I frowned at him, because I wasn’t following. “What’s a good idea?”
“Rubbing your face in my body,” he said, his voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
I blushed and hoped he couldn’t see it in the dark. “It’s an expression, Richard. You know I didn’t mean it.”
“I know,” he said, “but it’s still a good idea.”
I stepped back. “Go away, Richard.”
“You don’t know the way to the lupanar,” he said.
“I’ll find it on my own; thanks, anyway.”
He started to reach out to touch my face, and I almost stumbled backing up. He flashed me a quick smile and was gone, running through the trees. I could feel the roil of power like wind in a sail. He rode the energy of the woods, the night, the moon overhead, and if I wanted to, I could go along for the ride. I stood there, hugging my arms, concentrating everything I had on blocking him out, cutting the power between us.
When I felt alone and locked within my own skin again, I opened my eyes. Jason was standing so close it made me jump. It also made me realize how careless I’d been.
“Damn, Jason, you scared me.”
“Sorry. I thought someone should stay behind and make sure no vampires made off with you.”
“Thanks, I mean that.”
“You all right?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
He grinned, and there was almost enough moonlight to see the laughter in his eyes. “He’s getting better at it,” Jason said.
“Getting better at what?” I asked. “Being Ulfric?”
“Seducing you,” Jason said.
I stared at him.
“You know how I was jealous of the way you looked at Asher?”
I nodded.
“The way you look at Richard . . .” He just shook his head. “It’s something.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” he said. “It doesn’t make you happy, but it matters.”
And to that, there wasn’t a damn thing I could say. We started walking through the woods in the general direction everyone else had been going. We didn’t need no stinking directions.
18
WE FOUND THE lupanar, and we didn’t need directions. We had Jason’s nose and my ability to sense the dead. I’d assumed that all lupanars were the same, but yards away from this one, I knew I was wrong. Whatever lay up ahead had death mixed in with it: old death. It felt almost like a restless grave. Sometimes you’d be out in the woods and find one. An old grave where someone was buried without rites, just a shallow hole in the ground. The dead don’t much care for shallow holes. It needs to be deep and wide or they get restless. Cremation takes care of all of it, actually. I’d never met a ghost of someone who had been cremated.
We could see the soft shine of lanterns through the trees when Jason stopped, touching my arm for attention. “I don’t like what I’m smelling,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“A body aboveground for a long time.”
“A zombie?” I made it a question.
He shook his head. “No, drier, older than that.”
We both looked at each other. I was pretty sure we were both thinking the same thing. Rotting vampire. I realized that I was clutching his arm, and he was clutching mine. We stood in the dark like children wondering if that noise was really a monster or if it was the wind. Neither of us took that next step to find out. If we’d had covers, we’d have been under them.
If we’d gone in there just to kill them, I’d have been all right. A slash-and-burn operation was my style lately. Every time we approached the vamps on their own territory by their own rules, we got hurt. I realized suddenly how much I did not want to walk into that place and negotiate with the monsters. I wanted to press a gun under Colin’s chin and pull the trigger. I wanted done with it. I did not want to walk in there and give him power over me through some ancient rules of hospitality among the terminally anemic.
Damian came gliding through the trees. He was dressed in the standard uniform of black leather pants so tight you knew that nothing else was under them but vampire. But he was wearing a black silk T-shirt with a scooped neck. It looked almost like a woman’s shirt. His shoulder-length hair helped the illusion of feminity, but the chest and shoulders that peeked out of the shirt ruined the effect: masculine, definitely masculine.
Jason was wearing an almost identical outfit, except the shirt and pants were satin. Though the knee-high boots were identical. For the first time, I realized that Jason was broader through the shoulders than Damian. Had that just happened recently? I looked from the werewolf to the vampire and shook my head. They grow up so fast.
What I said out loud was, “You guys look like backup singers for a Gothic band.”
“Everyone’s waiting for you,” Damian said.
