Anita Blake 20 - Hit List (18 page)

Newman’s body reacted as if someone had poked him, as if something about what I’d said mattered, or surprised him. In the swirling color of lights I watched his face debate. Should he go with me to the ambulance or stay with the guys and tough it out?

I also wanted to talk to Edward in semiprivacy away from Raborn and the rest, and he was still by the ambulances. Besides, what I’d said was absolutely true. I had nothing to prove to anyone anymore. I knew how tough, how brave, how good I was at my job. Raborn could go to hell, and I’d actually matured enough that I didn’t have to tell him that last part out loud. It was plenty satisfying to simply walk away.

Raborn’s voice rose as he said, “You going to be a girl about this, Newman, or a man?”

I turned around, still walking, and yelled. “Yeah, Newman, be a man, keep bleeding until you pass out in the middle of the woods with shapeshifters and vampires after your ass.” Then I went back to following the dark-haired EMT.

The light that spilled out from the ambulance seemed terribly bright and totally screwed my night vision, but Matt, the EMT, needed the light.

The blond EMT came to join us, muttering under her breath. I caught, “Stupid . . . men. Scalp wounds bleed . . .”

Matt had cleaned my arm and was squinting at it as if he either needed glasses he wasn’t wearing, or would soon. “Julie, can you look at this?”

The blonde, Julie, stopped cursing the stupidity of men under her breath and just joined him in staring at my arm. She was careful not to touch me, since she hadn’t double-gloved, but she let his fingers do the walking. When he spread the edges of the wound, I protested. “That hurts,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, but didn’t look up from the wound.

“How long ago did you say this happened?” Julie asked.

“An hour, less,” I said.

“No way,” she said.

Matt finally met my eyes. He was frowning. “I’d say this was hours, maybe a day old, at least.”

“I told you I carry lycanthropy. It means I heal faster than human-normal.”

“It’s healing so fast it’s going to heal crooked. Stitches would have kept it from doing that,” Matt said.

“Crooked?” I asked.

“It’s going to scar more,” Julie said, “than if a doctor had stitched it for you.”

I looked down at my arm. It was a long, jagged cut, almost like angry lightning going from elbow to almost wrist. “Nothing to be done about it now,” I said.

“Actually if you go to the hospital they can cut it open again, and then sew it up. We just had a seminar on preternatural patients. Lycanthropes can heal so fast that they scar more, or even get their muscles bunched up so the wound gives them pain almost like arthritis.” Matt said it staring down at my arm, as if it were a sort of show-and-tell.

“Is there a time limit for when I need to come in and get this done?”

“Sooner is better, at the rate you’re healing,” he said, poking at the wound again.

“Please, stop poking it,” I said.

He looked up a little startled. “I’m sorry; it’s just the first wound like this I’ve seen since the seminar.”

“Matt’s a big one for theory in the field,” his partner said.

I looked at her, nodding. “I usually heal without scarring now.”

“Well, this is going to scar,” she said.

I looked at it and believed them, but wasn’t sure why it was happening. I thought about it, and then realized I’d absorbed anger when I visited the red tigers, but I hadn’t fed theardeur . The anger had taken the edge off my hunger, but it hadn’t really refueled me. I wasn’t healing as well as normal, which explained why the tree limb had hurt me so badly in the first place, as well as the scarring. I could go longer between feedings. I could control it, but apparently this was the price. I healed better than a pure human, but not as well as I could heal. That wasn’t good when hunting the Harlequin. Shit.

I tried to imagine what Raborn would say if I actually did take time out for a nookie break. It didn’t even bear thinking about; I couldn’t stop for sex, not until we finished hunting through the woods. Well, fuck, or rather no fuck. Damn it, I was tired of getting punished for not having sex.

It was sort of the horror movie cliché turned on its ear; only the slutty survived, not the virginal.

I couldn’t explain any of this to the EMTs, or anyone else here but Edward. Always before with theardeur it had consumed me, forced me to feed, but now I had enough control that I could delay it. The angry purple and red wound on my arm showed me the price for controlling theardeur . Staring down at the wound, I realized that I had started counting on healing and being harder to hurt. I tried to remember the last time I’d been hurt by accident like this, and I couldn’t remember. My stomach clenched tight and it wasn’t hunger—that wasn’t where theardeur ’s hunger hit me—it was fear. If a tree limb could do this to me, then what about a sword, or a bullet? Shit.

