Dead Ice

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "Please," she repeated. He was still only touching the edge of her chin with the barest tips of his fingers, but she began to open her eyes as if she couldn't help herself. I remembered when I'd wanted to see what face went with that voice but been too afraid to look.

  I realized that was it; it was the first time I'd seen him interact with another woman where it reminded me so strongly of what he'd done with me years ago. I'd seen him with other sexual partners, but he treated them all differently, unique to them, and nothing like he treated me. I was special to him, as he was to me, but as Lita opened her eyes like a bird staring at a snake, I wondered if I'd ever looked at him in just that way when I was still fighting to stay free of him.

  "Your talk is rough, ma souris, but you are not."

  I watched her try to fight at that, the struggle to break his gaze plain on her face, her hands that tried to rise up and then just hung in midair as if she didn't remember that she'd moved them.

  Nicky came up beside me and I reached out for his hand to hold, because I'd never seen Jean-Claude like this with one of our guards before. I didn't like it much and Nicky had picked up on that.

  Jean-Claude stepped back from her, but she stayed frozen, staring at where his face had been, her face slack and empty as if waiting for orders.

  "It is as I feared," he said in his normal voice.

  "What is as you feared?" I asked.

  "I did not try to bespell her, ma petite. I used no powers, and she is a type of wereanimal that I should have no special hold over, but she stands there enchanted and waiting for whatever I would do."

  "So this was a test?" I asked, and squeezed Nicky's hand.

  "Oui."

  I must have frowned, because he put his head to one side, studying me. "You are upset. I come through the door to find that you have a gun to her head and are threatening to kill her, but my bespelling her upsets you; why?"

  "It's almost the exact same thing you used to do to me at the beginning, when you were trying to seduce me and I was trying not to be seduced."

  "This is play to me, ma petite, or was once. When you and I began this dance I never dreamt that you would be in my life, be my love, my queen." He walked toward me, leaving Lita standing frozen and waiting for what came next. It was like she didn't matter at all to him.

  "You were going to blow her brains out, Anita," Nicky said.

  "Maybe," I said, and it sounded pissy even to me.

  "What is wrong, ma petite?" Jean-Claude asked.

  "It's like you don't care about Lita, at all, and you just did the big vamp thing with her."

  "You know that this is not my 'big vamp thing,' this is play, and I needed to see if my powers had grown; a woman that you would threaten to kill seemed a safe choice, but I see it was not."

  "Were you just playing with me at the beginning?" I asked.

  "You know you began as a challenging seduction, as I began as just a handsome irritant to you." He was standing directly in front of me now, and since I still had Nicky's hand he was standing in front of both of us. "Your strength of character intrigued me, and then your power called to me"--he reached for my hand and I let him take it, but I didn't exactly hold on--"and the rest of you quite overwhelmed me, eventually." He lifted my hand up and laid a kiss against my knuckles.

  I think I glared at him.

  He rose up, still holding my hand loosely. "Ma petite, this jealousy is unlike you, especially over something so small."

  I nodded. "You're right; it's just that I hadn't realized that the early part of our seduction really was just a game to you. I mean, I knew it, but I didn't, if that makes sense."

  "But wasn't it a game on both our parts, the old game of the man pursuing and the woman escaping his attentions?"

  I thought about it, then shook my head. "I didn't know it was a game, at the time."

  "Perhaps modern people do not speak of it so bluntly, but it is the age-old game of chase and capture. There is always someone in a relationship who begins the hunt for someone's heart, and the pursued must decide whether she wishes to be easily caught, or to be a long and difficult hunt." He smiled when he said it.

  I frowned at him. "Have you ever not gotten to sleep with someone you set your sights on?"

  He raised the dark, graceful curve of one eyebrow. "You led me on the merriest chase of anyone I had ever met, ma petite."

  "What does ma souris mean?" I asked.

  "Mouse, because she is too weak to be a rat." He frowned and said, "Is that it, the French nickname? I can refrain from using that with any other woman if you like, ma petite."

