Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (61 page)

“I like boy stuff better, too, so I can’t really fault you, but I also don’t know how to be with a man who finds my genitalia unappealing.”

“Fair,” he said.

“So who talked?” I asked.

“Byron.”

I frowned. Byron had been fifteen when he died, so he was caught forever in that first blush of high school when the guys fill out and muscles seem to happen. He was forever unfinished, never to find out what he’d look like at twenty. “Byron? We only had sex once. It was an emergency feed for the
ardeur
.”

“Yes, but he actually came inside you, and he’s only done that with three women, ever, counting you.”

“Hmm . . . I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a huge compliment, Anita.”

I frowned harder; I had a headache starting right between my eyes. “Okay, I guess I can see that as a compliment.”

“The
ardeur
is the other thing that might make us work together. You unleash it on me and I think even I will find you irresistible.”

“Unappealing lady parts and all?” I asked, giving him a look and raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t give me that look; I think we need to be absolutely honest with each other, or this will not work.”

“I don’t think it’ll work now.”

“I understand that, but if we aren’t honest it will surely fail.”

I looked down at him, so serious in the bed, with his eyeliner decoratively smeared, and his hair looking almost artful in its messiness. He was one of those people who wake up looking good; I was so not one of those people.

“One other thing that you need to know before you give your answer,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“You know, they used to call intersexed people like me a hermaphrodite.”

I nodded.

“I have functioning boy parts and girl parts.”

“Yes.”

“Knowing is one thing, actually seeing and touching is another. I’ve had people be intrigued and then get grossed out, or scared, so you should see everything before you decide.”

I looked down at his body where it was covered with the sheet. I hadn’t felt nervous about it until he announced the possibilities; now suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the whole show. “You know, I wasn’t weirded out by the idea of seeing you nude until you said that.”

He studied my face, his own expression cynical. “Really, I find that hard to believe; most people are either intrigued or horrified by my . . . uniqueness.”

“I honestly hadn’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about what your plumbing might look like, sorry.”

“I thought that was part of your issue with me.”

I shook my head. “My issue with you was that when I met you, you managed to let my words and your club rules hurt people I loved and cared about.”

“I am sorry for that, by the way. I honestly didn’t understand what they were doing to them, especially Nathaniel. I would never have let them leave the swords in long enough for his body to heal around them.”

I could still remember that moment when I’d finally gotten a good look at what Chimera’s men had done to Nathaniel. The anger came back to me, so that my hands made fists before I could stop them. “It was your club, your rules, Narcissus, and you had a werehyena in the room, reporting to you.”

“Your eyes are almost black with anger, just remembering that moment.”

I gave him the full weight of that darkened gaze. My hyena rose in the dark center of me and looked up with golden brown eyes; again she wasn’t behaving like most of my beasts around another of her kind. She seemed reluctant to approach him, but why?

“I thought my man was reporting accurately to me that night, Anita, but I swear to you, he was not.”

“I believe you taunted me with comments about it being my fault for ordering you to order them to stop what they were doing and wait for me.”

“I did not know what they had done. I would swear on my honor, but my reputation says I have none.”

“And that would be another reason you and I aren’t buddies.”

“And you have a reputation for being a ruthless murdering bitch, which I didn’t see as a problem, but you were a woman and metaphysically powerful. I did not want you near my hyenas.”

“You thought I’d take them over,” I said.

“Yes.”

“If I feed the
ardeur
on you, I’ll feed off every werehyena that is tied to you metaphysically. Are you sure you really want to do that?”

“No, but I’ve seen you with Rafael’s wererats. They feel more and more loyalty to you, but they still feel more to him. You have not stolen them away from him. You work with him, and he grows in power because of it.”

“Rat isn’t one of my inner beasts; hyena is.”

“You think that will make a difference?” he asked.

“I’m saying it might. I just don’t know for sure, and I don’t want you to pop this cork and then find out the champagne costs you more than you’d planned on paying.”

He smiled up at me. “I like the metaphor, but I don’t really like champagne, or dry wine. I like sweet things, not bitter.”

