"The next person he throws that kind of power at won't be teaching, or playing; they'll just kill him."
"We get it; now everyone back down," I said.
"Tell your vampire to back off first."
"Damian."
"Tell him to take the blade away from Nathaniel's neck."
"Bobby Lee."
"He backs up first."
"Damian, put the knife up," I ordered. He should have just done what I said, but for the first time ever he didn't. What the hell was happening? I tried again. "Damian, put up your knife, now!"
"I don't seem to have to." He sounded puzzled, as if he wasn't sure what to do with the fact.
The door opened; I had a glimpse of black-and-white curls and knew it was Domino. He held his hands up to show that he meant no harm. His voice sounded more than just regular normal--it was that false cheerful voice you use when trying to de-escalate, rather than push things further. "Who's throwing all the magic around?" he asked.
"Nathaniel," I said.
He didn't look surprised, just took it in stride. "What's up, Bobby Lee?"
"Nothing much. You?" His voice sounded perfectly ordinary, as if he weren't holding a blade to the neck of someone he was supposed to be protecting.
"You know that Nathaniel wouldn't really hurt you. He's just a little drunk on the new magic," Domino said.
"He doesn't know how to use it as an offensive weapon yet."
"Then why are you holding a knife to him?"
"To prove to him that power won't keep him safe from a trained attacker."
"I think you've made your point," Domino said; he was walking farther into the room as he talked. He was close enough now that I could see his guns clearly against the black-on-black clothing. Some of the guards carried knives; he didn't like blades, but I knew he had a collapsible baton, an ASP, on him somewhere. I could see his fire-colored eyes; of all the clan tigers, the black and red had the most inhuman-looking eyes. He was part black tiger and his eyes and black curls showed that. The white tiger part of his mixed heritage only showed in the few white curls scattered through the black.
"Now I'm doing it because his friend's behind me with a knife."
"Damian, would you really stab him?" Domino asked.
"If he hurts Nathaniel, yes."
"Are you really going to hurt Nathaniel, Bobby Lee?"
"I guess not."
"Then everyone put their knives up," Domino said.
"Yeah, what he said," I said, because I had no idea how things had gotten so out of hand. Normally I'd have picked someone to take out and de-escalate without needing help, but it was Nathaniel and Bobby Lee. One I didn't want to hurt, and the other one I didn't want to throw down on, because I wasn't sure I'd win. They were usually two of my most dependable and reasonable people. Damian was usually reasonable, too, and usually had to obey any direct order I gave him. What the hell was wrong with all of them?
"If Damian puts his knife up, I'll be happy to," Bobby Lee said.
Domino was standing nearly beside the vampire as he said, "How about it, Damian?"
He stared down at the knife in his hand, as if he'd just seen it. "I don't know why I did that."
Nathaniel's voice was very careful, and suddenly I could feel the press of the blade against his throat as if it were mine. "I think it was my fault."
"First, Damian puts his knife away, and then Bobby Lee is going to take the knife away from Nathaniel's throat, and then we're going to talk about what just happened and try to figure out why," I said; my voice wasn't as steady as Domino's, but it was clear and understandable.
"I don't have to obey you anymore," Damian said, and he sounded almost befuddled, not himself.
"I'm not telling you as your master vampire. I'm telling you to put the knife up as your queen, your boss, or your boss's wife. I don't care, but I know that I have more authority in this room than anybody else, and we are not going to be this stupid. Put the fucking knife up, now!" My anger came fresh and hot and my beasts coiled around it as if they were warming their hands on it. They threw little bits of their own frustration, trying to make it blaze higher. Trapped. We're trapped. We need out. How dare they threaten our mate? How dare they threaten us? How dare they . . .
I must have lost a few minutes fighting for control, because when I could "see" the room again Nathaniel and Bobby Lee were standing beside each other, not fighting. Damian must have handed his blade over to Domino, because he was holding a naked blade, and he had a gun still nicely holstered and visible.
