“Do you hear music?” I asked.

“No,” Jake and Kaazim said together. They exchanged a look at each other and then Kaazim said, “But the compulsion is quieter, not gone, but as if its power has been dimmed.”

“I hear music,” Domino said.

“Can you make out the words?” I asked.

“No.”

“Me, either.”

“I don’t hear it, but Anita feels calmer,” Nicky said.

“What the hell is it? The music, I mean.”

“Whatever it is seems to be on our side, or at least not on hers,” Jake said.

Damian said, “Nathaniel says it’s Flannery’s friends.”

“You mean the fa . . . little gentle folk?” I finally managed to get out something that wasn’t going to insult every Fey within earshot.

“Flannery has them dimming her magic with their own, but it’s a temporary fix,” Damian said, and he was listening as he talked, as if he were repeating things.

“How temporary?” Domino asked.

“How much time do we have?” I asked.

“They aren’t certain since they’ve never done anything like this,” Damian said, “but they think maybe until dark.”

Jake was looking off in the distance, but whatever had caught his attention was hidden from the rest of us by the open ambulance door. “Nolan and Forrester are coming this way.”

Kaazim looked that way, too. “They are moving with purpose.”

“Ed . . . Ted always moves with purpose, and probably so does Nolan,” I said.

Domino moved so he could see around the door. “You know how Ted is Clark Kent?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s serious Superman face coming this way.”

“If Superman needs me to play Batman for him, then I’m going old-school Bat.”

“What does that mean?” Domino asked.

Jake answered, “Batman originally used a gun and shot people rather than using gadgets and kung fu. I would have thought you would be too young to know that, Anita.”

“My dad had a comic book collection, and he liked Batman,” I said.

“Ah, of course.”

I looked down at my arm. “Good thing I practice shooting with my left arm.”

“This is why we practice with our off hands,” Kaazim said.

“Your groupings on the range are as good left-handed as they are right-handed,” Nicky said.

“Yeah, but my speed for drawing and finding my target in a dynamic training exercise is a little slower,” I said.

“It’s our job to shoot the bad guys and protect you,” Domino said.

“Not when I’m working with the police,” I said.

“You have your own version of Clark Kent, Anita. It complicates things,” Jake said.

I didn’t even try to argue, because he was right. “If I had shot the vampire inside the building as soon as I saw him, there’d be two less wounded, and one less dead police officer.”

“But Superman wouldn’t have done that anyway,” Domino said.

“That is so not my superhero alter ego.”

“You and Ted are both more Batman than Superman,” Nicky said.

“Agreed.” And then Edward and Nolan were with us, and since it was just my people we didn’t have to pretend we were mild-mannered anything; we could just be what we were, which was the good guys who worked like bad guys, because to catch the villains sometimes squeaky-clean doesn’t do it. Sometimes to clean up the dirt, you have to get dirty yourself. If I’d shot when I first wanted to, I wouldn’t be hurt. If I’d shot then, I know that Edward and my people would have joined me. There might have been only two casualties today, Logan and the vampire. I’d have been good with that. I was pretty sure the families of the injured and fallen officers would have been good with that, too.

69

FOUR HOURS LATER my arm was wrapped in bandages, and they’d even insisted on putting it in a sling. Since it was my right arm, I’d had to have Edward help me adjust where all my weapons were so I could get to them with my left arm. This was why I practiced off-hand weapons practice, from guns to blades and hand-to-hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d hurt my right arm this badly, maybe never. If it had been a wound caused by almost anything else, I’d have already been healed, or at least starting to heal without a trip to the emergency room, but a wound caused by something preternatural or magical healed slower. Now that the piece of vampire was out of my flesh I would start to heal faster than human-normal, but because of what made the injury I probably wouldn’t heal like I normally did. In fact, what I really needed was to find someplace private and use some of my metaphysical healing abilities, but since almost all of them either were sex based or looked like they were sex based, it didn’t seem like the thing to do when I was surrounded by the Irish police and medical personnel. Saying, “Excuse me while I take my lover off for a quickie. No really, it’ll help me heal”? Nope, just nope.

Besides, the local painkillers they’d given me had stopped working before the doctor finished sewing up the wound. Only pride had kept me from throwing up, and if it hadn’t been Edward holding my hand my pride might have lost. One of the reasons he had been holding my hand was his insistence that I’d be tougher with him than with one of my lovers. He’d been right, and it had freed Nicky up to get a ride back to Nolan’s headquarters, where he could change into his lion form and heal the damage to his hearing that he’d taken for me. I was still determined to keep Domino off the menu for me, so that had left me with Damian for sexual healing, but I was still surrounded by police and doctors. Besides, my stomach hadn’t settled completely, so sex didn’t seem like the best idea. Nausea was one of the few things that ruined even my mood for sexy naked time. Nathaniel, Dev, and the rest of our party hadn’t gotten back to us until all the cursing at Edward and the hazmat-suited doctor and nurses was over. Yes, the doctor and nurses who actually helped treat me had taken one look at my medical alert card and treated me like a contagious plague victim. It had been like being sewn up by an astronaut, or abducted by bulky aliens.