that I couldn’t or didn’t want to understand completely. When he said, “He will give us away,” it was like every time you’d ever been left out, abandoned, unwanted.
“We must distract the Master using Hector,” Pierette/Pierrot said.
I looked up into his storm-cloud eyes set in her face and missed her brown. “How?” I asked.
Benito asked, “How do we distract him without attacking him?”
Pierrot smiled with her lips and then slid into my lap, one arm around my neck and the other hanging loose for weapons, though he/she wasn’t obvious about it. It was natural for my arm to slide around her waist and my other hand to cup the side of her thigh to hold her more securely in place as she wiggled in my lap to find just the right spot. It would have been a lot more titillating if I’d been a man, but she still managed to be distracting. Maybe that was the point, because all the touching and adjusting helped calm me down. I could think again, and Hector’s voice wasn’t getting through. Pierette wasn’t even one of my moitié bêtes, so was it just her being a leopard, which was my first animal to call? It always felt good to touch your animal of choice.
Jean-Claude whispered through my mind, “She is our lover, ma petite; for our bloodline that is power.”
Pierette glanced at Benito, who was bending over us as Claudia kept an eye on the crowd around us and Rafael tried to refute Hector’s accusations. “Hector’s master has always had an eye for the ladies,” Pierette said.
I said, “He has a rape fetish.”
Pierette said, eyes still gray, “No bad thoughts, Anita. We need to tempt him and you frowning will not do that.”
“He likes unwilling partners,” I said.
“That is true, but he loves most of all to see a woman happy with someone else, in love with someone else, and then steal her away from them. If he can force her lover to watch the abuse, so much the better.”
The anger was just there, as if it had been only minutes ago instead of years. I could still see Hannah with her face bloody, her dress torn, and Fernando laughing as she begged Jean-Claude to help her. Willie McCoy, the love of her undead life, standing there in one of his bright suits and ugly ties that he’d loved to wear even when he was still human. Jean-Claude had had to hold him back or he would have tried to save her, and he would have died trying. I’d had a gun and had used it to threaten and buy us time, but in the end we’d gotten lucky because a little inner council squabbling played out in our favor, but Padma had chosen Hannah because she and Willie loved each other so much. It had amused him and his son that Willie and Hannah loved each other so much that hurting her was torturing them both. We’d been able to prevent Padma and his equally awful son, Fernando, from actually raping Hannah, but I hadn’t been able to save Sylvie, the second in line to the werewolves’ throne, or Vivian, one of our wereleopards. I’d rescued them after the damage had been done, and we’d been able to kill the son, who had been the primary rapist in Sylvie’s torture, but even revenge doesn’t undo the damage.
Rafael handed the microphone to Claudia and leaned over us. “Your rage feeds mine. I was forced to watch some of the torture to the women before they started cutting me up. I want him dead.”
“That’s the plan,” I said, smiling up at him so that only he could see that my eyes were nearly black with anger.
He smiled then and it was such a close echo of mine that I wasn’t sure if it was his smile, or mine. It usually took longer to intermingle than this, but maybe it was the shared hatred?
Pierette raised her face up toward his anger. I wondered if he saw that her eyes were the wrong color or if he just saw a pretty woman gazing up at him. He moved past her offered kiss to me, though, saying, “One should always dance first with the woman you brought to the ball.” He kissed me soft, and I leaned into it, my hands tightening around Pierette, so I didn’t accidentally dump her off my lap.
“What are you doing, Rafael?” Hector asked, and I realized that Rafael’s body might be blocking