“Easy for you to say, you’re not the one they’re always pushing at, demanding more from. You don’t see how they look at me, the accusations, and the recriminations when I do pull away. They all want a piece of me, and there isn’t enough of me for all of them.”
“You said that a few weeks ago when I first asked you to help me explain things to J.J.”
“It’s still true,” I said.
“Everyone has ex-lovers, Anita,” J.J. said.
“You don’t understand, J.J.; you can send your ex-lovers away. You move out, or they do, and you don’t see them again. You get some distance and maybe you can be friends on down the road, but you need a little distance to get there. Every time I reject a lover they’re still here. Not just in town but living in the Circus of the Damned; hell, Damian has an apartment over my garage at my house.”
“Why in the world did you let him move in like that?” she asked.
“Because he’s my vampire to call, and keeping your servants near you helps increase your power base.”
“And you felt guilty about not loving him more,” Jason said.
I gave him a dirty look. “Don’t help me.”
“Hey, it’s the truth, and you know it.”
“If you broke Jade free of her bonds to her old master, and freed others from theirs, could you break Damian free?”
“Every time I try to cut my ties with him and Nathaniel they start to die; Damian went crazy and attacked people. Jean-Claude almost had to put him down like a dangerous animal.”
“Okay, then that would be a no,” J.J. said, with wide eyes; she pulled the sheet more up over her, as if suddenly cold.
I grabbed a piece of sheet from her and pulled it over me, too, because it was cold, or maybe the conversation was making me feel cold, who could tell.
“But what worked with everyone else was that you broke the bonds with their old master and replaced that master with you. What if you broke Damian’s bonds with you and replaced yourself with another vampire?”
“He’s tied to Nathaniel, too, remember? We’d have to cut Nathaniel free, too. I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything that metaphysically complex with these kinds of vampire marks.”
“Has anyone ever tried?” J.J. asked.
“No, because if it goes wrong, you can break the sanity of your people, or kill them outright, which is a pretty damn big incentive to not mess with shit.”
“Okay, okay, it was just a thought,” J.J. said.
“I’m sorry, I’m not mad at you, just the situation, I think.”
“But Damian has Cardinale, and they seem pretty happy together,” Jason said.
“She’s asked for Damian to not be on my feeding list for the ardeur, and I’ve respected that.”
“But would he have found Cardinale if you had been having sex with him as often as you did with Nathaniel?” Jason asked.
“If I’d been sleeping with him and Nathaniel like that, there wouldn’t have been room for Micah.”
“You mean in the bed?” J.J. asked.
“Or in your life?” Jason asked.
I frowned at both of them. “You know, the two of you are enough alike that’s it’s a little unnerving.”
“You feel double-teamed?” he asked.
“Didn’t we already do that?” J.J. asked, face and voice mild.
I rolled eyes at them again. I got the idea that being around them would entail a lot of that for me. I didn’t really mind.