Damian said, his voice calm and even, the way you talk someone down off a ledge, "I don't know what made me draw my knife on Bobby Lee, so I gave it to Domino until we figure this out."
I nodded, and let out a long, slow breath. My beasts were still huddled around my anger, eager to make it worse, so they could come out to play. The newest beast, the rat with its black eyes shining in the dark, wasn't getting along well with everyone else. Rats would eat anything, including people, but they were prey animals, too. My beasts didn't like having food inside with them, especially food that they couldn't rend and tear and eat.
We'd wanted to give me a beast that could come and help me in its natural form if I lost all my guards, but no one had asked how my inner leopard, wolf, lion, hyena, and rainbow of tigers felt about adding a new beast. It had never occurred to me to go into meditation as I'd been taught by my spiritual mentor, Marianne, and get everyone else's furry opinion. This was the first time I'd taken a new beast on voluntarily, and could have asked first. It had never occurred to me to ask until this moment when they exploited a weakness of mine to be loud enough to demand to be heard. Fuck.
"What's wrong, Anita?" Nathaniel asked, and his voice sounded like him again. He was part of my calm center again.
I shook my head. "One problem at a time. What did you mean about Damian and all this being your fault?" I asked.
"I was angry, but part of me knew that Bobby Lee is better than I am at fighting, so I was scared and angry."
"I felt that," Damian said, "and I knew I needed to protect you." He sounded like he was repeating a memory, not something that had just happened.
"And the anger may have been me," I said. They all looked at me. "The emotions just now stripped some of my control away and let my beasts talk to me."
All the wereanimals in the room said in unison, "Talk to you?"
"I translate it to words, but I'm not sure . . . Anyway, they're upset about the newest addition."
"What do you mean, the newest addition?" Damian asked.
"You mean the rat?" Bobby Lee asked.
"Yes, apparently they see it as prey and it's just one more thing that they can't do. They can't come out of my body and be whole, and now they're trapped inside me with a prey animal that they're not supposed to eat."
"I don't understand," Damian said.
"That would be very frustrating," Bobby Lee said.
"Did they complain about the rat before you did it?" Nathaniel asked.
"My control is really good now," I said.
Nathaniel looked at me. "Anita?"
Domino came to stand in front of me. "You didn't talk to them first, did you? You ignored them."
I opened my mouth, closed it, and shrugged.
Nathaniel said, "Marianne taught you how to meditate and communicate with your beasts. I thought you were doing that regularly. I thought that was part of your new uber-control over them."
"If I said I'm sorry, would that help?"
"Are you saying that your inner beasts' anger transferred to Nathaniel and Damian?" Bobby Lee asked.
"Maybe."
Nathaniel paced away from me, then back. "Anita, you can't keep pretending that you don't carry the beasts inside you."
"I don't pretend . . ."
"Control doesn't mean you ignore your beasts. Control means you make peace, or something, with them. It's a cooperation, not a dictatorship."
I shrugged again. "I'm powerful enough that most of the t
ime I can dictate."
"Losing control once a month or more isn't a curse, Anita. It's a release," he said.
I shook my head. "I don't like losing control."
"Well, that's an understatement," Bobby Lee said.
I frowned at him.
"Don't give me grief when you just fucked up your inner menagerie."
"They didn't complain when I caught the hyena."
"That was another predator and an accident. You let Rafael cut you up in rat-man form, hoping to catch what we have."
"I didn't think they'd see a difference."
"You mean your beasts wouldn't see it as different?"
"Yeah."
"Why wouldn't they see the difference between an accident and a deliberate act?" Bobby Lee asked.
I didn't want to say it out loud, because even in my head it sounded condescending and stupid. But sometimes if you're thinking loud enough, the people tied to you metaphysically can hear you thinking. I thought I had control of that, too, but I was going to be wrong again.
Nathaniel stared at me. "You didn't think they'd know the difference. Even a real leopard knows what an accident is, Anita." His face let me see just how disappointed he was in me.