I realized that I still didn’t want to go. I felt Jason shake his head. “No,” he said.
“You’re afraid,” Damian said.
Jason nodded. I frowned. Jason and I were both usually braver than this, no matter what nasty things were in the next room—or the next clearing, as the case may be.
“What’s up, Damian? What’s happening?”
“I told you what Colin was.”
“You called him a night hag. He can feed off fear. Was that supposed to be a clue?” I asked.
“He can also cause fear in others,” Damian said.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax my hold on Jason’s arm. He kept his death grip. “That makes sense,” I said. “They can always guarantee a meal that way, right?”
Damian nodded. “But he also enjoys it. Fear is like a drug to a night hag. My old master said it was better than blood, because she could walk through a world of fear. If she desired it, she could move through a world that trembled, ever so slightly, at her passing.”
“And that’s what Colin is doing tonight?” I said.
Jason dropped his hand from my arm. He stayed close enough that our arms brushed, but we weren’t huddling in the dark like rabbits.
“I can usually tell when a vamp is doing mind stuff on me. He’s good.”
“This is different from the other master-level powers, Anita. My first master said it was like breathing to a human, something you did without thinking about it. She could intensify it, but she could never really stop it. A low level dread surrounded her at all times.”
“Was she scary in bed?” Jason asked. I think he meant it as a joke.
The look on Damian’s face even by moonlight wasn’t funny. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, she was.” He looked at me, and there was an intensity in his face that I didn’t like. He actually reached out to me, then let his hand drop.
He finally said, “Some of the masters can feed off of other things, not just fear.”
“What else?” I asked.
Asher breathed through my mind, and he must have done the same to Damian, because we both jumped. His voice came like a whisper in a nearby room, almost as if it was sound without words. “Hurry.”
There was no more talk. We hurried.
The lantern light shone through the trees like small, yellow moons. Damian glided through that last line of trees into the clearing. I didn’t glide. I stumbled over the outer edge of the clearing. There was a power circle in this land so old and walked so often that it was like a curtain waiting to be drawn around the lupanar. It would take almost no power to bring whatever was here alive.
When I quit seeing with that inner vision and looked out into the clearing, I stopped walking. I just stood and stared. Jason stood and stared with me. Between the two of us, we were getting pretty jaded, but the lupanar of the Oak Tree Clan was worth a stare or two.
It was a huge clearing with an oak tree in the center of it, but that was like saying the Empire State Building is tall. The tree was like some great spreading giant. A hundred feet tall, rising up and up. There
was a body hanging from one of the lower branches. It was mostly skeleton with dried bits of tendon holding one arm on. The other arm had disintegrated, falling to the ground. There were bones everywhere under the tree. White bones, yellowed bones, bones so old they were grey from being weathered. A carpet of bones stretched out from beneath the tree, filling the clearing.
The wind picked up, hurrying through the forest. It sent the leaves on the oak rustling and whispering. The rope on the skeleton creaked as it swung in the wind. And with that one creak, my eyes went back to the tree, because there were dozens of creaking ropes. Most of them were empty now, broken or eaten to ragged ends, but those ropes creaked and moved with the wind, up and up. I followed the ropes up to the top of the tree as far as I could look in the dark by moonlight. The tree had to be over a hundred years old, and there were ragged bits of rope at its top. They’d been hanging bodies on this tree for a very long time.
The skeleton rotated suddenly in the growing wind, jaw gaping, empty sockets reflecting the lantern light for a second. The tendons at the jaw gave way, and the jaw hung, swinging on one side, like a broken hinge. I had a horrible urge to run across that boneyard and yank the jaw away, or reattach it, anything so that bit of bone would stop waggling in the wind.
“My God,” Jason whispered.
All I could do was nod. I wasn’t rendered speechless often, but I had no words for this.
