Crimson Death (38 page)

Jean-Claude said, “In three.”

“God, you're joking,” Sin said, but he thrust himself in my mouth and down my throat, once. Jean-Claude shoved between my legs. Twice inside my throat. A second time deep inside me. The third time Sin thrust down my throat, and Jean-Claude said, “Now, now!” Sin buried himself as deep inside my throat as he could; I drove my nails into his thigh and his ass and would have screamed as Jean-Claude thrust himself as deep inside me as he could go and they both poured themselves inside me at the same time. I could feel Sin pulsing, spilling the heat of him down my throat, and Jean-Claude pouring warm between my legs, and I fed on them. I fed on the seed of them spilling inside me. I fed on the feel of their bodies plunged inside me. I fed on my nails digging into Sin's body, on Jean-Claude's hands on me. I fed on them everywhere they touched me, and when I got Sin's blood under my nails, it seemed to absorb up through my fingertips.

He cried out above me, and then he screamed. I always valued when the men screamed for me. It was so damn rare. It all felt so good, so right, and then I felt power rushing over me, through me, and it wasn't coming from Jean-Claude. It was Sin. I couldn't see what was happening, because my face was still buried upside down against his body, but that body was doing some kind of magic that I'd never felt
before. I had a moment to start to pull away from him, so I wouldn't be choking on him when the
ardeur
left me and whatever this power was happened, but I was still blind against his body when the room started to shake and all I could think was
Earthquake . . . St. Louis doesn't have earthquakes
, and then we were all scrambling to untangle ourselves and try to find cover, but how do you hide from an earthquake when you're in a cave?

I
T WASN'T AN
earthquake, but the lump under the rug that Sin tripped over turned out to be the floor. It had cracked and buckled as if something had torn through the rock. All the floors in the underground were solid rock, some with flooring over it, but it was basically bedrock, or close to it.

“What the hell did that?” I asked, staring down at the rip in the solid rock. It wasn't deep, just baring more rock underneath, but it was a nearly straight line about five feet long and maybe six inches wide. The rock stuck up on either side of it like a miniature mountain range just brought to life with a valley in between, waiting for grass to fill it.

I hugged myself, but the black silk robe wasn't much for warmth. Jean-Claude was back in his much thicker black robe with the fur collar and cuffs. We'd put on the robes because the guards on the door had come into the room when they heard the noise of the floor cracking. It had sounded like an explosion, and the guards had hit their general alarm button before they came into the room pale and ready to defend us from the danger, except that there hadn't been anything to attack. How can you protect your charges from something that can split the floor open without leaving a trace?

Nicky had gone to get some of the guards with the most experience with magic and metaphysics—the Harlequin. They'd spent centuries
dealing with the Mother of All Darkness and the vampire council, who were all heavy hitters for stuff like this.

“If we had not killed him I would wonder if it was the Earthmover warning us,” Jean-Claude said.

“He could level a city with a real earthquake, but I didn't know he could do things like this,” I said.

“I honestly do not know, but it has the appearance of his sort of power.”

I nodded. “Agreed, but I cut his heart out personally, so it's not him.”

“Who's the Earthmover?” Sin asked from the chair by the fireplace. He didn't have a robe here, so he'd put his jeans back on and was sort of huddling in the chair. He'd managed to pull those long legs up so that he was hugging his knees. He reminded me more of the teenager I'd first met now than the confidently arrogant lover of earlier. It was almost comforting to see the younger Cynric peeking out of that handsome, muscular body.

“He was one of the vampire council, and one of the oldest vampires I'd ever met until Marmee Noir. He came to town to try to kill Jean-Claude and take over St. Louis.”

“I thought the old council members gave up any chance at their own territories when they took a council seat,” Sin said, looking at us over his knees, so that his dark blue eyes glittered in the artificial firelight.

“That's true,” I said.

“The Earthmover did not come to rule St. Louis,” Jean-Claude said. “He came to take over here and use my vampires as his tools to cause a vampire incident so terrible it would repeal the new laws and make us illegal monsters again.”

“Why would a vampire want to go back to having no rights?” he asked.

I answered, “He thought that legal vampires would eventually spread across the earth and turn so many humans into vampires that they'd basically run out of food, and thus they'd die out along with the humans. Mutually assured destruction for humans and vampires.”

“The Earthmover sought to make vampires illegal again, so we
would go back to the shadows where he thought we belonged. He thought the old system guaranteed that vampire numbers would stay smaller, because we had to stay hidden, and thus we would not overpopulate and depopulate our only food source.”

