Reluctant Partnerships (2 page)

“Leighton was an anomaly,” Raymond insisted. “A new partnership wouldn’t be that way.”

“I know you believe that,” Adèle replied, “but that doesn’t make me any more interested in taking the risk. Let’s go. Dinner’s ready and people are waiting on us.”

Raymond pulled a face but gave in to her logic and Jean’s guiding hand.

Adèle wished, not for the first time, that she could find a way out of the weekly dinners, but work had not cooperated this week, and with no case to use as an excuse, she had given in to the guilt she felt at brushing off Raymond’s concern. They had all seen the grief that had overtaken Blair Nichols, the one vampire she knew of who had lost his partner during the war, after Laurent Copé’s death. Their partnership had been more like Raymond and Jean’s or Thierry and Sebastien’s, a true match of hearts and spirits that would have developed into a formidable bond if Laurent had not died in one of Serrier’s attacks. She had lost sight of Blair after the war ended, making her wonder if Raymond importuned the vampire the same way or if Jean had reined his partner in on that score.

“I worry about you,” Raymond said as they took their seats at the head table where Raymond always insisted Adèle sit. She might not be on the faculty at l’Institut, but she was a veteran of l’émeutte des Sorciers like Raymond and the others on the staff, not to mention their friend. “Are you well?”

“I’m fine,” Adèle said as she did every week. She suspected it would be easier on Raymond if she was pining away from Leighton’s loss. He would understand that emotion because it would be his own reaction if anything ever happened to Jean. She shuddered to think of that. She might have hated her own partner, but she recognized the devotion between the partners around her. “Are Alain and Orlando here tonight?”

It was a diversionary tactic, but it worked. “They should be, although they said they’d probably be late. They’re in Paris at a meeting,” Raymond said. “Did you need them for something?”

“No,” Adèle said. “I just hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks. You’re not the only one who likes to keep up with his friends.”

Raymond flushed. “Am I really that intolerable?”

“I know you want what’s best for me,” Adèle replied. Now if they could only agree on what that was. Raymond wanted her to find another partner, or rather, the researcher in him wanted to know if it was possible for a wizard who had lost her partner to find another one. “So did you have any matches this week?”

“None,” Raymond said with a frustrated grimace. “More weeks than not, we don’t. It seemed so easy that first morning at the gare de Lyon. Not the meeting itself—that was incredibly awkward—but the partnerships. I don’t understand why we have so little success now.”

“A smaller pool to choose from, for one thing,” Adèle suggested. “Ten wizards and vampires a week instead of the four hundred people we gathered at the gare de Lyon. And not all of the wizards and vampires each week choose to try for a partnership. Even those who do decide to try but don’t meet a partner leave with good intentions of coming back to try again in subsequent weeks, but you know most of them get busy with their lives and forget as many weeks as they remember. Without the pressure of the war to add urgency to the mix, people put it off. Or maybe they change their minds once they’re away and have time to reflect. If we’d known then what we know now, I probably wouldn’t have let Jude feed from me that first time.”

“Really?” Raymond asked.

“Okay, maybe I would have because of the war,” Adèle admitted, “but Jude and I rubbed each other the wrong way from the moment we first spoke. He looked at the bite marks on my arm and judged me for it even though he knew why they were there. He never stopped judging me.” Out of habit, she ran her fingers across the upper swell of her left breast where even now, she bore the scars of his fangs. Realizing what she was doing, she jerked her hand away quickly, hoping Raymond had not noticed. She had healed the other marks he left on her body, but she kept the one set of scars as a reminder of the mistake she had made once so she would not make it again.

Sebastien Noyer, Thierry’s partner, joined them at the table before Raymond could reply to that, his hand trailing across the back of Thierry’s neck as he passed. Adèle smiled at the open gesture of affection between the two men. She knew partnerships could be positive and productive. She had only to look at Sebastien and Thierry or Jean and Raymond to see it. Unfortunately, her own partnership had been nothing but a nightmare.

“Bonsoir, Sebastien,” she said, drawing Sebastien’s attention from his partner to the social niceties he had ignored in favor of greeting the lover he had left perhaps ten minutes earlier.

