He raised my hand to his mouth, slowly, touched his lips to my knuckles. Nothing happened. He risked a caress of his lips, sliding along my skin. It did make me catch my breath, but the ardeur did not rise.
He stood upright, my hand still in his. He smiled, that brilliant smile that I valued, because it was real, or as close to real as he could come. He’d spent centuries schooling his face, his every motion to be courtly, graceful, and give nothing away. He found it hard to simply react. “Come, ma petite, come let us meet our guests.”
I nodded. “Sure.”
He wrapped my arm through his and looked at Damian. “Take her other arm, mon ami, let us escort her inside.”
Damian settled my hand on the smooth, muscled skin of his forearm. “With pleasure, master.”
Normally, Jean-Claude didn’t like his vamps calling him master, but tonight we’d be formal. We were trying to impress people who hadn’t been impressed by anything in centuries.
Asher stepped forward to get the drapes, Jason went to the other side, and they held the drapes aside for us so we could enter without having to bat at the drapes. There are reasons that wall-hangings over doorways fell out of favor.
The only downside to having an attractive vampire on each arm was that I couldn’t go for my gun quickly. Of course, if I had to draw a gun as soon as we went through the door, then the night was going to be a bad one. Bad enough that we might survive this night, but not the next.
7
MUSETTE STOOD BY the white brick fireplace. It had to be her, because she was the only little blond Barbie doll in the room, and that’s how Jason had described her. Jason had a lot of faults, but describing a woman inaccurately was not one of them.
She was indeed small, shorter than me by at least three inches. Which made her barely five feet tall, if she was wearing heels under the long white gown, then she was tinier still. Her hair fell around her shoulders in blond waves, but her eyebrows were black and perfectly arched. Either she dyed one thing or the other, or she was one of those rare blonds where body and head hair didn’t match. Which did happen, but not often. The blond hair, pale skin, dark eyebrows and eyelashes framed blue eyes like spring skies. I realized that her eyes were only a few shades bluer than Jason’s. Maybe it was the dark eyebrows and lashes that made them seem so much more vivid.
She smiled with a rosebud mouth that was so red I knew she was wearing lipstick, and once I saw that I knew she was wearing more makeup. Well done, understated, but there were touches here and there that helped a striking, almost childlike beauty along.
Her pomme de sang knelt at her feet like a pet. The girl’s long brown hair was piled on top of her head in a complicated layer of curls that made her look even younger than she was. She was pale, not vampire pale, but pale, and the icy blue of her long, old-fashioned dress didn’t help give her any color. Her slender neck was smooth and untouched. If Musette was taking blood, where was she taking it from? Did I want to know? Not really.
A man stood between the fireplace and the large white couch with its spill of gold and silver pillows. He was the opposite of Musette in almost every way. Well over six feet tall, built like an overly large swimmer, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, narrow-hipped, with legs that seemed longer than I was tall. His hair was black, black like mine was black—with blue highlights. It was tied in a thick braid down his back. His skin was as dark as skin that hadn’t seen much sun in centuries could be. I was betting he tanned with very little effort. He just hadn’t had much opportunity to catch any rays. His eyes were an odd blue green, aqua, like the waters of the Caribbean. They were startling in his dark face and should have added warmth and beauty. But they were cold. He should have been handsome, but he wasn’t, the sour expression on his face stole all that. He looked as if he were always in a bad mood.
Maybe it was the clothes. He was dressed as if he’d stepped out of a century’s-old painting. If I had to go around in tights, I might be grumpy, too.
Though I had a man on either arm, it was definitely Jean-Claude who led us between the two overstuffed chairs, one gold, one silver, with their piles of white pillows. He stopped in front of the white wood coffee table with its crystal bowl of white and yellow carnations. Damian also stopped instantly, standing very still under the touch of my hand. Jason flopped, gracefully, into the gold chair closest to the fireplace. Asher stood on the other side of the silver chair, as far away from Musette as he could get without leaving the room.
