Crimson Death (44 page)

“Am I the only one having trouble not making girl-on-girl jokes?” Dev asked.

“No,” Nathaniel said.

“Yes,” Pride said.

“I enjoy the sight of three beautiful women together as much as any man, but dawn is near,” Kaazim said.

Fortune turned to him, still hugging both of us, and said, “You aren't moved by the three of us together. I honestly don't know what moves you, Kaazim.”

“To serve my queen and her kings to the best of my abilities.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

Fortune grinned down at me, then said, “I agree with Anita: bullshit.”

“Jake, is that not what moves me?”

The other man grinned, but it was more a baring of teeth, as if he were snarling more than smiling. “I think I would like to be left out of this discussion.”

“Do you not know me after all this time, old friend?”

“I know your innermost desires, as much as you know mine, Kaazim, old friend.”

“Translation: You don't know,” I said.

Jake looked at me. “That is not what I said.”

It was Damian who touched my arm and made me look down at him. “I know I would be perfectly safe here even with the window open, and I may not die at dawn, but I would move to the back of the plane with the other vampires if that is all right.”

I leaned down and kissed him. “Of course, sit where you feel safest.”

Pilot Jeff came over the intercom. “Sunrise is almost here. Is the cabin secure?”

“Nicky, close the window,” I said.

He leaned over Damian and patted my hip—okay, my ass—and closed the window. I swear that the lights in the plane dimmed; I knew they hadn't, but it just seemed darker. Crap.

Echo kissed my cheek. “Thank you, Anita.”

“I'm a big, grown-up necromancer. I can do this.”

She smiled and went to find a seat to strap herself into, because once the sun rose she would drop like the corpse she almost was; Giacomo joined her in moving toward the back of the plane. Damian unbuckled and stood up. Nathaniel reached up and drew him down into a kiss, which he gave without any hesitation. Whatever magic Nathaniel had worked on the vampire, it was still working. He went back to join the other vampires while everyone else rearranged their seats so the vamps could have the seats farthest to the back of the plane where it was a little bit dimmer, just in case.

Fortune hugged me, just the two of us; I had to look quite a bit farther up to meet her pale blue eyes with their almost bright blue eyelashes like the coolest mascara ever to frame the forget-me-not blue of her eyes. It had been her eyes that had made me take Sin to the side and stand him in bright light to discover that his eyelashes weren't black like I'd always thought, but an incredibly dark navy blue. It was a very small sampling, but so far only the blue tigers all had eyelashes the same color as their clan name. The gold tigers certainly didn't all have golden eyelashes, or even eyebrows.

“Thank you for taking care of her,” Fortune said.

“You're supposed to take care of your lovers, aren't you?”

She smiled down at me from a face that looked about twenty-five and would look that way forever, but she suddenly looked beyond cynical as if the years that didn't show on her face were still there in the depths of her blue eyes.

“Yes,” she said, “you are, but a tremendous number of people don't seem to know that. Thank you for not being one of them.” She kissed my forehead as if I were a child, and then kissed my mouth like a lover. She left me to go give Echo a good-bye kiss, before the sunrise stole her master and lover away. We had coffins packed in the belly of the plane for the vampires traveling with us, and I knew that Fortune and Magda both had duffel bags big enough to put their masters in and carry them out on their backs if they had to, but that was for short periods of time or if something went horribly wrong. There was a third duffel bag in the cabin for Damian, just in case he died at dawn again. If he did we'd treat him like all the other vampires, though neither Nathaniel nor I had had time to practice carrying him like that. Damian wasn't a big guy, but he was tall, so Nathaniel would probably do the carrying just because he was taller and broader than me.

