Page 38 of Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 29)

I nodded. “Just in case the vampire was already awake for the night. If he’d answered she’d have asked if he needed anything, or said she’d come back later.”

McKinnon and I nodded. Dolph just stood there making notes and thinking. I’d begun to suspect that sometimes doodling in thenotebook helped him think, but maybe he made in-depth notes. I wasn’t going to arm-wrestle it away from him to check, and without a stepladder I was too short to peek.

“Are we all thinking she opened the drapes and then waited to put out the fire so there was no loss of life other than the victim?” Dolph asked.

McKinnon and I exchanged a look, then turned back to Dolph. I said, “Yes.” McKinnon said, “We are.”

“Let’s go talk to our hero,” Dolph said.

11

I’D HAVE BEENtoo direct, or made it complicated, but Dolph just asked Mona Castel to come and make a formal statement. She didn’t call for a lawyer or see the trap in the request. She went with him meek as a lamb, and he stayed beside her looking pleasant and hiding the wolf in his impeccably pressed suit until she was safely in the back of his unmarked car with Officer Kay Beecher beside her. Dolph told her he had to confer with his colleagues and he’d be right back, and then he motioned McKinnon and me to follow him away from the car. He started to talk to us then but noticed people with their cell phones pointed this way. It used to be that the news media had to arrive before you worried about cameras; now everyone was a potential leak about the investigation.

He started to walk back toward the hotel, and we went with him. I felt a knock at my psychic shields that made me look around. There was the crowd of people being kept back behind the police tape, most of them with phones pointed this way, and uniformed officers doing their best to keep the looky-loos contained. Whatever had caught my attention wasn’t there, so I paused and looked through the more distant part of the crowd and then to the parked cars. There, somewhere there.

Dolph had backtracked to be beside me and asked, “What did you see?”

“Not see, feel.” My phone sounded with my text tone, and because I wasn’t sure what I was sensing I checked it.

It was Ethan texting,We’re parked waiting for you. Claudia ordered extra security.

I texted,Good.Was that what I’d felt? It didn’t feel like Ethan, he was tied to me metaphysically, but he was usually quieter in my head than this. Whatever this was, it was much louder in my head.Who else is with you?I texted.

Ru.

Ru was one of my Brides, designed to be basically cannon fodder for the master vampire that made them. They were all this calming silence in my head because they could feel my emotions, but it didn’t work both ways like it could with Ethan.

I leaned into Dolph with McKinnon joining the huddle. “Ethan Flynn and Ru Erwin are here for extra security for me when I’m not surrounded by cops. That’s who I texted.”

“What, Murdock isn’t with you today?” Dolph said.

“Nicky had something else to do,” I said. If it had just been Dolph I might have explained that I’d made the mistake of kissing Nicky in public, and the image went viral. Speculation was that I was dumping Jean-Claude at the altar for my ruggedly handsome bodyguard. To calm the rumors and to keep the media from swarming me we were rotating my security for a little bit. Since Nicky had become my regular security person as well as my lover and one of the men I was in love with, it felt weird that he wasn’t in the parking lot ready to back me up.

“Everything okay?” Dolph asked.

I nodded, and then there it was again. Something didn’t feel right. “Something feels wrong, like I’m missing something that I should be picking up on.”

“Could McKinnon’s charm have messed with your abilities?”

“Since I don’t know what the charm does, or is, sure.”

“I didn’t mean any permanent harm, Blake.”

“Let’s take this inside,” Dolph said. We went back into the air-conditioned hush of the hotel and found an unused conference room, though the manager had informed us that he would need it for a meeting with the hotel staff to convey the concerns of his bosses and their bosses. Dolph assured him we wouldn’t need the room long. I thought we were going to discuss strategies for the interrogation or the next part of the investigation. What I hadn’t seen coming was Dolph telling me, “There’s no active warrant of execution on this one, Anita.”

“I know that.”

“It doesn’t fall under the preternatural marshals’ jurisdiction.”

“You invite me to come play and now you’re kicking me out?”

“If the hate groups get her a lawyer, you being involved with the interrogation will give them ammunition to say we used supernatural influence to get a confession.”

“When did I start being supernatural influence?”

He gave me a look.

“What?”

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