figure out something very unpleasant to do to you that will be just as legal as what you just did to me."

We glared at each other. Grimes came beside us. "Okay, what went wrong, Cannibal?"

"She caught my power and turned it on me. I got it back, but I had to fight for it."

Grimes's eyes widened, then he looked at me. He looked at me the way he might look at a new weapon, or another shiny new truck to put in his garage from testosterone hell. "How good is she?"

"Good," Cannibal said, "and controlled. We could have seriously hurt each other, but we were both careful. Honestly, Lieutenant, if I'd known she was this powerful I'd have been gentler. If she had been less in control of her abilities, you might be carting both of us off to the hospital for the day."

Grimes continued to look at me, as if he'd only just seen me, but he talked to Cannibal like I wasn't there. "You saw her range scores when she qualified for the badge."

"Yes, sir."

"Is she as good psychically as she is with a gun?"

"Better," Cannibal said.

Grimes looked pleased. "Better, really."

"You know, Grimes, it's a little unnerving to have you looking right at me but talking like I'm not here."

"I'm sorry, really, that was inexcusable, but I've just never seen anyone take Cannibal on like that. He is the best practitioner of his kind we have."

"Yeah, I bet he's hell on wheels at an interrogation."

"He gathers information that helps us save lives, Marshal Blake."

"Yeah, I've felt how he gathers his information, Grimes, and I don't like it."

"I told you if you fought me, you might get hurt," Cannibal said.

"No, you said if I fought to keep my shields up so you couldn't get through, it might hurt me. I let you in, and frankly, I consider what you just did the equivalent of having an invited guest steal the silver."

"Am I missing something?" Grimes asked.

"No, sir."

"You're missing the fact that you aren't psychic and you're trying to be in charage of men who are. Nothing personal, Lieutenant, but if you don't have abilities, then you are going to miss things."

"I'm not a doctor either, Marshal, which is why each team has one, plus a med tech that goes out on every run. Since we added practitioners to our teams, we've saved more lives with no injuries to anyone involved than any unit in the country. I may not understand everything that just happened between you and Cannibal, but I do know that if you're as good as he is, then you can help us save lives."

I didn't know what to say to that. He was so sincere. He might even be right, but that didn't change the fact that Cannibal had mind-fucked me and enjoyed feeding on my pain. Of course, I'd fed on the energy of his memory of sex with his wife, and we'd both fed on the memory of me with Micah. Had I found another way to feed the ardeur, or without Cannibal's abilities would I never be able to repeat it again? Didn't know, wasn't sure I cared.

She's tired of killing, Cannibal had said. That was the worst insult of all because he was right. I had six years of blood on my hands, and I was tired. I could still see the vampire with her bloody hands, begging me not to kill her. I'd dreamed about her for days afterward, waking up to Micah and Nathaniel, having them pet me back to sleep or take turns getting up with me and drinking endless cups of coffee and waiting for dawn, or waiting until it was time to get ready to go to work so I could raise the dead or get a new warrant and maybe kill someone else.

I'd pushed it all back in that part of myself where all the other ugliness gets shoved, but whatever Cannibal had done had raked it up like having a scar start to bleed again. I thought I'd dealt with it, but I hadn't. I'd just tried to ignore it.

"We have to take you to Sheriff Shaw now, Marshal," Grimes said, "but we want to take you to the hospital, let you see our men. All our practitioners, and all our doctors, have come up empty on what's wrong with them. I trust Cannibal, and he's impressed. He's not easily impressed."

"I'd be happy to go to the hospital and look at them. If I can help, I'll do it."

He gave me the full weight of his sincere brown eyes, but there was a weight to them. It wasn't psychic power, but it was power. The power of belief, and a sort of purity of purpose. This unit of SWAT was Grimes's calling, his religion, and he was a true believer. One of those frightening ones whose faith can be contagious, so you find yourself believing in his dreams, his goals, as if they were your own. The last person I'd met who had that kind of energy to him had been a vampire. I'd thought Malcolm, the head of the Church of Eternal Life, had been dangerous because he was a master vampire, but I realized as I met Grimes's true-brown eyes that maybe it hadn't all been vampire powers in Malcolm either. Maybe it was simply faith.

Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren't sure which side you're on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn't make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing?