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1. Partnership
"I'm calling in my favor," Edward said over the phone, and Anita went quiet. She had known this was coming, of course, ever since they had nearly drawn on each other in that hospital room, but over the months of silence she had tried to forget. There were two things to be afraid of: what was so terrible that Edward needed her help, and more importantly whether he would ask her to do something she knew she couldn't do, like help him with a hit on someone innocent of any crime. She didn't know whether she was more afraid of having to kill him or fail and be killed, or of finding out she was willing to murder to avoid it.
"All right," Anita said. "What do you need help with?"
He wouldn't give her any details over the phone, except to tell her where she was going: the address in Chicago, a four and a half hour drive. That was good, because it wasn't police business and Anita would have had a hard time bringing the guns on a plane without some kind of excuse. It was also good because she hated to fly.
The address went to an apartment in a big, anonymous building, red brick and spaced around a mostly-concrete courtyard. The condo itself was sparse, with new appliances, stark colors and minimal furniture. Anita realized it was exactly what she had unconsciously imagined for Edward - except for the building.
"I didn't think you were the type for historical architecture," she said, looking out the third story window. There was a gargoyle outside.
Edward shrugged. "A high rise is hard to get out of in an emergency. I can climb out the window here without dying."
"Very practical," Anita said, and wandered through the living room. There were two bedrooms. One had an office in it. The other had a mattress, clothing storage, shelving units, all the kind of furniture that you ordered out of flat packs. There was no decor whatsoever, although Anita couldn't say what she thought was missing. "You really live here?" said Anita, dubiously.
Edward shrugged. "Edward lives here," he said, as though he was talking about someone else.
"And Ted Forrester lives somewhere else?" Anita said.
"Ted Forrester has a different legal address," Edward acknowledged, and walked past her into the office. "Let's talk about the case."
Anita kept her breathing steady, but her heart sped up, and she followed Edward into his office to talk about the case. It turned out she didn't need to worry, though:
Edward took a manila folder out of the desk and spread photographs on it. Anita knew she didn't want to see them without even having to ask, but she leaned down and examined them: bodies, just as she had expected. A lot of bodies, piled up, like something out of a war zone.
"The Master of Chicago has been challenged, recently," said Edward. "Neither vampire was strong enough to prevail immediately, so they've settled on opposite sides of the city, in their respective hidden bases, and they've been making war on each other. That was one thing when they stuck to killing each other's minions, even a little collateral damage, but they've escalated to mass attacks on each other's businesses, maybe false flag attacks, even, trying to get the authorities to come down on their opponent. A lot of civilians are dying." Edward said it without much affect; it didn't bother him much, of course.
"You said we weren't working for the police?" said Anita, looking at the photographs.
"We're not," said Edward. "It's a hit. You can have half the money if you want when it's over. Lots of dead civilians is bad for business, and vampires aren't the only players in town in Chicago. I was hired by the mob."
"I don't want mob money," said Anita, which was an easy answer, and true. "You can keep the payment."
"But you'll help," Edward said, and smiled.
Anita looked at the pictures. Knowing what they were, the details of the one on top resolved until they made sense: she was looking at a picture of a corner booth in a diner, after a fire and a lot of other damage. Piled on the broken table were four, maybe five bodies. One was small.
"Yeah," she said, "I'll help."
"I knew you would," said Edward. "First problem is, identifying the masters and their hideouts."
It was and it wasn't like working for the cops. There were fewer rules, but there were still rules. There was substantially more money, for anything they needed money for: bribes, weapons, even clothing for going in undercover. Anita wasn't any better at undercover either; she had to let Edward do most of the talking if they were playing tourists or innocent patrons.
Vampires were another matter, and Anita found out there was a reason Edward had brought her in besides her actual expertise: they could tell she was a vampire master's servant, a powerful one, and of course none of the vampire servants knew who their enemy was; most of the lower level servants didn't even know who their own master was. Half the time Anita could put up a show of power and some mild bluffing and they thought she was either carrying a message from the enemy or on their side.
It wasn't much fun. Anita wouldn't have said working with Edward was fun, not exactly, but she realized it had been before a week into the Chicago job. Most of what they were doing was not really fighting, but bribing, lying, and other assorted dirty tactics. It left a bad taste in her mouth. It made her realize some part of her had been looking forward to a straightforward bloodbath with Edward, away from the complications of her love life.
They were sitting in Edward's kitchen, at his sad, bare table, looking at lists of contacts. Anita sighed.
"I know," said Edward, not looking up from his surveillance footage, no hint of emotion in his voice. "But if we keep it up we'll get to kill something soon."
Anita wasn't sure if she liked that he had understood her or not. She definitely didn't like that they felt the same way about the job right now.
It was strangely intimate, working a private job as partners in this way. They lived together in the apartment, ate together, spent practically every waking hour in each other's company. If they weren't together they had split up to work on the job, and Anita was hyper aware of Edward's location, when she expected him back, what risks he was or wasn't facing at that particular minute and when she should consider him missing. They hadn't known each other well, she realized - her legal identity was easier to find, but what did that tell anyone but some names and dates? Anita was surprised to find out Edward like Mexican food. Edward was surprised to hear her father was a vet.
Three weeks in Anita said, "If this lasts much longer Bert is going to fire me." She was surprised by how upset she wasn't. She had taken the job at Animator's, Inc. because it was the first offer she got when she left college, and she had to animate corpses or she'd start doing it by accident.
"Does that bother you?" said Edward, not like it was a question, and shifted his position.
They were sitting in an abandoned underground storefront with the lights off and the window mostly covered, staking out a staircase that was an entrance to a deeper level of the tunnels below the Chicago Pedway. A tip suggested it might be a vampire den.
"I'd been meaning to take a vacation," Anita said, and shrugged. Three weeks into the job, she knew what Edward liked to eat for breakfast and he had let her move his coffee beans to the freezer, and bought her preferred quality when he got groceries for them last.
Edward laughed. "And this qualifies?" he said, but then the door to the stairs down opened, and they both went back to work.
