Crimson Death (39 page)

“But she is not Anita's blue tiger to call. You are,” Giacomo said.

“If I did tear up the floor, I didn't do it on purpose and I don't know how to do it again.”

“It is like your inner beast, Cynric—Sin—you will learn how to control it and how to use it more knowledgeably as you have more practice,” Giacomo said.

“If this is my power, then how dangerous is it going to be? I mean, my tiger form could kill people if I weren't in control of it. Legends say that the blue tigers could cause earthquakes and destroy entire armies. That's an exaggeration, right?”

“No, it is not an exaggeration. I have stood upon a mountain and watched ten of your clan call their magic together and raise the earth itself against an enemy army. You on your own, even with more training, could not wreak such havoc. I am glad to see that the clan that raised you told you the history of your people, but do not fear your powers.”

“Queen Bibiana made certain that I knew the history of all the clans. We thought the gold tigers were extinct centuries ago, so Bibiana wanted the white clan, her clan, to be up to speed on all the legends and history so they could lead if it was needed.”

“I'm not sure the other remaining clans would allow that,” Giacomo said.

Sin shrugged. “Bibi wanted us ready, just in case. She knew the red tigers' queen wasn't teaching anyone the legends, because she'd asked. Their queen thought the legends were done, because the gold tigers were gone, and the only known blue tigers and black tigers left were enslaved to the Harlequin, who served the Mother of All Darkness, our greatest enemy. No offense on the enslaved part.”

“None taken. When our Dark Mother was still alive we were all slave to her plans and wishes,” Giacomo said.

“We have all been slaves to one vampire or another in our time,” Jean-Claude said.

Giacomo bowed to him. “True and wise words, Your Highness.”

“The main reason she has agents looking at foundlings across the world is to find any survivors of the lost clans,” Sin said.

“I would have said there would be no survivors, but here you are, my prince. The new genetic tests have proven that you are as pure of blood as Fortune, who is the last of the blue clan that I knew to be alive,” Giacomo said. There was something about the way he looked at Sin that I didn't like. He was centuries older than Jean-Claude, so he should have been even better at hiding his expressions, but I'd noticed that a lot of the Harlequin weren't that good at schooling their faces. I'd asked Echo about it and been told,
We wore masks almost all the time; no one saw our face except when we played a part to gather information, and then we were playing human. We needed our faces to show emotions.
It was as good an explanation as any.

“I was nearly two when someone left me at a church. I was well fed, well clothed, a happy well-adjusted toddler. Someone took care of me for all that time and then just left me.”

“There were rumors of clan tigers here in this country, but we were not the ones sent to investigate,” Magda said.

“Bibi figured that either my parents had left me to save me from what was hunting them, or they had died and whoever they left me with didn't want to deal with a baby.”

I put my arms around his bare waist and hugged him. He looked down at me, but his face still held that edge of anger, sullenness, and deeper in those rich blue eyes was the uncertainty of it.
How could they leave me? Why would they leave me? Was it something I did? Why didn't they want me?
All the questions that children who are lost ask about their past.

Jean-Claude gripped Sin's shoulder tight. I expected him to hug us, but he didn't. He kept that almost-artificial distance from us. I put an arm around both their waists and tried to draw us into a group hug, but Jean-Claude resisted.

Sin looked at him then. “You're afraid to hug me now. Why?”

“Let us say that I am no longer certain of how to interact with you.”

A look of absolute pain came over his face, and the emotion of it crashed the shields between us. He was sad and scared that he'd screwed up a relationship that he valued. He suddenly felt very young in my head, because it hadn't occurred to him that sleeping together even just this much would change things between them.

Nicky came over and wrapped us all in one huge group hug. “Don't get weird about it, Jean-Claude.”

