He started walking towards me. It made me look away as if we'd been at a restaurant or something, and I'd been caught staring at my ex. I remembered a night just after college when I'd been in a restaurant with some friends, and seen my ex-fiancé with his new girlfriend. He'd walked towards us as if he'd introduce me to her. I'd fled to the ladies' room and hid out until one of my girlfriends came and told me the coast was clear. Four years ago, I'd run for cover because he had dumped me and didn't seem to miss me. Now I stood my ground but not because I had dumped Richard. I stood my ground because my pride wouldn't let me hurry away through the trees and pretend I hadn't run away. I wasn't much into running lately.
So I stood there in the silvered dark, my heart beating in my throat, and waited for him to come to me.
Jamil and Shang-Da stood together in the dark, watching but not following him, as if he'd told them to stay put. Even from here, I could tell Shang-Da didn't like it. As far as I could see, Shang-Da hadn't changed clothes. He was still in his all-black, totally monochromed tailored suit, shirt, and accessories.
Richard came to stand about two feet in front of me. He just looked down at me and said nothing. I couldn't read his expression, and I didn't want to read his mind again.
I broke first, babbling. "I'm sorry about that, Richard. I didn't mean to invade you like that. I'm not very good at controlling the marks yet."
"That's all right," he said. Why is it that voices in the dark can sound so much more intimate?
"You okay with Asher's plan for tonight?" I asked, more for something to say while he stared down at me than for anything else.
Verne had learned through Mira that Colin believed that Asher was his replacement. Both masters were of an equivalent age. Colin was more powerful, but much of that extra power could have been from the ties that made him Master of the City. It was the first time I'd ever been told that just being Master of the City gave you extra power. Live and learn.
"I understand that Asher has to convince Colin that he doesn't want the job," Richard said.
Asher had decided that the way to do that was to convince Colin he was infatuated with me and with Jean-Claude. I wasn't sure how I felt about the plan, really. But we all agreed, even Richard, that the local vamps wouldn't believe that ties of friendship and nostalgia made Asher happy where he was. Vampires are like people in one respect, they'll believe a sexual explanation before an innocent one. Even death doesn't change the human trait of being willing to believe the worst of a person rather than the best.
"It's none of my business what you do or who you do it with, remember?" His voice was a great deal more neutral than his words.
"I was embarrassed in the bathroom. You caught me off guard."
"I remember," I said. He shook his head. "If we're supposed to flaunt our power tonight, that means we need to use the marks."
"Mira told them that you were interviewing new lupas. They know we're not an item," I said.
"We don't have to show them domestic bliss, Anita, just power." He held out his hand to me.
I stared at it. The last time he'd led me through summer woods had been the night he killed Marcus. The night when everything had gone wrong.
"I don't think I can take another stroll through the woods, Richard."
His hand closed into a fist. "I know I handled it badly that night, Anita. You'd never seen me shapeshift, and I shifted on top of you, while you couldn't get away. I've thought about that. I couldn't have chosen a worse way to introduce you to what I was. I know that now, and I'm sorry I scared you."
Scared didn't quite cover it, but I didn't say it out loud. He was apologizing, and I was going to accept it. "Thank you, Richard. I didn't mean to hurt you. I just ... "
"Couldn't handle it," he said.
I sighed. "Couldn't handle it."
He held his hand out to me. "I'm sorry, Anita."
"Me, too, Richard."
He gave a small smile. "No magic, Anita, just your hand in mine."
I shook my head. "No, Richard."
"Afraid?" he asked.
I stared up at him. "When we need to draw the marks, we can touch; but not here, not now."
He reached up to touch my face, and I heard the silk of his shirt rip. He lowered his arm and put three fingers in the ripped seam. "That's the third time that's happened." He spread the seam on the other arm, putting his whole hand in it. He turned and showed me his back. The seams at the shoulders had pulled apart on both sides like mouths.
I giggled, and I don't do that often. "You look like the Incredible Hulk."
He flexed his arms and shoulders like a bodybuilder. The look of mock concentration on his face made me laugh. The silk ripped with an almost wet sound. Silk sounds the closest to flesh of any cloth when you tear it; only leather sounds more alive under a blade.
His tanned flesh showed pale through the black cloth, as if some invisible knife were slashing rips in it. He straightened up. One sleeve had ripped so badly at the shoulder that it flapped around his upper arm. The seams at the top of his chest were like twin smiles.
"I feel a draft," he said. He turned and showed me his back. The shirt had peeled off his back, hanging in tatters.
"It's trashed," I said.
"Too much weight lifting since I was measured for the shirt."
"You are perilously close to being too muscular," I said.
"Can you ever be too muscular?" he asked.
"Yes, you can," I said.
"You don't like it?" he asked. He wadded his hands into the front of the shirt and pulled. The silk tore into black shreds, ripping like a soft scream. He tossed the silk at me. I caught it by reflex, not thinking.
He grabbed what was left of the shirt across his shoulders and pulled it over his head, exposing every inch of his chest, his shoulders. He strained his arms upward, making the muscles mold against his skin from stomach to shoulder.
