Anita Blake 22 - Affliction
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Authors: Laurell K. Hamilton
Laurell K. Hamilton
An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novel
Copyright © 2013 Laurell K. Hamilton
The right of Laurell K. Hamilton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published in the United States of America in 2013 by the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
A BERKLY BOOK
First published as an Ebook by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2013
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 0 7553 8905 6
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Table of Contents
Guilty Pleasures 1993–2013 Affliction
Sunday Times
and
New York Times
bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton returns with another exciting, thrilling and addictive adventure for her vampire hunting heroine Anita Blake.
Had everyone bitten tonight caught this? The other bites had not looked like vampire bites. They’d been zombie, or human looking. Was this infection something that vampires and shapeshifters could catch? If it was, then it was something new. Some zombies are raised. Others must be put down. Just ask me, Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter.
Before now, I figured I could handle them. Before now, I had never heard of any of them causing human beings to perish in agony. But that’s all changed. Micah’s estranged father lies dying, rotting away inside from some strange ailment that has his doctor’s whispering about ‘zombie disease’.
I make my living from zombies – but these aren’t the kind I know so well. These creatures hunt in daylight, and are as fast and strong as vampires. If they bite you, you become just like them. And round and round it goes … Where will it stop? Even I don’t know.
Laurell K. Hamilton is the bestselling author of the acclaimed Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novels. She lives near St Louis with her husband, her daughter, two dogs and an ever-fluctuating number of fish.
She invites you to visit her website at
www.laurellkhamilton.org
.
GUILTY PLEASURES
THE LAUGHING CORPSE
CIRCUS OF THE DAMNED
THE LUNATIC CAFE
BLOODY BONES
THE KILLING DANCE
BURNT OFFERINGS
BLUE MOON
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY
NARCISSUS IN CHAINS
CERULEAN SINS
INCUBUS DREAMS
MICAH and STRANGE CANDY
DANSE MACABRE
THE HARLEQUIN
BLOOD NOIR
SKIN TRADE
FLIRT
BULLET
HIT LIST
KISS THE DEAD
AFFLICTION
BEAUTY
‘A hardcore guilty pleasure’
The Times
‘Anita Blake is one of the most fascinating fictional heroines since Scarlett O’Hara’
Publishers Weekly
‘What
The Da Vinci Code
did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel’
USA Today
‘Hamilton remains one of the most inventive and exciting writers in the paranormal field’
Charlaine Harris
G
UILTY
P
LEASURES
1993–2013 A
FFLICTION
This one’s for Anita and me. Here’s to another twenty years of facing our fears, solving mysteries, catching bad guys, and finding love.
Artists and their art, mirror and reflection, yin and yang, the push and the pull, separate but joined, in the end it becomes an act of co-creation, because to truly create art the artists themselves are re-created.
We’re taught Lord Acton’s axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don’t believe it’s always true anymore. Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.
Robert Caro
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy
My gun was digging into my back, so I shifted forward in my office chair. That was better; now it was just the comforting pressure of the inner-skirt holster, tucked away underneath my short royal blue suit jacket. I’d stopped wearing my shoulder holster except when I was on an active warrant as a U.S. Marshal. When I was working at Animators Inc. and seeing clients, the behind-the-back holster was less likely to flash and make them nervous. You’d think if someone was asking me to raise the dead for them that they’d have better nerves, but guns seemed to scare them a lot more than talking about zombies. It was different once the zombie was raised and they were looking at the walking dead; then suddenly the guns didn’t bother them nearly as much, but until that Halloweenesque moment I tried to keep the weapons out of sight. There was a knock on my office door and Mary, our daytime receptionist, opened it without my saying
Come in
, which she’d never done in the six years we’d been working together, so I wasn’t grumpy about the interruption. I just looked up from double-checking my client meetings to make sure there wouldn’t be any overlap issues and knew something was up, and knowing Mary it would be important. She was like that.
