Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,258

might be able to use his magic to escape from the ambulance, or hospital, I honestly couldn’t say yes or no. He’d already done a piece of magic that should have been impossible, so all bets were off.

“What did you do to her?” he asked, straining against the straps that held him down and the handcuffs on both wrists.

“I helped her be less afraid.”

“I want her afraid. I want her to remember that she only has herself to blame for this.”

“Why, because she dumped your ass? Stalker much, Max?”

“Maximiliano, and she’s mine, Anita, mine! You keep your magic off of her!”

“She listens to me, to my necromancy, when you’ve got a piece of her soul trapped in you, and you still can’t keep me from controlling her.”

“I stopped you over the computer.”

“Yeah, because you could touch the zombie and I couldn’t, but now I can touch her and you can’t. I’m betting I can control her, even if you don’t want me to. I’ll keep her calm and unafraid while we get a judge to sign off on removing the gris-gris so we can free her soul, because trafficking in human parts, even souls, is a felony. Did you know that?”

“How do you prove I have her soul?”

“I don’t have to, someone tried to sell their soul on eBay a few years back and a judge ruled that a soul is the same as any human organ. It’s a felony to sell pieces of ourselves.”

“Fine, take it, it still won’t prove that I did anything to earn an execution, and by the time you get through all the hearings to remove the gris-gris I’ll have healed. It will be years in court before you can prove anything. Magic is so hard to explain to a jury, and I’ll get to tell them what a bastard my father is, and how he abandoned me. His wife isn’t going to like knowing that he had a bastard child with Dominga Salvador.”

Max was right about that.

“Juries love videos, Maximiliano. The sex slavery angle will make them hate you. By the time they see it all, they will be thinking there but for the grace of God go I, or my sister, my daughter, my wife, my child. They’ll put the needle in your arm themselves by the time we’re done with you.”

“A good lawyer will make sure those videos never see a jury, Anita. They are too prejudicial, and would bias the jury against me. If convicted it would be magical malfeasance, which means my execution would be swift. They won’t take the chance of getting the verdict overthrown after I’m dead—that doesn’t look good on a judge’s record.”

“What was your major in college again, Maximiliano?”

“Prelaw.”

“Of course it was.” I smiled at him.

He didn’t like the smile.

“But, Max, all I have to do is get a court order to remove all dangerous magical items from you. I can honestly say that I don’t know exactly what the gris-gris does. I mean, after all I don’t do voodoo, not really. If we cut it off tonight, I think three bullets in the chest will be enough that natural causes will do it for us.”

“You’ll never get a judge to sign off while I’m this hurt.”

I leaned in and spoke low. “You’re probably right, but I’m going to try anyway.”

He smiled, smug and safe behind magic too complicated to explain to most judges and nothing quite hard enough to be called evidence. He should have been safe as they bundled him up into the ambulance and we got in the Bear Cat and followed him. I didn’t want him safe. I didn’t want Estrella to be trapped in her ruined body for weeks while we fought this out in court.

I found Manny and his whole family in the waiting room outside surgery. I was still dressed for SWAT, so it took Mercedes a second to recognize me. She looked like a slightly younger version of Connie. She got up and came to me, hugging me. “Thank you for rescuing them!”

Then Rosita was there, all five-ten of her with her wide shoulders and nearly square shape. Her hair was back in a bun at the nape of her neck, so she could still undo her hair and let Manny brush it out at night. It was one of the things they’d done since they married in their teens. She’d probably have been embarrassed that I knew that, but I liked knowing it. It was sweet to