Laurell Hamilton - Hit List

I fought the urge to look out in the hallway where my backup was lingering. I knew what they looked like, and innocent wasn’t a word that anyone would have used to describe them.

“First, Raborn, that is exactly what innocence means under the law, you should know that.” Her voice was going quieter with each word, but the heat in each syllable was notching up. Again, I would have seen the warning signs and acted accordingly, but Raborn seemed past that. He’d let his anger take him to a place that his ass might have trouble getting out of, or maybe I just didn’t understand the normal branch of the service whose badge I carried.

She put her elbows on the arms of her chair, her hands like a double fist in front of her lips. “Second, get the fuck off my desk.” Oh, I did understand the normal branch of the service. It worked just like all the others.

He startled, visibly, back straightening, as if he’d just realized he had touched her desk. He didn’t know me well enough to hate me this much personally, but he had enough of a problem with me that he was hurting his career. What the hell was going on?

She stood, slowly, carefully, and at five-eight she was tall enough in her boots to back him up a little. She managed to loom and seem much taller just by her presence. I’ve been told I can do the same thing, but it was nifty watching it from the other end.

“Marshal Blake is within her rights as a U.S. Marshal of the preternatural branch to deputize people she believes will aid her in executing her warrant in the most efficient and lifesaving manner possible.”

“The law was written for emergency situations in the field,” Raborn said, “when a marshal doesn’t have access to other marshals for backup. It was never intended to allow us to pick and choose whom we deputize for a given job when there are enough marshals to get the job done.”

“There were three branches of the government last I checked, Raborn. We’re the branch that carries out the law as written and given to us. If the legislative and judicial branches decide at a later date that the law as written needs to be changed, they’ll change it, and then you can come bitch to me about Marshal Blake’s choice in deputies, but until then, we will uphold the law as written and act within its confines. Is that clear, Marshal Raborn?”

A hint of red was creeping up his neck—not a blush, more an angry flush, I thought. Through tight lips he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at us, “You two go do your job.” She looked back at Raborn. “You get the fuck out of my office and stay the fuck out of their way.”

Edward and I stood, and did as we were told. Raborn hesitated behind us. I heard him intake a breath and wondered if he was going to keep pushing, but it was no longer my problem. Clark had backed me, and that was good enough.

My backup was waiting in the hallway outside the office. The other people with badges watched them covertly and were probably just as unhappy as Raborn, but they were smart enough to let it go. You could pick out which of my backup was ex-military. They stood a little straighter, as if fighting not to come to attention as we stepped up. Bobby Lee had grown thinner and somewhere the sun had turned his blond hair paler and tanned him deep brown, darker than most blonds could get. His brown eyes watched me from behind gold-framed glasses. He was older than the rest of us, but it only showed in fine lines around his eyes, an extra line here and there on his face. He’d always been tall and fairly lean, but he’d been out of the country on some secret assignment for the wererats for a long time, and wherever he’d been, it had carved him down. There was a look in his eyes now, almost a flinching, as if whatever he’d seen, or done, had worn the inside down as much as the outside.

“Well, darlin’, are we staying, or going?” His soft southern accent was deeper than it had been before. I didn’t believe it was because he’d been somewhere the accent existed, more like it was a piece of home they couldn’t take from him.

I didn’t even tell him not to call me darlin’ ; it was nothing personal, and he seemed to need all his down-home charm like a shield against whatever had taken the shine from his eyes.

“Staying,” I said.

He smiled, and gave a small nod. Lisandro, tall, dark, handsome, with his black hair in a ponytail trailing down his shoulders, stepped up beside him. He wasn’t quite as pretty as Bernardo, but he was ballparking. He looked like the proverbial Hispanic leading man. He was married and had two kids. He coached their soccer teams. We’d had sex together once for a sort of emergency feed to keep Marmee Noir from doing bad things. To keep his wife from trying to kill us both, we’d agreed it would never happen again. Actually, we just pretended it hadn’t. Worked for me. “Why is Raborn against you?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

Lisandro gave me a look.

I smiled. “I’m not lying, I just met the man.” I turned to Edward beside me. “Tell him.”

“He took an instant dislike to Anita.”

“Maybe it’s just being a woman and being better at the job than he is,” Socrates said. His skin was the color of coffee with a little cream added. Hair was short, clipped close to his head, just long enough on top that he could style it, but today he’d chosen not to, so that the hair formed tiny little curls. It looked . . . cuter than his usual, but he’d actually explained that this was natural, and cops didn’t like you styling your hair on the job. He was an ex-cop, so he’d know. He wasn’t as tall as the other two men, less than six feet by a few inches. He tended to round his shoulders, slumping a little, as if he’d gotten his height early in life and never lost the habit of trying to hide it, even though he wasn’t the tallest kid in the room anymore.

“You think it’s as simple as that? Raborn is a misogynist?”

He grinned at me, filling his dark brown eyes with that spark he could get. “That’s a big word just to say he doesn’t think much of women.”

I grinned back, and shrugged. “Hey, I’m not just another pretty face. I have a vocabulary.”

“You gotta watch the big words there, ma’am, we humble bodyguards don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ares said.

I turned to him. He was just under six feet, blond and brown-eyed. He’d lost the desert tan he’d come to us with. He’d been out of military on medical discharge for a while, but he still couldn’t quite lose the ma’am and sir , or the shoulders-back, spine-straight stance. He’d tried letting his hair grow out, but finally he’d cut it short again, keeping the top long, but his hair was as straight as Socrates’ was curly, so the longish top spilled a little over and to one side of his face. He had a habit of pushing it away from his face, as if it bugged him. I was betting next trip to the barbershop he’d be evenly short. Socrates had tried to help him style it when the top was longer so it was in sort of anime spikes, but that just wasn’t Ares. If he hadn’t caught lycanthropy, he’d have probably been lifetime Army.

But the real anime hair was Nicky’s. He was white-bread enough to have yellow-blond hair, shaved short on the sides, but long on top so it spilled out over one half of his face, in a long triangle of straight blond hair. With Ares right beside him it was more apparent that there was some body or wave to Nicky’s hair. Ares’s was straight as the proverbial board. Nicky’s overly long fall of hair had a sort of curve to it. It made the two of them look like they were going out to a club, or to an anime festival, but Ares dyed his hair so he could remind himself he wasn’t in the military anymore, and Nicky grew his out to hide that he was missing an eye.