Rafael

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I moved back from the kiss to say, “That’s still the plan, but we were going to all work out, clean up, and then have our . . . date before the fight.” It wasn’t really a date, but I just couldn’t make myself call it a hookup, or a fuck date, at least not in front of Benito and Claudia.

  “We could be very efficient and use the shower together. We could clean up and start our date early.”

  I knew that Micah and Nathaniel were having their own “date” currently, and Jean-Claude was in the sword class he’d started with some of the older vampires and shapeshifters. In fact, everyone I might have spent time with was either exercising, working, or otherwise occupied.

  “Unless you are expected elsewhere by one of your other lovers,” Rafael said. He managed to be almost neutral as he said it.

  “No, nothing scheduled but cleaning up, and you’re right, sharing the shower would be efficient and it would conserve water.” I tried to be serious as I said it, but a smile crept in at the end.

  The smile he gave in return was worth saying yes. It chased all the gloom and doom away and left him looking happy. We started walking hand in hand toward the showers, and this time we didn’t stop to debate anything.

  3

  RAFAEL AND I were holding hands and all romantic until we got close enough to the showers to hear the rumble of male voices and realize that the four of us weren’t the only people showering. If I’d been by myself, I’d have used the shower in the room I shared with Nathaniel and Micah, but it seemed a little awkward to use their shower when I was planning on getting a different man out of his clothes. Also, I wasn’t sure where they were on their date, and since Micah was still working out his issues about it being just the two of them without a girl in sight, I didn’t want to crash their rendezvous. Nathaniel was for Micah what Kane kept trying to make me for Asher—the one person who had changed his sexual orientation, except in this case Micah had been heterosexual until he fell in love with Nathaniel.

  “What’s wrong?” Rafael asked.

  I realized that I’d stopped moving forward, so he was a little ahead of me with our arms stretched between us. “Showers are a little crowded for romance.”

  He looked up as if he’d only just heard the water and the male voices raised in good-natured shit giving. It was Claudia who said, “We are wereanimals, Anita, we don’t notice nudity.”

  I looked up at her. “You all keep saying that and most of the time it’s true, but all it takes is one guard noticing the naked girl in the room and suddenly it’s awkward as hell.”

  “Who noticed and made you uncomfortable?” she asked, and her voice was back to that drill-sergeant/boss-from-hell/parent you’re-in-deep-shit tone again.

  “The werewolf, Ricky,” I said.

  “Which is why we fired him,” she said.

  “He was also not good enough to be part of our guard,” I said.

  “He did not train hard enough to get better,” she said.

  “No, he whined almost as much as Kane,” I said.

  “If this Ricky is gone, why are you so apprehensive?” Rafael asked.

  “I could just shower with the other people in there, and I have, but you and I were going to get each other out of our clothes and have at least foreplay in the shower. I don’t like an audience.”

  “Nor I, but we can use one of the closed showers with curtains,” he said.

  “Like Claudia said, you’re wereanimals, so it’s not just sight that’s the problem. To most of you smell and hearing are as intimate as a visual.”

  I liked the curtained shower stalls, and I wasn’t the only one. It hadn’t been just me among the women that didn’t like showering with the men. I’d even come in more than once to find men in the curtained stalls. Men like more privacy than you think, or at least some do. It’s not only women who are modest; another double standard bites the dust.

  He took the step back to me and used our still-clasped hands to draw me into a hug. “That is true, but I want as much of you as I can have today, Anita. I am willing to use the showers with curtains.”

  I put my free hand on his chest where it showed above the tank top. The skin was smooth and warm, the sweat already drying. “The other thing is that having sex while the other guards are in the room might make them all wonder if it’s okay for them, too.”

  “They would not dare approach you,” Rafael said.

  “Probably not, but the other female guards might have a harder time in the showers.”

  “I won’t have any problems,” Claudia said.

  “They’re afraid of you and me for different reasons, but they’re not afraid of most of the other female guards. Also do we want to encourage everyone to have sex in the public showers here?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time for you and one of your . . . people,” Claudia said, and then looked almost embarrassed, which didn’t happen often. She was like most bodyguards—nothing their clients did fazed them.

  “Yeah, but that time you made sure it was just Nicky and me, and I almost drained him to death,” I said, frowning.

  Rafael hugged me closer. “I am not your Bride of Dracula to be drained of life by the ardeur, Anita.”

  “And I have better control over the ardeur than I did back then,” I said.

  “We can kick everyone else out,” Benito said.

  “They’re in the middle of showering,” I protested.

  “I’ll go in and tell them all to hurry up and finish.”

  Claudia nodded. “Yes, do that.”

  “Wait, no,” I said, as Benito started to move past us. He turned and looked at me.

  “What is wrong, Anita?” Rafael asked.

  “It just seems, I don’t know, high-handed to kick them out of the group showers.”

  Rafael laughed and kissed me on the forehead. “It is adorable that you keep forgetting that you are both their employer and a queen.”

