She spread her arms wide, chin coming up. “I am Belle Morte, I am Beautiful Death, gaze upon me, desire me, but come to me, my petite ones, and I will give you all you desire.”
I had a flash of memories of Jean-Claude and Asher and a speech like this for both of them separately. I saw her offer herself to others in front of them, countless others. But none of us wanted her, none of us were tempted, that had so not been the case the last time she’d visited us. Then I’d known that Jean-Claude would always love her; he could run away from her, but he could never be free of her. Now the three of us who had been touched by her didn’t want to be touched again, and Richard was the difference. He hadn’t been there through any of the other times, and now he was our rock in the tide of temptation, because he wasn’t tempted.
Jean-Claude took Richard’s lack of interest and built on it so we could all stare at her with cold eyes. We could pull ourselves apart from each other so that Richard lay beside me, holding me, and Jean-Claude could hug Asher and reach up to undo one wrist from the chains. In a way, we ignored her, though it was like ignoring a leopard that just happened to be walking through your living room. Maybe if you ignored it the cat would keep moving, but then again, maybe it would stop and want a snack.
Rejection wasn’t something that Belle Morte had dealt with much in the last two thousand years. She didn’t deal well with it. Her anger filled her eyes with pale, brown fire, like staring at the sun through dark glass, but as the sun can burn skin if magnified through glass, so could Belle’s power if you dared reject her.
Belle tried to flood us with the ardeur, but it was too well fed. We were sated. She held her hand out to the darkened room. I caught shadows and realized the only light was torchlight. Where was she? “Lust is no longer my only weapon, Jean-Claude. Feel my new power and learn to fear me again.” The scent of roses was thicker, but underneath that was the scent of jasmine, and that had never been Belle’s perfume.
A fresh thrill of fear painted my skin in cold goose bumps. Jasmine was the scent of the Mother of All Darkness, but she was dead, her body destroyed by the mercenaries the Vampire Council had hired to do the job. I’d heard her last scream in my mind from thousands of miles away. She was gone, so why did Belle Morte smell of roses and jasmine?
Jean-Claude had used Richard and his connection to the wolves to help us, but Belle’s animals were all cats. I smelled leopard. The leopard inside me woke and began to pad up that long path in my head. My beast liked the scent of the leopard touching Belle, and we liked Belle. For the first time she tried to call me as if I were just another wereleopard and she my master. “You are still warm, Anita. Jean-Claude can cut your vampire away from me, but he doesn’t hold leopard, and you don’t know enough to fight me.”
I thought about my leopards, Micah and Nathaniel, and I knew they were coming. I reached out and tasted Damian’s power. I called him to me. Belle had opened us too wide and I could feel so many people. It was as if she’d peeled away my shields, like breaking into a house by tearing down an entire wall. I couldn’t keep her out, but I was suddenly sensing people that I’d never been able to sense before. I knew that Rafael, the wererat king, was sitting at a table at a restaurant with others of his rodere, his animal group. I knew that the swan king was in St. Louis visiting our local swanmanes. It was as if anyone I had ever fed the ardeur on was suddenly clear in my mind. Face after face, body after body, and I realized that Belle was shifting through them like shuffling a deck of cards.
“You have done my bloodline proud, Anita; look at all of them, taste them, feel them,” she said.
Jean-Claude undid Asher’s other wrist, and Richard went to him, helped him hold the other man, who was still too lost in afterglow. The moment that Richard wasn’t touching me, the leopard inside me started to run. It would hit the surface of me and burst on my skin in a rush of pain and damage. Belle laughed that musical, slithering, seductive, frightening laugh.
Then Jean-Claude touched Richard’s skin, even a small brush and he thrust that coolness, that calmness that Richard had learned from the tigers into my leopard, and my beast did slow, but she was still walking toward the light with a sense of purpose. Jean-Claude and Richard carried Asher back to me, laid him on one side of me, and Richard laid down on the other. Asher slid down on the bed so he could cuddle his head against my shoulder, his arm around my waist. Asher was still boneless and fighting back to full awareness; as he’d said, he didn’t have a triumvirate so he didn’t have the energy we did to fight her. He needed a werehyena, which was his animal to call. I thought it to Nathaniel and Micah, and more-distant Damian.