Musette said something in French. Jean-Claude replied in French, and I actually understood that he’d told her that I didn’t speak French. She said something else that was a complete mystery to me, then she switched to a heavily accented English. Most vampires have no accent, at least in America, but Musette had a doozy. Thick enough in places that I knew if she spoke too fast, English or not, I wouldn’t be able to understand her.
“Damian, it has been long since you graced our court with your presence.”
“My old mistress did not care for the life of the court.”
“She is an odd one, your mistress Morvoren.”
I felt Damian’s body react to the name like he’d been slapped. I stroked the top of his hand the way you’d sooth a worried child.
“Morvoren is powerful enough to compete for a council seat. She was even offered the Earthmover’s old place. She would not even have had to fight for it. It was a gift.” Musette was watching Damian, studying his face, his body, his reactions. “Why do you think she refused such a bounty?”
Damian swallowed, his breath shaky. “As I said,” he had to clear his throat, to finish, “my old mistress is not one for court life. She prefers her solitude.”
“But to give up a seat on the council without a battle to risk, that is madness. Why would Morvoren do that?”
Each time she said the name, Damian flinched. “Damian answered your question,” I said, “his old master likes her privacy.”
Musette turned those blue eyes to me, and the flat unfriendliness of the stare made me half wish I hadn’t interrupted.
“So, this is the new one.” She walked towards us, and it wasn’t just gliding, it was a sway of hips, there were high heels under the skirt. You didn’t get that sashay without them.
The tall dark and scary man moved behind her like a shadow. The young girl stayed sitting in front of the fireplace, her pale blue skirts spread around her like they’d been arranged. Her hands were very still in her lap. She looked arranged, too, as if she’d been told sit here, like this, and she would sit there, like that, until Musette told her to move. Definitely yucky.
“May I present Anita Blake, my human servant, the very first I have ever called to me. There is no other, there is only she.” Jean-Claude used his hand in mine to sweep me outward away from the coffee table, and incidentally, Musette. It was almost a dance move, as if I was supposed to curtsy, or something. Damian followed the movement, making it look like a very graceful game of crack the whip. The vampires bowed, and, caught between them, I had little choice but to do what they did. Maybe there was more than one reason that Jean-Claude had put me in the middle.
Musette swayed towards us, her hips making a dance of the billowing white skirt. “You know the one I mean, Asher’s servant, what was her name?” There was a look in those blue eyes that said she knew damn well what the name was.
“Julianna,” Jean-Claude said, voice as neutral as he could make it. But neither Asher nor he could say Julianna’s name without some emotion.
“Ah, yes, Julianna, a pretty name for someone so common.” She’d come to stand in front of us. The tall dark man stood behind her, menacing by his very size. He had to be damn close to seven feet tall. “Why is it that Asher and you choose such common women? I suppose there is something comforting about good, sturdy, peasant stock.”
I laughed before I could think. Jean-Claude squeezed my hand. Damian went very still under my other hand.
Musette didn’t like being laughed at, that was plain on her
face. “You laugh, girl, why?”
Jean-Claude squeezed my hand tight enough that it was just this side of pain. “Sorry,” I said, “but calling me a peasant isn’t much of an insult.”
“Why is it not?” she asked, and she looked genuinely puzzled.
“Because, you’re right, as far back as anyone can trace my family tree I have nothing but soldiers and farmers. I am good peasant stock and proud of it.”
“Why would you be proud of that?”
“Because everything we’ve gotten, we’ve made with our two hands, the sweat of our brows, that kind of thing. We’ve had to work for everything we have. No one has ever given us anything.”
“I do not understand,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can explain it to you,” I said. I was thinking it was like Asher trying to explain to me what you owed a liege lord. I had nothing in my life that prepared me to understand that sort of obligation. I didn’t say that out loud though, because I didn’t want to bring up the idea that I owed Belle Morte anything. Because I didn’t feel I did.
