“The vampire's gone, but she's done something to me.” The tiger was running full out, a blur of white and black; if she hit the surface of me, the least bad thing that was about to happen was I'd fall on the ground and almost change. Worst case, whatever Marmee had done to me would make me tiger for real.
“What has happened?” Olaf asked.
“I've got a better question, what
is
happening?” Bernardo asked.
If I'd had a wereleopard or a werewolf, or even a werelion, I could have distracted the tiger inside me, turned the beasts against each other, or even a tiger of a different color. I stood in the heat and the light, and I needed things that I couldn't explain to the others.
“I can help you calm your tiger.” Victor's voice came from behind us. He'd followed us into the light.
“I don't think so,” Edward said.
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes.”
Edward looked at me. “Anita, he almost brought your beast earlier.”
“That was an accident,” Victor said, “but I am trained to help the females of my clan keep their human form.”
Edward drew me closer to himself. But we were out of time; the tiger was about to hit the surface of me. “Let him try, Edward, or I could be tiger for real.”
I reached for Victor, and Edward let me go, reluctantly. Victor put his hands on either side of my face, the way that Crispin had done when I'd first met him in North Carolina. Victor threw his colored glasses away, so that I gazed into those pale blue eyes, naked to the light. I fell into those eyes, and the tiger slowed inside me. It didn't stop, but it slowed.
He lowered his face toward mine.
I sensed movement to the side and caught the tall, dark presence of Olaf. Edward stopped him from touching us. “Let him,” Edward said.
Victor kissed me. He pressed his mouth over mine. With Crispin I had forced my beast into him and brought his own tiger, but now Victor breathed his power into me. Not his beast, but his power. That skin-tingling, breath-stealing power, like nothing I'd ever felt from any lycanthrope except his own mother.
The tiger inside me paused, then started trotting again, so close, so close to being out.
Victor drew back enough to say, “You must accept my power willingly. You are too strong for me to force your beast into stillness.”
The tigress was at the surface of me, like she was gazing up from the bottom of some pool, and I was that pool. Always before the beasts had slammed into me, as if I were a solid object to tear through, but now I was water, and the tigress hesitated.
“Look at me, not your beast, Anita.” He drew my attention back to his eyes, his face.
The tigress scraped a claw down the underneath of the water that was me, and only Victor's hands kept me standing. Always before it had hurt more, but now I knew, absolutely knew, that this new watery barrier would not hold the beast. Whatever Marmee Noir had done, she wanted me to shift. She wanted me to be tiger. I didn't know what was happening, but I knew that anything she wanted, I shouldn't give her.
The tiger took another pass, and I swear I felt my skin move with it. “Save me,” I whispered.
“Let me in,” he whispered back, as he pressed his mouth on mine one more time.
I wasn't sure how to do it, so I dropped the shields to my beasts. The tigress let out a roar of triumph, in the same instant that Victor's power smashed into her. She screamed at its touch, but the power drove her back. Victor's power was a warm, living wind that chased her back, gently but inexorably. Then, suddenly, she was gone, and I was alone in my skin. Alone in my skin, but still wrapped in Victor's arms.
He drew away from the kiss, but kept his arms on me, as if he wasn't sure I could stand. Me either.
“You're bleeding,” Bernardo said, softly.
I looked down and couldn't see anything under the vest, but Victor had blood on the lower part of his body. “I don't think it's mine,” he said.
Edward moved up to block the view. “We need to get out of here.”
“You make friends too damn fast for comfort.” Hooper was there, with some of his team.
Victor whispered, “Can you stand?”
I thought about it, then nodded.
Victor stepped away from me, standing so that the cops might not see the blood on his front. I said, “Sorry you don't like how I make friends, Sergeant.” I meant that, actually. I liked Hooper and would have liked to keep his good opinion, but . . . The most important thing was to get the hell away from all the other cops and see how badly I was hurt.
“I'll be your friend.” This from Georgie.