She had said to Edward once in words that she'd never had a romantic or sexual thought about him. She was starting to wonder after nearly a month in his company if it was only that she hadn't known enough about him to be attracted to him; she had started to wonder if now she did. But it would be humiliating to admit she'd changed her mind if Edward hadn't, and for all she knew they would both die trying to take out multiple master vampires in a single city, so she decided she'd worry about that after the job was over.
It took them six weeks: when they found the first master vampire under the Pedway and took out all of the vampires in his very traditional coffin-filled stronghold, his rival celebrated too openly, openly enough they could track down his base without much trouble. This vampire was a little more modern, with a reinforced, armored building inside the shell of an old theater and daytime minions who toted guns, not just swords. So once they were reasonably sure about the location, Edward called in reinforcement - from a few of his other contacts, and from the mob.
Submachine gunfire and grenades and plastic explosives wasn't Anita's kind of warfare. She followed Edward's instructions on the way in, and she figured - she hoped - she did well enough not to have embarrassed herself. They went in as a team, they punched their way through the defenses, and Anita was back in charge for the process of disposing of the vampires in the coffin room. "You take the head and the heart of each one," she said, and had to demonstrate. The mob mostly wasn't big on respecting women, she had noticed that by now, and Edward's backup seemed to vary; but they were remarkably more respectful after watching Anita decapitate, or help with, eight bodies in a row.
When it was all over, they went back to Edward's condo to clean up. Anita was surprised to realize she would be leaving to drive home in the morning, and more surprised to realize she didn't want to go.
"You still don't want your half?" said Edward, smiling. "It's a lot of money."
"That's not why," said Anita, and sat down next to him on the couch. She tried to remember if she had been the same person six weeks ago, what she had been thinking when she first saw this sparse, bare apartment. A vision of her own apartment - the one she had had to get rid of because of the collateral damage - swam in front of her eyes: bare white walls instead of black, sparse furniture. She had the penguins, maybe. Her house wasn't much better except for the things other people had put there. Surprising, that Edward still lived in an apartment, but then he didn't care if he got other people killed, and in all of the last six weeks when Anita had seen another person in the halls no one had actually spoken to her.
"What the hell," she said, "I'll take the money. I probably won't have a job when I go home... Maybe I should just go missing, not have to check my answering machine."
Edward laughed, but he said, "It helps to have a legal identity that's mostly real. You can fake it pretty well, but there are always holes if someone looks closely enough. You work with the cops often enough that that's useful."
It did not escape Anita that Edward's advice to her had changed focus, the last few weeks. "Yeah, okay," she said. "I still can't abandon the pard, anyway, I'd have to go back."
Edward smiled at her and said, "I'll be in touch soon."
"I know," Anita said, and wondered if she would figure out what she felt about him - or who she was now - by then.
2. Legitimacy
When Edward called in his favor, he came unexpectedly and in person, and he made sure they were alone in the house.
"I'm giving you a chance to pass on this one," he said, quiet and serious, sitting in Anita's newly furnished living room. "I wasn't going to use my favor for this, but there's no one else who could do it."
Anita hadn't been frightened exactly, just to see him, knowing this was coming, but now she was scared. "I didn't think you had moral qualms, Edward," she said.
"I don't." There wasn't a twitch in his face. "When I said you owed me a favor, I thought I'd ask you for backup on a job that would use your skills - a hit or an investigation of some creature I couldn't identify, or maybe a vampire I could use your help reaching and defeating. It was possible I'd need an animator, but I didn't think it would be for this."
"What's this, Edward?" Anita said. She was getting annoyed, and impatient; she hated it when people withheld information from her, but Edward was hard to rush. She got up to get them more coffee while Edward thought about his words.
"I can't tell you what the job is unless you take it," Edward said, slowly. "But I can give you an idea of why I'm not sure you should. This won't be like helping me, Anita. I'm bringing you in on someone else's job. If you agree, they'll know who you are, and what you can do, and they'll call you again. I don't think they'd try to force you to work for them - you can't be beaten into animating zombies, and they would always hope you'd change your mind and work for them voluntarily, so they wouldn't want to risk alienating you completely. But they'd have your name and your address, and sooner or later they wouldn't take no for an answer."
"You're making me think I should tell you no," Anita said.
"You probably should," Edward said. "If I was you, I'd tell me no."
"Then why ask?" said Anita.
Edward took a sip of his coffee, slowly, and said, "They already have your name, from someone else, but they aren't entirely sure you can really do what they've heard. As long as they don't know for sure, and you haven't been brought in, they might decide not to contact you. I was offered money - a lot of it - just to give my opinion about whether you can do this, and to be a middleman if the answer was yes. I haven't given them my opinion yet, which is why I couldn't call, in case the call was wiretapped. If you tell me no, I'll tell them I don't think you can do it. I thought you needed to know about this either way. And there's another reason."
"Another reason?" Anita said.
"It's not the thing I care about, but the reason they want you involved is because if they don't get someone to do this, they think a lot of people are going to die in the near future. Most likely you're the only one who can help. If you can."
"You're not being very reassuring," said Anita, and tried to decide what to do.
Edward always withheld information, but this wasn't how. He didn't talk in circles, trying to give her advice without telling her anything. She should probably tell him she wouldn't do it. He had said he wouldn't do it. "I can ask more questions?"
"I can't tell you everything, but yes, if I can't answer you I'll just tell you this time."
There was one really obvious answer behind what he wasn't saying. "You're talking about the government," said Anita, who felt like a child playing James Bond as she said it. "Black ops, maybe. CIA?"
"No comment," said Edward, which was more or less what she had dreaded him saying.
She rubbed her face. "Does the job involve killing someone?" she said.
"No," said Edward. "All they want you to do is raise a zombie and pass it off as human."
"I can't do that," said Anita, with both relief and dread that it wouldn't really be that simple. "I can make a very lifelike zombie, but it doesn't matter how good you are, they rot. They don't last."
"It wouldn't be for very long," Edward said. "Just two or three days, and if it only worked from a distance that would be fine with them. That's why it has to be now. They only need that much time."