“I am not stupid, Anita, I would understand if you would explain yourself clearly.”
Asher moved from behind, to the other side of us, still as far as he could stay from Musette, but it was brave of him to draw attention to himself. “I attempted to explain to Anita earlier what one owes a liege lord, and she could not understand it. She is young and American, they have never had the . . . benefit of being ruled here.”
She turned her head to one side, disturbingly like a bird just before it takes a bite out of a worm. “And what has her lack of understanding of civilized ways to do with anything?”
A human being would have licked their lips, Asher went still, quiet. (Hold still enough, and the fox won’t know you’re there.) “You, lovely Musette, have never lived where you were not subject to a lord, or lady, or where you did not rule others. You have never lived without knowing the duties one owes one’s liege.”
“Oui?” she made that one word cold, so cold, as if to say, go on, dig yourself a deeper hole to be buried in.
“You have never dreamt of the possibility that being a peasant, owing no one, would be a freeing experience.”
She waved a carefully manicured hand, as if clearing the very thought from the air. “Absurd. ‘Freeing experience,’ what does that mean?”
“I believe,” Jean-Claude said, “that the fact that you do not understand what that means is Asher’s exact point.”
She frowned at them both. “I do not understand, thus it cannot be that important.” She dismissed it all with a wave of dainty hands. Then she turned her attention back to me, and it was frightening. I wasn’t sure what it was about the mere gaze of those eyes, but it chilled the marrow in my bones.
“Have you seen our present to Jean-Claude and Asher?”
I must have looked as confused as I felt, because she turned and tried to motion behind her, but all I could see was her very large human servant. “Angelito, move so she may see.” Angelito? Somehow the name, “little angel” didn’t fit him. He moved, and she finished the motion towards the fireplace.
It was only the fireplace with it’s painting above it, then something about the painting caught my eye. It was supposed to be a painting of Jean-Claude, Asher, and Julianna in clothing à la the Three Musketeers, but it wasn’t. If there hadn’t been new and strange vampires in the room, I’m sure I would have noticed it sooner. Oh, yes, I would have noticed it sooner.
It was a picture of Cupid and Psyche, that traditional scene where Cupid asleep is finally revealed to the candle-wielding Psyche. Valentine’s Day has robbed Cupid of what he was in the beginning. He was not a chubby sexless baby with wings. He was a god, a god of love.
I knew who had posed for Cupid, because no one else had ever had that golden hair, that long, flawless body. I had memories of what Asher had looked like before, but I’d never seen it, not me, myself. I walked towards the painting like a flower pulled towards the sun. It was irresistible.
Asher lay on his side in the painting, one hand curled against his stomach, the other hand flung outward, limp with sleep. His skin glowed golden in the candlelight, only a few shades lighter than the foam of hair that framed his face and shoulders.
He was nude, but that word didn’t do him justice. The candlelight made his skin glow warm from the broadening of his shoulders to the curve of his feet. His nipples were like dark halos against the swell of his chest, his stomach was flat to the grace of his belly button as if an angel had touched that flawless skin and left a delicate imprint, a line of hair dark gold, almost auburn, traced the edge of his stomach, and ran in a line down, down to curl around him, where he lay swollen, partially erect, caught forever between sleep and passion. The curve of his hip was the most perfect few inches of skin that I’d ever seen. That curve drew the eye down to the line of his thigh, the long sweep of his legs.
I remembered with Jean-Claude’s memories what the curve of that hip had felt like under my fingertips. I remembered arguing about whose hip was the softest, the most perfect. Belle Morte had said that the lines of both their bodies were the closest to perfection she’d ever seen on a man. Jean-Claude had always believed that Asher was the more beautiful, and Asher had believed the same of Jean-Claude.
The artist had painted white wings on the sleeping figure, so detailed they looked as if they’d be soft if you could touch them. The wings were huge and reminded me of renaissance pictures of angels. They seemed out of place on that golden body.