“Adèle, I didn’t see you come in,” Sebastien said, greeting her as Thierry had done.

“I just arrived a few minutes ago,” she said.

“You’re late tonight,” Sebastien teased. “Did a case keep you?”

“Paperwork,” Adèle said. It was even mostly true. She could have done it earlier in the day, but she had been working on it at the time she normally would have left to come to dinner.

“You work too hard,” Raymond said, drawing a snort of disbelief from Adèle. That was a case of the pot calling the kettle black if ever there was one. “You need someone to make you relax.”

“I don’t need anyone to
make
me do anything,” Adèle retorted, hackles rising. “It was that kind of condescending attitude that made me hate Leighton so much. I didn’t take it from him, even if I understood where his attitude came from. I’m certainly not going to take it from you!”

A reverent murmur went through the room, forestalling the rest of Adèle’s rant, although from Raymond’s contrite look, he would have apologized before it went any further. Alain Magnier and Orlando St. Clair had arrived. To Adèle, they were friends, fellow veterans, and more proof of how good a partnership could be, but she had spent enough time around vampires not involved in l’émeutte des Sorciers to know how they were viewed by the wider vampire community. The brand on Alain’s neck, proof of a different kind of bond, set them apart and gave Orlando near mythical standing within vampire society. As striking as they were together, Orlando dark and slender, Alain fair and broader through the shoulders, Adèle suspected they would turn heads even if they did not have the Aveu de Sang to set them apart.

When they reached the head table, they greeted everyone, ending with Adèle, before taking their seats. “How did the meeting with Anne-Marie go?” Raymond asked.

“She said to tell you that you could have your job back whenever you wanted it,” Alain said with a grin.

“Oh, no,” Raymond said. “I served my time as president of l’ANS. That’s her problem now.”

They all laughed, Adèle included. L’Association Nationale de Sorcellerie, the non-profit organization that campaigned for the rights of all magical beings, had fallen into Raymond’s hands at the retirement of the previous president, Marcel Chavinier. Raymond had, in turn, retired from the post with the opening of l’Institut six months earlier. Anne-Marie Valour, his successor, was doing a good job from what Adèle could see, but she tried to give Raymond the job back at least once a month.

Y
AWNING
, Adèle drove toward home, her thoughts all in turmoil. So far she had resisted Raymond’s blandishments to try her magic on the vampires who completed l’Institut’s educational seminars, but sometimes, especially on nights like tonight, when the partners around her seemed in a particularly affectionate mood, she wondered what her life might be like now if she had paired with someone different. It would always be her choice. Raymond could not coerce her into creating a new partnership bond. The whole point of having the seminars was to make both sides aware of the commitment entailed in forming a partnership, but she also knew he could not understand—not really—why she would not want it again, knowing what it meant. How could he, when Jean worshiped the ground he walked on, a feeling he clearly returned?

In the darkness and silence of her own bedroom, she could admit that she had not hated every minute of it. Most of it, but not all of it. Leighton, damn his black soul, had known how to touch her like none of her previous lovers had dared. She had fought him—and left him—because his attitude toward her was intolerable.

Shaking her head at her wandering thoughts, she yawned again, focusing on the road in front of her. As she rounded a bend, the beams of her headlights caught the slender form of a woman perched precariously on the edge of a bridge across one of le Morvan’s many ravines. Slamming on the brakes, Adèle grabbed her wand, jumping from the car and casting a spell on the woman to keep her from jumping. The woman’s arms continued to move wildly. Adèle cursed under her breath. She had felt the magic leave her. The spell had gone where she intended, but it hadn’t worked.

Stomach churning, Adèle recognized the irony that she had just been thinking of the only other person her magic hadn’t worked on, but she did not have time to worry over the implications at the moment. She could not let the woman jump. Changing her tactics, she cast a spell on the bridge itself, raising a barrier between the woman and the ravine. “Come down,” Adèle urged. “No matter what it is you think is so bad, it isn’t worth killing yourself.”

“I’m already dead,” the woman shouted back. “The fucker killed me and then instead of letting me die, he forced his blood down my throat and made me into a monster.”

