WE STARTED WITH a hug, wrapping our arms around each other. The heels meant that I was tall enough that our hips were pressed against each other, so that the soft mound of his body lay warm and solid against me. The feel of just that made me shudder in his arms and bury my face against his shoulder. Hiding my face against the smoothness of his skin. His arms tightened around me, and I raised my face up for a kiss. His lips were as soft and full and kissable as I remembered. Sometimes you try to drown yourself in the kisses of other people, trying to forget how the one that got away tasted, but they’re like that rare vintage of wine that you think you’ll never drink again; the first sip reminds you why you loved it.
His body was starting to grow firmer just from kissing. I ran one hand up to touch his hair. The texture was rougher than all those foamy waves looked, but it was still soft, just not as soft as others. It filled my hand and made me go up on tiptoe to kiss him harder, pressing our bodies closer, starting to grind gently against that growing point of his body as the kiss became more. I bit gently on his lower lip, and he growled for me, pulling away, and since I knew he didn’t like pain I let him. Richard bit my lower lip, tit for tat, but I didn’t pull away, because I did like pain. He bit down a little harder and my eyes rolled back into my head, and then he bit more, and that was too much for there. I patted his shoulder like tapping out in the dojo, but he took it as me pretending to struggle. I hit his shoulder harder, and he let go, moving back so he could see my face. “Too much?”
“Yes,” I said.
Nathaniel said, “If she can’t talk she taps out.”
“I didn’t know,” Richard said, and it was the truth.
“Now you know and just in case it comes up, my safeword is ‘safeword.’ ”
He widened his eyes at me. “ ‘Safeword,’ really?”
I frowned at him. “Yes, really.”
“Mine’s ‘red.’ ”
“Red as in stop,” I said. He nodded, looking down at me, and it was both familiar and weird as hell to be gazing up at him naked. “You’re a top to a dominant, since when did you ever need a safeword?”
“Recently,” he said, and he was searching my face as if not sure how I’d take it.
“Are you telling me you’re a switch like I am?”
“Yes, no, I’m still figuring it all out, but you should always share safewords beforehand, don’t you think?”
“I do, actually,” I said. His body chose that moment to do one of those involuntary twitches that can happen when a man is very eager and very hard. I had to close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing for a second. I had a second of hating that his body could still make me react this strongly, and then Jean-Claude was in both our heads.
“Release the ardeur now!” He’d been shielding us, because now we could feel the other vampire’s power creeping into him, into us. He was the king with the power of a million vampires shared inside him; no other vampire should have been able to touch him, but the power of this vampire was like black smoke engulfing Jean-Claude. We could see him covered in it as if there was a fire between us and him.
I saw Jake beside him yelling, looking at us as if he knew exactly where our viewpoint hovered. Richard said, “Jake is yelling for us to come to our master’s side.”
Nathaniel opened the office door and said, “You need to touch him, Anita, like you touched Damian and me in Ireland.”
“What happened in Ireland?” Richard asked.
“We called an army of ghosts to protect us from a group of evil vampires,” I said, but I’d already started for the door, and since Richard’s hand was still in mine he came with me.
“What?” he asked, and he pulled on my hand, which normally wouldn’t be a problem, but I wouldn’t normally have been wearing five-and-a-half-inch heels. Nathaniel caught my arm, so I kept my feet. Richard caught up and stopped asking questions. Nathaniel got us to the hallway and was reaching for the stage door when it opened, and Jean-Claude was standing there. He reached for me, and Nathaniel drew me forward as if it were a dance and he was passing me to the next partner. Jean-Claude’s hand wrapped around mine and I could see the black smoke like a dark haze around his upper body. He drew me closer and because Richard was holding my other hand he pulled us both closer. Richard touched his arm, and the moment Jean-Claude was touching both of us the blackness thinned, and I could see two shining points hovering in that hazy darkness.
Richard whispered, “Are those eyes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We must destroy it,” Jean-Claude said.
“How?” Richard asked.
