begins.”
“You don’t mean Narcissus starting a war, do you?”
“Non, ma petite, a master vampire has crept into this country when I am supposed to be the king of us all. My power is supposed to be absolute; even if we weather this threat and keep the wererats, the other vampires will learn that one of them found a chink in my armor, and just as Rafael cannot appear weak without bringing more challengers to his throne, so with my own. If I do not make an example of this vampire, then others will search for weakness and they will find it, because no one is unassailable.”
“You’re afraid, too,” I said.
“Yes, very much.”
“Why very much? What have I missed?”
“I know that there is a master vampire near us. I know who his moitié bête is, and I know where that person is, and yet knowing all of this, I still cannot sense the vampire. Do you understand the implications of that, ma petite?”
I suddenly had trouble swallowing past my pulse, and yet my skin felt cold. “Shit, they have to be incredibly powerful.”
“And very old, perhaps far older than I am.”
I stared at him, my pulse still racing into my throat, so it was like choking, and just like that I realized I wasn’t choking on my fear, but on his. He sat there cool and calm like a smooth sea, but underneath he wasn’t just paddling as fast as he could, he was starting to drown.
Jean-Claude held his hand out to me. “Please, ma petite, let us hold each other and be comforted by the touch of each other before we have to put one or all of us in harm’s way.”
I looked at his hand still held out and then I looked at his face. If it wasn’t the face that launched a thousand ships, it was the one that opened my heart up to the possibility of love again. I looked from him to Asher. He was staring at his lap, his hair down like a curtain hiding his entire face as if he couldn’t bear to see me, or maybe couldn’t bear me to see him. If he’d been staring at me all bold and gorgeous, I might have hesitated, but he’d been saner and explained things well, and he was trying. Isn’t that all any of us can do?
I went to the bed and climbed up on the foot of it. It was still big enough that I had a ways to crawl to reach them. Jean-Claude smiled at me, his face alight with happiness in a way that he would never show in public because the older vampires thought showing soft emotions was a weakness. I started crawling toward them, still in all the weapons and the clothes, because the war council would start any minute. I didn’t even try to make the long crawl over the big bed sexy, I just moved toward them, but maybe that was enough, because Asher raised his head enough to look at me with one pale blue eye like a star lost in the golden cloud of his hair. I knew what the scars near that eye looked like, I’d kissed them often enough.
I took Jean-Claude’s hand and he pulled me the rest of the way between them. Asher stayed stiff and awkward beside me, keeping the hair like a shield between us. Jean-Claude put his arm across my shoulders and across Asher’s, but the other man didn’t look at either of us or try to hold us back. He sat with his hands in the lap of his brocade robe and wouldn’t look at me.
I cuddled in against Jean-Claude and just looked at all that golden hair and didn’t know what to do. I finally said, “You asked me up here, remember, Asher?”
“I’m so ashamed of how I behaved.”
I reached out and let myself touch the thick, shining hair until I could sweep it back and see the unscarred side of his face. I tried to sweep all the hair back so I could see all of him, but he grabbed my wrist and said, “Not yet, please.”
“Okay,” I said, and dropped my hand away from his hair. We ended up holding hands and looking at each other from inches away. The first tear slid down his face, and it was pink with the blood of whatever willing donor he’d fed from tonight.
I caught the tear on my finger before it could travel down his face. “Don’t