"Jean-Claude, you cannot allow them to go to her island," said a voice from behind us. It was Asher. He was tall, pale, handsome, with long golden hair spilling around his shoulders. Nothing would ever make Asher physically less than gorgeous, but physical wasn't everything.
The bodyguards around the room came to attention, because the last time we'd interacted with Asher it had gotten nasty. I knew they were under orders to not let us be alone with him. His emotional instability made him dangerous, and sometimes that danger wasn't just to your heart.
"This is for my job, Asher. Jean-Claude doesn't control that." My voice was as angry as I felt. Nathaniel was right--we missed Asher topping us in the dungeon. I missed him being part of a threesome with Jean-Claude and me. I hated that I hadn't found anyone to replace Asher in those two places in my life. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference, and I wasn't indifferent to him yet. Which pissed me off, because I knew better.
Asher had spilled his hair across half his face like a golden veil, and like most veils, it was hiding things. His eyes were as pale a blue as Jean-Claude's were dark, a brilliant, icy blue. I caught the gleam of one through the lace of his hair, but the other eye was bright and visible, set in a face that was so gorgeous that he'd been the artists' model for paintings of angels and gods. "I have always respected your job, Anita. Whatever mistakes I have made in the past, I never presumed to tell you your job, and I am not now, but do not take Damian back to his old master and do not give her Nathaniel."
"We aren't taking him back to his old master, and we sure as hell aren't giving her anyone, let alone Nathaniel."
Asher held his hand out toward us, but it was to Jean-Claude he was giving the weight of those eyes, that face. "Jean-Claude, you have been at her mercy as well as I. You know what she is and what she is capable of. Please, by all that is holy, all that is left us, do not put our flower-eyed boy within her grasp."
"I'm not your flower-eyed boy anymore, Asher," Nathaniel said.
Asher's eyes glittered and I realized it was unshed tears. "And that is my fault, my flaw that drove you away. You have no idea how much I regret what I have done in the past few months. Only Julianna's death is a greater regret to me."
We all stared at him. Julianna's death had been the great tragedy that had driven a wedge between him and Jean-Claude. She had been their heart, and when she'd died it died with them.
"That is a bold statement, mon ami, if only you meant it."
"I swear to you, Jean-Claude, that I mean every word."
"Your word of honor?"
"Yes."
Asher was an old enough vampire that his word of honor meant something. An oath breaker was not trusted among the older vampires, and for some broken oaths it was a death sentence.
"Sudden contrition does not seem like something you would feel," Jean-Claude said.
"I have been full of regret for weeks, but I could not . . . decide . . . create . . . a way to convince you of my deep regret until I heard what you are planning, and then I did not care if you believed. I would rather give up Nathaniel forever than let him go to that cursed . . . beast."
That was the first thing he'd said that I was really interested in. I asked, "Do you mean that literally? Is She-Who-Made-Damian old enough to be a lycanthrope and a vampire like the Mother of All Darkness was? And do you mean a real curse, or are you just being dramatic?"
Asher shook his head so that his hair swung just enough to give a glimpse of the scars that he was using it to hide. He used his hair a lot like Nicky did, except Asher simply let the long waves spill down over his scars; of course he had more of them to cover. He had two good eyes, but an inch or two out from the corner of his kissable mouth were burn scars. They trailed down his cheek and skipped his neck, but the right side of his chest looked like it had melted and re-formed. Holy water acts like acid on vampire flesh, and that was what the Church had used to try to burn the devil out of Asher centuries ago.
"She is a beast in the old sense of being a monster, but she cannot transform her physical body. She is a vampire and we are all cursed, but beyond that I am being dramatic, as you say."
"We were with her a few centuries ago. You are being overly dramatic," Jean-Claude said.
"I was with her longer than you, Jean-Claude."
Jean-Claude drew Nathaniel and me into his arms so he could hug us both. I don't know if it was to comfort himself or to rub Asher's losses in his face. I didn't care. I was good with both. Asher deserved to be reminded that he'd behaved so badly he'd lost all of us and more in one fell swoop.
"After you fled to the New World, Belle had less use for me. She could not use me to torment you anymore."
"We have been through this," Jean-Claude said, his voice very serious and very unhappy, but his arms tightened around us, so that we both curled an arm around his waist to let us be as close as he seemed to want. He could look and sound calm, justified, but he didn't feel it.
"I am not saying you were to blame. I am merely explaining that she was less careful of me after she could not use me against you."
"You know I am sorry for everything that happened between us back then."
"I know, and I am sorry that I blamed you for so many years, but that is beside the point tonight, Jean-Claude. I was not traded for Damian for a few hours a night as you and I were, but given to her for months. Damian was there while I was her prisoner."
"Neither of you has ever spoken of this to me."
"We vowed we would not speak of it even to each other. Do you remember how frightening she was when we were with her for only a few hours at a time in Belle's court?"
