Shadow's Bane

  “I’m not getting in there! It’s a fire hazard!”

  “That was not a request.”

  “Look at it! It’s not even a real thing. It’s like . . . it’s like . . .”

  “Frankentruck?” I offered.

  “Yeah! Like that! Where the hell am I supposed to—”

  He broke off for the second time, when a fan of fat bills appeared in front of his face, like magic. His eyes crossed; my own narrowed. Not at the bills, but at who was holding them. And then smirking slightly when they disappeared, into the pocket of the khakis now clambering into the truck’s wonky cab.

  A moment later, Frankentruck went belching and burning around a corner and I was left staring down with Louis-Cesare.

  “We could have handled that,” I pointed out.

  “But why waste time?” Tonight he was in a green pullover that looked knitted, but shone like silk. It changed his hair almost to red and his eyes to aquamarine, the same startling hue as his father’s, which wasn’t fair. Like the jeans, which fit him like a glove but didn’t fit the old-world bow he managed to execute flawlessly.

  I scowled at him.

  “I went to the house,” Louis-Cesare said. “I was informed you were here.”

  “So you decided to stalk me?”

  An eyebrow raised.

  “I decided to see the show. I hear it is quite something.”

  The words were mild, but there was a definite challenge in those blue eyes. He knew we weren’t here to see the damned show. Any more than he was.

  To be here already, he’d have had to be awake well before sunset. And while a master at Louis-Cesare’s level was perfectly capable of daywalking, it was still unpleasant. Not to mention burning through power like nobody’s business. There was absolutely no reason for him to have been up and about that early.

  Except the obvious.

  “And it had to be tonight.”

  “Is there a reason it shouldn’t be?”

  Yeah. A whole list of them. Which I might have enumerated, except Olga took that moment to step heavily on my foot. And heavily for a troll is no joke. I gasped; she simpered.

  “Good show. You come.”

  Louis-Cesare smiled at her, and kissed the hand she regally extended. “What an excellent idea. I’d be delighted.”

  And so the whole sorry lot of us went to see the show.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Ray went to see his buddy, and the rest of us went to get tickets. Olga splashed out on box seats, probably because the Mormons wouldn’t fit in the regular ones. And I guess she wanted to keep an eye on the boys so they didn’t get too trigger-happy too soon, so she squashed them all into the same box.

  I watched it worriedly.

  I hoped it had good struts.

  Louis-Cesare and I had the box next door to ourselves. It should have been fairly romantic, with a cute baby chandelier overhead, sparkling like diamonds against rich brocaded wallpaper, the kind of moldings they don’t make anymore, gilded and two feet high and carved to within an inch of their lives, and enough red velvet to outfit Olga’s entire family. But not under the circumstances.

  I shifted a little in my seat, so I could get a better view of the curtain over the stage, which had yet to be pulled back. People were still finding their seats, so I guessed we had a while. Great.

  Louis-Cesare came over and sat beside me, so I got up and sat on the front of the box. He’s six foot four in his socks, so I didn’t get opportunities for a height advantage very often. When I did, I took them.

  He didn’t say anything, just watched me with curious eyes.

  Curious, beautiful eyes, and damn it! I needed to pick a fight, prick that famous pride, get him to go away and stop dogging my footsteps until I could figure out the latest curveball life had chucked at me. Which should have been easy, because fighting with people was what I did best. Except where he was concerned, because he didn’t fight fair.

  My family got cold and cutting when we fought, like normal, dysfunctional people. We sulked, we avoided one another, and when confronted we lashed out with stuff that had been over for centuries in some cases, because if you’re not hitting below the belt, are you really trying?

  Louis-Cesare did not.

  I wasn’t sure if it was the old-fashioned manners, or the fact that he knew it threw me, but he did weirdly unexpected things.

  Like reaching over and pulling me into his lap without saying a word.

  “Are you planning to give them a show?” I asked, straddling him. A curious troll was peering at us around the wall separating our box from Olga’s, his glamourie sliding slightly off center in the process, because it was too small. Leaving him looking like he’d ripped the face off some earnest young man and was wearing it like a mask.

  It was kind of horrifying.

  “No.” The box had plush hangings, which Louis-Cesare reached over and untied one side of, swishing it closed in the troll’s face.

  It was suddenly darker in here, and cozier, with only half the box still open toward the stage. I didn’t know if you were actually supposed to do that, to move the curtains around from their nicely arranged shapes. I’d always assumed that they were just there for show, because it never would have occurred to a peasant like me to try and find out.

  Like it wouldn’t have occurred to me to bribe the valet instead of just arguing with him for half an hour. Or that golden baksheesh was expected at the consul’s court. Or probably a thousand other things, because we didn’t live in the same world—we didn’t even live in the same universe—so what the hell was I doing?

  “Are you upset with me?” Louis-Cesare asked, steadying me so that the slippery jumpsuit didn’t dump me on the floor.

  “No.” It came out flat, because it was the truth. I was trying, really hard, to work up a good head of indignation, to call on some of that anger that was probably my foremost character trait, to help me through this. But tonight, when I could have really used it, it wasn’t working.

