Kiss The Dead

24

I HAD TIME for coffee, which is usually a good thing, but it turned into a trap, as if the coffee were the goat the hunter had staked out to lure the leopard into firing range. I stood in my kitchen with the fresh cup of perfect coffee in my favorite baby penguin mug, and was so not happy. Cynric had made the coffee, and it was perfect, but it was a trap. I knew the feel of “the talk” in the air, and I didn’t want to have it. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to do it, or talk about it, or deal with it. I especially didn’t want to deal with it when Brice and SWAT could be outside in just moments. I’d even said that, and his reply had been, “There’s never a good time to talk about us, Anita. You’re always ass-deep in alligators.” It was hard to argue with that, so I didn’t try. Arguing when someone says something so very true just makes you look stupid.

I fought not to be sullen about it, and to be a reasonable grown-up. In that moment the grown-up in the room wasn’t me. I leaned my back against the cabinet, leaning back on my butt, so it was a type of reclining. Cynric stood in front of me. He’d let his hair grow out in the year and some change he’d been with us, so that now it touched his shoulders. He usually brushed it out when it was wet and tied it back tight in a ponytail. His hair managed to be thick and luxurious rather than just soft. I think he had the thickest straight hair I’d ever touched. He had it back in a ponytail, not quite tight enough to hide the fact that there was a lot more hair behind him. His face had thinned down, letting nice, triangular cheekbones come out of what I could only have called baby fat, though no one called it that now. He was leaner from gaining extra inches of height and hitting the gym in a serious way. Nathaniel worked out because he was a stripper, and when you take your clothes off for customers, you need to look good. I worked out so I could fight bad guys. The bodyguards who stayed at the house with us, and at the Circus with Jean-Claude, worked out to stay in shape to protect our asses. Richard was Ulfric, wolf king, and occasionally you had to fight to keep the title, so he worked out to make sure he could do that. Micah worked out because I, his leopard queen, did, and because occasionally the leopard king had to fight for the right to keep his title, too, though it was a lot rarer among the leopards than the wolves. Wereleopards were more practical creatures than werewolves, as a general rule. Micah didn’t work out as much as I did, but then neither did Nathaniel. I was the one most likely to be depending on my body to save my ass on a regular basis. It was a serious incentive to exercise.

I’d insisted that Cynric take fight practice with me and the guards, because I preferred my people to be able to defend themselves. I couldn’t be with everyone all the damn time, so fewer victims was a good thing. Cynric had gotten his ass kicked at the hand-to-hand and non-gun weapons practice, so he’d started lifting weights and running with us, so he’d be in better shape for practice. It had probably helped give him that extra height and widen his shoulders, fill out his upper body, and just put muscle on what had been a slender, softer frame. Now he was lean and had more muscle. He didn’t bulk up as much as some of the other men; Nathaniel had broader shoulders and put on muscle easier. Cynric muscled up not much better than Micah did, which meant he fought for every ounce of it, almost as much as Micah. Micah looked amazing out of his clothes, lean, muscled, strong, and so very male, but in clothes, especially anything that wasn’t tight, it was harder to see the workout. Cynric had some of the same problems. It meant that in the new preternatural high school football league, he was quarterback. He didn’t have the bulk to be much else, and he had a good eye, good hands, lightning-quick reflexes, and dead-calm nerves even with kids three times his size barreling down on him. He also could run like a son of a bitch and would have made a good running back or wide receiver if he hadn’t been so good at quarterback. Considering he’d never played organized sports in his life, it was pretty impressive. His couch bemoaned all those years of lost opportunity.

He was also running track again, in a preternatural league, and there he excelled at anything that required speed and agility. He was a sprinter, not a distance runner, but within his distances he was almost untouchable. We actually had college coaches sniffing around, because there was talk of a college preternatural league, and there were already amateur adult leagues across the country, with some talk of a professional one starting up, at least in football.

There weren’t enough preternaturals between one school and another to have more than one team between states right now. Which meant the St. Louis team was really a Missouri team. We were doing well in football, and a lot of that was due to the guy standing in front of me.

Nathaniel loved going to the games and meets, and they introduced themselves as brothers, which left me in the interesting situation of having a few parents at the games wondering exactly what I was doing with Nathaniel and his younger brother. I didn’t really care what strangers thought about me, but Cynric bothered me, personally, and always had.

