Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (21 page)

I sat up, suddenly very serious about the robe. “Oh my God, there are reporters with her.”

He started looking for Chuck’s business card. “You call Chuck, tell him what’s happening.” I didn’t argue, I just took the card and started punching buttons. Jason went to the door but didn’t open it. He yelled through it, “My name is Jason Schuyler, I am not Keith Summerland.”

“You tried that in high school, Keith, pretending to be Jason when you were screwing Nan Brandweiss.”

I had Chuck on the phone. “This is Chuck.”

“Anita Blake. We have reporters outside our door with Keith Summerland’s very drunk fiancée, demanding to know why he’s cheating on her.”

“Oh, shit.” He said it with real feeling.

“My sentiments exactly. What do we do?”

“I thought you weren’t going to call, I’m not at the hotel. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll alert some of the other guards. Hell, they should be with her now. Do not open the door.”

“Do you want the eleven o’clock news to show Keith’s fiancée banging on the door, but not having it open? That’s what the reporters are threatening. She’s crying and she’s drunk.”

“Damn it, I’ll be there. Just, oh hell, this is going to go to shit.”

“Going, Chuck? I think it’s already gone.”

Jason called through the door, “Lisa Bromwell, is that you?”

“Keith, this isn’t funny, don’t humiliate me like this, don’t make me beg.”

Jason started to unlock the door.

“Gotta go, Chuck, Jason is unlocking the door.”

“Can’t you control him better than that?”

“About as much as you can control Keith and his fiancée,” I said.

“Then we’re screwed,” Chuck said. He hung up. I hung up. And I couldn’t have agreed more. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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27

I GOT MY
gun from the bedside table and put it in my robe pocket. Not because I thought I needed my gun handy, but because it was my gun and it was my job to control it. A very drunk woman scorned was about to come through the door. I did not want to give her any ideas. A loaded gun unattended could be a real disaster. The robe hung funny on that side, but it was better than the alternative.

Jason opened the door and a short blond woman spilled through, pounding fists on his chest. She was screaming at him. A reporter, complete with camera and lights, pushed in behind her. Perfect. Jason was trying to out-yell her. “It’s Jason. Lisa, look at me, it’s Jason!”

Lisa’s eyes were squeezed tight as she pounded at him and screamed. She had wanted in the room, but she didn’t want to see.

I stood there without a clue as to what I could do that might help. I could have forced the reporter and cameraman out; I was armed. But somehow I thought that might play badly in the press. To the hysterical Lisa I was the other woman, so trying to touch her would be bad. I had no freaking idea what to do. Fuck.

The camera was getting it all: me standing in the robe, the mussed bed, the string of condoms in their wrapper on the floor where Jason had dropped them. There were even a few pieces of clothing draped on the room’s chair. Again, perfect.

The reporter shoved a microphone into Jason’s face. “Keith, is this the new woman? Is the wedding off? Lisa deserves the truth, Keith.”

Jason spoke into the mic. “My name is Jason Schuyler. I went to school with Lisa and Keith and Keith’s brother Kelsey.”

Maybe they would have listened, maybe not, but struggling with Lisa had finally loosened his robe so that it spilled apart enough for the camera to try to get the whole show. If it was network they wouldn’t be able to show it, but how often do you get a chance to get film of a presidential hopeful’s son nude? The cameraman wasn’t missing his opportunity.

Lisa’s hands were on Jason’s stomach, and she’d stopped screaming. She was blinking down at him, not up at his face. She muttered, “Jason?” as Jason managed to get his robe a little more closed. The fact that seeing him nude had made her believe it was him made me wonder, just how close a friend had Lisa Bromwell been to Jason in high school?

Voices from the hallway, mostly men, yelling. Peterson was the first one in the doorway, but he had other suits with him, and some of the uniformed guards we’d seen earlier. They were what we needed. Someone to be bad guys to the press and rescue us at the same time. I didn’t usually wait to file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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be rescued, but this level of press attention had thrown me. How do you handle people this rude that you can’t belt in the nose?

Peterson and his men got the press out. They tried to get Lisa Bromwell out, too, but she was now clinging to Jason and blinking up at him blearily. A second woman from the hallway was trying to help Peterson persuade Lisa to let go of Jason. The new woman was tall in heels that made her at least six feet, with sleek brunette hair that had been styled straight, but was thick enough I was betting it curled when left to its own devices. She was beautiful in that perfect-makeup, I-read-
Cosmo
sort of way. You know, beautiful enough to make other women jealous and men stare, but she didn’t seem quite real. Women like that almost never make me feel insecure. I don’t understand them enough to be jealous.

