I woke staring up at a white ceiling. Micah was standing by the bedside, smiling down at me. Bedside? My left arm was taped down to a little board and there were needles and tubes going into it. My right arm was bandaged like a mummy. Someone had left a florist shop in one corner near the window, complete with those silly character Mylar balloons.
"How long?" I asked, and my voice sounded funny. My throat felt like sandpaper.
"Forty-eight hours." He found one of those cups with the little bendy straws and brought it to me. The water tasted stale and metallic in a none-too-tasty sort of way, but my throat felt better.
The door opened, and a doctor, a nurse, and Nathaniel came through the door. The doctor and nurse I'd expected. I reached for Nathaniel and found that my right arm actually did work.
He gave me that wonderful smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. They looked haunted, and I knew that I'd put that particular look there. Me, getting hurt.
The doctor's name was Nelson, and the nurse was Debbie. Nurse Debbie, like she didn't have a last name, but I didn't protest. If it didn't bother her, I guess it didn't bother me.
Dr. Nelson was short and roundish, with most of his dark hair receding around a face that looked too young for either the hairline or the weight. "It's good to see you awake, Marshal." And he laughed, as if that amused him. "Sorry, but every time I say it, I keep thinking of Gunsmoke, my dad's favorite show."
"Glad I could be amusing," I said, and I had to clear my throat again.
Micah gave me some more water, and Nathaniel moved up on the other side of him. He touched the side of my face, and even the brush of his fingertips made me feel better.
Nurse Debbie's eyes flicked to the two men, and then her face had that pleasant professional look again.
"First, you're going to be fine," Nelson said. He had the nurse hold my arm up while he began to cut away the bandages.
"Good to hear it," I said in a voice that was beginning to sound more like me.
"Second, I have no idea why. You took a very large caliber rifle round to your right arm. There should be muscle damage, but there isn't." He slid the bandages off, handing them to the nurse to dispose of. He took my hand in his and raised my arm so I could see it. There was a slick, pink scar on the side of my arm, about an inch and a half wide at its widest. "It's been only forty-eight hours, Marshal. Care to explain how you're healing this fast?"
I gave him nice blank eyes.
He sighed and lowered my arm to the bed. He got out one of those little flashlights and began to shine it in my eyes. "Any pain?"
"No," I said.
He made me follow his fingers back and forth; he even made me look up and down. "Your head connected with a marble tombstone, so the FBI tells me. Our tests showed you had a concussion. Initially we thought your skull was cracked, and you were bleeding in places inside your head where you don't want to be bleeding." His eyes were very serious as he studied my face. "We ran a second set of tests before scheduling you for surgery, and what do you think, Marshal? No internal bleeding. Gone. We thought we'd read the first test wrong, but I've got the pictures to show what we saw that first night. There was a crack in your skull, and you were bleeding, but later that morning, it had stopped. In fact, the second set of tests shows the fracture healing. Healing like your arm is healing." His serious expression intensified.
"You know, the only person I've ever seen heal damage like this was a lycanthrope."
"Really," I said, giving him my best blank face.
"Really," he said, and looked at Micah. He had his sunglasses back on over his kitty-cat eyes, but something about the way Nelson looked at him said the doctor had probably seen Micah without the glasses. "We had to type you for surgery. There are certain things we look at it in a blood test, just routine these days. Guess what we found?"
"No idea," I said.
"Weird fucking shit," he said.
I laughed. "Should I be worried? I mean, are doctors supposed to say 'weird fucking shit' to their patients?"
He shrugged, laughed, but it was too late to go back to the nice roly-poly doctor disguise. There was a very sharp mind in there, and someone who only did good bedside manner because he was supposed to.
Nurse Debbie moved, almost uneasily, beside him.
"You're not a lycanthrope, but you're a carrier, which is impossible. A person either has lycanthropy, or she doesn't. You're actually carrying around four different kinds. Wolf, leopard, lion, and one we can't even identify, all of which is impossible. You can't catch more than one kind of lycanthropy, because once you've got one, it makes you immune to the others." He looked at me as if the look would be enough and I'd crack and confess.
I just blinked at him. I'd suspected the leopard and wolf, but the only time I'd been touched by a were-lion had resulted in tiny wounds. They had been from Micah's old leader, Chimera, in lionman form. He'd bled me, but it was unusual to catch feline-based lycanthropy from such small damage. Lucky fucking me.
"Did you hear me, Marshal? You're carrying four different kinds of lycanthropy." He kept giving me his hard-as-nails look.
I kept blinking at him. If he thought his threatening doctor face was enough to get me talking, then he hadn't seen anything truly scary in his life. I just looked at him.
"Why do I think this isn't news to you?"
I shrugged, the tubes and needles pulling on my left arm. That hurt worse than anything else. "I got attacked by some shapeshifters a few years back, but lucky me, I didn't catch anything."
"Don't you get it, Blake? I'm telling you that you did catch it. It's floating around in your veins right now. But you aren't a lycanthrope, are you?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Why aren't you?"
