Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

I rolled my eyes and sighed. ‘Okay, okay, I didn’t mean that part.’

He laughed again and then said, ‘One other thought. If we are doing this, then you need to tell Richard, or Jean-Claude does, before he hears it from somewhere else.’

I hung my head. ‘Damn it, he’s an ex.’

‘An ex who you still have sex with occasionally, and who Asher lets top him in the dungeon, and who Jean-Claude and you, and sometimes Asher, all have sex with.’

‘He doesn’t have sex with the men.’

‘You mean he doesn’t have genital contact with them.’

I looked at him. ‘Wow, that is what I meant, but that just … that was blunt of you.’

He smiled. ‘I think if we’re going to do this for real, we’ll need to be blunt.’

‘I’d love to argue with you, but I think I’d just sound stupid, so I’ll pass.’

‘I’ll be honest: I’d love to marry you legally and have Nathaniel be a part of the ceremony like husband one and husband two, but Jean-Claude has to be a part of it, and probably the legal part.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘First, his ego won’t let it be anyone else. He’s reasonable, ruthlessly practically, but like all the old vampires he’s also arrogant. He’s the first vampire king of America, and you are his queen.’

‘I’m your queen, too.’

‘Yes, but the shapeshifters are used to taking second place to the vampires in the power structure. They’ll think it’s normal that the legal spouse is Jean-Claude. The vampires have made peace with the thought that Jean-Claude looks the other way because he gets to sleep with all of us, too. They’re a lot happier now that Envy has become one of Jean-Claude’s regular lovers.’

‘I can’t sleep with everybody every night, and he does really prefer women to men, unless it’s Asher.’

‘He’d totally do Richard if our Ulfric would be okay with it,’ Micah said.

‘Not happening,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘You said once that you thought you’d have to sleep with Jean-Claude to be my leopard king, and you were relieved to find out it wasn’t true, but you would have done it.’

‘I would have done anything to save my people from Chimera, and Jean-Claude is not a fate worse than death,’ he said, and smiled.

‘No, no, he’s not,’ I said, and smiled back.

‘I think I can eat something now,’ Micah said.

‘Good, I’ll try some soup.’

‘The lycanthropy keeps any of us from catching viruses, so you can’t be sick.’

I didn’t want to tell him it was the smell of his father’s sickness that had reminded me of the smell of rotting corpses, so I said, ‘I think something at lunch didn’t agree with me.’

He accepted that, and for all I knew it might be true. We got food, and I started to get coffee, but the smell made my stomach roll again. I got water and soup. I also texted Edward to see if how he was feeling, because if there had been something wrong with the food then he’d be hit worse, because he didn’t have the lycanthropy helping him stay healthy.

Edward was fine. I ate half my soup and was so done. I’d told Micah that I wanted to question Little Henry. Micah rushed his food so he could go back up with me and back up to his dad. Though we did stop off at the gift shop and get me a little travel toothbrush set. I did a quick oral cleanup in the bathroom and when Micah kissed me good-bye it was as thorough a kiss as you would ever want to do in public view of a hallway full of cops.

They gave us both good-natured ribbing about it. ‘Get a room, Blake.’ ‘Another Callahan ladies’ man, it figures.’ The cops couldn’t seem to decide which of us was the coworker to be teased and which of us was the ‘girl.’

He and Bram went back into his father’s room. Nicky and I went in search of Henry Crawford’s doctor. I wanted to know if they’d found any fang marks on him, or any injuries at all. He’d looked unharmed, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been; not every kind of harm leaves marks.

Henry Crawford wasn’t that hurt and normally wouldn’t have been on the same floor as Rush Callahan, but putting him a room just down the hallway from Micah’s dad meant that all the cops hanging out there could help watch Henry’s room, since vampires did have a habit of coming back for humans they’d singled out. Wolves will take the weakest in a herd, the easiest to kill. Though wolves are one of the traditional and most common animals to call for a master vampire, vamps don’t think like wolves. They think more like lions.

Lions don’t pick the weakest, though they can, and they will take opportunistic kills if offered, or even chase other predators off their kills and eat it. They’ll even eat carrion, but when they hunt they go at it like some people enter a bar on Saturday night. They walk into the room, survey the crowd, pick out one they like, and think, ‘I’ll have that one.’ People then spend the night seducing that person to take home for sex.

Lions pick the biggest, toughest water buffalo, or the fastest, juiciest-looking antelope, or whatever strikes their fancy, and then they throw overwhelming force at it. They live as part of a pride of lions, and the bigger the pride, usually, the bigger prey they will bring down, and the more arrogantly they choose it. Lions are the guy, or girl, who believes he, or she, really is God’s gift to the opposite sex, and of course, you’ll be flattered if they want you, and you will eventually say yes. Most of these people never turn into stalkers, because they are beautiful, sexy, and most people can be seduced. But lions, real lions, don’t want sex from their prey, that’s what other lions are for; they want to eat you, and unless the water buffalo can fight its way free early in the chase or have enough of its herd to fight back force against force, the lions will bring it down and eat it. Buffalo is big prey, so they kill it first; smaller prey sometimes gets eaten before it’s totally dead. Most humans aren’t big enough prey for vampires to kill us first. They toy with us, some because they enjoy it, because they can, but others because they’re still deciding – do they want sex from us, or servitude, or are we just food?

Henry was still alive. The question was, had they just been playing with him, had they meant to make him their slave, or had the vampire that bewitched him grown to desire him? Food, torment, slavery, or sex; those were the choices between humans and vampires. How could I say that, with Jean-Claude’s proposal just a few hours old? In my experience with vampires the overwhelming truth was they saw us as prey. I actually think it was a way of distancing themselves emotionally so they could feed on us. It was the same principle I used at crime scenes to distance myself from the victims. The bodies became it s, things, so I didn’t run screaming. Live victims are harder; they demand more, and vampires can’t feed on the dead.

Some of the vampire community called me a living vampire, but if I was, I didn’t have the attitude yet. I would not have picked Henry Crawford junior at six foot seven, or his father, who had not been a small man either, as my victims du jour. I’d seen the group that had been out there in the woods looking for the lost, and there had been so many other men in the group who would have been easier marks than the Crawfords. Why them? Why go for the water buffalo when there’d been so many antelopes to choose from?

Several of my inner beasts sort of ‘looked’ up at me, if something inside you could look ‘up.’ They didn’t talk like people talk, but I understood them all the same. Sometimes you get tired of antelope, and if you’re big enough to take the water buffalo, why not? Until they took the Crawfords the vampires had taken tourists, some families with younger kids, hikers, one runner doing his route through the mountains, elderly couples in isolated areas. They’d been victims of opportunity, like the Crawfords, but everyone else had been much easier marks. Maybe the vampires were learning how to hunt and just decided to take bigger prey?