  I frowned up at him. Most short people hate to be called adorable; even cute can be problematic. “I’m their boss, but technically Jean-Claude pays their salaries so he’s their employer, and I’m not a queen yet, not until I marry Jean-Claude.”

  “You are the queen of tigers,” he said.

  “That’s only because I didn’t like being called the mother of all tigers,” I said.

  “Most of the ex-Harlequin guard call you their dark queen,” Benito said.

  “They’re used to following a queen, as in thousands of years of being the elite guard for the Queen of All Darkness.” I shuddered when I said her name. I’d killed the vampire queen of the old council, if you could kill something that didn’t have a body. I’d killed her as dead as humanly and inhumanly possible.

  “Anita did try to break them of calling her their dark queen,” Claudia said.

  I sighed and leaned in against Rafael’s body a little, resting my cheek against his tank top and the solidness underneath it. “I did break most of them from calling me their evil queen.”

  He hugged me close, kissing the top of my head. “I am sorry, Anita, I did not mean to bring up something that makes you uneasy.”

  “That’s a good word for it,” I said, still with my head on his chest. I didn’t say out loud that afraid was a better one. I’d killed the Mother of All Darkness by absorbing her essence while she tried to take over my body and use it for herself. It had been sort of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force, and most people had been betting on her. She had been the very first vampire, maybe, so old that her original body had been lost and the last body she’d had had been one that she’d successfully possessed. That body had been blown up by a group of mercenaries hired to assassinate her, but all they’d done was destroy the body that had trapped her for a thousand years. They had freed her from her prison to wander like a nightmare to try and find a new body. She’d wanted mine.

  Rafae
l stroked my hair and murmured, “She is dead and gone, Anita. You do not need to fear her.”

  I moved out of the circle of his arms. “You never had her try to take over your dreams, or your body.”

  “You are quite right,” he said; his face was closed down, reasonable, and blank, hiding what he was feeling and thinking.

  “I feel like I should apologize to you, but I don’t know what for,” I said.

  He gave a very small smile, but it left his eyes sad. “If I were truly a gentleman, we would shower separately and I would prepare for tonight’s battle, but I want to be with you too much to play such games.”

  “I want you, too, Rafael,” I said, because that’s what you’re supposed to say when someone declares that kind of attraction. It’s like when someone says I love you; you’re supposed to say it back if it’s even remotely true, unless you’re willing to have that most awkward of modern dating talks, the one where you try to explain that it’s not about love.

  “I can only take your words at face value, search your face to see if it matches them, because I cannot read your mind, feel your emotions.”

  “You can smell my emotions on my skin, all shapeshifters can,” I said.

  “In this moment I know you are not feeling lust, because you are right, I would smell it on you.”

  I fought not to look embarrassed or even uncomfortable. I looked at the floor and then forced myself to look up and meet his gaze. “I can’t smell your emotions, but I can read your face and you’re not feeling very lustful either.”

  “I cannot disagree, and if this were any other day, I would let you go to shower in the room where you shower with your other men, or perhaps that huge bathtub that Jean-Claude has in his rooms, but it is not any other day. I want you as a man wants a woman, but I also want you to feed the ardeur on me.”

  “Won’t that weaken you for the fight tonight?”

  “If you fed off only me, perhaps, but you will feed off the strength of all who call me king. If it is to be the last time, I want you to take as much power from us as possible for Jean-Claude to share among your people.”

  I touched his arm, studying his face, trying to read him. “I asked if you thought you would win tonight, and you said yes. Am I missing something? Am I not asking the right questions?”

  “He is me thirty years ago, Anita. He has less to lose and more to gain. I have far more to lose and nothing to gain except his death, which I do not want. I think he believes that you will enslave us all, you and Jean-Claude. He is righteous in his goal to tear me from the throne. I am defending what is mine, and I am decades too late for that righteous surety of youth.”

  “I don’t understand what that means.”

  He smiled down at me, putting his bigger hand along the side of my face so that I could rub my face against the weight and warmth of his hand. “Of course you don’t, you still have that righteous surety.”

  I moved away from his hand, frowning. “Not as much as I used to have.”

  “You are starting to grow into the next stage of your life, Anita. Your job as a vampire executioner and now as a marshal has aged your attitude faster. Hector knows nothing but his clan. He has risen as high as he can within the local clan, so he sets his sight on the highest seat among my kind.”

  “You said he’s you thirty years ago.”

  “Very much so.”

  “So how old is he?”

  “Are you asking how old I am?”

  I stared up at his raven-black hair, the unlined face. If I hadn’t looked into the wisdom and patience in his eyes, I’d have put him at no more than thirty, but his eyes gave it away almost like some of the vampires’ did. They were ageless, but their eyes could show an echo of the great weight of all those years, as if there were ways to grow old that had nothing to do with the body.

  “I know that shapeshifters age slower than humans,” I said.

  He smiled. “I am over fifty.”

  I must have looked as shocked as I felt, because he laughed. “Sorry, it’s just . . . I’d have never guessed.”

