[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade Read online

  “And what was that?”

  “A hole in his head, and a hole in his heart big enough to see daylight through.”

  “I’ll help you do it.”

  “I didn’t think undersheriffs did fieldwork.”

  “For this one, I’ll make an exception. When can you get here?”

  “I’ll have to check the airline schedule, and I’ll have to check the regulations for my vampire kit. Seems like the rules change every time I have to fly.”

  “Our marshal didn’t carry anything special on him that you couldn’t get on a plane with if you’ve passed the air marshal test.”

  I thought to myself, Maybe that’s why he’s dead. Out loud, I said, “I’m bringing phosphorus grenades if I can get them on the plane.”

  “Phosphorus grenades, no shit.”

  “No shit.”

  “They work on vampires?”

  “They work on everything, Shaw, and water makes them burn hotter.”

  “You ever seen a man dive into water, thinking it will put it out, but it just flares?” Shaw asked.

  I had a sudden picture in my head of a ghoul that had run through a stream trying to get away. He, or one of his pack, had killed a homeless man who’d fallen asleep in the cemetery where the ghouls had come out of the graves. They’d never have attacked him awake, but they still ate him, and that still earned them an extermination. I’d just been backup for a flamethrower team of exterminators. But ghouls that are brave enough to attack and kill the living rather than just scavenge the dead can turn deadly. Which means you don’t send civilians in without badges to back them. It’d been the first time I’d used the grenades. They worked better than anything I’d ever used on ghouls. When they go bad, they are as strong as a vampire, faster and stronger than a zombie, immune to silver bullets, and almost impossible to kill with anything but fire. “I saw some run through a stream. The phosphorus flared up around them like a hot, white aura everywhere the water splashed. So bright, the water sparked in the light.”

  “And the men screamed for a long time,” Shaw said.

  “Yeah, ghouls, but yeah, they did.” I heard my voice utterly cold. I couldn’t afford to feel anything yet.

  “I thought modern phosphorus didn’t do all that,” he said.

  “Everything old is new again,” I said.

  “I’m beginning to see why the vampires think you’re scary, Blake.”

  “The grenades aren’t what make me scary, Shaw.”

  “What does?” he asked.

  “That I’m willing to use them.”

  “It’s not being willing to use them, Blake. It’s being willing to use them again.”

  I thought about that, and finally said, “Yeah.”

  “Call me when you have your flight arranged.” His voice was unhappy with me, as if I’d said something else that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I know. Give me your direct number, if you’re my go-to guy.”

  He sighed loud enough for me to hear it. “Yeah, I’m your go-to guy.” He gave me his extension and his cell phone number. “We’re not going to wait for you, Blake. If we can catch these bastards, we will.”

  “The warrant of execution died with your vampire executioner, Shaw. If you guys kill them without me or another executioner with you, then you’ll be looking at charges.”

  “If we find them, and we hesitate, they’ll kill us.”

  “I know that.”

  “So what are you telling me to do?”

  “I’m reminding you of the law.”

  “What if I said I don’t need a fucking executioner to remind me of the law?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I have a friend with a private plane. That’s probably the fastest way to get to you.”

  “Your friend, or your master?”

  “What did I say to piss you off, Shaw?”

  “I’m not sure; maybe you just reminded me of something I didn’t want to remember. Maybe you just made sure I know what may have to happen in my town before this is over.”

  “If you want pretty lies, you have the wrong marshal.”

  “I heard that about you, that and that you’ll fuck anything that moves.”

  Yeah, I’d pissed him off. “Don’t worry, Shaw, your virtue is safe.”

  “Why, not pretty enough for you?”

  “Probably not, but I don’t do cops.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Monsters.” I hung up. I shouldn’t have. I should have explained the rumors, and how it wasn’t true, and how I had never let sex interfere in a case, much. But there comes a point when you just get tired of explaining yourself. And, let’s face it, you can’t prove a negative. I couldn’t prove I didn’t sleep around. I could only do my job to the best of my ability and try to stay alive, oh, and try to keep everyone else alive. And kill the bad vampires. Yeah, mustn’t forget that part.

  I had other phone calls to make before I could leave town. Cell phones are wonderful things. First call was to Larry Kirkland, fellow U.S. Marshal and vampire executioner. He answered his own cell phone on the second ring. “Hey, Anita, what’s up?” He still sounds young and fresh, but in the four years we’d known each other, he’d acquired his first scars, along with a wife and baby, and was still the main person for the morgue stakings. He had also refused to kill the shoplifter. In fact, he’d been the one who called me from the morgue to ask what the hell to do about it. He’s about my height, with bright red hair that would curl if he didn’t cut it so short, freckles, the works. He looks like he should be going out with Tom Sawyer to play tricks on little Becky, but he’s stood shoulder to shoulder with me in some bad places. If he had one fault, other than that I wasn’t entirely a fan of his wife, it was that he wasn’t a shooter. He still thought more like a cop than an assassin, and sometimes that wasn’t good in our line of work. Oh, and what did I have against his wife, Detective Tammy Reynolds? She didn’t approve of my choices in boyfriends, and she kept wanting to convert me to her sect of Christianity, which was a little too Gnostic for me. In fact, it was one of the last Gnostic-based forms of Christianity to have survived the early days of the church. It allowed for witches, read psychics in this case. Tammy thought I’d be a fine Sister of the Faith. Larry was now a Brother of the Faith, since he, like me, could raise zombies from the grave. It’s not evil if you’re doing it for the church.

