Page 56 of Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 28)

He kept turning toward me with the knife, so I broke his elbow. It made a nice meaty pop. Normal people scream and stop fighting after that, but he didn’t even bother to scream. He just kept turning toward me, and with his elbow broken the arm was no longer stiff enough to act as a barrier. He let me tear his arm up and didn’t even hesitate as he slashed for my thigh, and I tried to switch one hand to his shoulder to keep him away from me.

18

I FELT THEhit of his blade on the outside of my thigh, because I’d turned my leg so he missed the femoral artery on the inside of the thigh, and the moment I felt the knife bite into me I used his arm and shoulder to try to put him flat on the ground and keep his other arm and the knife away from me. I’d done similar moves in practice and in real life, but I forgot one thing—I was stronger now, a lot stronger.

His arm tore away from his body, gushing blood everywhere, and it was so fresh and there was so much of it that it was hot on my skin. I screamed and he was already screaming, and all I could think wasWhere’s the knife?The blood was so thick and fast that I couldn’t see what the bad guy was doing, and with his arm barely held to his body by skin, I couldn’t use it to feel his movements. My fingertips found his back and that was something I could understand. I let go of his useless arm and rode his back down to the floor. I drove my knee into his back because I wasn’t big enough to keep him down with just my weight, and pinned his remaining shoulder to the ground to keep the knife that was still in his hand away from me. I drew the knife at my waist with my other hand and plunged it into the side of the man’s neck and gave it atwist on the way out. Almost no blood came out; that wasn’t right. I’d seen enough throat wounds to know they bleed like a son of a bitch.

I heard someone yelling my name, but I kept staring at the knife in my hand and the barely bleeding neck wound. What was happening? Why wasn’t it bleeding more?

“Anita!” Claudia was kneeling on the floor, balanced on the balls of her feet, shouting at me.

I blinked at her and wanted to ask her,Why isn’t his throat bleeding more?Even though it was just steel he should have bled before he healed it.

“Anita, can you hear me?” Claudia asked.

I blinked at her again and then nodded.

“Are you hurt?”

“My leg, he cut my leg.” My voice sounded beyond calm, there was no emotion to it at all. I felt dull and distant. I wasn’t hurt bad enough to be in shock; what the hell was wrong with me?

“How bad?” she asked.

I shook my head, not sure how to answer the question. “He was going for my femoral, but I turned so he only got the outside of my thigh,” I said in that dull, emotionless voice.

“Take his blade, and then I’ll look at your wound.”

I looked down his arm where his hand was still wrapped around the knife. It was as if his arm had gotten longer and everything was farther away than I knew it was; distortion like that wasn’t good. Maybe I was more hurt than I thought.

I looked at Claudia and her expression softened for a second. “You must finish the kill by taking his blade.”

I wanted to say, I hadn’t meant to kill him, I hadn’t even drawn one of the blades with high silver content. How could he be dead? I moved the knee that I was driving into his back, but he never reacted to the pressurechange, but until the head and heart were gone, death wasn’t a sure thing, so I kept one knee on his remaining shoulder so I’d feel if he tried to move, and then I reached down his arm for the blade he was still gripping.

Somewhere between reaching for it and getting to his hand, that unnatural stretching of reality stopped happening. Maybe it was just shock? I took the knife out of his soft, unresisting hand, and that was when I knew he was dead. I hadn’t meant to kill him, and if the blade I’d just taken from him didn’t have a high silver content, he hadn’t meant to kill me either. God.

19

THE KNIFE I’Dtaken off the dead man had been silver. He’d meant to kill me; good, that made me feel just a teensy bit better about what I’d just done. If there’d been more fighting to do, I could have rallied and kept going, but strangely, no one wanted to fight me now. Of course, no one wanted to hug or flirt with me now either; since I was drenched in fresh blood, I couldn’t really blame them. Going from a violent, life-and-death fight to nothing meant that all the adrenaline just washed away, which left me feeling weak, faint, nauseous, and really needing a few minutes out of sight of strangers to get my shit together.

I had cleaned my blade on the dead man’s shirt and put it back in its sheath. I didn’t have a sheath for the silver blade I’d taken off him, so it was still naked in my hand. I held it out wordlessly to Claudia.

“You’re entitled to the sheath and any other weapons or equipment that he’s carrying,” she said.

I glanced down at the body lying there in the huge pool of blood. I understood now why the throat wound hadn’t bled much; the hydraulics had lost too much fluid by the time I got to his neck. The blood was still shiny; it’s almost cheerful red when there’s enough blood in the right light. It would start to darken soon.

“Is there some place I can clean up?” I asked in that detached voice that people who don’t understand violence think means you don’t care, but that’s not it at all. It means you care too damn much, so much that your mind is trying to shut down so that you won’t feel all the emotional fallout all at once, because if you do, then you’re going to fall apart right here, right now.

“There’s an area where the fighters get ready and there’s a bathroom,” Claudia said.

“Which gives me the most privacy?”

“Bathroom,” she said.

“That,” I said.

She started guiding me away from the curtain opening that was the way into the main fighting pit. That was fine with me; I’d had enough fighting for the moment. Pierette moved up beside me and took my left hand in hers. I squeezed her hand to let her know I appreciated the gesture, but I took my hand back. If anyone was too nice to me in that moment, I was going to lose my shit, and I couldn’t afford that in front of all the wererats here.

They looked at us as we passed, some not wanting to make eye contact, but others stared, and some even nodded. I didn’t know if I was supposed to nod back or ignore them, so I pretended I didn’t see and did nothing but follow Claudia’s tall figure. She was walking ahead of me like a good bodyguard, clearing the crowd, but we moved in an oval of emptiness; people were staying away from us, from me. They weren’t all horrified, but they were all being careful of the crazy woman who had just torn a man’s arm off.

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