Psyche was peering around the edge of one wing, so that it shielded her upper body, yet revealed a shoulder, the edge of her body, down to that first curve of hip, but most of her was lost behind Cupid’s body. I frowned up at the picture. I knew that shoulder, the curve of the ribs under that white skin. Though traced with golden candlelight, I knew the line of that body. I’d expected Psyche to be Belle Morte, I’d been wrong.
I looked past the long black curls that didn’t so much hide the figure as decorate it, and the face peering around the candle’s edge was Jean-Claude’s. It took me a second to be sure, because he seemed more delicately beautiful than normal, until I realized that he was wearing makeup—that centuries-old version of it, anyway. Things had been done to soften the line of his face, make his lips more pouting. But the eyes, the eyes were unchanged, with their black lace of lashes and that drowning deep color.
The painting was too large for me to stand next to the fireplace and see it all, but there was something about the eyes of the Cupid figure. I had to move close to see that they were open a mere slit, enough to show the cold blue fire that I’d seen when the hunger was upon Asher.
Jean-Claude touched my face, and it made me jump. Damian had moved back, giving us space. Jean-Claude traced the tears on my cheeks. The look in his eyes said clearly that I was crying tears for both of us. He couldn’t afford to appear weak in front of Musette. And I couldn’t help it.
We both turned to Asher, but he was standing as far away as the room would allow. He had turned away, so that all you could see of his face was that golden fall of hair. His shoulders were slightly hunched, as if he’d been struck.
Musette came to stand on the other side of Jean-Claude. “Our mistress thought, since you are together again as of old, that you would enjoy this little reminder of days gone by.”
The look I gave her around Jean-Claude’s shoulder was not a friendly one. I saw the girl who was her pomme de sang on the other side of the couch. I hadn’t even been aware she’d moved away from the fireplace. If the bad guys had wanted to take me out, they could have done it, because I had seen nothing for a few minutes but the painting.
“The painting is our guest gift to our host, but we have a more personal gift just for Asher.”
Angelito moved up beside her like a dark mountain, a much smaller painting in his hands. There were remnants of the paper and twine that had covered it like a discarded skin on the floor. It was half the size of the other, but ob
viously in the same style, realistic, but in glowing colors, hyperrealistic, very Titian.
The only light in the painting was firelight, the glow of the forge. Asher’s body was colored gold and crimson with the reflected firelight. He was nude again, the edge of the anvil hid his groin, but the right side of his body was bare to the light. Even his hair was tied back in a loose ponytail so that the right side of his face couldn’t be hidden. His arms were still strong as they pretended to forge the blade that lay on the anvil, but the right side of his face, the right side of chest, his stomach, his thigh, were a melted ruin.
These were not the old white scars that I was used to seeing, these were raw, red, discolored, angry lines, like some monster had slashed and gouged at his body. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a memory that was not mine.
Asher lying on the floor of the torture room, freed of the silver chains, the men who had tormented him slaughtered around him, in an explosion of blood. He reached out to us, his face . . . his face . . .
I swooned, and Jean-Claude and I fell in a heap on the floor, because I was experiencing directly what he was remembering.
Damian and Jason moved up beside us, but Asher stayed well back. I didn’t blame him in the least.
8
“ASHER, COME AND see your gift,” Musette called.
Damian was already on the ground beside me, his hands on my shoulders, fingers digging in. I think he was afraid of what I would do. He should have been.
Asher’s voice came strained, but clear, “I have seen that particular gift before. I know it well.”
“Do you wish us to return to Belle Morte and tell her you did not appreciate her gift?”
“You may tell Belle Morte, that I have gotten exactly what she wished me to get out of her gifts.”
“And what is that?”
“I am reminded of what I was, and of what I am.”
I got to my feet, Damian still with a death grip on my shoulders. Jean-Claude rose gracefully like a puppet pulled by invisible strings. I would never be that graceful, but tonight it didn’t matter.
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