"Who do they want raised?" Anita said, but she knew Edward wouldn't answer before he shook his head. "It's not a prisoner, somebody who was tortured, was it?" Nikolaos had wanted that, once.
Edward shook his head.
Anita swallowed. "You believe them," she said, "That if this doesn't happen, a lot of people will die."
Edward hesitated. He didn't look happy, but he said, finally, "I'm not sure, but I think it's likely, and it's possible there are more details I don't know. Probable, even."
"They don't want me to sign my life away now," Anita said. "And they already have my name."
"Someone gave it to them, Anita," said Edward. "I'm not sure who, although I'll see if I can find out. They thought of you first. It wasn't my idea."
"And we'll be even if I do this," said Anita.
"Don't do it for that," said Edward, still in his cool, even voice. "Hell, if that's a factor, I'll forgive the debt now."
On the one hand, that was terrifying. On the other hand, Edward had said it himself: he didn't really care about the lives. They just weren't a factor for him.
Anita swallowed, and she looked at the clock. If there was a corpse they needed to be passed off for living, she had to make up her mind soon. It had to have been hours, already.
"I'll do it," she said.
"I was afraid you'd say that," said Edward, and got up. "I need to make a call," he said. "Pack a bag. We're going by helicopter. You can bring your guns, but don't bring the illegal ones."
Anita wondered how stupid it made her that she was more bothered by the helicopter than the rest of it, but she went and packed a bag.
The helicopter came to the clearing in the woods outside her house, terrifyingly quickly: they had bet on her decision, or they had been watching Edward and he hadn't been able to shake them, which was worse. It was almost enough to distract Anita from being petrified of flying, but not enough. She could barely focus on the details of the job.
That might have been a blessing in disguise, considering.
They were going, in the helicopter, one state over, to the capital city, and the person they wanted Anita to raise, temporarily, from the dead was one of the senators. He had been assassinated that morning, violently, by a bunch of preternatural criminals: shapeshifters had ripped him apart, but they believed at least one vampire had been involved as well, presumably a master vampire, perhaps with the ability to call the shapeshifters. They knew these details already and didn't need Anita's help investigating the crime. What they wanted her to do was fix, or forestall, the other effects of the assassination: bring the senator back and complete the next couple of days of plans on his behalf, or however many her zombie could manage, so that the group's goals were not achieved.
He was senator of a different state, but Anita didn't vote for his political party. (Of course lately Anita didn't know what the hell she thought of national politics and often didn't vote at all; any more than she knew what the hell she thought of the personhood of vampires.) That honestly didn't trouble her, although she saw Edward look faintly surprised when she didn't react. Anita had been raised to believe in democracy. That was the problem: what she was being asked to do was interfere in politics. A zombie raised with enough of a mind could give the opinions it had had in life, explain its will, give or refuse forgiveness, but Anita could have forced it to sign a document as long as there were no witnesses who would tell, or only used the fact that the senator had been seen, alive, to get through forgeries. It was a new kind of power for her and it scared her in a different way from necromancy.
She had already agreed to do the job, but she was waiting to hear what Edward had meant about lives in the balance. The whole thing didn't make any more sense when she walked into what had been a room in the senator's residence for giving press briefings, and saw the state of the bodies - plural.
"This was a terrorist attack," said Anita, "By shapeshifters? Wasn't the senator a supporter of shapeshifter rights?" Richard had mentioned, once, that he had voted for a bill to try to regulate the shapeshifter halfway houses, that you couldn't get out of once you signed yourself in.
"We think it was a group with the goal of removing vampire and preternatural legal rights," said one of the suits. "Possibly a false flag attack."
"I'm familiar with the goal, Mr..." Anita said, and breathed shallowly. So this was another rendition of Mr. Oliver's mission, executed with more human tactics. It wasn't the gore that made her heart race, not this time, it was the location, the meaning, the identity of the victims. If shapeshifters and vampires were learning from human terrorist groups, they were going to keep learning. This would happen again.
"Mr. Greenway," the man who had spoken said, and finally shook her hand. "Can you do it?"
Anita looked at the bodies, and walked around the room, carefully not associating it with the news. She wondered if this would be easier or harder if she cared more about politics. "It won't work in person," she said. "I can make a very lifelike zombie, but especially if time passes, you can tell. And it will destroy any forensic evidence."
"We have all of the evidence we need," said another of the suits, this one a serious black woman. "What we need is to prevent a crisis."
"It's been hours," said Anita. "You must have canceled meetings. There must be staff who would normally be here." She felt more than saw Edward at her back, smiling coolly in approval.
There was a shuffle among the suits. Then the first one who had spoken to her, Mr. Greenway, said, "Officially, he's had a medical emergency which will unfortunately lead to his death in the next couple of days. We're not asking for miracles, Ms. Blake. We just need to muddy the waters, make it seem like a tragedy without a specific culprit."
"Why?" said Anita. "Politicians have been assassinated before. My friend told me you'd said there were more lives at risk."
There was another shuffle. They didn't want to tell her. Well, the bodies weren't getting any fresher, but Anita realized that she needed to know this before she would do anything. She had to know what she was actually helping to accomplish. If they asked her to make the Senator vote - well, she probably couldn't do it anyway; he would have to get to Washington, D.C. and show up in the Senate among his colleagues to do that and her zombies didn't pass that well, for that long. But they might not know that. Or there might be something else.
"We have reason to believe," said the woman, "That the senator's assassination by a supposed rogue gang of preternaturals was meant to be the trigger for a general massacre in the state capital. We caught two of them alive here, earlier this morning, and are working to track down the rest, but we need a few days to stall. We believe the leaders of the group won't act with the assassination unconfirmed. The Senator was supposed to speak publicly tonight opposing a bill in Congress now, which would seriously limit the rights of preternaturals. Should it pass, we believe two outcomes are possible - more massacres, meant to persuade them, or a war with those elements who appreciate their rights, should it pass."
Right. So Anita was here to prevent a war between vampires, shapeshifters and humanity. She looked at the bodies, and took a breath, and she knew she was going to do it before she said, "I'll need a live chicken and my bag from the helicopter. It has my supplies for raising zombies."
