Laurell Hamilton - Kiss The Dead

“Fine, Domino can come into the room.” I looked at Godofredo. “You can tell Claudia you did what she ordered.”

“She wanted two guards in with you.”

“Don’t push it,” I said, and there must have been something in my voice, or in my face, because he literally backed off, hands held sort of out from his body as if he wanted to show that he meant no harm.

“Fine,” he said. “As long as you take Domino with you, Claudia won’t bitch-slap me.”

“More like she’ll knock you on your ass,” I said.

He smiled, and nodded. “That, too.”

I felt a touch on my psychic shielding, the equivalent of a knock. I knew the touch, and dropped shields enough to see Damian. He was still six feet of the whitest skin I’d ever seen on a vampire, because the long hair that spilled over his shoulders was the red of fresh blood, and his eyes the green of grass. He’d been pale when alive, but hundreds of years without sun had paled his skin and let his hair get as red as red could get. I could feel that he had a hand in his, and a thought let me see the woman who was almost as tall as he was at his side. Cardinale’s hair was more orangey red and curly to his very straight, but they were both natural redheads, both tall, both slender, though he’d died with muscle over his frame, and she was just model thin, but they were physically very well matched, like a team of beautiful horses chosen because they looked good together.

Damian was manager at Jean-Claude’s dance club, Danse Macabre, and Cardinale was one of the dancers. She partnered him for some demonstrations of old dances that had existed when he was alive, but centuries before she was born. She was also one of the taxi dancers, where you paid for the privilege of dancing with a vampire for a song. People loved dancing with the shapeshifters and vampires at Danse Macabre. The club even had a dance master who would work with new customers to teach them the ancient line dances. I’d seen the entire club floor thick with people: human, vampire, shapeshifter, all in neat rows with a hand held here and there, moving to a dance that no one had seen in centuries. It was just plain cool.

Damian let me see the second woman in front of him. She was tiny, shorter than me by inches, short enough that she fit under my arm, when I put my arm across her delicate shoulders. Her shining black hair fell like patent-leather water straight and perfect to her waist. Her uptilted eyes looked brown, but I’d spent enough time looking into them to know they were actually an orange so dark they looked brown. In the right light they were the color of fire when it burns deep into the wood and you think the flame is out, but if you don’t douse it with water, it’ll flare up and burn the house down. Her Chinese name translated to Black Jade; to me she was just Jade, my Jade. She was my black tiger to call, and the first woman to change me from heterosexual to heteroflexible.

Jade looked frantic, and jerked away from Damian’s hand. She started running down the hallway. Damian looked up, as most of us did when we were “seeing” each other in our minds. “Someone told her you were hurt.”

“Shit,” I said, out loud.

“What’s wrong?” God asked.

“Someone told Jade I was hurt. She’ll have to see for herself that I’m healed.”

“Can’t you just tell her mind-to-mind?” God asked.

“She’s too scared, and panicking. It makes her head-blind.”

“No offense,” God said, “but for a ninja assassin super-spy she spooks easy.”

Domino said, “You try being abused by a master vampire for centuries and see how you do.” His beasts flared enough to raise heat around him like a breath of summer in the cave-cool corridor.

“Hey, no offense,” God said.

“None taken,” I said, and touched Domino’s arm. I was trying to calm him before Jade got here. He was very protective of her. Touching him made the heat of his beasts try to jump to me and call my matching tiger colors, but I understood how to soothe the energy now. Not shut it down, not trap the beasts, but soothe them like you’d pet and cuddle a big kitty. Of course these kitties would have happily torn my body apart so they could be on the outside with their own real fleshy bodies if it had been possible. We’d finally figured out it was Jean-Claude’s vampire marks that kept me from being able to shapeshift for real. Modern lycanthropy wasn’t contagious to vampires, and I was just too close to being a vampire thanks to his marks, and my own necromancy. Ancient-strain lycanthropy had been contagious to the undead.

“Ease down,” I said to Domino.

Jade had paid Domino the highest compliment she had for men; she let him join us in bed. Nathaniel was tolerated in the bed, and Crispin, a white tiger and stripper at Guilty Pleasures, but she seldom slept with me because I kept insisting on all these men being there. Her abuser had been male and it had given her a bad opinion of them; the only thing she disliked more was male vampires. Damian had won her over with tales of his own abuse at the hands of She who made him. His vampire mistress made Jade’s master look sane. She’d had to accept that women could abuse, too. Jean-Claude and Asher had enough stories of Belle Morte, and then there’d been the Mother of All Darkness, and Nikolaos the first Master of the City of St. Louis had been one crazy bitch. Crazy didn’t discriminate on the basis of gender.

Jean-Claude had won her over by being himself. It had been interesting watching him work to gain her trust. He’d always told me the only woman who ever frustrated his plans was me; watching him charm Jade had made me believe that statement.

Jade came into sight running so fast she was a blur of black and white. I handed the weapons I’d been holding to Domino and then braced. She was small enough and I was strong enough, but running at that speed it was a lot of momentum to stop.

She slowed down enough for me to see the long hair sweeping out behind her, the pale face, eyes frantic, and then she leapt on me like a monkey. Jean-Claude put a hand on my back to help steady me as all that speed and energy leapt into my arms, and stopped. She wrapped her legs around my waist, arms around my neck, and buried her face into my hair and the side of my neck. I put my hands the only place I could to hold her, which was underneath her slender ass. It was the same way Nicky had carried me into the showers. That thought made my stomach clench tight.

She mumbled into my neck, but she was mumbling Chinese. Even after a year, the nuances of the language when muttered into my hair, or neck, escaped me.

I was already making soothing noises to her, but I transferred one hand up to stroke the incredible silkiness of her hair, while the other arm held her weight.

“Jade, sweetie, I can’t understand you when you’re this upset. Slow down and English, please, dearest, English.”

She raised her face up enough to look at me. Her eye makeup was smeared around her eyes, which probably meant I was wearing it on my neck and the blue silk of the shirt.

Her voice came out in a breathy whisper. “They said you were hurt.”

“I’m all better; all healed.”

She studied my face, serious as a child, as if she thought I might be lying. I’d tried doing that, but found truth worked better than comforting lies. She was way more girly than I would ever be, but liked truth the way that I did, and once lied to, she never forgot. Again, like me.

“Promise,” she whispered.

I nodded as solemn as she was. “Promise.”

She smiled and her whole face changed from serious beauty to a shining happiness. She glowed, and when someone looks at you like that, what can you do? I kissed her, and she hugged me, wrapping her arms around my neck again, and wriggling happily. I was suddenly glad the shirt hung to my knees; her enthusiastic cuddling had made more than one short skirt ride up and give way too much of a girl-on-girl show for the guards.