"That's pretty species-ist, Anita," Domino remarked.
"No, it's human-centric," Bobby Lee corrected. "She still thinks of herself as human first."
"No," Damian said, "I can feel . . . She thinks of herself as human, period."
"Just because you don't shift into animal form doesn't make you human," Nathaniel said.
"I think it does."
"So the fact that I shift to leopard means I'm less than human?" And there was the anger again, him speaking for my beasts, or maybe just for part of me that I couldn't accept.
"No, of course not," I said.
"But being human is better," he said.
"I didn't say that. I would never say that."
"You're still relieved that you don't shift," he said, and his lavender eyes stared into me as if he saw my thoughts and feelings laid bare, because he was right. I was relieved that I didn't change form. I did think it was better. Did that make me the species equivalent of a racist? Did it make me human-centric? Maybe it did.
"Wow, okay," Domino said, "that's a lot of truth to share all at once."
"Can you feel what she's feeling, too?" Nathaniel asked.
"I hear her thoughts more than her feelings."
Nathaniel turned to Damian. "Are you her thoughts, or her feelings?"
"Her thoughts, your emotions, I think. This level of contact is new, so I'm not positive which way it runs."
"As the only person in this room not tied to you intimately, I'll say this: You have to consider your beasts as a real part of you, Anita. You are one of the most powerful metaphysics I've ever met, but eventually you'll need to become whole, and that means embracing all of yourself, including the parts that want to turn furry once a month," Domino said sternly.
"Even if they don't turn furry once a month?"
"Maybe especially then, because contacting them through meditation and magic is the only way you can communicate with them."
I didn't know what to say to that. "It's a little late to apologize."
"Apologize to who? Your beasts, Nathaniel and Damian, Bobby Lee?" Domino asked.
"All of the above," I said.
"That's a start," he said.
Bobby Lee said, "You asked me who else goes to Ireland. How about Domino? He de-escalated this nicely."
"Yeah, thanks for the help, Domino."
"It's my job. Besides, this is nothing next to some of the fights Max and Bibiana used to get into in Vegas. When your Master of the City and the queen of your clan go at it, you've got serious trouble."
I laughed. "I bet they have real doozies."
"They're powerful enough to destroy each other. Instead they've been married for over seventy years. As bodyguards, part of our job is to see trouble and head it off."
"The three of you are going to be on a learning curve with this new power level. Looks like Domino can help with that," Bobby Lee said.
I nodded. "Agreed."
"And no offense meant, but he can act as food for the ardeur if needed."
"No offense taken," I said.
"I'm actually off the menu," he said.
Bobby Lee looked from one of us to the other. "I'd heard Anita was shortening her list of lovers."
"I'm sorry, Domino, but there just isn't enough of me to go around to this many people. I can't date a dozen people. No one can."
"I remember our talk, Anita." He only sounded a little bitter.
"I'm not going to apologize again."
"No one's asking you to."
"Enough," Bobby Lee said. "Domino only goes if it's going to make things better, not worse."
"I can handle myself and it's like any breakup; you heal in stages," he said.
I tried very hard not to think that it didn't feel like a breakup to me, because we hadn't had a relationship; we'd had sex on a semiregular basis, but for whatever reason it had never clicked emotionally between us like it had between Nathaniel and me. Hell, it had never clicked between the wereleopard and the vampire until this last literally magical moment. Domino had never crossed the emotional divide for me, or not enough. I understood that it was Nathaniel's emotions that were making Damian more than he had been, but even knowing that, I couldn't seem to separate it out into his, my, and Damian's feelings. Lucky for me none of my other animals to call had a vampire to back them up, and I wasn't tied to any other vampires except for Jean-Claude and Damian. I'd almost married Richard once, thanks in part to the vampire marks that Jean-Claude had on both of us.
