Crimson Death
Page 13

   “Join us or die, huh?”
   “Something like that. Jean-Claude cautioned me to make certain you leave by about now,” he said, glancing at the wall clock.
   I let the surprise show on my face. “I don’t think he’s ever talked to one of my other people before like that.”
   “He didn’t want you to get distracted by me.”
   “Fine. I’ll fill Jean-Claude and Nathaniel in on what’s happening with you and we’ll come up with a plan.”
   He offered his hand to me, as if it were any other meeting, and I took it the same way. We forgot that weird was where we started. Power jumped between our skin in a wash of heat, as if a sudden fever had gripped us both. The last time I’d touched him there’d been attraction, power, magic, but not like this heat wave.
   I let go of his hand, but he held on, until I said, “Let go of me, Damian,” and he had to let go, because I’d ordered him to do it.
   Our hands parted, but it was like pulling our hands out of some invisible taffy: sticky, sweet, and trying to hold on to both of us. We stood there staring at each other, both of us breathing fast, chests rising and falling with the need for air as if we’d been running.
   “What the hell was that?” I gasped it, because I didn’t have air for anything else. I was even sweating, just a little.
   “I don’t know,” he whispered, and there was the faintest dew of sweat on his face. The sweat should have been pinkish with blood, but it was darker than that, more red than pink. One drop of that bloody sweat trailed down his face and took my gaze with it, to find more sweat down the middle of that bare line of chest, so that it looked like he was bleeding from a hundred tiny puncture wounds, except it was the fine pores of his skin. He wasn’t wounded; he wasn’t even truly bleeding; there was always a little blood in a vampire’s sweat, enough to make the clear liquid slightly pink.
   I watched Damian bleed down the paper whiteness of his skin, and knew something was wrong, as in call-a-doctor wrong, but who do you call when a vampire gets “sick”? Since they didn’t get sick in any traditional sense, there weren’t a lot of doctors that specialized.
   Damian touched his fingers to his skin and stared at the blood on them. “What is happening to me, Anita?”
   “I don’t know,” I said.
   “You’re a necromancer and my master; shouldn’t you know something?”
   I felt that little spurt of anger but pushed it down, because he was right. “Yeah, I should, but I don’t. I’m sorry for that.”
   He got some Kleenex from his desk drawer and started dabbing at the bloody sweat. The tissues came away soaked. “I woke from the nightmares like this today, Anita, drenched in blood. I ruined the sheets and Cardinale just lay there in the bloody bed like the corpse she was.”
   I stared at him, because I’d never heard a vampire describe another vampire like that before. “Damian . . .” I reached out to touch him, comfort him, but stopped myself before I finished the gesture; shaking hands had been exciting enough.
   “Whatever is wrong with me is getting worse, Anita.” He threw the bloody Kleenex in the small office wastebasket.
   “We’ll talk to Jean-Claude first.”
   “And if he doesn’t know what’s wrong with me, what’s second?”
   “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said.
   “If Jean-Claude doesn’t have an answer for this, Anita, then you and Nathaniel and I have to make our metaphysics work better.”
   “Even if it costs you Cardinale?”
   He stripped off his coat and held it out by two fingers away from his body. Blood was still beading on the skin between his shoulder blades. Shouldn’t it have soaked into the coat? He turned around and fresh blood was sweating onto his chest and forehead.
   “Cardinale said she’d rather I keep having nightmares than have me sleep with someone else.” He wiped at the fresh blood with more Kleenex, until it was all a bloody mess. “I can feel it dripping down my back,” he said with distaste.
   “It is, but I’m afraid to touch you again after the handshake,” I said.
   “Nothing personal, but I don’t want to bleed more,” he said.
   “Maybe Jean-Claude can help us figure out why my touch made you do this,” I said.
   “The next time we touch he should be in the room.”
   “And Nathaniel,” I said.
   “And maybe some security guards,” Damian said, as he threw more bloody tissues into the trash can.
   “Why security?” I asked.
   “The last time things went wrong with me, Anita, I killed innocent humans, just slaughtered them. I don’t remember doing it, but I believe that I did. I was worse than a freshly risen vampire, more like one of the revenants that never regains its mind.”
   “You didn’t have any of these symptoms before last time, did you?”
   “No, no nightmares, no bloody sweats, no power jumps, just out of my head with bloodlust.”
   “That was different, then, Damian.”
   “Was it?”
   “You said it yourself: The symptoms are different.”
   “I suppose.”
   “You just went crazy that time, Damian.”
   “No, I didn’t just go crazy, Anita. You had cut me off from my connection to you and instead of dying finally and completely, I was old enough, or powerful enough, to go crazy.”
   “Damian . . .”
   “I know you haven’t cut me off from your power as my master this time, Anita, but you’ve still distanced yourself from me.”
   “Because you and Cardinale asked me to.”
   “We did, but I didn’t understand how much I would miss interacting with you and Nathaniel.”
   “We were never that close, the three of us.”
   “No, but I feel the lack of you both, somehow.”
   Since Nathaniel had said almost the same thing about Damian a few months back, I wasn’t sure what to say; I didn’t seem to miss Damian as much as my other fiancé did. “I did what you asked, Damian.”
   “Maybe I’m unasking,” he said.
   “What does that mean?” I asked.
   “It means that I’m lonely.”
   “You live and work with Cardinale, and you’re in love with her.”
   “I know that.”
   I wanted to ask, Then how can you be lonely? But I wasn’t sure how to say it. He said it for me. “I thought being in love meant you’d never be lonely again, that it would be like coming home in every sense of the word.”