Crimson Death
Page 18

   “Damian isn’t like that.” I said it out loud and hadn’t meant to.
   “He isn’t like what?” Cardinale asked.
   “He has been as loyal and faithful to you as any man could be to a woman.”
   “You would say that, since you’re his mistress.”
   “I’m not his mistress. I’m his master, and there is a big difference between the two titles,” I said.
   “You don’t have to fuck your master,” Cardinale said.
   I looked past her at Damian. “Do you want me to say it?”
   “Say whatever you want, Anita.”
   I took in a lot of air, blew it out slow, then said, “The Master of the City of London brought you into his kiss with the understanding you’d have to fuck him to be one of his vampires, didn’t he?”
   She looked behind her at Damian. “How could you tell her that?”
   “He didn’t have to tell me anything, Cardinale. I’m his master. We have to work at not sharing thoughts and memories.”
   “It has never been like that with me and any master I have ever served.”
   “Damian is my vampire servant, as I am Jean-Claude’s human servant. It’s a different kind of master relationship, a deeper relationship than that between vampire and Master of the City.”
   She looked at me then, tears shining in her eyes. “So you have a deeper relationship with Damian than I do—is that what you’re saying?”
   “There’s no way to win with you, is there?” I asked.
   “I’m not a game to win, Anita. I’m a person with a heart and right now you’re breaking it.”
   Shit.
   “No,” Damian said, “there’s no way to win with Cardinale. She’s a riddle with no answer.”
   “My answer is that I love you more than anything in the world,” she said, turning toward him and starting to cry.
   “You’re a rigged game, Cardinale, because your rules make it impossible for Damian to convince you that he loves you enough.”
   “I’ll love enough for both of us, then!” she said, reaching out to him. He didn’t reach back; in fact, he’d done nothing to get closer to her physically since she walked into the room. It was a bad sign for any relationship.
   “It doesn’t work that way,” Damian said. “You have to leave room for me to love you, too, and your issues don’t leave any room for me. It’s like you’re fighting men from your past that I don’t even know about, but I’m paying for their sins.”
   “I don’t know what that means. I just know I love you more than life itself!” She moved toward him then, hands reaching for him.
   His hands stayed at his sides as he said, “I can’t fight ghosts from your past unless you help me, Cardinale.”
   “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Damian.” She was crying now, softly.
   “Would you be willing to see a couples therapist with me?”
   “Why? There’s nothing wrong with us except you’re cheating on me.”
   He hung his head, and the wave of despair that washed over me was almost soul crushing, as if it would wash away all of me and leave nothing behind but a black loneliness that we’d lived with for so long before we came to St. Louis. I was choking on the utter isolation he’d endured when he was trapped in Ireland with the vampire that made him.
   Again I spoke out loud without meaning to. “Why didn’t you kill yourself?”
   “I was too frightened to do the one thing that would kill me for certain,” he said.
   “What are the two of you talking about?” Cardinale asked.
   “Sunlight,” I said.
   He nodded.
   I had shared the memory of his best friend, his shield mate, brother-in-arms, his heterosexual life partner, being forced outside into the sunlight by She-Who-Made-Them, to punish them, yes, but mostly just to cause them both pain, because she could. She’d done a lot of things because she could, and there was no one to stop her; some people are only good because there are rules and punishments in place to make them be good. Take that away and it’s amazing what people will do to each other if they think they can get away with it. I felt the weight of centuries of having no safety, no surety of what evil thing she’d do next, and still being forced to share her bed when she wanted it. I was impressed that Damian had been able to get it up for the evil bitch century after century.
   “A man who couldn’t service her was tortured to death, or mutilated and left alive. It gave us all a great incentive to rise to the occasion.”
   “Why are you talking about such horrible things?” Cardinale asked.
   I felt the vampire behind me before she spoke, and knew it was Echo before I heard her voice. “They are speaking mind to mind, sharing emotions, memories, pieces of their heart and soul.”
   “No,” Cardinale said, “no, no one gets a piece of his heart but me.”
   “You are only his love. She is his master. It is a closer bond.”
   I turned and looked at her then, because that last part was rubbing salt in Cardinale’s wounds. Was my new head of security at Danse Macabre here to make things worse, or better?
   Echo was shorter than me tonight, because I was wearing heels and she was in flat boots, but then she was security tonight and I was hoping to have a date. Her hair was a brown so dark, it was almost black. It even looked black until you got her too close to Jean-Claude’s hair, or mine, but whereas we were curly she had waves that helped hers fall in a more orderly fashion to her shoulders, framing one of the most delicate triangles of a face I’d ever seen. She was one of the few women who made me think dainty, but once you looked into her dark blue eyes you stopped thinking dainty and started thinking dangerous. She wore no makeup when she worked security, which would have made most women’s faces look plain, but Echo’s natural black lashes and brows framing deep, rich blue eyes, and all that dark hair, well . . . plain was just never a word you thought of when looking at her. Beautiful maybe, but never plain. She did her best to dress down for the job, with a looser black T-shirt over a tighter-fitting black tank top. I couldn’t see the tank top under her T-shirt, but I knew it was there, because she didn’t like the weapons at her waist digging into her bare skin, so there’d be a layer of clothing to protect her bare skin. She’d had a business jacket thrown over all that, so that she hid as much of the trim figure underneath as she could, but you never forgot that Echo was a beautiful woman for very long, no matter how she tried to hide it. Since I was sleeping with her, that should have been a good thing, but she made me strangely nervous, like I was fourteen again and had my first crush.