Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

I slept, and I dreamt of a gray sky with golden clouds that looked like puffy lions, and bears, and all sorts of animals. The sky turned blue, the sun was warm, and there was the sound of an ocean on a beach just out of sight, over the hill. I walked toward that sound all night but could never find the sea.

THERE WAS MUSIC playing; it climbed into my dream and pulled me out. I came to with a vague memory of water and a boat, and zombies juggling kittens that slashed and clawed through the air. I woke, but snuggled down between the two men and tried to ignore the music. The music finally stopped, and I started to drift back to sleep, so warm in the darkened room. I snuggled against the man in front of me, putting my face against his bare back, and didn’t know the smell of his skin.

My eyes opened, my body tensed, and I tried not to panic. I’d been asleep long enough that Magda and Travis had had to go do something else. I’d been through this before when I was injured, or exhausted, and slept so long that I needed shift changes for my bed buddies, but logic had nothing to do with it. The warm press of the two men, sandwiching me in the dim room, in the nest of sheets and bodies that had been so comforting a second before, now felt like I was trapped and couldn’t move.

The music sounded again, and I realized it was my phone ringing. I didn’t remember bringing my phone with me, so someone had put my stuff in here for me. People were taking care of me, so why was my stomach tight and all I wanted to do was fight my way free of covers and bodies and grab the phone? I started trying to sit up and realized I was lying on my left arm, which meant I was at least partially healed. I was also trapped under the covers because they were tangled around me and the men somehow.

The man in front propped up on his elbow and reached a long arm out from the bed. He was very dark-skinned, black in the room, though I wasn’t sure if that was true color or just the very dim lighting. He came back with my phone in hand, and I still didn’t recognize the short, almost shaved black hair and long, very tall body. I could feel that the man behind me was shorter and more delicate than the one in front of me, but I hadn’t even bothered to look. I knew by just lying there that it wasn’t anyone I was that familiar with . . . no one I had slept and woken up with.

I took the phone and finally recognized the glimpse of face of the tall man. It was Seamus, werehyena to call for the Harlequin Jane. I hit the button and said, “Yes, I’m here.”

“You sound like you were asleep, Blake,” Special Agent Manning said.

I snuggled back down on my left side, burying my face against Seamus’s back. The smaller man in back snuggled in against me, too. I stopped worrying that I didn’t know who it was and just let it feel comforting. “I had to work all night, so yeah I was asleep, sorry.”

“You raised the dead all night?”

“Something like that, yeah. What’s up?”

“You do remember that you requested to view the videos again?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“By the time you get dressed and down here we should be ready for you.”

“Ready for me? I just walk in and your partner does his computer magic and we watch the videos; just this time I use my psychic abilities to look for clues.”

“The home office wanted another pair of eyes to help you look for clues.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’re flying another agent in to view the videos with you and Marshal Kirkland, remember?”

I’d forgotten all of it; it made my shoulders tighten and took some of the comfy out of my nest of bodies and covers. “Fine, I know not to argue with the home office.”

“Can the sarcasm, Blake; just because you ride around like the Lone fucking Ranger doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t have superiors riding our ass. Working with you makes all the upper-management types nervous. I wonder why that would be?”

“I think that was sarcasm.”

“I think you’re right.” She sounded unhappy, and I didn’t think it was just at me.

“I know the upper muckety-mucks don’t like me at the bureau. They think I’m a pain in the ass and don’t follow orders well.”

“Prove them wrong,” she said.

“I can’t, because I’m a pain in the ass, and I don’t follow orders well.”

She gave a small laugh then, and finally said, “Shit.”

“What’d I do now?” I asked.

“Not you, the plane is delayed. Take your time, Blake, you’ve got two extra hours before the bird lands and we get our extra agent on the ground.”

“Good to know, maybe I can eat something.”

“You know what’s on the videos; like I said last time, eating first would probably be a good idea.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

THE MAN BEHIND me snuggled down so that his nose was buried against my back, but I knew from where the rest of his body was that it wasn’t because he was that much shorter than me. He was just burying himself under the covers.

“Are the FBI always so abrupt on the phone?” the man asked.

I froze, because I did know that voice.

“Now you’re all tense, Anita, why would that be?”

I turned over and actually had to pull the sheet up and off him to see Narcissus’s face. He was smiling up at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were dark and glittering. He was holding a tight rein on it, but he was angry. I couldn’t blame him after what Asher and Kane had done, but I also couldn’t figure out what he was doing bunking over at the Circus. He rarely, if ever, left his club and home, Narcissus in Chains.

He rose on one elbow, still smiling at me. His short black hair was tousled from sleep, but I could admit that the slender triangular face was pretty. Remnants of black eyeliner had smeared around his large, brown eyes, as if he’d been crying, though I knew it was just from sleeping with eyeliner and mascara still on. Maybe he never took his eye makeup off, but I was betting he’d rushed to be here. He usually slept the day away and worked nights, just like me.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, dearie,” he said, and there was a bitterness in his words to match the harshness in his eyes.

I swallowed hard, and finally managed to say, “I just didn’t expect you to be here, Narcissus. The Oba of the hyena clan doesn’t make house calls.”

“We’re supposed to work together, aren’t we?” He scooted higher up in the bed, so that we were both lying there propped up on our elbows, and looking into each other’s faces from inches away. It was too intimate for me with him, so I started to sit up.

He grabbed my arm, not hard, it didn’t hurt, but I didn’t like it. “If I say don’t touch me, then you say, but I touched so much more of you while we slept. That about how it’s going to go?”

He smiled, but again his eyes stayed glitteringly cold, or hot, but it was anger-hot, not sex, not anything positive. His hand on my arm was gentle, as if I could have jerked away easily. I didn’t try, because if he fought me for it . . . it wasn’t worth it, yet. Just by his being here I knew that Jean-Claude had done his best to fix the mess that Asher had made of things with the local hyenas. I was pretty sure that Narcissus helping to heal me like this was part of some compromise that kept Narcissus from declaring war, or demanding Asher’s head on a pike, or just killing Kane—who was just one of his lower-level hyenas, and that meant in hyena society he lived or died at the whim of his king, his Oba, Narcissus.

“Yes, that’s about how it would go,” he said.

“Let’s skip it, then,” I said.

He smiled. “Let’s.”

“I have to get dressed and go play cops and robbers.”