Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,69

I was still mostly human. I had to work harder to play with the big dogs, because I wasn’t one. I was stronger than human-normal, but so were most of the people who gave me grief, both on my job as a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch and here at home.

Lita was beautiful and both knew it and was insecure about it, which made her issues all over the board. Her skin was the color of that first nice brown that a good tan can give you, but her “tan” was with her year-round, though she’d probably tan darker if she ever went out into the sun enough. Her dark brown eyes were edged with thick lashes and a little too much eye makeup for my taste, but she could carry it off, and we were both wearing lipstick so red it looked like blood, so who was I to bitch? Her wavy black hair fell to her waist, held back only by a slender headband that was a black so close to her hair color that I only knew it was there because I knew hair like hers didn’t stay away from your face without something forcing it back. The black T-shirt tucked into black jeans, waist made tinier with a black belt with a silver buckle, and knee-high boots that were more club wear than military made her look like the gun at her hip and the AR on its shoulder strap were props for some kind of cosplay at a science fiction convention rather than the real deal. She was barely twenty-one but looked older in that lush, I-blossomed-early sort of way.

Her red lips quirked in that smile that some of the men thought was sexy, but if you looked at her eyes when she did it, they were always cold, even cruel. No, that smile wasn’t about sex; it was about power. Claudia, who was one of our guard leaders, and I had decided it’d be nice to have more female guards. I’d forgotten what that might mean for the wererats. Lita and two others had come from L.A.; they were all members of a street gang there. The last new guard we’d brought in who’d had a gangster background had been Haven. He’d ended up shooting Claudia and Nathaniel and killing one of our werelions, Noel. I still blamed myself, because I had been wishy-washy with Haven. I believed that if I’d been hard enough, clear enough, from the beginning that Noel would still be alive and have his master’s in English lit by now, maybe even his doctorate. He’d died trying to keep Nathaniel alive, so I owed Noel. It’s hard to pay a debt to the dead, so I’d decided to pay it forward and never let another person with a certain background doubt who was in charge. I wasn’t sure how to make that clear to Lita yet, but I was pretty sure she’d give me an opportunity.

Kelly started to stand, but winced hard enough that Nicky had to catch her arm, or she might have fallen. That was it; I had to say something.

“What’s going on, guys? Why is Kelly hurt?”

“You smelled surprised when they did the formal greeting, Anita,” Lita said with that cruel little smile on her face.

Rats actually have some of the best scenting noses in the animal kingdom. How do you hide your reaction from someone who can smell it? Answer: You don’t. But you can ignore her, and that’s what I did.

“Answer me, Nicky,” I said, and because he was Bride he had to do exactly what I said. He had more independence and could fight me, but a direct order, or question, was still very hard for him to refuse.

“I don’t know why she has fresh wounds hidden under her clothes, but I can guess.”

“Then guess, and tell me why the formal greeting. That sort of shit is usually reserved for when we have company, or when someone needs to assert dominance.”

Nicky’s shoulders flexed before he turned more squarely toward the drapes. Dino moved apart from us, so he was closer to the drapes than we were; so nice that everyone knew their jobs. Kelly and Lita were both paying attention, too, when the drapes parted and Meng Die walked through.

She was one of our vampires, which made her on our side, and she was, but in the end Meng Die was always on her own side. She was shorter than Kelly, slender and