Skin Trade

I thought about it. “Not yet, but if the Darkness takes me, and there’s no more me left, then yes.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Wicked said.

“I know that everyone else loves me too much, but if all that’s left of me is the ardeur, then I’m already gone.”

The brothers exchanged a look, then gave me almost identical looks back. “How do we know when you’re gone?” Truth asked.

I thought about that. “I don’t know.”

Truth touched a finger to my cheek and came away with a single trembling tear. “You mean it.”

I nodded, and curled my arms around my knees, clutching me to myself. “I thought that it was the men. That living with Jean-Claude and all the others was making me lose control of myself, but they aren’t here. It’s me. It’s me, Truth, don’t you see? I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I don’t know how to control it.” I laid my head on my knees and cried. Knowing that I should get dressed, and there was a demon waiting, and I didn’t know where Edward was, but all I could think of in that moment was that I didn’t trust myself anymore.

Truth wrapped his arms around me, and Wicked came at my back, so that they held me between them while I cried. They held me while I confessed to them something I wasn’t sure I could say to Edward, or any of the men I loved. How do you ask someone you love to kill you if you grow too powerful, too evil? Jean-Claude had asked it of me once, and I had cursed him for it. Now I let the two brothers hold me, and gave them my darkest fear.

Truth whispered against my hair, “If the ardeur takes you and you become as evil as Belle Morte, I promise…”

Wicked said, “We promise.”

“We promise,” Truth said, “that we will not let you be that evil.”

“You’ll kill me,” I said softly.

They were quiet for a few breaths, and then their arms tightened around me, and they said in one voice, “We’ll kill you.”

And that was the best I could get, that if the ardeur or the Darkness took me, that Wicked and Truth would kill me before I could do whatever it was that either of the evil bitches of the West wanted me to do. It didn’t matter that it might kill anyone metaphysically tied to me, because if Marmee Noir possessed me, or I became nothing but a vessel for the ardeur, whatever was inside me would spread to them eventually. The thought of what we could all do, if we became truly evil, truly without pity, was too awful to contemplate. We could rule the vampires and most of the wereanimals in this country, and then we could move on Europe. If Marmee Noir took me over and possessed all that belonged to Jean-Claude and me, there’d be nothing to stop us unless the two vampires holding me now could stop it early, stop it with me.

I sat there in the starry night, held in the arms of the only two people who I thought might be good enough, ruthless enough, and honorable enough to kill me if I asked. I’d once thought that Edward would do it if it needed doing, but I knew now that even he would hesitate. He loved me too much. But Truth and Wicked didn’t love me, not yet, and if we were careful, they never would. I needed them to keep this promise. I needed to know that if I failed, utterly and completely, I had a fail-safe. A fail-safe made of swords and bullets, and two of the finest warriors that had ever walked the planet. As fail-safes went, it wasn’t bad.

59

WE GOT DRESSED, because strangely, when the ardeur left and the grief left, the desert night was cold. Truth gave me his leather jacket; when I protested, he said, “I don’t really feel the cold like a human.” Duh, I so knew that, but the emotional revelations had shaken me a little. When he held the jacket out to me, I saw his arms. His lower arms had nail marks on them, some bleeding. I’d even managed to bleed the back of his right hand.

“God, Truth, I’m sorry.”

He glanced down at the scratches as if he’d just noticed them, too. “It’s nothing.”

“I’m still sorry I didn’t ask how you felt about nails.”

He gave a small smile. “We didn’t have much time to negotiate.”

“I guess not.”

“I count it as a mark of my service to you and Jean-Claude,” he said.

I flinched a little. “Don’t call it service, that sounds too much like…”

“Don’t make more of what he said than there is to make, Anita,” Wicked said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

I let the conversation die because it was all too confusing for me. Truth’s jacket was large enough that my hands kept vanishing in the sleeves, and the bottom of the leather hung down to midthigh. I looked like I was five and playing dress-up in my dad’s clothes, but I was warm. The fashion police could ticket me later.

I called Edward on Truth’s cell phone. Mine was probably in Phoebe Billings’s yard. I hoped Edward had found it. I called to find out where he was, and if I was too late to help him hunt demons.

“Anita,” and he sounded half relieved and half frightened, not something you hear from Edward often.

“Are you okay?”

“I should be asking you that,” and he lowered his voice, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “Last I see, you’re carried off by a vampire, and I let him do it, and it’s an hour and a half later, and you’re not back. I’d think if you had to feed the ardeur, a quickie would have done it.”

I fought not to glance at the two vampires. “Trust me, Edward, it was a quickie. Did I miss it? Was there a demon at Bering’s house?”

“You haven’t missed anything. Did you ever try to get a warrant based on a possible demon being in a house?”

I almost said yes, then had to stop and think about it. “No, actually.”

“Well, we got a judge who thinks that demons are just evil spirits. He’s arguing that demons couldn’t possibly have killed our cops.”

“Normally, he’d be right, but it doesn’t matter. Our warrant of execution should get us in Bering’s house,” I said.

“Shaw didn’t think so, and he’s the undersheriff.”

“Let me guess, Bering is rich, or co

“His family has been a big deal around here for as long as Max has been in charge. He’s the last of the family unless he breeds, which doesn’t seem likely if we can ever get into the house.”

“You can just press the warrant; it’s federal, and that outranks local.”

“I wanted to give you time to get back,” he said.

“Shit, Edward, you didn’t have to delay the investigation because I’m having a metaphysical breakdown.”

“Put it another way, have you seen anyone else but you and me that you’d want backing you against a demon?”

I thought about that. “Lieutenant Grimes and his men are good,” I said.

“They’re some of the best, but I haven’t seen them pray to the angels and have everything glow.”

Oh. “Okay, tell me where you are, and Wicked will drop me nearby.”

He was back at SWAT headquarters. “We’ve had the briefing about Bering’s house. We’re just waiting for the warrant, or for me to push the one we have.”

“My weapons are stashed there; could you change out some things? I didn’t pack with demon in mind.”

“I’ve already repacked for you, and I found your phone in the yard with your weapons. I can list what I packed for you,” he said.

“That’s okay, I trust you to pack for me. Though, frankly, most of the time a demon isn’t solid enough for normal weapons of any kind to work. The rare ones that do get solid enough to attack may only be solid for the second of that attack, so we’ll have to be shooting around each other if it goes bad.”

“See, none of their practitioners knew that, and neither did the priest they’ve got here that’s been blessing our bullets.”

“The priest has been doing what?” I asked.

“You heard right.”

“Hmm, I’ve never tried that.”

“Me, either,” he said.