Skin Trade

I gave a harsh laugh. “Kill the Mother of All Vampires? Not likely.”

“Why not?” Olaf asked.

I frowned at him. “If she can do all this to me from thousands of miles away, then I do not want to see what she’s capable of if I’m physically closer. All vampire powers grow with proximity.”

“A bomb would do it, something with high heat yield.”

I searched his face, trying to read something in it that I could really get a handle on and understand, but it was almost as bad as staring into the faces of the shapeshifters in their half-human forms. I just couldn’t decipher him.

“I’d still have to get to the city she’s in, and that would be too close. Besides, I don’t know anything about bombs.”

“I do,” he said.

I finally got a clue. “Are you offering to go with me?”

He just nodded.

“Damn it,” Edward said.

I looked at him. I shook my head. “I won’t ask you to go.”

“I can’t let you go off alone with him to hunt her.” He said it as if it were a done deal, a given.

I shook my head, and waved my hands as if erasing something in the air. “I’m not going either. None of us is getting any nearer to her.”

“If you do not kill her first, she will surely kill you,” Olaf said.

“Should we be talking about this in front of witnesses?” Bernardo asked. He had finally moved closer to us.

We looked at Phoebe and Michael as if we’d forgotten them. I almost had. Edward never forgot anything, but as he looked at me, I realized that there was guilt in his eyes. I’d never seen that for anyone but Do

I reached out and laid fingers on his arm, a gentle touch. “You dying trying to kill Marmee Noir would not have helped me now. You’d be dead, and I’d be alone with these two.”

That almost earned me a smile. “Or she’d be dead, and you’d be safe.”

I gripped his arm, tight. “Don’t second-guess yourself, Edward, you’re not good at it. Certainty is all we have on shit like this.”

He did smile, then. “Look who’s talking, Ms. Doubting-All-My-Choices.”

“Are you saying that thing has a physical body, on this plane, right now?” Michael asked.

I thought about the question, then nodded. “I’ve seen where her body lies, so yeah.”

“I thought you’d never been physically close to her.”

“Only in dreams and nightmares,” I said.

Music started-“Wild Boys” by Duran Duran-and it still took me a minute to realize it was my cell phone. I fumbled it out of my pocket, vowing to pick a different song for Nathaniel to put into the phone so I could get rid of this one.

“Anita,” Wicked said, “are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you being coerced?”

“No, no, I’m fine, really.”

“I ca

“You don’t have to, Wicked, just wait outside. I’ll come to you in a little bit.”

“I felt the Mother of All Darkness, and then I felt…” He seemed at a loss for words.

I almost helped him out, but he was a vampire, and it had been angels. I wanted to know what he’d sensed.

He finally spoke again, “When I first arrived, I could have entered the house with an invitation, but now I wouldn’t dare. It glows like something holy.”

“The priestess had to redo the shields,” I said, “to keep out Marmee Noir.”

“If anything goes wrong in there, I ca

“It’s covered, Wicked, honest.”

“I know you have Edward with you, but I am your bodyguard, Anita. Jean-Claude charged me with your safety. If I let you die here, Jean-Claude would kill me and my brother. He’d probably kill Truth first and make me watch, and then he’d kill me. And right this second, I can’t reach you. Shit.”

“Isn’t that usually my line?” I said.

“Don’t make a joke of this, Anita.”

“Look, I’m sorry you can’t enter past the wards, but we are all right, and you couldn’t have kept me safe from Marmee Noir even if you’d been with me.”

“And that is another problem. I could see her like some black storm towering over the house. She ignored me as if I didn’t exist, but I felt her power, Anita. All the weapons training in the world won’t stop her.”

“Apparently, magic does,” I said.

“Would the wards you are behind keep her out?”

“Maybe.”

“But they would also keep out every other vampire, and Vittorio has wereanimals to send for you, so Jean-Claude tells me.”

“I’m pretty sure of that, yeah.”

“Then we need to be with you,” he said.

“Agreed.”

“But we need to keep the Mother of All Darkness from you, too. How do we do both?”

That he was asking me was not a good sign. “Wolves,” I said, finally.

“What?”

“Wolf, she can’t control wolf, only cats.”

“What about the werehyenas?”

“I don’t know, I’ve only made wolf work for me.”

“We have Graham.”

“Any other wolves would be helpful,” I said.

“I’ll call Requiem and see what we can find.” Then he hung up. I was left to turn back to the room and say, “Um, nope, no idea how to explain it, so I’m not going to try.”

Phoebe said, “You are wearing something that was supposed to help you against the Darkness.”

I almost touched the medallion on its chain with the cross, but stopped myself in midmotion.

She smiled.

“Fine,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, since it seems to have stopped working.”

“If you will permit me to look at it, I believe it only needs to be cleansed and recharged.” There must have been a look on my face because she added, “Surely whoever taught you to shield well enough to keep Michael outside taught you this as well.”

“She tried, but I don’t put a lot of stock in jewelry.”

She smiled again. “Yet you believed in the piece of metal around your neck.”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the cross or the medallion, but either way, she had a point. “You’re right, my teacher has talked to me about stones and stuff. I just don’t believe in it.”

“Some things don’t require your belief to make them work, Marshal.”

“I’ve got stuff on me,” Bernardo said, “that just works, Anita.”

“Stones?” I made it a question.

He nodded.

Phoebe said, “It is supposed to help you see your prey, but when you removed your cross, you had only things that made you see more into the spirit world and nothing to protect you from it.”

He shrugged. “I got exactly what I asked for; maybe I just didn’t know what I needed.”

I looked at him. He’d put his cross back on, but there was still a tightness around the eyes. Whatever he had seen of Marmee Noir had spooked him. “I didn’t see you for the mumbo-jumbo type,” I said.

“You said it yourself, Anita; most of us don’t have your talent with the dead. We get what help we can.”

I looked at Edward. “Do you have help?”

He shook his head.

I looked at Olaf. “You?”

“Not stones and magic.”

“What then?”

“The cross is blessed by a very holy man. It burns with his faith, not mine.”

“A cross doesn’t work for you, personally?” I asked, then almost wished I hadn’t.

“The same man who blessed the cross told me I am damned, and no amount of Hail Marys or prayers will save me.”

“Everyone can be saved,” I said.

“To be forgiven, you must first repent your sins.” He gave me the full weight of those eyes again.

“And you’re unrepentant,” I said.

He nodded.

I thought about that, that his cross burned with the faith of a holy man who had told him he’d go to hell unless he repented. He didn’t repent, but he still wore the cross that the man had given him, and it still worked for him. The logic, or lack of it, made my head hurt. But in the end, faith isn’t always about logic; sometimes it’s about the leap.

“Did you kill him?” Bernardo asked.

Olaf looked at him. “Why would I kill him?”