I shrugged again. "Honestly, Doc, I don't know."
"Well, if we could figure out how to put this into other people and not make them shifters, we could make people pretty much indestructible."
"I'd tell you how it works if I knew."
He stared down at me with that hard look again. "Why don't I believe that?"
I smiled. "If I could tell you something that would help millions of people, I would. But I think I'm sort of a metaphysical miracle, Doc."
"I read the papers. I watch the news," he said. "I know you're the human servant of the St. Louis Master of the City. Is that what makes this kind of healing possible?"
"I honestly don't know, Doc. Not for certain."
"Does being a vampire's human servant help you heal like this?"
"It helps me be harder to hurt," I said.
"And the lycanthropy?"
"That I can't answer, Doc."
"Can't, or won't?"
"Can't," I said.
He made an impatient sound. "Fine. You're fit, well enough to go home. I'll get the paperwork started." He moved toward the door. He turned with his hand on the door. "If you ever figure out how the healing works, I'd love to know."
"If it's something that can be duplicated, I'll share," I said.
He left shaking his head.
I looked at the nurse, and she wouldn't meet my eyes.
"I need to take out the IVs." Debbie hesitated, then said, "A little privacy, maybe?" She said it like she wasn't certain. Why was she so nervous?
Micah and Nathaniel glanced at me. I shrugged again. Nathaniel smiled at me, and the smile had a touch of mischief in it. Micah shook his head, smiling as well, and they left.
Debbie was as gentle as she could be. It actually hurt more for the tape to come off than the needle. When she had my arm free of all the paraphernalia, she said in an almost embarrassed voice, "Which one of them is your boyfriend?"
"You mean, Micah and Nathaniel?"
"Yes," she said.
"Both of them are."
She gave me a look. "Mr. Callahan told you to say that, didn't he? They've been incorrigible, teasing all of us."
"Teasing all of you?" I made it a question.
"Saying that you lived with both of them, then trying to make us guess which of them is your boyfriend." She actually blushed. "There's a betting pool, so whichever of us was here when you first woke had to ask."
"A betting pool for what?"
"Which one is your boyfriend. Some people even bet that they both were. Some even said neither." She looked almost painfully embarrassed. "I have to ask. I'm sorry."
"I live with both of them," I said.
She gave me that look again, like she didn't believe me.
"Honest, cross my heart and hope to--well, you know."
She shook her head. "And what is Mr. Graison's job?"
I had to smile. "He's a stripper."
She put her hands on her hips and almost stamped her foot at me. "It can't all be true."
The door opened behind her. It was my men and Special Agent Fox. The nurse threw them both a look, then hurried out.
"What have you been telling the nurses while I've been lying here?"
"The nurses were just trying to be friendly at first," Micah said, "but when we answered their questions truthfully, they didn't believe us."
"No one lives with two men," Nathaniel said, mimicking someone's voice that I didn't remember hearing. "And federal marshals don't live with strippers."
"Once we knew you were going to be all right, Nathaniel teased them a little," Micah said.
Fox laughed. "A little."
I held my left hand out to Nathaniel, and he took it with a smile. "You mad?" he asked.
"No. It was the crack about federal marshals not living with strippers, wasn't it?" I said.
He shrugged. "Maybe."
"The nursing staff seemed more interested in your boyfriends than in you," Fox said.
"Well," I said, "it's hard to compete when the guys are this cute."
Micah came around and took my other hand. He ran his finger over the new scar. "You've finally got one on your right arm."
I sighed. "My only unscarred arm. Damn."
Fox said, "I come all the way down here to tell you what you missed, and I don't think you give a damn."
I smiled at Fox. "Truthfully, I'm just glad to be alive. When I hit that marble, I knew I was hurt."
His face went very serious. "Yeah, you were hurt. We all thought..." He waved it away. "It doesn't matter what we thought. When you went down, the zombie attacked Salvia. We couldn't stop him. Not to mention he had a shooter in the cemetery."
"I remember Salvia saying something about not shooting me now. That the zombie was up and it wouldn't help anything."
"He wasn't delaying to be irritating. He was delaying to give the new hit man time to get to the cemetery. The idea was that with you dead or badly injured, they'd have more time to think of a plan C."
"Plan C? What happened to plan A and B?"
Micah began to rub his thumb over my knuckles in small circles. Nathaniel pressed my hand against his chest. Whatever I was about to hear, I wasn't going to like it.
Fox told me, "After you and Micah went to a different hotel, a salesman checked into the room that we'd reserved for Marshal Kirkland. The salesman was shot in his room. Then the killer put a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door and probably took a plane to a different country. A very clean, very professional hit. Micah wanting a romantic weekend may have saved your lives."
Micah kept stroking my hand, and Nathaniel kept holding on, as if there was more to come.
"Salvia must have gotten the shock of his life when he got word that Marshal Anita Blake was coming to raise the zombie. He scrambled around and hired a not-so-clean, not-so-professional hit."
"But it almost worked," Micah said.
