'If you and he were simply a couple, then no, but you are my human servant, one leg of the triumvirate of power that we share with my wolf to call, our reluctant Richard. If it was Richard, two of us heading into another's territory, they would be certain we were coming to destroy them.'
'We just need to get Micah to his dad's bedside before it's too late, that's all. Surely they can just check and see that the man is in the hospital.'
'It is never that simple to cross from one land to another for master vampires or for the leaders of wereanimal groups. Micah and you are the Nimir-Ra and Nimir-Raj, leopard queen and king, of our local pard. Are there wereleopards in Micah's hometown?'
'I don't know,' I said.
'You need to know,' he said, quietly.
'Shit,' I said, and put real feeling into it. 'This is going to piss me off really soon.'
'The new vampire council is very new, ma petite; we cannot afford to be seen as tyrants and bullies. If you enter other territories without at the very least alerting them, then it will be viewed as arrogance. It will seem as if you - we - feel that the entire country is ours to visit and use as we see fit. It will make the lesser leaders nervous and even be used by our enemies to stir up more rebellion against us.'
'I thought we took out the last rebels, or do you know something I don't?'
'I do not know of rebels in our country, but I know with certainty that there is discontent, because there is always discontent. Never in any government of any form is everyone in an entire country happy with being ruled. It is the nature of the political beast to be hated.'
'So you're saying they hate us because we formed a council to keep them safe from all the rogue vampires?'
'I'm saying that they ran to us for safety, but now that they feel safe, they will begin to look at the very power that enabled us to keep them safe, and they will begin to mistrust it, even fear it.'
'Well, isn't that just peachy. So, Micah, Nathaniel and I can't go to see his father.'
'Why Nathaniel?'
'He's our third. Micah wants him to come.'
'Ah, I thought perhaps you were taking Nathaniel as your leopard to call, and Damian as well, as your vampire part of your own triumvirate of power.' A super-powerful vampire could form a three-way power structure between their human servant and a wereanimal whose beast form was their normal animal to call, but I was the first human to be able to do my own equivalent of it. Jean-Claude thought that the fact that I was a necromancer and his human servant had enabled me to do the metaphysically impossible, but honestly, we didn't know how I'd done it, just that I had.