Reluctant Partnerships

by Ariel Tachna

Jean nodded. “It could undo all our hard work over the past two years to convince people of vampires’ right to be treated fairly and our ability to live within the confines of the law.”

  “That’s what you have to make people understand,” Raymond said. “That he isn’t living within the confines of the law, human or vampire, and that vampires are as upset about his behavior as mortals will be when they learn about it. It will be an uphill battle, no doubt about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s one we have to lose. I need to sleep a little and then we’ll go see Anne-Marie again and get the legal people at l’ANS started on legislation we can propose. We’ll deal with this the same way we’ve dealt with everything else since the alliance began.”

  Jean smiled, the simple reminder reassuring him. “Together.”

  Adèle let herself into her house in Château-Chinon, resetting the wards and locking the door behind her. She tossed her keys and wand in the basket she kept by the door so she wouldn’t have to search for them in the morning and stretched, her back arching as she reached toward the ceiling. Her whole body hurt from the tension of being in the same room with Pascale and not letting anyone see the turmoil. The stretches helped, but they would not relax her enough for her to sleep.

  Pulling the pins from the chignon that kept her long hair confined during the day, she shook it out, feeling that bit of tension leave her as well. She walked slowly through the small house to the bathroom, turning the hot water on full and closing the door to keep the heat inside. She would soak until she was wrinkled and then go to bed.

  And forget about the woman in Paris who could be her partner if Adèle would let her.

  Stripping down, she climbed in the tub, hissing as the hot water hit her chilled skin. It would be time to turn the heat on soon, and then another long, cold winter. Every winter she swore she would move to Provence, but she never did. No matter how much she cursed the cold weather, this was home in a way no other place had ever been.

  Settling into the water, she closed her eyes and wondered how she had managed to be the one driving along the road from Dommartin to Château-Chinon at exactly the right—or wrong—moment to find Pascale. Any of the wizards associated with the now-defunct Milice de Sorcellerie would have done the same thing she had done, but none of them would have had to worry about the consequences, because they all had partners. They would have calmed Pascale down, taken her back to l’Institut or on to Paris to see Angelique, and gone home to their partners. Instead, Adèle had to be the one to find her. Adèle, who did not have a partner to go home to. Adèle, who had hated having a partner the first time around.

  “I don’t want another partner, damn it,” she muttered, dunking her head beneath the water so she could wash her hair. “The one I had the first time was bad enough.”

  Jude had been gone for six months, mostly out of her life for a year before that, and yet she still tensed when she saw a shadow across a doorway, expecting to hear his voice drawling, “Hello, pussy” in greeting before he grabbed her.

  She shuddered in disgust at herself as she felt her body react to the mere thought of him touching her. If only her body had reacted with the same disgust as her mind, she might have been able to deal with him, but even as he had spewed filth at her, he had aroused her as none of her previous lovers had ever done.

  Even with a partner she had hated, the partnership had turned sexual. Adèle had no illusions a new partnership would be any less so. She had nothing against sex, but she liked men, and her potential new partner was most definitely not a man. She might have said that would make it easier to keep her partnership on a functional level only, but she had seen what happened with Sebastien and Thierry. She was not in Thierry’s confidence, so perhaps he had been bisexual before meeting Sebastien and she had simply been unaware of it, but one way or another, he had gone from being married to being partnered with Sebastien. She had seen them together during the war and since then. They showed all the same hallmarks of a deeper relationship that she had remarked in Alain and Orlando or Jean and Raymond. She had never been invited into their quarters at l’Institut, where they lived full-time now, but she doubted she would find more than one bed if she were.

  She could not care less about what they did in the privacy of their own rooms. Their relationship was their business, but she had no interest in copying it. She had never looked at women in any kind of sexual manner. Sure, she could see why men would find certain women more attractive than others or say whether an outfit was flattering on another woman, but that was hardly the same as wanting to take one to her bed.

  She liked men.

  “This is getting me nowhere,” she muttered with a sigh. Scrubbing quickly, she got out of the bath and dried off, wrapping her hair in a thick towel to blot some of the water out before blowing it dry. As she dressed, she tried to imagine sharing her house with another woman. Two sets of toiletries on the edge of the tub, two brushes, two hairdryers, two nightgowns instead of one. She could list the changes, but she could not fathom making them. She had never shared her house with anyone. She had never met anyone she wanted to share her life with that way, certainly not her former partner, yet if she accepted that she had a new partner, she had to be open to those changes.

  As set in her ways as she was, she could make those changes if she had the right incentive, if she met the right man. And therein lay the rub. On the rare occasions she imagined a relationship, it had always been with a man.

