Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,39

left arm in a neat oval almost as big as both my fists side by side. The wound placement let me know what had happened. Sheriff Callahan had been attacked and he’d put his left arm up to defend himself and something had bitten him. I had my own share of defensive wounds like that, but none as deep. Even if he lived, I wasn’t sure how much use he’d have of the arm. It was an awful lot of muscle and ligament to lose.

Micah’s hand tensed around mine, his eyes narrowed, but other than that he showed nothing. His stress sang down his arm into his hand, but it showed almost nowhere else. God, he had such control in that moment. It was impressive and made me proud that he was mine.

He started to say something, swallowed hard, tried again, and just shook his head. I hoped I was about to ask the questions he wanted to ask. ‘The edges of the wound look darker than they should, and there’s discoloration in the wound itself; is that from the treatment?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It’s starting to rot again,’ Micah said, his voice sort of hollow.

‘Yes, there are some bacteria in the mix that we’ve never seen before and they’re not responding to the antibiotics.’ He started refitting the sheet back over the framework without asking if we were done looking. Micah didn’t say anything, so I let it go.

He looked at me and there was such pain buried in the green-gold depths of his eyes. In a voice that was only a little thicker than it should have been, he said, ‘Ask.’

‘Ask what?’ I said.

‘Anything you want to know.’

‘Not as your girlfriend, but as me?’ I asked.

He nodded.

I raised an eyebrow, but I wasn’t going to question it. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘what attacked Sheriff Callahan?’

‘We’re not sure.’

‘I heard it was a flesh-eating zombie.’

‘Someone’s been talking,’ Rogers said.

‘I am a U.S. Marshal with the Preternatural Division. This is kind of what I do.’

‘The local police were worried you’d do just that and take the case away from them.’

‘I don’t want to take anything away from anyone, but I also don’t want people to hoard information between different police agencies. That’s a good way to keep the case from being solved and guarantee more victims.’

There was a faint flinching around his eyes when I said that. The other victims had been bad, for Rogers to react like that. If Micah’s dad hadn’t been the latest it would have been interesting, but now … it was scary and interesting.

‘You don’t want other people hurt like my dad,’ Micah said, and I knew he’d seen the flinching, too, and that he’d used ‘my dad’ deliberately. We both wanted more information and we’d sensed an opening; we’d double-team Rogers. Individually, Micah and I could be relentless, even ruthless; together we were more.

‘Of course not,’ Rogers said.

‘Then help us,’ I said.

‘You are police, but right now you are the fiancée of a patient’s son. That means that you are a civilian, as the police like to say.’

I had a thought. ‘Has someone been treating you like a civilian and hoarding information from you, too?’

He looked away from us for a moment. I was betting he was both working to control his expression and debating what to say, or how much to say.

I felt Micah tense beside me, and I touched him, letting him know we needed to wait. This was the first tipping point, and it could lead to spilling all the information we needed, or to nothing; if we rushed it Rogers would clam up, I was almost a hundred percent certain of that. It was like hunting; you needed to be patient and move carefully or you’d step on a stick or a rock and scare the game away.

Nathaniel moved slightly beside us, but I didn’t warn him. I trusted him to let us work and not to push.

He looked from one to the other of us, then looked at me and Micah, very hard. It was a good look, not a cop look, but maybe a doctor look. He was looking at us as if we were a mystery illness and he was trying to decide if he could figure out what we really were. ‘Are you really his fiancée, or even his girlfriend, or is that just an excuse to butt in on this case, because the local cops would never have asked