She didn't raise zombies who hadn't made it to the grave very often, but she had done it before. This zombie was only a few hours old. She didn't even need a goat. She might not need a chicken.
Kneeling in a press briefing room to slaughter a chicken, painting chicken blood on the senator's half-torn apart mouth, all of it was probably the weirdest night on the job Anita had had, but it wasn't anything very difficult. That was the thing: for other animators, putting together a torn apart corpse, making it seem to be alive, helping to form a mind that wasn't incoherent with terror after the death, all would have been nearly impossible.
For Anita it wasn't even difficult. That must have been why someone gave her name to the government. There were experts who could have told them what they wanted was near impossible. Most likely there was an expert in the crowd of suits around them now, who would watch and remember.
It didn't even occur to her that it was still daylight until the zombie was rising to its feet. Well, she had been told she could raise a zombie at noon before, that only her beliefs stopped her. She had finally been too distracted to think of her limits.
"Senator," said Anita, and tried not to feel the ground sway under her feet. "What do you remember?"
He told her.
After that it was a weird, efficient bustle. The senator or the senator's zombie understood quickly, and was more coherent than Anita had been afraid he would be, brought back after a violent murder. They went at once to remove him from the blood-soaked, torn apart room. (Anita wondered, finally, how the preternatural terrorists had gotten in in the first place, but she had seen too many vampires with impossible-sounding powers to wonder long. Normal security just wasn't cut out for this kind of thing. Probably in some ways the United States's decision to treat the vampires as ordinary citizens had been its undoing, by encouraging vampires to think of ordinary political motives as goals.) They had a change of clothes for the senator, cameras and technicians to carefully adjust the lighting so it wasn't obvious he was already dead, plans for what his last actions would be and his notes on the speech tonight, in favor of the rights of the people who had torn him apart - people who had been trying to get rid of their own kind's rights, the better to rule over their own kind securely.
Anita turned to Edward. "This is going to get out," she said. "There are too many people here, somebody will talk."
Edward shrugged. "Somebody will talk," he agreed, quietly. "As long as it's after he's in the ground, who will take it seriously?"
One of the suits, listening, said, "What's the quote? 'You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...'"
"How long do we have, Ms. Blake?" asked another suit, hurrying over.
Anita looked at the door the zombie had gone out. A part of her was aware of him: her zombie, linked to her, animated by her life force. She could have made him do anything she wanted without even being in the same room, at least until the suits shot her for interfering in politics. She kind of hoped they would have shot her. "Two days," she said. "Maybe three, but don't count on it."
"Thank god," he said, heavily. "You came highly recommended, and I see it was entirely correct. I'm sure we'll be in touch again."
That was the unnerving thing. Nearly everyone was smoothly professional for the two days - human, but professional, without the grandstanding and gun-flashing that she was used to as a feature of police forces and even the fucking FBI. She hadn't been surprised she wasn't allowed to carry a gun into the senator's residence - uncomfortable, maybe, but not surprised - but she could forget she wanted one for long hours, despite the grisliness of the original attack. Everyone was entirely subtle about being armed. Anita felt more unprepared for table manners than combat. But there was a quiet, definite confidence that Anita would be used for more in the future. They were so happy to see her, to arrange for any small request she had, for the future of their relationship with Anita Blake, animator. It scared her to death.
She turned to Edward near sunset on the third day, with the preparations for the senator's sudden death going on around her. The political terrorist group had apparently been quietly apprehended earlier that morning and a local vampire executioner brought in. The news had been brought bloodlessly over lunch. "If I can't get out of here," she said to him, not really expecting him to agree, "Will you stay with me?"
"If I can," Edward said. For the first time she could remember, he touched her for no purpose - not cleaning a wound, adjusting her grip on a weapon, threatening her. He only put a hand on her shoulder and left it there.
That scared her, too. "Thanks," she said, and leaned her cheek against it. She was so, so out of her depth, and about as scared to think that she'd learn.
"I'll need a reason to do it, some kind of legal relationship. Maybe we should get married," Edward said. He was almost joking.
"Jesus Christ, Edward," Anita said, although she didn't pull away from him. "That might be the worst marriage proposal I've ever had."
"How many have you had?" Edward asked.
"Two," Anita said, and felt him start in surprise. Well, Edward wasn't likely to dump her when she realized what she really was - not white enough for her first fiance in college, and not human enough for Richard. Edward might not know the details of her life, but he knew what she was, for better or worse. He had made her what she was, in many ways - vampire hunter, shooter, and now, finally, an animator on call for the CIA.
They lapsed into silence for a while. Anita wanted to believe the proposal had been a joke, but she knew they would have to talk about it later, if she really wanted him with her. If she didn't want to be alone.
"I knew," Edward said, as they watched the bustling suits around the slowly graying zombie, "That when I called in my favor, I'd be making another decision. You're important to me, Anita. I think you understand me the best, at once, of anyone I know, and when I let you into some version of my life, I'd have to keep it up, I'd want to be the person I was for you more often... So in a way, I was deciding which identity would be real in the future. I think that was why I put it off until this."
"You didn't expect it to be this identity, did you?" said Anita. If Edward had liked working for black ops, he never would have gone to the trouble of becoming a hit man, she was pretty sure.
"No," Edward said. "But here we are." Almost like Richard used to, he took her hand.
3. Defiance
Edward told her very little when he called in his favor: he'd been hired to kill a master vampire in Seattle who was rumored to have a necromancer for a human servant, he needed Anita's help, and he'd pick her up at the airport. Anita packed the guns she could legally take with her, but didn't get to carry one on the plane, since she wasn't on police business. It was either a testament to how much Edward meant to her or how fucking scared she was of him that she got on the plane anyway, books in hand, and tried very hard to forget where she was for the next five hours.
She was also reasonably terrified of the case itself, of course: Anita might be, supposedly, a powerful necromancer, but she knew nothing about ritual necromancy and was not equipped to battle a vampire's human servant who had studied it for real.
