with people: human, vampire, shapeshifter, all in neat rows with a hand held here and there, moving to a dance that no one had seen in centuries. It was just plain cool.
Damian let me see the second woman in front of him. She was tiny, shorter than me by inches, short enough that she fit under my arm, when I put my arm across her delicate shoulders. Her shining black hair fell like patent-leather water straight and perfect to her waist. Her uptilted eyes looked brown, but I'd spent enough time looking into them to know they were actually an orange so dark they looked brown. In the right light they were the color of fire when it burns deep into the wood and you think the flame is out, but if you don't douse it with water, it'll flare up and burn the house down. Her Chinese name translated to Black Jade; to me she was just Jade, my Jade. She was my black tiger to call, and the first woman to change me from heterosexual to heteroflexible.
Jade looked frantic, and jerked away from Damian's hand. She started running down the hallway. Damian looked up, as most of us did when we were "seeing" each other in our minds. "Someone told her you were hurt."
"Shit," I said, out loud.
"What's wrong?" God asked.
"Someone told Jade I was hurt. She'll have to see for herself that I'm healed."
"Can't you just tell her mind-to-mind?" God asked.
"She's too scared, and panicking. It makes her head-blind."
"No offense," God said, "but for a ninja assassin super-spy she spooks easy."
Domino said, "You try being abused by a master vampire for centuries and see how you do." His beasts flared enough to raise heat around him like a breath of summer in the cave-cool corridor.
"Hey, no offense," God said.
"None taken," I said, and touched Domino's arm. I was trying to calm him before Jade got here. He was very protective of her. Touching him made the heat of his beasts try to jump to me and call my matching tiger colors, but I understood how to soothe the energy now. Not shut it down, not trap the beasts, but soothe them like you'd pet and cuddle a big kitty. Of course these kitties would have happily torn my body apart so they could be on the outside with their own real fleshy bodies if it had been possible. We'd finally figured out it was Jean-Claude's vampire marks that kept me from being able to shapeshift for real. Modern lycanthropy wasn't contagious to vampires, and I was just too close to being a vampire thanks to his marks, and my own necromancy. Ancient-strain lycanthropy had been contagious to the undead.
"Ease down," I said to Domino.
Jade had paid Domino the highest compliment she had for men; she let him join us in bed. Nathaniel was tolerated in the bed, and Crispin, a white tiger and stripper at Guilty Pleasures, but she seldom slept with me because I kept insisting on all these men being there. Her abuser had been male and it had given her a bad opinion of them; the only thing she disliked more was male vampires. Damian had won her over with tales of his own abuse at the hands of She who made him. His vampire mistress made Jade's master look sane. She'd had to accept that women could abuse, too. Jean-Claude and Asher had enough stories of Belle Morte, and then there'd been the Mother of All Darkness, and Nikolaos the first Master of the City of St. Louis had been one crazy bitch. Crazy didn't discriminate on the basis of gender.
Jean-Claude had won her over by being himself. It had been interesting watching him work to gain her trust. He'd always told me the only woman who ever frustrated his plans was me; watching him charm Jade had made me believe that statement.
Jade came into sight running so fast she was a blur of black and white. I handed the weapons I'd been holding to Domino and then braced. She was small enough and I was strong enough, but running at that speed it was a lot of momentum to stop.
She slowed down enough for me to see the long hair sweeping out behind her, the pale face, eyes frantic, and then she leapt on me like a monkey. Jean-Claude put a hand on my back to help steady me as all that speed and energy leapt into my arms, and stopped. She