Danse Macabre

42

I BROKE THE kiss, pushed him away hard enough to make him stumble. His eyes were drowning emerald fire. «Didn't it feel good?» he asked.

I shook my head, not trusting my voice. But the moment he wasn't touching me the panic was back. The fear, and it was worse now. I was surrounded by vampire tricks. Surrounded even inside myself, and that was one person I couldn't run from.

Micah tried to hug me again, but I moved around him, toward the living room. Nathaniel brushed my arm, and I moved away. I was shaking my head, and wasn't sure why.

«This does not have to be a disaster, ma petite.»

«Yes,» I said, «it does.»

«Anita,» Micah said, «I don't care that it was vampire magic that brought us together. We're together, that's what matters.» He held his hand out to me.

I shook my head. «No, because if you touch me, I'll give up. I won't fight. I can never win a fight when you touch me. The effect you have on my body overwhelms everything else.»

«And that's a bad thing?» He made it a question, his hand still held out toward me.

«I wondered why your touching me always overwhelmed me, and now we know. It's vampire powers. It's mind tricks. It's an aftereffect of the ardeur, Micah.»

He let his hand drop slowly. «I love the way your body reacts to mine, Anita.» He closed his eyes, hugged his hands into fists in front of his chest. «I abso-fucking love that you react to me like I'm intoxicating.» He opened his eyes and gave me the full stare out of those yellow-green kitty-cat eyes. «Don't you love it, too?»

I opened my mouth to say no, but it would have been a lie. The vampires could sense lies, but wereanimals could smell them. I told the truth. «Yes, I loved it.»

He shook his head. «Not loved, not past tense. You love it. You love it so much, you're afraid to let me touch you now.»

«Please, Micah, don't do this.»

«Do what? Make you happy? Make us both happier than we've ever been for longer than we've ever been happy in our entire lives? We're both almost thirty, Anita; it doesn't get better than what we have. We've all tried other people, other ways of living. This works for us. Don't throw it away because it started with the ardeur.» He took a step toward me. «We always knew that you and I began with the ardeur, Anita.»

«Maybe, but not all of it. Not…«I turned away from him. I couldn't keep being this stubborn and look at the anguish on his face. But looking away put me looking at Nathaniel. It wasn't an improvement. First, he was nude, and any of the men I loved only had to take their clothes off to win most arguments with me. I might never admit that out loud, but it was the truth. Nathaniel nude was a treat, but what made it even harder was the look on his face. So hurt, so terribly hurt.

«Anita,» he said, «would you really throw us away? Could you just walk away? Just like that?»

My throat was tight, but not with panic anymore. The panic had company now. Can you choke to death on unshed tears?

He stared at me; those lilac eyes sparkled through the fall of all that hair. I stared at his eyes, so bright, like firelit amethyst, as he tried not to cry. Then the first tear glittered down his cheek, and I was undone.

I went to him. I hugged him, and he collapsed so suddenly in my arms that it pulled us both to the floor. He clung to me, weeping, and I was left drowning in the vanilla warmth of his hair. Micah stood there, looking down at us.

Was it a lie? It didn't feel like a lie. The man in my arms felt real, and his tears were real. The thought that I could turn away from him because of something so… petty, had broken his heart, just a little. Micah had said it; we knew that the ardeur had been the beginning of us. Hadn't I always known it was the beginning of Nathaniel and me, too? If I hadn't needed to feed the ardeur, I would never have allowed him to move in with me. I would never have slept with him, clothed and strangely chaste, feeding by a kiss, a touch, but never with release for him. I would never have done all that without the ardeur to feed. I would never have fallen in love with him, if the ardeur hadn't kept him in my way.

I hugged Nathaniel, and held one hand out to Micah. He smiled, and came to me, to us. He dropped to his knees, and put his arms around us both. Nathaniel cried harder. I held them both as hard as I could. Micah kissed me, and I kissed him back. The taste of his mouth was the taste of sex to me. Just the kiss, and my body reacted to it. Nathaniel's hands spilled over my breasts. Had I taught them that the only way to make up a fight was sex, or had the ardeur preordained that sex was our currency of healing? It was a chicken/egg sort of question. I let it go in the sensation of hands and mouths on my face and neck, and body.

We licked the tears off Nathaniel's face, and somewhere in all that closeness, I let go of my doubts. I could worry about it later. Right at that moment, nothing seemed more important than touching the two of them.

We both came up for air, to the smell of lion. Micah growled. It was Noel on hands and knees. He had his forehead pressed to the stone floor, one hand held out toward us. Travis collapsed to his knees behind him, cradling his broken arm. He leaned against the wall, heavily, and for the first time it occurred to me that maybe the broken arm wasn't the worst of his injuries. Wereanimals were tough bastards. I hadn't even asked if there were other things broken. I hadn't even asked exactly what the doc had said. They had just been another embarrassing problem. Another pint of blood to lay on the altar of the ardeur, and my beast.

I looked at Micah. «I agree with the lions. I don't want Haven.»

I turned to Nathaniel. He smiled. «I agree with Micah. Though Jean-Claude, or someone, needs to help you not to bond with them completely.»

«Agreed,» I said.

I looked behind us, for Jean-Claude. «How do we do this?»

«I can help you not use the ardeur as deeply, but I do not know if I can control the lion within you.»