It didn't just make me catch my breath, it made me catch and hold, forgetting to breathe for a few seconds, so that when I did remember, my breath came out in a shaky gasp. So much for being cool and sophisticated.
He lowered his arms and all that was left were the sleeves. He pulled them off like a stripper removing long gloves and let the bits of silk fall to the ground. He stood looking at me, nude from the waist up.
"Am I supposed to applaud or say, 'My, my, Mr. Zeeman, what big shoulders you have'? I'm aware that you have a great body, Richard. You don't have to rub my face in it."
He moved into me until he was standing so close that a hard thought would have made us touch. "What a good idea," he said.
I frowned at him, because I wasn't following. "What's a good idea?"
"Rubbing your face in my body," he said, his voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
I blushed and hoped he couldn't see it in the dark. "It's an expression, Richard. You know I didn't mean it."
"I know," he said, "but it's still a good idea."
I stepped back. "Go away, Richard."
"You don't know the way to the lupanar," he said.
"I'll find it on my own; thanks, anyway."
He started to reach out to touch my face, and I almost stumbled backing up. He flashed me a quick smile and was gone, running through the trees. I could feel the roil of power like wind in a sail. He rode the energy of the woods, the night, the moon overhead, and if I wanted to, I could go along for the ride. I stood there, hugging my arms, concentrating everything I had on blocking him out, cutting the power between us.
When I felt alone and locked within my own skin again, I opened my eyes. Jason was standing so close it made me jump. It also made me realize how careless I'd been.
"Damn, Jason, you scared me."
"Sorry. I thought someone should stay behind and make sure no vampires made off with you."
"Thanks, I mean that."
"You all right?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I'm fine."
He grinned, and there was almost enough moonl
ight to see the laughter in his eyes. "He's getting better at it," Jason said.
"Getting better at what?" I asked. "Being Ulfric?"
"Seducing you," Jason said.
I stared at him.
"You know how I was jealous of the way you looked at Asher?"
I nodded.
"The way you look at Richard ... " He just shook his head. "It's something."
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "It doesn't matter."
"It matters," he said. "It doesn't make you happy, but it matters."
And to that, there wasn't a damn thing I could say. We started walking through the woods in the general direction everyone else had been going. We didn't need no stinking directions.
18
We found the lupanar, and we didn't need directions. We had Jason's nose and my ability to sense the dead. I'd assumed that all lupanars were the same, but yards away from this one, I knew I was wrong. Whatever lay up ahead had death mixed in with it: old death. It felt almost like a restless grave. Sometimes you'd be out in the woods and find one. An old grave where someone was buried without rites, just a shallow hole in the ground. The dead don't much care for shallow holes. It needs to be deep and wide or they get restless. Cremation takes care of all of it, actually. I'd never met a ghost of someone who had been cremated.
We could see the soft shine of lanterns through the trees when Jason stopped, touching my arm for attention. "I don't like what I'm smelling," he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"A body aboveground for a long time."
"A zombie?" I made it a question.
He shook his head. "No, drier, older than that."
We both looked at each other. I was pretty sure we were both thinking the same thing. Rotting vampire. I realized that I was clutching his arm, and he was clutching mine. We stood in the dark like children wondering if that noise was really a monster or if it was the wind. Neither of us took that next step to find out. If we'd had covers, we'd have been under them.
If we'd gone in there just to kill them, I'd have been all right. A slash-and-burn operation was my style lately. Every time we approached the vamps on their own territory by their own rules, we got hurt. I realized suddenly how much I did not want to walk into that place and negotiate with the monsters. I wanted to press a gun under Colin's chin and pull the trigger. I wanted done with it. I did not want to walk in there and give him power over me through some ancient rules of hospitality among the terminally anemic.
Damian came gliding through the trees. He was dressed in the standard uniform of black leather pants so tight you knew that nothing else was under them but vampire. But he was wearing a black silk T-shirt with a scooped neck. It looked almost like a woman's shirt. His shoulder-length hair helped the illusion of feminity, but the chest and shoulders that peeked out of the shirt ruined the effect: masculine, definitely masculine.
Jason was wearing an almost identical outfit, except the shirt and pants were satin. Though the knee-high boots were identical. For the first time, I realized that Jason was broader through the shoulders than Damian. Had that just happened recently? I looked from the werewolf to the vampire and shook my head. They grow up so fast.
What I said out loud was, "You guys look like backup singers for a Gothic band."
"Everyone's waiting for you," Damian said.
I realized that I still didn't want to go. I felt Jason shake his head. "No," he said.
"You're afraid," Damian said.
Jason nodded. I frowned. Jason and I were both usually braver than this, no matter what nasty things were in the next room -- or the next clearing, as the case may be.
"What's up, Damian? What's happening?"
"I told you what Colin was."
"You called him a night hag. He can feed off fear. Was that supposed to be a clue?" I asked.
"He can also cause fear in others," Damian said.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax my hold on Jason's arm. He kept his death grip. "That makes sense," I said. "They can always guarantee a meal that way, right?"
