Then I realized that we were a man down. Where was Olaf?
32
OLAF WAS OUTSIDE, under a little covered area to one side of the hospital entrance. He was talking to a woman who was shorter than I was, in pink hospital scrubs. Her black hair curled over the shoulders of all that pink. Olaf was smiling, bending over so he could hear what she was saying. Whatever she said, it made him laugh. I’d never seen him laugh. It was a little unnerving, like seeing your dog sit up and try to hold a conversation with you. I mean, you know the dog communicates, but it’s not supposed to speak the queen’s English. I knew there had to be laughter in Olaf somewhere, but not this soft, smiling face. It changed his face, filled it with lines that seemed almost—kind. Either he really liked this woman, or he was a better actor than Edward.
He looked over her head at me, and for just a moment he let the laughter slip away. He let me see in those cavernous eyes that he did like her, he liked her lots, but not in a good way. He let me see in that strangely handsome face that he was thinking about her not without her clothes on, but eventually without her skin. He let me see the darkness in his eyes for a blink or two, and then the woman touched his arm, made him look back down at her. I realized that with the height difference she hadn’t seen his eyes, hadn’t seen what he’d shown me. Fuck.
She spared a glance back at us, as if wondering what had attracted his attention. She had that expression on her face that let me know she was looking at me as a potential rival, doing that girl thing that some women do of assessing who’s the prettiest, who’s a threat. Whatever she’d decided about me made her move just a bit closer to him and lay her small hand on his arm. She was marking territory. If I reacted badly, she’d know I was interested in him, too.
Olaf laid his big hand over hers, pressing it to his arm, and smiled down at her. The frightening look was gone, washed away in a terribly normal flirting. Shit.
“I thought he wasn’t allowed to hunt anything but monsters on the job,” Nicky said.
“He’s not,” I said.
“Then you better do something, because he’s shopping for a victim.”
I sighed. “Shit.” I moved toward them with Nicky at my back. The doors whooshed open behind us and Lisandro came hurrying up behind us. “Anita, please don’t do that again.”
I kept moving toward Olaf and the woman as I said, “Do what?”
“Leave me alone with a beautiful woman who is obviously trying to pick me up.”
“You’re a big boy,” I said. “I thought you could handle it.”
“If I fall off the wagon again, my wife will divorce my ass. Help me avoid the temptation.”
I would have said it was ironic, his turning to me for help in avoiding the temptation of sex with other women, but we were up with Olaf and the woman. There wasn’t time to worry about Lisandro’s lack of logic.
Olaf looked at us, still smiling, the pleasant mask hiding everything, but the faintest flash in his eyes. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d miss it, and how many women would be looking for serial killer sex in anyone’s eyes?
The woman touched his arm again, but he didn’t put his hand over hers this time. She noticed the lack of touch and looked at us all. She frowned at me, but seeing my U.S. Marshals jacket she both relaxed and frowned harder. Her hand tightened just a little, squeezing his arm. “Do you have to go to work?”
“I told you I was here to hunt monsters.” He smiled while he said it, and lifted her hand off his arm, gently. He held her hand for a moment, lingering. “This is Marshal Anita Blake and her deputies.”
The “deputies” part wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t untrue either, so I ignored it and moved on. “Hey,” I said, “sorry, Marshal Jefferies, but we have to go hunt bad guys now.”
“So you just work together,” the woman said, her hand still in his. She seemed to take encouragement from the fact that he was still holding her hand.
I nodded, but he said, “Only because she refuses to date me.”
The woman glanced back at him as if to see if he was kidding her. He kept his face very carefully full of wry humor, an expression I’d never seen on his face and a set of emotions that I didn’t think he ever felt.
“Then she’s a fool,” she said, and put her arm around his waist, and he cuddled her against him, tucking her up under his arm. She couldn’t see his face anymore, and the charming humor was just gone; one minute he was a flirting man, the next he was Olaf. He let me see in his eyes, his face, that he wasn’t thinking anything safe, sane, or consensual. He let the monster show in his face with no hiding. It stopped the breath in my throat, made me hesitate between one step and the next so that I almost stumbled. That one raw look let me know that Olaf hadn’t changed at all; if anything he’d been hiding more from me.
Nicky touched my arm and kept me moving, whispering, “Don’t let him spook you; that’s what he wants.”
I nodded and kept walking. He dropped his hand away and let me walk on my own, but he stayed beside me now. Lisandro trailed us both.
“We need to rejoin Marshal Forrester and the others now, Otto,” I said; my voice was calm, very calm, trailing down to that emptiness where it would have almost no inflection at all. I was one step away from going to that empty staticky place in my head where I used to go when I killed people. Lately, I didn’t have to disassociate to pull the trigger. That probably should have worried me, but it didn’t. Olaf worried me. One monster at a time, even if one of them is yourself.
“Time to go, Marshal Jefferies,” I said, my voice that low, careful, empty sound.
He was still holding the woman’s hand. “She wants to date me.”
She was looking from one to the other of us. “Is something going on between you two?”
In unison, he said, “Yes,” and I said, “No.”
She tried to pull her hand out of his, but he held on. Without looking at her, he said, “She has refused every offer from me.” He looked at the woman, and he dredged up one of those pretend smiles again.
She looked a little hesitant, and looked at me. “You’re not his exgirlfriend?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She smiled up at him. “Great.” She even put her other hand on his arm, so she was holding on to him twice. It was sort of the girl version of the double-arm squeeze that some men use on women, except the guys always seemed aggressive and the woman just seemed like a victim clinging to his arm, or maybe the victim analogy was because I knew what he was.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “no.”
“You had your chance,” the woman said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She looked unsure, but said, “Karen, Karen Velazquez.”
“It won’t help,” Olaf said.
“What won’t help?” she asked.
“Giving him a name to personalize you,” I said.
“What?” Karen Velazquez asked, and she dropped the second hand from his arm.
Bernardo called out behind us. “Hey, Otto, got a call for you from Forrester. You turn your phone off again?” His voice was all cheerful, and normal. It lay on the tension between us like oil on water. It covered, but it didn’t change anything.
Bernardo kept walking up to us, as if the tension weren’t thick enough to walk on. He was smiling and pleasant and again he stood halfway between us, but not exactly between us.
“We’re supposed to join up with everybody. They found a clue.”
Edward would have called me first, I was ninety-nine percent certain of that, but I appreciated Bernardo trying to help get the woman away from Olaf. I didn’t really think he’d hurt her here and now, but if he made a date with her there was only one kind of date that Olaf wanted from a woman. One with blood and death and things done that couldn’t be repeated unless you liked the dead, and I had Olaf pegged for wanting his victims alive enough to feel pain or it was no fun.