Edward took point on tracking down the master's daytime lair. At first Anita assumed this was a matter of experience, but as time went on she started to wonder. He didn't seem to want her to talk to his informants, or much of anyone. A certain amount of Edward refusing to share information was normal, and she wasn't necessarily concerned about him leaving her in the hotel alone to go and handle mysterious errands for six hours - only deeply irritated. Anita's complacency about it said something about how used to hunting vampires Anita was. Much of her still missed the times when there was no execution warrant necessary, when she had spent her first years as a vampire hunter - and she had gotten started young, younger than most people did if they didn't have family in the business - assuming that any vampire was better off dead, no need to prove they were guilty.
She still might not have cared, at least not enough to ask the right questions, if she hadn't been paged on one of those times, with Edward out of the hotel for two hours and Anita sitting with a pile of surveillance footage Edward admitted wasn't likely to get them anywhere. She was relieved by the distraction, to be honest: it was an excuse to stop looking. So she got up right away and called Ronnie back.
"Hi," Ronnie said, "You're in Seattle, right?"
"Yeah," said Anita, wondering. "Why?"
"Are you alone right now?"
Anita hadn't told Ronnie who she was going to Seattle for, only that it was a favor she owed someone. "Yeah, why?" she said.
"I got a tip," Ronnie said, and hesitated. "Look, I'm not going to ask any questions about this favor," she said, "I don't know why you're there. But..."
"But?" said Anita, heart in her mouth. She knew Ronnie, and Ronnie wasn't especially fond of vampires.
"I heard a rumor that there's a hit on the master of Seattle because she took over from a guy who let the vampires pretty much run wild as long as they didn't leave bodies anywhere too obvious. She cracked down on them pretty brutally, stopped them from attacking humans, but the old master had supporters with money who hired a hitman." Ronnie paused. "I don't know if it's true," she said. "And I hate defending any of them, but..."
"But if it is, and his supporters kill her, there'll be a bloodbath," said Anita. "Damn it." She didn't need to ask if Edward had known. Edward had obviously known. He might have hidden information, but he wouldn't have tried to stop her from talking to his contacts otherwise.
Anita hung up the phone a few minutes later, and stared at the hotel room walls. If it was true... She already knew it was true, there was no point in asking would Edward, because he would, or does he know, because he obviously did. Edward had always been motivated first by the thrill of danger and second, to some extent, by money. The things that mattered to Anita didn't matter to him.
She could try to contact the master of the city and warn her about Edward, but Anita didn't know how much good it would do, and anyway she didn't give humans to the monsters, did she? She didn't know anymore, the way things had been tangled up with Jean-Claude and Richard and the pard, but she didn't think she could face giving Edward to the monsters. She would have to draw down with him herself, and kill him or be killed by him; anything else would be dishonorable, in a way. She did not consider the possibility that she could refuse to help without a fight, or that Edward might call off the hit without a necromancer's help; that wasn't Edward.
If she was going to fight Edward, the best thing to do would be to kill him quickly, when he came back to the hotel, although she knew that he would have given her at least some warning, and she would have no idea how to hide what would look like a cold-blooded murder to the police. It might, possibly, help that Edward had paid for the hotel under some fake identity himself. She would have to worry about that later, after Edward was dead. Or she would die, and it wouldn't be her problem at all. Certainly Edward could handle having shot someone in a hotel room that wasn't even under camera surveillance.
Anita paced, waiting for Edward to come back. She checked her weapons and put on everything she could wear on her body: both handguns, the smaller knives and the foot-long, near-sword she wore down her back under her hair. She started to pack her luggage, then worried it would be obvious something was wrong. Finally, she put her wallet in her jacket pocket and decided she would have to leave the clothing if she had to flee, and then she had to go back to waiting. She couldn't see the parking lot entrance from the room, couldn't see the hotel entrance, and had no idea if any particular guest coming through the hall was him... But going out to look for him would be stupid. Anita had, and knew she had, no experience tracking a particular person through a city, and Edward knew where she lived and who she cared about, while she had no idea of where Edward lived, and was certain he cared for no one. She had one chance to kill him and get away cleanly: when he came back to the room.
When the door opened, she was sitting on the bed with the Browning leveled at his chest, but she didn't shoot; that might be a mistake.
"Anita." Edward stopped, eyes cool and face untroubled. He might have been expecting this all along; he might only have had the world's best poker face, as always. "Don't tell me you want the money after all."
"I had a call about the hit," Anita said. She should have shot him then, without explaining, but she couldn't quite manage it. Maybe it was honor. Maybe it was that she didn't want to kill Edward. She considered him a friend. She - cared about him, maybe, she realized with a certain distant horror, loved him, even. She hoped that wasn't it; if that was why she hadn't shot him, she was going to die. "Who hired you to kill the master of the city, Edward?"
Edward shut the door behind him with one foot, hands still clear; he knew without Anita having to tell him that she'd shoot if he reached for a gun. She hoped she'd shoot. "I don't know who my clients are, Anita. There are safeguards for that, go betweens. It makes it less likely I'm talking to a cop."
"But you know why they want to kill her," Anita said.
"Do I?" said Edward.
"Yeah. She took down a real bad vampire master to become master, didn't she? And her enemies want to go after her for it, so they can go back to killing humans again," Anita said. She stared down the barrel of the gun at Edward, and tried to feel nothing, the way she usually felt nothing. She had wondered, earlier on this job, if that made her as bad as Edward, to kill easily. Now she clung to it to keep her from being as bad as Edward, to help her refuse him even if it meant one of them would die.
"Are you worried about the poor, innocent vampire master, Anita?" Edward said.
"I'm worried about the poor, innocent humans who are going to die if she's not keeping control of the vampires of Seattle," Anita said. "And you knew that."
"Did I?" Edward said, again.
"You did," Anita said, "Because you've been hiding things from me this whole time," and then, finally, Edward went for his gun. Anita fired, but she didn't kill as easily as Edward after all, at least not her own friends, because she was slow and she knew it; he got his gun up before she fired, and then--
Then Edward was hitting the ground. Her moment of hesitation hadn't been too much, she'd still fired before he could draw a gun from a concealed holster and aim. Anita's breath was heavy. She had hit him in the chest, not the head; he wasn't dead yet, unless she'd been very lucky. She couldn't hear anything, the gunshot in the small hotel room with no ear protection had left her ears ringing.
