[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade (55 page)

“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?”

“Why wouldn't you?”

Olaf seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, “I didn't want to, and no one was paying me to do it.”

There, perfectly Olaf, not that he didn't kill a priest because it would be wrong, but because it didn't amuse him at the moment, and no one had paid him. Even Edward at his most disturbing wouldn't have had the same logic.

“We're talking in front of you too casually,” Edward said. “Why?”

“Perhaps you simply feel at ease.”

He shook his head. “You've got a permanent spell of some kind on the room, or house.”

“All I have cast is that people may speak freely if they desire to. Apparently, your friends feel the need, and you do not.”

“I don't believe confession is good for the soul.”

“Nor do I,” she said, “but it can free up parts of you that are blocked, or help soothe your mind.”

He shook his head, then turned to me. “If you're going to have her do something with the medallion, do it. We need to go.”

I fished the second chain from underneath the vest and all. I'd tried carrying the cross and the medallion on the same chain, but there were too many times when I needed the cross visible, and I got tired of people asking what the second symbol meant. The image on the metal was of a many-headed big cat; if you looked just right on the soft metal, you could discern stripes and symbols around the edge of it. I'd tried to pass it off as a saint's medallion, but it just didn't look like anything that tame.

I held it out to Phoebe. She took it gingerly by the chain with only two fingers. “This is very old.”

I nodded. “The metal is soft enough that it bends with pressure, and some with just the heat of the body.”

She started walking toward the door that her daughter had come through with the tea. I expected us to go all the way to her altar room, but she stopped us in a small, bright kitchen. Her daughter, Kate, was nowhere to be seen.

Phoebe answered as if I'd asked out loud, “Kate had a date tonight. I told her she could go after the tea was served.”

“So she missed the metaphysical show.”

“Yes, though many gifted in the area might have felt something. You do not call down such evil and such good without alerting those who can sense such things.”

“I don't usually pick up stray stuff,” I said.

“But you are not trained for it. Tonight's show would have attracted either the untrained, who cannot block it out, or the trained, who are open to the alert.”

I shook my head. “Are we here for me to get lectured or to cleanse the charm?”

“So impatient.”

“Yeah, I know, I need to work on it.”

She smiled, then turned to the sink. “Then I will not waste more of your time.” She turned the water on and waited a few moments for it to run, while her eyes were closed and she looked upward at nothing that I could see or feel.

She passed the charm and chain under the running water. She turned the water off, then held the charm in her hands and closed her eyes again. “It is cleansed, and ready for use.”

I gave her a look.

She laughed. “What, you were expecting me to put it on the altar and take you out to dance naked in the moonlight?”

“I've seen my teacher cleanse jewelry, and she does the four elements: earth, air, water, fire.”

“I thought I would see if I could cleanse it doing something that you might actually do yourself.”

“You mean just wash the bad stuff off?”

“I let the water run for a few minutes, as I thought, ‘All water is sacred.' Surely you know that running water is a barrier to evil.”

“I've actually never found that a vamp couldn't cross water to get to me. I've had ghouls run through a stream.”

“Perhaps the stream, like your cross, needs you to believe.”

“Why isn't the water like the stones, and works on its own?”

“Why should water be like stone?” she asked.

It was one of those irritating questions that Marianne would ask occasionally. But I'd learned this game. “Why wouldn't it be?”

She smiled. “I see why you worked so quickly and seamlessly with Michael. You both have a certain exasperating quality to you.”

“So I've been told.”

She dried the medallion carefully on a clean kitchen towel, then handed it to me. “This is not like your cross, Marshal. It is not an item that automatically keeps the bad things at bay. It is a neutral object; do you understand what that means?”

I let the medallion and chain pool into the palm of my hand. “It means that it isn't evil or good; it's more like a gun. How it's used depends on who's pulling the trigger.”

“The analogy will do, but I have never seen anything like this. You do not know me, but I don't say that very often.”

I looked at the dull gleam of the metal in my hand. “I was told it would keep Marmee Noir out of me.”

“Did they tell you anything else about it?”