  He drew me into another hug, still laughing.

  “We’ll clear the showers for you,” Claudia said, and she and Benito started toward the entrance, but there was a small crowd of guards hastily dressed coming out. They mumbled, “Anita, Rafael, Claudia,” and a few mentioned Benito but he wasn’t their boss, or one of the people who trained them, or a king of any kind. He didn’t take offense, like all good bodyguards, he knew being invisible until needed was part of the job.

  “I think they heard us,” I said, not sure how I felt about the fact that Rafael and I just suggesting we might want them to give us the showers was enough to get them to do it, or maybe it was Claudia and Benito starting to clear them out? I knew that Claudia intimidated a lot of them, and if Benito wasn’t as scary as he looked, then he wouldn’t be Rafael’s main bodyguard.

  When the exodus of tall, athletic men clutching clothes and weapons trickled to a stop, Rafael offered me his hand. “Shall we?”

  What else could I say but “Yes”?

  Claudia insisted on going through the doorway first, even though we were supposed to be safe as houses down here. There were bodyguards I might have argued with; she wasn’t one of them. Benito trailed behind his king and incidentally me, but I had no illusions about whom he’d protect if the flags went up, but then I had Claudia, so I was good.

  4

  THE SHOWERS WEREN’T completely empty, though; Pierette was still in there with her dark hair still damp and her only clothing one of the supersize towels that we kept in there for everyone. The towels were designed to cover people close to seven feet tall, like Claudia, so for Pierette, who was only a few inches taller than me, the towel covered her to the ankles like a formal evening gown. On me I had to fold the top of the towels down, so I didn’t trip over them. One size does not fit all.

  Pierette dropped to one knee and managed to make the movement look graceful, as if the towel were a real dress. I’d have knelt on it wrong and ended up flashing if I’d tried it, but then I hadn’t had hundreds of years to practice being graceful and she had.

  “My queen, King Rafael, how may I serve you?” She looked at the floor as she said it, so I couldn’t even see her expression, which might have helped me know what the hell was going on.

  “Pierette, I told you I didn’t like the whole bowing and scraping thing,” I said.

  She raised her face up to look at me then, and without any makeup at all she was still pretty. Her eyes dominated her face even without eye makeup, but without eyeliner or shadow the brown of them seemed paler, lighter than mine or Rafael’s. Her face was a delicate triangle with her lips pale but still kissable without the red lipstick that she usually wore to match mine, but then I wasn’t wearing any right now either. I thought about leaning over and giving her a kiss, but I wanted to know why she was kneeling before I did anything. She was my lover and I liked having her in our poly group, but sometimes she puzzled me.

  “You did, my queen, but I was not certain how to approach both you and King Rafael, so on my knees seemed to be a good place to start.” She looked up at me as if that made perfect sense.

  “Approach us about what, Pierette?” I asked.

  “For joining the two of you in the shower.” Again, she said it as if I should know what she was talking about, and I was getting a clue, but I wasn’t happy about it.

  I felt Rafael’s stare on the side of my face before I turned and met it with my own. He raised eyebrows at me and said, “What is going on, Anita?”

  “Give me a minute, okay?”

  He nodded but let go of my hand, as if I might need both to handle the woman kneeling at our feet. “First, get up off the floor,” I said, and offered her my hand. She took it and even let me take some of her weight as she stood, though she didn’t need a hand up any more than I would
have.

  She stood with us still holding hands, and again I had that urge to kiss her. If Rafael hadn’t been standing right there, I might have, or if she’d been one of my primary partners, or . . . oh hell. “I want to kiss you, Pierette.”

  She smiled and started to lean in toward me, but I stopped her, using my hand in hers to sort of stiff-arm her. “But first I want to know why you think you’re joining us in the shower.”

  She stopped trying to lean into me and looked puzzled. “I thought those of us that wished to sleep with King Rafael were supposed to make that known to him.”

  “What did she just say?” Rafael asked from behind me.

  I sighed, closed my eyes, and tried to think of a good way to say the next part; nothing came to mind. I let go of Pierette’s hand and turned and faced him. “So, I was wondering why you don’t date more.”

  “Are you trying to say that you’re tired of me?” he asked, face blank, but I knew the tension in his shoulders well enough to see it.

  “No, not at all; God, this sounded way less awkward in my head. I love being with you, the sex is great, the friendship is, as it has always been, wonderful. I know that you have not just my back, but all of our backs, as we have yours.”

  “This sounds like a ‘let’s be friends’ speech.”

  I made an exasperated sound and tried again. “It’s not, I swear, but you’re great and I sort of assumed that you were dating other women in a more serious way, but that you were just very private about it.”

  “You thought I was sleeping around on you?” he asked, frowning, clearly puzzled.

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant. Fine, I talked to my poly group about the fact that you were only having sex with me and I couldn’t give you more time because I’m already sort of overcommitted relationship-wise, so I asked the group if they’d be okay with you maybe sleeping with any women in our group that were interested in you that way.”