  Maybe because I knew him too well.

  Despite the bank balance, Louis-Cesare wasn’t an overprivileged douchebag, a loser parking his Ferrari in a handicapped zone, because fuck you, that’s why. He was an old-fashioned aristocrat who could have coined the term “noblesse oblige,” the outdated concept that with wealth and power came a responsibility to help those without, and to fight for something besides just enriching yourself some more. In short, he was a goddamned Disney hero, including the hair, while I . . .

  Was not.

  And, frankly, his attitude didn’t even make sense. Because he hadn’t been born into privilege. In fact, his background weirdly paralleled Ray’s, with a randy father who cut out quick and a mother who didn’t die young, but who did abandon him at an early age.

  Of course, in his case, the father was a duke and the mother a queen with a reputation to protect, and as far as I knew, he’d always gotten enough to eat. But his meals had been taken in a variety of prisons, where his half brother had locked him away so nobody would find out that their mother got around, and maybe start questioning his own royal parentage. And once Louis-Cesare had finally gotten out, it hadn’t been followed by a trip back to the palace where he’d never lived anyway.

  Yet you couldn’t tell it. He acted like the prince he’d never been, with a casual arrogance that frequently made me want to strangle him, and an overconfidence that made me afraid for him, and an innate goodness that made me want to sit down and have a serious talk with him, because life wasn’t a Disney flick. In real life, Prince Charming took a knife in the eye, because he fought fair when nobody else did, and the bad guys won.

  That was my reality. Hell, that was everyone’s reality, because that was actual fucking reality, and yet here he was, acting like none of that was true, none of that could touch him. But it was, and it could; I could. Not only wasn’t I a
Disney hero, part of me wouldn’t even have been cast as the villain because she’d scare the crap out of the kiddies.

  “You are upset,” said Mr. Insightful.

  “Getting there.” And—finally—I was. And it felt good.

  Anger was comfortable, familiar, unlike everything else these days. My life had started to feel like a fight against an outsized opponent, where every time you got back to your feet, he hit you again. And back down you went, onto your ass, with the little birdies flapping around your head while you wondered where you were.

  And how you got into this.

  I sure as hell didn’t know how I’d gotten into this. It was like I’d stumbled into some kind of crazy dream, one where I had all these people around me, and a respected job, and a gorgeous boyfriend, and . . . and that wasn’t real, that didn’t happen. Which is why it felt less like a dream, and more like the setup for a nightmare, because I didn’t know how this all ended yet, did I?

  I felt my hands clench on the thick muscles of Louis-Cesare’s shoulders, and wanted . . . what exactly? Reassurance? Life didn’t give reassurance. You paid your money and you took your chances, and most of the time, you lost. Like I was going to do, because I didn’t deserve—

  “I’m frightened, too,” Louis-Cesare said suddenly.

  I blinked, torn out of my mental battle by whatever the hell that was. “What?”

  “I, too, am afraid,” he repeated.

  I just stared at him. His eyes met mine, hedged by lashes that couldn’t decide what color they wanted to be, like his hair. At the moment, both were reddish gold, gilded by a stray beam from outside making it into our little cave. And the eyes themselves were open and honest and vividly blue, because the damned man didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say things like that.

  And then I realized the implication. “I’m not afraid!”

  “I think you are.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of this.”

  The hands on my thighs clenched, and I scowled at him. “I’ve fooled around before!”

  “I’m not talking about that.” The disturbing gaze didn’t waver. “I feel it, too. I’ve never been in love—”

  “Stop it.”

  “Why? It’s true. I’m in love, and it terrifies me.”

  “Then why are you here?” It came out harsher than I’d intended, but he didn’t flinch.

  “Because you’re here.”

  I just stared at him some more; what the hell do you say to that?

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he told me. “I never had the chance to find out. I spent my youth trying to survive. When I finally managed to work my way into a better situation, a stable one, for the first time . . . Christine.”

  Yeah, irony of ironies, the best catch on the planet had ended up tied to a crazy bitch named Christine, who was even a worse romantic prospect than me. But she’d gotten her claws into him deep, not because he loved her, but because he’d hurt her. To be more exact, she’d been injured, he’d tried to change her into a vampire to save her life, and it hadn’t worked. She’d ended up as something called a revenant, a masterless monster that resulted sometimes when a change went wrong, and was supposed to be put down immediately.

  But, of course, he hadn’t put her down. Instead, he’d kept her around, like a living penance. And, I strongly suspected, because he’d been abandoned by his own Sire, the vampire father who’d left him just as his human parents had done, and he couldn’t bring himself to do the same to anyone else. But Christine wasn’t a vampire, and she was crazy, and it had all ended about as you’d expect.

  “I made many mistakes,” he told me quietly. “For a long time, I thought I would end up paying for them forever. Maybe that is why, lately, everything seems so unreal. She is gone and you are here, and I never thought—” He stopped, and his hands clenched again. “I never thought I would have this, so I am afraid.”

