ZERBROWSKI SURPRISED ME by getting a salad with grilled chicken on it. "You're not getting a burger?" I asked.
"Had my cholesterol checked. No burgers for a while." He looked glum as he said it.
"So, no more fast-food burgers?" I asked.
He shook his head.
I patted his back. "Dude, I'm sorry."
Brice said, "Am I missing something? You're acting like he's lost a relative."
"When you ride in Zerbrowski's car, you'll understand. He lives on fast-food burgers, and throws the wrappers into the backseat."
"Will there be room in the backseat for me to sit with all the fast-food wrappers?" Brice asked, laughing.
I looked at Zerbrowski. He shrugged. "I can clean out the back."
"I was joking," Brice said, looking from one to the other of us. "Are you serious that the backseat is so full of fast-food debris that no one can sit in it?"
"We're serious," I said.
"I'll clean it out. The smell of the wrappers will just make me hungry." Zerbrowski picked up his tray with its healthy salad on it; he looked sad.
There were plenty of tables to choose from, because we were late for dinner and hours too early for breakfast. We needed plenty of seating choices, because we were all cops and that meant that none of us wanted our backs to a door, or to the restaurant in general, and especially not a busy area where people would be walking back and forth behind us. We didn't really like windows where people on the outside could just walk up to where we were sitting, especially not if we had to put our backs to the windows. Yeah, the chances of someone walking up and just starting to shoot at us was small, but small wasn't the same as not ever happening. Police aren't paranoid because of some psychological disorder, they're paranoid because real bad things have happened to them, and in our job paranoia was just another word for staying alive.
So, where to sit?
There was a booth that sat back in a corner with a wall that backed the kitchen so there were no windows, and as many as four could sit comfortably with enough room to get to weapons without crowding each other. We also had a clear line of sight to the door. It was perfect. We slid into the booth, with me in the middle, which would have trapped Brice or Zerbrowski, but I was small enough that if I had to, I could go under the table and be shooting at people's legs and be shooting them in the chest and face as they dropped to their knees, because that's what happens to most people if bullets shatter their leg bones. Yes, that is how cops think, that's how anyone who lives by the gun thinks. We don't talk about it, but we are totally into preplanning our survival.
We got settled into the booth, portioned out our food, and started eating before we started talking, because we could talk in the car, but we couldn't eat most of the food we'd gotten in the car while driving. Have you ever tried to eat a salad in a car? Of course, I hadn't ordered a salad, I had a burger, but you can't eat Jimmy's burgers in a car either unless you want to be wearing all that yummy condiment goodness.
"Red meat is bad for you, you know," Zerbrowski said, sort of forlornly.
"My cholesterol is fine," I said, stacking the bun higher with all the layers of vegetables on the burger.
"Mine, too," Brice said, as he took his first bite.
"You should have said something when we were ordering, if you were going to pout, Zerbrowski."
"Would you have ordered a salad to keep me company?"
"No, but I would have felt guilty about it." I took the first bite of the burger. It was juicy and cooked to perfection. The veggies were crisp, ripe, and yummy. I tried to keep the look of bliss off my face, but I think I failed, because Zerbrowski looked like something hurt.
Brice and I ate in happy silence for a few minutes, and then I said, "Sorry, Zerbrowski, but I eat salads at home because Nathaniel decides the menu; when I'm not at home, I eat what I want."
"Nathaniel is your live-in boyfriend?" Brice asked, after he'd swallowed another bite of burger.
"Yep," I said, and took another bite of burger.
Zerbrowski gave me a pained look.
I ignored him.
"You said he does the menus; what does that mean?"
"He does most of the cooking, as either head chef or sous chef to one of the others."
"You make it sound like a restaurant," Brice said.
I shrugged. "The men started it; whoever is the main cook for a meal is designated chef and the others are sous chefs. It's their system and it works, so I just work with it. I figure if I'm not doing the cooking, I shouldn't bitch about how they want to do it."
"Very reasonable," Brice said.
I shrugged again and took another bite of my burger.
"She usually is," Zerbrowski said, as he took a small bite of his salad. He chewed the lettuce as if it were the opposite of yummy.
He was only about nine years older than me; would I have to give up burgers someday? Of course, I was as lean as I had been in college, but more muscular. Zerbrowski had started getting a little thicker around the middle, nothing bad, but he had put on weight. With two kids and a wife, he had more trouble finding time to hit the gym. Kids seemed to make things a lot harder; good thing I'd probably never have to worry about that particular complication.
"Earth to Anita," Zerbrowski was saying.
I blinked at him. "What?"