I took my seat beside Nathaniel again. I could see Magda checking Giacomo's seat belt as he reclined the seat back so he was lying down. She wouldn't be giving him a good-bye kiss, because they didn't kiss, so far as I knew. They weren't lovers. They were fellow warriors, battle buddies, partners in that police way, maybe even best friends, but there was nothing romantic between them. Magda had proved with us that she was bisexual, so I wasn't sure why they hadn't added fuck buddies to their list, but with them it seemed to be strictly mutual respect and a partnership somewhere between the ones I had with Edward and Sergeant Zerbrowski, who was my partner when I worked with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team back home. Edward and I were about to be best “men” for each other. Zerbrowski had put me and Nathaniel on the short list of people who could come get his kids from school in case of emergency. It would never have occurred to me to cross the line romantically with Zerbrowski. Edward and I had decided long ago that our friendship meant more to us than any friendship with benefits could gain us. You can be friends with your sexual
partners, but you can't be best friends, because the sex gets in the way, and if you're trying for a romantic relationship, that means regular friendship is almost impossible. I'm told there are people who can pull off both, but I've never met them. Maybe Magda and Giacomo had done the same relationship math and partnership won, too. Or maybe I didn't understand either of them well enough to hazard a guess yet.

I watched the two
moitié bêtes
tuck their vampire masters in, in very different ways. Damian buckled himself in and started lowering the seat back. I guess if he died at dawn, it would be less disturbing than watching his body slump sitting up. Fortune and Echo were each other's primaries, but Magda didn't seem to have a serious lover outside of us, and none of us were very serious with her. Did she want to be serious with someone?

Nathaniel got up to see if Damian wanted him to hold his hand the way that Fortune was doing for Echo. I remembered Jean-Claude asking me years ago to be with him at dawn. Watching him “die” as the sun rose outside the hotel room had been my first confirmation that vampires really did die at dawn. I'd heard his breath rattle out and felt his energy change from alive to not. I knew from medical write-ups that vampires' brain activity didn't go dead like true death and in fact didn't even go as low as most coma patients', but when you were just watching it happen without monitors to tell you different, it looked the same as anyone else dying in front of you. I'd seen people die for real and I'd seen vampires die at dawn, and I'd killed vampires for good. It all looked pretty much the same.

Nathaniel came back to his seat. “Damian's afraid that if he holds my hand he won't die at dawn.”

“Why would he want to die at dawn?” Socrates asked from across the aisle.

“When he sleeps like a regular person he has nightmares,” I said.

“I can understand wanting to skip that,” he said.

I felt the sun rise on the other side of the closed windows, and I felt Damian die. Nathaniel grabbed my hand tight. He'd felt it, too. I heard the curtain close behind us and didn't blame whoever had done it because one window wasn't perfectly set and there was a thinnest of golden
lines that slid along the inside of the plane. Domino was closest and he tried to force it down that last fraction. “It's not square in the window. It won't close more.”

We got napkins from the bar and wedged them in the crack of the “closed” window. “Good thing none of the vampires stayed up here,” he said.

We all agreed. “Someone make a note to get this window fixed. Blackout shades aren't a luxury for us.”

“Done,” Nicky said, and he was making a note in his smartphone.

We all sat back in our seats, though Dev moved up to sit across from Nathaniel where Damian had been. There was barely room for his shoulders next to Nicky's even in the comfy swivel seats. I wasn't sure they would have fit next to each other in coach seats on a regular airplane.

“What do you guys do on commercial airlines? I mean, how do you fit into the seats?”

They looked at each other and then Nicky answered, “I ride first class.”

Dev grinned. “Not fit.”

I smiled back. I couldn't help it. “Okay, ask a silly question.”

Nathaniel put an arm across my shoulders and said, “We should tell Dev about Asher.”

The smile faded on Dev's face. “I don't need to know anything about him.”

“This, you actually do,” I said.

We told him, and Nicky, and anyone else on the plane who wanted to hear. It wasn't big enough to really keep secrets, especially not when the people in question had super-hearing. It was like trying to keep secrets around Superman: just not happening.

Dev was frowning and rubbing his temples by the time we were finished.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “You didn't break my heart. Why are you sorry?”

“I guess I'm sorry Asher is such a shit.”

“He was a shit to you, too.”

