Anita Blake 18 - Flirt (6 page)

“First, it’s Ms. Blake to you. Second, people say a lot of shit about me. I wouldn’t believe it all.” Once upon a time I’d been a bad liar, but that had been a long time ago.

“I’ll take proof to the police about some of your crimes. You’ll lose that badge of yours, if not more.”

“And I’ll tell the police what you wanted me to do, because anyone who would really do what you’re describing would do something to a live person.” I studied her face. “How’s his illegitimate son’s health lately?”

Her face flickered uncertainly.

“If anything happens to him I will make sure the police come to your door.”

“You don’t know his name.”

“Oh, please, like I couldn’t find that out. He’s probably got a page on the Internet somewhere where he’s talked all about his father being Chase Zell.”

She frowned at me, as though she was wondering if I was right.

“Nothing happens to the kid, or you will not have enough money to keep yourself out of jail, or at least the nut house.”

“I am not crazy, Ms. Blake. I’m a woman scorned.”

“He was married to you for twenty-five years. I think the poor bastard suffered enough.”

That was it. She turned on the stiletto points of her expensive shoes and stalked out. If I’d known that that would make her leave I’d have said it sooner. Seemed this was my week for people wanting my very “alive” zombies for very bad purposes.

TWO WEEKS PASSED before I went back to the restaurant where Micah, Nathaniel, and Jason had flirted with the waiter and, all right, so had I. This time I was at a table not a booth, and all by my lonesome. Though honestly I’d eaten more lunches alone in my adult life than with anyone else. The workers at Animators Inc. had staggered schedules so no one had lunch at the same time. Sometimes I brought a book; sometimes it was just good to get out of the office. Today I had actually brought the latest copy of
The Animator
, our trade publication. There were a couple of articles I’d been wanting to read, so I’d order food, read, and hopefully learn something.

My waitress was petite, blond, and female when I ordered drinks, but when the drinks came my waiter was tall, black-haired, and male. It was the waiter from the time before. He put down my Coke, smiled, and said, “I traded tables with Cathy; I hope you don’t mind.”

I shook my head, smiled back. “I don’t mind.”

His gave me that even brighter smile that I remembered from last time. I did what I’d learned last time; I smiled back. It would take two more trips back and forth from the table for me to realize that he thought I was flirting with intent. It was when he stayed at my table talking after my food had arrived that I realized I’d made some kind of tactical error. It was one thing to flirt in the safety of my group, with Nathaniel and Jason to take some of the heat and Micah to look on, but a totally different experience with just me and the waiter. Crap.

His name was Ahsan. He was a college student. He was a theater major with a minor in literature. He was graduating this year and going on to start his master’s program. His goal was to teach at a college, unless his own acting career took off. I learned all this because I couldn’t figure out how to stop the conversation. I had flirted first, so it was my fault, and if something is my fault, I try to fix it. But Ahsan was like that scene in
Fantasia
with Mickey Mouse and the brooms carrying water buckets. I’d flirted and gotten the game started, but I had no idea how to stop it. I mean, I could have been blunt—my usual—but I had started it, and so was there a way to gracefully retreat? By now I was pretty certain that he thought I’d come back by myself so I could flirt more freely with him. Eek. I was remembering why I didn’t flirt for fun—because I didn’t know how. I could flirt with intent of dating or sex, but I sucked at casual flirting. Shit.

I would have tried to play the age difference card, but he was Nathaniel’s age exactly, so I couldn’t claim that an eight-year age difference weirded me out. I was debating on exactly what I could do to let him down gently, or whether I was irritated enough to let him down hard, when I felt energy. Not just regular human psychic energy, but shapeshifter energy. It was someone powerful enough that it raised the hair on my arms and crawled down my back, to see if it could find my own beasts. Those shadows inside me moved almost like a hand caressing deep within my body. God, he was powerful. Either he was a bad guy letting me know he was here, or he’d picked up my own beasts and thought I was a real shapeshifter. Some of their societies encouraged them to mark territory. One of the ways to do that without a fight was simply let the power out. It was a safe way of saying,
Don’t fuck with me
. Or, it was a bad guy, and a threat. I wouldn’t know until too late, so I treated it as bad guy: better paranoid than dead.

