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“Why would you do that?”
“Let me mark you as my own, and then I will have Nicky taken to a hospital.”
“Once you’ve marked me, then you’ll just kill him.”
“Give me your word that you will allow me to mark you without fighting me, and I will have him taken to the hospital now.”
“You’ll have them carry him away and pretend to take him to a hospital, but you won’t do it for real. Even if you don’t kill him, you’ll just let him die.”
“If he is useless to me as a pawn to persuade my queen to protect me, then I will kill him in front of you. I tasted the despair in you when you thought him dead. I think you would do anything to save him.”
“I would, but that’s not what you’re offering.”
“Do not kill him in front of her, my lord, I beg you; I did that once with another of her loves and it did not go well,” Rodrigo said.
“Perhaps an act of kindness will win where threats will not,” said Trappolino as he came into view unmasked but still cloaked. His skin was almost as dark as the cloth. We all pretend that white and black mean the same for skin tone as they do for anything else, but it’s not true. Almost no one is actually white or black in color, but Trappolino was the closest I’d ever seen in real life. I had thought I dreamed this face, but apparently I’d dreamed the other, or he’d made an illusion of it. Better than any mask if you could put a false face into someone’s mind.
“What are you suggesting?” Deimos asked.
“With help, I will transport her lover to the closest hospital.”
“I can’t trust you either,” I said.
“I was not one of the Harlequin that came to St. Louis and took blood oath with Jean-Claude. I did not take oath with him and then break it as the others did.”
I couldn’t really argue with him. “You’re telling me to trust that your word is good?”
“Have I ever broken an oath that I made to you?”
“No.”
“Are you calling me an oath breaker?” Mischa said.
“Aren’t you?” Trappolino said.
Mischa took a step toward the other vampire, but that rocked Nicky’s body. He didn’t moan, just moved far too bonelessly for comfort. I knew death when I saw it, and it was close. “If you want to move you have to tell the rest of us,” Capitano said.
“You should be able to move with us as in battle, anticipating our moves,” Mischa said.
“We have not been able to do that since our dark queen died,” Capitano said.
Trappolino said, “Indecisiveness will kill Anita’s lion.”
I said, “You’ll have to take him to one of the hospitals that treats supernatural injuries.”
“Tell me, and I will go there,” he said.
I told him the two hospitals and if it was close enough, the one with the best trauma center. Did I trust him? No, but what choice did I have? If Trappolino’s word was no good, then Nicky was dead. If someone didn’t take him to the hospital now, he would die. Trust or not, it was Nicky’s only hope.
“I will not give my permission to lose the only prisoner I have that moves Anita’s heart.”
There was the sound of fighting just out of sight down the same damn hallway that everyone seemed to enter through. Trappolino looked toward the sounds, then said, “Others have returned with someone that may not move her heart as deeply, but for the purposeof possessing Jean-Claude’s power and making it your own he is perfect.”
The four Harlequin holding Nicky moved as a unit so they could all look toward the sound. “A prize indeed,” said Capitano.
“Oh, shit,” Scaramouche said.
My pulse sped up, and I had to swallow past the instant panic. Who did they have? Damn it. I knew how Nicky and I got captured, but the rest should have been protected better than this. How many of our Harlequin had turned on us? How compromised was our security? I said a prayer of safety for all of us, but I didn’t get that usual peaceful wash of energy. Normally I just accepted that, because I knew that not every prayer is answered, but tonight I could have really used the reassurance.
