“You make all the vampires under you alive?” I made it a question.
“The power comes through me, yes, but only if they are of my line, my lineage. If they are descended from other than Belle’s children, then no, the blood oaths do not bind as tightly.”
“What about Asher? You don’t make his heart beat.”
He nodded. “Very good, ma petite. No, I do not. A Master Vampire is a vampire that has become enough of a power that they fill themselves up. It is one of the things that being a master means, and one of the reasons that many of the older vampire masters still kill their children when they feel that tie break.”
“You’re volunteering an awful lot of information, and don’t think I’m not grateful, it’s fascinating, but what does this all have to do with Damian?”
“You have raised Damian from his coffin once, filling him with your necromancy like a zombie. You have saved his life twice with your necromancy. You have forged a tie between him and you.”
Actually, I knew that, but out loud I said, “He said that he couldn’t tell me no if I gave him a direct order. That he wanted to serve me. It scared him.”
“It should have.”
“I didn’t mean to do it, Jean-Claude. I didn’t even know it was possible.”
“Legends speak of necromancers that could control all types of undead, not merely zombies. It was at one time Council policy to slay all necromancers on sight.”
“Gee, glad the policy changed.”
“Yes,” he said. “But you severed my tie with Damian. I did not realize it at first, but when he returned from Tennessee, it was not my power that made his heart beat, it was yours.”
I remembered feeling that in Tennessee, feeling the tie between us. “It wasn’t done deliberately,” I said.
“I know that, but you left me with a problem when you went away for over half a year. Damian is over a thousand years old. Though not a Master Vampire, he is still powerful. He no longer had ties to any vampire hierarchy. It freed him of all blood oaths, of all mystically bound loyalties. He was yours, but you did not come to claim him.”
“You should have told me.”
“And what would you have done? Taken him home to live in your basement? You did not have the power or control six months ago to deal with him.”
“Now I do. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You cast out Belle Morte. One of the most powerful of the Council. If you can do that, ma petite, then you can handle Damian.”
“This is all great, but where is Damian?”
“I could no longer count on his loyalty. I no longer controlled him, do you understand, ma petite? I had a vampire that was more than twice my age, and I could not control him. It both made me look weak in others’ eyes when I could not afford to appear weak, and it was dangerous, because he knew when you healed over your aura and shielded so tight. It wasn’t only Richard and me who felt the loss of you. You cut Damian off, and he went a little . . . mad.”
I was scared now, my heart beginning to climb up my throat. “Where is Damian?”
“First, ma petite, understand that you cannot take him with you tonight, because to tend him will be a full-time job for the first few hours.”
“Just tell me,” I said.
“I had to lock him away, ma petite.”
I stared at him. “Lock him away, how?”
He just looked at me, and it was eloquent.
“He’s been locked in a cross-wrapped coffin for six months?”
“About that, yes.”
“You bastard.”
“I could have killed him, ma petite, that’s what others would have done.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because it was partially my fault for exposing him to you. Damian was mine to protect, and I failed him.”
“He’s mine, mine to protect,” I said.
“Yet, you deserted him.”
“I didn’t know. You should have told me.”
“And six months ago would you have believed me? Or would you have thought it was some ploy to get you back into my life?”
I started to tell him, of course I’d have believed him, but I stopped and thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d have believed you or not.”
“I hoped that I would find a way to reestablish my dominance over him, but he is closed to me.”
I swallowed hard and looked at him. “If he’s mine, then why didn’t I feel him when my shielding broke all to hell in New Mexico?”
“I have been blocking you from sensing him, and it has not been easy.”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten, but it didn’t help. I was so angry my skin felt hot. “You had no right to do that.”
“Without the marks being married, I think Damian would have seduced you. Because you would have been drawn to him as you are drawn to Nathaniel now, or perhaps even the Nimir-Raj.”
“I would not have fucked Damian without the ardeur helping me, and I didn’t have that six months ago.”
“You may have your vampire back tomorrow night. I will help you nurse him back to health.”
“I’m coming back tonight to get him.”
“Talk to Asher, ma petite. Ask him what it will take to nurse a vampire back from six months in the coffin. Damian is not a master; he has had no ability to feed or gain energy. He will come out of the coffin a starved, crazed thing. There will be very little left of him, at first.” He was so calm while he said it.
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to hit him, but it wouldn’t change anything. I wasn’t even sure it would make me feel better. “I want him out tonight, when I get back from the lupanar.”
“You will not be able to tend both your injured wereleopard and Damian tonight. Ask Asher, and he will tell you how much work goes into such as this. One more night will not make a difference to Damian, and tonight you are trying to prevent war between the leopards and the wolves. More than that, you are trying to make a strong enough show of force to convince Richard’s enemies that he is too well-allied to be killed. You must concentrate on these things tonight, ma petite.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
He shrugged. “Believe what you like, but it will take hours of care to make Damian sane again. It will take days of care, and blood, and warmth, to bring him back to himself.”
