Bete Noire (20 page)

“No?” the vampire asked as he started to pace a slow line behind the wall of foot-tall fox. “You’re not as good at blocking your thoughts as you think you are.” Lucien’s citrine gaze shot to Ash, making her stiffen. “By the way, good to see the real you this time, Asta—a feminine you. Ah, I can’t even recall the last time I saw you in a dress. But, yes
yes, this face, your au natural, it suits you well, even if you do such a good job of keeping yourself masculine self pretty. And I do prefer my men to be on the pretty side.” His gaze flicked to Tristan. “Who doesn’t?”

“I’ve about had enough of your mouth, kid.
”

“Fine! Be shy.” He resumed his pacing. “What are my crimes then?
” He stopped and put on a deadly serious face. “Give it to me straight.”

“You slaughtered Yukihime’s children,” Ash answered first. “Such an insult will not be tolerated, Lucien.”

“Ha!” the young vampire laughed in the worst way. “Is that all? Worthless sacks of dead blood. Good for nothing but fucking and they weren’t even good at that. They didn’t even know how to
play
. Not properly anyway. But you, Asta, you know the game well. Oh god, can you play.”

Ash’s hands were shaking ever so slightly, her eyes full of barely contained wrath. She was going to put a serious hurting on that vampire the moment she got ahold of him and Tristan rallied at the thought. Together, they could stop him. This kid was nothing compared to Malik. 

Lucien sighed, coming to a stop again. “Their deaths meant nothing to that old fart and you know it.”

“You lie,” Ash hissed, taking an
other step forward, looking more confident and no longer shaking, having corralled her emotions. “You did not slay them for poor sex. You would rape a corpse.”

Tristan’s eyes widened as he shot her a quick look. H
e knew she didn’t use the word corpse for vampire, but for a real dead person—vampire or otherwise. When he looked back to Lucien he felt sick. The look on the kid’s face… Jesus, she was right; he’d fuck a dead body.

“You killed them because you are angry,” Ash continued. “You are angry that your beloved Mistress was slain by Mast—Malik and Yukihime. You have been biding your time all of these long years and now that your powers are developing you think to exact your bloody revenge. You are a fool
, a naïve child.”

Lucien cocked his head to one side as if in consideration, but his smile was forced now, eyes crinkled at the corners with anger. “Perhaps. But I’m not here to talk, Asta,” he said putting a lot of emphasis on “talk” and gave her a look, wiggling his eyebrows. “You always talk too fucking much. Women,” he scoffed looking to Tristan, “always talking. Am I right?”

Tristan knew that look, that nefarious grin. The guy was thinking about what Ash would taste like. Like he didn’t know. “I’ve had enough your bullshit, pal.” Tristan lifted the long blade of his katana to point it at Lucien’s head, an excellent target if he ever had one.

Lucien only smirked, head tilted down slightly to give him a menacing glare. It was the vampire who broke first, suddenly darting across the space separating them as he jumped the line of fox. Tristan swung out but missed as Lucien’s path made a sharp left. The vampire
crashed into Ash, scooping her up and slamming her into the wall separating the bedroom from the living room. Tristan turned to help but the fox with the five-tails let out a screech that gave him goose bumps and then all four fox jumped him at once.

One sprung up and bit into his right hand before dropping off and skittering away. Tristan
cried out, dropping the sword as he instantly went numb. Two other fox landed squarely on Tristan’s chest, their tiny but sharp claws digging deep into his flesh for purchase. The last bit down on his left foot and held on, making him to topple backwards as he went numb and off balance.

He groaned when he landed, feeling the burn of the carpet across his naked back.
Rug burn was the least of his problems right then. Fur and whiskers brushed his collarbone and he tensed, expecting a pair of bites he wasn’t sure he could deflect. Determined to try, he swung out with his non-dominate left hand and caught the two on his chest right in their middle. Their claws let go with an almost electric pain of skin tearing as they yelped, falling away.