“The only way I know,” Jean-Claude said, his eyes filled with blue fire, as if the midnight sky could burn. The pale eyes floating in the mist seemed dimmer just in comparison, but they didn’t go away, and the hazy blackness tightened around his upper body like a snake trying to squeeze his life away.
“Whatever you need to defeat that thing,” Richard said, and his brown eyes filled with blue fire.
“Whatever you need,” I said, and I didn’t need a mirror to know that my own eyes had turned to the same burning-night-sky blue.
Jean-Claude stood there wreathed by that blackness, the eyes of the other vampire floating above him as if it could mark him the way he had marked us. No other vampire was strong enough to do that to him, but there it was like a venomous serpent clinging to him. The eyes were less clear with him touching both of us, but it wasn’t gone, and it should have been gone, chased out by the power of his own triumvirate, his own human servant and beast half. We were his seat of power, the thing that had allowed him to rise to rule over every other vampire in America. There was a hiss of sound through my head, every vampire save one. That wasn’t our thought.
Fear poured over us like the coldest of showers, all lust lost in the terror of that serpent body and those floating eyes. “It’s a mora, a night hag, it feeds off our fear.” I said it out loud as if we didn’t all know, but somehow saying the words helped loosen what it was doing to us.
“Release the ardeur,” Richard said.
“I will not have control as normal, Richard, and I would not lose you so soon again,” Jean-Claude said.
“No more running,” he said, “no matter what happens I swear to you both I will stay and work it out, and not abandon you.”
Jean-Claude gave me a desperate look because it was too good to believe. Jean-Claude’s blue eyes were as human as they ever got, but the pale eyes floating just above and beside his head gleamed like fog with headlights behind it, coming this way. The vampire was going to drive right over us unless we acted now.
“Jean-Claude, you have to raise the ardeur now, right now,” I said.
“He feeds on nightmares and terror. He won’t care about my feelings, or anyone’s feelings but his own. He will take over your vampires, and then the entire country will be his,” Richard said.
That hissing voice came again. “Such tender morals Jean-Claude has acquired, he will not take by force what is rightfully his, but I will.”
My skin ran cold with the opposite of nameless dread because I knew exactly where the dread was coming from, no name needed. My mouth went dry, and I was so scared I could taste metal on my tongue as if I was already bleeding from wounds he hadn’t made yet. I heard Richard almost moan, “I will not give the Thronnos Rokke clan over to you.”
The smoke turned black and solid; it was feeding off our fears, using us to give it power. It turned a huge spade-shaped head toward me and even without the colored scales I knew that head shape.
“Viper,” Richard said; I thought he’d read my mind, then realized that we both had biology degrees.
“I want to say rattlesnake but I’m not sure that it’s anything natural.”
“Maybe it’s an ancestral viper like some of the older types of shapeshifters are extinct species,” he said.
The night-dark head turned to look at each of us in turn as we spoke. Its head was as wide across as Jean-Claude’s. Another wave of terror tried to travel down Jean-Claude’s hands to us, but we were studying the snake, trying to classify it, not something recommended in the field with real snakes. If you think it’s venomous just get away from it, figure out species later in safety, but we couldn’t let go of Jean-Claude. We could not leave this snake alone, so . . . “No viper in the world was ever this big,” I said.
“Not that we’ve found a fossil for,” agreed Richard.
The more we used our brains for thinking and studying, the easier it was to slough off the fear, like a snake shedding its skin so it can grow bigger. “The eyes haven’t changed color,” I said.
“Still pale gray,” he said.
“Shining like moonlight or rain if it could glow,” I said.
“Why do you think the eyes aren’t changing color with the rest of the body?” he asked.
“I don’t know, maybe they’re windows into his soul and all that jazz.”