She’d finally let her hair go gray, but it was still in the same obviously artificial hairdo that it had always been. She’d let herself get a little plump as she neared sixty and had finally embraced glasses full time. The combination of it all had aged her about ten years, but she seemed happy with it, saying, ‘I’m a grandma; I’m okay with looking like one.’ The look on her face was sad and set in sympathetic lines. It was the face she used to deal with grieving families who wanted their loved ones raised from the dead. Having that face aimed at me sped my pulse and tightened my stomach.
I made myself take a deep breath and let it out slow as Mary closed the door behind her and started walking toward my desk. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t want to tell you over the phone with all the clients listening,’ she said.
‘Tell me what?’ I asked, and fought the urge not to raise my voice. She was about one more uninformative answer away from getting yelled at.
‘There’s a woman on line two; she says she’s your future mother-in-law. I told her you weren’t engaged to my knowledge, and she said that she didn’t know what to call herself since you were just living with her son.’
I was actually living with several men, but most of them didn’t have families to use words like
son
. ‘Name, Mary, what’s her name?’ My voice was rising a little.
‘Morgan, Beatrice Morgan.’
I frowned at her. ‘I’m not living with anyone named Morgan. I’ve never even dated anyone with that last name.’
‘I didn’t recognize it from your boyfriends, but she said that the father is hurt, maybe dying, and she thought he’d want to know about his dad before it was too late. The emotion is real, Anita. I’m sorry, maybe she’s crazy, but sometimes people don’t think clearly when their husband is hurt. I didn’t want to just write her off as crazy; I mean, I don’t know the last names of everyone you’re dating.’
I started to tell her to ignore the call, but looking into Mary’s face I couldn’t do it. I’d trusted her to screen callers for years. She had a good feel for distraught versus crazy. ‘She give a first name for her son?’
‘Mike.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve never dated a Mike Morgan. I don’t know why she called here, but she’s got the wrong Anita Blake.’
Mary nodded, but her expression looked unhappy. ‘I’ll tell her that you don’t know a Mike Morgan.’
‘Do that. She’s either got the wrong Anita Blake, or she’s crazy.’
‘She doesn’t sound crazy, just upset.’
‘You know that crazy doesn’t mean the emotion isn’t real, Mary. Sometimes the delusion is so real they believe it all.’
Mary nodded again and went out to tell Beatrice Morgan she had the wrong number. I went back to checking the last of my client meetings. I wanted to make sure that no matter how long it took to raise each zombie, I wouldn’t be too late for the next cemetery. Clients tended to get spooked if you left them hanging out in graveyards too long by themselves. At least most of the meetings were historical societies and lawyers checking wills, with the families of the deceased either long dead or not allowed near the zombie until after the will was settled in case just seeing the loved ones influenced the zombie to change its mind about the last will and testament. I wasn’t sure it was possible to sway a zombie that way, but I approved of the new court ruling that families couldn’t see the deceased until after all court matters were cleared up, just in case. Have one billionaire inheritance overturned because of undue influence on a zombie and everybody got all weird about it.
Mary came through the door without knocking. ‘Micah. Mike was his nickname as a kid. Morgan is her name from her second marriage. It was Callahan. Micah Callahan’s mother is on line two, and his dad is in the hospital.’
‘Shit!’ I said, picking up the phone and hitting the button to put the call through. ‘Mrs Callahan, I mean, Mrs Morgan, this is Anita Blake.’
‘Oh, thank God, I’m so sorry. I just forgot about the names. I’ve been Beatrice Morgan for eighteen years, since Micah was twelve, and he was Mike to us. He didn’t like
Micah
when he was a little boy. He thought
Mike
was more grown up.’ She was crying softly, I could hear it in her voice, but her words were clear, well enunciated. It made me wonder what she did for a living, but I didn’t ask. It could wait; it was just one of the thoughts you have when you’re trying not to get caught up in the emotions of a situation. Think, don’t feel, just think.