I thought, then had to shake my head.

“They may not have known, but I think as it keeps the Dark Mother out of you, it may also call things to you.”

“What kind of things?” I asked.

“There's something very animalistic, almost shamanic, to the energy of the piece, but that's not quite it, either.”

I wanted to ask, did it call the tigers to me? Was it the medallion itself that was causing me to be drawn to them? Would asking be giving her too much information?

“Why did you ask how good a witch Randy was?”

I felt the compulsion to simply tell her. She was right, I wanted to tell her, felt we should enlist some help from the local talent, but it wasn't my call. Edward was senior on this, and I bowed to his expertise. What could I say?

“The bad guys, or things, didn't go in for a killing blow. Their first strikes were to keep him from talking. He was a fully armed, fully trained, special teams guy. That's dangerous enough to just kill, but whoever struck the blows saw his ability to speak as more dangerous than the weapons.”

“You asked me about a spell, but I can't think of anything that would force Randy to speak out loud. You saw Michael and what he did. His invocation was soundless.”

“Yeah, but it takes concentration to do that kind of summoning, doesn't it? Could Randy call up that kind of energy in the middle of a firefight?”

She seemed to think about it. “I don't know. I have never tried to do a working in the middle of combat. We have other brothers and sisters who are soldiers. I can email them and ask.”

“Just ask if they've tried doing magic in the middle of a firefight. No details.”

“I give you my word.”

Had I said too much? It didn't feel like I had. “Let's say for argument's sake that your people tell you they can't do magic, silent and normal, during combat. What would come up against an armed unit, a SWAT unit, that Randy Sherman would have thought words, a spell, would be more effective against than silver-coated bullets?”

“Are you certain it was silver bullets?”

“It's standard ops that tac units like SWAT have silver-coated ammo to be carried at all times, in case one of the bad guys turns out to be a vampire or shapeshifter. They were backing up a vampire hunter; they'd have silver ammo.”

“But you didn't check,” she said.

I nodded. “I will, but I've seen these guys work, and they wouldn't make that big a mistake.”

She nodded. “Randy would certainly not have made such an error.”

“You haven't answered my question, Phoebe.”

“I was thinking,” she said. She frowned, rolling her lip under just a little. It looked like an old nervous habit that she'd almost lost. I wondered if it was her tell. Did it mean she was lying, or more nervous than she should be? Could she have some tie to what was happening? Well, yeah, duh, but it didn't feel right. But then, how much was her magic and the house itself with all its wards affecting my reaction to her? Shit, I wished I hadn't thought of that, or that I'd thought of it sooner. That I hadn't thought sooner meant I was being messed with again. Shit.

“The demonic, some evil spirits, as you saw with your Mother Dark.” She frowned.

“You've thought of something,” I said.

She shook her head. “No, it's just, it could be almost anything. You haven't even told me how they stopped Randy from speaking. I assume it was some kind of gag or damage that made speech impossible.”

Honestly, for her to really be a worthwhile information source, she needed more clues, but Edward had expressly told me not to give her any. Crap.

“I know you don't trust me, Marshal.”

“Why should I? You've got this house so wired with magic that you've taken most of our natural cynicism away. We've talked more openly around you than we should have already.”

“Cynicism is not always conducive to studying and performing magic.”

“But for cops, it's essential.”

“I did not ward my house with the idea that police would come and question me.”

“Fair enough, but how can we tell what was on purpose and what wasn't? I can't even tell if we were talking too much before you redid the wards, or only after. If it was after, you did it on purpose to try to get us to tell you more about Randy Sherman's death.”

“That would be a very gray thing for a Wiccan priestess to do, Marshal.”

I smiled, and it was a real smile. “You did, didn't you? You used the emergency to tweak the spells so we'd be more chatty.” I shook a finger at her. “That's illegal. Using magic on police in the middle of an investigation is automatic arrest. I could charge you with magical malfeasance.”

“That would be an automatic jail sentence of at least six months,” she said.

“It would,” I said.

We stared at each other. “Grief makes me foolish, and I apologize for that, but I want to know what happened to Randy.”