She couldn't just walk away - besides the body, and besides the fact that it was in the doorway, she had to know he was dead. If she turned and went out the hotel window, and it turned out Edward was playing possum, he could shoot her in the back.
Slowly, pointing the gun, Anita walked forward, and she saw that Edward wasn't dead. She had hit him in the chest, and he probably would die if he didn't get to a hospital pretty soon, but it wasn't impossible he could patch himself up and drag himself there. But his eyes were open.
"Anita," he said, and smiled. "You shot first. Congratulations."
"I knew we were going to fight, and you didn't." Anita didn't put the gun up. Very carefully, still pointing it at his head, she knelt next to Edward. She should have shot him in the head then, and started worrying about the clean up, and staying out of jail. She should have been relieved.
Instead, maybe from sheer reflex from all of the other times, she took Edward's jacket and put pressure on the gun wound with her left hand.
"Are you going to patch me up before you shoot me?" Edward said. His eyes followed the gun still in her right hand, still pointed.
"Oh, hell," Anita said. "I don't know. This was a stupid thing to die over, Edward."
"Knew it might be a bad idea." Edward closed his eyes. "The job was too... interesting." His skin had always been pale, but there was a colorless tinge to his lips that looked very bad, to Anita. Still he wasn't going to apologize. She knew him.
"Was it worth it?" Anita said, suddenly pissed off. She kept the pressure on the wound with her left hand, and finally put the gun up, back in her shoulder holster. There was no point in keeping it out; Edward didn't have his hand on his weapon anymore, and she could see for herself he wasn't up to going for one - and that she wasn't going to kill him now, if she hadn't already.
"No. But it would have been, if we got as far as fighting them," Edward said. Anita wanted, badly, to punch him, like shooting him in the chest and killing him wasn't enough and at the same time she was exasperated almost fondly. Yeah, that was Edward: like a tame leopard, and he had about as much sense. She had probably been right, that she hesitated because she loved him one way or another.
Then someone pounded on the door: "Police! Open up!"
Surprisingly, Anita didn't go to jail.
The door was still unlocked, so the police opened it and found her holding pressure on Edward's wound, and Edward said, like he'd rehearsed it: "Did the burglar get away?"
In the ambulance they cut his gun holsters off, and he had to answer a number of awkward questions about them in the hospital, but no one so much as questioned Anita. They all seemed to assume she was Edward's helpless girlfriend - probably helped along by Edward's exasperated, "You forgot to call the ambulance yourself, honey?" - and since she wasn't arrested or searched, they didn't find her guns. Anita would have been - okay, was - pissed as hell about that, but if it meant she didn't go to jail for attempted murder it was probably just as well. She didn't say anything. If they didn't find the Browning, they couldn't make any attempt to match the bullet to it.
After Edward was out of surgery and stabilized, after he had satisfied the cops somehow or other about all of the guns he had been packing, and finally after the two of them gave their respective completely unhelpful witness statements, they were finally left alone again.
They looked at each other in the hospital room. The shootout had happened in the early afternoon; now it was nearly midnight. Anita knew for a fact that Edward was unarmed. He hadn't had a chance to be anything else. She had packed his luggage herself, minus several seized weapons.
If he told her that they didn't have to shoot it out, could she believe him?
"I never pictured this," Edward said, finally, as unemotional as ever. "I fantasized about hunting you - about you shooting me, and about killing you. It didn't occur to me that you might be better, and let me live."
"I don't think I was better," Anita said. "I surprised you."
"I knew you might do this on this job," Edward said. "I almost didn't call you. I should have been ready." He looked at her through those pale blond lashes, and Anita wanted to kill him all over again - although in a very different way. "So. What now?"
"You can't finish the job," Anita said.
"No," Edward agreed. "I'll be weeks recovering. Not going to shoot me after all, just in case?"
"Not in a hospital bed," said Anita, although she was terrified all over again. "Are you going to hunt me down when you recover because I ruined your job?"
"Are you going to come when I need another favor?" Edward said.
Anita nearly pulled her gun on him again, but of all the things that would make the cops realize she had been the shooter, someone walking in on that would top the list, so instead she folded her arms and said, "What kind of favor will it be next time?"
Edward laughed, then winced. "Let's call it even. If this favor doesn't kill me, the next one might." He hesitated. "When you had the gun pointed at me, I thought of telling you to go - that you didn't have to help. Or of telling you to get out of the hotel and fight it out later. You'd have done it, wouldn't you?"
"I'd have left the hotel peacefully," Anita said. "I don't know if I could have gone home, knowing what would happen if you killed the master of the city. Was that why you didn't?"
"Once you drew on me, I thought one of us would die," Edward said. "If we left, I'd have an easier time hunting you down than you would, me."
There was a long silence. The patient in the next room had the television on, and Anita could hear the faint, obnoxious sound of late night TV through the wall.
"What are you saying?" Anita said.
"I'm saying that I think I went for my gun because I wanted you to win, instead of me killing you. I'm not used to feeling that way, Anita."
"Not in the habit of falling for your marks," said Anita, and then wanted to shoot herself. Edward smirked, and she glared back. "I could still shoot you in the head and walk out of the hospital, you know, you gave the cops a fake ID for me."
Edward smiled. "No, I felt it too. That moment when you think one of you is about to die, with a gun in your face..."
Anita wanted to call him crazy, but she did know what he meant. "I thought I wasn't sure I could kill you, and I couldn't tell if it was just honor, that I'd ambushed you, or that I cared about you too much." Then she said, testing the idea out, trying to see if it was just too strange: "It always bothered you that I was dating Richard or Jean-Claude."
"Dating," said Edward, and laughed. "Is that what you want to do?"
"Sure. You can take me to another gun range, just as soon as you're out of the hospital, Edward," Anita said. "Let me guess - you've got a knife hidden in the blankets, and when I lean over to kiss you you'll stab me in the chest, right?"