Jean-Claude lay on the other side of Asher, but he put an arm across the bed, and Richard and he clasped wrists, and Jean-Claude put a hand across Asher to take my hand in his. The moment we touched we were more solid. The shadowy torch-lit room was foggy around the edges, beginning to recede like a bad dream.
Then the scent of evil flowers was stronger, like we were bathing in jasmine perfume, but underneath was heat, dry grass, and then lion. The scene in my mind came into focus again like crystal, all hard edges and unbelievably brilliant in color the way dreams so seldom are. She stood there pushing lion and leopard at us and we had only wolf touching us. It wasn’t enough.
She smiled, and the scent of roses and jasmine grew stronger. Jean-Claude said, “Belle, what have you done?”
“The roses are your scent, but jasmine is Marmee Noir,” I said.
Jean-Claude said again, “What have you done, Belle?”
“She was the Mother of us all. If we had let her power die with her, we would all have died,” Belle Morte said.
“That is a lie,” Jean-Claude said, “a lie to keep us from attacking those that made us.”
“We were not willing to take that chance,” she said, and I felt her power reaching out to us, almost visible like some evil fog. I didn’t know what she meant to do with it, but if she had truly swallowed some of the Mother of All Darkness, then I didn’t want any of that power to touch us. But it was as if the mist were a trick, a sleight of hand to keep me looking in the wrong direction, because her power was just suddenly there, against my body. I could feel a claw digging under my ribs. It tore a gasp of pain from me, and blood began to spill down the front of my body. Belle had never been able to cut from a distance with her animals. But it was more than that; it was as if the invisible claw were a hand being held out to my leopard, saying, Come, take my hand, let me free you, and no matter how much control I thought I had on the beasts inside me, they all wanted out. They were all frustrated with this human body that would not let them come out and play.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” Belle said, and then she called it in French, but the language didn’t matter, only the power. I writhed and fought not to scream.
Richard put his hand on my stomach and I felt that soothing power again. He stroked my leopard as he’d petted the wolf before. The leopard snarled at him, but it stopped racing for the surface. It circled, snarling in frustration. My leopard was stopped, but Belle wasn’t. She clawed at my skin, and faint red lines appeared across my stomach.
“I am not so easily stopped now, necromancer. I have the power of the Mother of us all in me, and you cannot stand against it.”
The door opened and Nathaniel, Micah, and Damian were there with one of our new female vampires holding Damian’s hand. Her name was Cardinal after her red curls, though they were more gold-red than Damian’s; nothing was quite as bloodred as his long straight hair, just as his eyes were the green of a cat’s eyes, inhumanly beautiful, though I knew that the eyes were the color he’d had in life. He was almost six feet tall, which made Cardinal very tall for a woman in the century she’d died in, thin and small breasted, boyishly hipped under her silk robe. In her day she’d have been too thin, but now she looked like a model.
Micah and Nathaniel reached the bed first and just climbed onto it. Micah was wearing purple silk boxers, but Nathaniel was nude, which meant they’d
been in bed sleeping, or trying to; most of the wereanimals wore nothing to bed if I didn’t make them. Lately I’d stopped insisting on it. It was only the group leaders who seemed to throw something on for walking around in the Circus.
I held my hand out and Nathaniel touched me first. The power flared like a warm wind over my skin. The moment his power touched mine the claws hurt a little less, but Nathaniel flinched and I saw red lines appear on his skin. He was sharing the damage but not stopping it. Micah knelt by my legs, putting his hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder and my thigh. His power was like a soothing wash of water, a calm deep pool, and his beast swirled up through his body and crossed that barrier into me. There was a moment of feeling his beast slide into me and then I could feel it rubbing its silken fur against my side. I could feel our beasts greeting each other with that long sinuous cat rub from cheek to hip, and at the same time it felt as if the fur was rubbing along the inside of my human body, so there was a moment of disorientation, of being my leopard, his leopard, and me at the same time. The two leopards turned as one, snarling, at the power that was trying to dig its way into us.