"What were you thinking about so hard just now?" he asked, and he looked suspicious.
"Nothing," I said.
"Liar; women are never thinking nothing."
"When you say you're thinking nothing, I believe you," I said.
"I'm a man, I really am thinking nothing."
I gave him an exasperated smile. "What the hell does that mean?"
"It means I want to know what you were thinking about so hard just now."
"And I said, nothing, so I'm not going to answer you."
He grinned. "See, you were thinking something."
I frowned at him. "Drop it, okay?"
"No," he said.
"You enjoying your rabbit food?" I asked.
"That was low, Anita," he said, and he stirred his salad with his fork, not really eating it. Maybe that was how you lost weight on salads; you just didn't want to eat them, so you didn't eat, and voila, you lost weight.
I ate my first French fry. It was crisp, salty, and yummy, too.
"If your lovers are all shapeshifters, then why do they eat rabbit food?" Brice asked.
"You mean when they should be eating rabbits?" I asked.
"Did I offend you?" he asked.
I thought about it. "Sorry, I'm just grumpy. Most of them are exotic dancers, and eating too much meat will make you bloat sometimes, get a little meat tummy. When you take your clothes off professionally, you want to look your best doing it."
"Again, very reasonable," he said.
"You sound surprised," I said.
"If you'd been listening, Brice was saying that you have a reputation with the other cops for being unreasonable."
I looked at Brice. "That true?"
He studied my face as he said, "They say you have a bad temper and bust their balls a lot."
Zerbrowski snorted and almost choked on his soda.
I frowned at him. "I don't back down, so if that busts their balls, then so be it."
"They're jealous that the itty-bitty woman is better at their job than they are," Zerbrowski said, when he could talk again without coughing.
"Itty-bitty?" I said.
"Argue if you can?" he said.
I started to frown, and then just smiled. "I'm short, what the fuck of it?"
Brice laughed.
I looked at him.
He held up his hands in a little push-away gesture. "Hey, I got no problem with anything."
"Fine; weren't we supposed to be discussing you, not me?"
He nodded. "How can I discourage Arnet without pissing her off?"
"I'm not sure you can," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Nathaniel Graison was my live-in sweetie but I wasn't telling everyone at work, so Arnet saw him a couple of times, thinking he was just a friend of mine. She decided she wanted to date him, and then felt like I'd made a fool of her by not saying up front that he was mine."
"He's a wereleopard, right?"
I looked at him; it wasn't a friendly look. "How do you know what kind of wereanimal he is?"
"He's on the website for Guilty Pleasures. They list the animal form of all the strippers, I mean dancers, who shapeshift."
"Were you checking up on my men?"
"I can look at the men at Guilty Pleasures and pass it off as research, getting to know the local wereanimals and vampires, and no one questions why a male cop would like looking at male strippers."
I had a moment of feeling a little odd that Marshal Brice might have looked at Nathaniel's picture, or Jason's, or Jean-Claude's, and lusted after them. Was it that he was a guy? I didn't think so. I think it was just that he worked with me and you're not supposed to lust after the sweeties of the other cops, or at least you're not supposed to let the cop in question know that you lust after his sweetie. It's just not cricket, somehow.
"Makes sense," I said.
He smiled. "Thought you were going to get weird about me looking at your guys."
"Its not the possible lusting after my guys; I know how yummy they are. It's the idea that you might be checking up on them for future hunting purposes that would piss me off."
He looked genuinely shocked. "I would never do that to a fellow officer."
"Jessica Arnet has; she damn near told me that someday Jean-Claude would go apeshit and we'd have to do something about him."
"She did not," Zerbrowski said. He looked genuinely shocked.
"She threatened your boyfriend?" Brice asked.
I nodded. I was suddenly not nearly as hungry.
"What did she say exactly?" Zerbrowski asked.
"She told me that Jean-Claude was just a pretty monster and if he wasn't around that Nathaniel would be free to have a life."
"She said exactly that?" he asked.
I nodded.
"When?" he asked.
"Three days ago."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I was trying to decide if this was something I should handle between Arnet and me, or if it was something to shove up the food chain."
"And?" Zerbrowski asked.
"And I think she went too far by threatening my boyfriend. She's gone to the club on nights that Nathaniel works. She's told him that she would rescue him from me and Jean-Claude. She's told me pretty much the same thing, but that was like over a year ago, almost two. I thought she'd let it go, moved on." I looked at Brice. "Nothing personal, Brice, but if she can obsess about you instead of my sweetie, I'd feed you to her."
"Gee, thanks, Blake," he said.
