Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,176

in your hair that it looked straight and paler. Long hair is a pain in the ass when it’s got that much in it.”

“Micah’s in medical talking to Rafael.”

“He’s with our king?” she asked.

“Yeah, is that a problem?”

“No, no, just . . . I’ll get Micah the message.”

“Thanks,” and I went back to literally scraping with my fingernails down the length of my hair, before shampoo did me any good. It had just made the stuff sort of gelatinous before, so I’d scrape it off and try again. Maybe I’d start packing some of those plastic hair coverings like they wear to crime scenes. It had to be an improvement over this.

When my hair was finally clean I wrapped the oversized towel around me; since it was meant to cover men that were closer to seven feet tall and four times as broad as I was, I was covered from under my arms to my ankles and had enough material to wrap around me tight and secure. I gathered up all the hair stuff to put back where I kept it and stepped out. I knew just from the noise level that the shower was a lot emptier than it had been when I went into it. What I didn’t know was that Kane, Asher’s new lover and Dev’s nemesis, was in the showers near the door to the locker room.

Kane stood with his back to the room. He had serious tan lines low on his hips and in a narrow line across the tight roundness of his ass. The contrast between his skin tones let me know that he tanned darker than Micah did, or his base skin color was paler than Micah’s, so the contrast was greater.

“Are you staring at my ass?” he asked.

I looked up and saw he was looking over his shoulder at me. He was almost bald, but it wasn’t because he’d lost all his hair; it was because he cut it down to black fuzz. The way his hair looked shaved down that short made me almost certain that if he grew it out it would be curly. He had two deep areas on either side of his head where his hair had receeded from a sharp widow’s peak, which again raised the question of baldness, or fashion choice. The lack of hair bared the bone structure of his face and let you know he was handsome, bordering on pretty, especially for a six-footer.

“Yeah, I guess I was.” I kept walking, which actually brought me closer to him, but if I kept moving maybe I wouldn’t get caught in our usual snark-tastic repartee.

“Like what you see?”

“I was actually wondering if you tanned darker than Micah, or if your natural skin color was paler, and that’s why your tan lines are more pronounced.”

“What, you don’t like tan lines?”

“I think I’m neutral about tan lines.”

Some of the guards close to us were rushing their showers. They darted covert glances from me to Kane. They shouldn’t have been looking at him like that; he wasn’t their king, or a prince, or whatever. He was just the lover of one of our shared lovers, but there it was; they were treating him like he had enough power to make them afraid, or at least enough that they didn’t want to get caught in the middle of us. Asher was technically Jean-Claude’s second-in-command if you were counting vampires, but honestly as Micah and I had taken on more responsibilities Asher’s role had gotten smaller, partly because his emotions got in his way, a lot, and partly because Asher had spent over six months exiled to another city. By the time he came back we’d divided up a lot of the daily upkeep without him. So why were the guards looking at Kane like getting on his shit list could ruin their day?

Kane turned around in the shower, so I could see that the tan lines went all the way around. It was a nice view, but the sourness that always seemed to roll off him ruined any momentary attractiveness. Asher had finally found someone who was more cranky than he was, and dealing with Asher was hard enough; Kane just seemed like too much work for too little payback to me.

He ran his hands down his body to cup himself, massaging a little so I could see he had room to grow. I raised an eyebrow and started walking. I was done here.

“Does it bother you to know you