One little biter left.
Cake
. He shook his left leg hard and gave a groan when it responded with deep muscle pain. He could hardly move the leg, the numbness was already past his knee. His sword was on the floor next to him and he twisted to reach it with his only working hand and swung out blindly when he found it. Luck was in his favor, for once, and he actually hit his target.

Guilt made him cringe when the animal cried out in high pitched screeches. He had to remember to think of it as a thing and not an animal. This kitsune, this shinwa—
whatever the hell that is
—was not human or animal. But as the little red fox collapsed on the carpet, a line of blood from the little fox’s cut-off leg streaking the distance between them, he felt cruel.

The two-tailed fox
that’d bitten his hand once already snapped at him again and then latched on to grind its teeth into his dead flesh. Sure, it didn’t hurt now, but he could tell that when the numbness wore off, it was going to burn like a son of a bitch.

Tristan grumbled a curse or three as he stumbled to his feet, using his sword as a crutch. He’d only just gotten upright when the
other two fox jumped him again, this time landing in unison on his shoulders. One nipped his ear before he knocked them off his shoulders. The other latched onto his hand.

Tristan
grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and spun, slamming it into the wall. The two-tailed fox yelped as it broke the plaster and then lost its grip. It stumbled, looking dazed and Tristan didn’t hesitate to go for it. He grabbed his sword again and cut the little red fox in two, right through the middle.

In a flurry of angry chatters and sharp teeth the remaining kitsune came for him again. One, he kicked in the face, sending it flying across
the room. The tiny body smashed into a side table near the patio window. The last unhurt fox, the one with five tails, ran straight for his neck. A surge of anxiety shot through him. He wasn’t sure if he would move in time. He forced himself to wait and at the last moment he flung himself to the right, swinging his blade with the left. The angle was bad and that damned little fox was fast. It darted right for his arm and Tristan gasped, flinging himself back so that he smacked his head on the wall.

Five-tails landed on his chest, jaws snapping shut onto empty air as it missed
his face by a mere inch. He swung out with the sword hilt fisted in his hand and caught the fox in the face. It tumbled, looking stunned. Instead of cutting it, he scrambled to his feet, cursed when his left leg shot tingling pain up his hip and hobbled into the bedroom, dropping his sword somewhere along the way. Moving quickly, but clumsily, he tore a pillowcase from its pillow. Seconds later he was shoving an unconscious five-tailed fox into the makeshift sack. The other two fox fell back, waiting—for what, Tristan wasn’t sure, but was happy they weren’t biting him anymore.

Having a moment’s reprieve, Tristan took the opportunity to check on the vampires—you know, the real reason he was in this mess. They’d somehow ended up on the sofa with Lucien pinned under Ash’s smaller frame. His arms were trapped under him at a bad angle and Tristan wondered if they were bound. Ash, well, she looked like she was enjoying being on top as much as Lucien was. She was riding his waist, mouth locke
d to his neck and hips grinding. Lucien’s face, it was pure bliss. And when the vampire opened his eyes and saw Tristan staring, he grinned devilishly, jerking his hips up into Ash so that she gave a little moan. 

“What the,” Tristan muttered, completely thrown. “Hey!”

Ash balked, tearing her fangs from Lucien. He screamed when a chunk of skin came free. She met Tristan’s eyes and was instantly filled with guilt. The look on his face, it struck the human in her with a pain that no other vampire could ever understand. She was too different from those others, how could they understand?

Tristan forced
himself to look at Lucien again and shook the bag held in his only working fist. “Got your pet. I think it’s time for you all to leave now.” Really, he should have walked right over to that sofa and laid the sharp end of his blade right across the vampire’s throat and cut off his smug fucking head. So what was stopping him, besides a numb hand?

Lucien’s not-quite-brown eyes moved to the pillowcase for a quick glance and then to Tristan again. “You’re not very good at this are you?”

“What?” Tristan snapped.