“I don’t like dry wine or champagne either. Hell, I don’t really like most wine. I drink it because Jean-Claude can taste it through me, and he misses good wine.”

“So you blamed me for Chimera making Nathaniel suffer.”

I nodded.

“And I avoided you, because I feared you’d do what the Harlequin bitch is trying to do.”

“I didn’t know that Jane was giving you a problem. You should have come to us and said something.”

“Come to you and Jean-Claude and admit I wasn’t king enough to handle one master vampire that could call hyena? No, so no. Kings do not go before kings from a position of weakness, Anita, not if they want to remain king.”

“Then don’t let Asher’s stupidity make you do something you’ll regret,” I said.

“I’m not here out of a position of weakness, Anita. I’m here because the wolves and the leopards, and the lions, and the rats, and all of you motherfuckers haven’t yet got enough new soldiers to be certain of defeating me.”

I fought to keep my face blank but knew my pulse rate and breathing had probably betrayed me to him.

“Did you all think I would be oblivious to what you were doing, or why?” He sat up and snarled in my face, “I am Oba of my clan! I am not so besotted with Asher that I have ceased to watch all the rest of you bastards.” His hyena flowed over him like heat and spilled over my skin. The power of it caught my breath.

He leaned in closer. “Tell me honestly, Anita, if you felt this much power from anyone else, wouldn’t you have been in their bed by now?”

“You in my bed, maybe, but you like boys, and I’m not one.”

“The
ardeur
can take a person’s preference away and just make them want you, or Jean-Claude. You know that.”

“Yeah, but if you use it to force someone to have sex with someone they don’t want to have sex with, then it’s rape, and neither of us is into that.”

The heat of his beast was just gone, like a candle blown out. He lay back on the bed in the nest of sheets and just stared at me. He looked astonished. “You believe that; you really do.”

“Yes, I really do. Why does that surprise you this much?”

“Asher has told me what Jean-Claude and he did at Belle Morte’s court. Rape was one of her things, and Asher misses some of it.”

“Jean-Claude doesn’t,” I said.

“He tells you that.”

“Ask him, you’re powerful enough, you’ll be able to tell if he’s lying.” We looked at each other and there was just no sexual tension between us. I said, out loud, “This, this is why I never hunted you up for sex.”

He frowned. “What is this?” He made a vague hand gesture.

“Neither of us is really attracted to the other. We are so not each other’s type.”

The look on his face was beyond cynicism, beyond jaded. He still looked young and just-woke-up handsome, but he also looked world weary, as if he’d seen everything, done everything, and I was being naïve.

“Anita, oh, Anita, you make me feel old.”

“I’m either older than you or about the same age.”

“In years, maybe, but in experience . . .” He just shook his head.

“I’ve probably seen as much bad stuff as you have. I’m a cop, remember.”

“But somehow emotionally you aren’t like most of them. There is a freshness to how you view love and sex that is quite . . .” He sighed, shook his head, and finally said, “Sobering, as if there’s no way to play with you. You taste of commitment and promises you intend to keep.”

I shrugged. “I try to keep my promises. I think everyone should.”

He smiled, but it left his eyes cynical and guarded. “I am a lying bastard if it suits my goals.”

“Don’t lie to me, or Jean-Claude, or anyone I care about.”

“And if I do?”

I just looked at him.

“That look, so absolutely serious.”

“Serious as a heart attack,” I said.

He smiled, blinking so that I couldn’t see what he was thinking. His brown eyes smiled up at me when he opened them, matching the smile. “Are you ready to play ‘you show me yours, and I’ll show you mine’?”

I don’t know what I would have said, because the door opened and Jean-Claude came through the door wearing a blue robe, almost as dark a blue as his eyes. “
Ma petite
, Narcissus, I see that you haven’t come to blows yet; that is better than I had feared.”

“Oh, I don’t enjoy hitting girls, but boys, I’m always up for hitting bad little boys,” he said, rolling over on his back and looking more lascivious than he had the whole time we’d been alone. “Do you want to be my bad little boy again, Jean-Claude?”