"I finally remembered where I knew Salvia's name from," I said. "He's a lawyer for some old-fashioned mob, real hard-core Italian."
Fox nodded.
"If I understood what Salvia and Rose were arguing about, then Georgie is the son of the head of that family. He's a pedophile, and Salvia and others had helped cover it up."
"Yes."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Fox, didn't you think the son's family would try to stop the testimony?"
"Old-fashioned mob does not attack federal officers. It's bad for business," Fox said.
"Old-fashioned is the operative phrase here, Fox. If what's left of the Italian mob found out one of their own had hidden a violent pedophile, even his own son, the Feds would be the least of Georgie boy's family's worries. The other mobsters would clean house on their own long before subpoenas and trial dates caught up with them."
"In retrospect, you're right," he said.
"In retrospect, you could have gotten Anita killed," Micah said.
Fox took in a lot of air and let it out slow. "You're right, Micah. I almost fucked up your life again."
I frowned at them both. "What are you guys talking about now?"
"When Micah was in a bed like you are now, I told him that I had wanted to put out an alert two days before he and his uncle and cousin went hunting. I wanted to put out an alert to keep the hunters out of the woods, but I wasn't the agent in charge. Hell, I was just the Indian who got lucky, because some of the first kills were on Indian land. I was outvoted, and I liked my career more than I liked the idea of saving lives. I told Micah that I owed him for that." Fox looked at all of us. "And now I owe him again, because we should have taken more precautions for your safety."
I looked at him. "I didn't think the FBI was allowed to admit they were wrong."
He smiled, but not like he was entirely happy. "If you tell anyone, I'll deny it."
I raised Micah's hand to my lips and kissed him. It took some of the anger out of his face. I kissed Nathaniel's hand too, and held them close. "I'm just glad to be alive, Agent Fox."
He nodded. "I'm glad, too." Then he headed for the door.
When the door closed behind him, Micah let out a breath I hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Every time I see that man, something bad happens in my life."
I tugged on his hand so he'd look at me. "What happened to the zombie?"
He gave a frown that showed even around the sunglasses. "I know Salvia tried to kill you, but you ask first about the zombie?"
"Salvia's dead," I said.
He nodded. "I thought you were unconscious by then."
"I was, but once I wasn't there to help with the zombie, it tore him apart, right?"
"Yes," he said.
"He deserved to die," Nathaniel said, and there was a look in his face, so fierce, so pitiless, that it almost scared me. I'd seen a lot of looks on his face, but never one so cold.
"They shot the zombie, they cut at him, but he tore Salvia up."
"Did they get the shooter?"
"They got him," Micah said. "He's dead, too."
"Did they get Rose's testimony?" I asked.
He lowered his glasses enough to give me the full force of his chartreuse eyes. The look was eloquent. Nathaniel laughed.
Micah looked from one to the other of us, then finally back at me. "Do you seriously think that with you dying, Salvia dead, and an assassin gunned down, they were going to question the zombie?"
"Well, why not? They had to wait for the ambulance, right?"
Micah shook his head. Nathaniel laughed again and leaned over to plant a kiss on my forehead. He looked at Micah. "If she'd been there and awake, she'd have questioned the zombie," he said.
"Fine, if they didn't question Rose, what happened to him? Without me they couldn't put him back in the grave."
"Larry flew up."
Nathaniel pointed to the huge bunch of Mylar balloons. "Those are from Larry and Tammy."
I realized then what the death of the salesman would have meant for Larry. It wouldn't have been some salesman in the wrong place at the wrong time; it would have been Marshal Larry Kirkland dead.
"He was really upset, Anita. He blamed himself."
"Not his fault." I squeezed Micah's hand. "Though thanks for the romantic hotel room. Who knew it would be a lifesaver?"
"Let's get you dressed," he said, "and go home."
Nathaniel kissed my hand and started finding my clothes, wherever the nurses had hidden them. Micah went for the door to see if Dr. Nelson needed any help getting me signed out. He stopped in the doorway and said, "You scared the hell out of me. Don't do it again."
"I'll do my best," I said.
He leaned his forehead against the door edge for a moment, then he looked at me. "I love you."
I had a lump in my throat that hadn't been there a second before. "I love you, too."
Nathaniel was suddenly airborne. I had a second to make that little-girl eep sound, and then he landed around me on all fours, perfectly. "Does anything hurt?"
"No," I said, breathless and laughing.
"Good," he said, and he lay down on top of me, pressing his body against me hard enough that I had to either spread my legs for him or risk bruising tender bits on both of us. He lay above the sheets, both of us fully clothed, but he was suddenly above me, and the look in his eyes was more intimate than nakedness could have made it. Because what was in his eyes was emotion too real for lust, too real for anything but a very different four-letter word.
He kissed me. He kissed me as if my mouth were air, food, and water, and he'd been dying without the taste of it. That's when Nurse Debbie and the other members of her betting pool came in. They screamed like freshmen at their first frat party. And I'd thought nurses were jaded.