Jean-Claude lowered his face against Nathaniel's hair, as if he were smelling the vanilla of his hair to comfort himself. I did it sometimes, too. "That I remember those terrible hours is why I bargained for Damian's freedom from her and brought him here." He almost managed to keep his voice even--almost.
"Then imagine being with her for months."
Jean-Claude just shook his head. "I cannot. I do not wish to dwell on the horrors that did not happen to me, for there are enough that did."
"Three months was my sentence to serve as part of her entourage in Ireland. I was warned that I might die at my first dawn there and not wake again. That frightened me until I had been there a few weeks, and then I began to half-hope I would not wake again."
"We've shared some of Damian's memories, and they're pretty terrible, but wait. . . . Why wouldn't you wake at dusk? Did they tell you that just to scare you?" I asked.
"Not every vampire that traveled to Ireland woke the first night they slept there. No one knows why, but it's as if the land itself is not friendly to our kind."
"People keep telling me that my necromancy may not work in Ireland, or it's not supposed to, and that vampirism isn't as contagious there."
"I do not know about zombies. If anyone could call them from the grave there, it would be you, but they are right about vampires. Even if you give the three bites over the three different nights and drain them dry on the third, it does not guarantee they will rise as one of us. I saw half a dozen humans who should have risen as vampires there that did not."
"Did their bodies start to rot?" I asked.
He had to think about that for a minute. "I know that she kept two of the bodies for quite some time and they did rot. The others were discarded sooner."
"Why did she keep the bodies until they rotted?" I asked.
The look on his face was all for Jean-Claude, as if the look should be enough without words. It wasn't for me. "What are you trying to tell each other?"
"Did she hope that the bodies would rise as something?" Jean-Claude asked.
"One of the reasons she wanted me, other than the obvious one, was to have a vampire that wasn't of her making. She had hoped that I would be able to make more vampires for her, but it worked no better for me than it did for her own vampires."
"Did you ever see her try to bring over a vampire herself?" I
asked.
"I did. She was able to create one of us, but the second one did not rise for her any more than the others."
"You know, you being in Ireland might have been good information for Damian to share with me."
"He and I were never friends, but we vowed that each of us would tell our halves of the story but not mention the other if we ever spoke of it at all."
Nathaniel said, "I think Damian's fighting his own fears so hard that he's not thinking clearly about what information might be helpful to you and the police."
I glanced at him and felt the beginnings of my irritation fall away. If Asher was this scared of the Wicked Bitch of Ireland, then Damian must have been petrified. "He's hiding it really well then, even metaphysically," I said.
"He's being very brave," Nathaniel said.
"Yeah, he is," I said. I added, Damn it, to myself.
"So are we risking Echo and Giacomo by taking them to Ireland?" Nathaniel asked.
"Shit," I said.
"I do not believe so," Jean-Claude said.
"How do we know they'll be okay?"
"The reason I was at risk was that I was not a master vampire," Asher said, "but the Harlequin are all masters who gave up their rights to territories of their own to become permanently part of the royal guard."
"Of course they are," I said. "They all have animals to call, and you only get that as a master." I wanted to slap my forehead in a "coulda had a V8" moment.
"Except for Damian, you are taking only masters," Jean-Claude said.
"Okay, good to know I'm not risking anyone else like that."
"But if I understand what is happening, there is a plague of vampires in Ireland."
"There's a bunch of them in Dublin, and more people coming up missing every night."
"But the newly risen are never masters," Asher said.
"So there shouldn't be a lot of them in Ireland," I said.
"No, there should not be."
"Did anyone ever say why the vampires didn't rise the way they were supposed to?" I asked.
He thought about it, looking at the floor, frowning, but finally shook his head. "No, just that it was something to do with the land. That the land didn't like our kind."
"The Harlequin told us that the land is more alive because it has such a high concentration of Fey magic and that's why the dead don't rise there."
"Then why are they rising now?" Asher asked.
"One theory is that the wild magic is fading in Ireland finally, like it has throughout the world. It would fade in the cities first, and that's where all the new vamps have appeared so far."
"I cannot speak to any of that, but I know that what you are describing would never have happened with M'Lady at her full strength. Something must be wrong."
I almost asked if she had forced him to call her that, but I didn't. If she had, she had; no need for me to rub it in. "We're going to Ireland to try to fix what's wrong."
"Do you know why she wanted me in Ireland with her, Anita?"
I shrugged. "You're beautiful and great in bed."
Normally that would have made him smile, but not tonight. He swept his hair aside so that all his face was visible. He did that so rarely that it was almost startling. The scars really didn't cover that much of his face. We all found him still beautiful, but for him the scars were nearly everything.
He dropped his hair but didn't try to hide behind it again. "She wanted this, my beauty marred." He lifted the edge of the oversize dress shirt up so that he exposed the much more serious scars that covered him from chest to belt on that one side. The scars were deep runnels in the roughened skin over almost every inch of that side of his upper body, but the other side was still smooth and perfect as it was the day that Jean-Claude met him. I'd shared some of those memories, so I knew what Asher had looked like before the Church had tried to burn the devil out of him.
