Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘I love that you trust me this much,’ he whispered.

The gag kept me from saying it back to him, but I did trust him that much, I really did.

Real food was had. We left Nathaniel back under the covers to sleep. Edward and I decided to divide and conquer. He would go talk to the local PD and see what they’d learned from the crime scenes and freshly discovered bodies. I’d go to the hospital and question Little Henry and see Micah. Nicky came with me, but Claudia kept Lisandro with her, so that when dark fell he could help manage the Harlequin vampires. They had a poor opinion of shapeshifters in general and had a hard time understanding that the people in charge of our bodyguards were all wereanimals, when vampires were so obviously superior. Yeah, they were beginning to get on everyone’s nerves. She gave me Domino back as a partner with Nicky and me.

‘Claudia, I’m not sure any of the weretigers can. They’re great in practice and as regular bodyguards, but none of them have seen combat or the kind of slaughter we walked into last night.’

‘I need Lisandro to help me with the Harlequin, and that’s that, Anita. You don’t want Dev, and Pride and Nicky don’t work well together. Emmanuel is good, but he’s not seen the hard stuff either. Domino wasn’t trained to be some white knight super-warrior like the gold tigers; he was trained as a mob bodyguard and enforcer who can be pretty brutal.’

‘But it’s not the same kind of brutal as what we faced last night and today.’

‘Look, I don’t have time or energy to debate this; Domino is your guy for now.’ She stood there hands on hips, all six foot six of her, in the conference room where we’d eaten. Her long black hair was in a tight ponytail; no makeup distracted from the high cheekbones and strong features of her face. She was what the Mexicans would call guapa , handsome rather than pretty; there was just too much of her, from the broad, muscled shoulders to the long, muscular legs and all the parts in between to be pretty, or even beautiful, though she was that.

‘How much trouble are you having integrating the Harlequin with our guards?’ I asked.

‘Look, I want to keep all the guards I can around Jean-Claude. The Harlequin are fearsomely good when they aren’t being whiny bitches. Jean-Claude coming here on the spur of the moment is a security nightmare, and now you tell me the rogue master vampire is a necromancer that can raise zombies and inhabit their bodies in daylight. This just gets better and fucking better,’ she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Claudia curse before, which meant she was even more upset than she was letting me see.

‘I’m all better; Jean-Claude can fly home.’

She gave me a look of such scorn that I had to fight not to squirm. ‘He’ll never leave now, not until you’re out of danger.’

‘Danger is sort of my job description,’ I said.

‘And don’t think that doesn’t piss me off, too.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘is this just about security issues, or are you pissed about something else?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about; just go and catch this bastard, so we can all go home.’

‘That’s the plan,’ I said. I left the conference room with Nicky in tow. We were going to pick up Domino from his room at the end of the hallway.

‘What’s got her panties in a twist?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but she’s been on edge for about two weeks,’ Nicky said.

‘This much on edge?’ I asked, looking up at him.

He shook his head. ‘No, not this bad.’

‘Good, because I was about to feel stupid for not noticing that one of our head guards was having some kind of personal issue.’

‘Claudia won’t let it interfere with the job, whatever it is,’ he said.

I nodded, and knew he meant it, but I also knew that even with the best of intentions personal stuff bled onto everything sometimes. But since she didn’t want to talk about it, I would let it go; unless it interfered with her job it really wasn’t any of my business.

Nicky knocked on the room door at the end of the hallway, just by the door marked EXIT . The door opened and it was Domino. He looked slender beside Nicky and Dev. Domino was five foot ten but he was more slender in his build, which made him look taller than he was, because when you looked at him your eye didn’t stop at the shoulders or the chest like it did on the other two weretigers. His two most striking features were his hair and his eyes. The hair was mounded on top in a soft mass of black and white curls; he’d recently started shaving the bottom layer of hair close to his head, so that it was almost a skater cut. The multicolored curls were natural, though he got a lot of club kids and Goths asking him where he’d gotten the great dye job. His hair showed his mixed tiger heritage, half white clan and half black. He was one of only a handful of black weretigers that had lived through the near-extermination of that clan. He’d been found in an orphanage by the white tiger clan; no one knew who his parents had been, only what they had been. He had two tiger forms, one white, one black, and he could also do tigerman form in both. His mixed heritage had made the white tiger clan treat him as not good enough to mate with, for fear of bearing an impure child. The clans mated with each other to keep the genetics healthier, but most babies looked like one side or the other and went to be raised with the clan that they most resembled. Domino was one of only two that I’d met who couldn’t hide his mixed heritage.

His eyes were pure black tiger, like orange flame. They were startling enough that people thought they were contacts, like they thought the hair was dyed. In his black tiger form, those orange tiger eyes were Halloween beautiful. In white tiger form, they marked him as impure, because in every form his tiger eyes stayed the same, like all the clan tigers they were born with the eyes. Though there were clan tigers that had human eyes, they were considered weak by the other tigers and usually only had the form of a giant tiger as their beast.

His smile filled those jack-o’-lantern-colored eyes with such happiness. It made me feel guilty that I hadn’t gone out of my way to greet him when he got to town and that I hadn’t wanted him to bodyguard me today.

‘Hey, Domino,’ I said, and went to him.

He wrapped me in his arms, and I hugged him around the waist. He didn’t have all his weapons on yet, which made it easier to hug, but meant it would take him longer to get ready to go; like so much about dating my bodyguards, it was a mixed blessing.

I went up on tiptoe still wrapped in the hug, so that he didn’t have to bend very far for us to kiss hello. His lips were soft and the kiss softer. It might have grown into something more, but my phone rang and the ring tone was the Hawaii Five-O theme, which was what I used for most police that I worked with occasionally.

Domino knew the ring tone and let me go without a question. He moved back into the room to get his weapons. We followed and shut the door behind us as I answered the phone. It was Hatfield.

‘Blake, everyone here is congratulating us on killing the rogue vampire, but before I celebrate I wanted to ask you and Forrester. Is it dead?’

I liked Hatfield a lot in that moment. ‘No, I’m like ninety-five percent sure it’s not.’

‘I thought you’d say that.’ She didn’t sound happy about being right, but it was honest emotion.

Domino had his gear laid out on the neatly made bed as if he planned to pack it all neatly away. He was casual about a lot of stuff, but not about his job. He’d been trained as a mob bodyguard and enforcer, because the master of the city of Vegas was a mob boss who dated back to the days of Bugsy Siegel. Domino had been playing catch-up in some areas of the guards’ training, because we had more ex-military and ex-police and mercenaries, running our crew, but for sheer brutality he’d probably seen his share. I’d met Max, the Master of Vegas. His first job in the mob had been as a leg-breaker himself, which meant in his day he hadn’t been squeamish about getting his own hands dirty, and expected the same willingness from his people. Domino slipped his vest on and began tightening the straps.