Jean-Claude hesitated for a minute and then finally hugged us all, so that we were entwined and it wasn't sexual. It was comforting. It was . . . family. Sin's muscled shoulders began to shake, and it took me a second to realize he was crying. Jean-Claude touched his face and dried the tears away with his hands. The look he gave Sin wasn't romantic; it was very much Uncle Jean-Claude to his beloved nephew, and that was why he wouldn't be able to put a ring on it. Sin had to decide if he was willing to lose Jean-Claude as his “uncle,” his father figure, to make him a romantic partner, but he had to decide, because he and Jean-Claude couldn't do both.

W
E SAID GOOD-BYE
to everyone at the Circus rather than at the airport for a lot of reasons. One, it made more sense from a security point of view. Two, we were already needing two large SUVs to get the luggage and us to the airport; it would have taken even more to get everyone to the airport who wanted to say good-bye. Three, we could say good-bye as enthusiastically as we wanted to without someone snapping a picture with their cell phone and posting it on the Internet. Jean-Claude was the vampire of everyone's dreams, which meant that just snapping a good picture with your phone could get you money from some gossip sites.

The luggage had been carried up the long steps by other guards
like overly muscled ants trip after trip. They'd loaded everything into the cars outside, and it was time to go. Jean-Claude and I had kissed good-bye in private, but seeing him standing there made me want to do it again. He broke from the kiss to touch the ring on my left hand. It was platinum, white gold, channel-set with white diamonds and one large oval dark blue sapphire. All the stones were set into the metal and, it was all smooth so that it wouldn't catch on anything, including the rubber gloves that I wore at crime scenes. The ring was still shining and beautiful, but it was practical, and I needed that for my job. Most cops wore plain bands or nothing to work, but Jean-Claude had wanted me to wear his promise ring always, and his promise would never be just a plain band of gold. No, he was all about the shiny.

“Ma petite,”
he said as he turned the ring on my finger, “I never thought to see my ring upon your finger, and now all I can think of is how much I want to add a wedding ring to it.”

“We're working on it,” I said, looking up into that almost painfully beautiful face.

“Yes. Yes, we are,” he said, smiling down at me. I'd shared enough of his thoughts to know that he thought I was beautiful and sexy and utterly desirable, but I didn't understand it. I was good at sex, so maybe the sexy part, but I was also a royal pain in the ass in other areas. He had been one of the most beautiful men in the world for centuries. How does one mortal woman, any woman, compare to that?

Nathaniel put his hand over ours, wrapping his hand so that we were all touching the ring, or maybe the ring was touching us. “It's a promise ring not just for you and Anita, but for all of us.” He raised his face for a kiss, and who would be able to turn Nathaniel down? They kissed, and just watching them so close, while we all held hands, made things low in my body tighten. It was a less chaste kiss than the one they'd had in the bedroom when Damian was with us. I realized that both times it had been Nathaniel who upped the ante, not Jean-Claude. Was the great seducer being seduced? I didn't have a problem with it. The men in my life being closer to each other usually worked in my favor. Micah might feel differently, but he wasn't here right now, so I just enjoyed touching them both and having my ringside seat for their kiss.

“Jean-Claude, you cannot allow them to go to her island,” said a voice from behind us. It was Asher. He was tall, pale, handsome, with long golden hair spilling around his shoulders. Nothing would ever make Asher physically less than gorgeous, but physical wasn't everything.

The bodyguards around the room came to attention, because the last time we'd interacted with Asher it had gotten nasty. I knew they were under orders to not let us be alone with him. His emotional instability made him dangerous, and sometimes that danger wasn't just to your heart.

“This is for my job, Asher. Jean-Claude doesn't control that.” My voice was as angry as I felt. Nathaniel was right—we missed Asher topping us in the dungeon. I missed him being part of a threesome with Jean-Claude and me. I hated that I hadn't found anyone to replace Asher in those two places in my life. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference, and I wasn't indifferent to him yet. Which pissed me off, because I knew better.

Asher had spilled his hair across half his face like a golden veil, and like most veils, it was hiding things. His eyes were as pale a blue as Jean-Claude's were dark, a brilliant, icy blue. I caught the gleam of one through the lace of his hair, but the other eye was bright and visible, set in a face that was so gorgeous that he'd been the artists' model for paintings of angels and gods. “I have always respected your job, Anita. Whatever mistakes I have made in the past, I never presumed to tell you your job, and I am not now, but do not take Damian back to his old master and do not give her Nathaniel.”