Micah and I had been enough to chase Belle out once before. She hadn’t been prepared for us to be a true Nimir-Ra and Nimir-Raj. With Nathaniel as my leopard to call, we were enough. We pushed her back. The scent of jasmine and roses began to fade.
“Not this time, Anita,” Belle said, and I smelled sun on dry grass, and a beating, pulsing heat, and there were bigger claws pushing at my stomach. The lioness looked up from deep inside me and began her walk up the road. “You have no lion to call yet, and you have not joined yourself to the local Rex. You cannot win this. I will bring your beast and make you my animal to call, Anita.”
I thought lion and I felt two of them, distant but reacting. One was Haven, our local Rex, and the other was Nicky, who was something less than an animal to call, and something more. He was a Bride, my Bride. It didn’t mean marriage; it meant I’d rolled his mind so completely that he was worse than a slave. I’d meant to roll him, but the results were frightening even to me. To Nicky I said, Come, but to Haven I said, Don’t. The local Rex was off my feeding schedule for starting a fight with Nathaniel and Micah one morning, and for “marrying” a female werelion and lying to her and me that she was his Regina. It had been a ploy to make me jealous; when it hadn’t worked he’d annulled the marriage and sent her packing. It was like he was stuck in a sitcom mentality and didn’t know how to behave in the real world. He projected the thought that he was coming. I thought back, No, don’t. I had a werelion closer; I didn’t need two.
Damian stood beside the bed in a new silk robe that was almost the same green as his eyes, with Cardinal pulling on his hand. He turned to her and I heard him say, “You’ve seen Belle’s court. Do you want her in charge here, too?”
She blinked big blue eyes, shook her head over and over, but she let go of his pale hand and let him crawl onto the bed. He had the palest skin of any of the vampires in our kiss, our group, because in life he’d probably been paler, too. Damian lay down, putting his upper body across my bare legs, and the moment that he and Nathaniel touched me, while Jean-Claude and Richard touched me, it was as if we were a wind, a storm edge that forced back whatever Belle was trying to do. Damian was my vampire servant, an impossibility, but through him and Nathaniel I had my own triumvirate. I was the equivalent of the master vampire for them, and Jean-Claude still had his triumvirate with Richard and me. Triumvirates of power were rare among vampires; to have two that we could draw on was unheard of. Belle’s image began to grow dim again.
“I told you it would take more of us,” said a man’s voice from Belle’s vision. I smelled the grass and heat of lion, and the thick pine of forest and the musk of wolf, and rain and jungle, thick and exotic and leopard. I knew who it was before the vision cleared and the Master of Beasts stood with Belle Morte. He was one of the darkest-complected vampires I’d ever met, pale with death, but he’d been dark enough in life that he could only be so pale. He was Indian, as in the country, not Native American. He wore what I used to think of as harem pants with a matching sparkly vest over a silk shirt. It would have looked like a cheap costume except that the sparkle on his clothes wasn’t sequins but real small jewels sewn in patterns. He was another Vampire Council member. He’d actually come to St. Louis once and tried to take over, or at least torment us. We’d killed his son, who he’d brought with him, for raping and torturing some of our people. It didn’t surprise me that he’d be willing to help Belle possess us. It only surprised me that he hadn’t tried to do something to us sooner.
He could call almost every kind of wereanimal, and he had three of them clustered around him now. He smiled out at us. It was a very unpleasant smile. “Jean-Claude, Master of the City of St. Louis, greetings from the Council on High. We have come to tame you tonight as I have tamed all my beasts.” Except for his wife, who had been a wererat and given him his now deceased son, he ruled by fear and power, as Belle ruled by seduction, power, and fear.
