to one of the leopards. I'd known somehow it would be Nathaniel. If she'd tried it before Micah and I had merged, he would have come to her, but now it was too late. We'd shut that gate and barred it. Belle Morte could not touch our leopards, not tonight.
"This is not possible," she said, and her voice had lost some of its purring caress.
Jean-Claude answered her doubt. "You can call almost all the big cats, but you cannot call the cats that answer to the Master of Beasts."
"Padma sits upon the council, you are one of my children. That I cannot take what belongs to another council member is merely truth. That any of my children could keep me from possessing what is theirs is impossible."
"Perhaps," Jean-Claude said, and he got to his feet. He offered a hand to both Micah and me. Normally, I don't let people help me up, but tonight I was wearing a long skirt, high heels, and had just had what amounted to metaphysical sex in public. We took his hands together, and he pulled us to our feet. Damian still had a death grip on my other hand, but he stayed on his knees, eyes still only half-focused, as if the power rush had thrown him more than it had the rest of us. He was the only one of us who wasn't either a master or an alpha something. I drew him in to sit against my legs, but didn't try and make him stand; it didn't look like he was ready to yet.
"By American standards," Jean-Claude said, "this did not count as sex."
Belle laughed, and the sound still shivered across the skin, but it was distant. Either we were too numb, or too shielded for her to touch. "The Americans do not count this as sex, that is absurd!"
"Perhaps, but true nonetheless. You and I would consider it sex, would we not?"
"Oh, oui,sex enough for one of my entertainments."
I almost felt Jean-Claude smile. I didn't have to see it. "Do you truly believe we have not done this and more with Asher?"
She looked at him, and her anger lashed through the room again like a wind off the lakes of hell. "I will not be turned aside so easily." She gestured back at the two dead vampires. "You have no idea what your human servant has taken from me. They were not merely vampires."
"They were lycanthropes," I said.
She looked at me, and there was more interest than anger in her now. Belle had always been more interested in power than being petty, though if she could be both, well, that would be the best of all worlds.
"How do you know this?"
"I felt their beasts, and I felt the beast from Mommy Dearest earlier today."
"Mommy Dearest?" She managed to look puzzled underneath all that glittering power.
"The Sweet Dark," Jean-Claude said.
"I felt her stir in her sleep, Belle. The Mother of All Darkness is waking up, that's why her children, as you put it, finally came to someone's call."
"I called them," she said.
"You can call all of the great cats, and among other things, they are cats. I'll bet the Master of Beasts could call them, too, if he tried," I said.
I thought for a moment she was actually going to stamp her foot--or rather Musette's--at me. "They came to my call, no one else's."
"Doesn't it worry you that the children of the dark are rising? Doesn't that scare you?"
"I have worked long and hard to amass enough power to wake the children of the dark."
I shook my head. "You felt her today, Belle, how can you stand there and not understand that this isn't your power going to a new level, it's hers waking up."
Belle Morte shook her head. "Non, ma petite,you are seeking to deter me from my revenge. I never forget an insult, and I always make sure someone pays the price for it." She walked up to us, and that glowing edge of power swirled at my full skirts, but it didn't catch my breath this time. It was power, and it crawled across my skin like lines of insects marching, but it wasn't seductive, it wasn't special. We'd all had so much power poured through us that we just didn't have anything left for more fun and games tonight.
She ran her hand down Micah's chest, and I felt his body tighten, but it wasn't the effect she was used to. She touched Jean-Claude's face, and he let her.