"Try it and see," Edward said, with his usual impenetrable smirk. Anita must have spent too much time with vampires and werewolves lately: she did, and the way her stomach turned over, wondering if he really did have a knife, made it more exciting after all. He was right.
4. Truth
Edward cuffed her hands and feet, and put classical music on, of all things, to muffle the sound. "They're going to know that's not me," Anita said. Everything felt very slow and clear and calm, like being in a gun fight slowed down to a tenth the speed. Edward was going to torture her. "I never play classical music."
"If anyone asks me I'll tell them I'm your new boyfriend," Edward said, and came over to look at her. "Come on, Anita. Don't make me hurt you."
"I'm not making you hurt me," said Anita, and tried not to picture what he was planning to do. It would only scare her more. He had said he wasn't planning to kill her, hadn't he? If he wanted to work together again he might not do anything really bad. Was mild torture an oxymoron? "You're the one who decided to do that."
"Tell me the name of the master of the city," Edward said, and kicked her in the chest. Pain exploded in her chest, and she rolled to the side on the floor. It hurt, she thought he might have broken a rib, but she'd had worse.
He stopped and glared at her, like he had been hoping hurting her once would be enough to convince her he was serious. Anita glared back, and wondered if her resolve would hold if he broke her fingers, or cut body parts off, or raped her. She wondered if she would hold her resolve not to talk. She could just give him Jean-Claude. Would he even believe her if she did, at this point?
That gave her a thought.
"The master of the city," she said. Edward's eyes widened. "Is Willie McCoy."
Edward narrowed his eyes. He knew Willie McCoy too, of course. Anita hadn't meant to deceive him.
"It's Alejandro; he's a vamp who came from out of town after Nikolaos," Anita said. Edward kicked her again, and she grunted, then managed to roll onto her back when he dropped to his knees next to her on the ground. "It's Nikolaos's very realistic zombie, Bert got a contract to raise her from the dead."
Edward put a hand on her wrist, and she kept talking, as much to distract herself as anything else. "It's Dolph - you know, the RPIT squadron leader. He wears a lot of sunscreen."
Edward was laughing.
"Damn it, Anita," he said, and he sounded almost affectionate. "You know, the problem with torture?"
"It's wrong," said Anita, not sure if she meant the words to be sarcastic or only angry. Her bound hands had fallen to one side when she rolled onto her back, and Edward leaned down to pull them into reach. She thought about whether she could bite him at that angle, and how much damage she could do with her human teeth. She could probably give him an infection, if he didn't go to the doctor for cleaning and an antibiotic prescription. In a couple of days.
"You can make someone talk to you, but you can't make them tell you the truth," Edward said, and cut the bonds on her wrist.
She shoved him off her and he went, going to his feet. "So, what," Anita said, glaring up at him. She didn't dare look down to concentrate on the bonds on her feet, but he slid her the knife and she cut them by touch, working slowly. "That's it?"
"If you were scared enough to give me a name to stop me from torturing you, I could ask you to come with me," Edward said, and shrugged. "I thought that would keep you honest; not that many vampires could fool me into believing it up close, and you would be with me when I went, or you'd let me go alone, but I could probably assume you were lying if you did."
"So you were never going to torture me," Anita said, and folded her arms. She felt incandescently furious, and relieved all the same, and she wondered at his answer. She had thought Edward would kill her without a second thought, and apparently he wasn't prepared to torture her, after all - but he said it was for practical reasons. She didn't really care that he had kicked her in the chest a few times; that was nothing by their standards. Patting her down for weapons and tying her up, though, might be something else. Her head was spinning; she half-expected Edward to say, just kidding, and point a gun at her again.
"I thought about it," Edward said, and went to sit on the couch. "But you're not a normal human servant; I couldn't beat you into opening a door in front of me. This was too complicated."
He was sitting on her couch. Anita got up, slowly, and wondered if she would feel safe in this room in the future, and how long it would take. She went to take her guns back. Her range of motion felt almost normal; he might not have broken anything after all. Damn it, that was probably the marks.
"By the way," Edward said, "I forgot to ask when you came in, who hit you in the mouth?"
"I mentioned the name Alejandro earlier?" she said. "Well, I'm not giving you the master of the city, but you could help me with something that might be a bigger challenge," and she started to tell Edward about her night.
A few weeks later, when both Alejandro and Jean-Claude's marks were off of her and everybody was out of the hospital, including Anita, Edward came by Anita's apartment again. Unannounced, again.
"I should take that burglar-proof lock back and demand a refund," Anita said, looking at him, sitting in her living room.
"I made you coffee," he said, looking at her implacably.
Anita went and sat down on the couch. There was a small brown stain on it from blood; when Edward had kicked her in the chest the first time, she had coughed or gagged and blood from the cut on her mouth had splattered, and the couch was white. She wondered why she had bought a white couch, and whether the stain bothered her more than anything else from that night.
Anyway, there was no point in arguing about drinking coffee on a white couch now that it was bloodstained.
"I heard you weren't marked anymore," Edward said to her, sipping coffee from one of her mugs. He'd chosen one of the ones with penguins on it. Anita had not, previously, had any reason to picture Edward with a penguin mug.
"Did you," said Anita.
"So you're free of the vampire. Are you seeing the other one? Richard Zeeman?"
Anita didn't ask how Edward knew about that. Presumably the answer was from following her around. "I haven't decided," she said.
"Because he's a werewolf?" Edward asked.
"No. That would be like blaming someone for being attacked," said Anita, and filled in mentally, or for getting a bad vaccine.
"Because he's too normal for you?" Edward asked.
That was a part of it, but, "Because he's still tied to Jean-Claude," said Anita, finally putting words to the whisper of discomfort over Richard that had been there all along. "Dating one of his servants - even if he's not a human servant, just a werewolf - would be just as bad as dating him. Why the questions about my love life, Edward?"
"Maybe there's another contract on Jean-Claude," said Edward. "You should have told me that the master of the city's death might have killed you."
"So you could shoot me first?" Anita said. Edward looked at her. Anita took a drink of the coffee, finally. Edward must have watched her use her coffee stuff last time, because she knew he'd been surprised she kept the beans in the freezer, but he'd done everything exactly right. "Is there another contract?"