“You okay?” EMT Julie asked.

I nodded. “Fine.”

“You really need to go to the hospital and let a doctor open the wound and then stitch it back up,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She frowned at me. “But you’re not going to do it, are you?” She sounded disgusted with me, I really couldn’t blame her.

“I can’t let them go into the woods without me.”

“You know, the marshals around here do just fine when you’re not in town. They hunt vampires and beasts, and they do a good job. Let them do their jobs and let us do ours and take you to the hospital.”

Matt pulled at the edges of the wound. “Stop that,” I said.

“Sorry, but it’s almost like one of those fast-forward films of flowers, you know, where you watch them bloom. I swear I can almost see your skin knitting together. It’s so cool.”

Julie hit him on the shoulder, and it must have been harder than it looked, because he said,

“Ow!”

“She’s a live patient, Matt, not a cadaver in class.”

He blinked up at me, and then looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I just . . .”

“It’s okay. Just patch me up so I can finish this hunt.”

“You’re being totally stupid,” Julie said.

“Not as stupid as Marshal Newman. He’s still bleeding.”

“He’s going to keep bleeding until he passes out, too,” she said, and the disgust was thick in her voice.

“Probably,” I said. “At least I’m letting you bandage me up.”

“Your wound will be closed by the time you finish this hunt. You’re not losing more blood.”

“Then just wrap it up so I don’t keep hitting the wound on things.”

She frowned, but got gauze and started wrapping my arm.

“Make sure none of it gets in the wound,” I said.

She looked at me. “I know my job.”

“I don’t mean to imply otherwise, but if I’m healing as fast as you think I am, sometimes the body can heal around the cloth.”

They both looked at me. Matt said, “You mean the body will actually knit closed with some of the bandages inside?”

“I’ve seen it happen,” I said.

“To you?” he asked.

“No, a friend who was a werewolf.”

Matt’s face glowed with eagerness. I could almost feel the questions bubbling to the surface.

“You’re wrapped up. Sign here, so we can say we tried to take you to the hospital in case something goes wrong with your arm, which it will.”

I signed, and hopped off the back of the ambulance. “Sorry I’m being a pain in your ass.”

“When the tall guy passes out in the woods, try to keep things from eating him,” she said.

“I’ll try,” I said, and I would, but with my arm beginning to ache from the rapid healing, I wouldn’t try too hard. Newman had let Raborn talk him out of even a bandage. I’d been green, but never that green. Maybe it was a guy thing and I’d never understand that level of stupid, or maybe mine was a girl thing. My arm began to twitch, the muscles fighting against each other as they knit together. I hadn’t had that happen since I first got lycanthropy in my bloodstream. Shit.

Maybe Newman wasn’t being any stupider than I was. I guess I would try to keep him from getting eaten. Damn it.

NEWMAN PASSED OUT, but I made sure nothing ate him. We were deep in the trees by the time he went down. He’d done well to make it this far. I stayed by him in the wind-kissed trees with the other police working their long line of searching, but I could see the other stretch of road, and I was pretty certain that there were no monsters to find. The Harlequin had fled. Either they were still trying to stay secret enough to avoid this many cops, or they hadn’t expected Edward to be packing a rocket and they’d retreated to rethink their plans. I think they’d underestimated both of us, hell, all of us. I looked down at Newman where he lay on the ground.

Detective Lorenzo was holding his inner suit jacket on Newman’s wound, trying to slow the blood down. He’d put his outer jacket back on so it still readPolice , but also it was cold. My hands were numb with it. Weren’t cold summer nights an oxymoron?

Lorenzo’s partner, Detective Jane Stavros, was helping me guard the two men, both the unconscious one and the one who had his head down tending the wounded one.

The police Windbreaker swam on Detective Stavros’s thin frame. The pantsuit that was showing was cheap, black, and too large for her. She was at least five-ten in her sensible and ugly black lace-up shoes. If she’d been dressed better I might have thought she was a professional model, but she had dieted too much for her bone structure, so she looked starved, and she’d dieted away all her curves so she was built like a man. Her straight brunette hair was back in a loose ponytail.