“You mean they’re really the vampire’s eye color?” Richard leaned closer and the snake’s head leaned toward him. He should have been afraid to get closer to it, but he wasn’t. The more we studied it, the less afraid we both were; it worked that way with real animals, too, so we’d discovered back when we were still camping, birdwatching, hiking, caving—he was the last person in my dating life who had loved the outdoors even more than I did. I saw a ghostly fringe around the top of its head, or I thought I did, but it was, like most of the body, smoke—the phrase smoke and mirrors came to mind.
“Is there a fringe on top of its head?” I asked.
“Yes,” Richard said, “and no. It’s insubstantial like smoke, and no living snake has ever had a fringe, that’s only lizards.”
“I am not a lizard,” the hissing voice said.
Richard sniffed the air almost nose to nose with the massive head. “It doesn’t smell real; it doesn’t smell like snake or lizard.”
The hissing voice came through our heads. “I am real enough to crawl into your souls and control you for the rest of eternity.”
“Rest of eternity? Isn’t that redundant?” I asked.
“Should it just be, you’ll control us for all of eternity?” Richard asked.
“No,” I said, “even that’s too much. It should be he’ll control us for eternity, because after you say that there is no more. Eternity is it.”
“Are you making fun of me?” the hissing voice asked, but the snake head never opened its mouth when it spoke; it wasn’t real enough to have to open its mouth. What the fuck was this thing?
Jean-Claude laughed. “I had almost forgotten that Richard shared your sense of humor once, ma petite.”
The snake body flexed around his chest and the laughter stopped. Jean-Claude staggered and started to fall, but Richard caught him. I tensed to see the snake hit him, too, but the coils were like mist that held its shape so that I could see Richard’s body through it. I pushed my hand through it to touch Richard’s arm and it felt less real than mist, there wasn’t even any moisture to it. I still had Jean-Claude’s hand in mine, though his grip seemed weaker. I moved my other hand to his chest, and the snake that looked so solid and black evaporated like clouds around my hand, graying out so I could see through it.
The hiss ran through us all. “You have left the door open a crack, Jean-Claude; did you think the words meant nothing? The fourth mark can only be completed two ways, by absolute force and will of the vampire involved, or by saying the spell along with the actions. Real magic is more than just rutting like beasts and thinking strongly at something, but you are so young, you don’t remember when the Mother was one of us, not the queen of us. Magic was everywhere, but there were rules, there are still rules, and you don’t know what they are, little would-be king. That lack of knowledge is going to be your death, and then your human servant, the greatest necromancer in over three thousand years, will be mine, and your beast, wolf king of the local werewolves. Not so powerful, but once he is mine I will fill him with such magic that none will stand before him.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Names are old magic. I will not share mine.”
“If you’re going to be our new master, shouldn’t we have your name?”
“You may call me Deimos.”
“The personification of dread before the battle, right?”
The strangely solid snake head looked at me and something flickered in the shining gray eyes. I’d surprised him. “Most unexpected that you would know that.”
“Ma petite is full of surprises, Deimos.” The snake coils moved as if someone had walked through mist to send it swirling around my arm where I touched Jean-Claude. He sagged as Richard took more of his weight with the one arm that was free; neither of us wanted to let go of Jean-Claude’s hands, as if that was more important than just touching his skin.
“Raise the ardeur, Jean-Claude,” Richard said.
“I will not force myself upon you, I gave you my word.”
This was news to me but made sense for the two of them. “You raise the ardeur and chase this cold-blooded bastard back to his den, or I will,” I said.
“If a man’s word is no longer good, then he is without honor.” He sagged until Richard had to brace to hold him and withdrew the hand I was holding so he could at least partially use both arms. The stupid heels made me stumble and almost fall. Jean-Claude’s skin was cool and clammy; it should have been warm and full of all the lust from the crowd. Deimos didn’t have to send fear into me, I was suddenly terrified all on my own. The fear chased back my own ardeur. Fuck. I had to swallow hard before I could look at Richard. His eyes were solid, chocolate brown with no hint of Jean-Claude’s power in them. Mine were probably just brown again, too.
I said, “I don’t know what bargain you made with him, but it is not worth him dying in our arms.”