  I squeezed their hands, the impossibly beautiful vampire and the handsome solidness of the werelion. They squeezed back, Jean-Claude smiling at me, and Nicky just waiting to see what was going to happen. Jean-Claude and I were shielding hard not to feel every emotion in both of us, but with Nicky as my Bride he could always feel what I was feeling. In that moment he knew more about the tangle of emotions I'd just waded through. It seemed weird that Jean-Claude didn't understand that I was close to angry with him, but Nicky did. I could lower my metaphysical shields and let Jean-Claude know how deep the relationship crap had gotten, but I didn't. One, we'd fought too long to have emotional privacy, and two, I was mad and didn't want to make it easier for him. The moment I thought it, I knew I'd have to do better than that, but . . .

  "So you tested your powers on Lita, because why?"

  "You had a gun to her head; I thought you didn't care for her."

  I made myself think before I spoke. "I don't really."

  He smiled a little, carefully. "Then that is good."

  "What I mean is, why did you test your abilities on any of the female guards?"

  "I've begun to fear that my powers to bespell have grown stronger, and before I go onstage at Guilty Pleasures again I want to know just how strong they have grown. I do not want to accidentally mind-roll some human audience member."

  "Did something happen at the club tonight?" I asked.

  "Yes, and no, as in it went according to plan. My voice bespelled the audience, but it was the manner in which the women reacted to me when I walked among them as host. It just seemed . . . different."

  "So did you do that to Lita on purpose?" I asked, looking at the woman who was still motionless behind him.

  "I meant to see what my touch and gaze could do without any added power, oui. She is a wereanimal, which should give her more immunity than a pure human, and she is an animal that I have no tie to, which should have helped her resist me, but as you see . . ." He used our clasped hands to motion at her.

  "Have you actually mind-fucked her?" I asked.

  "It would appear so." He didn't sound happy about it, though.

  "If you've rolled her past a certain point, then you can't undo it," I said.

  He sighed, which he didn't always do, since he didn't always breathe. "I will have to be most cautious at the clubs."

  "Cautious?" Kelly said. "You barely touched her, and look at her. I've seen you onstage, Jean-Claude; you touch the audience more than that." She motioned at Lita with the hand that wasn't holding a gun. She'd put the AR on her own shoulder like an awkward purse.

  As if she'd heard her name, Lita took a long shuddering breath, and blinked. She looked confused, and then she saw Jean-Claude. "You son of a bitch, you fucking son of a bitch, you rolled me like some kind of human tourist!"

  Jean-Claude smiled. "She remembers what I did, that's good."

  Lita's hands were in fists at her side. "You bastard, how is that good?"

  "It means he didn't mind-fuck you," I said.

  "The hell he didn't!"

  "If he had, you wouldn't remember that he'd done anything to you. You'd have just woken up and remembered whatever happened just before he touched your face, or maybe not even remember that he'd even spoken to you."

  "So you mean the fact that Lita remembers what Jean-Claude did means he didn't actually roll her?" Kelly asked.

  "Oui."<
br />
  Lita shook her head. "No, no, I was helpless, fucking helpless, and you're saying that wasn't mind-fucking me?"

  "No," I said, "it wasn't."

  Lita began to curse, first in English and then in Spanish in a long nervous torrent. She turned to Kelly. "Get me out of here, away from them both."

  "I'll take you to Claudia," Kelly said, and led the other woman toward the long curtain. Dino raised it for them. "Ladies."

  Kelly turned just before going through the curtains. "I'd noticed that I'm having a harder time ignoring you, and you aren't supposed to have the ability to call lions either. You might want to ask some of the other wereanimals and see if they've noticed it, too."

  "I will do that, and thank you for telling me."

  She nodded. "Now that I know you weren't doing it on purpose, I figure you needed to know."

  Dino let the drapes fall back in place.

  "You may go with them, Dino," Jean-Claude said.

  Dino glanced at me.

  "Go on, Lita may need someone to comfort her," I said.

