Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

He made a sharp, exasperated sound. ‘I am over six hundred years old; you would think I would be past such silliness.’

‘What silliness?’ I asked.

‘We need to gather our young men and retire to the hotel, but I am told that our chat has his family with him.’

Chat was French for cat, which meant Micah. Nathaniel was minet , kitten, or pussycat in French. ‘So we go up and we see how his father is doing. It’s hard, but …’

He shook his head. ‘It is not the sad fate of his father that leaves me so anxious.’

‘Then what is it?’ I asked.

‘The introduction to Micah’s family is troublesome.’

‘Did he not introduce you?’ I asked.

‘I came straight to your side, so he has not had time to introduce me.’

‘Then I am totally confused,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘I am being the girl, am I not?’

‘If you mean confusing, yes.’

‘I want to greet Micah, to comfort him, but I am not certain what he wishes me to do in front of his family. I am a vampire and male. I was told that they are very religious.’

I smiled. ‘Some of them are, but his parents will be okay about the guy-guy part.’ I explained the domestic arrangements of Micah’s parents.

By the time I finished, Jean-Claude was laughing. ‘Micah has agonized about being with Nathaniel and what his family would think, and all this time they have had their own ménage-à-trois. It is too perfect.’

I nodded, smiling. ‘They were cool about all the wereanimal stuff, so I think they’ll be okay with vampires.’

‘So they have welcomed both you and Nathaniel into their familial bosoms?’

I nodded. ‘It went really well.’

‘But a ménage-à-trois is more acceptable than our larger arrangement.’

I had a clue, at last, where he was going with his case of nerves. ‘Are you worried about how Micah will introduce you to his family?’

He gave that graceful Gallic shrug that meant everything and nothing.

I went to him and wrapped my arms around his waist, and he put his arms around my shoulders. I gazed up at him and smiled. ‘I think the fact that you’re worried about Micah and his family is one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard you say.’

‘It is not sweet, ma petite , it is ridiculous. The only man he loves is Nathaniel, and I know this.’

‘You don’t love him the way you love Asher,’ I said.

‘That is true, but Asher is no longer with us.’

‘Actually, I promised Dev I’d talk to you about Asher.’

‘What of Asher and our handsome Devil?’

‘Dev misses him.’

‘Many of us miss him, ma petite ,’ he said, and there was the slightest tone to his voice that let me know just how much of that ‘us’ was him.

‘Have you spoken to him lately?’ I asked.

‘I have.’

I studied that handsome, unreadable face. He was hiding whatever he was feeling and thinking from me, which meant it was something he either didn’t want to share or thought I’d be upset about. I had a smart thought, or a potentially smart thought.

‘Did Asher tell you about the new man in his life?’

Jean-Claude tensed and then went very still, that kind of stillness that people don’t have. Snakes can be that still, held frozen and stretched out like a tree branch while waiting for the danger to pass, or the prey to come that inch closer.

‘I’ll take the silence for a yes,’ I said.

‘He mentioned his new beau,’ Jean-Claude said in a voice as empty and neutral as he could manage. Once upon a time I would have thought he didn’t give a damn, but now I knew that sometimes his most neutral tone meant he cared very damn much.

‘Dev was supposed to call Asher while I was cleaning up,’ I said.

‘Was he?’ And again the voice was too neutral.

‘Yes, he was.’ I tightened my arms around his waist. ‘Dev wanted to double-check how many of the mean things Asher said were true and how many were said just to hurt our Devil.’

Jean-Claude looked at me then, his face still carefully neutral. ‘Asher does have a gift for cruel words.’

I nodded. ‘Dev misses him enough that he’s willing to give up everyone but Asher.’

Jean-Claude allowed his expression to thaw a little. ‘What made Mephistopheles change his mind?’

‘He’s never missed anyone as much as he misses Asher. I don’t think he understood that any one person might be worth giving up all the others for.’

‘Has our Devil never been in love before?’

‘Apparently not,’ I said.

‘No, because only love can make of parting such a hell,’ Jean-Claude said.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

His body relaxed around me then, so that he hugged me, rather than simply had his arms around me. That unsettling, almost reptile stillness was just gone, and his body had movement, flow, not just a sense of pulse and life, but as if he could stop his energy, his aura, from moving, too. Maybe that was it? Maybe it was a psychic thing, that vampire stillness, so that they could dampen down not just their physical movement, but all their ‘movement.’

I said, ‘It’s okay if you miss Asher.’

He pulled me in against his body so that my head rested on his chest, cradled against the velvet of his jacket. I snuggled in against him and knew from the softness of the jacket it wasn’t real velvet, but some modern synthetic. The modern stuff was always softer.

‘Is it, ma petite ? I miss him and yet I do not believe he has learned the lesson we wished to teach him. He waxed quite eloquent on the phone about his new man and how he is denied nothing from this new werehyena.’

I tried to move back so I could see his face, but he held me in place. I didn’t fight it, because sometimes he did that when he wasn’t certain he could control his facial expression. The older vampires saw an unguarded expression as something that could be potentially dangerous to them. Centuries of having been punished for the wrong look at the wrong time had taught most of them to hide what they truly felt. Jean-Claude had told me once that it was actually an effort to show emotion. I think that ceased to be true as he got metaphysically closer to all his warm-blooded servants like me. We’d given him some of our warmth, but it had cost him some of his hard-won control.

‘I didn’t realize it was a werehyena,’ I said, with my cheek cradled against his chest.

‘Yes, but he is not the leader of the local hyenas, just the prettiest boy to fall under Asher’s spell.’ He sounded tired.

‘Did Asher seducing this werehyena piss off the leader of their pack?’

‘Their leader is a woman, and because I sent Asher to her city, he seems to have taken it as a hint that I wanted him to be more heterosexual.’

‘Which means he did just the opposite and went for just the guys,’ I said.

‘Oh, much better than that; he seduced her and then ignored her for this new man.’

I rose up, and this time he let me. ‘Holy shit, was he trying to get himself killed?’

Jean-Claude stepped back, shaking his head. ‘If he had not been my envoy, the leader, Dulcia, would have made an example of Asher. She called me about a month ago to tell me of his misdeeds.’

‘Hyena society is matriarchal, which is why Narcissus won’t let women in his clan. He’s afraid a woman will automatically take over just like with real wild hyenas.’

‘I know all that, ma petite .’

‘But maybe Asher doesn’t,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t do the research that you, me, Micah, Nathaniel, hell, Nicky, everyone does. Narcissus doesn’t run his group like most of hyena society, and if they’re the only hyenas Asher has spent any time with, maybe he didn’t know how dangerous they could be.’