Damian had stopped and moved back to stand by us. He seemed to be waiting, as if he were our escort. I finally tore my gaze away from the tree and its awful burden. There were benches forming three sides of a disconnected triangle. There was enough room between each bench that no one was unduly crowded, yet the clearing felt crowded, almost as if the air itself was thick with things unseen, hurrying to and fro, brushing past me in a rush of gooseflesh.
“Did you feel that?” I asked.
Jason looked at me. “Feel what?”
I guess not. That meant whatever was crowding so close in the air wasn’t something that a shapeshifter would pick up on. So what was it?
There was a vampire staring at me from where he sat on the near bench. His hair was brown, cut short so his neck was pale and bare. His eyes seemed very dark, maybe brown, maybe black. He smiled, and I felt his power rush over me. He was trying to capture me with his eyes. Usually, I would have tried to stare him down, but I didn’t like what I was feeling in this place. Power, and it wasn’t vampires. I looked away from his eyes, studying the pale curve of his cheek. His lips were full, with an upper lip that was set in a perfect bow, very feminine. The rest of the face was all points and angles; the chin sharp, the nose too long. It was a face that would be homely except for that mouth and those long-lashed eyes, dark and drowning deep as black mirrors.
I didn’t stare too long at those eyes. I was feeling unsteady, as if the ground under my feet wasn’t quite solid. Richard should have told me about the lupanar. Someone should have prepared me. Later, I’d be angry that no one had; now, I was just trying to figure out what to do about it. If Verne’s clan were practicing human sacrifice, then it had to be stopped.
Damian moved in front of me, blocking my view of the others. “What’s wrong, Anita?”
I looked at him. The only thing that kept me from losing it right then in front of the other vampires was Richard. He’d have never tolerated human sacrifice. Oh, he might have come down here once, then never returned, and not called the police, but he would never have returned year after year. He simply wouldn’t have approved.
Maybe this was the way Verne’s clan treated its dead. If it was anything else, I’d call in the state cops, but not tonight. Not unless they dragged out a screaming victim. If they did that, then all bets were off.
I shook my head. “What could possibly be wrong?” I said. I walked into the clearing, going for our own little group. It looked as if all three groups had the same amount of people. That was pretty typical of a meet between preternatural groups. You always negotiated your entourage.
Richard stood and came to meet me. I took his hand when he offered it, but strangely, right at that moment, I didn’t care if he was wearing his shirt or not. I was angry at him. Angry at him for not preparing me for this place. Maybe he thought that nothing shocked me anymore, or maybe. . . oh, hell, I didn’t know, but he’d screwed up again.
So I let him hold my hand, and the touch of his flesh meant nothing. I was too confused and working too hard on holding my temper to be seduced right then.
“Take the jacket off, child; let’s get a look at what you’ve got,” a voice said.
I turned, slowly, to look at the owner of that voice.
The vampire had hair that I would have called golden if I hadn’t had Asher’s hair to compare it to. The hair was cut short, all over. His eyes could have been blue or grey in the uncertain light. The face had frozen before he’d ever hit twenty. Still young enough that his face was thin and smooth, as if he’d died before he’d been able to grow a decent beard.
He had the face of a child on a tall, gangly frame, as if he’d been awkward in life. He wasn’t awkward as he stood. He came to his feet in a movement so smooth it looked like dancing. He stood, and the black-eyed vamp stood with him, coming to his side in a motion of long practice like they were two parts of a whole.
There was one human woman among the eight of them. She looked like pure Native American with waist-length hair that was as true black as my own. Hers was straight and thick. Her skin was a dark brown, face almost square, with large, brown eyes that had lashes so thick that even from a distance they were noticeable. If she wore any makeup, I couldn’t tell. She was one of those women that is striking rather than beautiful, too strong featured for conventional prettiness, but you wouldn’t forget the face once you saw it.
“Come on, girl, strip off,” that young face said. “We’ve seen most everything everybody else has. I will be mighty disappointed if I don’t get to see your goodies, too.”