“We aren't taking him back to his old master, and we sure as hell aren't giving her anyone, let alone Nathaniel.”

Asher held his hand out toward us, but it was to Jean-Claude he was giving the weight of those eyes, that face. “Jean-Claude, you have been at her mercy as well as I. You know what she is and what she is capable of. Please, by all that is holy, all that is left us, do not put our flower-eyed boy within her grasp.”

“I'm not your flower-eyed boy anymore, Asher,” Nathaniel said.

Asher's eyes glittered and I realized it was unshed tears. “And that is my fault, my flaw that drove you away. You have no idea how much
I regret what I have done in the past few months. Only Julianna's death is a greater regret to me.”

We all stared at him. Julianna's death had been the great tragedy that had driven a wedge between him and Jean-Claude. She had been their heart, and when she'd died it died with them.

“That is a bold statement,
mon ami
, if only you meant it.”

“I swear to you, Jean-Claude, that I mean every word.”

“Your word of honor?”

“Yes.”

Asher was an old enough vampire that his word of honor meant something. An oath breaker was not trusted among the older vampires, and for some broken oaths it was a death sentence.

“Sudden contrition does not seem like something you would feel,” Jean-Claude said.

“I have been full of regret for weeks, but I could not . . . decide . . . create . . . a way to convince you of my deep regret until I heard what you are planning, and then I did not care if you believed. I would rather give up Nathaniel forever than let him go to that cursed . . . beast.”

That was the first thing he'd said that I was really interested in. I asked, “Do you mean that literally? Is She-Who-Made-Damian old enough to be a lycanthrope and a vampire like the Mother of All Darkness was? And do you mean a real curse, or are you just being dramatic?”

Asher shook his head so that his hair swung just enough to give a glimpse of the scars that he was using it to hide. He used his hair a lot like Nicky did, except Asher simply let the long waves spill down over his scars; of course he had more of them to cover. He had two good eyes, but an inch or two out from the corner of his kissable mouth were burn scars. They trailed down his cheek and skipped his neck, but the right side of his chest looked like it had melted and re-formed. Holy water acts like acid on vampire flesh, and that was what the Church had used to try to burn the devil out of Asher centuries ago.

“She is a beast in the old sense of being a monster, but she cannot transform her physical body. She is a vampire and we are all cursed, but beyond that I am being dramatic, as you say.”

“We were with her a few centuries ago. You are being overly dramatic,” Jean-Claude said.

“I was with her longer than you, Jean-Claude.”

Jean-Claude drew Nathaniel and me into his arms so he could hug us both. I don't know if it was to comfort himself or to rub Asher's losses in his face. I didn't care. I was good with both. Asher deserved to be reminded that he'd behaved so badly he'd lost all of us and more in one fell swoop.

“After you fled to the New World, Belle had less use for me. She could not use me to torment you anymore.”

“We have been through this,” Jean-Claude said, his voice very serious and very unhappy, but his arms tightened around us, so that we both curled an arm around his waist to let us be as close as he seemed to want. He could look and sound calm, justified, but he didn't feel it.

“I am not saying you were to blame. I am merely explaining that she was less careful of me after she could not use me against you.”

“You know I am sorry for everything that happened between us back then.”

“I know, and I am sorry that I blamed you for so many years, but that is beside the point tonight, Jean-Claude. I was not traded for Damian for a few hours a night as you and I were, but given to her for months. Damian was there while I was her prisoner.”

“Neither of you has ever spoken of this to me.”

“We vowed we would not speak of it even to each other. Do you remember how frightening she was when we were with her for only a few hours at a time in Belle's court?”

Jean-Claude lowered his face against Nathaniel's hair, as if he were smelling the vanilla of his hair to comfort himself. I did it sometimes, too. “That I remember those terrible hours is why I bargained for Damian's freedom from her and brought him here.” He almost managed to keep his voice even—almost.

