Anita Blake 22 - Affliction Read Free

was working on it, but something about the whole conversation had hit an issue of mine. I was better than this, damn it. I wasn’t the sad, angry girl he’d first met.
    ‘Your father is hurt, maybe dying. Probably dying,’ and my voice wasn’t angry now, or cold, but more apologetic. Shit, I so sucked at this.
    ‘Anita, what are you talking about?’
    I started over and told him everything I knew, which seemed like damned little under the circumstances.
    ‘How bad is he hurt?’
    ‘I’ve told you what I know.’
    ‘He’s dying? My dad is dying?’
    ‘That’s what your mom said; she seemed pretty hysterical about it, actually.’
    ‘She was always pretty emotional. It kind of balanced Dad’s stoicism out. Anita, I can’t think. I feel stuck.’
    ‘You want to see your father, right?’
    ‘If you mean do I want to make peace with him before he dies, then yes.’
    ‘Okay, then we catch the first plane and get you to his bedside.’
    ‘Okay,’ he said. He sounded so unsure, so unlike himself.
    ‘You want company?’ I asked.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Do you want me to come with you?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said.
    ‘Do you want Nathaniel to come?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’ll call him and let him know. I’ll call Jean-Claude and see if his private plane is available.’
    ‘Yes, good. Why can’t I think?’ he asked.
    ‘You’ve just learned your dad is in the hospital and you’re running out of time to make up with him. You’re having to make up with your whole family during a crisis of epic proportions. Give yourself a few minutes to process, Micah.’
    ‘Good points,’ he said, but he still sounded shell-shocked.
    ‘Do you need me to stay on the phone?’
    ‘You can’t call about the plane if you’re talking to me,’ he said. The words were reasonable; the tone was still stunned.
    ‘True, but you sound like you need me to keep talking to you.’
    ‘I do, but I need you to arrange the trip more. I’ll give myself a few minutes to process and then I’ll arrange for other people to take the business end here while I’m gone.’
    ‘I’ll do the same.’
    ‘I love you,’ he said.
    ‘I love you more,’ I said.
    ‘I love you most.’
    ‘I love you mostest.’
    It was usually something that he, Nathaniel and I said to each other, but sometimes just two of us would do it. Sometimes you just needed it.

3
    It was late enough in the day that the vampires had begun to rise in the underground beneath the Circus of the Damned, so when I called to see if we could borrow the private jet, Jean-Claude was awake enough to take the call himself. His voice held none of that sleepy edge because he didn’t really sleep; he died during the day, so when he woke it was abrupt and instant ‘awake.’ Vampires sleep more like a switch: on, awake; off, dead. His body would even cool over the hours, not as cold as a real corpse, and there was no color change, because the body wasn’t really ‘dead,’ and it wasn’t beginning to rot. If you were really dead, and human, the body began to rot as soon as the heart stopped. It’s like cutting a flower in your garden; you can put it into water, delay the process, but from the moment you pick it, it begins to die. The flower looks pretty for a long time, but it’s just a waiting game, the end is inevitable. Jean-Claude was a vampire, Master of the City of St Louis, and he’d been dead and beautiful for about six hundred years; his end was not inevitable. Theoretically, he could still be fresh as an unblemished rose five billion years from now when our sun finally gave up the ghost, expanded, and ate the planet. Of course, I’d killed enough vampires in my job as a legal vampire executioner to know that even being master of a territory and head of the newly formed American Vampire Council didn’t make him truly immortal, just fucking powerful. That was one of the reasons he was awake with the sun still shining in the sky. If he hadn’t been deep underground in