He drew me a little closer with his hand. "What are you saying?"
I smiled. "I need a vacation."
He laughed then, and it was a good laugh, open and joyous, nothing special about it but his own astonishment. I'd heard better laughs but none when I needed it more. "A vacation, just a vacation?"
I shrugged. "I don't see myself taking up flower arranging, Detective Ramirez."
"Hernando," he said.
I nodded. "Hernando. This is part of who I am." I realized we were still holding hands, and I drew away from him. He let me, no protest. "Maybe if I take a break, I'll be able to do it again."
"What if a vacation isn't enough?" he asked.
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it." It wasn't just the brutal day in and day out of the job. My reaction to Bernardo's body and letting a perfect stranger comfort me were so unlike me. I was missing the guys, but it was more than that. When I left Richard, I left the pack, all my werewolf friends.
When I left Jean-Claude, I lost all the vamps, and strangely one or two of them were friends. You can be friends with a vampire as long as you remember that they are monsters and not human beings. How you can do both at the same time, I can't really explain, but I manage.
I hadn't just cut myself off from the men in my life for six months. I'd cut myself off from my friends. Even Ronnie, Veronica Sims, one of my few human friends had a new hot romance. She was dating Richard's best friend which made socializing awkward. Catherine, my lawyer and friend, had only been married two years, and I didn't like to interfere with her and Bob.
"You're thinking something very serious," Ramirez said.
I blinked and looked at him. "Just realizing how isolated I am even back home. Here, I am so … " I shook my head without finishing it.
He smiled. "You're only isolated if you want to be, Anita. I've offered to show you the local sights."
I shook my head. "Thanks, really. Under other circumstances, I'd say, yes."
"What's stopping you?" he asked.
"The case for one. If I start dating one of the local cops, then my credibility goes down the tubes, and I'm not too high on some lists already."
"What else?" He had a very gentle face, soft, as if he would be very gentle in everything he did.
"I've got two men waiting back home. Waiting to see who I'm going to choose, or if I'm dumping both of them."
His eyes widened. "Two. I'm impressed."
I shook my head. "Don't be. My personal life is a mess."
"Sorry to hear that."
"I can't believe I just told you all that. It isn't like me."
"I'm a good listener."
"Yeah, you are."
"May I escort you back?"
I smiled at the old-fashioned phrasing. "Can you answer some questions first?"
"Ask." He sat down on the ground in his dark brown pants, lifting the pant legs so they wouldn't bunch.
I sat down beside him. "Who called the police?"
"A guest."
"Where is he or she?"
"Hospital. Severe shock brought on by trauma."
"No physical injuries?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"Who were the mutilation vics this time?"
"The wife's brother and two nephews, all over twenty. They lived and worked on the ranch."
"What about the other guests? Where were they?"
He closed his eyes, as if visualizing the page. "Most of them were off on a planned outing, an overnight camping trip into the mountains. But the rest borrowed the ranch cars that are kept for the guests' use and left."
"Let me guess," I said. "They just felt restless, jittery, had to get out of the house."
Ramirez nodded. "Just like the neighbors around all the other houses."
"It's a spell, Ramirez," I said.
"Don't make me ask you again to use my first name."
I smiled and looked away from the teasing look in his eyes. "Hernando, this is either a spell or some sort of ability the creature possesses to cause fear, dread, in the ones it doesn't want to kill or hurt. But I'm betting on a spell."
"Why?"
"Because it's too selective to be a natural anxiety like a vampire's ability to hypnotize with its eyes. A vamp can bespell one person or a room full of people, but it can't do an entire street except for one house. It's too exact. You need to be able to organize your magic for this, and that means a spell."
He picked one of the rough-looking blades of grass, running it between his fingers. "So we're looking for a witch."
"I know something about wiccan and other flavors of witchcraft, and I don't know any way a lone wiccan, or even a coven could do this. I'm not saying there isn't a human spell worker involved somewhere, but there is definitely something otherworldly, nonhuman, at work here."
"We got some blood traces off the broken door."
I nodded. "Great. I wish someone would tell me when we find a clue. Everyone, including Ted, is playing it so close to the chest, I've spent most of my time going over ground that someone else has already figured out."
"Ask me and I'll tell you anything you want to know." He tossed the grass blade to the ground. "But we better be getting back before you get a worse reputation than just dating me."
I didn't argue. Put any woman in an area run mostly by men and rumors will fly. Unless you make it very clear that you are off limits, there is also a certain competitiveness that sets in. Some men are either trying to run you out of town or get into your pants. They don't seem to know any other way to deal with a woman. If you're not a sexual object, you're a threat. Always makes me wonder what kind of childhoods they had.
Hernando stood brushing grass and dirt off the back of his pants. He seemed to have had a dandy childhood, or at least he'd turned out well. Congrats to his parents. Someday he'd bring home a nice girl and have nice children in a nice house with yard work on the weekends, and every Sunday dinner at one set of grandparents or another. A nice life if you can get it, and he still got to solve murders. Talk about having it all.
What did I have? What did I really have? I was too young for a mid-life crisis, and too old for an attack of conscience. We started walking back towards the cars. I was hugging my arms again, and had to force myself to stop. I lowered my arms to my sides and walked along beside Ramirez … ah, Hernando, like nothing was wrong.
"Marks said that one of the first cops on the scene had his throat nearly bitten out. How did that happen?"
"I wasn't here for the first rush. The lieutenant waited to call me in." There was a trace of harshness in his voice. He was gentle, but not if you pushed him. "But I heard that the three living victims attacked the cops. They had to subdue them with batons. They just kept trying to take pieces out of them."
"Why would they do that? How would they do it? I mean you skin most people and rip off pieces, they aren't going to feel like fighting."
"I helped pick up some of the earlier survivors, and they didn't fight. They just lay there and moaned. They were hurt and they acted hurt."
"Have they ever traced down Thad Bromwell, the son of the first scene I saw?"
Hernando's eyes widened. "Marks didn't call you?"
I shook my head.
"He is such a shithead."
I agreed. "What? Did they find the body?"
"He's alive. He was away on a camping trip with friends."
"He's alive," I said. Then whose soul had I seen hovering in the bedroom? I didn't say it out loud because I'd forgotten to mention the soul to the police. Marks had been ready to chase me out of town. If I'd started talking about souls floating near the ceiling, he'd have gotten matches and a stake.