Dead Ice Read online

  Copyright (c) 2015 Laurell K. Hamilton The right of Laurell K. Hamilton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in the United States of America in 2015 by BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This Ebook edition was first published by Headline Publishing Group in 2015

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library eISBN: 978 0 7553 8909 4

  Jacket photograph (c) Clayton Bastiani/Trevillion Images HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Laurell K. Hamilton

  Praise

  About the Book

  Also by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  About Laurell K. Hamilton

  (c) Stefan Hester

  Laurell K. Hamilton is the bestselling author of the acclaimed Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novels. She lives near St Louis with her husband, her daughter, two dogs and an ever-fluctuating number of fish. She invites you to visit her website at www.laurellkhamilton.org.

  Reviews for the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novels

  'Hamilton remains one of the most inventive and exciting writers in the paranormal field' Charlaine Harris 'Anita Blake is one of the most fascinating fictional heroines since Scarlett O'Hara' Publishers Weekly

  'What The Da Vinci Code did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel' USA Today

  'Wildly popular' Entertainment Weekly

  'Hamilton's complex, enthralling world is utterly absorbing' Booklist

  'A hardcore guilty pleasure' The Times

  'Always very, very sexy and exciting' Dreamwatch

  'This fast-paced, tough-edged supernatural thriller is mesmerizing reading indeed' Locus

  'The action never stops' The New York Review of Science Fiction

  'Supernatural bad guys beware, night-prowling Anita Blake is savvy, sassy and tough' P N Elrod 'I was enthralled by a departure from the usual type of vampire tale' Andre Norton 'A real rush . . . a heady mix of romance and horror' Jayne Ann Krentz

  About the Book

  My name is Anita Blake and I have the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the country. I'm a U.S. Marshal who can raise zombies with the best of them. But ever since master vampire Jean-Claude and I went public with our engagement, all I am to anyone and everyone is Jean-Claude's fiancee.

  It's wreaking havoc with my reputation as a hard ass - to some extent. Luckily, in professional circles, I'm still the go-to expert for zombie issues. And right now, the FBI is having one hell of a zombie issue.

  Someone is producing zombie porn. I've seen my share of freaky undead fetishes, so this shouldn't bother me. But the women being victimised aren't just mindless, rotting corpses. Their souls are trapped behind their eyes, signalling voodoo of the blackest kind.

  It's the sort of case that can leave a mark on a person. And my own soul may not survive unscathed . . .

  Also by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novels

  GUILTY PLEASURES

  THE LAUGHING CORPSE

  CIRCUS OF THE DAMNED

  THE LUNATIC CAFE

  BLOODY BONES

  THE KILLING DANCE

  BURNT OFFERINGS

  BLUE MOON

  OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY

  NARCISSUS IN CHAINS

  CERULEAN SINS

  INCUBUS DREAMS

  MICAH and STRANGE CANDY

  DANSE MACABRE

  THE HARLEQUIN

  BLOOD NOIR

  SKIN TRADE

  FLIRT

  BULLET

  HIT LIST

  KISS THE DEAD

  AFFLICTION

  JASON

  DEAD ICE

  eSpecials

  BEAUTY

  DANCING

  I could not be with someone who did not understand my darkness

  as deeply as they understand my light,

  for one without the other is only half of me,

  and if you love me, love all of me, or love me not at all.

  To Jonathon, my husband,

  who loves all of me, as I love all of him.

  To Genevieve, our lady love, and her husband, Spike,

  two other walkers in the darkness of the light,

  who have joined us on this journey

  to find ourselves and each other.

  Acknowledgments

  To Shawn, who has been a constant in my life, as I have been in his--friendship forged in fire, loss, and laughter. To Jessica, who taught me competency is a superpower! Will, who helps with research, and answers odd questions without thinking them odd. They saw a book from inception to completion for the first time. Welcome to the literary salt mines. Sherry who feels she has allies at last in the battle to organize a house full of artists. Mary, my mother-in-law, whom we love. To the Word Posse--my writer's groups new venture. I hope it makes all your dreams come true! And last, but not least, to Sasquatch, who sits by my side as I write, and has sat with me through many a long night for fourteen years. To Keiko and Mordor, who have been sitting at my side for only a couple of years, new furry muses to help me write.

  Thanks to Peter Orca for the title Dead Ice, and to Isis Maria Hess for naming the jewelry store creating Anita and Jean-Claude's rings: Etoile du Soir, or "Evening Star."

  And for Susan Allison, my editor for over a decade. She was able to retire early and I'm happy for her, but sad that this is the last book she will be ferrying through for me. Enjoy th
e horses, dog(s), your husband, and yourself, as you embark on the next great adventure.