“Then imagine being with her for months.”

Jean-Claude just shook his head. “I cannot. I do not wish to dwell on the horrors that did not happen to me, for there are enough that did.”

“Three months was my sentence to serve as part of her entourage in Ireland. I was warned that I might die at my first dawn there and
not wake again. That frightened me until I had been there a few weeks, and then I began to half-hope I would not wake again.”

“We've shared some of Damian's memories, and they're pretty terrible, but wait. . . . Why wouldn't you wake at dusk? Did they tell you that just to scare you?” I asked.

“Not every vampire that traveled to Ireland woke the first night they slept there. No one knows why, but it's as if the land itself is not friendly to our kind.”

“People keep telling me that my necromancy may not work in Ireland, or it's not supposed to, and that vampirism isn't as contagious there.”

“I do not know about zombies. If anyone could call them from the grave there, it would be you, but they are right about vampires. Even if you give the three bites over the three different nights and drain them dry on the third, it does not guarantee they will rise as one of us. I saw half a dozen humans who should have risen as vampires there that did not.”

“Did their bodies start to rot?” I asked.

He had to think about that for a minute. “I know that she kept two of the bodies for quite some time and they did rot. The others were discarded sooner.”

“Why did she keep the bodies until they rotted?” I asked.

The look on his face was all for Jean-Claude, as if the look should be enough without words. It wasn't for me. “What are you trying to tell each other?”

“Did she hope that the bodies would rise as something?” Jean-Claude asked.

“One of the reasons she wanted me, other than the obvious one, was to have a vampire that wasn't of her making. She had hoped that I would be able to make more vampires for her, but it worked no better for me than it did for her own vampires.”

“Did you ever see her try to bring over a vampire herself?” I asked.

“I did. She was able to create one of us, but the second one did not rise for her any more than the others.”

“You know, you being in Ireland might have been good information for Damian to share with me.”

“He and I were never friends, but we vowed that each of us would tell our halves of the story but not mention the other if we ever spoke of it at all.”

Nathaniel said, “I think Damian's fighting his own fears so hard that he's not thinking clearly about what information might be helpful to you and the police.”

I glanced at him and felt the beginnings of my irritation fall away. If Asher was this scared of the Wicked Bitch of Ireland, then Damian must have been petrified. “He's hiding it really well then, even metaphysically,” I said.

“He's being very brave,” Nathaniel said.

“Yeah, he is,” I said. I added,
Damn it
, to myself.

“So are we risking Echo and Giacomo by taking them to Ireland?” Nathaniel asked.

“Shit,” I said.

“I do not believe so,” Jean-Claude said.

“How do we know they'll be okay?”

“The reason I was at risk was that I was not a master vampire,” Asher said, “but the Harlequin are all masters who gave up their rights to territories of their own to become permanently part of the royal guard.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “They all have animals to call, and you only get that as a master.” I wanted to slap my forehead in a
“coulda had a V8”
moment.

“Except for Damian, you are taking only masters,” Jean-Claude said.

“Okay, good to know I'm not risking anyone else like that.”

“But if I understand what is happening, there is a plague of vampires in Ireland.”

“There's a bunch of them in Dublin, and more people coming up missing every night.”

“But the newly risen are never masters,” Asher said.

“So there shouldn't be a lot of them in Ireland,” I said.

“No, there should not be.”

“Did anyone ever say why the vampires didn't rise the way they were supposed to?” I asked.

He thought about it, looking at the floor, frowning, but finally shook his head. “No, just that it was something to do with the land. That the land didn't like our kind.”

“The Harlequin told us that the land is more alive because it has such a high concentration of Fey magic and that's why the dead don't rise there.”

“Then why are they rising now?” Asher asked.

“One theory is that the wild magic is fading in Ireland finally, like it has throughout the world. It would fade in the cities first, and that's where all the new vamps have appeared so far.”