Hit List (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 20)

NEWMAN PASSED OUT, but I made sure nothing ate him. We were deep in the trees by the time he went down. He'd done well to make it this far. I stayed by him in the wind-kissed trees with the other police working their long line of searching, but I could see the other stretch of road, and I was pretty certain that there were no monsters to find. The Harlequin had fled. Either they were still trying to stay secret enough to avoid this many cops, or they hadn't expected Edward to be packing a rocket and they'd retreated to rethink their plans. I think they'd underestimated both of us, hell, all of us. I looked down at Newman where he lay on the ground. Detective Lorenzo was holding his inner suit jacket on Newman's wound, trying to slow the blood down. He'd put his outer jacket back on so it still read Police, but also it was cold. My hands were numb with it. Weren't cold summer nights an oxymoron?

Lorenzo's partner, Detective Jane Stavros, was helping me guard the two men, both the unconscious one and the one who had his head down tending the wounded one.

The police Windbreaker swam on Detective Stavros's thin frame. The pantsuit that was showing was cheap, black, and too large for her. She was at least five-ten in her sensible and ugly black lace-up shoes. If she'd been dressed better I might have thought she was a professional model, but she had dieted too much for her bone structure, so she looked starved, and she'd dieted away all her curves so she was built like a man. Her straight brunette hair was back in a loose ponytail. Some women on the job try to dress like the men, to fit in, to pretend that they aren't women. I hadn't seen any woman who had been on the job long enough to get a detective's shield carry it to this extreme. Maybe she was a newly minted detective; sometimes that can throw you back to old issues. But it wasn't just the men's clothing; it was that she was sloppy, as if she'd rolled out of bed and put on someone else's clothes by mistake. Nothing fit her right, as if she were wearing someone else's skin.

But she held her gun like she knew what she was doing, and she watched the darkness and her partner's back. She hadn't done anything to make me think less of her except buy into the whole guy thing a little too much, and who was I to bitch about that? But there was almost a starved feeling to her, as if she'd never had enough. Enough food, enough love, enough anything worth having. An air of jaded tiredness and wariness hung over her like a dark cloud. It was an interesting mix of that ten-year blase that cops get, and the nervousness that usually goes away by then, as if she'd seen it all, but instead of being bored it had spooked her.

Edward had gone ahead with the line, because we wanted one of us with the group; besides, my right arm wasn't very happy with me. My right arm, my main shooting arm, was twitching so badly from the overly rapid healing that I couldn't have used it to shoot anything. Moments like these were why I practiced everything left-handed. I wasn't as good on the left as I was on the right, but I was still better than average, and it would have to do. I'd forgotten how much it hurt to have the muscles fighting against each other, as if my arm were at war with itself. A little sex would have kept it from happening, but I'd been stubborn, and the red tiger Harlequin had interfered, but I should never have left off feeding for days. It was stupid, but until Seattle there hadn't been anyone in town for me to feed on. Okay, no one I was willing to feed on. I was paying for my rule of no strangers now. My arm was twitching so badly it could no longer help me hold the MP5 in place for shooting.

"What's wrong with your arm?" she asked.

"I'm healing faster than the muscles can keep up."

She gave me a disbelieving glance. There was enough predawn light for me to see her expression now.

Lorenzo said, "You're hurt more than you let on, Blake."

I shrugged, and just concentrated on breathing through the pain of my arm being at war with itself.

It was Raborn who tramped back through the trees, "They're not here, Blake."

"Probably not," I said.

He put his gun over one shoulder so the barrel was pointed up at the sky. "That kind of twitching means you've damaged nerves. You need to go to the hospital when they take Newman."

"You bully Newman into passing out, but me you'll send to the hospital? Why, so you can say, 'See, she's just a wimpy girl'?"

I watched Raborn's expression by the cold, white light of dawn, but I couldn't decipher it. He looked down at my arm. It was shivering, a continuous dance of muscles. The pain was mind-numbing and only pride kept me from making small noises, or bigger screams.

"I didn't know you were this hurt, Blake."