  He grinned at me. "You are the best wingman ever, Anita." He let the drapes fall shut behind him, whistling softly under his breath.

  "I feel I have missed much today," Jean-Claude said.

  "Dino and Lita have a fuck-buddy date after work tonight," I said.

  "Fuck buddy, I dislike the term," Jean-Claude said.

  "Me, too, but fuck date sounds worse," I said.

  Nicky chuckled.

  We both looked at him. "What?" I asked.

  "You two, the great incubus and succubus eating the souls of little vampires and wereanimals out through their dicks, and you both think the term fuck buddy is crass."

  We both frowned at him.

  "Oh, come on, that's funny."

  Jean-Claude started laughing first and eventually so did I. It was funny, but the fact that Jean-Claude's powers of seduction were growing wasn't. How was that going to work with the weretigers tonight? Hell, how would it work with the rest of us? That thought was so not funny I stopped laughing. Jean-Claude even sexier than before? We were all so screwed, maybe literally.

  19

  LEFT TO HIS own devices Jean-Claude would have made the small get-together with the weretigers something formal, with more jewelry; left to my own devices it probably would have been a backyard barbecue. So we compromised. We didn't dress up, or add jewelry, unless we wanted to, and most of us were in our work clothes. Everyone at the mixer tonight had met everyone else, so we'd seen each other in work clothes, fancy clothes, and a lot of us had worked out in the gym together; some of us had even had sex together, so it wasn't your typical matchmaking scenario. Most of the clan tigers and all the Harlequin vampires and their animals to call worked for us as guards, which meant most of the people in the room were armed and on our side. The only extra guards were the ones who routinely went with Jean-Claude, Micah, and me. Nathaniel was mingling with the tigers he didn't know as well, with Nicky just following along behind him both as a guard and to help scout prospective housemates.

  I wasn't sure if that made things more awkward or less, because it was all so casual; maybe it just made it different. By the time we all settled around the living room on the two couches, the love seat, and the two big comfy chairs, I was regretting agreeing to it. I'd fought through some of my earlier panic when I realized that I was blaming Cynric for things that weren't his fault. Now I just felt stupid for running from the truth into a supernatural dating game. I needed to call Marianne, my magical mentor and accidental therapist. She was a witch and the wise woman for her werewolf pack in Tennessee. She'd helped me learn control of a lot of my metaphysical abilities, and turned into my counselor in a lot of other areas. But I'd agreed to this, whatever this was, and now I felt like I had to at least pretend to go through with it. Besides, Nathaniel's point about trying to add someone who could date people besides me in our poly group was logical. I just forgot for a moment that sex and romance aren't about logic; they're about feelings, and that is one of the least logical things of all.

  What I needed to be doing was finding out how many other animal groups were having trouble with the ancient wereanimals I'd casually forced into their groups when we brought the Harlequin vampires and their animals to St. Louis. Or trying to figure out anything that would help us find and set free the zombies being used online for those horrible films, though honestly the biggest hope for locating them was the FBI cyber division. Once they narrowed the location I might be able to locate them if I was close enough to them geographically, but an entire country and possibly countries away was beyond even my necromancy.

  "Ma petite . . ."

  I startled and turned to Jean-Claude, who was draped artfully beside me on the couch. I was curled up on the couch beside him; I didn't really sit artfully on couches, my legs were usually too short for the graceful slouch he could manage.

  "I'm sorry, I wasn't . . . I'm sorry, what were you saying?"

  The woman sitting beside me raised an eyebrow that went perfectly with the cynical expression in her blue-gray eyes. "I don't think you really care what I was saying."

  I turned more fully toward her, my back resting in the crook of Jean-Claude's arm. "I really am sorry, but I was thinking about a case at work. Sometimes I have trouble leaving it at the office."

