Edward leaned over me and said, 'Why is it bad that the zombies and vampires don't smell?'

I smiled up at him; trust Edward to go right back to business. I followed his lead and said, 'It means that something, or someone, is controlling these things, or at least keeping enough power over them to keep them from rotting.'

Nicky leaned over us, talking into the roar of water and flame. 'But the vamps and zombies in the mountains were rotting. Bits fell off them.'

'I've seen rotting zombies lose bits off, but when they changed to their human form the parts they'd lost were still there, and whole.'

'How does that work?' Yancey asked.

I told the truth. 'I don't know. I just know it works that way, or can.'

'Are you saying sometimes it doesn't work that way?' he asked.

I wiped water and something thicker off my face before I answered. 'Rotting vampires are special; a lot of vamp rules don't apply to them.'

'So is the vampire that possessed the vamps in the mountains the one raising the zombies?' Nicky asked.

I started to say yes, then stopped myself. 'I don't know.' If Yancey hadn't been with us I'd have just brainstormed out loud, but I wasn't sure where the thoughts would go, so ...

Dev called out, 'The elevator won't work.'

'Once the alarms are triggered, it goes to the lobby and waits for the firemen to use a key to override it,' Yancey said.

'You could have said something before he went and pushed the button,' I said.

Yancey shrugged.

'I knew, too,' Edward said.

'And you didn't say something, why?' I asked.

Edward just looked at me. It was an eloquent look.

I looked at Nicky. The water had plastered his hair to the right side of his face like it had been glued in place. 'And your excuse?' I asked.

'I'm a sociopath; I don't have to be nice,' Nicky said.

I gave him a look.

'You're mad at him. I can feel it, which means I really don't have to be nice to him.'

'I thought you were friends.'

'What part of sociopath didn't you understand?' he asked.

The water stopped pouring down and the sudden absence of it seemed loud, as if my body had gotten used to the pounding cold of it. I actually heard myself gasp; that meant my hearing wasn't permanently damaged, which was nice to know.

Dev leaned against the wall and slowly slid down it until he was sitting with his knees drawn up, and tears shone in the overhead lights. I looked at the men standing around me and realized that though they'd all help me kill monsters and burn the bodies later, they were so not helping me do the emotional stuff.

'Well, fuck,' I said, softly, and went to give what comfort I could. I spent a lot of that short distance trying to make my face more neutral, instead of irritated. I also upped my psychic shields, because Dev could feel my emotions sometimes, not all the time, but this was one moment I didn't want him to feel with me, just like I didn't want to feel his emotions with him.

I stood over him, debating what to do with him. He spoke without looking at me. 'You knew I was going to shoot at them. How did you know?'

It took me a minute to realize he meant SWAT. 'I've been in these kinds of battles before. It was Edward who saved me.'

'I'm good with a gun, and hand-to-hand, but I don't think I can do this, Anita. This isn't being a bodyguard, this is war.'

'Yeah, sometimes that's what I do.'

He looked up at me, fresh tears shining in his eyes. 'I didn't understand.'

I knelt beside him and debated on whether he wanted a hug, or if it would undo him completely, but he decided for me. He reached for me and I wrapped my arms around him. He buried his face against me and wept huge, racking sobs that shook every inch of that six-foot, three-inch body. He was strong and fast and brave, but I would never take him out again as my bodyguard. This had been killing zombies; what would he have been feeling if it had been humans, or shapeshifters, or vampires? Our Devil wasn't hard enough for my job.

