"Are you threatening me?" Dolph asked, in a voice gone cold.
"Not you," I said. "I don't think he was threatening you."
"Then what did he mean by that?"
"He's quoting Keats. 'Ode to a Nightingale,' I think," I said.
Requiem looked back at me and nodded, making it almost a bow. He kept looking at me, and there was too much intensity in that gaze. I met it, but it took effort.
"I don't care what he's quoting, Anita. I want to know what he meant by it."
"What it means," I said, meeting Requiem's blue, blue gaze, "at a guess, is that he's half-wishing you'd pulled the trigger."
Requiem bowed then, a full-out sweeping movement, using his cloak as part of the theatre of it. It was a lovely, graceful show of body, hair, and all of him. But it made my throat tight, and my stomach jump. My stomach didn't like that, and I winced.
Requiem put his cloak on, drawing the hood around his face. He gave me the full force of that handsome face, those eyes, and said, " 'I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!' "
Dolph looked at me then, then back at the vampire. Requiem glided out the door all black cloak and melancholy. Dolph looked back at me. "I don't think he likes you very much."
"I don't think that's the problem," I said.
"He wants to pick out curtains," Edward said from where he was slouched beside the door. He only slouched when he was pretending to be Ted Forrester.
"Something like that," I said.
"You fucking him?" Dolph asked.
I gave him the look the question deserved. "That is none of your damn business."
"That's a yes," he said, and his face was taking on that look, that disapproving look.
I glared at him, though frankly it's hard to glare in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes. It always makes you feel so vulnerable. Hard to be tough when you're feeling weak. "I said what I meant, Dolph."
"You only get defensive when the answer's yes," he said. The disapproving look was sliding into his angry look.
"My answer's always defensive when someone asks me if I'm fucking someone. Try asking if I'm dating him, or hell, even if he's my lover. Try being polite about it. It's still none of your business, but I might, might, answer the question if you weren't ugly about it."
He took in a lot of air, which with his chest was a whole lot, and let it out very slowly. Olaf was taller, but Dolph was bigger, beefier, built like an old-style wrestler before they all went to heavy bodybuilding. He actually closed his eyes and took another breath. He let that out and nodded. "You're right. You are right."
"Glad to hear it," I said.
"Are you dating him?"
"I'm seeing him, yes."
"What do you do on dates with a vampire?" It seemed to be a real question, or maybe he was just trying to make up for being pissy.
"Pretty much what you do on a date with any guy, except the hickeys are really spectacular."
It took him a second, and then he stared at me. He tried to frown, then laughed and shook his head. "I hate that you date the monsters. I hate that you are fucking them. I think it compromises you, Anita. I think it makes you have to choose where your loyalties lie, and I don't think us mere humans always win the coin toss."
I nodded and found that it didn't hurt my stomach to do it. Had I healed more in the little bit we'd been talking? "I'm sorry that's how you feel."
"You aren't going to deny it?"
"I'm not going to react all angry and defensive. You're being reasonable about your feelings, so I'll be reasonable back. I don't shortchange the humans, Dolph. I do a lot to make sure that the citizens of our fair city stay upright and mobile, the living and the dead, the furry and the not-so-furry."
"I hear you're still dating that junior high teacher, Richard Zeeman."
"Yeah." I said it carefully, trying not to act tense about it. To my knowledge the police didn't know Richard was a werewolf. Was his secret identity about to be revealed? I rubbed my hand over my stomach to give my eyes somewhere else to look and hoped that any tension in my body would be attributed to the wounds. Hoped.
"I asked you once if you were dating any humans, and you said no."
I fought not to look too relaxed, or too tense. This was Richard's world I was playing with. "You probably asked during one of our many breakups. We're pretty on and off."
"Why?"
"Why all the questions about my love life? We have a dangerous vampire out there to catch."
"To kill," he said.
I nodded. "To kill, so why all the questions about who I'm dating?"
"Why don't you want to answer questions about Mr. Zeeman?"
We were on dangerous ground. Dolph hated the monsters, all monsters. His son was engaged to a vampire, and she was trying to talk the son into joining her as undead. It had made Dolph's attitude toward the preternatural citizens go from cynical and dark to downright dangerous. Did he know about Richard, or suspect?
"Truthfully, Richard was who I thought I'd spend my life with, and the fact that we seem to be headed for the big breakup still hurts, okay?"
He gave me cop eyes, as if he were tasting the truth and weighing the lie. "What changed?"
I thought about how to answer that. The first time we'd broken up had been after I saw Richard eat someone. It had been a bad guy, but still, a girl's got to have standards. Or that's what I thought at the time. If I had it to do over again, would I have made a different choice? Maybe.
Dolph was beside the bed now. "Anita, what changed?"
"Me," I said softly, "I changed. We broke up, and I started dating Jean-Claude. I went back and forth between them for a while, and finally Richard just couldn't take me not deciding. So he decided for us, for me. If I couldn't choose, he'd take away one of my choices."
"He didn't want to share you."
"No."
"But he's dating you again, now."
"Some." I so did not like where this conversation was going.
Edward must not have liked it either, because he interrupted. "Not that this isn't fascinating, Lieutenant, but we still have a very powerful vamp out there. She's killed, or helped kill, at least two women that we know of: one Bev Leveto, and Margaret Ross." I think he used their names to make them more real to Dolph. Names have a way of doing that. "Shouldn't we be concentrating on catching the bad vampire, instead of quizzing the marshal here about her dates?" He said it all with a smile and a face full of down-home charm. I would never be the actor that Edward was, but damn there were moments when I wished I could be.
"How did you manage not to catch both of the vampires in the hotel room?" I asked. Maybe if we concentrated on crime-stopping, Dolph would let the other topic go.
Edward did his "aw, shucks" look, like he was embarrassed. The reaction wasn't his, but maybe the emotion was; it was incredibly rare for Edward to miss a target. He came to stand by the head of the bed.
One, so I could see him around Dolph's broad build, but two, I think, so Dolph wouldn't be able to scrutinize my reactions so damn closely.
"When we got to the hotel room there was only one vampire in the room. She was dead when we got there, but we took her head and heart, just like we're supposed to. I know that dead doesn't always mean dead for these guys."
"That must have been Nivia."
"How did you know her name?" Dolph asked.
I opened my mouth, closed it, and said, "An informant."
"Who, Anita?" he said.
I shook my head. "Don't ask, and I won't have to lie to you."
"You have someone who knows more about these murderers, and you won't bring them in so we can all question them. You, and just you, get to do the interrogation."