  1

  "SO, YOU'RE ENGAGED," Special Agent Brenda Manning said. She wore a black pantsuit with a heavy belt that could wrap around her waist and hold the gun at her side. She was FBI and didn't have to worry about concealed carry, so the fact that her gun flashed when her suit jacket flared out, which was every time she moved, wasn't an issue. The gun looked very stark against her white button-down shirt.

  "Yep," I said. My own gun was at the small of my back, underneath a suit jacket made to hide the gun from the clients at my other job. I'd also started getting belt loops added to my skirts so I could wear a belt that could stand up to the weight of a gun and holster. I'd come straight from Animators Inc., where the motto was "Where the Living Raise the Dead for a Killing." Bert, our business manager, didn't believe in hiding the fact that raising the dead was a rare talent, and you paid for talent. But lately my job as a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch had been taking more and more of my time. Like today.

  The other very special agent, Mark Brent, tall, thin, and looking barely old enough to be out of college, was bent over the portable computer they'd brought with them, which was sitting on the room's only desk. He was dressed in a suit almost identical to Manning's except his was brown to match his holster, but his gun was still a black bump, stark against his white shirt. We were in the office of our head honcho, Lieutenant Rudolph Storr. Dolph was currently somewhere else, which left me alone with the FBI and Sergeant Zerbrowski. I wasn't sure which was more dangerous to my peace of mind, but I knew Zerbrowski would mouth off more. He was my partner, my friend; he was entitled. I'd just met Special Agent Manning, and I didn't owe her my life story.

  "The article I read made the proposal sound amazing, like something out of a fairy tale," Manning said. She smoothed her shoulder-length hair back behind one ear and it stayed put, because it was straight as a board. My own curls would never have behaved that well.

  I fought the urge to sigh. If you're a cop and a woman, never date a celebrity; it ruins your reputation for being a hardass. I was a U.S. Marshal, but ever since we'd gone public with our engagement I'd become Jean-Claude's fiancee, not Marshal Blake, to most of the women I met, and a lot of the men. I'd really had hopes that the FBI would be above such things in the middle of crime-fighting, but apparently not.

  The real problem for me was that the story we told publicly was both true and a lie. Jean-Claude had done the big gesture, but only after he'd proposed in the middle of shower sex. It had been spontaneous and wonderful and messy, and very real. I'd said yes, which had surprised him, and me. I'd figured I just wasn't the marrying kind of girl. He'd told me then that we'd need to do something to live up to his reputation for the media and the other vampires. They expected their king/president to have a certain flair, and the real proposal was too mundane. I hadn't understood that flair would include a horse-drawn carriage--yeah, you heard me; he'd actually picked me up in a freaking horse-drawn carriage. If I hadn't already said yes, and loved him to pieces, I'd have told him not only no, but hell no. Only true love had gotten me to play along with a proposal so grand that trying to imagine a wedding that topped it sort of scared me.

  "Oh, yeah, Anita is all into that princess stuff, aren't you, Anita?" Zerbrowski called from the chair he was half-tipping against the wall. He looked like he'd slept in his suit, complete with a stain on his crooked tie. I knew he'd left his home freshly washed and tidy, but he was like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comic: Dirt and mess just seemed to be attracted to him within minutes of his walking out of his house. His salt-and-pepper hair was getting more salt and less pepper, and had grown out enough to be all messy curls, which he kept running his hands through. Only his silver-framed glasses were clean, square and gleaming around his brown eyes.

  "Yeah, I'm all about that princess shit, Zerbrowski," I said.

  Agent Manning frowned at both of us. "I'm getting the idea that I stepped in something. I was just trying to be friendly."

  "No, you were wanting the princess to talk about how wonderful the prince is, and how he swept her off her feet," Zerbrowski said, "but Anita is going to disappoint you like she's disappointed the last dozen women to ask questions about the big romantic gesture."

  I wanted to say, it wasn't a big romantic gesture, it was a freaking epic romantic gesture and I had hated it. Jean-Claude had loved being able to finally pull out all the stops and just do what, apparently, he'd wanted to do for years while we dated--the whole princely sweep-you-off-your-feet shit. I liked to keep my feet firmly on the ground unless sex was involved, and you can't really have sex in a horse-drawn carriage; it scares the horses. No, we didn't try, because we were on freaking camera the whole time. Apparently, there are now engagement coordinators just like there are wedding coordinators, so of course we had a videographer. It had been all I could do to keep from scowling through all of it, so I'd smiled for the camera so I wouldn't hurt Jean-Claude's feelings, but it's not my real smile, and my eyes in a few frames have that "wait until we're alone, mister, we are so talking about this" look.