  “I’ve got to fly to Vegas on a warrant.”

  “You need me to cover while you’re gone?” he made it a question.

  “Yep.”

  “Then you’re covered,” he said.

  I thought about giving him more details, but I was afraid he’d want to come with me. Endangering myself was one thing, endangering Larry was another. Part of it was that he was married and had a baby; the other part was that I just felt protective of him. He was only a few years younger than me, but there was something still soft about him. I valued that, and feared it. Soft either goes away in our business or gets you killed.

  “Thanks, Larry. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “Aren’t I always?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  We hung up. He’d be pissed when he learned the details about Vegas. Pissed that I hadn’t confided in him, and pissed that I was still protecting him. But pissed I could live with; dead, I wasn’t sure about.

  I also called New Orleans. Their local vampire hunter, Denis-Luc St. John, had made me promise that if Vittorio ever resurfaced I’d give him a chance to get a piece of the hunt. St. John had almost been one of Vittorio’s victims. Months in the hospital and rehab after had made him pretty adamant about helping kill the vampire that put him through all that.

  It was a woman’s voice on the other end of the phone, which surprised me. To my knowledge, St. John didn’t have a wife. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I have the right number. I’m looking for Denis-Luc St. John.”

  “Who is this
?” the woman asked.

  “U.S. Marshal Anita Blake.”

  “The vampire executioner,” and she made it sound like a bad thing.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Denis-Luc’s sister.” She said Denis-Luc with an accent I couldn’t match.

  “Hi, could I speak to your brother?”

  “He’s out, but I’ll give him a message.”

  “Okay.” I told her about Vittorio.

  “You mean the vampire that nearly killed him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why would you even call him?” Her voice was definitely hostile now.

  “Because he made me promise that if this vampire resurfaced I would call him and given him another crack at it.”

  “That sounds like my brother.” Again, she didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Will you give him the message?”

  “Sure.” Then she hung up on me.

  I wasn’t sure I believed that the sister would give him the message, but it was the only number I had for St. John. I could have called the local police and probably gotten a message to him, but what if I did, and this time Vittorio killed him? What would I say to his sister then? I left it in her hands. If she gave him the message, fine; if she didn’t, then not my bad. Either way, I’d kept my promise and wouldn’t be getting him killed. It seemed like a win-win to me.

  3

  IN THE MOVIES, you always see the hero just getting on a plane and going off to fight the bad guys; in reality, you’ve got to pack first. Clothes I could probably have bought in Vegas, but the weapons . . . those I needed.

  Home, for the moment, was underneath the Circus of the Damned. Sort of like the old idea of a store owner living above his shop, except when you’re shacking up with a vampire, windows are bad; cavernous underground, good. Besides, it was also one of the most defensible places in all of St. Louis. When your vampie sweetie is also the Master of the City, you have to worry about defense. Not humans anymore, but other vampires wanting to take a bite of your action. Okay, once it had been a group of rogue shapeshifters, but the problem was the same. Monsters outside the law were as dangerous as humans outside it, but with more skills.

  Which was why I knew there were guards watching me as I parked and went to the back door. I always had to resist the urge to wave. It was supposed to be a secret that they were watching, so waving was out.

  My cell phone rang as I was digging out my keys for the back door. The music had changed again; now it was “Wild Boys” by Duran Duran. Nathaniel found it amusing that I couldn’t figure out how to program my own ring tone, so he changed it periodically without warning. Apparently, this was my default ring tone now. Boys.

  “Blake here.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone stopped me dead in the parking lot. “Anita, it’s Edward.”

  Edward was an assassin who specialized in killing monsters because humans had become too easy. As Ted Forrester he was a U.S. Marshal and fellow vampire executioner. By any name he was one of the most efficient killers I’d ever met. “What’s wrong, Edward?”

  “Nothing on my end, but I hear you’re having a hell of an interesting time.”

  I stood there in the summer’s heat, keys dangling from my hand, and was scared. “What are you talking about, Edward?”

  “Tell me you were going to call and have me meet you in Vegas. Tell me you weren’t going to hunt this one without inviting me to come play.”

  “How the hell did you know about it?” Once upon a time, not that long ago, if anyone died, especially spectacularly, Edward was a good bet for it. I had a moment to wonder if he knew more about Vegas than I did.

  “I’m a U.S. Marshal, too, remember?”

  “Yeah, but I only found out less than an hour ago. How did you rate a call, and from whom?”

  “They killed one of our own, Anita. Cops take that hard.” In one sentence he’d said our own and then talked about the police like he wasn’t one. Edward was like me; we had a badge, but sometimes we didn’t quite fit.