The woman’s face remained marvelously blank, but there was a tightness to those strong shoulders, a slight turn to that long line of neck. She didn’t seem to be enjoying the show.
Richard’s hand tightened around mine. I thought at first he was trying to warn me not to get mad, but one glance at his face, and it was the other way around. He was getting pissed. The night would go downhill pretty damn fast if I was supposed to be the calm one.
“Are you always this offensive, or am I getting a special treat?” I asked.
He laughed, but it was just a laugh, ordinary, human. He couldn’t do the voice tricks that Jean-Claude and even Asher could do. Of course, Colin had other talents. I’d seen those other talents carved in Nathaniel’s chest.
Asher stood. He’d started the evening wearing satin a pale icy blue only two shades darker than his white-blue eyes. The jacket had darker blue embroidery at the sleeves and lapels. It fastened with one of those cloth loops over a large, silk-covered button. The pants matched the jacket perfectly. He’d tried the jacket on with no shirt. His chest had been very visible. The scars had seemed harsher against the soft blue cloth. He’d stared at himself in the room’s only mirror for a long time. He’d finally put a white silk shirt on under the jacket.
Now that white shirt was in tatters. It looked like gigantic claws had ripped at it. His chest showed very plainly through the ruined cloth. There was no blood. I’d only seen three vampires that could cause harm from a distance. One of them had been a member of their council. But none of them had had the delicacy of control to shred cloth so close to flesh and not draw blood. We were deep into the pissing contest. So far, Colin was winning.
I looked at Shang-Da and Jamil, standing just behind the bench. They looked untouched, unharmed.
“Some bodyguards,” I said.
“We’re not here to guard vampires,” Shang-Da said.
I looked at Jamil. He shrugged.
Great, just great. Zane was standing even farther behind the wolves. He didn’t look any worse for
wear, either, but he also looked lost, like the lone teetotaler at a wine tasting.
“Was I supposed to stop him?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No, Zane. Not you.” I spared a glance at Richard, wondering why he’d just let everyone stand around. Asher I understood. Asking for help was a sign of weakness.
“Remove the jacket, or I’ll remove it for you,” Colin said.
“Colin, you’ve made your point.” The woman’s voice was surprisingly deep, a rich, smoky alto.
Colin patted her hand, smiled, but his words weren’t gentle. “I will tell you when my point has been made, Nikki.” He moved away from her then, dismissed her, and the pain of that dismissal showed.
For a moment, anger flared in those dark eyes, and I felt her power. Her power, not his. She was a witch or a psychic or something I had no word for. Human in the same way I was human: barely.
The anger vanished behind that dark, stoic face, but I knew what I’d seen. She didn’t love him, nor he her. But she was his human servant, bound for all eternity, for better or worse.
“You want to see what’s under the jacket,” I said, “come over here and help me out of it. It’d be the gentlemanly thing to do.”
“Anita,” Richard said.
I patted his arm. “It’s okay, Richard. Chill.”
The look on his face was enough. He didn’t trust me to behave. Funny, in our own ways, neither of us trusted the other.
I looked at Asher. We shared no marks. We couldn’t read each other’s thoughts. But we didn’t need to. We were getting our butts kicked because the werewolves weren’t helping us.
I looked over at the eight werewolves that were local. Verne sat on the bench with his wolves poised around him. Two of them were in full wolf form, except they were the size of ponies, bigger than any normal grey wolf. Verne was still in his T-shirt and jeans. No one had dressed up but us. Even the other vampires were just in suits and dresses.
I’d never seen this many vampires dressed so . . . ordinarily. Most of them had a sense of style, or at least theater. They put on a good show. Of course, in the presence of the bone-draped tree, who needed a better show? Of course, the lupanar was supposed to be our showplace, not Colin’s. Again, I wondered if we could trust Verne as far as Richard thought we could.
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