Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,142

long as I’d been the Executioner, but the nickname had been his before a badge and falling in love with Donna had tamed him down some. But the vampires had dubbed Edward Death once as an assassin/bounty hunter and once as a bounty hunter/marshal. It was convenient of them to use the same name twice.

I fought to keep my face blank as Edward drawled in his best Ted voice, ‘If you know I’m one of the Four Horsemen, then you know that Anita has two earned names among the vampires.’

She looked sullen. ‘Yeah, I know she has two pet names.’

‘I don’t,’ Jonas said. ‘Enlighten me.’

We both looked at Hatfield. She glared at both of us, then finally back at Jonas. ‘Forrester is Death and Blake is War.’

‘Who are the other two Horsemen?’

‘Otto Jeffries is Pestilence, and Bernardo Spotted-Horse is Hunger.’

‘I’ve met Spotted-Horse and I know Jeffries by reputation; they’re both ex-military, and so are you, right, Forrester?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then why is Blake “War”? She’s never been military.’

‘She has a higher kill count than I do,’ Edward said, ‘and the vampires see Death as a one-on-one killer, whereas War kills a lot all at one time.’

‘You asked the vampires,’ Jonas said.

‘I did.’

‘But why not Jeffries, or Spotted-Horse?’

‘You’ve met Bernardo, right?’ I asked.

‘I’ve met him, too,’ Hatfield said. ‘He didn’t seem that scary.’

‘He’s Hunger,’ Edward said.

‘I don’t get it,’ Hatfield said.

‘The vampires said Bernardo looks good enough to eat, but no one’s ever tasted him, so he leaves them hungry.’

She frowned.

Jonas seemed to think about it, and then he grinned wide and happy. He laughed. ‘He’s tasty like food, I get it.’

‘Dangerous food,’ Edward said. ‘He has the fifth highest kill count of any marshal.’

‘I’ve met Jeffries once. He had a way of looking at women when he thought no one else was looking, like we were meat, and that was before he caught lycanthropy on the job. Now I guess we really are meat to him.’ She shivered, shoulders hunching a little, and then seemed to realize what she’d done and stood up straight, shoulders back.

The fact that she’d noticed made me think better of Hatfield. I knew Otto Jeffries as Olaf. Olaf’s hobby was being a serial killer, never in this country, and never on government work, so if you could keep him working he was ‘safe.’ The military kept him busy, and since he got a badge he was even busier, and being a part of the Preternatural Branch of the Marshals Service meant he could torture and kill vampires and rogue shapeshifters to his heart’s content, and as long as he killed them in the end, there were no rules to how he carried out the execution or how long he took to do it. Olaf was one of the scariest people I’d ever met, alive or undead, and that was an impressive list to be near the top of. Hatfield was right; he’d been that scary before he got cut up by a werelion and tested positive for lycanthropy. He’d gone AWOL after he got his test results, but he’d resurfaced a few months later. If he’d done anything unfortunate while he was learning to control his beast, the human authorities hadn’t heard about it.

Micah had asked around in the preternatural community, and Olaf seemed to be playing the part of a nomad lion. He had stayed away from any group. Where he’d gone to learn to control himself, no one seemed to know. I actually wondered if he hadn’t gone anywhere, if the serial killer part of him was actually so close to an inner beast that he’d understood how to control both?

Since Olaf had considered me his little serial killer girlfriend because we went out and killed people together, I’d avoided him before he learned to turn furry; now he was avoiding me as hard as I avoided him. He’d known Nicky before he became my Bride, and Olaf was afraid of my taming him the same way. Anything that kept Olaf away from me was fine in my book.

‘I haven’t seen Otto since he caught lycanthropy either.’

‘You’re a fur-banger; why would him being a wereanimal bother you?’ Hatfield asked.

I turned and looked at her. ‘What did you call me?’

‘So you don’t deny that you slept with Jeffries, too.’

‘I didn’t sleep with him, but I’ve learned two things. One, it’s impossible to prove a negative, to prove I didn’t do something. Two, when a woman sleeps with more than one man, she gets accused of sleeping