I smiled sweetly up at Ahsan and said, “I’m sorry, Ahsan, it’s been great talking to you, but I’ve got to get back to work. I need the check.”

“Can I have your number?”

“How about you give me your number, when you give me the check?”

He wasted more smiles on me, but hurried back through the busy restaurant to get the check and scribble his number on something. But at least the nice waiter wouldn’t be standing at my table when the bad guy walked up. There was the remote possibility that it was a sort of preliminary flirting attempt. Some of the really powerful lycanthropes were always searching for a mate to match their power. It helped you control your animal group and keep other shapeshifters from trying to mess with you. But this felt like too much for flirting. The only reason to do the power that was making the air thick and hot and hard to breathe was to mark his metaphysical territory and tell me that he was bigger and badder than I was. Fine with me. I took my gun out from under my arm, as discreetly as I could, and put my hand under the table, gun and all.

I didn’t try to draw my own version of shapeshifter power. One, I wasn’t as powerful as what was coming toward me. I knew that just from that roil of power. Two, sometimes when I drew my power out it got out of hand; just because I didn’t change shape didn’t mean the beasts inside me didn’t want out. They did. They’d damn near torn me apart from inside before I got a handle on the control. But it wasn’t just the pain; there was always the chance that one day I’d shift for real, and a crowded restaurant wasn’t the place for it. Also, if it was some misguided macho flirting attempt, then I would let him know he’d misread what I was, and maybe he’d go away.

There was so much power that I couldn’t tell what direction he was moving in from. It was like being in the middle of some kind of heat storm. Fuck this; I had a power colder than this, and I’d used it before to keep my own beasts from rising, because lycanthropy is a thing of life, so hot-blooded it’s almost more alive than the rest of us. I drew my necromancy, which was always with me. It was like opening a fist that I always had to keep so tightly closed. It was a colder power, closer to vampire than wereanimal. It swept outward through the tables; a few sensitives shivered, but it wouldn’t hurt them. It wouldn’t do anything to them, because nothing dead walked during the day aboveground, at least not in this town. I used my power like cold water on the heat of his power, because sex I knew; he tasted male. It worked even better than I’d hoped, like water on fire, so that the “blaze” he’d thrown out around him like a distraction went out, and only the core burn was still bright. I saw him walking through the tables toward me, and his body was edged with a wavering shine of power like some kind of ghostly heat. It was an interesting effect, as if my necromancy pushed his power back. I hadn’t visualized it working quite like that, but I filed it away as useful.

I looked at him, and he looked back. We looked at each other across the few yards of space. The moment our eyes met, I knew this wasn’t about romance, even shapeshifter romance. He was tall, a shade over six feet, unless he was wearing boots with heels, then he was just under. His hair was pale and shaved close to his head. It was oddly military, but he didn’t seem like a soldier, or not one that the government trained. He stood there in his black suit jacket, black button-up shirt, and black jeans. Even his belt buckle was black, probably because silver things attract bullets in a firefight. He started walking toward me again, his big hands out to his sides showing him unarmed, but I wasn’t fooled; the suit jacket didn’t fit quite right on his left hip, which made him right-handed, and the gun big enough to ruin the line of the jacket.

He moved carefully toward my table, hands still out at his sides, palms forward so I could see he held nothing. But I knew better; he was a shapeshifter, which meant that bare-handed he was stronger, faster, and more deadly than any human in here. They didn’t need claws and teeth to break your neck, just speed and strength, and that he would have.

“That’s close enough,” I said, before he got quite to the table; if I could have figured out a way to keep him farther back without yelling and drawing attention to us, I would have done it.

He stopped obediently, but his power slapped out at mine, and my nostrils flared with the scent of him. He’d had to call more of his beast to chase back my colder power. I smelled the thick, heavy, heat-washed scent of lion. The lion inside me raised her head and looked up at me, if something that lived inside your body could look up at you. It was the way my mind visualized it so I could “see” the beasts and not lose what was left of my sanity.

