Skin Trade(24)
Grimes asked, “If it wasn’t violence, what was the memory?”
Cannibal and I exchanged another look. I shrugged. “It was personal, about my family.” He looked from the lieutenant to me and asked again, “How did you do that?”
“In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.” There, that was cryptic enough; one thing I did not want the police to know was that I was a succubus. The only thing that would keep Cannibal from spilling the beans was that he didn’t want me to tattle on him. We’d keep each other’s secrets, if we were smart.
A look passed over his face, as if he were trying to decide what expression to show me. “She showed me love, tenderness, like the girl version of what I can do.” Again, he’d told the truth, but not too much of it.
“You learned fast enough, Cannibal. The last memory you got from me wasn’t about violence, either.”
He nodded. “So you peeked at mine and I peeked at yours.”
“Yes.”
“Peeked at what?” Grimes asked.
“The people we love,” Cannibal answered.
Grimes frowned from one to the other of us.
“The man in your memory wasn’t a vampire,” Cannibal said. “I thought you were living with the Master of the City.”
“I am.”
Then who is he, the man? I saw his eyes; they weren’t human.”
“He’s a wereleopard,” I said.
“Don’t you have any human men in your life?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.
I thought of a lot of answers, but settled for, “Did you plan on falling in love with your wife?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, and said, “No, she was supposed to be a one-night stand.” He frowned, and the look was enough; he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “If you were a man, I don’t know what I would do right now.”
“What, you’d hit me?”
“Maybe.”
“You drag me through one of the worst kills of my recent past, and you stand there and bitch because I made you remember something wonderful. I think I’m ahead on karmic brownie points here. Don’t you ever mind-fuck me like that again.”
“Or what?” he asked.
“I can’t shoot you, but if you ever touch me and do that again, I will figure out something very unpleasant to do to you that will be just as legal as what you just did to me.”
We glared at each other. Grimes came beside us. “Okay, what went wrong, Cannibal?”
“She caught my power and turned it on me. I got it back, but I had to fight for it.”
Grimes’s eyes widened, then he looked at me. He looked at me the way he might look at a new weapon, or another shiny new truck to put in his garage from testosterone hell. “How good is she?”
“Good,” Cannibal said, “and controlled. We could have seriously hurt each other, but we were both careful. Honestly, Lieutenant, if I’d known she was this powerful I’d have been gentler. If she had been less in control of her abilities, you might be carting both of us off to the hospital for the day.”
Grimes continued to look at me, as if he’d only just seen me, but he talked to Cannibal like I wasn’t there. “You saw her range scores when she qualified for the badge.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is she as good psychically as she is with a gun?”
“Better,” Cannibal said.
Grimes looked pleased. “Better, really.”
“You know, Grimes, it’s a little unnerving to have you looking right at me but talking like I’m not here.”
“I’m sorry, really, that was inexcusable, but I’ve just never seen anyone take Cannibal on like that. He is the best practitioner of his kind we have.”
“Yeah, I bet he’s hell on wheels at an interrogation.”
“He gathers information that helps us save lives, Marshal Blake.”
“Yeah, I’ve felt how he gathers his information, Grimes, and I don’t like it.”
“I told you if you fought me, you might get hurt,” Cannibal said.
“No, you said if I fought to keep my shields up so you couldn’t get through, it might hurt me. I let you in, and frankly, I consider what you just did the equivalent of having an invited guest steal the silver.”
“Am I missing something?” Grimes asked.
“No, sir.”
“You’re missing the fact that you aren’t psychic and you’re trying to be in charage of men who are. Nothing personal, Lieutenant, but if you don’t have abilities, then you are going to miss things.”
“I’m not a doctor either, Marshal, which is why each team has one, plus a med tech that goes out on every run. Since we added practitioners to our teams, we’ve saved more lives with no injuries to anyone involved than any unit in the country. I may not understand everything that just happened between you and Cannibal, but I do know that if you’re as good as he is, then you can help us save lives.”