Crimson Death
Page 118

   “If you’d come in on a commercial flight I’d have been able to check a timetable, but the fancy private jets are harder to time.” He tipped his hat at the lady customs official, and she was flustered by it. Edward was so solidly in the “best friend” box for me that I had trouble seeing him as this handsome, flirtatious man, but other women seemed to see it just fine.
   He looked at some of the people with me. “This isn’t who we discussed,” he said, and the real Edward had eased into his Ted voice, just a little.
   “Long story,” I said.
   He let it go, because he knew that meant I couldn’t tell him in front of strangers. He eyed them all, and it wasn’t Ted looking out of his face now. Even Ted’s slightly rounded shoulders were gone, replaced by Edward’s upright, shoulders-back, I-was-in-the-military stance. The customs official who had been flattered was looking at him warily now. She’d been on the job long enough to know trouble when she saw it; good on her.
   Edward looked at me when he got to Dev and Domino, because he’d been there to see Dev have his moment under fire, when he’d broken down completely. In his defense, the zombie fight in the basement of the hospital had been one of the worst things I’d ever done, even by my standards. It had been a really harsh introduction to my job for Dev. He flat-out told me he didn’t want to go zombie fighting with me again. Domino hadn’t liked a homegrown zombie of mine that we’d had to burn in a cemetery, and I’d told Edward about it, so he knew neither of them were my top choices. He’d tell me which of the others he didn’t like later.
   “Later,” I said.
   “Can’t wait,” he said with a smile as he crawled back into his Ted skin and just folded back into the charming cowboy act. To her credit the customs official didn’t buy it now; she knew something odd was happening and she wanted no part of the blond man with his identity crisis.
   We were joined by another man; he was taller than Edward, though not as tall as Dev. It was nice when I had a variety of heights that I actually knew to compare new people to, so the new guy was five-eleven, or six feet tops. I was never good at subtracting the inch or more that even work boots could give a person, and he was wearing the kind of boots that SWAT wore in the field. The kind that I had in my luggage. His uniform was black, from the tac pants to the long-sleeved button-up shirt. It bulked out from the body armor underneath it, but I didn’t need that hint; the sidearm worn out where we could all see it was clue enough.
   His dark brown eyes scanned the room and us. His hair was a rich brown that was almost a dark auburn, and might be under the right light. Nathaniel’s hair was solidly on the red side of auburn, but most people with the hair color leaned more to brown. He had a good face, but the level of energy and edge of threat he brought into the room took away all my interest in him as a man. He raised my hackles, and the energy in the room from the real wereanimals told me that it wasn’t just me.
   He stared back and didn’t try to hide his own hostility, and in fact . . . he added his own energy to the room. Edward went up to him, and I knew before he introduced Captain Nolan that this would be his work acquaintance, Brian. I also knew that he wasn’t plain-vanilla human before Edward called me up to introduce us.
   “So you’re Anita Blake,” he said, his Irish accent softening the near-hostility in his voice.
   “And you must be Brian,” I said, smiling sweetly. I even worked to push it up into my own brown eyes. If I could do it for clients at Animators Inc., I could do it to piss off the cranky Irishman.
   He raised his eyebrows at me, then glanced back at Ted/Edward. “Well, Forrester, are we all going to be on a first-name basis?”
   “I call Anita by her first name and she calls me Ted.”
   “And the rest of . . . her crew?”
   “First-name basis,” I said.
   Captain Brian Nolan shook his head. “I can use your call sign if you prefer, Forrester, but I just can’t call you Ted.”
   “Theodore,” I suggested, doing my best innocent face.
   Nolan frowned at me. “No.”
   Edward smiled at both of us. I think he was genuinely enjoying introducing us. His eyes were bluer than normal, and his breathing had sped up a little. I think he liked the energy rising in the room, and the sense of potential carnage.
   “Have it your way,” Edward said, and turned to me. “Anita Blake, this is Brian Nolan. Nolan, Blake.”
   “Captain Nolan,” he said, narrowing his brown eyes.
   “Fine, then it’s Marshal Blake,” I said, but I was smiling.
   “Am I amusing the two of you?” Nolan asked.
   “A little bit,” I said.
   “You always amused me,” Edward said, smiling his Ted smile.
   Nolan scowled at us. “I don’t think I like your attitude, Blake.”
   “I’m not thrilled with yours either, Nolan, but we don’t have to like each other to work together.”
   He frowned harder, putting deep lines in his forehead and between his eyebrows. It made me add a few more years onto his age, which I’d have called at early thirties; now maybe forty wasn’t out of the question. Once people got to a certain age I just sucked at guessing.
   “It would make things easier, though, if we liked each other, at least a little bit,” Dev said, coming up smiling and just giving off this vibe of being happy to be there, happy to meet Nolan, and just doing his best to turn the energy in a friendlier direction.
   He held out his hand and said, “I’m Mephistopheles.”
   Nolan didn’t shake his hand. “What the fuck did you do to earn that as a nickname?”
   Dev made a sad face and said, “Sadly, it’s not a nickname.” He held up his passport so the other man could see it clearly. It read, “Mephistopheles Devlin Devereux.”
   Nolan actually stopped being angry; his face folded into something human and much more attractive. “That’s a hell of a name, Devereux.”
   “I go by Dev.”
   “I don’t blame you,” he said with the Irish thicker in his voice. He almost smiled at the thought of going through life with such a name.
   The first and last name were his parents’ fault, but I knew that he’d chosen Devlin as his middle name himself. When the gold tigers reached age ten, they got to choose that part of their name. Most chose very simple names, or normal-sounding ones, but little Mephistopheles had chosen the name that sounded most like the nickname he’d already earned, Devil.
   “Devereux is French,” Nolan said, and started speaking in fluent and very rapid French.
   Dev shook his head, smiling. “Most Americans don’t speak the language of their ancestral country; sorry.”