"No," Edward admitted.
"Are we friends, Edward?" Anita asked him. It was almost friendly behavior, by Edward's standards: breaking into her apartment, making her coffee, interrogating her about dates.
"I don't have friends," Edward said, then, "I don't know. What I told you about torture not working well for truth, just obedience, that was true... But I also didn't want to do it."
"Is that a first for you?" Anita asked.
Edward half-smiled. "Maybe," he said. "Do you think so?"
"If you don't threaten to torture me again, maybe." Anita put the coffee mug down. "Do you want to be friends?" He was watching her in a strangely intent way, and she remembered the questions about Jean-Claude and Richard. "Or something else? Is that a first?"
"For Edward, maybe," said Edward, which was a strange way of putting it. "I didn't realize it before; I don't think I would have if I hadn't had to decide how far I was willing to go to scare you, without planning to leave you dead after. If I killed you I wouldn't have to think of your reaction to me afterward. Did I blow my chances?"
"I'll think about it," Anita said, and her eyes traveled to the bloodstain. "No, actually, let's make a deal. You got my blood on the couch. If you replace it, I'll try a date with you, okay?"
"Does the new one have to be white?" Edward asked. But he laughed.
5. Company
After they killed Nikolaos, Anita got out of the hospital first: she only needed a wound cleaned and stitches. Edward had to wait for them to put his shoulder back in its socket and set the two broken bones in that arm, injuries which did not compliment each other by coming together on the same side. An arm broken during intentional torture was a more complicated injury to deal with.
Then it turned out the arm was more messed up than they thought, and he had to stick around in St. Louis to get surgery done once the swelling went down. Anita offered her couch, but he got a hotel room.
By coincidence, he came to tell her the surgery was done and he was leaving town a few days later, just as Anita was contemplating an unexpected delivery.
Edward rang the doorbell this time, which was probably a first, but then when Anita answered it she could see why: he still had the arm in a cast and sling. His eyes traveled past her to the living room, and he said, "Who sent you flowers, Anita?"
Jean-Claude had sent a dozen white roses. Anita let Edward in, and she handed him the card.
He read it, and raised his eyebrows. "Going to go dancing?"
"It's from Jean-Claude," said Anita, sounding pissed off even to her own ears, and stomped off to make Edward coffee.
He followed her, taking the card with him. "He's a vampire, Anita."
"I know. I'm just worried about what he's going to do when I tell him no this time." Anita stared at the coffee maker. "It just came, I'll send it back to Guilty Pleasures with a no tomorrow. When it's light out."
"Good," Edward said. Then he laughed.
"What is it?" Anita said. She was disconcerted by the whole thing and annoyed by it; it was easy to snarl at Edward, too.
"It's funny, that he wants to - what - date you after you killed the master of the city. Can a vampire have a death wish?"
"That's rich, coming from you," Anita said, and Edward laughed again. She turned in the kitchen to glare.
"I generally hunt the danger, instead of asking it out. Although..."
"Although?" Anita said, both intrigued and terrified to have the topic of Edward's love life brought up. He was a man of mystery, without so much as a P.O. Box. It wouldn't have occurred to her to even be curious.
"It gives me a bad feeling," he said, looking back towards the roses. The white petals were very stark against the dark coffee table. Anita had been half-wondering why white ever since the delivery arrived. It was probably only Jean-Claude's evident fixation on black and white decor, but it seemed too innocent and young a color for either of them.
"Maybe you should get out of town for a while," Edward said. "Jean-Claude won't have an easy time following you."
"I have work," Anita said.
"Quit," Edward said, simply. Anita looked at him, surprised, and he said, "You had just started working there when you met, and you said you needed something to pay your bills. You have money saved, I know what Bert's paying you and you don't exactly live an expensive lifestyle." His gaze traveled around the small, mostly bare apartment.
"Quit, and what, hunt vampires full time?" Anita shook her head. "Besides, I need to raise zombies or my power will work by itself. When I was a kid, I used to get followed around by road kill." Edward's eyes were shiny and she glared. "It's not funny."
"No, I'm sure it's not," Edward agreed, too fast. "So don't quit right away, tell Bert you need a vacation and you'll quit if he doesn't give you time off, but leave town, and don't tell Jean-Claude it's temporary. You know he won't give up if you're nearby."
They both looked at the card in Edward's hand.
"Fine," said Anita, although she had never lived out of Missouri and had no idea how to even plan a vacation. It was true that she had had offers from animating companies on both coasts. She had turned them down because she didn't want to move. If she had to move, maybe she would rethink things. "I'll get out of town for a while and then decide. What am I going to do, out of town?"
"You could come with me," said Edward, and looked surprised, like he hadn't meant to say it. They stared at each other.
"I take legal work sometimes, too," Edward said at length. "Bounty hunting, or consulting for the police or feds. Sometimes it's stuff that could use another specialist, especially since you know more about magic than me. I can pick what I do; I'll look through my offers and see if there's anything you can help with, and you can come with me and help."
Then she wouldn't have to make Bert an ultimatum, either. "I didn't know you had a legal identity," Anita said, to cover her surprise. The idea of finding more out about Edward was almost enough of a reason on its own.
Edward had recovered his aplomb, and smiled back inscrutably. "There's a lot you don't know about me, Anita."
"The question is do I want to know," Anita said, and took the card from him. She found a pen in a drawer, flipped it over, and wrote "NO" in stark capitals.
"So you'll come," said Edward.
"So I'll come," said Anita, and was surprised to feel her stomach turn over. "Just a business venture?"
"I don't usually interfere in my business partners' personal lives," said Edward.
"Aww, I didn't know you cared." Anita went to get an envelope to put the card inside. Every employee of Guilty Pleasures didn't need to see Jean-Claude's invitation, either.
"Neither did I," said Edward, and that shocked Anita more than anything else: he had just admitted that he did.
A few months later, Anita admitted two things: she wasn't coming back to St. Louis any time soon, and she and Edward were definitely much more than business partners. It was just as well she had moved, though, because introducing him to her father and Judith would have been a nightmare.