"If I'd told her that Nathaniel was my lover from the beginning, would she have fixated on him? I was embarrassed that I was living with two men, and I was trying so hard not to love Nathaniel. God, I was so in denial about how I felt about him back then."
"You really did poke at anything that made you happy, didn't you?" Brice said.
"You have no idea," I said.
Zerbrowski laughed. "I do, and no one fucked up their own love life weirder than you did."
I glared at him, but the look of sympathy and real concern on his face made it impossible to hold. I finally just sighed, and poked at my cooling French fries.
"You're not going to argue?" he asked.
I shook my head. "It's the truth, why argue?"
He stood up, leaned over the table, and tried to feel my forehead. I jerked back, batting his hand away. "What are you doing?"
"Checking for a fever," he said, "because you just gave in, and said, Why argue? You have to be sick."
I glared at him now.
He grinned. "That's my grumpy partner; I knew you were in there somewhere."
I fought it, but finally grinned back. "Damn you, let me be in a bad mood for a minute or two."
"I'm your partner. I'm supposed to keep your mood up so you can continue being the biggest, baddest bull in the damn shop. You like knocking stuff off the shelves and letting the pieces fall where they may. You like being the bad-ass, and that rubs people the wrong way. I help rub them the right way."
"You make me sound like a bully."
"No, never that," he said.
"Are you really as good as your reputation?" Brice asked.
I gave him the full attention of my big, brown eyes. "Yes," I said.
"I'd accuse you of bragging, but if half of what I've heard is true..."
"I don't know what you've heard," I said.
"That you have the highest kill count of any Marshal."
"True," I said.
"That you've got some kind of super lycanthropy that makes you faster, stronger, harder to hurt, impossible to kill, but you don't shapeshift."
"Everything but the impossible to kill; I wouldn't bet my life on that rumor," I said.
"That you're a living vampire."
I shrugged. "Not sure what to say to that one. I don't drink the blood of the living, if that's what you mean."
"How about the blood of the dead?" he asked.
Zerbrowski and I both stared at him. "Are you serious?" I asked.
He nodded. "Rumor says that you feed off vampires the way they feed off us."
I shook my head. "Not true."
"That you're some kind of succubus and feed off sex with vampires."
"I hadn't heard that one," I said, and it was true I hadn't. I'd heard that I was accused of feeding off sex, but not that my "victims" were exclusively vampires. I was really trying to never admit out loud that I actually did feed on sex, thanks to sharing Jean-Claude's ardeur, which translated roughly to fire, passion, and was the blood right, extra-special gift of the bloodline of vampires descended from Belle Morte, Beautiful Death.
"I take it that's not true either."
I was giving him blank cop face, because I'd known that one was coming and it was almost true, except that I could feed off sex in general; it didn't have to be with vampires. "Let's cut to the chase," I said. "Sum up the rumors, I'm bored with the list."
"That your ability to raise zombies from the grave gives you an edge with all the undead, including vampires. That being a shapeshifter that doesn't shift gives you the best of being human and animal. That the reason you're better than the rest of us is that you're better than any human could ever be, and stay human."
"I'm sensing a theme," I said to Zerbrowski.
"Don't say it," he said.
"I'm better at killing the monsters, because I'm one of them, is that it?"
"I never said that."
"But that's what some of the others are saying, right?" I asked.
He sort of shrugged, and looked uncomfortable.
"Remember that some of the people saying that are jealous of my success rate, and others are just plain jealous like Arnet."
"Some of them are scared, Blake," he said.
"Scared of me," I said, and I pushed my food away. I was so done.
"Not of you, of becoming you. They're afraid that the only way to get as good as you is to become like you."
"You mean become one of the monsters," I said.
"You were on the case where Marshal Laila Karlton caught lycanthropy."
"Yes." It had been Laila's first vampire hunt, and it could have been her last. She survived the werewolf attack, but she became one of them.
"She fought for her badge, and she's still a Marshal. She's the first one who was ever allowed to stay after they shifted."
"I was the first they let stay who tested positive," I said.
"But you don't change form," he said.
"There is that."
"Some people say you encouraged her to fight for her job."
"It could have happened to any of us, Brice. The only reason I'm not in the same boat is that I don't change forms."
"That's why she still has a badge, because it could be any of us next. They're afraid if she sues that she'll win. Right now she's riding a desk, but if they put her in the field again, then that opens the way for people who are already wereanimals to try to join up."
I nodded. "I think it's a great idea. I know some ex-cops and military people who are only ex- because they got attacked on the job and that's an instant medical discharge."
He looked at me, and then at Zerbrowski. "Would you partner with someone who shifted completely?"