Cynric was wearing jogging shorts and no shirt, so he’d either worked out already or been about to when he heard me get up. He wasn’t sweating, so he’d been getting dressed to run, and just stopped in the middle to come out to me. The shorts left his upper body bare in the last of the late-day sun, so that the dying gold of the light painted his muscles in amber highlights, giving them even more depth and shading. At least he was wearing the bottoms; a lot of the wereanimals went around nude unless my modesty protested-though Cynric had come with his own share of modesty and rarely went around buck naked, come to think of it.

“Would you just stand there and say nothing if I didn’t start?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I sipped the coffee; it was hot, and Nathaniel had taught Cynric exactly the way I liked it, but today, even good coffee couldn’t cheer me up.

“Why?” he asked.

“You’re the one who made everyone else leave the room, Cynric. You wanted the talk, not me, so you get to talk.”

“God, you are so much the dude.”

I shrugged and sipped my coffee; maybe if I just kept drinking it, I’d enjoy it eventually. It was a shame to waste good coffee on such a bad mood.

He ran his hands through his hair, but in the ponytail he couldn’t finish the gesture, so he pulled out the tie and let the thick, straight hair fall loose. It fell around his face like a dark blue curtain, making the ring of pale blue in his eyes richer, closer to cornflower blue, and the darker ring of midnight blue, almost as dark as Jean-Claude’s eyes, look richer, more blue, a navy bordering on something less deep.

He ran his hands through his hair, now that he could, and started pacing a short, tense circle in the largest piece of unobstructed floor in the kitchen. That just happened to put him directly in front of me, pacing, like one of those big cats in the zoo that forever paces, miserable, and eventually they go mad. His thick hair spilled forward around his face, so that as he turned it fell in disarray around his face. The morning light had made his hair oh so blue, but this was a darker shade of light, thicker, holding shades of gold so deep, it was like fire as it fades, so that some of his hair was rich, deep blue, but some of it looked black, so that the highlights and lowlights of his hair were… heart-stopping.

He stopped in front of me, at last, his chest rising and falling as if he’d been running. The pulse in the side of his neck pounded against his skin, already darkening from running shirtless in the spring practices. He tanned, did our Cynric. He stared at me, eyes a little too wide, lips half-parted in that triangular face, hair in that artful disarray.

I had the urge to push it back from his face, out of his eyes, but stayed leaning against the cabinets. I would lose ground if I moved toward him, and I would lose a lot of ground if I touched his hair. If we were going to fight, I didn’t want to do it with my fingers remembering the warm silk of his hair.

“I’m worried about you,” he said, at last.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and started to sip the coffee again, but realized I didn’t want it. I set it on the cabinet beside me.

“Sorry about what?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Sorry my job upsets you, I guess.” For Micah, or Nathaniel, I would have taken this, owned it, maybe even agreed, but Cynric hadn’t earned this yet; he wasn’t the boss of me.

“I’m a weretiger, Anita; I can smell your emotions and you’re not upset.”

“Now you’re telling me what I feel,” I said.

“You want this to be a fight. I don’t want to fight.”

I crossed my arms under my breasts and settled against the cabinets again. “I don’t want to fight either, Cynric.”

“Please, at least, call me by my name.”

I sighed. “Sin; fine, I don’t want to fight either, Sin. You know I hate the nickname.”

“I know you do, but then you hate a lot of things about me.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“Maybe not, but it’s true.” He took two more steps toward me, so that if I’d unfolded my arms I could have touched his chest easily. “I can’t help being this young, Anita. It’s not permanent; I’ll get older.”

I hugged my arms around myself, because I wanted to touch him. It was one of the up/downs to him being one of the animals to call. It felt good to touch the type of animal you could call, and it felt especially good to cuddle your very own animal to call, and Cynric was one of mine. The fact that I had a record number of animals to call didn’t seem to make any difference; I wanted to touch them all when they were near me. It was damn hard to fight when you wanted to wrap your arms around someone so you could breathe in the scent of their skin.

“I’ll get older, too,” I said.

“Older in years, but as Jean-Claude’s human servant, you won’t age.”

“I haven’t taken the fourth mark from him.”

“But you and Damian shared it, and he’s a vampire, too.”

“He’s my vampire servant; we’re not sure if that will change the dynamics.”

“I know that there’s a chance you shared your mortality with Damian rather than him sharing his immortality with you, but so far you both look great. I think you just don’t want to accept that it’s not an age thing.”

