Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,159

see about going out with her and maybe Nathaniel for a dinner out. Why not just the two of us? Because Jade puzzled me; she was more than a thousand years old, originally from ancient China, and there were cultural differences that went beyond her being the first girlfriend/lover I’d ever had. I needed a wingman to date Jade in so many ways.

The firefighters were yelling at Edward about the phosphorus. I caught one loud male voice saying, ‘What the hell is this stuff?’

Firefighters do not like saying that about burning things; they’re used to knowing what and why things burn. I caught the comforting tone of Edward’s Ted voice, though not what he was saying. We were too far away for that, and my hearing wasn’t a hundred percent yet.

‘I think if I could shower and get the blowback off me, I’d feel less freaked,’ Dev said.

I remembered the first time I’d gone home and realized I had a piece of a vampire’s brain in my hair. I’d stared at myself in the mirror and started to shake and ended up on the floor of the bathroom a lot like Dev was sitting now, but there’d been no one to comfort me. I’d been so alone for so many years that maybe I’d have reached out for someone, too, if there’d been anyone to reach out to.

Would I be less hard now if I’d had someone to turn to, or would I still be me? Maybe I’d just have been a lot happier, a lot earlier? There was no going back, but looking down into Dev’s earnest face, I wondered. I wasn’t sure I’d ever wondered before, not about that.

‘I need to make sure the rotting vampires that were reported on other floors are all executed, and check on Micah and Nathaniel, and then we can go clean up.’

‘Showers?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Can you help me make sure I get all of it off me?’ he asked, and his eyes looked uncertain again.

‘Are you asking me to join you in the shower?’ I smiled when I said it, made it teasing.

He smiled back, and the change in his eyes from uncertain to happy anticipatory lust was worth it. Would I normally have maybe moved Dev off the list of lovers after this? Maybe, but for the gloom to lift from his face and eyes, sex in the shower with him was not a hardship.

‘Yes, I am,’ he said, and this time when his arms went around me it wasn’t a desperate grip, but a caress with a promise of more to come. Sex may not be the answer to everything, but it’s also not the worst answer to a lot of things. It beat the hell out of anger and killing things.

49

We stepped off the elevator into a mass of police, medical professionals, and first responders of every flavor. It was as if the hospital population had tripled between the time we went down to the basement and now.

A uniform who I remembered from the hallway earlier that day, though it seemed like a hundred years ago, said, ‘What the hell happened to you guys?’

We all looked at each other. The men’s hair was plastered to their heads, and even my curls were dripping wet, as were our clothes. I looked down to find that we were making a puddle on the floor. We had to have done the same thing in the elevator, but we just hadn’t noticed.

The uniform laughed. ‘How did you get that wet and still look like you walked out of a slaughterhouse?’

I blinked at us all and realized that the sprinklers hadn’t exactly gotten all of the mess. It was like I was seeing the world in pieces, which meant that though I was handling it better than Dev, I might be a little shocky. Interesting.

‘Zombies,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘They were killing zombies,’ Hatfield said as she walked up to us.

‘We were killing vampires, but none of us look this bad,’ he said.

‘Zombies are messier,’ she said, and then she said, ‘Just give it a rest, Lewis. I need to talk to the marshals.’

He started to say something else, but she said, ‘Now, Lewis.’

He frowned, but he walked away.

Hatfield was in full gear like we were, though we had more weapons on us, but then Edward and I tended to overpack. A gurney with a covered body on it wheeled between us. There was blood soaking through the covering, which meant it was a very fresh body.

Hatfield