I looked from Nathaniel to Damian, and for the first time my gaze lingered over both of them. I suddenly wished Micah or Jean-Claude could come with us to Ireland--not for solving crime, or physical safety, but for emotional safety. It probably wasn't a great idea to go to Ireland without either of the other two that I wanted to marry. I needed someone else who would help Nathaniel not obsess about the new relationship parameters with Damian, because his obsession could so easily become mine. I was taking the two women that we shared with us, but one was more a fuck buddy for all of us and the other had a primary in her vampire master, who was the love of her life. If I was looking at Damian like he was way more to me than he had been, than I knew Nathaniel was, we needed a buffer.
I was pretty sure I knew who to take to help me hold on to my heart, but we needed someone to help Nathaniel, too. I looked at Domino and knew another weretiger who might be just the ticket.
25
I FINALLY GOT Micah on the phone between peace negotiations. "How are the negotiations going?" I asked.
"We haven't had to fight anyone yet. Everyone is still talking about a resolution that may actually be bloodless."
"That's great. You know I worry when you go out to these peace talks."
"Because before they'll settle for peace, they usually want a little war," he said, and his voice held laughter, but it was too close to true for me to find it funny.
"Ironic that I don't like the shoe being on the other foot for the dangerous stuff," I said.
"You're very good about not saying the worry out loud."
"Thanks, you've been such a good sport about all the crime fighting over the years that it would just be bad form for me to bitch now."
He did laugh then. "Since when is being part of a couple fair?"
"Since I try to be," I said, and I gave him a little laugh, because that was what he was wanting.
"We all try to be fair," he said.
"We really do."
"So Edward found a way to bring you in as a consultant to Ireland."
"Yeah, but not just me. I can bring some of the guards with me."
"Really? How did he manage that?"
"It's Edward. He's like the go-to guy for the nearly impossible stuff."
"Who are you taking with you?" he asked.
/>
"That's what I wanted you to know before we left."
"Uh-oh," he said.
"What uh-oh?"
"You don't expect me to be happy about some of the people you're taking with you."
"How do you know that?"
"Your voice just now told me."
"I love that you know me so well, and sometimes it's a little unsettling."
"That's better than creepy, which is what you thought all of this interpersonal couple stuff was once."
"I wasn't that bad," I said.
"Do you really want to have this debate now? I only have a few minutes before I have to go back inside and play referee for more negotiations."
"Point made," I said, and tried to explain how I'd ended up going to Ireland with not just Nathaniel, but every lover he had. Jean-Claude was staying home, but he and Micah weren't lovers, contrary to the rumor mill.
He was quiet for a minute, then said slowly, as if he were choosing his words, "So let me test my understanding--you're taking Nathaniel because he finally figured out how to control your triumvirate with Damian, which gives you a power boost and makes Damian feel safer going back to the country he escaped from?"
"He didn't escape. His old master let him go."
"After torturing him for centuries, she just let him go?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"He thinks in her own twisted way she cared for him and was afraid she would finally kill him."
"You mean she sent him away to save him?" Micah sounded dubious. I couldn't really blame him.
"That's what Damian said."
"What do you think?"
"I think we'll have guards and the police, plus a paramilitary unit, looking after our safety. I don't think we'll be seeing Damian's old master in person."
"And you really think that the death of Marmee Noir lost his old master that much power?"
"It's possible."
"A lot of things are possible, Anita. Explain to me again why you and Nathaniel are suddenly more attracted to Damian."
"You know how your wish was to find a safe haven, a home, for you and your wereleopards when you met me, and my wish was to find a true partner, so the ardeur gave us both our hearts' desires?"
"Yes."
"Damian wanted us, someone, to desire him the way we desire you. Nathaniel wanted Damian to want him and be a real lover to him. He's tired of so many men being afraid of guy-on-guy stuff."
"He's been very patient with me; it's one of the reasons I love him."
"I wasn't hinting about you, Micah."
"Maybe I just feel guilty that I made Nathaniel feel rejected for so long."