“You think that I actually care about those kitsune? That we vampire make bonds?” He looked up to Ash. “Am I right, Asta?”

She frowned and slapped him hard enough that Tristan almost felt it.

“
Oww,” Lucien mumbled around a fake frown. “Bit my tongue. Lick it for me,” he said and then laughed when Ash hit him again.

A female moan sounded to Tristan’s right and he spun. There were two naked women lying on the floor. They were nearly identical with their sharp Asian features, pale skin and contrasting bright red hair, the last two inches pure white. Tristan gasped as he took an unconscious step back, feeling the open bedroom door at his back.

The closest woman was missing her right hand, though no blood came from the wound. She looked up into his eyes and his pulse beat up into his throat. She had bright yellow fox eyes in a human face lined in that heavy black all canines had. But more than that her ears... they were fox ears, fuzzy black-tipped fox ears pinned right onto the side of a very human head.

The other naked Asian chick was across the room, groggily picking herself out the table she was entangled with. Frowning, she tossed the table away and it crashed into the wall. She pushed to all four, limbs akimbo to support the sudden shake of her head that ma
de those fuzzy, pointy ears flap against her head.

Tristan took another step back.
Am I the only one seeing this? Seriously!

The woman wobbled to her feet, shaking slightly. She moved as if her head were heavier than it should have been, weighing her to the left and right when she stepped. She was a broken bobble head.

“What the shit is this?” Tristan whispered and flinched when he hadn’t expected the words to come out of his mouth.

The pillowcase in his hand started to convulse violently and he jerked his arm straight out, holding the sack away from him. The scream of cloth being torn apart made him let go. The
cotton shivered and then there was a woman lying at his feet, a torn pillowcase on her head like an extremely undersized Halloween ghost costume. She sat upright, teetered and then shot her legs out almost at a 180-degree angle as she reached up to pull off the ruined pillowcase.

“Oh Christ,” Tristan breathed when he noticed that she had no sexual features between her legs.

Bright yellow eyes lined in heavy black blinked up him, considering. “
Konbanwa
,” the naked woman said in a tiny voice.

“Uh…,” Tristan drawled, pulse hammering in his head. “Hi?”

Lucien burst into laughter, making Tristan flinch back enough that he crossed the threshold into the bedroom.

“Ah! My dear kitsune. These are the one I told you of. They have it,
you have to kill them for it. Do it, do it now!” Lucien sang.

The two kitsune across the room screeched a noise that shouldn’t have come from human throats, but before they could dart forward, the closest of the three held a hand up. She was the one
that had five tails, clearly the leader of the group. “
Taiki!
”

The other two growled their discontent, but stopped, crouched on all fours and the ready to shift and move at a second’s notice. Tristan held the sword across the front of him, ready to strike too, albeit a bit slower with the way these things moved and his numb body parts. Damn, he really needed to know more about the world he lived in and those things that were not meant to be. Like himself.

Ash growled a noise that made Tristan shiver with foreboding and then she flung a few quickly spoken, smooth French words at the vampire under her before sending a fist into his nose.

“Oh, that’s it! Hit me, hit me harder! That’s how we play!”

Lucien laughing like a maniac seemed to snap something in Ash. Tristan chanced looking away from the kitsune in time to see Ash bite down over Lucien’s nose.

“My god,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure if he was disgusted, but he was definitely in shock. He’d never seen Ash this angry, not even with Malik—the monster who changed her fate for his amusement
, giving her only pain and despair.

He’d looked away from the fox—women, whatever
, for too long and when he felt movement, he snapped back around to find the kitsune had moved closer to him. The one who’d spoken before stood at the front line, protecting, dominating the other two at her back. In her arms, she held the halved body of the one Tristan killed, still in fox form, petting it slowly.

He forced himself to step back into the main room again. It was only an invisible threshold, holding no meaning, but he felt like if he didn’t it would make him look weak. O
ut of his element, sure, he was, but he was anything but weak. Physically inferior, but not weak.