“How could you know that and still do this to him?” My voice didn’t even sound angry, just tired.
“I learned the lessons of the cross-wrapped coffin personally, ma petite. I have not done to Damian anything that has not been done to me.”
“You were in it for a few days until I killed the old Master of the City.”
He shook his head. “When I returned to the Council with Asher and bargained with them, the price for them saving his life was my freedom. I spent two years inside a coffin, unable to feed, unable to sit up, unable . . .” He was hugging his arms, holding himself. “I know that what I have done to Damian is a terrible thing, but my only alternative was to kill him. Would you have preferred that?”
“No.”
“Yet, I see the accusation in your eyes. I am a monster because of what I have done to him. But you would feel me more a monster if I had killed him. Or perhaps you would have preferred that I let him go into the city streets and slaughter people.”
“Damian would never do that.”
“He went mad, ma petite. He became an alien. Do you remember the couple that was slaughtered about six months ago?”
“I saw several slaughtered couples over the last year. You’ll need to be more specific.”
He was angry now, too. Great, we could be angry together. “They were in a car, at a stoplight. The front of the car was dented as if they had hit a body, but no body was found.”
“Yeah, I remember that one. They had their throats torn out. The woman had tried to defend herself. She had wounds on her arms where something had clawed at her.”
“Asher found Damian wandering a few blocks fro
m the car. He was covered in blood. He fought Asher, and it took over half a dozen of us to bind him and bring him home. Was I supposed to let him wander the streets after that?”
“You should have called me,” I said.
“And what? You would have executed him? If insanity is a viable plea in your court system, then he cannot be held accountable. But your court system does not give us the same privileges it gives humans. We cannot plead insanity and live.”
“I saw that crime scene. It didn’t look like a vampire did it. It looked more like a shapeshifter, but . . . but the marks were wrong.” I shook my head. “It was vicious, a vicious animal.”
“Oui, and so I locked him away and hoped that you would come home to us, or sense his plight. At first I did nothing to block him from reaching you, but you did not come.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You knew that Damian was yours, and yet you did not ask about him. You cast him away.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, again, each word tight with anger.
“And I had no choice, Anita. I had to put him away.”
“Do you think the insanity is permanent?”
He shrugged, arms still hugging his body. “If you were a vampire and he your vampire child, I would say no. But you are not vampire, you are necromancer, and I simply do not know.”
“If he stays that crazy . . .”
“He will have to be destroyed,” Jean-Claude said, voice soft.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Nor did I.”
We stood there for a few moments while I thought about everything and Jean-Claude either thought about it, too, or just stood there. “If all you’re saying is true, then you had no choice,” I said.
“But you are still angry with me. You will still punish me for it.”
I glared up at him. “What do you want me to say? That knowing you’ve shoved him in a box for six months takes the sparkle out of our relationship? Yeah, it bothers me.”
“Under normal circumstances you would rescue Damian and avoid me for a time until your anger cooled.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right.”
“But you will need me, ma petite, in these first few nights. You will need another vampire with the same hungers to teach you control.”
“Can’t live with you, can’t live without you, is that it?”
“I hope your anger cools before you need my help again, but I fear it will not. Remember this, ma petite, that the ardeur is not bound by morals, or even by your preferences. If you fight it long enough, hard enough, you will eventually give in, and it will be out of your control who it chooses. So do this one thing for me, if you cannot forgive me right away, keep always by your side either Nathaniel or the Nimir-Raj. Not for my sake, but for yours. For I think, of the two of us, I would forgive you sooner for sleeping with strangers than you would.”
We pretty much left the conversation there. I found Asher and had him confirm the story. Hell, I waited for Willie McCoy to climb out of his coffin and heard the story from him. Damian had gone ape-shit and killed a couple that apparently hit him with their car. The man had gotten out to check on whoever they hit. They had hurt him and Damian struck out, killing the man. But the woman . . . he’d climbed into the car after her. We might have to kill him, because I hadn’t understood what my magic meant to Damian. I hadn’t understood a lot of things.
I drove out in the soft summer dusk with Nathaniel riding beside me. It had been a very long day. I was going to go home and pick up Rafael and the wererats, and Micah and his pard. He’d left a number at the shapeshifter hospital, and I’d called for it. I almost didn’t call, but we needed backup tonight. My embarrassment was a small price to pay. If I had been in contact with Jean-Claude and Richard for the last half year, I probably could have talked Richard out of doing all the shit he’d done to his pack. I’d come home to try and reestablish a relationship, or two, but I was mostly cleaning up the mess that my absence had made. Richard might be dead at the full moon, and Jacob, Ulfric. Damian might be permanently crazy and have to be destroyed. The couple that had hit him with their car would have been alive if I’d known what the hell my magic was doing.