Peterson got the reporters outside the room with the help of the uniformed guards. Two of the younger suits stayed on our side of the door and took up positions against it, as if the press might try to break down the door. Surely not, but I was beginning to realize that we’d passed into a sort of press
Twilight Zone
, where the normal rules did not seem to apply. The brunette offered me her hand. “I’m Trish, friend of the bride’s, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop her in time.” She had a good handshake, though her hand was big enough, and her nails long enough, that it felt almost dangerous, as if she’d cut me if she shook too hard.

“How did she find our room?”

“The reporter knew your room number. He told her they’d seen Keith check in with a brunette. They had pictures of the two of you in the hotel obviously going to a room.”

“The bachelorette party must be in full swing for her to be this drunk,” I said. Trish shook her head. “It hasn’t really started yet. She was this drunk when we got to the room for the party.”

I looked over at the small blond woman, inches shorter than Jason and me. She swayed against him, clinging to his robe as if without it and his hands on her slender frame she’d have hit the floor. It must have shown on my face because Trish said, “Apparently she got drunk alone in her room. Her bridesmaids found her this way, clutching a handful of pictures of Keith with you.”

“Not Keith,” I said.

Trish nodded. “Apparently not, but the resemblance is eerie.”

I couldn’t argue with the eerie part. Now that Lisa wasn’t screaming or crying hysterically or trying to claw Jason’s eyes out, I realized that she and he looked alike. In fact, Lisa Bromwell looked more like Jason’s sister than either of his actual sisters.

“You are the first woman I’ve gotten to talk to who isn’t from this town. Is it just me or do they look alike, too?” Trish said.

“It’s not just you,” I said.

“Have you seen many of the descendants of old Jedediah and the original families from his little town in the hills?”

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“Not yet,” I said.

“They all look like that, like they’re related.”

“Jason said that Jedediah Summerland helped populate most of the town in his day.”

“When you see the wedding party, you’ll believe it.”

I gave her a look.

She nodded, eyes a little wide. “Just wait, you’ll see, it’s very
Twilight Zone
.”

“We just had a reporter with camera and lights burst into our hotel room, I already feel like I’m in the
Twilight Zone
.”

“I’d like to say it’ll get better, Anita, I can call you Anita, right?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve been friends with them since they announced the wedding, and the closer it gets the weirder the press get. One of the reasons that they were so sure of you and—Jason, right?”

I nodded.

“—of Jason being Keith is that there is a rumor going around that he has a brunette on the side. It may even be true.”

Jason had sat Lisa down in the chair. He rubbed her shoulders as he talked softly to her.

“If it’s true, then why is she marrying him?” I asked.

Trish gave me a look.

“What?”

“He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s fun as hell when he’s not being a bastard. His father is governor of the state and about to run for president. He may even make it all the way to the Oval Office.”

She stopped talking, as if that explained why a woman would put up with a man who would cheat on her days before her wedding. I finally said, “You haven’t said anything that would get me down the aisle with someone who would cheat on me days before my wedding.”

“How about it’s one of the biggest weddings of the year in this country, and backing out now would be more humiliating than going through with it?”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t work for me either.”

Trish studied my face, as if she were trying to decide if I was serious or not. “You really would just dump his ass, wouldn’t you?”

“In a hot minute.” It was my turn to study her. “Wouldn’t you?”

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She gave a laugh, a nervous laugh. “I’ve married for worse reasons than money and politics, Anita.”

“And divorced, I take it.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but the alimony was the kicker.”

In that moment I knew I might like Trish eventually, but I would never understand her, nor she me. We were both women, but our girl culture was too different. She was a girl-girl, and I was just a woman. She married for money and politics and potential alimony. I couldn’t think of anything that would get me down a church aisle, but love would have been higher on the list than anything the woman beside me had listed. Who the hell married already planning how much alimony she’d get?