Movement made me look up from murmuring sweet, comforting nothings into Dev's silky blond hair. Nicky was standing, talking to Edward and Yancey. He met my eyes and that one look was enough. He wasn't shaken. He'd been through battles like this before on his own job back when he was a mercenary, before the ardeur helped me tame him. We had the long look, and then he went back to talking to the other men, and I went back to holding Dev. Nicky and I both knew that we would never bring Dev out on a job again. He wasn't a soldier; there was no shame to that; we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but I needed someone ... harsher. Nicky and Edward turned and looked at me, as if they'd felt me thinking. Nicky could have felt it because he was my Bride, and Edward, well, best friends know what you're thinking sometimes. I looked at the two of them, and I knew that Edward would be fine with Nicky coming out to play with us again. It was a pure Edward look in his face; Ted was gone like a dream, and what looked out at me was the same man who had threatened to torture and kill me when we first met, and he'd have done it if the job called for it. Now I was his friend, he cared for me, would miss me, depended on me, but that killing coldness was still in there. Nicky's face held the same look: distant, cold, able to do what needed doing to survive and finish the job, whatever that job was, whatever it called for, no matter how terrible. Nicky was probably capable of things that even I wouldn't do, maybe even things that Edward wouldn't do, but sometimes a little bit of a sociopath was about right for my world. I'd told Nicky I loved him and realized for the first time just how much. Seeing him standing there, all stone-cold-killer calm, didn't make me love him less, it made me love him more. I hadn't been in love with Dev, but as I held him in his tears, I knew I never would be.

CHAPTER 48

The elevator opened and spilled firemen in full gear out into the hallway, while I was still comforting him. I was pretty sure they'd be pissed about the fire that water didn't put out, so I concentrated the hell out of holding Dev and being all girly and comforting, and after we assured them that neither of us was physically hurt, they left us alone.

I smoothed his wet hair, and he buried his face against my chest, which was less sexy than it sounded because of the body armor, but it was the desperate strength of his hands, his arms, as he held me so tight that eased my anger and even my disappointment with him. If I hadn't used him as a beard to keep the firefighters from bitching at me about the fire, I'd have hugged him and been up and on to something else, but I couldn't hold him in that moment and not be moved. I would still never take him to work with me again, or let him bodyguard me outside normal St Louis events, but something hard and unpleasant that had been trying to take root against him eased.

Maybe what I saw as a weakness wasn't, and maybe the rest of us, in our strength, had lost something that this man would never lose. If I had ever been the kind of person who would have fallen apart in front of the other men like this, it was long gone. Pride would have kept me more together than this, or maybe stubbornness; whatever it was, or wasn't, I held our Devil, our Mephistopheles, and murmured, 'It's okay, it's okay. I've got you.'

He raised up his face and looked at me with his blue-on-blue tiger eyes so sad. 'I'm supposed to help you, supposed to protect you. I'm sorry.'

'You stood at our side and fought all the way through. You didn't run, didn't flinch, you did the job. A lot of people couldn't have done that, Dev.'

'But I'm a mess now.'

'Once the fighting is over, the danger past, it's okay. You stayed in there until it was over.'

'But you think less of me for falling apart, I know you do.'

I smiled at him, and with me on my knees and him sitting flat, I was barely taller than him. 'I won't take you vampire hunting again, but you're brave enough to admit you're in love with another man, and I know a lot of people who wouldn't do that. They'd hide from themselves. I still haven't gone out in public with Jade on my arm even though she's been in my bed for over a year. There are all different kinds of bravery, Mephistopheles; this just isn't your kind.'

The moment I said it, I promised myself I'd talk to Jade when I got home and see about going out with her and maybe Nathaniel for a dinner out. Why not just the two of us? Because Jade puzzled me; she was more than a thousand years old, originally from ancient China, and there were cultural differences that went beyond her being the first girlfriend/lover I'd ever had. I needed a wingman to date Jade in so many ways.

The firefighters were yelling at Edward about the phosphorus. I caught one loud male voice saying, 'What the hell is this stuff?'

Firefighters do not like saying that about burning things; they're used to knowing what and why things burn. I caught the comforting tone of Edward's Ted voice, though not what he was saying. We were too far away for that, and my hearing wasn't a hundred percent yet.

'I think if I could shower and get the blowback off me, I'd feel less freaked,' Dev said.