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ROUND 3 I got to meet the rest of the Resistance a few hours later. Larry drove me to a rundown apartment building in the Tenderloin, rushed me out of the car and through the door of the basement. "Hello?" Larry peered blindly into the dark basement. "I am here," a male voice said. It had a French accent, like the Master of the City supposedly had. My gun was pointed at the source of the voice before it finished the sentence. "It’s okay," Larry said, placing a steadying hand on my arm. My left arm. Smart man, that Larry. Playing sidekick to the Executioner had obviously taught him better than to go messing with the gun arms of us murderous bitches. "He’s on our side," Larry said, like that explained everything. "Then turn on the light," I snapped. Larry hesitated, and I felt the owner of the voice draw back. "Turn on the light, Lawrence. Let me see who smells so strongly of the Necromancer’s blood. Let me see the human who got close enough to wound her. "And…" the voice grew still for a moment."…let her see me." I heard a click behind me, and a pallid flickering florescent bulb struggled to illuminate the large, empty room. A vampire stood in motionless profile, ten feet away from me. His face was badly scarred. It looked like it was formed of pale, melted wax rather than skin and flesh. I recognized him from Death’s descriptions. "Asher," I said, leveling my gun at him. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I’d walked in on a meeting of the Anita Blake Fan Club. "Explain." The vampire looked me over. He couldn’t see much of me beneath the blood and grime, but he saw enough to know me for a killer. He smiled like people do when they see a small child, or a dog that can do a particularly cute trick. I tightened my finger on the trigger and he let the smile fall away. "Explanation is simple," he said, turning his face with a flourish of his long blond hair. Death had said that only one side of this vamp’s face was scarred, but now, I saw that both sides were horribly marred. Difficult as it was to believe, the side he’d kept toward me when I entered the basement was the better of the two. "She did that?" I asked. "The Ulfric," Asher replied. "But individual identity no longer matters to them. They are all one, they all must die." Dramatic, but true--though, not for the reasons they were thinking. I didn’t care that the Triumvirate was Evil, with a capital "E". I didn’t care about the scarred vamp or the former sidekick’s beef with his old mentor. All I cared about was the fact that the Executioner had lived when she should have died. I’m a paid killer. I don’t deal in right or wrong. But this time, I’d make an exception. The Executioner had cheated Death, and that was Wrong. And for the first time in my life, I was willing to do whatever it took to make things Right. ***** They say that "politics makes for strange bedfellows," but I’ve found that nothing brings people together like revenge. Under any other circumstances, St. Louis’ unofficial "Civic Improvement Committee" might have been at each other’s throats, but a shared desire to free the city bound the odd collection of men and monsters together like a razor-wire rope. The lycanthropes arrived first. There was Rafael, who had been the rat king, before the Ulfric had destroyed his pack, and Dr. Lilian, one of the few survivors of that pack. On their heels, two timid wereleopards skulked through the door. Cherry and Zane were hiding from the Pard which the Executioner had ruled with an iron fist for more years than either of them cared to remember. The leopards’ arrival was followed by that of a sullen, solitary werewolf named Jamil, who was all that remained of the lukoi who had dared oppose the Ulfric’s increasingly tyrannical tendencies. Last in line for the preternatural meet and greet was a crazy blond vamp named Gretchen, who tried to lick the dried blood off my arm when she learned it was the Executioner’s. I put a bullet in her knee, and we got along a lot better after that. There were humans, too. A Vaudun priest named John Burke, stepped through the door without bothering to knock. A former policeman named Zokowsky arrived last, solicitously holding the door open for a thin, sad-eyed woman who said her name was Ronnie Fane. They had all been friends of the Master, the Ulfric and the Executioner before the Triumvirate had made their unholy alliance. They all had good reasons to hate the secret rulers of the city. The Triumvirate had turned St. Louis from a trendy tourist town into what one of the Committee bitterly called, "the City of the Damned". I laughed with them, not at the grim joke, but at myself. Who would have guessed, when I rode into St. Louis on my pale horse, with a gun at my side and a promise to keep, that I’d end up playing Lone Ranger; righting Wrongs and cleaning up the town? I love life: it’s full of surprises. Larry introduced me as "Terri Forrester". Some of the Committee didn’t recognize the name, and took it at face value. Others remembered the bounty hunter who had made sporadic cameos in Anita Blake’s early adventures, and regarded me with a sort of wary acceptance. With the possible exception of Burke--who looked at me like I’d a list of my crimes tattooed on my forehead--only Asher recognized the bloody, battered young woman Larry had "rescued" as a ruthless killer who could have executed every being in the room without batting an eye. He was the only one who smiled when Larry introduced us. The look he directed at me was knowing, faintly amused; a private joke between peers. His amusement came at the expense of the others in the room, who, fooled by my gender and my slim physique, cooed over me like I needed a shoulder to cry on. Not one to waste an opportunity, I smiled bravely through trembling lips and told them that I was "OK". I told them that what the Necromancer and her lovers had done to this city and its people was "Wrong". If they would let me, I pledged in the low, steady tones that most people mistake for sincerity, I would do anything I could to help bring Anita Blake, Richard Zeeman and Jean-Claude to Justice. It was probably the dimples that did them in. I haven’t got the gift Death had for emulating real emotion, but, I’ve found that if you flash a cute pair of dimples at a person, they almost never notice the ice in your eyes--or the knife in your hand. Bravery, modesty and dimples; the Committee ate it up. Despite the facts that I’d been quick and cunning enough to behead their feared Necromancer on her own turf and that I’d escaped the Circus of the Damned alive, covered in the blood of the most feared woman in the city, the Committee treated me like a brave little soldier who’d had a lucky break. Since both Asher and Burke kept their traps shut about my lethal nature, I wasn’t about to clue the noble Freedom Fighters in to the notion that they’d mistaken a tiger for a tabby cat. They talked about fighting the Good Fight, about how they were bound to win. They welcomed me into their circle and talked about making plans and fighting battles, assuming, all along, that I would bow before their older--and therefore, wiser--council. Poor saps. They thought they’d drafted another foot-soldier for their holy war, when, really, they’d elected a dictator.
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