“I’m sorry if it wigs me to be sleeping with a high schooler.”

“I graduate this year, Anita; then what will your excuse be?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” I held myself very tight, because I was afraid that Cynric-Sin-was about to say some very grown-up things that I didn’t want to hear.

“Nathaniel was only nineteen when you met him; Jason, too. That’s just a year older than me. It isn’t just my age, Anita.”

I looked into those eyes, those almost frantic blue-on-blue eyes, and couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought of him knowing that I didn’t love him. I couldn’t bear to hear him say it out loud, and yet part of me wanted someone to say it, if it meant he’d go back to Vegas and I’d have one less person to take care of in my life. I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with police work, and everything to do with the fact that no one person could date this many people. You could fuck them, but you couldn’t have a relationship with them. Maybe I’d been ready to jettison Cynric out of my bed and life, not because of him, really, but because I had to find a way to thin down the people in my life, and concentrating on how young he was seemed a reasonable excuse to thin the herd. Was my issue with Cynric not him personally, but just being overwhelmed with all my lovers? I collected them the way a crazy cat lady found strays to bring home, except I could afford to feed and take care of all of them, I was just running low on emotional resources, or so I told myself.

Was I really ready to send a whole person away, just so I could date the leftovers more easily? Put that way, it seemed a shitty thing to do. Hell, it didn’t sound good to call the men I loved and slept with the “leftovers.” If I was going to get rid of Cynric and risk Nathaniel losing yet another brother, I needed a better reason than being emotionally tired; didn’t I?

I reached out, touched his hair, and smoothed it back from his face. His hair was so soft, softer than Nathaniel’s, but not quite as thick; almost, though. I wanted to say, It’s not you, it’s me, but it sounded so fucking cliché. Maybe the reason it’s a cliché is that it’s true, so much more than people want to believe. You can be a perfectly good person, wonderful lover, great friend, and it can still not work. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He put one hand over mine, holding it against his face. His eyes closed, and he leaned his face into my palm, rubbing his cheek against me, scent-marking me as his, like cats will do. Was I his? Was he mine? Fuck, I didn’t know. How could I not know after more than a year? How could I not know the answer to this? What the fuck was wrong with me? What the fuck was wrong… with me? With… him and me, with us? No, with me. With me. What was wrong with me?

His other hand went around my waist, drawing me in against his body. It was a possessive gesture, one that marked territory if other men were present. This is mine, not yours; mine, just by that arm around me, that drawing me into him. I just didn’t think it was true.

I stared up at him, studying his face, trying to see something that would help me know what the hell I was feeling.

He drew me in tighter to his body, and I put my hands on his waist, just at the top of his hips, not holding him, but keeping that last fraction of a distance between his body and mine. I knew what was under the silky jogging shorts. I knew what he had to offer, and I knew my reaction to being pressed against it, even through clothes. It wasn’t just love that made me react to the men in my life, and somehow if I reacted to Cynric the same way, it would mean something. I wasn’t sure what, but something, something I didn’t want it to mean.

He tried to pull me closer, but I stiffened my arms and kept the small distance. He didn’t fight me. He just let me go and stepped back a few inches, so we weren’t touching at all.

I reached out to him, but the look on his face made me drop my hands to my sides. It wasn’t the anger that I’d earned, but the disappointment in his eyes, the pain; I hadn’t wanted to see that. It made my chest tight, and there was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t seem to swallow around, as if I were choking on something more solid than words.

“I’m not jealous,” he said, “but after what I heard and smelled you doing with Micah and Nathaniel, and you won’t even let me hold you close…” He shook his head, making a little push-away gesture with his hands. He turned and went to stand by the sliding glass door, as far from me as he could get without leaving the room.

I didn’t know what to do. If Nathaniel hadn’t adopted him as a brother, if Jean-Claude didn’t seem to take such pride in his accomplishments, if he didn’t try so damn hard to do everything that was asked of him, if… how would I feel if I never saw Cynric here in the kitchen again? What if I never saw him painted in dark squares of amber light and shadows again? He was beautiful standing there with the light making his shoulder-length hair rich blues and blacks, as if someone had painted him with the color of dark ocean water, but… but I could live without him. I’d miss him, but I couldn’t wrap my head around helping him pick out colleges and fucking him. It felt too much like a conflict of interests. Could you finish raising someone, kiss him and send him off to school every day, and be sleeping with him, and have it be okay? I didn’t think so.