“Who?” Adèle asked, walking slowly toward the woman. “Who hurt you?”

“I don’t know his name. He appeared out of the darkness, grabbing me as I opened the door to my house.” The words came out in short gasps. Adèle wished she could see better in the darkness, the headlights from her car creating crazy shadows.

“He dragged me behind the garage and bit me.”

Adèle could sympathize with that feeling. Jude had grabbed her and dragged her into alleys, empty rooms, and any other private place he could find to feed from her whether she agreed or not.

“I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker, and then instead of letting me go, he tore open his wrist and forced his blood down my throat.”

Adèle shuddered. She had seen the strength of the vampires during the war. This slight woman who barely passed Adèle’s shoulder would have had no chance against one of them.

“When I woke up, he told me I was a vampire and I’d need to find someone to feed from so I didn’t starve. I don’t want to be a monster like him!”

“Calm down,” Adèle said soothingly, hiding her shock. She had learned enough about vampires over the past two years to know the mysterious vampire’s behavior fell well outside the norm of accepted behavior within that community. She had no idea what, under French law, she could charge a vampire with for a non-consensual turning, but she knew without a doubt what the reaction of the vampire leadership would be. She moved closer, keeping her hands out in front of her where the other woman could see them. “You aren’t a monster, no matter what he did to you. What’s your name?”

“You don’t know what he turned me into!” the woman wailed, completely ignoring Adèle’s question.

“You told me he turned you into a vampire,” the wizard said, struggling to hold on to her calm. “That doesn’t make you a monster.”

“But he drank my blood. He took my life!”

Adèle rolled her eyes. She wondered if the woman was always this melodramatic. “And gave you a different kind of life. Look, I know it’s a change, a huge one, but I know some people who can help you.”

“They can make me human again?”

“Nobody can do that,” Adèle said apologetically, “but they can help you learn to live with your new situation. I have some friends who are vampires, decent ones, not like the one who turned you without your permission. I can take you to them if you want. We can be there in twenty minutes. At least listen to what they have to say. If they can’t convince you, it will be dawn in an hour or so. A lot of what you hear about vampires isn’t true, but that part is. If you really can’t deal with your new existence after you’ve talked to Jean and Sebastien, all you have to do is walk outside once the sun is up. It will be over in a matter of seconds.”

“They won’t… hurt me?” the woman asked, stepping away from the edge of the bridge.

“What else can they do to you that you weren’t going to do to yourself?” Adèle asked, stepping closer. “Come on. It’s cold. You’ll be warmer in the car.”

“I don’t even feel it,” the woman said.

“There you go,” Adèle joked. “An advantage to being a vampire, because I’m freezing standing out here.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“It’s what I do,” Adèle said, pulling out her badge. “Detective Adèle Rougier at your service.”

“Enchantée, Detective.”

“And you are?”

“I’m sorry,” the woman apologized. “I’m Pascale Auboussu.”

Adèle had to suppress a shudder at hearing the first name of the dark wizard who had wreaked so much havoc in Paris before the Milice de Sorcellerie finally cornered and killed him. That wasn’t this Pascale’s fault, Adèle reminded herself. Here in the country, she had probably been only marginally aware of what many saw as a magical problem. Most people outside of Paris had never registered that the loss of the war would have disrupted everyone’s lives and instituted an absolute rule the likes of which had not been seen in France since the days of Louis XIV. Taking a deep breath, Adèle let it go. She had more pressing problems. Like a potential partner who was newly turned and had no idea of anything. “Let’s go, Pascale. Time’s passing. We need to get you somewhere safe before sunrise.”

In the dim glow of the car’s dome light, Adèle got a better look at the woman she had rescued. Pascale was petite, blonde, and slender, the opposite of Adèle’s height, dark hair, and curvaceous figure. Snarling at catching herself staring, she reminded herself firmly that she didn’t want another partner, and even if she did, she liked men. Given her own experience and what she had observed, indeed what l’Institut was teaching during its seminars, anyone entering into a partnership needed to expect and accept it becoming personal, even sexual.