“Sorry, my dance card is a little full.”
“No fucking joke.” He gave me that look that you never want to see from a man who is supposed to be a coworker and has never been your boyfriend. His too-young face didn't carry the look well.
But Hooper was giving me a look I wanted even less. He'd narrowed his eyes and was trying to see around the blocking bodies of the other men. He started toward us. Edward started us toward the car. Victor came with us. We did our best to keep the blood out of sight. It didn't show on my black-on-black, but Victor's pale shirt showed the blood scarlet.
Hooper sent the other men inside, then kept walking toward us. Sanchez caught up with him, kept him talking. It looked like they were arguing, but it gave us enough time to get me in the back of the car. Victor rode shotgun so he could direct Bernardo to the doctor. Edward rode in back with me, and Olaf, too. We tried to get Olaf to drive, but he simply would not agree to driving. Hooper had broken away from Sanchez and was moving our way again. We were out of time to argue.
“Drive,” Edward said.
Bernardo drove.
48
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“TAKE OFF THE vest, Anita. We may need to put pressure on the wound.”
If it had just been Edward and me in the backseat, I'd have been okay with that, but Olaf sat beside me like some looming shadow. I gave one glance up at his face, and there was nothing in his face that made me want to undress in front of him.
“Stop being a girl,” Edward said, “just do it.”
“That's not fair,” I said.
“No, and I know why you don't want to do it, but bleeding to death because you don't want Olaf to see you bloody and half naked is a stupid reason to die.”
Put that way . . . “Fine,” I said, and let that one word hold as much anger as it could. I helped him get me out of the holsters and weapons. I gave them to Edward, as I'd given them to him at Bibiana's place, because who else would I trust with my weapons? But that left Edward's hands full, and Olaf to help me unfasten the side of the vest. I expected him to dwell on each movement, the way he had in the morgue, but he was strangely businesslike. He simply unfastened the Velcro on the sides and lifted it off me. The blue of my T-shirt had streaks of purple on the stomach area, where blood had soaked through. Not good.
Olaf just suddenly had a knife in his hand. I said, “No! You don't have to cut the shirt off me!” I started pulling the shirt out of my jeans. I admit that I was tensed, ready for it to catch and hurt on the wounds. Cutting it off would actually have been more practical, and the shirt was ruined anyway, but the sight of the big man looming over me with the huge serrated blade . . . No way was I giving him an excuse to bring the blade closer to my skin.
I must have made some small involuntary pain sound, because Edward put my weapons on the floor and had his own knife in his hand. “We need to see, Anita.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he'd picked up the slack of the shirt and was already cutting. I could have stopped him, but he was right, and I wasn't afraid of Edward. He cut up the middle of the shirt, his blade sharp enough that it made a straight, almost surgical line up the center. He cut it until the collar of the T-shirt stopped the blade. I might have protested that I really was half naked now, but I could see my stomach, and the fact that everyone could see my bra just didn't seem important.
“Crap,” I said.
There were bloody claw marks on my stomach. I'd bled before when I almost changed, but I'd never had wounds from it before. Blood had seeped out from under my nails, but never this.
Olaf's fingers hovered over one ragged-edged wound. I started to tell him,
Don't touch me
, but he said, “The edges of the wounds are wrong.”
“They go out, not in,” Edward said.
I stared down at the wounds, but the angle wasn't as good for me, or maybe it's just harder to look at your own body when it's cut open and analyze the wounds. I tried to be positive. “Well, at least it's not as bad as the last stomach wound.”
“True,” Edward said.
“Yes, your intestines are not bulging out this time,” Olaf said. He said it so calmly, as if it hadn't mattered then and didn't matter now. I guess, what can you expect from a sociopath?