I decided to try for honesty. I wasn’t sure it would help my chest and throat loosen up, but it was all I had. I went closer, but not close enough to touch him. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t look at me as he said, “Sorry for what?”

“That there’s not enough of me for everyone.”

He turned to look at me then, frowning. “What does that even mean?”

I opened my mouth, closed it. I wasn’t sure how to put it into words.

“See, it’s not a real reason, Anita. You just want an excuse to say no.”

I shook my head. “It’s not that, damn it.”

He turned around, crossing his arms over his bare chest. “Then explain it.” He threw the words down like a gauntlet. It was my turn to pick it up and accept the challenge, or leave it lying there, sad and cowardly.

“I don’t know how to send you off to high school, hug you good-bye, attend parent-teacher conferences, and be having sex with you. It feels wrong, like I’m doing something wrong. No one else in my bed makes me feel like I’m doing something immoral.”

The frown was replaced by a puzzled look, and then a half-smile. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“I really am only a year younger than Nathaniel and Jason when you met them.”

“But I didn’t sleep with them at nineteen, and I was three years younger, too.”

“I’m only five years younger than Nathaniel,” he said.

I fought a serious urge to put my fingers in my ears and go La-la-la-la. I hadn’t really thought of it that way.

He gave a short, harsh laugh. “You hadn’t done the math, had you?”

I tried not to squirm uncomfortably, and said, “I hadn’t thought how close in age you two are, so no.”

“Does everything only work for you because you don’t think about it too hard?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and said so. “I don’t know.”

“You’re seven years older than Nathaniel, right?”

I nodded, and shrugged. I fought to not look away, because honestly, that had bothered me at one point, too.

“The age difference really does bother you, even just the seven years?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it did, and I was taking care of him, keeping him safe. I thought it was a conflict of interest trying to get him to stand on his own two feet, and sleep with him at the same time.”

“He was a pet when you met him, not just submissive but someone who had no ability to protect himself. He said, before you insisted on him getting therapy and being more independent, he was just a victim waiting for the right killer to come along and finish the job.”

I couldn’t keep the surprise off my face as I said, “He said that, really?”

Cynric nodded.

“I think if I hadn’t lost control of the ardeur around him, I’d have kept my distance, Cynric.”

“Sin.” He said it automatically, with a note of tired-of-saying-this in his voice.

I sighed. “Sin, fine; you know the nickname doesn’t help me get over this whole taboo thing, right?”

“What taboo?” he asked.

“You’re a kid that I’m supposed to be taking care of; I think it was the parent-teacher conferences that really capped it for me, Cynric-Sin.” I put my hands on my hips and finally had a solid glare on my face; it felt good, justified even. “You shouldn’t be going to parent conferences for someone and fucking them, Sin, okay? There, that’s the truth, that’s the problem. It’s just wrong.”

He laughed then and leaned against the glass of the door, arms still crossed. “Then stop coming to the parent-teacher conferences.”

“What?” I asked.

“Stop coming to the parent things; I don’t think of you as a parent, Anita. The closest thing I’ve had to a mother was Bibiana in Vegas, and she’s not exactly motherly to her own sons, but trust me, I have never thought of you that way.” He frowned, unrolling his shoulders enough to put more of his back against the glass, his arms back against it, putting his hands flat against the sun-warmed glass, so that his upper body was suddenly framed against the light, and I realized that the pale blue silk of his shorts wasn’t exactly light proof.

I looked away, so that I wouldn’t keep looking harder to see how much I could see revealed in the sunlight. Wanting to see him silhouetted against the light made my whole protest about feeling parental toward him seem either stupid, like the lady was protesting too much, or incestuous. I felt myself begin to blush and wished, so wished, I could stop doing that.

“You don’t think of yourself as my mom.” His voice was a little lower as he said it.

I shook my head, because he was right. I didn’t, I just… “But by going to the parent conferences and things, it puts me in that… role. Don’t you understand? I can’t do stuff like that and still…” I waved a hand vaguely toward him. “This!”

“Jean-Claude is my legal guardian, and he enjoys going to the parent stuff. Nathaniel likes it, too. All big brother on me,” and there was real happiness in his voice when he said the last.