“If I thought we could both survive I might have once, but that was then, and Deimos would not be an improvement.”
I started to say that if he let Jean-Claude die it wouldn’t matter if he survived because I’d kill him, but I’d learned enough to keep the more self-sabotaging things to myself. Somewhere in that sentence he’d agreed to help Jean-Claude.
Richard kissed Jean-Claude’s cheek. I had no idea why; it wasn’t something I’d ever seen them do before. Jean-Claude moved his face back to see Richard more clearly; those dark blue eyes were having trouble focusing.
“Would you really let him kill you and give Anita and me into slavery just so you didn’t accidentally ravage me?”
“I gave you my word.”
“That’s a yes,” I said.
“Oui.”
“Honorable men are so easily manipulated,” Deimos said.
“We can be,” Richard said, still staring into Jean-Claude’s face like he was trying to memorize him, and then he kissed him full on the mouth. It was a chaste touch of lips, but in nearly ten years of off-again, on-again it was the first time I’d ever seen them kiss. He drew back first, and Jean-Claude’s face showed the astonishment we were both feeling at our so-heterosexual Richard.
“You astonish me, mon lupe.”
“I’d rather not take one for the team, but if it happens in the heat of the moment, I promise no buyer’s remorse from me. Now release the ardeur and save us.”
The coils swirled, or flexed, I had no word for what they did around Jean-Claude’s chest, but it staggered him so that Richard and I let go of our hands to grab him. In the fraction of a second before I was touching them both again, Deimos filled me with terror that froze my breath in my throat and damn near collapsed my chest with dread. We were going to lose, we were going to die, we were . . .
“He cannot find his lust while I ride him; your master cannot save you now, wolf.”
“We just need the ardeur to rise,” Richard said, and he looked at me.
“Lust is the balm in which men have hidden their fear before battle, their terror on the battlefield in rape and ravage, but it is too late for Jean-Claude to give you such comfort.”
“I know that,” Richard said, and he gave me a look that was strangely peaceful, as if he’d made peace with it, whatever it might be. I’d never thought to see a look like that on his face again, our conflicted teacher who happened to be a werewolf. He stood there, the muscles in his arms flexing, holding Jean-Claude with my arm around his waist, one arm trapped between their bodies. He nodded, and I looked up at the snake’s head. I wanted to touch it to feel if it was solid enough to smash; once we’d freed Jean-Claude and ourselves, we’d test the theory. I looked at the pale gray eyes and they flickered again, maybe it was a blink without eyelids. Richard shared some of his resolute calm with me. I didn’t question where that sense of peace came from, because I needed it too badly to question. It helped me regain control of myself.
“Deimos, dread or fear, is the son of Ares, god of war,” I said.
“Yes, I am a god.”
I smiled and I knew it was the smile most unpleasant that I got when I was about to do something violent and usually fatal for the other guy. I’d made peace with that smile and what came with it because it kept me alive. “Do you know what my nickname is, Deimos?”
“You are the Executioner, and soon you will be slaying my enemies as I bid you.”
“My other nickname.”
“What other name?” He sounded impatient and he tried to send fear down my skin again, but it was too late for that to stop me; I’d made my decision and there was an untouchable stillness in the choice.
“War, the other preternatural marshals call me ‘War,’ that’s why I know Deimos is fear or dread of the battle to come: I researched it.”
“That is absurd; you are a tiny, delicate woman, you cannot be War.”
Jean-Claude sagged in our arms so hard we were going to have to go to our knees soon. “Hurry up,” Richard said.
I called the ardeur from inside me, not Jean-Claude’s power, but like the wolf that hid inside me, what had begun as his power alone was now mine. “What is this? What is happening?” Deimos sounded afraid, perfect.
“Who’s your daddy, Deimos?” I said, and then the ardeur engulfed us like a wave of summer heat. I had a vague memory of Deimos screaming and then it was just the three of us with our hands and mouths on each other without Jean-Claude in enough control to save us from ourselves.