Лорел Гамильтон - Obsidian Butterfly

I shook my head. "I've never seen anything like the survivors." I laughed, but it wasn't a happy sound. "If survivor is the word for them. What kind of life are they going to have, if they live?" I hugged myself tighter, staring at the ground, trying not to think.

"I've been having nightmares," Ramirez said.

I looked up at him. Police don't admit things like that often, especially not to civilian consultants that they've just met. We looked at each other, and his eyes were so gentle, so genuine. Unless he was a much better actor than I thought he was, Ramirez was letting me see the real him. I appreciated it, but didn't know how to say it out loud. You don't verbalize something like that. The best you can do is return the favor. The trouble was, I wasn't sure what the real me was anymore. I didn't know what to put in my eyes. I didn't know what to let him see. I finally stopped trying to pick and choose, and think I settled for confused, bordering on scared.

He touched my shoulder lightly. When I didn't say anything, he moved into me, wrapping his arms across my back, holding me against him. I stayed stiff in his arms for a second or two, but didn't pull away. I relaxed against him in inches, until my head rested in the curve of his neck, my arms tentatively, around his waist. He whispered, "It will be all right, Anita."

I shook my head against his shoulder. "I don't think so."

He tried to see my face but I was standing too close, at too awkward an angle. I pulled back so he could see my face, and suddenly I felt awkward standing there with my arms around a stranger. I pulled away, and he let me go, only keeping the fingers of one hand grasped in his. He gave my hand a little shake. "Talk to me, Anita, please."

"I've been doing cases like this for about five years. When I'm not looking at the messily dead, I'm hunting vampires, rogue shapeshifters, you name it."

His was holding my hand solidly now, wrapped in the warmth of his skin. I didn't pull away. I needed something human to hold onto. I tried to put into words what I'd been thinking for awhile now. "A lot of cops never use their guns, not in thirty years. I've lost count of how many people I've killed." His hand tightened on mine, but he didn't interrupt. "When I started out, I thought vampires were monsters. I really believed it. But lately I'm not so sure. And regardless of what they are, they look very human. I could get a call tomorrow that would send me down to the morgue to put a stake through the heart of a body that looks every bit as human as you and me. Once I've got a court order of execution, I am legally sanctioned to shoot and kill the Vampire or vampires in question, and anyone that stands in my way. That includes human servants or people with just a bite on them. One bite, two bites, they can be healed, cured. But I've killed them to save myself, to save others."

"You did what you had to do."

I nodded. "Maybe, maybe, but that doesn't really matter anymore. It doesn't matter whether I'm right to do it, or not. Just because it's a righteous kill doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. I use to think that if I was right, it would he enough, but it's not."

He drew me a little closer with his hand. "What are you saying?"

I smiled. "I need a vacation."

He laughed then, and it was a good laugh, open and joyous, nothing special about it but his own astonishment. I'd heard better laughs but none when I needed it more. "A vacation, just a vacation?"

I shrugged. "I don't see myself taking up flower arranging, Detective Ramirez."

"Hernando," he said.

I nodded. "Hernando. This is part of who I am." I realized we were still holding hands, and I drew away from him. He let me, no protest. "Maybe if I take a break, I'll be able to do it again."

"What if a vacation isn't enough?" he asked.

"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it." It wasn't just the brutal day in and day out of the job. My reaction to Bernardo's body and letting a perfect stranger comfort me were so unlike me. I was missing the guys, but it was more than that. When I left Richard, I left the pack, all my werewolf friends.

When I left Jean-Claude, I lost all the vamps, and strangely one or two of them were friends. You can be friends with a vampire as long as you remember that they are monsters and not human beings. How you can do both at the same time, I can't really explain, but I manage.

I hadn't just cut myself off from the men in my life for six months. I'd cut myself off from my friends. Even Ronnie, Veronica Sims, one of my few human friends had a new hot romance. She was dating Richard's best friend which made socializing awkward. Catherine, my lawyer and friend, had only been married two years, and I didn't like to interfere with her and Bob.

"You're thinking something very serious," Ramirez said.

I blinked and looked at him. "Just realizing how isolated I am even back home. Here, I am so … " I shook my head without finishing it.

He smiled. "You're only isolated if you want to be, Anita. I've offered to show you the local sights."

I shook my head. "Thanks, really. Under other circumstances, I'd say, yes."

"What's stopping you?" he asked.

"The case for one. If I start dating one of the local cops, then my credibility goes down the tubes, and I'm not too high on some lists already."

"What else?" He had a very gentle face, soft, as if he would be very gentle in everything he did.

"I've got two men waiting back home. Waiting to see who I'm going to choose, or if I'm dumping both of them."

His eyes widened. "Two. I'm impressed."

I shook my head. "Don't be. My personal life is a mess."

"Sorry to hear that."

"I can't believe I just told you all that. It isn't like me."

"I'm a good listener."

"Yeah, you are."

"May I escort you back?"

I smiled at the old-fashioned phrasing. "Can you answer some questions first?"

"Ask." He sat down on the ground in his dark brown pants, lifting the pant legs so they wouldn't bunch.

I sat down beside him. "Who called the police?"

"A guest."

"Where is he or she?"

"Hospital. Severe shock brought on by trauma."

"No physical injuries?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Who were the mutilation vics this time?"

"The wife's brother and two nephews, all over twenty. They lived and worked on the ranch."

"What about the other guests? Where were they?"

He closed his eyes, as if visualizing the page. "Most of them were off on a planned outing, an overnight camping trip into the mountains. But the rest borrowed the ranch cars that are kept for the guests' use and left."

"Let me guess," I said. "They just felt restless, jittery, had to get out of the house."

Ramirez nodded. "Just like the neighbors around all the other houses."

"It's a spell, Ramirez," I said.

"Don't make me ask you again to use my first name."

I smiled and looked away from the teasing look in his eyes. "Hernando, this is either a spell or some sort of ability the creature possesses to cause fear, dread, in the ones it doesn't want to kill or hurt. But I'm betting on a spell."

"Why?"

"Because it's too selective to be a natural anxiety like a vampire's ability to hypnotize with its eyes. A vamp can bespell one person or a room full of people, but it can't do an entire street except for one house. It's too exact. You need to be able to organize your magic for this, and that means a spell."

He picked one of the rough-looking blades of grass, running it between his fingers. "So we're looking for a witch."

"I know something about wiccan and other flavors of witchcraft, and I don't know any way a lone wiccan, or even a coven could do this. I'm not saying there isn't a human spell worker involved somewhere, but there is definitely something otherworldly, nonhuman, at work here."