I looked at him then, and the happiness was there plain on his face. He leaned against the door in that fall of sunlight and was happy, relaxed, himself, more himself than when he came to us. I didn’t have to fight not to look lower on his body, because I liked seeing that look on his face. He’d done more than just grow taller and more muscled since he got to St. Louis. I enjoyed watching him grow into himself, become the person he could be. That part I liked, the same way I’d enjoyed it with Nathaniel, or Jason, or… or Micah. We’d all grown more ourselves.

“You’re right; Jean-Claude does enjoy the whole parent thing.”

Sin laughed. “He’s a little puzzled by the sports, but he enjoys coming.”

“He’s proud of you,” I said.

Sin grinned. “I think he is.”

“I know he is.”

Sin looked at me, his blue eyes going more serious. “That’s right, you can feel what he’s feeling if you’re not shielding tight enough, even more so than with one of your animals to call.”

“It’s harder to shield against Jean-Claude.”

“Than against Nathaniel, or Damian?”

“Damian, yes; Nathaniel is harder depending on what we’re doing.”

“You mean sex,” Sin said.

I smiled, and shook my head. “Sex with Jean-Claude is pretty full of abandon, too, but Nathaniel doesn’t control his emotions as well as the vampires do.”

“They’ve had centuries more practice,” Sin said.

I nodded. “True.”

“Just stop coming to the parent things, as my parent, Anita.” He held his hand out to me.

“Just like that,” I said, “and that’ll make it okay?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll certainly trade you sitting there all uncomfortable, and half-defensive, for being your lover.” He waggled the hand he was holding out in the air.

I went close enough to take his hand. We stood there holding hands. Neither of us tried for anything closer. We just stood there, him still leaning against the door, me fighting the urge to pull against his hand, and looked at each other.

The smile slipped a little, leaving a much more serious look behind. The happiness remained like the glow that lingers pushing against the dark when the sun has gone below the horizon, but you know that true night is only a thought away-night, when the monsters come out to play.

I didn’t want to be the monster to Cynric, the way I was to Larry. It wasn’t a fair analogy, but I was tired; not physically, I’d slept, but emotionally. I was just tired of the shit, everyone’s shit. I was also wondering where Brice was, not because I wanted a rescue from Cynric’s talk, but because we needed to get these bastards before nightfall.

Cynric squeezed my hand and shook it a little. “You’re thinking too hard, and it’s not about me.”

I had the grace to look embarrassed, but didn’t lie. “I’m wondering when the other cops will come and give me a ride to the party.”

“You know it scares me every time you leave for work with the police.”

I nodded. “I know.” We had another moment of just looking at each other, still holding hands from a little distance.

“Nothing I can do would make you not go,” he said.

I sighed. “No,” I said.

“Can I hug you?” he asked.

I looked at him, startled. The change in conversation was too fast for me. “Hug me, yeah. I mean, why not?”

“Because I think we’re fighting, and you’ve gone all work serious.”

“I don’t think we’re fighting.”

“We were both thinking about having a fight,” he said, smiling.

I smiled a little. “Yeah, we thought about it.”

“But we’re not going to,” he said, and made it a question with the uplilt of his voice.

“I don’t think so.”

He frowned and pulled on my hand, bringing me closer to him. “Don’t take this wrong, Anita, but why aren’t we fighting?”

I realized he’d stopped pulling me closer, leaving me a few inches of distance, so I could decide if I wanted to close the distance or not. Cynric had learned what not to do in the last year. It was figuring out what to do that was the problem with dating me, or so one of my ex-boyfriends had said.

I went to him, closing the distance between us. I was left standing almost the same as before, looking up at him, his arms around me, but my hands on his waist and upper hip, keeping that last bit of distance.

“I don’t want to fight,” I said.

“Me either,” he said.

I nodded. “Good.”

“You’ll stop coming to the parent-teacher stuff.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you’ll stop being weirded out by our age difference?”

I laughed then, and shook my head. “I’m twelve years older than you are, Sin.”

“I know.”

“But it’s not just the age difference; it’s the when of the age difference. You’re eighteen and I’m twelve years older than you are. I’m thirty, and you’re eighteen; that is a big age difference.”

“You said I could hug you,” he said.

“You can,” I said.

He glanced down at my hands where they held us apart. “Not without forcing the issue, and you don’t like that, at least not from me.”

I moved my hands around his waist, slowly, reluctantly, feeling the firmness of his body and the softness of his skin, so that I wasn’t sure whether to say his body was muscled and hard, or soft and tender. He was both, all of it.