“Good kitty,” I said, and I wasn’t talking to the pale gold image in my head. That image sniffed the air and gave a low purr. She liked what she smelled, which meant he was as powerful as I feared. The lions, especially the lions, demand a partner that’s strong. It probably had something to do with the fact that real lion males will kill all the cubs when they take over a new pride; when your babies are at stake, you want a male that can defend them.

The man’s thin lips gave an even thinner smile, but he nodded, as if somehow knowing he was a cat had won me a point. He sniffed the air and gave me a more serious look. He smelled my lioness, and it seemed to surprise him. He hadn’t known that I held lion inside me: good. It meant he didn’t know everything about me: even better.

His eyes actually slid to the side, and I fought not to look where he was looking. I gave only the edge of my vision in that direction. He was too close to me for me to risk taking my gaze off of him completely. He probably wasn’t going to jump me here, but I wasn’t sure, so I only saw Ahsan working his way toward me out of the corner of my eye. The shapeshifter turned and watched him completely, not looking at me at all. Was it an insult, or a show of trust?

Ahsan paused before he got to the table, shivering a little. He felt some of the psychic energy wafting around us. He got a point for that. Psychic nulls don’t survive well around me. I didn’t want to date him, but I didn’t want to get him killed, either. He glanced at the man still standing near my table, but not “at” my table. It was suddenly not just a dangerous situation, but socially awkward. Perfect.

Ahsan looked from one to the other of us, his smile faltering. “Is this another . . . friend?” He hesitated way too long before settling on that last word.

“He’s not a friend,” I said.

“Coworker,” the shapeshifter said, voice absolutely ordinary, even pleasant. “I just saw Anita getting ready to leave and thought I might get her table. There isn’t another empty one.”

Ahsan relaxed. I didn’t, because the stranger had managed to calm the waiter and subtly threaten everyone in the restaurant. I fought to let my breath out slow and even, and kept the gun aimed on the main body mass of the stranger. Though with his height, and the table height, he’d better hope I didn’t have to pull the trigger, because the main mass I would hit was low, as in below the waist. To hit higher I’d have to be willing to show the gun to the restaurant, and I was hoping not to have to do that. He was right; the restaurant was packed full of innocent bystanders. Packed full of human bodies that the silver-plated bullets would kill just as surely as the shapeshifter; fuck. Not to mention that the amount of power he’d displayed meant he could probably put out just claws on his human hands without having to shift completely, which would have given me time to shoot him. But claws are like switchblades—fast. He could slice up the humans faster than I could kill him. The situation was just chock-full of bad choices.

The lioness inside me began to pace slowly upward, as if she really could. I knew it was a comforting illusion my mind created, but she walked up a path, and that meant she was coming closer to the surface of me. I did not need to try to shift in the restaurant. It would make me unable to concentrate on the bad guy. I worked at calming my pulse, slowing my breathing. I could control this.

Ahsan wasted another brilliant smile on me, and I fought to smile back as he handed me the faux-leather holder that contained the check. I had one of those moments that no one ever seems to have in movies. How did I pay the check with one hand while keeping the gun aimed in the right direction with the other hand, and actually keep my attention on someone only a few feet away who could probably move in a blur so fast it couldn’t be followed with the human eye?

I opened the holder with my left hand, keeping my right and the gun under the table. If I hadn’t thought it would make Ahsan call the cops, or talk to a manager who would call the cops, I might have flashed the gun to see if that cooled the flirting, but I wasn’t ready to escalate—yet. There was an extra piece of paper folded in with the check. Normally, I’d have unfolded it and looked, but I was trying to keep my attention on the shapeshifter. I took the paper and asked Ahsan, “Your number?”

He nodded, and smiled more happily.

I knew my smile wasn’t up to his, and I thought, What would Nathaniel do? I did my best to put that look into my eyes, but the smile that went with it was not Nathaniel’s, it was all mine, a little bit of come-hither and a little bit of threat, as if to say,
When you take a bite I might bite back
. It had been Jason who first explained my smile to me, but it was an honest smile, my life being the way it is. It didn’t dissuade Ahsan one little bit. His smile went from bright to serious, and his eyes got that look that a man gets sometimes when he sees something he really likes. Great, now I’d been too intriguing. I should not have to flirt with someone while I’m trying to threaten someone else with a gun; it was too hard to do both.