  “How did you find out about it, Edward?”

  “You sound suspicious.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, just talk to me.”

  He took in a deep breath, let it out. “Fair enough. I live in New Mexico, remember? It isn’t that far from Nevada. They’ll probably call up all the western-state executioners.”

  “How did you know to call me?” I asked.

  “They’re only holding the message back from the media, not from other marshals.”

  “So, you know about the writing on the wall; that’s why you called me.” The question was, did he know about the head? How good were his sources these days? Once he’d been like a mysterious guru to me. All-knowing, all-seeing, and better at everything than I was.

  “You telling me that you aren’t going to fly to Vegas to hunt this bastard?”

  “No, I’m definitely going.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said.

  I leaned against the side of the building and said, “You know about the head?”

  “That the vampires took the head of Las Vegas’s executioner, yeah. I’ve been wondering why they took his head. They’re vampires, not ghouls or a rogue zombie. They don’t eat flesh.”

  “Even ghouls that cache food almost never take the head. They prefer meatier bits.”

  “You’ve seen ghoul food caches?” he asked.

  “Once,” I said.

  He gave a small laugh. “Sometimes I forget that about you.”

  “What?”

  “That you are one of the only people who run into weirder shit than I do sometimes.”

  “I don’t know whether to be insulted, flattered, or scared,” I said.

  “Flattered,” he said, and I knew he meant it.

  “They didn’t take the head for eating,” I said.

  “You know what happened to it?”

  “Yep.”

  “What, I need to ask?”

  I sighed. “No,” and I told him about the little present I’d gotten at work this morning.

  He was quiet for so long that I continued talking. “We’re just lucky it came in on the only morning that I do client meetings all day. God knows what Bert, my business manager, would have done with it if I hadn’t been there to make him wait for forensics.”

  “You really think it was coincidence that the package got there on the only morning that you’d be in?” Edward said.

  I leaned a little harder against the wall, clutching the cell phone with one hand and my keys with the other. I suddenly felt exposed out there in the parking lot, because I understood exactly what Edward meant.

  “You think Vittorio’s been monitoring me. That he knows my schedule.” I looked out into the daylit parking lot. There was no place to hide. Daylight meant there weren’t that many cars. I had this sudden desire to be inside, out of sight.

  I put my key in the door and used my shoulder to hold the phone while I opened the door.

  “Yes,” he said. That was Edward: high on truth, low on comfort.

  I spilled in through the door and got it closed behind me before the two guards inside could do much more than push themselves off the wall. They were both in black T-shirts and jeans, only the guns and holsters ruining the casual look. They tried to talk to me, and I waved at them that I was on the phone. They went back to holding up their section of wall, and I went for the far door. The door was one of only two ways into the underground area where Jean-Claude and his vampires slept. It was why we had two guards in the storage room at all times. Boring duty, which meant they were two of the newer hires; I remembered that one of them was Brian, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the other one’s name.

  “Anita, you still there?” Edward asked.

  “Give me a minute to find some privacy.”

  I opened the door leading down and closed it behind me. I was standing at the head of stone steps that led down and down. I kept one hand on the
wall as I started down. High heels were not meant for these steps. Hell, they seemed carved for something that didn’t walk quite like a human being at all. Something bigger than a person, with different legs maybe.

  “Vittorio wouldn’t have come back to St. Louis,” I said.

  “Probably not, but you know better than most vampire hunters that the vampires have other resources.”

  “Yeah, I’m Jean-Claude’s human servant, so Vittorio could have one, too.”

  “Hell, Anita, he could have humans with just a couple of bites. You know that once a vampire uses its gaze on someone and does the whole bite thing, they’ll do anything for their master.”

  “I wouldn’t sense a human with a few bites on them. They hit the radar as just human.”

  “So, yeah, I think you’ve been spied on. I’d tell you not to come, Anita, but I know you won’t listen.”

  I stumbled on the steps and had to catch my balance before I said, “You honestly would tell me to stay home on this one? You, who are always inviting me out to hunt bigger and badder monsters?”

  “This one’s made it personal, Anita. He wants your head.”

  “Thanks for that imagery, after my little present this morning.”

  “I said it on purpose, Anita. You’re like me now; you’ve got people you love, and you don’t want to leave them. I’m just reminding you, like you remind me, that you really do have a choice. You can sit this one out.”

  “You mean stay safe in St. Louis while the rest of you guys hunt this bastard?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can tell me, honestly, that you wouldn’t think less of me for playing it that safe?”

  He didn’t answer for so long that I was almost at the blind corner turn at the halfway point of the stairs. I didn’t prompt him. I just listened to him breathe and concentrated on my heels on the uneven stones.

  “I wouldn’t blame you for staying home.”

  “But you would think less of me,” I said.

  He was quiet. “I’d try not to.”

  “Yeah, and the rest of the cops who already think I’m a girl, and that I’m sleeping with vampires, and that I’m sleeping around with other cops, they wouldn’t think less of me?”