That wasn’t a marriage, that was a business transaction with rings exchanged. How much trouble would we get into if I managed to talk Lisa Bromwell into dumping Keith Summerland’s ass days before their wedding? It had possibilities, and not all of them were bad. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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28

I GOT INTRODUCED
to the bride-to-be eventually. There’d been a point in my life when I wouldn’t have wanted to meet strangers dressed in nothing but a robe, in a hotel room, with a man who I wasn’t married to, who was also in a robe. Strangely, this was so mild in comparison to my life lately that I didn’t even flinch.

She blinked pale blue eyes at me. What makeup she’d started the night with had surrendered to tears and the damp rag that Jason had fetched for her. She blinked up at me, stray wisps of yellow hair clinging to her face where they’d been wetted down, other bits of her hair just all around her face. Without the makeup she looked about twelve, though I knew she had to be Jason’s age. Twenty-two or twenty-three; she did not look it.

I said automatically, “Nice to meet you, Lisa.”

She blushed a nice pink color and looked down. “I am so embarrassed.”

Jason knelt in front of her, making sure his robe covered him. “It’s okay, Lisa, you didn’t know I was back in town, and the reporters lied to you.”

“And I was drunk,” she said, softly.

I thought,
That, too
, but out loud I said, “Did the reporters lie, or could they really not tell the difference between you and this Summerland guy?”

Lisa and Jason looked up at me together, and the mirror effect was startling. They really did look alike.

“They do look that much alike,” Lisa said.

Trish came up beside us, towering over all of us in her heels. “Wait until you see Keith, you’ll freak at how much alike they look. I swear it’s like the Summerlands had triplets instead of twins.”

Jason stood up. “Yeah, everyone intermarried a little too much in Promise.”

“Promise?” I made it a question.

“It was the name that Summerland gave to his little religious community in the hills above Asheville. Promise to God was the full name, actually.”

“You mean like those Puritan names, Pass-through-the-valley-of-death Smith?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yeah, like that, but it got shortened to Promise.”

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“The school is still called Promise School,” Lisa said, as if she were trying to focus and making some headway.

“You can still get free tuition if you prove your ancestors came in with Jedediah,” Jason said.

“I take it your mom’s side of the family came in with ol’ Jedediah,” I said.

“Mine, and Lisa’s, and others.”

In my head, I thought,
So does that make Keith and Lisa some sort of kissing cousins?
But it wasn’t any of my business; once you leave first cousins behind, most states don’t care. I decided to concentrate on something that interested me more than ancestors and religious zealots who got eaten by vampires.

“Lisa figured out that it was Jason, though, even drunk,” I said. Okay, I was trying to be subtle, because what I wanted to ask was,
Why did seeing him nude convince you he wasn’t Keith?
I just couldn’t figure out a polite way to ask it.

Jason grinned at me, eyes not quite sparkling, but it was his grin. I gave him a look that I’d once thought would squash that grin, but now I did it out of habit; nothing I could do would ever take the spark out of that smile. Lisa blushed again, and was very flustered. “I…Keith isn’t…I…” She stood up, abruptly, swayed.

Jason and I both caught her arm.

“May I use your bathroom, please?”

“I’ll take her,” Trish said. The taller woman eased Lisa out of our arms and toward the open bathroom door. Uncharitably I hoped she wouldn’t throw up in our room anywhere, but I was glad for the privacy. Though, looking at the two suited guards at the door, I guess
privacy
was stretching it. We waited until the door closed behind the women, and then I looked at him. “I take it you and Lisa dated in high school.”

He nodded. “We did.” He was going to make me ask. Fine.

“She recognized you once you were nude, Jason. What clued her in? You and the Summerland boys not quite identical when the clothes come off?”

“You’re mad I made you work for it,” he said, grinning.

“Not mad, just tired of being embarrassed about stupid things. Answer the question.”

“I shave.”

“I assume so does Keith.”

“I wasn’t talking about my face.”

Oh. “You mean you shaved totally smooth in high school, too?”

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“No, but I did shave enough so that no body hair showed in the costumes for dance recitals. I didn’t start shaving completely until after I started stripping. I got enough grief from the other guys about what I did shave, I can’t imagine what they would have said if I’d showed up smooth as I am now.” He shook his head. “I liked parts of high school, but other parts sucked.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

There was a knock on the door. One of the suits turned and spoke quietly to the door. He started to take the flip-bar off.

I called, “Stop.”

He glanced at me, hand still on the flip-bar. He had brown eyes and hair to match. His eyes tried for hard and empty, but he was too fresh out of the package to carry it off.

“Our room, so we get to say who comes and who goes.”