  She pushed a strand of her short, pale blue hair back behind her ear and studied my face, as if she didn't believe me. Her hair was very short, just barely below her ears, but with strands of it tracing the strong oval of her jawline. The pale blue color was natural, not dyed, and the blue-gray eyes were tiger eyes in her human face. Fortune was the last female of the blue tiger clan left on earth as far as we knew. She was five-ten, which meant when she first hit her height as a young adult she must have been a giant among the men, let alone the women. People just hadn't been that tall over a few thousand years ago. Okay, I didn't know for certain how old she was, but necromancy let me know how old her master was, and if her master was over two thousand, then she had to be pushing the same.

  "You really don't want to be doing this, so why did you agree to it?" she asked.

  I didn't owe her the truth, so . . . "According to the prophecy that the clan tigers have been keeping, if I don't marry one of you, then the Mother of All Darkness could come back to life. I don't really want that to happen, do you?"

  Her eyes narrowed, and I realized that even her eyelashes were a pale powder blue. Cynric's eyelashes were black, weren't they? Could they possibly be a dark navy blue so that I'd only assumed they were black? It made me want to get him and make him stand with the light behind so I could double-check.

  "Do you believe that part of the prophecy?"

  "A lot of it has come true recently; don't you believe in it?"

  She smiled and it was an age-weary smile, as if she'd seen everything and been impressed by none of it. "Answering the question with a question means I can't smell if you're lying."

  I shrugged, and smiled back at her. "I really was thinking about work."

  "Zombies or police work?"

  "Both, actually; the police came to me for my expertise."

  "In what capacity?"

  I shook my head. "Sorry, but it's an ongoing investigation. I can't discuss details."

  "I can't tell if you're lying; your heart rate doesn't change, even your scent stayed the same. It takes a very experienced wereanimal to lie with the smell of their skin."

  "Since I'm technically not a wereanimal, maybe I'm just telling the truth?"

  A brunette vampire who was only a couple of inches taller than me, five-six at best, came to stand in front of us. Her smile was cynical, too, but there was a shine of humor in the rich blue of her cornflower eyes. "Fortune and I think you just agreed to meet with female tigers to stop your men from complaining when you add another male to your harem."

  I laughed and glanced at the woman beside me, then back to her vampire master. "Really, so why did you both agree to come if yo
u thought it was pointless?"

  Jean-Claude stroked my shoulder with the hand across my shoulders. I wasn't sure if he was trying to soothe me or himself. I hadn't even done anything that rude yet.

  "When the king requests your presence, you don't disappoint him," she said.

  "Even if you think it's a waste of time," I said.

  She grinned wide enough to flash one delicate fang and show that she had a dimple in one cheek. Her blond hair was wavy enough that it was like big, loose curls to her shoulders. "Most things that kings want are a waste of time." She did a low sweeping bow to Jean-Claude, but the dimpled grin never wavered.

  "I do not believe that I have known as many kings as you have, Echo, but I cannot disagree with your statement. I swear to you that I believed ma petite was in earnest or I would not have called you in from your tasks."

  "May I sit down?"

  "You do not need to ask for permission to sit next to your own tiger, and lover."

  She flopped down on the other side of Fortune hard enough that the couch bounced a little. "You are very even-handed for your age and your sex."

  "I understand that older vampires are often set in their ways, but what does my being male have to do with it?"

  "Jean-Claude, do not play games; you know what men have thought of women through most of the centuries you've lived. We have been second class at best, evil temptresses, or little better than breeding animals to many very learned and powerful men."

  "Do you hate men, then?"

  "I don't hate sex with them, but relationships with them, yes." She went up on one knee so she could put an arm across the other woman's shoulders. Fortune entwined her fingers with hers. Echo said, "I prefer to give my heart to more reliable hands than a man's."

  Jean-Claude laughed and pulled me in closer to his body. "And I have found that men and women are equally heartbreaking."

  "I would ask Anita, but she's only been with two women; that hardly counts."

  Fortune said, "Most American women do that much in college when they experiment. Is Jade your experiment?"

  "No, not that that's any of your business."

  Jean-Claude hugged me to him and let me know I'd tensed up.