gained the power that it turned into love.”
“Yeah, I accidentally bound several people to me in true love.” I rolled my eyes as I said it, trying to make light of something that scared me. To be able to make someone accidentally fall in love with you—real love—was not a power I wanted.
“Belle could cause lust in hundreds, thousands, and be unmoved if she wished it, so it was her weapon of power. I saw kings give up their kingdoms for one more night with her. In me, it became a two-edged blade. I could cause casual lust, but for more, I could only cut as deeply as I was willing to be wounded myself.”
I nodded. We’d realized a while back that some of our love might be the ardeur, but if it was, we both felt it now. What do you do when your happy-ever-after may be magically induced love? Do you fight it? Ignore it? Find some witchy therapy? I’d have been pissier about it if I hadn’t bound several people to me by accident, too. It made it harder to throw stones at him. My house had too much damn glass in it for me to bitch at him. Lust isn’t love, and my version could even cause true friendship, because that’s a type of love, as well. The learning curve was still ongoing.
“You’re explaining in detail things I already know, because you want me to think about them.”
“Yes, ma petite.”
“You’re saying that the zombie, Thomas Warrington, used a type of the ardeur on himself and Justine here. You’re saying that’s what made them fall in love.”
“I believe so.”
“That’s not possible. He was a zombie, not a vampire, for a start, and even vampires don’t come into secondary powers like the ardeur as soon as they rise from the grave. It takes decades, or centuries, to come into that kind of power.”
“I do not believe it was his ardeur, ma petite, but yours. He was your creature, after all.”
I really didn’t like the term your creature, but I let it go, because it couldn’t be true, or maybe because I didn’t want it to be true. “But he’s dead, Jean-Claude. We let the exterminator crew burn him to ashes and bones after he went crazy and tried to attack us.”
“He turned into a flesh-eating zombie, if I remember correctly.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t in his history that he’d gotten trapped in the mountains in winter. The group he was with turned to cannibalism when one of their members died from the cold. Cannibalism in life is on the list with people having psychic ability or magical ability, voodoo practitioners, witches, sorcerers, devil worshippers, murder victims, and clergy. Because any one of them can come back as a flesh eater. They look good at first, but unless they eat the flesh of the living, they start to rot.”
“You told me his time in the mountains was a deep secret that he and the men with him never shared with anyone. You could not have known, ma petite.”
“I know, but damn it. We were just lucky he didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Are you sure he was reduced to ashes?”
“And bigger bones. I mean, the flamethrowers couldn’t get hot enough to turn the bigger pieces to more than charcoal, but that’s dead enough for a zombie. I treated him like a master vamp and put some of his ashes in different bodies of running water. Thomas Warrington is as dead as I could make him, Jean-Claude.”
“But there were larger bones left?”
“Stop pussyfooting around and just tell me what you’re hinting at, please? I’m out of patience for your usual soft delivery.”
“If his skull and a few other bones remained intact and he was a powerful enough vampire, then there might remain enough power for him to reach out to someone addicted to his power.”
“First, he wasn’t a vampire, he was a zombie. Second, no, they went to a crematorium and were turned to ashes, then those were scattered in water.”
“Did you see the bones burned to ash?”
I stared at him. “What are you saying?”
“If you