Brown Hair looked at his partner, who was also young, with hair cut so short I could see his skin through the hair. He wore small silver-framed glasses over pale eyes. The haircut made me think exmilitary. I’d have to wait and see if the haircut matched anything else before making the final call. Military Cut gave a tiny shrug.

Brown Hair said, “It’s Peterson and the governor’s man.”

“The governor’s man, you mean, Chuck?” I asked.

Another exchange of looks between them, and then they both nodded as if they’d timed it. I exchanged a look with Jason. Did he think their referring to Chuck as “the governor’s man”

was as strange as I thought it was?

Jason shrugged. “I think we have to let them in; we did call them for help.”

He was right, darn it. I nodded at the suits by the door. “Let them in.”

The two suits exchanged another look. It was Military Cut who said, “You do know we don’t take orders from you.”

“All right, guys, first, what are your names?”

They looked at each other again. Did they do that before they answered any question, or was it just because I was confusing them?

“I’m Shadwell,” Military Cut said.

“I’m Rowe,” Brown Hair said.

“You’re Shadwell and Rowe?” I made it a question, because I knew if they hung around I would never be able to resist calling them Shad and Rowe, it would just be too fun. Jason proved he knew me well, because he touched my arm and said, “Be nice.”

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I grinned at him for a change—but controlled myself out loud. I could always be irritating later; I was good at it. “Okay, guys, here’s the deal: you say you don’t take orders from me; well, we don’t take them from you, either. We’ll need to figure out a way to cooperate or it’s going to be a very unpleasant few days.”

There was a sharper knock on the door, and I was pretty sure it was Chuck’s voice saying, “Open the door.”

Rowe said, “Can I open the door now?” in a tone of voice that said he was unimpressed with anything I’d said.

“Sure,” I said. Because he could be unimpressed, as long as he did what I wanted him to do. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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29

PETERSON AND CHUCK
were having a fight, sort of. They weren’t yelling or throwing punches, nothing so uncivilized, but they were pissed at each other. It was there in the way they spoke to each other, the set of their body language, the way their eyes worked when they had to look at each other. The point of contention seemed to be something to do with us, or maybe Lisa. Trish had helped her out of the bathroom; she looked pale, but better. She’d even brushed her hair and put it back in a neat ponytail.

“I’ll take Lisa back to the party,” Trish said.

Everyone agreed that was a good idea.

Lisa grabbed Jason’s arm. “You have to come to the party”—she looked at me—“both of you. Please, most of my bridal party are girls from school. They’ll want to see you, Jason, and they’ll want to meet your new girlfriend.”

I soooo did not want to go to Lisa’s bachelorette party. But I was pretty sure what Jason was going to say, and he did not disappoint me. “We’d need to get dressed first.”

“Of course, of course,” Lisa said, and then she turned that fragile face to him, “but you’ll come, right?”

He nodded, and I did not like the look he gave her. It was way too intimate a look from a man to another man’s fiancée. I’d wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the wedding plans, but not like this, no, this was a bad idea.

As if he’d read my mind, Chuck said, “This is a bad idea, Lisa.”

She looked at him, and the one look told me two things. One, she didn’t particularly like Chuck; two, there was more force of will inside her than I’d seen yet. It blazed to life in those blue eyes, gave some color to her face that wasn’t embarrassment.

“I say who comes to my party, not you, not my future in-laws, me.”

He took a breath as if he’d argue.

Trish said, “Let’s not fight.”

Chuck frowned at her.

Lisa said, “I’m not fighting; Chuck is an employee, you don’t fight with employees.” She said it cold and hard. Point for her, but the look on Chuck’s face made me want to touch my gun in its robe pocket. Chuck didn’t like Lisa any better than she liked him. Interesting. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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“Fine,” Trish said, “fine, but let’s get you back to your party. The other girls are going to wonder what happened to us.” Her tone of voice alone said that she’d been doing a lot of managing in the last few days. I wondered if Lisa had a drinking problem. That would be bad. Lisa wouldn’t let go of Jason’s arm. She gave him all the eye contact she had in those blue eyes.

“You will come to my party, right? Promise me that you and—Anita, right?—promise me you’ll come. The other girls are going to flip.”

“Who’s all there?” he asked.

“All the Jennifers,” and she grinned. It wasn’t quite his smile, but it was still close. He grinned back. “All of them?” he asked.