Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(114)
Was that them? My stomach clenched tight, my pulse racing into my throat so it was hard to breathe.
Was Nicky right, was I actually afraid of my family? That was ridiculous, they’d never laid a hand on me in violence, well no one who was coming on this visit. It wasn’t like Nicky’s past, or Nathaniel’s.
Nothing that violent or monstrous. The relief when I realized the people were strangers was huge.
Damn it, my dad wasn’t that bad.
There was a lull in the passengers going past us, I guess they were between planes or something.
Only a handful of people were in line to go through security. Ru had vanished again, though I don’t know how. I didn’t look around for him because like concealed carry, if you mess with undercover people you draw attention to them. The long hallway that my family would be coming down sometime soon stretched empty until you got to the bored TSA security person at their small lectern. They were the one who would tell people you’ve crossed the line and can’t go back.
Nicky leaned over me and spoke low for just me as people rushed past to make their planes, “It’s not a game of who had the suckiest childhood, Anita. It’s okay to be afraid and to feel fucking traumatized if that’s how you feel.”
I stared up at him, his face so close to mine. “But I wasn’t traumatized,” I said.
“Your lips say that, but your pulse rate and the sweat on your palms and down your spine say different.”
“Can’t hide anything from a shapeshifter,” I whispered.
He grinned and said, “Therianthrope, or didn’t you get the new vocabulary memo about using a more inclusive term for lycanthropes and other shapeshifters?”
It made me smile like he knew it would. “You don’t give a damn about politically correct vocabulary.”
He smiled down at me, his face so close it filled my vision. “Not a damn bit.”
“You’re always telling me you can’t bodyguard and kiss in public,” I said.
“I think we’re safe unless someone runs into us with a roller bag,” he said, and moved in for a kiss, and I helped him lay his lips against mine. I was wearing bright red lipstick and full-on base makeup, so we had to behave ourselves, because if we smeared it I didn’t have the makeup with me to fix it. Usually I don’t do base, so I just clean off the lipstick and then reapply. No muss, no fuss, but I didn’t have the products or the skill to fix clown makeup lipstick if we got carried away today. It was one of the most careful kisses Nicky and I had ever shared. He pulled back with a line of red down the middle of his lips. Some of the men in my life had coined the phrase the go-faster stripe.
Couldn’t really argue, so I hadn’t.
Nicky smiled and whispered, “Zoom, zoom.”
I giggled, which I almost never did. “You read my thoughts.”
“Part of my job,” he said. He wasn’t wrong. He whispered, “I’m your Bride, you’re supposed to fuck us, throw us at your enemies so we delay them and allow you to escape. You’re not supposed to keep us around this long, and you’re definitely not supposed to fall in love with us.”
“I guess if I’d been a vampire I’d have known the rules,” I said.
“Necromancers, all the vampire powers, none of the downsides,” he said, smiling.
“Not all the powers,” I said, smiling up at him, and somehow we were holding hands while I gazed up at him, far too romantic for public when my face had been plastered all over the place in connection to Jean-Claude. Not long ago the internet rumors had me dumping Jean-Claude and running away with Nicky. It had gotten so bad he’d had to stop being my main bodyguard, but then Deimos attacked and I’d wished for Nicky that night, so screw it, safety first. The public and the press knew we were all polyamorous and in a larger-than-normal poly group, but knowing Jean-Claude and I both had other lovers, some shared, some not, didn’t stop outsiders from defaulting to monogamy rules and trying to apply them to us. One gossip site had posted pictures of Jean-Claude with Angel, one of our shared girlfriends, on his arm for a public event. I’d been serving a warrant of execution in a different state, and the rumor mill had him dumping me for her.
We broke the kiss and turned to see a group of younger women either high school or early college age texting busily on their phones. Shit. They’d post it to social media before I could collect my family from the plane and flee. It wasn’t Deimos I was afraid of finding us but various hate groups or media. The first-ever vampire king of America was getting married to one of the U.S. Marshals with the Preternatural Branch, which meant he was marrying someone who hunted down and executed rogue vampires and shapeshifters, or any other supernatural citizen that started piling up a body count.
But I wasn’t any preternatural marshal, I was the Executioner, I was War. The first was a nickname the vampires had given me back when I still believed sincerely that I would never, ever date a vampire, but the second nickname the other marshals had given me. It was a play on the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse; I was War because I had the highest legal kill count of any marshal. If they’d only known that my best man, Marshal Ted Forrester, aka Death, had a much higher count if all his kills were counted, but Edward wouldn’t tell and neither would I. Marshals Bernardo Spotted-Horse and Otto Jeffries were Hunger and Plague respectively. They knew Edward’s background, too, but since they had secrets of their own they weren’t talking either.