Richard shook his head. "It was you I was looking at, Anita, not him. A little pain is fine."
It was my turn to shake my head. "Are you truly saying that letting him sink fangs into my body would bother you as much as sinking..." I let the thought die unspoken. "I see donating blood as the lesser evil, Richard. Don't you?"
"Yes," he hissed. His power was filling the room like warm, electric water. I could almost reach out and grab it.
"Then what are you bitching about?" I said. "We wouldn't have done it the first time, but you wanted me to do it. You wanted us to do it." I stalked towards him, finally angry myself. "You don't want to kill Marcus, fine, but this is the price. You want enough power to cow the rest of the pack without losing your humanity, great, but that kind of power isn't free." I stood in front of him, so close that his power danced over my skin like fine needles, like sex that rode that edge between pleasure and pain.
"It's too late to back out now. We are not going to strand Willie and the others because you're getting cold feet." I took that last step, putting our bodies so close together that a deep breath would have made them touch. I lowered my voice to a whisper, though I knew everything in the room would still hear me. "It isn't the blood that bothers you. What bothers you is that you enjoyed it." I lowered my voice until it was almost a movement of lips with only a breath of sound. "Jean-Claude isn't just seducing me, he's seducing us."
Richard stared down at me, and the look in his true brown eyes was lost, hopeless. A little boy who's discovered the monster under the bed is actually real, and it's screwing Mommy.
Jean-Claude's power eased through the room, mingling with Richard's electric warmth like a cool wind from the grave. We both turned and looked at the vampire. He was smiling ever so slightly. He undid his robe and let it fall to the floor. He glided towards us, wearing nothing but his silk pajamas and a knowing smile. His own power making his long hair flare round his face like a small wind.
Richard touched my shoulders and even that chaste touch sent a line of warm, shivering energy along my skin. The power was there for the calling, just below the surface. We didn't need all the sexual charades.
Jean-Claude reached a pale hand out towards me. I met his hand with mine, and that one touch was enough. That cool, burning power flowed over me, through me, into Richard. I heard Richard gasp. Jean-Claude started to move forward, like he'd press his body against mine. I held him away from me with the hand that was entwined in his, straight-arming him. "It's here, Jean-Claude, can't you feel it?"
He nodded. "Your power calls to me, ma petite."
Richard's hands slid over my shoulders, his face brushing my hair. "Now what?"
"We ride the power this time, it doesn't ride us."
"How?" Richard whispered.
Jean-Claude looked at me with eyes that were deep as any ocean and as full of secrets. "I believe ma petitehas a plan."
"Yeah," I said, "I have a plan." I looked from one to the other of them. "I'm going to call Dominic Dumare and see if he knows how to put vampires back in their coffins." Dominic had been cleared of Robert's murder. He had an airtight alibi. He'd been with a woman. Even if he hadn't been, I might have asked for his help. I wanted to save Willie more than I wanted to revenge Robert.
A strange expression crossed Jean-Claude's face. "You, asking for help, ma petite? That is unusual."
I drew away from both of them. We could get the power back, I was pretty certain of that. I looked at Willie's empty face and the fuzzy dice hanging from his coffin. "If I make a mistake, Willie's gone. I want him back."
There were times when I thought that it wasn't Jean-Claude who had convinced me that vampires weren't always monsters. It was Willie and Dead Dave, ex-cop and bar owner. It was a host of lesser vampires that seemed, occasionally, like nice guys. Jean-Claude was a lot of things; nice was not one of them.
31
Dominic Dumare showed up wearing a pair of black dress slacks and a black leather jacket unzipped over a grey silk T-shirt. He looked more relaxed without Sabin looking on, like an employee on his day off. Even the neatly trimmed Vandyke beard and mustache seemed less formal.
Dominic walked around the three vampires I'd raised. We'd moved back out into the rubble-strewn main area, so he could see the zombies and the vampires all at once. He paced around the vampires, touching them here and there. He grinned at me, teeth flashing in his dark beard. "This is marvelous, truly marvelous."
I fought the urge to frown at him. "Forgive me if I don't share your enthusiasm. Can you help me put them back the way they were?"
"Theoretically, yes."
"When people start using the word theoretically, it means they don't know how to do something. You can't help me, can you?"
"Now, now," Dominic said. He knelt by Willie, staring up at him, studying him like a bug under a bioscope. "I didn't say I couldn't help. It's true that I've never seen this done. And you say you've done this before." He stood up, brushing off the knees of his pants.
"Once."
"That time was without the triumvirate?" Dominic asked.
I'd had to tell him. I understood enough about ritual magic to know that if we withheld how we'd gotten this much power, anything Dominic helped us come up with wouldn't work. It would be like telling the police it was a burglary when it was really a murder. They'd be trying to solve the wrong crime.
"Yeah, the first time was just me."
"But both times in daylight hours?" he asked.