His arms slid slowly tighter around me, drawing me in against his body. I let my fingers play up his back, tracing the edge of his spine, the muscles of his lats where they traced under his skin like the faint shape of wings, as if with more weight lifting the angel wing shape would spring out of the skin and rise like a white feathered dream above his back. One of my lovers, more a fuck buddy really, was the Swan King, the leader of the swanmanes. I knew what it was to have sex surrounded by feathers and the strength of wings, but Sin didn’t need wings to be special. I wrapped myself around his upper body, laying my cheek against his bare chest, so I could hold the warmth of his skin against me, and just like that it wasn’t enough. He was my tiger to call, my blue tiger, and it wasn’t just him that was tied to me; because of a lot of metaphysical things I could tie people to me only as tight as I was willing to be bound to them. My power was a double-edged sword, and I could cut someone only as deep as I was willing to be cut.

Sin wrapped his arms around me, curled me in against his body, and I let him do it. I let myself be small, and curl against the front of his taller body, so that he could hold me tight, and enjoy the fact that no matter how in charge I was, in the end he was bigger than I was, and no amount of years would change that. One day he would be twenty, but I’d still be six inches shorter than he was, and I could admit, at least silently in my own head, that it wasn’t always bad to be smaller.

He held me tight, and laid his mouth against my hair, and asked, “Can I kiss you?”

“Why ask? Why not just try?”

“Because you’re in one of those moods where what you want changes every few minutes.”

“God, am I that hard to deal with?”

“Challenging,” he said.

“Oh, that was diplomatic,” I said.

“I want to kiss you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes,” I said, and went up on my tiptoes, balancing against his chest. He took the hint, and leaned over to bring his face next to mine. We kissed, a soft touching of lips.

He drew back, studying my face. I started to ask what was wrong, but whatever he saw on my face must have pleased him, because he kissed me again, sliding one hand through my hair, so that he cupped the back of my neck and head, and the kiss grew from something chaste to a caressing of lips and tongues, and then a small sound escaped him, and his hands were suddenly eager against my body. He reminded me that he was more than human-strong, and there was a reason that lycanthropes weren’t allowed to play with humans. They were fragile. The fingers of one hand dug into my upper arm, bruising, and if I’d been human-fragile I might have been more than bruised, but I wasn’t human, and sometimes I liked it rough. The bruising, the pain, tore an eager sound from my throat and made me press myself against him. His body was hard, and it made me cry out again and press harder against him.

“Anita.” He growled it almost against my lips, and the first trickling rise of his beast flared across my skin like a spill of something warm, almost hot, sliding everywhere along my skin.

“God,” I said, and got that first glimpse of tiger inside me, that great blue-and-black beast that rose to him.

There was a loud throat-clearing and a knock on the doorway. We both turned, startled, toward the sound. Nathaniel looked apologetic. “You guys are fun together.”

“How long have you been watching?” I asked.

“Not long, but the police just pulled up outside.”

“Shit,” I said. I looked back up at Cynric. “I have to go.”

“I know.” And then he smiled. “But I know you’re sorry to leave me now, and that helps.”

I wasn’t sure how to take that, so I ignored it and went for the door, adjusting the weapons and straps as if the make-out session had mussed them, but I think it was more to get back into work headspace. I touched the weapons, made sure they were all where I could grab them if I needed them, and went for the door. I gave Nathaniel a quick kiss. Micah was at the door, standing with one of my equipment bags in his hand. I kissed him, too, but neither he nor Nathaniel tried to get more than a quick kiss. They knew my head was already moving ahead, already settling into the mind-set I needed to do my job. When you’re thinking about killing people, you don’t want to think about kissing your sweeties, or at least I didn’t. It was a way to separate that part of the job from the warm, happy part of my life.

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“We know,” Micah said.

“We’re scheduled with Jean-Claude tonight,” Nathaniel said, reminding me of the time split.

“Thanks, I’d have forgotten and wondered where you guys were.” I started out the door. Micah let me take both bags from him. You didn’t let the other cops see your guys carrying your bags; you just didn’t.

“Do whatever it takes to come home safe to us, Anita,” he said.

I looked into those eyes and said, “Always.” And I had to go, but now that Brice was calling at me from his SUV, and the SWAT van was already pulling away, there was that edge of excitement in me. I loved my guys, but a part of me still loved this, too. How do you divide yourself between killing people and loving them? The best I had on that one was just to kill the bad guys, and love the good guys, and hope the two lists never crossed.