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Richard turned his head and saw me; the moment our eyes met there was a spark of power that had been not missing but dulled, like taking the shine off a piece of silver. He tried to reach out to me automatically even though he had to feel his hands in handcuffs. I wanted to reach out to him, too, but I knew better than to try. He began pushing himself farther up the pile of rugs, with his feet and legs getting closer to the wall and to me.
“Awake? Very good, Ulfric,” Deimos said. “Let us begin.”
“Begin what?” Richard asked.
“Torturing you,” Deimos said.
43
Richard got himselfsitting up leaning shoulder to shoulder with me. Just the feel of his weight next to me helped calm all the negative emotions inside me. I leaned my head against his shoulder and so wanted him to put his arm around me. It was a craving to be closer to him. Once it had been just part of being in love with him. Now it was more than that, or less. We weren’t in love with each other anymore, maybe that would come back, maybe it wouldn’t, but the physical attraction was back in spades.
“The two of you are part of a true triumvirate of power now; you have me to thank for Jean-Claude giving you the fourth mark and sealing the three of you into one of the first true triumvirates of power that I’ve seen in two thousand years, give or take.”
“We did the fourth mark to keep you from possessing Jean-Claude the last time you were in town,” I said.
“As I said, you have me to thank for it,” Deimos said, and he looked so self-satisfied, like he really had done us a favor.
Richard said, “Thank you,” then kissed the top of my head; I turned and raised my face up toward him. He leaned down toward me and we kissed, soft lips, eager mouths, tongues exploring, and finally teeth. Richard took my lower lip between his teeth and it wasjust enough pain that it made me want more. He bit down just a little too much. I tasted blood, sweet copper pennies in my mouth, and then Jean-Claude was there in the kiss and the blood and the good pain. Whatever Queenie had done to the marks broke like chains unsnapping. Richard’s hands were on my face, the edge of the cuffs brushing my cheek, and then theardeurrose up inside me like a wave of warmth and desire that spilled from us and outward into the room.
I heard people scream, but I didn’t care because I was in Richard’s arms. I tried to touch him back, but my hands were still chained to the wall. Then there were other hands, other people, and theardeurdidn’t differentiate or care. More just meant more energy to feed on, and that was all theardeurwanted. Fangs sank into my neck and then there was a roaring sound and theardeurscattered. It wasn’t gone; I could feel it inside me like a piece of myself was home again. Jean-Claude was there in my head, our heads, Richard’s and mine. I expected him to be in the big bed downstairs, but he was sitting in the big conference room with Dev standing at his back with his hands on Jean-Claude’s shoulders. He’d stood like that with me in Ireland when he helped us fight off fairie glamour. I realized that of all the people I was magically connected to, he had been the one that had been most lost to me when the vampire marks weren’t working. It hadn’t even occurred to me to contact Dev as if he were just missing from me.
I stared at our Mephistopheles, our Devil, our Dev, with his yellow hair streaked with white, so it was among the palest of our blonds, his skin pale gold as if he was always sun-kissed. He was six feet three inches tall with broad shoulders to match the height. I stared into his blue-hazel eyes with their pale brown around the irises and even now the connection wasn’t as strong as it should have been. Why would the links to our pure-blooded gold tiger be the hardest hit?
“Because he is a dragon,ma petite, and tiger energy threatens him.” He had dirt on the side of his face, and his white shirt was covered in dust or grit. I started to think at him,What happened?, but something large smashed me into the wall; Richard’s arm cushioned my head and held me as we blinked up at something in front of us.
What I thought at first was,There’s a wall in front of me, a wall that wasn’t there before. Then I realized that made no sense, no one would put a wall a few feet from the first wall. It wasn’t wide enough to be a hallway, it was like a crawl space that you walked through. It was so narrow that Richard would have to put his back to one wall and go out sideways. Then the wall breathed. I watched the surface rise and fall and suddenly I could see it.
The belly scales were glistening and white like mother-of-pearl; the dim light caught pastel rainbows in it as he breathed. I looked up and up and all I could see was the shining white of the belly scales. The warehouse ceiling had to be at least thirty feet high, but it wasn’t high enough for Deimos. His neck and head curled downward because there wasn’t room for him to stretch upward. His head was bent downward toward us. The top of him was black, so that he mingled with the darkness near the top of the roof, but his silver eyes shone down at us like twin moons.
My first thought was not that we were in terrible danger, but that he was beautiful. I actually said it out loud: “Beautiful.”
He leaned his head down toward us and spoke in a deeper, rumbling version of his human voice. “I appeared before you as the most handsome of humans, and you did not think I was beautiful, but you find this form beautiful.” He had a mouthful of sharp teeth that detracted a little from the beauty, but not much.
“I do,” I said, and it was the truth.
“She’s right,” Richard said, “you’re amazing.”
“People usually run screaming when they see me like this,” he said, peering down at us with his twin moon eyes, shining and silver like moonlight on water. We forgot for a second that he was notjust a dragon but a vampire. One second we were staring into those huge eyes, and the next we were falling into the silver shine of them like moonlight on water. The trouble is once you dive through the moonlight the water underneath is black and there is no light to lead you back.