"If it were Anita, sure."
Brice looked at his plate; there wasn't much left of his food. He ate like a lot of male cops, like he was inhaling. "Just how good are you, Blake?"
I glanced at Zerbrowski. He used his hands to make a little tell-him gesture, like an usher uses to guide people to their seats, but what was I guiding Brice to: the truth, a lie, what?
"I'm a good cop, if you don't make me follow orders too closely."
Zerbrowski laughed into his water.
I didn't bother frowning at him. "But when it comes to killing, it's one of my best things, and my best is very, very good."
"Anyone else I might accuse of bragging, but it's not bragging if it's true," Brice said.
"She's not bragging," Zerbrowski said.
I glanced at him. We exchanged one of those long looks that men are so fond of, and most women are puzzled by - the one that said everything we needed to say about working together, being friends, holding each other's lives in our hands. I had literally held his internal organs inside his body after a shapeshifted and very non-Wiccan witch had gutted him. When you've literally held someone's life in your hands, it's more than the word friend can hold, but a look, one look can hold it all.
"Then I want to learn how to hunt monsters from you, not Kirkland."
"You can tag along some of the time," I said.
"Sure," Zerbrowski said, "the more the merrier."
"Now, how do I keep Arnet from obsessing about dating me?"
I shook my head. "I have no idea."
Zerbrowski said, "I only ever understood one woman, and she was kind enough to marry me so I didn't have to decipher anyone else."
Brice nodded. "Fair enough." Then he smiled that lopsided charming smile, and it blossomed into a grin. His teeth were white and even like a commercial for dental care. He was strangely perfect in a down-home sort of way. "I'll date Arnet, and see if that takes the heat off you and your men."
"Won't that make her obsess about you, which you were trying to avoid?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I'll date her and a few others. I can date around for a few months and sometimes by then I've been moved to another state, but maybe Arnet will get jealous enough that I'll have to swear off dating anyone at work, and then it will be her fault, not mine."
"Not a bad idea," I said.
"And maybe it will stop her obsessing about your Nathaniel, and the rest of your men."
"You volunteering to take one for the team?" I asked.
He gave me that smile of his.
"You know the smile doesn't work on me, right?"
The smile faltered around the edges, which let me know he knew just how charming it was to have it aimed at someone. "Sorry, I'll remember not to waste smiles on you."
That made me smile and Zerbrowski shake his head. "You just can't help but try to flirt with women, can you?" Zerbrowski asked.
"I like flirting. It's fun, and if I flirt with women, people think that's all I'm interested in."
"It's a way of hiding," I said.
"Yes," he said, and there was no smile now.
"It's exhausting hiding who you are, and who you really love," I said.
He looked down at his hands on the tabletop. "Yeah." There was absolutely no smile as he said that one short word.
I don't know what made me do it, but I reached across the table and put my hand over his; my hand looked small trying to cover his, but it made him look up at me with those sad brown eyes. "I know about having to hide who you love."
That made him smile, a gentle, more "real" smile. He turned his hand in mine, and we were holding hands when Detective Jessica Arnet and most of the rest of the women from work came through the door and saw us.
Never had I ever wished not to have a perfect line of sight between me and a door more than in that moment. Brice looked at my face and whispered, "It's Arnet, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said.
"If I'm dating you, that keeps me safe."
I said, keeping my mouth very still, "If you use me as a beard, I will hurt you."
He squeezed my hand and let go so he could turn his shoulders and smile at the women as they came toward our table. Their faces ranged from cold to outright angry. The angry wasn't from the policewomen, but from some of the office staff. Cops hid their emotions better by the time they got to be detectives. Arnet's face was hard to read, but it wasn't a good look. Her triangular face that looked delicate and pretty most of the time looked harsh, as if her emotions had honed her down to the bone structure underneath. Her eyes were the darkest color I'd ever seen them. Dark eyes get darker when they're angry; pale eyes get paler.
The other women came at her back like a Greek chorus of disapproval. "Are you dating Marshal Brice now, too?"
"No," I said.
Brice stood up, and I knew he was wasting that great smile on them. The other women stared up at him as if the sun had broken through the clouds, and it was a handsome, yummy, bright sun. Arnet kept looking at me.
Brice said, "I was just asking Marshal Blake here, and Detective Zerbrowski, which of you had boyfriends and such. I had a bit of trouble at one of my posts with a beautiful woman who failed to mention she had a fiance. I don't poach other men's girlfriends, or fiances."
"Why ask Anita?"