“But I didn't want to marry him, so it didn't break my heart as much,” I said.

Dev smiled, more chagrined than happy. “Yeah, well, I'm not twenty-five yet, so I get to make stupid choices.”

“At least he didn't say yes,” Nicky said.

Dev looked at him and it was not a friendly look. “I wanted him to say yes, or I wouldn't have asked him.”

“If he'd said yes, then you would just be fucking Asher and no one else; is that really what you want?”

“He was never monogamous for you, but he expected you to be for him,” I said.

“Cousin,” Pride said, leaning in between Dev's and Nicky's seats, “Asher is one of the most selfish people I've ever met. I don't know how you dated him as long as you did.”

“He's the most beautiful man I've ever met,” Dev said.

“No one is beautiful enough to make up for being that much of a selfish bastard.”

“The sex was amazing.”

Pride shrugged, his hands making a push-away gesture. “We'll all stay with the crazy ones longer than we should for the sex.”

“I hate the idea that only the crazy ones are great in bed, because it's not true,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“What? I'm having great sex and I'm not dating crazy.”

They looked at each other now, and then Nicky said, “Anita, I'm a sociopath who tried to kill you and almost everyone you loved when we first met. How is that not the most crazy boyfriend ever?”

“Okay, I'll give you that one,” I said, smiling and patting his knee.

Nathaniel said, “I was the crazy boyfriend for years, but I went to therapy and worked through my issues.”

“But you still do sex like you're the crazy boyfriend,” Dev said, leaning forward and kissing Nathaniel. He parted from the kiss, his hand playing with the thick braid of Nathaniel's hair.

Nathaniel ran his hand along the other man's thigh as he said, “You fuck pretty good for not being the crazy one.”

It made Dev laugh and lean in for another kiss. This one lasted a little longer, and I watched sort of fascinated. I'd been with them together more than once and knew they were doing more just the two of them, but that just made them better together and I was good with that.

Dev drew back and said, “I'm so vanilla compared to you.”

“Everyone is vanilla compared to Nathaniel,” Pride said.

We all shook our heads. Ethan spoke up from across the aisle. “Not anyone else sitting over there with you.”

“What do you mean?” Pride asked.

“It's one of the reasons that Anita and I didn't work out as regular lovers. I am vanilla and she isn't, and she's not attracted to straight vanilla men.”

“I won't apologize for what I like,” I said.

“I'm not asking you to, but I'm trying to explain to Pride that he doesn't understand that Nathaniel isn't the only nonvanilla here.”

“Me, too,” Domino said. “I'm too vanilla to be part of Anita's harem. I'll do group sex if there are enough women involved, but other than that I'm not oriented the same way that the rest of Anita's men are.”

“I thought Nathaniel was the only . . . I don't want to be insulting,” Pride said.

“I'm the biggest pain slut of anyone in Anita's life, if that's what you mean.”

Pride looked relieved. “Yes, that's what I mean.”

“Nathaniel isn't the only one of us who likes pain; he just goes further than the rest of us,” I said.

“I guess I consider Dev vanilla except for being bisexual,” Pride said.

“I do group sex and you know I'm an exhibitionist,” Dev said.

“I guess I was just counting bondage as not vanilla.”

“Sorry, Pride, but vanilla sex is narrower than just not doing bondage,” I said.

Dev said, “The first time I was with Asher was with Nathaniel, Micah, and Anita. A four-way doesn't count as vanilla.”

“Okay, I get that I'm wrong on my definition of vanilla, and if you were as into bondage as Anita, or Nathaniel, I could see you missing Asher. Apparently, he's a talented top in the dungeon, but you and he never did the dominant-submissive thing together.”

“No.” All the smiles were gone from Dev now. He'd sat back in his seat, not trying to touch anyone.

“If you don't like pain, then a vampire can't go down on you that well, because of the fangs, so was the sex really that good, or was it just the being-in-love-with-him part?” Pride asked.

“He really is good at sex. Anita can back me up on that,” Dev said.