“We are not so easily tamed as all that,” Jean-Claude said, and he settled back against the bed with all of us clustered around him, touching and being touched. I felt him think that the sight would bother Padma, Master of Beasts, because his line of vampire didn’t use sex as their tools. Nothing we would be willing to do would scandalize Belle Morte.
“You say that, but you have two triumvirates of power in your bed. We are still using only our beasts to call, and yet the vision remains even,” Padma said, and I knew before he called them who would come to his hands. Captain Thomas Carswell was still dressed in a version of the British uniform he’d worn when he was a soldier for Queen Victoria in the 1800s. His dark gold hair was still cut short and neat, but the brownish mustache that curled across his upper lip and up to meet his sideburns always made me unable to really see his face. Still, you had to admire a man who had worn the same look for more than a century. He was Padma’s human servant, but the only time I’d seen them in person, well, it hadn’t been a love match between him and his master. In fact neither he nor Gideon, Padma’s animal to call, liked their master very much. Gideon’s hair was still somewhere between brown and blond, but it was longer than last time, shoulder length now, thick and straight with an edge of wave to it as if the longer it got the more it would wave. His eyes were still yellow with orange pinwheels, tiger eyes. I knew he had kitty-cat fangs upper and lower in his mouth. His master had forced him to stay in tiger form too long and now Gideon didn’t come completely back.
The more vampires I met, the better a master Jean-Claude seemed in comparison.
Padma made a gesture, and first Gideon touched his shoulder, still standing behind him, and then Thomas raised a slow hand. He said, “If I had a choice, I would not help him do this.”
“I believe that,” I said, and then there was no air for talking. There was nothing but power. Padma was the storm now, a hot wind blowing out of the edge of a painful hell to make Damian, Nathaniel, and me scream. Micah reached out to the other leopards in the city and fed that power into us. There was a moment where I could draw a breath, but it was as if every beast inside me were trying to come to the surface at once. Padma was muttering in French under his breath. I couldn’t understand the words, but my beasts could and they clawed and fought inside me like a crowd with one narrow door and a fire behind them, except that the door they fought at was the inside of my body. I screamed, and then Micah was there, and Richard’s wolf, and they chased back two of the beasts, soothed and calmed them with what we’d learned from the weretigers. They should have been able to calm them all regardless of beastie form, or that was what we’d discovered was possible, but it was as if the tigress and lioness inside me spoke a different language that none of us could speak. Padma spoke it.
I reached out for tiger and found Crispin curled in bed with Gina and her boyfriend. I felt him look up, and felt Domino farther away with Nicky, and knew that Domino was already hurrying this way with th
e werelion.
The only good thing was that I was the only one writhing in pain. Padma’s attack was narrowly focused on me. His voice came through the pain. “I control all the beasts you carry, Anita; I am the perfect weapon against you.”
There were no claw marks on the outside of my skin; this was different power, and it was my skin that pushed out as if things were fighting to get out through my body. I watched a claw stretch up against my skin like some horrible baby caught inside me. It felt like the claws were ripping up things that no hand should have ever been able to touch with my skin still intact, and I screamed. The pain had to come out somehow, and my body couldn’t free the beasts clawing inside me.
Crispin was suddenly above me, pale blue tiger eyes wide. He’d been born with the eyes of his beast. His short, curly white hair stayed the color of his tiger form as his eyes never changed. I hadn’t heard or felt him come into the room; the pain was too much, it was eating the world. He held my face between his big hands and forced me to look at him. He was my white tiger to call, and he’d been trained since puberty to help the women of the white tiger clan not to shapeshift while they were pregnant.
He soothed the beasts, all of them, and I was left breathing too hard, lying on the bed staring into the calm of his pale blue eyes. He smiled down at me. “Better,” he said.
I swallowed and realized my throat was raw from screaming. “Better,” I whispered.
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