«I can,» and it was Auggie. He'd added a long black cloak. His shoulders were so wide that it made him look square, his head too small for all that body. The bottom of the cloak puddled on the floor, because any vampire here that the cloak could belong to was a foot taller. The cloak looked borrowed, and it was, but Octavius and Pierce were at his back, and they didn't look borrowed at all. They looked perfectly at home.

The two bodyguards at their backs looked right at home, too. Standing orders were that Pierce and Haven got four guards. I wondered if Haven, now unconscious, had two of his own? Probably.

«I want this to work, Auggie, if it can,» I said. «I need your word that you won't spoil it.»

«Tell me exactly what you want me to swear to, Anita,» he said. His face was empty, pale with concentration. His eyes looked huge and even darker, like the sky before it goes black.

I thought about what he'd asked, then looked again to Jean-Claude. «Help me to word it, okay.»

«I will second Augustine on this, ma petite. Tell me what you wish him to swear to.»

«I want to really try to bond with Noel. I don't want him to interfere with that, but I don't want to bond to Noel the way I did with Micah and Nathaniel. I want to see if it's just lions I'm hunting, or if Auggie's lions are especially tasty.»

«If my lions are more tasty, it may not be because they are my lions, but because your power seeks something more dominant than what's kneeling on the floor. I think in your Rex's zeal not to give power to a rival, he has sent you food that your inner lioness will never accept.»

«My inner lioness,» I said, though it's hard to be disdainful when you're on your knees with men still hanging on to you. But I managed it.

«Inner beast, then,» he said, voice empty. His face showed nothing. He was finally acting more like all the other really old vamps that I'd ever met. Will the real Augustine please stand up?

«Are the lions more likely to want a dominant?» I asked.

«I thought you had read up on lions,» he said.

I thought about it, then nodded. «If a new male takes over the pride, second thing he does is kill the cubs. It means he doesn't help the lion he drove off breed successfully, and it puts the females into estrus faster, so he gets to mate.»

Auggie nodded. «It makes the females of most wereprides very tough to impress.»

I shook my head. «You're not saying that werelion prides are run like real lion prides? That the new leader kills the children? That's ridiculous.»

He shrugged those big shoulders under the long cloak. «It has happened.»

I turned back to Noel and Travis. «You guys know about this happening for real?»

They both said, «No.»

«They're too young to know what we did before we became legal.» This from Pierce.

«Are you saying that some men do kill the babies of the old Rex?»

«I've seen it,» Pierce said in a very clipped voice.

I almost asked, Which end of the fight were you on? but I didn't. There was a look in his eyes, almost a flinching. Either he'd been a victim, or he'd done things that haunted him. I had enough nightmares of my own; I'd let Pierce keep his to himself.

«I guess that would make you want the strongest lion around,» I said, but my voice was a little thin. The pregnancy scare was too recent. How would it feel to go through nine months, then labor, and have some stranger kill your baby, after first killing your husband? I said it out loud. «If someone did that to me, he wouldn't survive very long.»

«Prides with really strong females don't get taken over much,» Pierce said, «because you gotta sleep sometimes.» He almost smiled when he said it.

I nodded. «That's how I'd be thinking.»

«Your local pride has very weak females,» Auggie said, his voice still that empty master's voice, so it could have been almost anyone talking. «Your Rex's wife is weak, and since the females of the lions are just like the males, it's forced him to reject a lot of strong women.»

«Are you saving that if someone killed Joseph, there wouldn't be enough fight in his pride to do much about it?»

«His brother would be a problem,» Pierce said, «but other than that, yeah.»

«You would definitely have to kill both of the brothers,» Auggie said, «but after that the pride would be helpless.» He looked past me at the lions.

Noel was staring at him with a sort of soft horror. It was Travis who said, «Sounds like you've thought this through.»

«It's why you brought dominants,» I said. «You came planning for Pierce or Haven to take over the local pride.»

Auggie gave me flat eyes.

«You evil bastard.»

«It's not me that's left his pride open, ripe for the picking, Anita. He did that himself.»

«He loves his wife, that's not a crime,» I said.

Auggie shrugged.

«Anita.» Noel's small voice brought me back to look at him. He inched closer to me, his hand out, his face showing his fear. «Please, Anita, please, try me.»

I wanted to say, I won't let them hurt you and your people, but I couldn't. Not and be truthful. We had an alliance with the lions, true, but if Joseph had truly let his pride get this fucked up, and it was truly the lion's way to take over the pride like this, then no other animal could interfere. We could help each other, but we couldn't interfere directly in the dominance hierarchy of the other groups. Not unless we wanted to start glomming us all into some kind of super-group. Wereanimals didn't do well in mixed-species groups. Too many cultural differences.

The only way I could send Haven home was to find another lion that my lioness liked. Shit. Noel stared at me, hand outstretched. The fear in his face made him look even younger and more inexperienced. No animal group could operate without dominants. You needed muscle and strength, and strength of will. If Joseph had truly done what Auggie said, then his pride was in the gravest of dangers. If it wasn't Haven or Pierce now, it would be someone else later. Of course, if one of them were my semipermanent pomme de sang, then other lions might hesitate to attack them.

Hell, master vamps from around the country who hadn't had the ballet troupe go anywhere near them were offering up pomme de sang candidates. We'd be seeing potential feeds for months even after this batch went home. We'd already had inquiries from animal groups that weren't aligned with any vampire. You know you're big fish, when all the sharks want to come play.

I did the only thing I could think of. I took Noel's hand and drew him toward me. I wasn't sure what we'd do when he got to me, but we'd think of something.