Free [Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

than they had been a moment ago, as if his temperature were rising. Again, I kept trying to equate it to a lycanthrope, because it was so not the cool touch of the grave.
    I realized I was staring at our hands. I was treating him like a real vampire. You don’t look one of them in the eye, but that was years ago for me. I hadn’t met a vampire that could roll me with its gaze in a long time. One very alive, psychic vampire wasn’t going to be able to do it, was he? So why didn’t I want to meet his eyes? I realized I was nervous, almost afraid, and I couldn’t have told you why. Short of someone trying to kill me, or my love life, my nerves were rock steady. So why the case of nerves?
    I made myself look away from his hands on mine and meet his eyes. They were just the same almost black, the pupils lost to the color, but they weren’t vampire eyes. They hadn’t bled their color into shining fire across the whole of his eyes. They were human eyes, and he was only human. I could do this, damn it.
    His voice seemed lower, soothing, the way you see people talk when they’re trying to hypnotize someone. “Are you ready, Anita?”
    I frowned at him. “Get on with it, Sergeant; the foreplay’s getting tedious.”
    He smiled.
    One of the other psychics in the room, I didn’t know their voices well enough to pick who, said, “Let him be gentle, Marshal; you don’t want to see what he can do.”
    I met Cannibal’s dark, dark eyes and said the truth: “Yeah, I do want to see what he can do.”
    â€œAre you sure?” he asked, voice still low, soft, like he was trying not to wake someone.
    I spoke low, too. “As much as you want to see what I can do.”
    â€œYou going to fight back?”
    â€œYou hurt me, and I will.”
    He gave that smile that was more fierce than happy. “Okay.” He leaned in, drawing down all that extra height from his much longer waist to bring our faces close, and he whispered, “Show me Baldwin, show me the operator you lost. Show me Baldwin, Anita.”
    It shouldn’t have been that easy, but it was as if the words were magic. The memories came to the front of my head, and I couldn’t stop them, as if he’d started a movie in my head.
    The only light was the sweep of flashlights ahead and behind. Because I didn’t have a light, it ruined my night vision but didn’t really help me. Derry jumped over something, and I glanced down to find that there were bodies in the hallway. The glance down made me stumble over the third body. I only had time to register that one was our guy, and the rest weren’t. There was too much blood, too much damage. I couldn’t tell who one of them was. He was pinned to the wall by a sword. He looked like a shelled turtle, all that careful body armor ripped away, showing the red ruin of his upper body. The big metal shield was crushed just past the body. Was that Baldwin back there? There were legs sticking out of one of the doors. Derry went past it, trusting that the officers ahead of him hadn’t left anything dangerous or alive behind them. It was a level of trust that I had trouble with, but I kept going. I stayed with Derry and Mendez, like I’d been told.
    I was left gasping in the chair, staring at Cannibal, his hands tight on mine. My voice was strained as I said, “That wasn’t just a memory. You put me back in that hallway, in that moment.”
    â€œI needed to feel what you felt, Anita. Show me the worst of that night.”
    â€œNo,” I said, but again, I was back in the room beyond the hallway. The one vampire that was still alive cringed. She pressed her bloody face against the corner behind the bed, her small hands held out as if to ward it off. At first it looked like she was wearing red gloves, then the light shone on the blood, and you knew it wasn’t opera-length gloves—it was blood all the way to her