44
I stood in thecenter of the village surrounded by flames, every building ablaze. The high-pitched screams of women filled the night. The men had run outside to try and fight; their bodies lay burned and twisted, the heat of our flame breaking bones as their bodies turned in upon themselves. A baby was crying somewhere nearby, high and pitiless. We stood in the center of the destruction and consumed their terror and grief. A woman crawled out onto the street with her baby in her arms and another baby old enough to walk. She was coughing, the small child crying, covered in soot and dirt. The baby in her arms wasn’t crying. She stared down at it, trying to get it to cry, or move. She threw back her head and wailed to the night sky above. It was a sound beyond prayers, or words; it was a sound of such pain that anyone who heard it would know what it meant and would try to give aid. I stepped forward, but a man’s hand was on my shoulder. His bearded face smiled so happily. How could he be happy in the face of such overwhelming loss? He told me that this was the moment of ultimate pain and to drink deep of it. I jerked free of his hand and ran toward the little family crying in the firelit dark. I felt something behind me and turned to see a dragon rising up and up above me until he blotted out the stars. “Now we feast onflesh and terror.” He opened his mouth, but there was no fire to breathe, just huge, pointed teeth.
I woke with a gasp in the dark and for a second I thought I was home in the underground of the Circus of the Damned. I thought I had fallen asleep wrapped around Jean-Claude’s nude body because he was cold to the touch as only the dead can be, but two things were wrong. I was still dressed, and the body didn’t feel like Jean-Claude. This was too broad through the shoulders, more like Richard or Dev, or Nicky. The moment I thought his name I remembered him being hurt. I stopped for a second in the confusion and prayed that he was alive; there was a moment of peace, and then my hand touched beard. No one in my life had a full beard. I froze then like a rabbit in the long grass, hoping the fox won’t find them. I forced myself to be still and not scream, because I didn’t know if that would wake Deimos, because that was who it was, and him dead for the day was better than him awake.
I forced myself to begin slowly and calmly to explore where we were with one hand, because I was curled on my side against his body. Would me moving wake him like it can when you’re sleeping beside someone? I didn’t know how dragon vampires worked; it was my first one. I knew I desperately did not want him to wake up right now, so I reached carefully with one hand to explore. I knew what we were in, but part of me hoped, really hoped I was wrong. Maybe we were in a lightless dungeon where the darkness never ceased without flame or flashlight to pierce it.
The first wall was right up against his shoulder; my one foot was already resting against the other wall. I had to swallow hard against the rising panic and force myself to take even, shallow breaths; I wasn’t up to deep breaths, but I tried to control my breathing, because you can’t have a full-blown panic attack until you lose control of your breathing. I raised my hand upward, praying that I would reach far up into the dark, but I knew that wasn’t the truth. I knewbefore my fingers touched the top less than a foot above me that I was in his coffin with Deimos. I’d originally gotten claustrophobia waking up just like this with a different vampire, but that had been a human vampire, and I’d known she wouldn’t wake until dawn. I did not know that about this vampire. Some of the ancient ones weren’t trapped until sunset; they just needed to stay in the dark, underground they could wake earlier even, and Deimos was ancient.
I lay there curled around his cooling body and tried to think logically about what my options were before I started moving around too much and chanced waking him up early. I had no idea how much time had passed, so for all I knew we were minutes from sundown, but that kind of thinking fed my panic and made it harder to think. What were my options? What resources did I have to get the fuck out of here?None, screamed the panic in my head, and maybe that had been true last time before the vampire marks, before my necromancy had come into its own. I had magic, damn it. They could take all my weapons, but they couldn’t take my magic.
I lowered my shields and reached out to everyone and anyone that I was connected to psychically. It started as just a calmI’m here, and then it became the metaphysical equivalent of the panic. I screamed out into the blackness for someone to find me.
I heard a noise outside the coffin. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, and then I heard soft skittering on the wood, then a soft squeak. Rats, there were rats on top of the coffin. There was a time in my life when I would have been more afraid, like,Oh, great, it’s not bad enough I’m trapped in a coffin with a vampire, but now rats are going to crawl inside and start nibbling on me, but that was before I made Rafael, king of all the wererats, my animal to call. I hadn’t tried to talk to regular rats before, only the very special kind they had in their inner sanctum, but I was willing to try.
I thought,I’m here. The rats stopped moving. Had they heard me? I thought,I’m here, get help, tell Rafael, and then I felt ridiculous. They were rats and I was trying to make them into Lassie:Goget help, girl, Timmy’s down the well again.I’m locked in a coffin with an ancient vampire that turns into a fifty-foot-tall dragon, and can breathe fire, and apparently rolled me completely with his eyes, and he wants to replace the warmth and pleasure of theardeurwith feeding on terror, despair, and misery.
The rats squeaked high-pitched and scattered. I almost yelledDon’t leave me, but caught myself in time. These were just regular rats, not the super-intelligent and sometimes mystical ones that lived inside the wererats’ inner sanctum of power. Those understood way more human words than was comfortable sometimes. But I’d seen the three brujas in a vision with Nathaniel, hadn’t I? Or had that been a dream, too? They were looking for me. They were helping Nathaniel look for me.