  That threw me some more, because it had never occurred to me that Louis-Cesare, of all people, felt anything but confident. He sure as hell never acted anything but confident. Or looked it—

  Until now, when there was something in his face I didn’t want to acknowledge, especially not with the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

  “You should be,” I told him harshly. “I could hurt you. She could hurt you. Or worse!”

  “And what if she does?”

  “What?”

  “Or what if I die in the war? Or what if you do? Will being deprived of love for whatever time le bon Dieu gives us help in some way?”

  I scowled at him, because he still wasn’t getting this. “If you’re not around Dorina, maybe you won’t die at all!”

  “And if I am not with you, I will not live at all, not as I have these past months.”

  I stared at him.

  “There are a thousand ways to die,” he told me quietly. “There are so few to really live. I would gladly risk the former for the latter, and it is my choice, is it not? To risk whatever I must, my heart, my body, my soul, in order to be with you. Is that not what love is?”

  I stared at him some more. And not just because he was doing it again, saying outrageous things that you weren’t even supposed to let yourself think. But because—

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.”

  I was never supposed to be asked that question.

  Dhampirs were nature’s loners, the perfect killing machines, with no friends, no lovers, and no family. And for a long time, that’s all I’d been. My own father had rarely talked to me, and my mother had died before I was old enough to remember, so what did I know about family?

  But I’d wanted one anyway. Desperately, terribly, no matter how many times I told myself that I couldn’t have it. To stop whining and get on with things, and so I had. For a very long time, I had. And just when I got used to that, when I finally started to accept it, when I was actually kind of okay with it—

  Fate, or fortune, or the game master up there with the whacked-out sense of humor decided to send me a blue-eyed Disney prince with his heart on his sleeve and words on his lips that I’d never, ever expected to have said to me, and—

  And I had no idea what to do with him.

  None at all.

  “Then let me tell you,” he said, pulling me closer so he could murmur in my ear. “Love is sending someone away, because you would rather hurt than hurt them, Love is fighting beside them, bleeding along with them, and putting their well-being above your own. Love is trembling at their touch so much that you do not notice that they are trembling at yours.”

  “I’m not trembling.”

  “I am,” he whispered, and kissed me.

  I kissed him back, because I didn’t know what else to do. I never had. From the first time I met him, the only way I’d ever found to deal with him was, well, this.

  And it worked pretty well, because he immediately deepened the kiss, one hand sliding under my hair, one remaining on my thigh, gliding up and down the silky fabric. Okay, make that really, really well, and God, this wasn’t helping, I thought, biting his lower lip. I was supposed to be pushing him away, not trying to climb down his throat!

  Then he groaned and did that thing, that slide-his-hands-down-my-back-to-grip-my-ass thing, and—

  What the hell; this fight wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

  “I never felt fear like when I saw you fall,” he murmured, when I paused for breath. “And didn’t know if I would be fast enough to reach you—”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does.” He caught my hand, which had gone exploring under that sweater. “I know you don’t want me here tonight—I knew before I came.”

  “Okay.” I started working on the jeans, which wasn’t as easy as you’d think left-handed.

  “You’ve been independent for so long, it’s all yo
u know. I was like that, too. I understand.”

  “Great. Good to know.” The jeans were too tight, especially with him sitting down, and then there was the problem of the damned jumpsuit.

  “Can you understand why I couldn’t not come?”

  “Can you just shut up and fuck me?” I gritted out, wishing Radu had sent a dress. Some short little thing that would be easier to—

  Screw it.

  The jumpsuit ended up on the floor, and I ended up back on his lap, and, oh yeah, that was better, that was perfect.

  Damn, I loved the theatre!

  Hard hands gripped me, moving over me while also trying to get him out of his own clothes. Which wasn’t easy in a chair that wasn’t built for two and also had a squeaky spring somewhere inside that was advertising the preshow, not that anybody could see. We were in the top row of boxes, so pretty high up, and the front of the box was fairly tall, and there were no seats on the left of us, where the curtain remained open. Just the stage where some musicians were warming up, but they were in the pit far below.

  Squeak, squeak, squeak. Louis-Cesare growled something profane, I laughed, and he rolled us onto the floor.

  And, okay, yeah. Better, especially since I’d ended up on top. There was plenty of room in front of the first row of chairs, the plush carpet looked clean, and the dim light filtering in from the theatre was just enough to see by. Ten/ten, would fuck again, I thought, and pulled his sweater off.

  And stopped halfway, because he’d just caught something in his mouth.

  In fairness, it had been swinging in his face, so.

  Callused hands slid up my back, pulling me down as he started to suck, sending shivers throughout my body. I didn’t have his sweater all the way off. It still trapped his arms, which was nice, which was perfect, I decided.

  “You can’t get away now,” I told him.

  I don’t recall trying.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  Mental communication was new to me, mental laughter even more so. And strangely intimate, because I couldn’t usually do it with anyone but him. And because it was still echoing in my head when he slid into me.