"Well, I wanted a woman's opinion, because they pay more attention to that sort of thing than men do, and it needed to be a woman that I wasn't interested in, so there'd be no conflict of interest."
Arnet looked at him then. "Did she warn you off some of us?"
"She said you were all available, and charming."
Arnet looked at me. "You didn't say I was charming, did you?"
"No, but it's not me that's standing in front of a handsome, eligible bachelor and getting all pissy at another woman in front of him. That's all on you, Arnet."
That seemed to get through to her, because she blinked and looked at Brice as he moved around her and started talking directly to some of the other women. They let him flatter them, and flattered right back. Arnet watched them for a moment as if she couldn't figure out how to join in, and then Brice turned and looked at her. He smiled and said, "Was wondering if you would do me the honor of being my first date here in St. Louis, Detective Arnet?"
"I'd be happy to," she said, but her voice didn't sound happy. I could no longer see her face, but I was betting she didn't look as gaga for him as the others.
"Let's get these bad guys and we'll talk about details."
She gave him her cell phone number. He took her hand and actually kissed it, and made it all seem charming. The only man who'd ever been able to do that without looking like a fool to me had been Jean-Claude, but he was over six hundred years old, and had come from a time when kissing the hand of a lady was a lot more popular. Most modern men couldn't pull it off.
"You ladies enjoy your food, and we'll see you back at the squad room."
Zerbrowski and I took that as our cue and got up to follow Brice. Arnet caught my arm as I went past her. I fought the urge to push her hand off me. She whispered, low and harsh, "Stay away from this one, Blake."
"Happy to," I said, and kept on walking. She had to either let go, or hold on tighter. She let go. Zerbrowski and Brice were looking back at us, waiting for me to join them. I caught up with Zerbrowski and we followed Brice through the tables to the parking lot.
"What did she say to you?" Zerbrowski asked.
"I've been warned off Brice." I moved toward the Jeep and the men followed me.
"Have I made your problem with Arnet worse?" Brice asked.
"I don't know," I said, as I beeped the keys. I took a deep breath of the fresh late-spring air, and let it out slow.
Brice spoke over the roof of the car. "I'm sorry, Blake, I didn't mean to make it worse."
I climbed behind the wheel. Zerbrowski was already in the passenger seat, buckled up and ready to go. Brice got in the back. "You have to go on a date with her; that's punishment enough," I said, as I started the car.
"How did I start the evening trying to avoid Arnet, and end up having a date with her?"
"Welcome to my life," I said, "though it's usually men for me."
"What do you mean?" Brice asked.
I backed up slowly, waiting for someone behind us to vacate their parking space and not hit us. "Most of the men I've dated have been ones I tried not to date. The ones I love the most, I fell in love with kicking and screaming."
"Really?" Brice said.
"Really," Zerbrowski and I said together. We looked at each other, and then he grinned. I smiled back. "Zerbrowski said it earlier: I used to hate being in love."
"Why?" Brice asked.
I finished easing us out past the idiot driver behind us. They couldn't seem to decide if they were parking or leaving. "Not sure, something about giving up too much control, fear of being hurt, pick something."
"I like being in love," Brice said.
"I like being in love with Katie," Zerbrowski said.
I smiled and eased out into the late-night traffic, which was pretty sporadic in St. Louis. "I like being in love with who I'm in love with now," I said.
"Too many men to list?" Brice asked.
"No, just can't honestly list all the men that are living with me on the I love you list, so I'd rather not say the names, in case I hurt someone's feelings."
"We won't tell," Zerbrowski said.
"Neither will I," I said.
"How did you end up living with men you aren't in love with?" Brice asked.
"I don't know you well enough to answer that question, Brice."
"Sorry; have you answered it for Zerbrowski?"
"He hasn't asked."
Zerbrowski held his fist out sideways to me. I touched it gently as I drove. In all the years I'd known Zerbrowski, he'd never asked as many questions as Brice had asked in one evening. I wasn't sure Brice was going to stay on my top-ten list of people I wanted to hang out with, not if he was always this nosy. My life worked, it made me happy, but I didn't owe anyone a diagram of how it worked. Especially not a brand-new U.S. Marshal who had just ridden into town days ago. I realized that it wasn't just Arnet I didn't know much about backgroundwise, but I could fix that. Was Brice just being friendly, or was he fishing? I realized that just by his saying he was gay, I'd let down a lot of my defenses. Zerbrowski and I both had. What if he'd lied? Was I being overly suspicious? Maybe, or maybe until I saw Brice in bed with a man, I'd never really know if he was lying to me, or to Arnet. The only thing I knew for certain was he was lying to somebody.