Skin Trade

“She said the other vampire made her do it; is that true?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Then how could you just shoot her?”

“Because she was guilty.”

“And who died and made you judge, jury, and ex-” He stopped in midsentence.

“Executioner,” I finished for him. “The federal and state government.”

“I thought we were the good guys,” he said.

“We are.”

He shook his head. “You aren’t.”

And through all of it, I could feel Ca

I pushed at the power, shoved it away, but it was like trying to grab a spiderweb when you run through it. You feel it on your skin, but the more you pull off, the more you find, until you realize that the spider is still on you somewhere making silk faster than you can get it off you. You have to fight the urge to panic, to simply start screaming, because you know that it’s on you, crawling, ready to bite. But the memory receded like turning down a radio, still there, but I could think again. I could feel Ca

“Not yet.” His power pushed at me again; it was like drowning, when you think you’ve made it to the surface, only to have another wave hit you full in the face. But the trick to not drowning is not to panic. I would not give him my fear. The memory couldn’t hurt me; I’d already lived through it.

I tried to stop the memory, but I couldn’t. I pulled on my hands, still in his, and got a flicker of image, like flipping cha

I pulled on my hands and got more, a woman under his hands, him holding her down. She was laughing, fighting not for real, and I knew it was his wife. Her hair was as dark as his, and curled like mine. It flung across the pillow, and her tan looked wonderful in the red silk. Sunlight spilled across the bed as he leaned down for a kiss.

I was suddenly back in that other bedroom, in the dark with the dead. I turned my hands in Ca

I felt her body underneath him, felt how much he wanted her, how much he loved her. The emotion was so strong, and just like that, I fed. I drew in the emotion of the moment.

But Ca

I shoved the power back at Ca

He got up too fast and knocked his chair to the floor with a loud clang. I sat where I was, hugging myself, huddling around the feeling of his power inside me, rifling through my head, though that didn’t cover how it felt. It felt intimate, and it wasn’t about the sex; it was about having his power force its way into me.

Ca

“Sergeant Rocco,” Lieutenant Grimes said.

I heard Ca

“Shut up,” I said, and got to my feet, but didn’t knock my chair over. Point for me. “That was private. That last memory had nothing to do with the deaths of the two men.”

He turned around, lowering his arms, as if he’d been hugging himself, too. He looked at me, but I saw the effort of that on his face. “You killed the vampire that killed Melbourne, you killed her while she begged for her life, and you hated doing it, but you killed her for him. I felt it; you took her life because she took his.”

“I took her life because I am duty bound by the fucking law to take it.”

“I know why you did it, Anita. I know what you were feeling when you did it.”

“And I know what you were feeling in that other room, Sergeant. Do you want me to share that?”

“That was personal, not the job,” he said.

I strode over to him, past the lieutenant. The men were on their feet, as if they felt that something was about to happen. I got close enough to hiss into Rocco’s face, a harsh whisper, “You overstepped the bounds and you know it. You fed off my memories, off my emotion.”

“You fed off mine,” he said. He kept his voice as low as mine. Technically what we’d done hadn’t been illegal, because the law just hadn’t caught up to the fact that you could be a vampire and not be dead. By legal definition, neither of us could be a vampire.

“You started it,” I said.

“You took my ability and used it against me,” he said. He was talking low, but not whispering now. I understood; we needed to talk about some of what had happened.

“If a vampire uses an ability against me, sometimes, I can borrow it,” I said.

“Explain, Ca

We both looked at him, then back at each other. I always hated trying to explain psychic ability to people who didn’t have it. It never translated quite right.

Ca

Grimes asked, “If it wasn’t violence, what was the memory?”

Ca

“In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.” There, that was cryptic enough; one thing I did not want the police to know was that I was a succubus. The only thing that would keep Ca

A look passed over his face, as if he were trying to decide what expression to show me. “She showed me love, tenderness, like the girl version of what I can do.” Again, he’d told the truth, but not too much of it.

“You learned fast enough, Ca

He nodded. “So you peeked at mine and I peeked at yours.”

“Yes.”

“Peeked at what?” Grimes asked.

“The people we love,” Ca

Grimes frowned from one to the other of us.

“The man in your memory wasn’t a vampire,” Ca

“I am.”

Then who is he, the man? I saw his eyes; they weren’t human.”

“He’s a wereleopard,” I said.

“Don’t you have any human men in your life?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked.

I thought of a lot of answers, but settled for, “Did you plan on falling in love with your wife?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, and said, “No, she was supposed to be a one-night stand.” He frowned, and the look was enough; he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “If you were a man, I don’t know what I would do right now.”

“What, you’d hit me?”

“Maybe.”

“You drag me through one of the worst kills of my recent past, and you stand there and bitch because I made you remember something wonderful. I think I’m ahead on karmic brownie points here. Don’t you ever mind-fuck me like that again.”