“Humans and wereanimals,” Sin said.

Jean-Claude nodded. “He talked only of humans, but yes.”

“I've listened to the Harlequin and most of the older vamps see us, all of us shapeshifters, as lesser.”

“It is a sadly common attitude among the oldest of us.”

“Well, it sucks,” he said.

“Yes, it does, which is why I am doing my best to promote newer and more progressive attitudes among them.”

One of the guards by the door cleared his throat. We looked at him. It was Emmanuel, one of Rafael's wererats; his hair was pale brown, cut short, and his pale gray eyes looked paler in the permanent tan of his face. He wasn't the tallest or the most muscled, but he excelled at everything physical: hand-to-hand, blade work, shooting; he was even good at undercover work. He was also handsome in that clean-cut sort of way. He looked like he should be walking around a college campus somewhere worrying about passing algebra and how it would affect his athletic scholarship, but he was actually a lot more deadly than some of the guards who walked around throwing attitude all over the place.

“Yes, Emmanuel?” Jean-Claude said.

“Some of us really appreciate how hard you try to make the older vampires treat us like we're people.”

“Yeah, we do,” said the second guard, and I realized it was the new guard, Harris, from yesterday, or was it the day before? Though he was all white-bread as far as I knew, his hair was almost the same shade of brown as Emmanuel's, and Harris was the one with brown eyes.

“It is good to know that our efforts are appreciated,” Jean-Claude said with a graceful incline of his head.

“I know that some of the older vamps here in this country and in Europe aren't too happy about it, so I just wanted to say
thank you
.”

Jean-Claude smiled. “You are most welcome, Emmanuel, and . . . Harry, is it?”

“Harris, sir.”

“Harris.”

“I see your pal Barry isn't with you tonight,” I said.

He made a face and then fought back to bodyguard neutral. “He's not my friend.”

“We let Barry and another guard go,” Emmanuel said.

“I've got one more chance to prove I'm not like Barry,” Harris said.

“Claudia and Fredo have decided to pair the new guards with more experienced guards—no newbies teamed up together.”

I looked at Emmanuel and nodded. “Agreed.”

There was a knock on the door, but it opened before we could say anything. It was Nicky with Magda and her master, Giacomo. He was taller than anyone else in the room except Sin. His shoulders were as broad as Nicky's, or damn close, but whereas Nicky had that upside-down triangle that bodybuilders had, Giacomo was built like an old-time refrigerator, a big rectangle of muscle. You wouldn't think he had the same kind of muscle that Nicky did, because his was hidden under an extra layer of flesh, but it was under there. I'd seen them lift weights in friendly competitions in the gym. The other guards would place bets on who could lift more, or do the most reps. It was like the room had shrunk around them.

Giacomo went to one knee in front of Jean-Claude. “My King, how may we serve you?”

Magda had gone to one knee beside him, though she almost never did it when Giacomo wasn't with her. If she thought it was excessive she kept her head lowered so it didn't show on her face. Giacomo was her master metaphysically, and that would be true until one of them died. Marriage had nothing on magic for longevity.

“Rise, Giacomo. I've told you such displays are not necessary in private.”

He raised the nearly perfect roundness of his face, the dark brown of one eye and the pale milky blue of the other set in tight folds. The scar that bisected his right eye curved through his eyebrow and onto his cheek. I'd thought he was blind in the eye, and so had some of the other guards in fight practice. They'd tried to go for his blind side and
he'd kicked their asses, because the eye worked, not as well as the other one, but he could see out of it.

Giacomo rose as he was bid and gave that nearly infectious smile of his. Nicky was just behind him and Magda. He still had his hair swept to one side so that the scars over his right eye were visible. The two big men stood there with their different scars over the same eye, and it was striking. Two such men with similar injuries on the same eye, what were the odds?

Nicky led Magda and Giacomo to where the floor was broken. They stared down at it and then Giacomo leaned into Nicky and whispered something. Nicky told Emmanuel and Harris to man the door from the other side, and they did it, though Emmanuel looked back as he closed the door.

“Why did we need privacy?” I asked.

“Because I know who did this,” Giacomo said.

“Who?” Sin said, coming to stand beside Jean-Claude and me.

“You.”

Sin blinked at him. “I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have any ability to do . . . whatever this is,” he said, waving vaguely in the floor's direction.