"You didn't ask," I said.

"The EMTs are almost here; go with Newman to the hospital. No one will think less of you."

"I told you, Raborn, I don't care what you think of me."

Now I could read his look; it was angry. "You just won't give an inch, will you?"

Edward came up behind Raborn and said, "It's not her best thing." Raborn moved so he could see all of us. "She might get along better if she were a little more flexible."

Edward nodded, smiling his Ted smile, as he tipped his hat back from his forehead, his P90 pointed one-handed at the ground. "She might, but if she were more flexible she'd be screaming from the pain, instead of watching the woods, doing her job."

Raborn seemed to think about that for a second, then just shook his head. "All you old-time hunters are stubborn bastards."

I smiled at that. Raborn had to have me by at least a couple of decades, but I was an old-time hunter. Then my muscles tried to form a fist inside my arm and tear their way out. The pain broke me out in a light, sick sweat.

"You just went pale," Stavros said.

I nodded, not trusting what my voice would sound like.

Matt and Julie, our EMTs from earlier, were carrying a stretcher sideways through the trees. Apparently they'd had to wait for us all. I'd actually expected the shift to have changed or something.

Edward said, "We've searched the woods. They're not here."

"Tell your partner here to go to the hospital," Raborn said.

He gave Ted's smile again and just shook his head. "I'll take Anita where she lets me take her, but I doubt that will include the hospital."

"There's stubborn and there's stupid," Raborn said, "but she's your partner." He walked away from all of us, apparently too disgusted to stick around and see who went to the hospital.

Stavros looked at me, gun pointed at the pale light of the sky. "Too-rapid healing causes pain? I thought it just healed if you had lycanthropy."

"It can," I said, in a voice that was thin with strain, "but sometimes it does this."

"Is the healing worth it?" she asked.

I nodded. "Yeah."

The EMTs were here. Edward and I walked Newman to the ambulance. Edward also talked to me about the arm and the muscle twitching. "If it scarred that badly and you were human, I'd be worried you'd lose mobility."

"That's what they said about my left arm and the scar tissue at the bend, but as long as I hit the weights regularly I'm fine."

He stepped on top of the log, not over. When you're in the woods long enough you step on logs, not over, in case of snakes. It just becomes automatic so you can look before you step.

"The new one is a longer scar and involves more muscles and tendons."

"What are you wanting me to do?"

"See if the doctors can do anything for it."

"The EMTs said they'd cut it open and stitch it to keep it from scarring."

"If you do that, then you can feed the ardeur and it'll be all better."

I gave him an unfriendly look as we followed the stretcher onto the road, and the morning light was suddenly more serious without the trees blocking it.

"I don't like stitches," I said.

He grinned at me. "No one does."

"If I wimp out you'll never let me live this down, will you?"

He grinned wider and shook his head. "Not if you lose mobility in the arm, and get us killed because of it." The grin faded, and his eyes went serious. "I'll hold your hand."

I glared at him. "Oh, that'll make it all better."

"I don't offer to hold hands with the other marshals."

We had a moment of looking at each other, a moment of years of guarding each other's backs, of being friends. I nodded. "Thanks."

He smiled, but his eyes were still too serious for it. "You're welcome, but save the thanks until after you finish cursing me."

"Why will I curse you?"

"The rapid healing means drugs go through your body faster than normal, right?"

My arm chose that moment to spasm so hard it almost dropped me to my knees. Edward had to catch me, or I would have fallen. When I could talk, I said, "Yeah."

"Is this the worst injury you've had since you got lycanthropy?"

"Without preternatural healing, yeah," I said. My voice still sounded breathy.

"So you don't know if painkillers still work for you, or if like all lycanthropes drugs run through your system too fast."

I stared up at him. I was already sweating and pale; I couldn't pale anymore without passing out. "Fuck," I said.

"See, I told you you'd curse."

Edward drove me in the SUV with its new scorch marks on the back. We followed the ambulance to the hospital, where we'd find out if painkillers still worked for me. I was betting they didn't. Fuck.