Crimson Death
Page 79

   I took his outstretched hand in mine; there was a hum of power as our fingers touched, and as more of our hands touched, the power rose until when we settled our palms against each other’s, it was like a jolt of electricity, except it didn’t feel bad; it felt good. It sped my pulse until I had to fight not to pant as if I’d been kissing someone too long and too hard, and forgotten to take a deep enough breath.
   “Wow,” I said, “that’s new.”
   “That was amazing,” Damian said; his face was flushed as if he’d taken more blood from somewhere.
   “What were you thinking when you touched him, ma petite?”
   “Nothing. I mean that I didn’t like being the experiment and that I didn’t want him sad. I preferred him happy to sad, or something like that.”
   “And you, Damian, what were you thinking?”
   “That I wanted the power to rise between us. I want what Nathaniel did to raise our power level.”
   “Why?” Jean-Claude asked.
   “To have more power, of course.” He started rubbing his thumb along my knuckles as he said it.
   “Most vampires would mean that, but you do not. You said the expected. We want the truth.”
   “I . . .” He looked up at me, then at Nathaniel, who was still standing in front of the fireplace halfway between the two chairs. He held his hand out mutely for the other man.
   Nathaniel moved toward us, but Jean-Claude said, “Let him answer the question first, mon minou.”
   I squeezed Damian’s hand and said, “The truth, Damian, just tell us.”
   He swallowed hard enough that I could watch his throat work and see the pulse in the side of his neck. He was a vampire; they didn’t always have a pulse, and they certainly didn’t have such a rich, throbbing beat in the side of their necks.
   “If we truly raise power for each other, if Nathaniel has finally figured out how to get our triumvirate to work, then he will have to come with us to Ireland.”
   “Why do you wish him to come?” Jean-Claude asked.
   Damian looked at the floor; as his happiness receded, so did the easy confidence. He kept one hand in mine, but the other pulled at the towel, trying to raise it higher up his body. The bold vampire who hadn’t seemed to care if the towel stayed, or fell, was gone. This was the Damian I knew: not shy, but not comfortable with being nude in front of other men, or certain people in general. He saw nudity the way I saw it, as a type of vulnerability.
   “I don’t know,” he said at last, but he stared at the floor as he said it. I don’t think any of us believed him.
   Jean-Claude motioned to Nathaniel, and he came to us, laying his hand on Damian’s bare shoulder. It wasn’t a lover’s touch, just a friend’s hand on your shoulder when you are feeling sad. Damian flinched and started to pull away from that friendly touch, and then he stopped. He didn’t just stop moving away; he stopped moving in that way that the older vampires could. His energy, the flow and hum of him, was almost not there at all. His hand wasn’t warm and alive in mine anymore; it was like trying to hold hands with a mannequin, or some kind of lifelike doll, but it wasn’t alive. Whatever I was touching wasn’t alive. I’d always hated it when Jean-Claude did it. I didn’t like it any better now.
   Nathaniel shook him by the shoulder. “Don’t do this to us, Damian. Don’t go away like this.”
   Damian looked up then, his eyes almost flat without the shine of living eyes. He’d said that She-Who-Made-Him had killed him in battle that night so long ago. In that moment I understood what he meant.
   I tried to pull my hand out of his, but his fingers just stayed around mine; it was like holding a corpse’s hand. “Either feel alive or let me go, Damian. I mean it.”
   “I still have to do whatever you order me to do,” he said. It was like magic—his hand just felt alive again.
   “Fine. Then why do you want Nathaniel to come with us to Ireland?” I asked.
   He shook his head.
   “Say his name, ma petite. You must be specific or he has room to wiggle.”
   “Damian, tell me why you want Nathaniel to come with us to Ireland. Tell me the true reason you want him to come with us.”
   He shook his head. “I don’t . . .”
   “Damian,” Nathaniel said, “why do you want me to come with you to Ireland?”
   The vampire sighed and again I was taken by the thick, beating pulse in the side of his neck. I wanted to lick the side of his neck and feel the beat of his life against my tongue.
   “Now, I have to obey both of you.” He looked up at me and his green eyes were so alive and so angry. He turned the intensity of his gaze to Nathaniel. “I feel braver when you’re with me. It takes everything for me to fight off the feeling of euphoria. I don’t remember feeling this good, maybe ever.” He put his hand up to cover Nathaniel’s where he was still touching the vampire’s shoulder. The towel began to slide back down to pool in his lap.
   “I wanted someone to desire me the way you and Anita seem to want Micah, and you made that wish come true. You wanted me to want you the way I want Anita, and I can’t seem to stop you from getting your wish either.” He turned and looked at me. “What did you wish for, Anita? What did you want from us? What did you want the three of us to be?”
   I thought about it for a minute. “I’ve thought life would be easier for a while if you were a little more bisexual.”
   Damian laughed then, and it was part amusement and part something that wasn’t light or funny at all. It wasn’t exactly bitterness, but if irony had a sound, that was it. “I don’t think I’m bisexual, but I may be Nathaniel-sexual.” He looked up at Nathaniel.
   “You wanted to be desired. I wanted you happy and not sad about Cardinale. Did I do a bad thing to us?”
   “I do not know, but I know that with you and Anita beside me I am brave enough to go back and face her.”
   “We are not going to face her, Damian. We don’t have to face her.”
   “Maybe not to save the humans that are being killed, but once we have stopped the plague of vampires in Dublin, I want the human authorities to help us free the rest of the people she is holding captive, Anita.” He turned back to give me the full weight of that emerald gaze of his, but there was a purpose in it that I hadn’t seen before.
   “Can we do that without messing things up for you with the European vampires?” I asked, looking at Jean-Claude.
   “One of the Harlequin told us that what’s happening in Ireland may be because we killed Marmee Noir, and we aren’t sending them back out to spy on all the other vampires, so we don’t know what’s happening,” Nathaniel said.