Magda said, “Did you feel a rush of power just before it happened?”

“We were having sex. I wasn't thinking about anything else.”

“Actually, there
was
a rush of power from him,” I said.

“It was just my beast, Anita. You know that orgasm is one of the times that the inner beast comes closest to the surface.”

“I know. That's why all the good little boy and girl shapeshifters get chained up for their first orgasms so they don't kill anyone by accident.”

“You were sensing that,” he said.

“Did you change shape?” Magda asked.

He shook his head.

Giacomo looked at us. “My King, did you sense anything from him?”

“As he said, we were having sex with Anita between us. It is always magical to be with her when she feeds the
ardeur
. It tends to blind you to any other power.”

“It can be quite overwhelming,” Magda said.

“Then perhaps the young prince did not understand what was happening.”

“I did not do that,” Sin said, pointing at the floor.

“You are a pureblooded blue clan tiger.”

“I know that.”

“Earth is what your clan controlled.”

“I know blue tiger is earth, red is fire, white is metal, black is water, and gold is sun, or controls all the other clans,” Sin said, repeating it the way you'd say something you were forced to memorize in school but didn't really want to.

“Have you seen Crispin call the small lightning to his hands?”

“It's like super static electricity, is all,” Sin said.

“But it is still the power of his clan manifesting since he became Anita's white tiger to call, and the prince of the red clan can now call fire to his hands after becoming Anita's red tiger.”

“A little super static electricity and fire like a match appearing in your hand is not the same thing as cracking the floor open,” Sin said, pointing at the damage again. I could feel his fear bubbling along my own stomach.

“Our new Queen has not seen the red prince in over a year, and Crispin is no longer blessed to be among her lovers, but you are much admired by her,” Giacomo said, being so polite about it that it sounded like he wasn't talking about sex at all.

“Wait,” I said. “Are you saying that Sin's power is more because I'm sleeping with him regularly?”

“Yes, because it is the coin of your vampire line. If you had been descended from a different bloodline, then other types of proximity would have had a similar effect.”

“So if Anita slept more often with the other two, then their power would grow?” Magda asked.

“I believe so.”

“So why hasn't Dev's power grown? She and Jean-Claude are sleeping with him regularly,” Sin asked.

“He has the ability to shapeshift into a lion, as well as a gold tiger, and he has gifted Micah with a second beast shape as well; I would say that Dev's powers are growing.”

“Crispin and the red tiger both showed their powers years ago. I've never had anything like this happen before,” Sin said.

“Some things take time,” Giacomo said.

“Domino and I slept with Anita the same night, a few months after Crispin. Are you saying that we'll both get powers?”

“I have never heard of someone who had mixed clan blood exhibiting their bloodlines' powers.”

“So because Domino is half white clan and half black, you think he won't exhibit any of the clan magic?” I asked.

“I have seen the tiger clans when they were at their most powerful, and only the pureblooded among them could work their most powerful spells.”

“So why did it take this long for Sin? He's pureblooded blue tiger,” I asked.

“He was too young.”

“He's been legally an adult for a couple of years,” I said.

“Legal adulthood by modern standards is merely an agreed-upon number. Some teenagers I see in this country are very grown-up years before they are eighteen, and others seem to be stuck in a perpetual childhood,” Giacomo said.

“Are you saying this proves I'm an adult blue tiger?”

“Yes, Cynric, that is exactly what I am saying.”

“Sin, not Cynric,” he said automatically.

“It is your choice, but
Prince Cynric
seems to roll off the tongue a little more sweetly than
Prince Sin
.”

“
Prince Sin
sounds like a rock star name,” I said, smiling and taking his hand to take the sting out of it.

“Nah,” Nicky said, “it's a porn star name.”

“I'm not
Prince
anything. It's just
Sin
.”

“Legally it's still
Cynric
,” Jean-Claude said.

Sin frowned at him; again there was that echo of the younger Cynric when sullen was more his style. It was not a style that was going to win him the brass ring—oh, my bad, the gold ring. Jean-Claude would never do anything as inexpensive as brass.

“By any name, you have grown into your powers of earth,” Giacomo said.

“Or perhaps it is that this is the first time he has been intimate with both Anita and me?”

“Perhaps,” Giacomo said.

“You said yourself that Dev has gained power and he is lover to us both.”

“So is Fortune, and she hasn't manifested earth powers, and she's older than me by centuries, so she was old enough.”