  I decided to appeal to Manning's sisterhood of the badge and said, "Sorry, Agent Manning, but ever since the story went live I'm getting treated more like Jean-Claude's girlfriend than a marshal, and it's really beginning to bug me."

  Her face went serious. "I'm sorry, I hadn't thought about it like that. Years of being one of the guys and building your rep, and I ask you about your engagement first thing."

  "I've never seen my partner be so girly about anything as meeting you today, Marshal Blake," Brent said as he unbent from hunching over the computer. He smiled and it made him look even younger. He seemed fresh-faced and less jaded than the rest of us. Ah, to be bright and shiny again, when you thought you could actually win the fight against evil.

  Manning looked embarrassed, which isn't something you see often in FBI agents, especially not when you've just met them.

  "Knock it off, Brent," she said.

  He grinned at all of us. "It's just that we've worked together for two years, and I've never seen you squee over anything."

  "It's the horse-drawn carriage," Zerbrowski said. "Chicks dig that kind of shit."

  "Not this chick," I said, quietly under my breath.

  "What did you say?" Manning asked.

  "Nothing. Is the video ready, Agent Brent?" I asked, hopeful we could actually do our jobs and leave my personal life out of it.

  "Yes," he said, but then his smile faded around the edges, and I saw the beginnings of the bright and shiny rubbing off. "Though after you see it we may all be game to talk about carriages and pretty, pretty princesses."

  It was another first, an FBI agent admitting that something bothered him. For them to admit it out loud, it had to be bad. I suddenly didn't want to see it. I didn't want to add another nightmare to the visuals I had in my head. I was a legal vampire executioner and raised zombies as my psychic talent; I had plenty of scary shit in my head and I so didn't need more, but I stayed in my chair. If Manning and Brent were tough enough to watch it multiple times, I could sit through it once. I couldn't let the other badges think that getting proposed to by the vampire of my dreams made me one bit less tough. I couldn't let myself believe it, either, though a part of me did. How could someone who let a man lead her into a Cinderella carriage carry a gun and execute bad guys? It made even my head hurt, thinking about it.

  Zerbrowski said what I was thinking. "I thought the Feds never admitted anything bothered them."

  Agent Brent shook his head and looked tired. Lines showed around his eyes that I hadn't seen before and made me add between three to five years onto his age. "I've worked in law enforcement for six years. I'd thought I'd seen it all, until this."

  I did the math in my head and realized he had to be around thirty, the same as me, but I'd used up my shininess years ago.

  "I thought this was just another big bad preternatural citizen gone wrong," I said.


  "Not exactly," he said.

  "I don't like mysteries, Agent Brent. I'm only here on this little information out of courtesy to the FBI, and because Lieutenant Storr requested it."

  "We appreciate that, Marshal, and we wouldn't have had you walk into this blind if we didn't feel that the fewer people who know the details, the better off we're going to be," Brent said.

  "Awesome," I said, "but the foreplay is getting a little tiresome; there's no one in the room but the four of us, so what is on the video?"

  "Are you always this cranky?" Manning asked.

  Zerbrowski laughed out loud and didn't even try to hold it in. "Oh, Agent Manning, this isn't even close to cranky for my partner."

  "We heard that about her, and you're right, Blake. I did come in here expecting the proposal to have softened that reputation. I didn't think I had that much girl left in me, and if I'm assuming that it softened you up, then your male colleagues must be making your life . . . difficult."

  It was my turn to laugh. "That's one way of putting it, but honestly it's the whole engaged-to-a-vampire thing that's making some of my fellow officers doubt whose side I'm on."

  "Vampires are legal citizens now, with all the rights that entails," she said.

  "Legally, yeah, but prejudice doesn't go away just because a law changes."

  "You're right about that," she said. "In fact, some at the bureau thought we shouldn't include you in this case because of your proclivity to date the preternatural."

  "Proclivity, that's polite; so what made you decide to trust me?"

  "You still have the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the United States, and only Denis-Luc St. John has more rogue lycanthrope kills than you."

  "He raises Troll-Hounds; they're the only breed of dog ever raised specifically to hunt supernatural prey. It makes him the king of tracking through wilderness areas, after shapeshifters."

  "Are you implying that the dogs make him better at the job, or that he's somehow cheating by using them?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "Neither, just a statement of fact."

  "Now that Anita has passed muster, and I'm included because I'm her friend, show us some skin, agents, or stop teasing," Zerbrowski said.

  "Oh, you'll see skin," Brent said, and he looked older again, as if this case in particular were rubbing the shine away.

  "What the hell is on the video, Agent Brent?" I asked.

  "Zombie porn," Brent said, and hit the arrow in the middle of the screen.

  2