Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,215

coming here on the spur of the moment is a security nightmare, and now you tell me the rogue master vampire is a necromancer that can raise zombies and inhabit their bodies in daylight. This just gets better and fucking better,’ she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Claudia curse before, which meant she was even more upset than she was letting me see.

‘I’m all better; Jean-Claude can fly home.’

She gave me a look of such scorn that I had to fight not to squirm. ‘He’ll never leave now, not until you’re out of danger.’

‘Danger is sort of my job description,’ I said.

‘And don’t think that doesn’t piss me off, too.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘is this just about security issues, or are you pissed about something else?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about; just go and catch this bastard, so we can all go home.’

‘That’s the plan,’ I said. I left the conference room with Nicky in tow. We were going to pick up Domino from his room at the end of the hallway.

‘What’s got her panties in a twist?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but she’s been on edge for about two weeks,’ Nicky said.

‘This much on edge?’ I asked, looking up at him.

He shook his head. ‘No, not this bad.’

‘Good, because I was about to feel stupid for not noticing that one of our head guards was having some kind of personal issue.’

‘Claudia won’t let it interfere with the job, whatever it is,’ he said.

I nodded, and knew he meant it, but I also knew that even with the best of intentions personal stuff bled onto everything sometimes. But since she didn’t want to talk about it, I would let it go; unless it interfered with her job it really wasn’t any of my business.

Nicky knocked on the room door at the end of the hallway, just by the door marked EXIT. The door opened and it was Domino. He looked slender beside Nicky and Dev. Domino was five foot ten but he was more slender in his build, which made him look taller than he was, because when you looked at him your eye didn’t stop at the shoulders or the chest like it did on the other two weretigers. His two most striking features were his hair and his eyes. The hair was mounded on top in a soft mass of black and white curls; he’d recently started shaving the bottom layer of hair close to his head, so that it was almost a skater cut. The multicolored curls were natural, though he got a lot of club kids and Goths asking him where he’d gotten the great dye job. His hair showed his mixed tiger heritage, half white clan and half black. He was one of only a handful of black weretigers that had lived through the near-extermination of that clan. He’d been found in an orphanage by the white tiger clan; no one knew who his parents had been, only what they had been. He had two tiger forms, one white, one black, and he could also do tigerman form in both. His mixed heritage had made the white tiger clan treat him as not good enough to mate with, for fear of bearing an impure child. The clans mated with each other to keep the genetics healthier, but most babies looked like one side or the other and went to be raised with the clan that they most resembled. Domino was one of only two that I’d met who couldn’t hide his mixed heritage.

His eyes were pure black tiger, like orange flame. They were startling enough that people thought they were contacts, like they thought the hair was dyed. In his black tiger form, those orange tiger eyes were Halloween beautiful. In white tiger form, they marked him as impure, because in every form his tiger eyes stayed the same, like all the clan tigers they were born with the eyes. Though there were clan tigers that had human eyes, they were considered weak by the other tigers and usually only had the form of a giant tiger as their beast.

His smile filled those jack-o’-lantern-colored eyes with such happiness. It made me feel guilty that I hadn’t gone out of my way to greet him when he got to town and that I hadn’t wanted him to bodyguard me today.

‘Hey, Domino,’ I said, and went to him.

He wrapped me in his arms, and I hugged him around the waist. He didn’t have all his weapons