Skin Trade

“We’ll start in the area where he found all his vampire victims tonight.”

“Yeah, maybe his lair will be in the area.” He got in his truck. We went for the doors. I wished I felt more secure that Vittorio only hunted near his lair. It seemed like an obvious mistake, and he didn’t strike me as the kind to make those.

Wicked and Truth didn’t say much until they got to the elevator and we were alone. “You seem tired,” Truth said.

“I am.”

“You fed on both of us, and you’re tired already,” Wicked said. “Should we be insulted?”

I smiled and shook my head. “It was a stressful night, and no, it’s no reflection on either of you. You know just how good you both are.”

“A backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it,” Wicked said.

“I wasn’t fishing, I was just saying you seem tired.”

“Sorry, Truth, sorry, just a long damn night.”

They exchanged a look, which I did not like. “What was that look about?”

Wicked said, “Requiem is waiting in your room.”

“I figured that my room would have the coffins, or the adjoining room.”

“That’s not what he means,” Truth said.

“Look, I’m beyond tired, just tell me.”

“He’s waiting to feed you,” Wicked said.

“I fed on both of you less than”-I squinted at my watch-“less than six hours ago. I don’t need to feed the ardeur.”

“Jean-Claude gave instructions that you needed to have food available more often if you wanted it.”

“Did he now?”

The elevator doors opened. “He’s worried that you’ll lose it with the police as your only food, Anita,” Wicked said.

I thought about that and couldn’t argue that it wouldn’t be very bad. “I do not feel in the mood, guys.”

“We’re just giving you a heads-up, Anita,” Wicked said.

“Did you guys tell him I fed on you both?”

They exchanged that look again.

“What?”

“We came through the door, and he said, ‘She fed on you. She fed on you both.’ ”

“How did he know?” I asked.

They shrugged, and it was like a mirrored gesture. “He said he could smell you on our skin.”

“He’s a vampire, not a werewolf.”

“Look,” Wicked said, “don’t shoot the messenger. But he’s waiting in your bed, and if you turn him down, I don’t know how he’s going to take it.”

I leaned my back against the wall between two doors that were not ours. “Are you saying he’s jealous that I fed on you guys?”

“Jealous may be too strong a word,” Wicked said.

“Yes, he was jealous,” Truth said.

Wicked frowned at his brother. “You don’t have to live up to your name all the time.”

Truth shrugged again.

“And this is exactly why Jean-Claude put you in charge during the night shift, and not Requiem,” I said.

“Because he’s a moody bastard,” Truth said.

I nodded. “Yeah.” I pushed away from the wall and looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour until dawn. Shit.” I stopped walking, because I was in the lead. “Gentlemen, I don’t know what room we’re in.”

Wicked led the way, and Truth brought up the rear, with me in the middle. We got to the room. Wicked used the little key card, pushed the door open, and held it for me.

It was a nice room. Big, a little too red and lush for my tastes, but it was a nice suite. We’d have no complaints about Max’s hospitality on rooms when we got back home. The outer room was a real living room with a table for four near the windows that looked out over the brightness of the Strip. There was a coffin near the door, but only one.

“Where are you sleeping?”

“Our coffins are in the other room for tonight. You have less than an hour; enjoy.” They put my bags by the closed door that had to lead into the bedroom, and then they left.

“Cowards,” I hissed.

Wicked stuck his head back around the door. “He doesn’t like guys, and neither do we.”

“You didn’t mind an audience earlier,” I said.

“We don’t, or I don’t, but Requiem does. Good night.” He closed the door, after taking the privacy sign with him. I realized that Jean-Claude hadn’t put Wicked in charge of just the vampires at night but me, too. I guess, in fairness, that Requiem wasn’t the only moody bastard still in the room.

But this kind of thing was exactly what had gotten Requiem moved lower down the food chain for me. He was like one of those boyfriends that the harder you try to break up with them, the harder they hang on. This was also the kind of thing that made me want to go back to my own house and leave most of them somewhere else.

I just wanted to get some sleep before I had to get back up and go out and hunt Vittorio again.

The door to the bedroom opened, just enough to show the line of his body, one hand, an arm, a spill of long, thick, dark hair. In the dimness of the room, with the backlight, the waist-length hair looked very black. It was hard to tell where the black robe he wore ended and the hair began. The skin that showed at chest and neck and face was pale as the first light of dawn, a cold beauty like snow. The Vandyke beard and mustache were black, darker than the hair. They framed his mouth the way you would frame a work of art, so that your eye was drawn to it.

I let my eyes rise higher, because that was my real failing. I was an eye man, or woman. A pretty pair of eyes really did it for me, always had. His eyes were blue and green like Caribbean seawater in the sun, one of the most startling shades of blue that I’d ever seen outside contact lenses, and his were natural. Belle Morte had a thing for blue-eyed men, and she’d tried to collect him, as she had Asher and Jean-Claude, so she’d have the darkest blue, the palest blue, and the greenest blue that was still blue. Requiem had fled the continent of Europe so he didn’t become another of her possessions.

A minute ago, I’d wanted to say, “I’ve been hunting serial killers all day, honey, can’t I take a pass?” Now all I could do was stare at him, and know that there was nothing to do but admire the artwork.

I dropped the bags in my hands and went to him. I slid my hands inside the half-opened robe to caress that smooth perfection of skin. I laid a kiss on his chest and was rewarded with the sound of his breath sighing outward.

“You were angry with me when you first came in the room.”

I gazed up at his six-foot-even frame, hands on his chest. I was still wearing too much weaponry to fall into his arms. “Then I saw you standing there, and I realized that you’d worried all night. You’d wondered where I was, and what was happening, and I didn’t call. You were left wondering if dawn would come and you still wouldn’t know I was safe.”

He nodded, silently.

“I’m a bad husband, Requiem, everyone knows that.”

His hands found my shoulders, traced my upper arms, as he said, “… the heart’s tally, telling off / the griefs I have undergone from girlhood upwards, / old and new, and now more than ever; / for I have never not had some new sorrow, / some fresh affliction to fight against.”

“I don’t know the poem, but it sounds depressing.”

He gave a small smile. “It’s a very old poem; the original was Anglo-Saxon. It’s called ‘The Wife’s Complaint.’ ”

I shook my head. “I’m trying to apologize, and I don’t know why. You always make me feel like I’ve done something wrong, and I’m tired of it.”

He dropped his hands away. “Now I’ve made you angry.”

I nodded, and started moving past him into the bedroom. No one was pretty enough for this level of need. I just didn’t know what to do with it. I kept my back to him while I stripped out of the vest, the weapons, all the paraphernalia of my day. It made quite a pile on my side of the bed. It was the side I slept on when there was only me and one man in the bed. Lately, that hadn’t been often. I didn’t mind being in the middle, God knew, but some nights there were too many, and this was one night when just one more was feeling like too many.