Some women on the job try to dress like the men, to fit in, to pretend that they aren’t women. I hadn’t seen any woman who had been on the job long enough to get a detective’s shield carry it to this extreme. Maybe she was a newly minted detective; sometimes that can throw you back to old issues. But it wasn’t just the men’s clothing; it was that she was sloppy, as if she’d rolled out of bed and put on someone else’s clothes by mistake. Nothing fit her right, as if she were wearing someone else’s skin.

But she held her gun like she knew what she was doing, and she watched the darkness and her partner’s back. She hadn’t done anything to make me think less of her except buy into the whole guy thing a little too much, and who was I to bitch about that? But there was almost a starved feeling to her, as if she’d never had enough. Enough food, enough love, enough anything worth having. An air of jaded tiredness and wariness hung over her like a dark cloud. It was an interesting mix of that ten-year blasé that cops get, and the nervousness that usually goes away by then, as if she’d seen it all, but instead of being bored it had spooked her.

Edward had gone ahead with the line, because we wanted one of us with the group; besides, my right arm wasn’t very happy with me. My right arm, my main shooting arm, was twitching so badly from the overly rapid healing that I couldn’t have used it to shoot anything. Moments like these were why I practiced everything left-handed. I wasn’t as good on the left as I was on the right, but I was still better than average, and it would have to do. I’d forgotten how much it hurt to have the muscles fighting against each other, as if my arm were at war with itself. A little sex would have kept it from happening, but I’d been stubborn, and the red tiger Harlequin had interfered, but I should never have left off feeding for days. It was stupid, but until Seattle there hadn’t been anyone in town for me to feed on. Okay, no one I was willing to feed on. I was paying for my rule of no strangers now. My arm was twitching so badly it could no longer help me hold the MP5 in place for shooting.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” she asked.

“I’m healing faster than the muscles can keep up.”

She gave me a disbelieving glance. There was enough predawn light for me to see her expression now.

Lorenzo said, “You’re hurt more than you let on, Blake.”

I shrugged, and just concentrated on breathing through the pain of my arm being at war with itself.

It was Raborn who tramped back through the trees, “They’re not here, Blake.”

“Probably not,” I said.

He put his gun over one shoulder so the barrel was pointed up at the sky. “That kind of twitching means you’ve damaged nerves. You need to go to the hospital when they take Newman.”

“You bully Newman into passing out, but me you’ll send to the hospital? Why, so you can say,

‘See, she’s just a wimpy girl’?”

I watched Raborn’s expression by the cold, white light of dawn, but I couldn’t decipher it. He looked down at my arm. It was shivering, a continuous dance of muscles. The pain was mind-numbing and only pride kept me from making small noises, or bigger screams.

“I didn’t know you were this hurt, Blake.”

“You didn’t ask,” I said.

“The EMTs are almost here; go with Newman to the hospital. No one will think less of you.”

“I told you, Raborn, I don’t care what you think of me.”

Now I could read his look; it was angry. “You just won’t give an inch, will you?”

Edward came up behind Raborn and said, “It’s not her best thing.” Raborn moved so he could see all of us. “She might get along better if she were a little more flexible.”

Edward nodded, smiling his Ted smile, as he tipped his hat back from his forehead, his P90

pointed one-handed at the ground. “She might, but if she were more flexible she’d be screaming from the pain, instead of watching the woods, doing her job.”

Raborn seemed to think about that for a second, then just shook his head. “All you old-time hunters are stubborn bastards.”

I smiled at that. Raborn had to have me by at least a couple of decades, but I was an old-time hunter. Then my muscles tried to form a fist inside my arm and tear their way out. The pain broke me out in a light, sick sweat.

“You just went pale,” Stavros said.

I nodded, not trusting what my voice would sound like.

Matt and Julie, our EMTs from earlier, were carrying a stretcher sideways through the trees.

Apparently they’d had to wait for us all. I’d actually expected the shift to have changed or something.

Edward said, “We’ve searched the woods. They’re not here.”