Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘And how will you stop me?’ It was Henry’s face, but the sneering arrogance wasn’t; it was like a stranger using the other man’s face.

‘Like this.’ I called the ardeur , and I prayed that I could use it like a gentle scalpel to cut away only what needed to be gone but save the rest. I wanted to free Henry, not enslave him to me. My cross flared bright and brighter as I leaned down and laid the gentlest of kisses on his mouth. I thrust my power through that kiss and into him. The Lover of Death fought back, and if it had been night maybe he could have kept Henry, but it was daylight and I was a creature of the day, I had slain the Father of the Day, and taken over his powers as the Queen of Tigers, and from the Mother of All Darkness I had inherited the ability to break the unbreakable bonds between animal to call and master vampire, between vampire and their blood-oathed Master of the City, and between human servant and vampire master. It had been her gift and she had tried to use it on me more than once, and any vampire power that was used on me had a percentage chance of becoming mine forever. I was the weapon that the vampires had created, the perfect nemesis that the Mother of All Darkness, the Living Night, had forged simply by hitting me often enough and hard enough with the fires of her insane power.

Every holy object in the room flared so that I was physically blind to everything but the white light, but the parts of my eyes that saw in dreams, they saw the vampire as the light chased down the tie that bound Henry to him and burned it up like a fuse. I tried to thrust that light into the vampire himself, but he turned those night-dark eyes to me and whispered inside my mind, ‘You have taken my servant, but you cannot take me. And now that you know I am alive I must destroy you, Anita Blake.’

I thought at him and ‘heard’ the words in the air of his hiding place. ‘Right back at you, Morte d’Amour.’

Then he was gone, the cave or whatever it had been lost to my inner sight. I came back to myself straddling Henry’s chest, the holy objects fading back to simple metal, and me rising up from the kiss.

I stared into Henry’s eyes from inches away; they were too wide, lips parted, pulse beating in his throat like a trapped thing. I had a moment for my bloodlust to see that pulse, like candy to be licked away at until the juicy center popped in my mouth, but I’d worked too hard to free him to hurt him now. I wasn’t new at this game anymore; I didn’t have to touch his neck. I moved off, so that I was sitting on as much of the bed as his broad shoulders left, but at least I wasn’t straddling him. It was hard to have serious conversations with a man while you were straddling any part of his body.

‘You okay?’ I asked, and my voice sounded a little breathless, as if it had been hard work or something.

He looked around the room as if afraid of what he’d see, and then he said, ‘I think so.’

Dr Aimes came over to the side of the bed and started checking his vitals. I think it was more for something normal to do than because he felt he needed to get Henry’s temperature and pulse rate.

Nicky helped me down off the bed and then started handing me my weapons back. Al came over to us. He looked pale. ‘I didn’t think any of that was possible.’

‘Things are only impossible until you find someone who can do it,’ I said, as I tucked the last gun back in place.

‘I guess so. So he made Henry his human servant?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is that like someone who they bite a couple of times or something?’

‘No, the really powerful ones don’t have to lay a fang on someone to make them a servant.’

‘I thought they had to bite you first.’

‘Nope,’ I said.

His phone rang, and he checked the Caller ID. ‘Sorry, got to take this, glad you were able to help Little Henry.’ He left to take his phone call.

Dr Aimes came over to me. ‘I don’t understand everything that just happened, but he seems perfectly fine now, a little shaken, but fine.’

‘If you don’t believe in angels I can’t explain it to you,’ I said with a smile.

‘Are you saying you’re an angel, Marshal Blake?’

I laughed. ‘An angel, no, I would never claim that.’

‘You were covered in white light at the end, almost completely hidden by the white glow of the crosses, and when you kissed him I swear I saw the light travel from your mouth into him.’

‘I prayed for guidance to be able to free him without him coming to any more harm.’ Yes, that was an edited version of what I’d prayed for, but God is okay with not explaining everything to everybody; if he weren’t, he’d have left more explicit instructions for the rest of us.

‘For a moment I could have sworn I saw wings in the light,’ Aimes said.

I smiled and looked at Nicky. ‘You see wings?’

He shook his head.

I smiled at the doctor. ‘If you saw wings, Dr Aimes, they weren’t mine.’

‘Whose were they, then?’

I smiled wider. ‘I believe in angels, remember.’

He looked shaken. ‘You’ll drive a man to drink, or to church, saying things like that, Marshal.’

‘It’s not my job to drive you to church and not my intention to drive you to drink.’

Dr Aimes looked at me. He had a look I’d seen before, but it was usually the first time people see a ghost, or a vampire, and they get good and truly scared for the first time.

‘What is your intention, Marshal Blake?’

‘I want to question Henry and see if we can get a clue where the vampire’s body is. If we can destroy the original body, we can end this.’

‘I’ll leave you to question Mr Crawford. I think I’ll go get that drink.’

‘On duty?’ I said.

‘If any good science-loving atheist wouldn’t need a drink after what I just saw, he’s a better disbeliever than I am.’ With that, he left.

The other cops were almost evenly divided between being scared by what they’d seen and being so impressed that it was almost worse, because I wasn’t sure what they’d expect me to be able to do next time. Aimes hadn’t been the only one who saw the white-shadowed outline of wings. I told them it was an answer to prayer, not me personally. I finally told one overly solicitous uniform, ‘Trust me, I’m no angel.’

Nicky started laughing and couldn’t seem to stop.

‘Yuk it up, lion boy.’

That made him laugh harder, until he had to lean against the wall with tears trailing down from his eye. At least his laughing stopped any more weird theological questions; they just couldn’t seem to talk about angels with this big, muscled bad-ass guy laughing his ass off beside me.

My phone rang, and it was Ted Nugent’s ‘Bad to the Bone,’ which was Edward’s ring tone.

‘Hey, Ted, what’s up?’

‘All the older crime scenes that we found today were in Callahan’s district almost without exception.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I don’t think the sheriff was targeted by accident. Gutterman says that Callahan senior visited the isolated houses regularly, had coffee with them, checked on his older couples, or people with disabilities, anyone he was concerned about.’

‘I take it those were a lot of the people who got hit,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

I said, ‘Hang on a minute, Ted.’ I turned to the cops and nurses with Henry. ‘I’m going to take this call. I’ll be right back; I have a few questions for you, Mr Crawford.’

‘Marshal Blake, you just saved my immortal soul; you can call me Little Henry.’

I smiled. ‘I don’t know about your soul, I think that was yours either way, but I can’t call you Little Henry when you’re over a foot taller than me.’