  Adèle had little patience with her own sex most of the time, finding far too many of them melodramatic, weepy, or weak. She could think of a few exceptions. Magali Ducassé, the wizard who had always stayed behind at the end of a battle to mop up, was possibly the deadliest wizard Adèle knew, and given some of the things Adèle had seen during l’émeutte des Sorciers, that was saying something. Angelique Bouaddi at Sang Froid had always struck Adèle as being a shrewd entrepreneur who ran her business with an iron fist despite her ultra-feminine appearance. If Angelique had been her partner rather than David’s, Adèle might not have hesitated as much. She could picture a functioning partnership with a woman like Angelique, intelligent, savvy, wily, even, and not afraid to go after what she wanted.

  Magali was not a vampire, so a partnership with her was out of the question, but Adèle had worked with her during the war and had found that collaboration to be nearly seamless. If Magali were a vampire, Adèle thought perhaps they could make something of a partnership as well.

  Adèle could not claim to know Pascale well, but nothing in what she had seen of the newly turned vampire gave her any reason to respect the other woman. Being turned was a life-changing experience. Adèle understood that, but she did not understand the impulse to self-destruction. She had never been one to bemoan what could not be changed, choosing to work through the challenges in her life and to come out stronger on the other side. Pascale’s histrionics were exactly the kind of display that made Adèle roll her eyes and dismiss a person from her esteem. She would never be able to make a partnership work with someone like that, male or female. She would lose patience and shout, as she was wont to do, and Pascale would wail and storm out, and that would be the end of it.

  Better never to begin.

  Raymond went to the réfectoire for breakfast the next morning, leaving Jean in their rooms busily contacting other chefs de la Cour. Halfway through the night, Jean had left their bed to pace the sitting room. Raymond had given up luring him back to bed when even walking into the room naked had not gotten his lover’s attention. It drove home the gravity of the situation with the nonconsensual turning far more than anything else could have done. Jean had never passed up a chance to ravish him before, even when they were still pretending their relationship was only functional.

  After breakfast, Raymond would call Anne-Marie Valour, his replacement as president of l’ANS, and set up a meeting with her to discuss the situation and the legislation, but no one would be at the office this early.

  To his surprise, Martin Delacro
ix sat at one of the tables nursing a cup of coffee. “Good morning,” Raymond said, bringing his own coffee and croissants to the table. “I didn’t expect to see you awake this morning.”

  “I haven’t been to sleep,” Martin admitted. “My mind is racing too fast to relax.”

  “Would it help to talk about it?” Raymond asked. “I have a few things to do this morning, but nothing that can’t wait an hour or two. We could go to my office and hash things out.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?” Martin asked. “I don’t want to take you away from your responsibilities.”

  “I don’t mind,” Raymond said. “Alain and Orlando can handle the morning’s session by themselves. They’ve done it plenty of times now, and while I’m slated to present this afternoon, I hope we can settle your mind in less than five hours.”

  “I hope so too,” Martin said with a laugh. “I’d like to sleep at some point. Coffee and adrenaline are only good for so long.”

  Raymond did not add his own suggestion for pushing his limits past their normal range. During the war, Jean feeding from him had often allowed him to stretch his waking hours into longer days than should have been possible, but Raymond had no intention of sharing his lover with anyone. Not that Jean could feed from any other mortal, even if he wanted to or Raymond agreed. The brand on Raymond’s back saw to that.

  “If you don’t mind me eating while we talk, we can go now,” Raymond said. “The sooner we get started, the sooner you can sleep.”

  Martin nodded and followed Raymond through the building to the director’s office that he and Jean shared, more because Jean had a tendency to end up wherever Raymond was working anyway. It had happened when Raymond was president of l’ANS, and it happened even more now.

  “So what’s on your mind?” Raymond asked, taking a seat in one of the armchairs and gesturing for Martin to make himself comfortable in either the other one or on the couch.

  “I read up on l’émeutte des Sorciers before I came,” Martin began slowly, “every scrap of news I could find. I studied all the conventional wisdom about vampires. I wanted to arrive having done my homework. I walked out of the session last night feeling like I knew nothing at all.”

  “There is a difference between reading about something and living it,” Raymond agreed, “or talking with people who lived it. Thierry is quite a compelling speaker when he starts on the topic of the war and the desperation that led to the alliance.”

  “Did Serrier truly believe he could establish and maintain a magical oligarchy?” Martin asked. “That’s madness.”

  “No more so than Hitler and his Aryan race,” Raymond replied. “Serrier went mad before the end. I wasn’t there when he was killed during the final battle. I was elsewhere, helping Jean deal with a rogue vampire, but from what I heard of those final moments, there’s no doubt he had left the realm of sanity some time before. When he first started his campaign, though, he was using very different rhetoric. He started with the restrictions on the use of magic that many wizards felt—and still feel—are unnecessarily limited. By the time his madness became clear, a lot of wizards were in too deep to get out. In fact, I’m only aware of two who did so successfully. He killed the others.”

  “How to win friends and influence people,” Martin said with a shake of his head. “And the magical equilibrium was dangerously out of balance. You’d think wizards from other countries would have noticed and helped.”

