Bullet Page 0,79
a lot less solid than his, “but why didn’t I bleed to death from all the vampire feedings? I’ve got at least eight. That’s enough to drain me dry.”
He stroked my hair, and answered me, “I am not certain. I believe the ardeur saved you. There are multiple bites on most of the wereanimals, but none are dead. The ardeur is about life. I turned the Lover of Death’s urge to life. My last solid thought was that we would not feed on death; we fed on life, on love, and I would not have my people serve the dark. We would serve the light.”
I turned my head so I could look up into his face. “You really thought all that? I didn’t have time to think much of anything.”
He smiled at me. “It was in French, but that is the gist of what I tried to do with the power.”
I hugged him tighter. “Is it night again?”
“No.”
I frowned up at him. “You’re awake again. What time is it?”
“We all passed out from the ardeur, but I do not believe I died at dawn.”
“Sometimes you don’t die at dawn when you and I are touching, but we weren’t, were we?”
“Non, but there was a great deal of power to feed on, ma petite.”
I was almost afraid to look around, but I couldn’t be a coward. I couldn’t tolerate that, so . . . I turned in his arms and looked farther into the room. There were bodies everywhere. They lay so still that if Jean-Claude hadn’t told me no one was dead I’d have wanted to start checking pulses. Micah was on the other side of the room, as if he hadn’t moved far from where we’d all started with the werelions. There was a pile of bodies near him, like a prettier version of the plague engravings depicting wagonloads of bodies to dump. Micah lay partially on top of that pile. I thought at first that the body entwined with him, arms and legs, was one of the male guards, but realized that I had the only man with long, straight, dark hair by me. I looked at that muscular back, those shoulders, those arms, and suddenly could see that it was Claudia. Her head was on Micah’s chest, his arms and one leg around her, his head back against someone else’s back.
“Where’s Nathaniel?” I asked.
“In the hallway with Jason, J.J., and a few others.”
“Richard, Damian?”
Someone groaned, the bodies on the loveseat began to shift, and one tanned, muscular arm came out from all the paler bodies. Richard’s face, his hair wild around him, rose from the other bodies as if he were struggling to the surface of thick water. He looked bleary-eyed and confused for a second, and then I watched comprehension fill his face. I wondered if I’d looked as shocked.
He looked at the woman in his lap, and I realized it was the blond vampire, Gretchen. She was completely limp as he stood with her in his arms. His moving made the others slide into the spot he’d emptied on the loveseat. I recognized Byron, one of the vampire strippers at Guilty Pleasures. The woman who collapsed against Byron had bright red hair. It had to be Cardinal. Richard put Gretchen gently on the floor since there was no more room on the loveseat. His back was covered in scratch marks, some of them bloody. Were some of them mine?
He turned and there was dried blood coming down one side of his neck, and his thighs. He had a bite at the bend of his elbow, too. He, like me, should have been dead from blood loss.
He had more scratches on his arms, and even down the sides of his body. Someone, or someones, had liked nails. He had to pick his way between the bodies. I realized the big glass coffee table was missing. I glanced around Jean-Claude and found the remains of the table in the tangle of torn draperies.
“I do not think I will buy another glass table.” Jean-Claude said. “Metal, perhaps.”
Richard was almost to us; he just had to concentrate on where his feet went in the labyrinth of body parts. “I don’t remember anything after you turned the craving for death into the ardeur,” he said, still looking at the floor as he finished the last few careful steps.
“Me, either,” I said.
“Nor I,” Jean-Claude said.
Richard caught his foot on a leg that had been hidden under the pile of clothes. Jean-Claude