Damian nodded. "But he also enjoys it. Fear is like a drug to a night hag. My old master said it was better than blood, because she could walk through a world of fear. If she desired it, she could move through a world that trembled, ever so slightly, at her passing."
"And that's what Colin is doing tonight?" I said.
Jason dropped his hand from my arm. He stayed close enough that our arms brushed, but we weren't huddling in the dark like rabbits.
"I can usually tell when a vamp is doing mind stuff on me. He's good."
"This is different from the other master-level powers, Anita. My first master said it was like breathing to a human, something you did without thinking about it. She could intensify it, but she could never really stop it. A low level dread surrounded her at all times."
"Was she scary in bed?" Jason asked. I think he meant it as a joke.
The look on Damian's face even by moonlight wasn't funny. "Yes," he said. "Yes, she was." He looked at me, and there was an intensity in his face that I didn't like. He actually reached out to me, then let his hand drop.
He finally said. "Some of the masters can feed off of other things, not just fear. "
"What else?" I asked.
Asher breathed through my mind, and he must have done the same to Damian, because we both jumped. His voice came like a whisper in a nearby room, almost as if it was sound without words. "Hurry."
There was no more talk. We hurried.
The lantern light shone through the trees like small, yellow moons. Damian glided through that last line of trees into the clearing. I didn't glide. I stumbled over the outer edge of the clearing. There was a power circle in this land so old and walked so often that it was like a curtain waiting to be drawn around the lupanar. It would take almost no power to bring whatever was here alive.
When I quit seeing with that inner vision and looked out into the clearing, I stopped walking. I just stood and stared. Jason stood and stared with me. Between the two of us, we were getting pretty jaded, but the lupanar of the Oak Tree Clan was worth a stare or two.
It was a huge clearing with an oak tree in the center of it, but that was like saying the Empire State Building is tall. The tree was like some great spreading giant. A hundred feet tall, rising up and up. There was a body hanging from one of the lower branches. It was mostly skeleton with dried bits of tendon holding one arm out. The other arm had disintegrated, falling to the ground. There were bones everywhere under the tree. White bones, yellowed bones, bones so old they were grey from being weathered. A carpet of bones stretched out from beneath the tree, filling the clearing.
The wind picked up, hurrying through the forest. It sent the leaves on the oak rustling and whispering. The rope on the skeleton creaked as it swung in the wind. And with that one creak, my eyes went back to the tree, because there were dozens of creaking ropes. Most of them were empty now, broken or eaten to ragged ends, but those ropes creaked and moved with the wind, up and up. I followed the ropes up to the top of the tree as far as I could look in the dark by moonlight. The tree had to be over a hundred years old, and there were ragged bits of rope at its top. They'd been hanging bodies on this tree for a very long time.
The skeleton rotated suddenly in the growing wind, jaw gaping, empty sockets reflecting the lantern light for a second. The tendons at the jaw gave way, and the jaw hung, swinging on one side, like a broken hinge. I had a horrible urge to run across that boneyard and yank the jaw away, or reattach it, anything so that bit of bone would stop waggling in the wind.
"My God," Jason whispered.
All I could do was nod. I wasn't rendered speechless often, but I had no words for this.
Damian had stopped and moved back to stand by us. He seemed to be waiting, as if he were our escort. I finally tore my gaze away from the tree and its awful burden. There were benches forming three sides of a disconnected triangle. There was enough room
between each bench that no one was unduly crowded, yet the clearing felt crowded, almost as if the air itself was thick with things unseen, hurrying to and fro, brushing past me in a rush of gooseflesh.
"Did you feel that?" I asked.
Jason looked at me. "Feel what?"
I guess not. That meant whatever was crowding so close in the air wasn't something that a shapeshifter would pick up on. So what was it?
There was a vampire staring at me from where he sat on the near bench. His hair was brown, cut short so his neck was pale and bare. His eyes seemed very dark, maybe brown, maybe black. He smiled, and I felt his power rush over me. He was trying to capture me with his eyes. Usually, I would have tried to stare him down, but I didn't like what I was feeling in this place. Power, and it wasn't vampires. I looked away from his eyes, studying the pale curve of his cheek. His lips were full, with an upper lip that was set in a perfect bow, very feminine. The rest of the face was all points and angles; the chin sharp, the nose too long. It was a face that would be homely except for that mouth and those long-lashed eyes, dark and drowning deep as black mirrors.
I didn't stare too long at those eyes. I was feeling unsteady, as if the ground under my feet wasn't quite solid. Richard should have told me about the lupanar. Someone should have prepared me. Later, I'd be angry that no one had; now, I was just trying to figure out what to do about it. If Verne's clan were practicing human sacrifice, then it had to be stopped.
Damian moved in front of me, blocking my view of the ethers. "What's wrong, Anita?"
I looked at him. The only thing that kept me from losing it right then in front of the other vampires was Richard. He'd have never tolerated human sacrifice. Oh, he might have come down here once, then never returned, and not called the police, but he would never have returned year after year. He simply wouldn't have approved.
Maybe this was the way Verne's clan treated its dead. If it was anything else, I'd call in the state cops, but not tonight. Not unless they dragged out a screaming victim. If they did that, then all bets were off.
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