  “I have a theory on that,” Raymond said, “although I have no real way of testing it. The local equilibrium was completely haywire, but I’m not sure how widespread that was outside of France other than the typhoon that hit la Réunion. I was too busy at the time fighting a war to check beyond that, and now it’s too late. And honestly, the last thing we wanted was to drag more wizards into our fight, because we risked losing as many to Serrier as we recruited to our side. We needed local people who we could convince of the negative ramifications of Serrier winning. The vampires were the logical choice.”

  “Why?”

  “In hindsight, the answer to that is why we’re here, but we didn’t know any of that at the time,” Raymond said with a laugh. “At the time, we had to weigh the weaknesses of each of the magical races against their strengths. Vampires are limited by daylight unless they have a wizard partner—something else we didn’t know at the time—but they are fast, strong, ruthless, and most importantly, they were willing to help us.”

  “The vampires during the session didn’t seem particularly trusting,” Martin observed. “How in the world did you convince them to help?”

  “Chance, mostly,” Raymond admitted. “If Marcel—Général Chavinier, the former president of l’ANS, leader of the Milice de Sorcellerie, and the man for whom l’Institut is named—if Marcel had chosen a different emissary, I don’t know that we would have been successful. For that matter, I don’t know if the alliance would have happened if Jean had sent someone else to the meeting. Alain and Orlando met the first time, Orlando tasted Alain’s blood to verify he was telling the truth, and the rest is history. Their instant connection to each other gave them each the incentive to press for cooperation, not just initially, but for weeks into the alliance. I can’t count the number of times Orlando, especially, shouted that we would never be successful if we fought each other instead of fighting Serrier.”

  “So they knew they were partners immediately?” Martin verified.

  “Not in those terms,” Raymond replied. “You have to remember we didn’t know anything about the magical exchange we’ve dubbed a partnership. We went looking for allies in a war. We found them, but we found so much more as well. Even now, two years later, we’re still discovering ramifications of the relationships we created. At the time, we knew nothing. Orlando knew he felt something special when he fed from Alain. Alain knew he felt more than he could have imagined possible when Orlando bit him. That led them to make a commitment to each other, the Aveu de Sang we mentioned last night, but we still had no idea what the lesser partnership commitment involved. The Aveu de Sang was between them. It was only later, as the partnerships spread and began to deepen, that we realized there was far more to a partnership than the exchange of blood and the protection from sunlight for the vampires.”

  “Within months of forming the alliance, Serrier was dead and the Milice was victorious,” Martin commented. “There was obviously a whole lot more going on beneath the surface.”

  “We didn’t realize it until nearly the last days of the war, but every wizard with a partner was getting stronger every time his vampire fed,” Raymond explained. “We knew about the short-term effects before then, but not that it was cumulative. By the time the war ended, that increase had been going on for months. Serrier was still a powerful wizard, but alone, he couldn’t have stood against any pair. He certainly couldn’t stand against Marcel and his partner.”

  “I didn’t realize the general had a partner,” Martin interrupted.

  “He does and he doesn’t,” Raymond explained. “There is a vampire who could be his partner, but that vampire lives in seclusion and chooses not to feed from Marcel. He was at the final battle, though, augmenting Marcel’s strength as he faced Serrier.”

  “So it is possible to have a partnership and not have it take over your life,” Martin said.

  “Maybe,” Raymond replied, “but they spent a matter of hours together. Monsieur Lombard fed twice, maybe three times in that span of time. To my knowledge, while they still meet to discuss politics and who knows what else, there has been no exchange of blood between them since then. While Alain and Orlando’s bond was instantaneous, that doesn’t always seem to be the case. Certainly the bond grows stronger with repeated exposure. Even most of us who have embraced our partners now took more than a few days—and a few feedings—to make that decision. Marcel may see his partner on a regular basis, but without the exchange of blood, there’s no exchange of magic and nothing to strengthen the bond.”

  “So does the bo
nd fade over time if the partners are separated?” Martin asked.

  “The only case of separation we’re aware of was Adèle Rougier and her partner Jude Leighton,” Raymond said. “Adèle chose not to continue their partnership after the war ended, a decision Jude did not agree with. By the time the war ended, though, their partnership had formed, however imperfectly. Leighton was destroyed in an accident at l’Institut six months ago, but at the time, he showed no lessening of interest in Adèle. She refuses to talk about her relationship with him, and since it’s no longer an issue, I haven’t forced the matter.”

  “That could be something worth investigating,” Martin mused aloud.

  “I know of one other pair that would be willing to be separated,” Raymond offered, “if that’s what you decide you want to look into. Another option would be to work on the increase in magical strength. We have intake numbers for wizards who have been through the seminar here, and we have post-war numbers for the wizards who formed their partnerships during the alliance. We have no idea what the limits are, or indeed if there are limits or other parameters for the increases. We haven’t had time to examine the data we have, much less set up any active experiments to test it.”