"That is her great pleasure, to see beauty that is spoiled in some way. She whispered to both Jean-Claude and me what she would do to us if she could. After seeing what the inquisitors had done to me, M'Lady said she could not have done better herself, that it was perfect."
Jean-Claude reached out toward him. "Do not torment yourself, mon ami."
Asher let his shirt fall back into place. "Some think her kind, because she will collect those who are marred as her lovers. Many of us think we will never be loved again after we are deformed, so it is a miracle to some. I saw her collect a woman who had lost a limb in an accident. She was not a lover of women; she brought her to be the lover for others of us. But she grew bored easily with most of them and if there was not someone who had met some horrible fate as I had, or the woman had, then M'Lady would create her own."
"What do you mean, create her own?" Nathaniel asked.
"She found another young woman, a dark beauty who would have been worthy of Belle's court. She was not when M'Lady finished with her. She kept her as a servant. The torture was sexual for her, but she seemed to enjoy just having the woman near her with that great beauty ruined."
"Damian said that she couldn't bear anyone being more beautiful than she was," I said.
"And you would take yourself, Nathaniel, Mephistopheles, and Damian to her. Even Echo should go nowhere near M'Lady. All of you would tempt her to create her ideal of marred beauty. Nicky would be perfect with his missing eye and scars. He would at least be safe from her adding to his injuries."
"Wait. She had Damian with her for centuries and didn't do this to him and he's beautiful."
"He was handsome enough, but not beautiful as you have made him, Anita. His nose had been broken before he came to her, and even that imperfection was enough to quiet her urges toward him, but your magic has straightened his nose and changed the very bone structure of his face. He is beautiful now, Anita. Do you not understand what she would do to him now if he ever comes into her power again?"
"We will be with the police the whole time," I said.
Asher shook his head. "She thought I was even more beautiful like this, and the woman she scarred was one of the few vampires we managed to make while I was there."
"Are you saying you brought over the woman she'd scarred?" I asked.
"I thought she would die like the others. I thought it was mercy to end her life and free her from M'Lady, but she rose. She lived when I wanted her, and she wanted herself, to die. Ironic, isn't it? God's little sense of humor, or perhaps the Devil's. I no longer know who rules in some places on earth. If God is a god of love, then He cannot rule over the evil that is M'Lady, and if the Devil rules her, he must pray that she never dies in truth because she would rule his kingdom in a hundred years."
"Now you are just being overly dramatic," I said.
He went down on his knees in front of us, raising his hands upward as if beseeching us. "I beg of you, Anita, do not take Nathaniel's beauty to Ireland."
"I am standing right here," Nathaniel said, and he was angry.
"I see you, my flower-eyed boy."
"I am not a boy. I am a man, and you do not get to talk around me as if I'm not standing right in front of you."
"Please, Nathaniel, I could not bear it if she destroyed your beauty. Please, do not go."
"We're going to be late for the plane," he said, and his voice was cold with anger. He started to walk away, but Asher grabbed his hand and mine.
The bodyguards were moving in, and one was touching his ear mic, which meant backup would be coming. There were four of them and four of us; if we needed backup from Asher, then things would have gone horribly wrong. I didn't think they'd go that pear-shaped, so I held up my free hand and waved them back. He hadn't hurt us . . . yet. If we were this afraid of him, then no apology in the world would matter, so I waved them back and hoped I didn't regret it later.
"Let go of me," Nathaniel said.
"What he said." I didn't try to tug my hand free, because I knew better than to try to outmuscle a vampire, but I wanted to pull a little. It was just automatic.
"Don't make me use my safeword," Nathaniel said.
Asher let go of his hand but clung to mine with both of his. "Please, Anita."
"What Nathaniel said."
Asher hesitated and then dropped his hands to his side, still on his knees with tears flowing faster down his face. They were leaving little pinkish trails down his skin so that I could see where every single one of them had fallen.
Jean-Claude couldn't stand it and reached out for him. Asher took his hands in his and started speaking rapid French. Jean-Claude shook his head. "Non, mon ami, they must understand your apology. I am weak when it comes to you, so it is them that you must win back. I will not come to your bed again unless they do, for they see you more clearly than I do."
I felt Nathaniel startle beside me. I glanced at him and he was already looking at me. The love of several lifetimes was holding Jean-Claude's hands, but it was up to us whether they ever got back together. No pressure.
Asher kept Jean-Claude's hands but turned to us. "I miss you both."
"You said that already," Nathaniel said. I realized that he was angrier than I was at Asher, which meant that the other man was, or had been, more important to him than he had been to me. I knew part of it was that I liked bondage and submission, but it wasn't the serious need to me that it was to Nathaniel. Asher had been an almost-perfect top for him in the dungeon. Apparently, Nathaniel missed it more than I'd realized, which was probably a relationship dropped ball on my part, or Micah's and my part?
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