Crimson Death

“Be less controlled then, ma petite,” Jean-Claude whispered through my head, as Nathaniel began to suck at my breast as if he were trying to feed from it. Since lycanthropes fed by biting off chunks of flesh I had to call, “Yellow.” He eased down to a point where it felt good again, and I moaned for him. Damian pressed harder against my ass, and I rubbed against him, feeling him grow achingly hard. I wanted him inside me, wanted it so badly. It was as if all the months of avoiding each other, of letting him be with Cardinale and not us, were concentrated down to this one moment in time. Desire . . . It was as if desire were a drug that someone had injected straight into our bodies.

“Fuck me,” I said.

“Fuck her,” Nathaniel said.

“Please,” I said.

“Fuck her,” Nathaniel repeated, kneeling down in front of me, letting the water pound against the front of my body and pour over his head, plastering his hair against the back of his body like a second skin. He pushed his hands against my hips, driving me even harder against Damian’s body.

Damian cried out, “Gods!”

“No more control,” Nathaniel said, “no more waiting.”

There were too many words in the sentence. I couldn’t think with Damian pressing against me, his hands cupping my breasts. Nathaniel’s fingers digging into my hips, his body covered in water and the drowning color of his own hair. “What?” I asked.

Nathaniel stared up at me, and the lavender of his irises spilled out over his eyes, so that he stared up at me blind with his own power. “I want this,” he said.

“I want this,” Damian said. I turned to look over my shoulder to find that the vampire’s eyes were a solid, shining green.

“We want this,” they said, and their voices echoed each other just a second out of sync.

“We want this,” I said, even as I knew that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that was true.

“Ma petite, lower your shields and let them inside.”

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“I do,” Nathaniel said.

I stared down into his flower-colored eyes and said, “What?”

“Look at me,” he said.

“Look at us,” Damian said, but I couldn’t look at both of them at the same time. I stared down into the drowning lavender of Nathaniel’s eyes and couldn’t look away. Jean-Claude couldn’t capture me with his eyes—no vampire could—but staring down into Nathaniel’s eyes I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t do anything but stare down as his eyes started to glow like that streak of lavender in a sunset. I fell into that glowing sunset as if the world had become light and all I could do was fall into the light and wait for something to catch me.

14

I WOKE IN a welter of sheets on the bed in our room. I didn’t remember leaving the bathroom, or getting into the bed. Nathaniel’s arm pinned me around the waist, his hair lying in a tangled mass as if he’d gone to sleep with it wet. Damian lay on the other side of him. He was on his back, his face peaceful with sleep. Nathaniel’s other arm was flung across his waist, so he had gone to sleep hugging us both. I lay there trying to remember what had happened earlier. I remembered getting in the shower. I remembered some foreplay, and then . . . nothing.

My body was letting me know that we’d had sex, because what goes in has to come out eventually. From the feel of things we hadn’t used condoms. I didn’t use them with Nathaniel, but I would have with Damian. Had I? Had I just had multiple intercourse with Nathaniel and that was what I was feeling? I’d check the trash can in the bedroom and bathroom to make certain. If I didn’t find a used condom in any of them, then I’d know we all forgot the most important safety rule of safe sex. I was on birth control and neither the vampire nor the lycanthrope could carry any sexually transmitted diseases, but still . . . what the fuck were we all thinking?

I tried to sit up, but Nathaniel snuggled tighter so that his arm pinned me to the bed and tight to his body. Damian hadn’t moved at all. I looked at him and held my breath while I looked to see if he was breathing, but his chest never moved. Vampires didn’t have to breathe. I stretched out a hand across Nathaniel’s shoulders until I could touch Damian’s arm. His skin was cool to the touch, and for the first time ever, I found my lover’s flesh gone cold comforting. He’d died like a good vampire should. There’d be no nightmares for us the rest of today, so at least whatever we’d done had helped.

But what had we done to cure him? I couldn’t remember a damned thing after we got in the shower. Okay, we got in the shower, and then . . . What?

I lay there with Nathaniel hugging us both while he slept, and there was something. A memory, a thought, a . . . something. It was like the harder I thought at it, the more my mind shied away from it. Sex, even sex with the ardeur, had never been like this unless something else was interfering with us. The Mother of All Darkness could cause blackouts, and so had Belle Morte and the Lover of Death. Two of the three were dead, because I’d helped kill them; that left Belle Morte, but this was too subtle for her. She liked you to know that she’d fucked you over. So if it wasn’t another vampire, then why couldn’t I remember what had happened?

I glanced at the bedside clock and had to do a double take. It said it was almost one p.m., which meant we’d been in here almost seven hours. That wasn’t possible. The first trickle of fear tightened my stomach and made it a little harder to take a deep breath. The last time I’d lost this much time had been because of the vampire council, or Mommy Darkest. We’d destroyed the power of the first and killed the second. I remembered Kaazim’s words, that the Mother’s power was inside me, and that her power might be acting in ways that I didn’t understand at all.