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points true north.”
“Don’t put all your faith in me, Bibiana.”
“Where else can I put it?”
And to that, there really wasn’t anything else to say. It wasn’t that I minded so much trying to save the world, but the idea that if I failed there was no backup plan . . . We needed a backup plan.
14
I’D BARELY GOTTEN off the phone from Vegas before my cell phone started playing the theme song to The Sopranos. I looked at Nathaniel. He said, “Augustine, Master of Chicago.”
“Because he’s a mob boss,” I said.
Nathaniel nodded.
I answered my phone. I was actually getting chilled sitting here with the congealing shapeshifter goo on me, and tried to draw some of the now-ruined silk around me. The men responded by wrapping themselves closer around me, even Asher spilling more across my lap, so I was forced to put an arm around him to keep him from falling. I answered, “Hey, Auggie.”
“I was visited by someone you assured me was dead.” He wasn’t his usual teasing self. He usually played it very casual. This was a much more serious voice, and word choice. It was the voice he used when he didn’t care that I knew he’d seen Rome at its height.
“It was a surprise to us, too,” I said, my voice a little less happy, too. The wet silk was not warm enough to cuddle in, so I stopped trying.
Damian, Nathaniel, and Asher held me closer. Nicky, in his soft, lionman fur, came to wrap himself around us all as if he were trying to be everyone’s fur coat. I half-expected one of the other men to protest, but they didn’t. Jean-Claude, Micah, and Richard were still by the door talking. Domino was still inside the door like the guard he was, but Crispin had gone to clean up.
“If Jean-Claude is supposed to be our de facto leader in the U.S., it shouldn’t have come as a surprise,” Auggie said.
“She was blown up, Auggie; that should be dead.” Nicky hugged us all a little tighter, and I forced myself to relax in everyone’s arms so Nicky would relax, too. My relaxing seemed to release some tension in him, because he sighed and rubbed his face against my hair and Nathaniel’s cheek. Like most wereanimals Nicky liked to cuddle, and it wasn’t about sex any more than a pile of kittens sleeping together was about sex.
“Well, I guess it wasn’t,” and Auggie sounded angry.
I realized he was doing one of my tricks, hiding his fear with anger; thinking that helped me not be angry. “Look, Auggie, we all got a shock tonight. Tell me what legend or dream or whatever you saw, what she did, or tried to do to you.”
“She pretended to be Belle Morte, but she is not her.” There was regret in that last word. Auggie, like all the vampires who were once part of her inner circle, always regretted her loss, even as she terrified them. “She tried to enter me. She tried to take me over, Anita. But she needed permission. I got the impression that if I’d said yes to the seduction by the false Belle, it would have given her the permission she needed to take me over. Then she was ripped away from me. I felt anger, fear, and that she needs a vampire who has big cats as their animal to call. She is weaker than she was, or she wouldn’t need permission, she’d just rape her way inside one of us.”
“It took Mommie Dearest a year to do this to the council. I think she’s been hanging around like a shadow or ghost of herself until she was strong enough to strike at them. The bombing hurt her, Auggie.”
“But not enough,” he said.
“Agreed,” I said.
“What did she do to keep herself alive and how did she grow stronger? If we could figure that out, then we might be able to keep her from getting any stronger than she is at this moment. Just keeping her from growing stronger would be something.”
“She has a toehold in Belle Morte and Padma. That’s strong enough to give us some major problems,” I said.
A phone rang, and this time it was just a nice, normal buzz; of course it wasn’t my phone since I was still talking to Auggie. Domino took his cell phone out of his pocket.
I “felt” lion, and it wasn’t Nicky. I sensed energy as if I were standing in the middle of the sun-burnt grass with that