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He glanced at Marco and looked back to Etta before answering. “You are my dark Mistress.” His vocal cords still weren’t quite right, but he was easily understandable.
Patience was seated at the end of our row, and she stood and walked to Etta with a collar and leash, which Etta affixed around her new slave’s throat.
“You still have to learn to drive, Etta darling,” Marco said from his seat, and Etta looked at him with a wry grin. “Damn. Since my new slave has a good driving record, I was hoping I could skip that.”
He shook his head. “It’s a skill all Americans need unless they live and work in a large city, and even then, it’s sometimes a hardship if they can’t.”
Patience handed a cock cage to Etta, who ordered her slave to stand before she deftly put it on him. It was one that goes three inches inside the urethra as well as wrapping all the way around the balls, so this one wasn’t coming off. “He’ll get a PA piercing soon, done with silver, and the jewelry will be a five percent silver amalgam — enough he won’t be able to heal around it.” She looked up to the audience. “He’ll never change to eagle again, and he’ll never have more than five minutes outside of a cock cage at a time, for the rest of his life. He’s had the last full hard-on he’ll ever be allowed.”
She turned to face me. “Is this punishment suitable in your eyes, Slayer?”
It was possibly overkill, but no way was I going to say that in front of the other shapeshifters, so I nodded and told her, “It is.”
Marco and Etta telepathed back and forth a few times, and Etta looked at the audience again, levitated off the stage and halfway across the room, and met the gaze of one of the eagles I’d made a note to check on later.
Without saying a word, she ate his fear until he was seventy percent depleted. He only dried out a little, so perhaps my theory about whatever he had that she needed had been accurate. He was in a great deal of pain, however, and his terror was as real as it gets. Those around him were frozen in place and also terrified, and it felt as if Marco was handling that, though I couldn’t be certain. It’s possible Etta was doing it and since she’s bound to Marco, it felt like his power.
My abilities allow me to always see things as they truly are, but I wasn’t sure on this point, and that bugged me.
When Etta finally stopped pulling from the eagle, Evan was standing on the other end of the aisle. “Pass him down to your chief,” she told the other eagles. “This piece of garbage has put a string of prostitutes in the hospital, getting rough with them when he hasn’t paid to do so. He’ll go into a cell for a month, in cuffs so he can’t change, and live rats in his cell that he can choose to eat, or not. He’ll be whipped every day for a month, and halfway through the month, the head of his dick will be cut off, along with his balls. Both will be cauterized in a way to assure they will not grow back. If he’s still sane and can pass the psych tests when he comes out, you’ll see him again. If not…” She shrugged and put power into her levitation so she floated back to the stage. She was wearing another red dress, this one came halfway between her knees and ankles, and red heels that matched the dress exactly. Not fire engine red, but a pleasing color that looked striking on her. An avenging angel dressed in red, rather than white.
Fuck, where had that come from? Etta is a vampire, not a damned angel.
Etta landed gracefully on the stage five feet in front of me and asked, “Is this punishment acceptable to you, slayer? If you’re going to kill him for his crimes, we’ll let you do so once his month in our dungeon is complete, before he undergoes testing to see if he’s managed to hold onto his sanity.” Her eyes were still solid black, but weren’t glowing red.
“I’d like to be in on the test of whether he’s trustworthy to turn loose as a security guard again, but yes, this punishment seems suitable.”
Assuming he hadn’t killed a human, I’d have beat the hell out of him, let him change and heal, beat the hell out of him again, and repeated the cycle until I felt it was enough, and then cut his dick and balls off with a sulfur infused silver knife and cauterized the wound with Hellfire to make sure nothing grew back. Our punishments weren’t actually so different, but hers in conjunction with Largo being paraded around without his willpower, a slave to the vampire with no hope of release except his eventual death — I figured every shifter present would behave for at least a year or two before even considering letting their dicks make bad decisions.
I gave my politest telepathic knock to Etta.
Yes?
I’d like to accompany you wherever you go after this meeting.
I’ll be taking Largo to the coterie house and getting him settled in. He’ll be installed in the downstairs common area for a few days, on a fucking station, so anyone who wishes can use any of his available holes. Once he’s in place, I can meet you somewhere.
I can drive the two of you there and wait outside.
That’s acceptable, but I’ll likely be from forty minutes to an hour. He’ll have an IV for fluids, and I’ll need to make some changes to his security settings in the computer.
Blade is not only welcome in the New Orleans coterie house, she has full access to come and go as she pleases. Would I ever be allowed inside this one? Did I want to be?
I made a decision, then and there, to take Etta to my home in New Hampshire. One of us had to trust first, and if that had to be me then so be it. She’d have to work out a time when Marco would be in town and could handle things without her a few days, but I hoped to be able to do so in the coming weeks, not months.
We had to figure out how to get my inner slayer and her inner vampire to stop wanting to fight for dominance, though. That had to happen first. We were both being very careful when we looked at each other, and it was working for now, but I knew it would be worse than bad if things went sideways around the other vampires.
Still, as we walked out, I saw a little alcove and I pushed her into it, pressed her against the wall, and kissed her senseless. Or, I hoped that was the effect I had on her. I pulled back and risked a glance into her eyes, and liked what I saw.
Just kissed female.
A quick kiss on the cheek, and I grasped her hand and pulled her back into the hallway before the next crowd behind us rounded the corner. We walked hand in hand while she held Largo’s leash. He’d been allowed to put shorts on — enough he’d be legal in public, but no more.
“My driver the other night talked to me about all the decisions he was making as he drove,” Etta told me. “It was quite helpful. We only have a handful of intersections between here and the coterie house, however.”
“A couple of red lights, some stop signs, a railroad crossing, a few places where traffic yields in with our flow. I can do the same. I get the feeling you haven’t ridden in a car a whole lot, much less considered what it would take to drive one.”
“That’s true. I’ve been taken places in helicopters and planes more often than cars in the decades since these modes of transportation have been available. Mostly, I was moved from one estate to another, without a need to be taken elsewhere. I rode horses and could manage a horse-drawn carriage in previous centuries, but cars are different.”
