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He thought at me,I thought we weren’t supposed to contact each other until Jean-Claude said so.
“Screw that, what happened?” I said it out loud because someone with me asked but was quickly hushed.
Damian didn’t have to use words, he just let me have the memory. I’d been weirded out by being able to do that once, but now it just saved so much time. I knew Damian was worried; he knew about the attack on us at the restaurant, and he was so happy to see me well, but he now knew what had happened to Wicked and Truth. That scared him for them and for all of us. Since it scared me, too, I couldn’t protest. We exchanged memories of the evening, because I’d asked first, and while he gave me what I wanted, he took what he wanted from my mind. He was my vampire servant, but of the three of us Nathaniel was the one in the driver’s seat of our triumvirate-of-power bus, because Damian and I had been conflicted about what we wanted out of it. Nathaniel had been the only one who knewexactly what he wanted, and he eventually helped us both figure out what we wanted, too.
Nicky hugged me a little tighter, and I blinked back to the hospital. I’d missed some of what Dolph had said, but I already knew that one of the male vampires had been hit in the face by a human customer who claimed that him feeding off his girlfriend had ruined her for any human. He’d actually accused the vampire of doing more than taking a willing and very public blood donation from the girlfriend at Danse Macabre. She’d been one of the many people who signed up nightly for a chance to be fed on by one of the vamp employees. They had to sign a waiver to even have a chance at being chosen. Then the donors lined up and the vampire flirted with everyone in line, and then picked someone, or Damian chose for them, or sometimes he chose for himself. I was okay with him eating at work; he came home to me and Nathaniel, though recently we’d added Pierette. She was my official girlfriend. Unlike Echo, she liked the title and happily introduced me as her girlfriend. Being wanted is its own aphrodisiac, and Pierette and I wanted each other and our shared men.
“Anita, are you listening?” Dolph asked.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I’m sorry, Dolph, I’m not…I know about what happened at Danse Macabre, but if you said anything else, then I missed it.”
“Doctor checked you over, right?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I didn’t get hurt.”
“Did you hit your head, or get hit?”
“No.”
“It’s not physical,” Nicky said.
“I should have been there,” Echo said.
“If it was just Danse Macabre that got hit, I’d say maybe they knew you wouldn’t be in charge of security tonight, but they hit too many other places. I think it would have happened tonight regardless,” Dolph said.
The elevator doors opened to an empty car. Echo said, “I need to know what else happened so I can do my job.”
“You can’t get in the elevator with us until after we cleanse ourselves,” Kaazim said.
It was like she’d forgotten for a second. She nodded and stepped back. “I will need a report later.”
“You’ll get one,” Nicky said. He led me into the elevator.
“I’d like Anita to tell me that.”
The others got on and for a second I couldn’t see her past Dolph. Once he cleared the way, I said, “You heard Nicky. Now, go help Fortune watch over Wicked and Truth. If they wake up, call me. If you need more backup, call us.”
“As you command,” she said, and there was just a touch of temper to her words, unusual for Echo. She was usually cool, calm, and collected.
We weren’t dating anymore; that meant I didn’t have to hold her emotional hand, so I didn’t ask what was wrong. She wanted to just be one of our guards, so she could be that, but if I wasn’t getting sex, and she didn’t want me to love her, then I didn’t have to do the rest of the relationship. She wanted space, she didn’t want to date me, and she didn’t want to be my girlfriend. She’d said it was too much that Fortune had been her girlfriend for centuries, and that was the only person who got the title. I’d respected that, too. I’d done everything she asked, but if she wasn’t my girlfriend, or my lover, then I could let the elevator doors close without asking her why she was angry. It wasn’t my business anymore.
24
I told Kaazim whatbutton to push, because thanks to Ethan having gone ahead I knew exactly where we were going. I held on to Nicky while the elevator went up. Dolph read down the list from one of the small notebooks that he’d been carrying since we met. “The same group that hit Asher at the Circus took responsibility for punching a waiter at Burnt Offerings, and two vampires in the Riverfront district getting punched in the face. They call themselves the Brotherhood of Samson.”
“Are they as Christian and alt-right as that sounds?” I asked.
“Religious, yes, and they only take followers of ‘the religions of the Book,’ their words, not mine. They believe that the devil has made the Christians, Muslims, and Jews fight among themselves so that the forces of Satan—read ‘preternatural’—can infiltrate our society and turn all humans into second-class citizens.”
“I decry what they are doing,” Kaazim said, “but I find anything that gets all three faiths to work together promising.”
“It’s mostly Christian and Muslim at this point, though one man arrested today claimed to be Jewish.”
“Why do you say ‘claimed’?” I asked.
“Because I’m not as familiar with Jewish extremism as I am withthe other two, so I want to do more research before I say publicly that all three faiths were involved.”
“Never assume,” I said.