“Cut the shit, Narcissus,” I said. “You were actually behaving like a reasonable human being until Jean-Claude stepped into the room. Don’t go back to being all creepy-sexy.”

He aimed that sexy, predatory smile at me. “You think I’m sexy? Really?” He writhed under the covers, stretching his body like a cat, except cats weren’t self-aware. Cats weren’t trying to draw your gaze to their groin, wiggling their hips as if they should have been onstage at Guilty Pleasures.

“I’ve never said you did not move well, Narcissus,” Jean-Claude said as he came to take my hand and look down at the man in the bed.

“And yet you don’t want to play with me anymore,” Narcissus said, pretending to pout.

“I do not enjoy your idea of play, Narcissus.”

“You got here just in time for a little ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine,’” Narcissus said. “Of course, you’ve seen mine, and I’ve seen yours. It’s only Anita and I who need a show-and-tell, isn’t it,
ma petite
?”

“Never, ever, call me that again. Only Jean-Claude gets to call me that.”

“Oooh, we get pet names special just to us; I like it.”

I sighed. “There was someone in this bed I could actually talk to, and then Jean-Claude comes into the room and you go back to being a caricature, hiding behind the flirting and the irritating shit. Why?”

“Why what?” he asked, but he stopped wriggling under the covers and looked at me.

“Why do you put on a show when he comes into the room?”

He blinked and I knew now that meant he was hiding whatever was in his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean, darling.”

I let it go, because either he didn’t want to address it, or even he didn’t know why he acted weird around Jean-Claude. “Fine, just get this over with, I have to go meet the FBI soon. And don’t call me darling.”

Narcissus looked up at me, but his eyes slid to one side and looked at Jean-Claude as he said, “But if it’s a show you want, pumpkin, I can give you a show.”

“Don’t call me pumpkin.”

“Well, if you insist, snickerdoodle.”

I put my head against Jean-Claude’s shoulder. The robe was satin, which meant it was soft and cuddly, and he was in the robe, which made it even cuddlier. He wrapped his arms around me, and I sank in against his body, letting him hold me, letting go of all of it for a minute.

“I hate you both, just a little, right now.”

We broke apart enough to look at him, but stayed in each other’s arms. “Why do you hate us,
mon ami
?”

“I thought I had someone to hold me, and I woke up this morning to find that it had all been a lie. I’m going to hate any happy lovers for a while.”

“We all woke to find one of our lovers had betrayed our trust,” Jean-Claude said.

“But you have other lovers, Jean-Claude; I do not.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You are not monogamous any more than we are.”

“True, I have other lovers, and other play partners, but none of them are putting a ring on my finger. Asher was going to do that.”

We both stared at him. “He promised to marry you?” I asked.

He stared up at us with those big brown eyes, with the black tears of his smeared eyeliner framing them. The white sheets had swirled around his upper body like rumpled wings fallen to earth. If angels could have mornings after full of regret, they might look like that.

Of course, angels probably didn’t cry black tears; that would probably be the other guys, if either angels or demons cried physical tears. If the real angel I’d seen cried anything, it would have been tears of fire. I guess the demon might have cried physical tears, but I’d been too busy quoting Bible verses at him to ask.

“Oh,
mon ami
, I am so sorry.”

“Don’t pity me, Jean-Claude, help me make him sorry.”

“What would you have of us?”

“You talked me out of killing either of them. I wouldn’t miss Kane.”

“But Asher would not let his death stand, and we would miss him,” Jean-Claude said.

“Eventually,” Narcissus said.

Jean-Claude wisely let that go. “You do not wish to tie yourself to us for the sake of revenge, Narcissus.”

“I would tie myself to you, Jean-Claude, but you don’t want to play ‘tie me up, tie me down’ anymore.”

“Not with you, no.”

Narcissus looked at me. “Asher says you like rough trade, snicker-doodle, do you want to come play?”

“Don’t call me that, and I’ve heard your idea of rough trade and I don’t play that rough.”

“Asher says you do, snookums.”

I just looked at him, all irritating and disheveled in the bed. “Don’t call me that, either. I’m pretty sure you and I wouldn’t match any better in the dungeon than we do in the bedroom.”