I’d avoided a lot of Marianne’s teachings because it was too much like pure witchcraft for my monotheistic beliefs, but I knew now that I had to understand how my powers worked. I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. God kept telling me I was okay with Him. I wasn’t evil. But at some level I didn’t believe it. At some level I thought that witchcraft, raising the dead, wasn’t very Christian. If God was okay with me doing it, then what was my problem? I’d prayed about it often enough and gotten the answer more than once. The answer was to do it, that this was what I needed to be doing. If God was for it, then who was I to question it? Look where my arrogance had gotten us. Two dead, one crazy, and if Richard lost the pack . . . there’d be a lot more dead.
I felt a quietness inside me as I drove. Usually the touch of God is golden and warm, but sometimes when I’ve been really slow and not picked up on what He’s wanted for me, I get this kind of quiet sadness, like a parent watching a child learn a necessary hard lesson. I’d never once prayed to God about Richard and Jean-Claude—not about who to choose anyway. It just hadn’t seemed right to ask God to help me choose a lover, especially when I thought I knew who He’d pick. I mean vampires are evil, right?
But driving through the falling darkness, feeling His soft presence fill the car, I realized that I hadn’t asked because I’d been afraid of the answer. I drove and I prayed, and I didn’t get an answer, but I knew He heard me.
20
IT WAS FULL dark when we pulled up in front of my house. Almost every light in the house was on, like I was giving a party and no one had bothered to tell me. The driveway was full and overflowing onto the road. One of the reasons I’d rented the house was because I had no near neighbors to get caught up in whatever crisis I was having. My crises usually involved gunfire, so no neighbors to get hurt had been my primary requisite in a house. There was no one around to peek out a window and wonder what the hell was going on next door. Just trees and the lonely road, neither of which cared what I did. Or at least I didn’t think the trees cared, though Marianne might tell me I’m wrong on that one. You never know.
I ended up parking quite a ways down from the house, with nothing but trees on either side of the road. I turned off the engine, and Nathaniel and I sat in the dark, listening to the engine tick. He hadn’t said much since I came back out of the bathroom at Jean-Claude’s—nothing at all on the forty-minute drive here. But then, neither had I.
I’d left Jean-Claude in a huff with a firm date to come back tomorrow night and get Damian out of hock. It wasn’t just Damian locked away all these months that made me not want to be with Jean-Claude, it was that he had finally changed me into one of the monsters. I already knew that sex with him bound the marks closer, but now that the marks were married . . . what would sex do to us now? How much closer could the marks bind us all? Was it just changes with Jean-Claude, or did I have mystical surprises coming up tonight with Richard, too? Chances were likely, and Jean-Claude really had no clue what the surprises might be. He didn’t know what he was doing. He really didn’t. Since I didn’t know what the hell I was doing either, and Richard had no clue. That left us in a bad place. I’d call Marianne tomorrow on the theory that one magic is much like another, but until then I was on my own. Big surprise.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly alone. I looked across the front seat at Nathaniel. He looked back at me, face peaceful, hands in his lap, seat belt still in place. He’d pulled his hair back into a thick braid, leaving his face very plain and unadorned. In the moonlight his eyes looked pale gray, instead of their usual vibrant violet. Without the hair or the eyes showing, he looked closer to normal than I’d ever seen him. He was suddenly a person sitting across from me, and I realized with a shock that I didn’t really think of Nathaniel as a person. Not as a grown-up separ
ate human being kind of person anyway. He was more a burden than a person to me. Someone to be rescued, helped. He was a cause, a project, but not a person.
The heat began to press in around the Jeep. If we sat here much longer I’d have to turn the air conditioning back on. If Jean-Claude was right, then I’d had sex with Nathaniel earlier tonight. I was hoping Jean-Claude wasn’t right, because I still considered Nathaniel a child, an abused child. You took care of them, you did not have sex with them, not even if they wanted you to.
My breast was aching, faintly, from his teeth marks. We’d shared a bed so often that it felt odd when he wasn’t beside me. But I still didn’t see him as a grown-up. Sad, but true.
“Jean-Claude is pretty sure that the ardeur is well fed enough that it won’t be an issue for the rest of the night,” I said.
Nathaniel nodded. “You won’t need to feed again until you’ve slept for a few hours. Jean-Claude explained it to me, a little.”
That pissed me off. “He did, did he?”
He shook his head. “Anita, he’s worried about you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You really aren’t going to sleep at the Circus tonight, are you?”
“No,” I said. I was sitting back in the seat with my arms crossed over my stomach. I’m sure I looked as stubborn as I felt.
“And when you get up tomorrow, what then?” His voice was very soft in the hot, dark car.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” he said.
I sighed. “I don’t want to do this, Nathaniel. I don’t want to have Jean-Claude’s incubus inside me. I’d rather be Nimir-Ra for real than have to feed off of others.”
“And if you’re both?” he asked, voice even softer.
I shrugged, arms still crossed, but hugging me more than being stubborn now. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll be there for you, Anita.”
“Be where?” I looked at him.
“Tomorrow, when you wake.”
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 222
