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I could feel the stuff clinging to my bare back where Damian had touched me. My pants were soaked with it from the knees down. The clothes would have to be burned or at least thrown away. This was one of the reasons I kept a pair of coveralls in my Jeep to put on over my clothes at crime scenes and some zombie raisings. Of course, I hadn't expected to get this messy before I'd even left the damn cabin.
"Showers sound great," I said. "You first."
"May I suggest that you go first. A hot shower is a wonderful luxury, but for Damian and me it is a luxury, not a necessity."
"Good point," I said. My hair had kept the stuff from soaking to my scalp, but I could feel it when I touched my hair.
It. I kept saying, "it." I was shying away from the fact that "it" was Damian's body rotted and leaked out upon the floor. Sometimes when it's too horrible you have to distance yourself from it. Language is a good way to do that. Victims become an "it" very quickly, because sometimes it's too horrible even to say, "he," or "she." When you're scraping pieces of someone's loved one off your hands, it has to be an "it." Has to be, or you run screaming. So, I was covered in black, greenish it.
I washed my hands thoroughly enough so I could dig through my suitcase without contaminating the clothes. I'd picked out jeans and a polo shirt. Asher appeared behind me. I looked up at him.
"What?" I asked. It sounded rude even to me. "I mean, what now?"
Asher rewarded me with a smile. "We will have to meet Colin tonight."
I nodded. "Oh, yeah. He is definitely on my dance card for tonight."
He smiled and shook his head. "We cannot kill him, Anita."
I stared at him. "You mean we can't, as in it's too hard a job or we can't, as in we shouldn't do it?"
"Perhaps both, but certainly the latter."
I stood. "He sent Nathaniel to us to die." I looked into the suitcase, not seeing it, just not wanting to look up. There was a rim of blackness at the base of my fingernails that the scrubbing at the sink hadn't lifted. There had been a moment when the power broke between us, and I knew it would work, but until that second ... I had tried very hard not to think about it. It was only after I'd gone into the bathroom to clean my hands off that I started to shake. I'd stayed in the bathroom until my hands were steady. The fear was under control, all that was left was anger.
"I do not think anyone was meant to die, Anita. I think it was a test."
"A test of what?" I asked.
"How much power we truly have. In a way it was a compliment. He would never have contaminated Nathaniel if he thought we had no hope of saving him."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because, to kill a pomme de sangof another master vampire is a mortal insult. Wars have begun over less."
"But he knows we can't make war on him without the Council hunting us down."
"Which is why we cannot kill him." Asher held up his hand, which stopped me with my mouth open. I closed it. "The last master you killed was threatening your life directly. You killed her to protect yourself. Self-defense is allowed. But Colin has not offered us personal violence."
"That is cutting it pretty damn close, Asher."
He gave a graceful nod. "Oui."
"So if we kill him the Council comes back to town and cleans our clock."
Slight frown lines showed between his eyes. I don't think he understood the slang. "They will kill us," he said.
I'd met some of the Council, and I knew he was right. Jean-Claude had enemies on the Council and now so did I. No, I did not want to give the nightmares of all vampirekind an excuse to come back to St. Louis and wipe us out.
"What can we do? Because, mark me on this, Asher, they will pay for what they did to Nathaniel."
"I agree. If we do nothing to avenge the insult, it will be viewed as a sign of weakness and Colin may come against us and kill us."
"Why is everything so damned complicated with you guys?" I asked. "Why couldn't Colin just believe we'd come down here to rescue Richard?"
"Because we didn't leave town." Nathaniel's voice came thin but steady from the bed. He blinked lilac eyes at me. Cherry had bandaged his chest and the neck wound was covered with a large piece of taped gauze. I assumed the thigh wound was similarly covered, but the bedspread covered him from the waist down.
"When Richard got out of jail, Colin expected us to leave town. When we didn't, he thought we meant to take over his territory."
I went to stand by the bed. "Zane said you went off with one of Verne's werewolves. How did the vamps get hold of you?"
"Mira," he said.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"The werewolf's name is Mira." He looked away from me as if he didn't want to look me in the face while he talked. "She took me home. We had sex. Then she left the room. When she came back the vampires were with her." He looked up at me. I found myself staring down into his eyes and the need in them was so raw it made me flinch.
"There were too many of them for you to fight, Nathaniel," I said. "It's okay."
"Fight?" He laughed, and it was so bitter it hurt just to hear it. "There was no fight. I was already chained down."
I frowned. "Why?"
He let out a long sigh. "Anita, Anita, God." He put one arm across his eyes.
Zane came to the rescue, sort of. "You know that Nathaniel is a submissive?"
I nodded. "I know he likes to be tied up and ... " The light dawned. "Oh, okay. I get it. Mira invited you home for some S and M sex."
"D and S, dominance and submission," Zane said, "but yeah."
I took a deep breath, mistake. The room still stank of bodily fluids, the unpleasant kind. "So she wrapped you up like a present and gave you to them?"
"Yes," he said, softly. "The sex had been good. She was a good top."
"Top?" I asked.
"Dominant," Zane said.
Ah.
Nathaniel curled onto his side, drawing the bedspread around him. "The master, Colin, paid her to bring one of us to them. Anyone of us. It didn't matter who. It could have been Jason, or Zane, or Cherry. One of their animals, he said." He huddled down into the blankets, eyes fluttering shut, then open, then shut.
I looked at Cherry. "Is he alright?"
"I gave him something to help him sleep. It won't last long. Our metabolisms are too fast, but he'll get maybe half an hour, an hour if we're lucky."
"If you're not going to take a shower, I'd like to," Damian said.
"No, I'm getting in."
"But you can't wear what you've picked out," Asher said.
I frowned at him. "What are you talking about?"
"Jean-Claude sent a trunk of clothes just for this occasion," he said.
"Oh, no," I said, "no more leather and lace shit."
"I agree with you, Anita," Asher said. "If we were simply going to kill them it wouldn't matter what we wore, but we are putting on a show as much as anything. Appearance will matter."
"Well, shit," I said. "Fine, I'll dress up, we won't kill anyone, but you better come up with something that we can do to them. They can't abuse our people like this and just walk away."
"They will expect retribution, Anita. They are waiting for it."
I looked at Nathaniel cuddled so deep in the blankets that only the top of his head showed. "This retribution better be good, Asher."
"I will do my best."
I shook my head. "You do that." I went into the shower without any clothes to put on because the trunk was in the other cabin. I figured with both coffins in my room I didn't need the trunk. I'd really hoped we wouldn't be opening the damn thing. I hated dressing up in normal dressy clothes. Jean-Claude's idea of dressing up was always worse.
15
It took three rounds of shampoo to get my hair clean. The stuff on my body didn't seem to want to come off unless I scrubbed. There is that point in the middle of the back that you just can't do yourself. It is one of the few areas that married people have an edge on us single folk. I finally had to turn the shower on as high as it would go and just let it pound the middle of my back. The stuff finally sloughed off and floated down the drain.
The stuff clung like nothing I'd ever had to clean off before. That included real rotting corpses and zombies. None of it had ever been as tough to get rid of as Damian's ... fluids.
