Bullet Page 0,49

at you if you messed it up.

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