He put those big fingers just over the wounds. There was a faint shudder in his hand, and he had to raise it higher to flex the hand, and then he put it back over the wounds and traced his hand over the wounds. “It looks as if something has tried to get out, not slashed from a distance.” He spread his hand over the marks. I started to protest, but realized his hand could almost cover it all; a dainty claw as claws went. Dainty as the wounds we'd found on the victims.
“They are the same size,” he said. He laid his hand on the wounds. The pain was sharp and immediate, and I know I made some small sound, because two things happened at once. Edward said, “Olaf,” with that warning in the word; and Olaf let his breath out in a sigh that was totally inappropriate for blood and wounds. Okay, inappropriate if you weren't a serial killer.
“Stop touching me,” I said, and made every word as hard and firm as I'd ever made them. I don't know why, but for the first time this kind of behavior from him didn't scare me. It just pissed me off. Let's hear it for anger.
He moved his hand and gazed down at me with those cave-dark eyes. Whatever he saw in my face didn't please him, because he said, “You aren't afraid.”
“Of you, not right now. I just had something try to tear its way out of me. Sorry, but on the horrible scale, that's got my attention. Now stop using my pain as your foreplay and fucking help me.”
He took his leather jacket off, folded it, and put it against my stomach. “It will hurt, but if I apply pressure to the wounds you will not lose as much blood.”
“Do it,” I said.
He pressed, and it hurt, but sometimes things need to hurt some now, so they don't hurt a lot more later. I must have made a small sound because Edward asked, “Is he hurting you?”
“No more than he needs to,” I said, and was proud that my voice was almost steady. Let's hear it for the tough-as-nails vampire hunter. Not fazed by overgrown serial killers or the beasts inside her. Shit.
“Victor,” I said.
He turned in his seat to look at me. His glasses had apparently been left on the sidewalk because I was gazing into the bare blue eyes of his tiger. No, of him. The weretigers, like Victor, were born, not made. “Yes, little queen.”
“First, stop calling me that. Second, are the claw marks on me what my tiger would be sizewise, if it could get out?”
He thought about that for a second or two. Bernardo had to ask, “I made the last turn; what now?”
He gave him more directions, then turned back to me. “You are a very different kind of . . . case. But, I believe, yes. It is the size you would be.”
“Shit,” I said.
Edward said, “Martin Bendez had bigger hands than Anita, even human.”
“Our killer is a woman,” I said.
“No, some men have hands as small as yours,” Olaf said.
“Any of your male weretigers have hands this small?” I asked, and held up one hand for Victor to judge. He reached through the seats and held his own larger hand up next to mine.
“Only Paula Chu.”
“Wait,” Bernardo said, “if Bendez wasn't the weretiger we were looking for, then why did he attack the police?”
“Good question,” Edward said.
Victor gave us an answer. “He had an ex-wife who was charging him with abuse. He had not been one of our successes, and if the charges were served, then he was either going to jail for life, or . . .”
Bernardo finished for him. “Or have a warrant of execution on his ass.”
“Yes. In other states, they might offer him a permanent place in one of the government areas for shapeshifters, but Nevada, like most of the western states, still has varmint laws on the books. Three strikes for us in this part of the country usually means death.”
“It might have been useful to know that going in,” Edward said, and not like he was happy with ol' Victor.
Bernardo took a corner a little sharp, making Olaf have to struggle for balance. He pressed harder on me, and I fought not to make pain noises. He put one long leg out to wedge himself in place. “That pain was accidental,” he said.
I'd been doing a good job of ignoring him, which, considering he was like six foot six and leaning over me, with his hands and jacket in my blood, was a testament either to shock or to my powers of concentration. I was betting on shock. But now I looked up at him,
saw
him. I saw the flicker of him deep down in those eyes of his. I saw him looking at me. I saw him fighting not to show everything he was feeling in his face, and failing.
He moved his face so that the only person who could see directly into his was me. He gazed down at me, with his big hands in the leather, pressing on the wounds in my body, and he let his lips part, his eyes go soft. His own pulse beat thick and heavy against the side of his neck.