Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

Mischa was tall for one of them, almost six feet. He had thick blond hair that was as straight as Wicked’s, but his hair was a paler, almost white blond, which meant it must always have been that pale, because sunlight hadn’t touched his hair in more than a thousand years. Wicked’s hair was an almost golden blond from lack of light to pale it.

Mischa looked at us with blue eyes that should have looked like warm summer skies, but they were cold, no matter how pure the blue of them might be. Wherever he’d been recruited for the Harlequin, it had been somewhere that all that pale hair and those bright blue eyes would have fit in without anyone blinking – somewhere Scandinavian.

‘Anita is a kinder mistress than the Mother of All Darkness,’ Truth said.

‘Jealous?’ Wicked said.

‘The Mistress of us all isn’t supposed to be kind, she’s supposed to lead.’

‘Anita leads us where we need to go,’ Truth said.

‘You believe she leads well enough,’ Wicked said. ‘You are just jealous that we have her favor and you do not.’

‘That is not true, and you know it. You say such things only to try to anger me.’

‘I was jealous of the other guards who shared her bed until I was added to the list,’ Wicked said.

‘That is you. I am made of sterner stuff than that,’ he said, and walked farther away from what looked to be a large bathroom behind him.

‘You have yet to best me at sword practice or outdo my score at the firing range with a handgun,’ Wicked said.

Mischa flushed, hands curling into fists at his side; for a really ancient vampire he was surprisingly easy to bait. Most of the really old ones could control their emotions to a degree that was frightening, almost … inhuman.

‘I have bested you both with knife and long gun,’ he said, hands in tight fists.

‘But neither of us with sword or handgun,’ Truth said, ‘and you won’t even try to practice with me and an axe.’ Truth would have stayed out of it, but the other vampire had said both . Truth would seldom start a fight, but he would finish one. Wicked would pick a fight but leave it laughing without caring who won most of the time. Truth cared more once you got him going.

‘Even I’ve bested your score with a handgun,’ I said.

‘That is at the range, not real combat,’ Mischa said.

‘I shoot just fine in real combat,’ I said.

Mischa looked almost pained as he said, ‘I was impressed with the shot you made on the news. I would not have thought you capable of it.’

‘I had to make it, so I did.’

He nodded. ‘Needing to make it does not automatically give you the ability to do it, Anita Blake. That you had the skill within you under trying conditions was … impressive.’

‘Bet you hate saying that,’ Wicked said.

Mischa glared at him. ‘Our Dark Mistress was a weapon; she had no need of guns and blades and training with us. She was more dangerous than any of us could ever be.’

‘So does that mean that Anita is more dangerous than all the remaining Harlequin?’ Wicked asked.

‘No.’ Mischa almost spat that one word.

‘You said that the Mother of All Darkness was more powerful than any of you; then wouldn’t whoever killed her be more powerful than any of you, too?’ Truth asked.

Mischa shook his head but said nothing.

‘They debate between themselves on how a mere human woman could have slain their dark mistress.’ A man stepped out from the adjoining bedroom. He was taller than Mischa by several inches, broader through the shoulders, just bigger all over. He had short brown hair that curled carelessly and eyes that were deep reddish brown. If you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d think they were human eyes, but they weren’t; they were bear eyes, big fucking ancient cave bear eyes. His name was Goran and he had been a werebear before most of the great cities of the world had been more than a wide place to sell your cattle, and Mischa was even older. If I let down my shields and let my necromancy feel them, they were old enough to make the bones along my jaws ache.

‘There isn’t a human being in this room,’ I said. ‘Where’s Jean-Claude?’

‘He’s on the phone in the other room,’ Wicked said, and there was the faintest tone to his voice. Whoever Jean-Claude was talking to, he didn’t like it.

Mischa had no problem saying out loud what he didn’t like. ‘Our lord and master is on the phone to the sodomite who has him pussy-whipped.’

‘Sodomite?’ I asked.

‘He’s talking to Asher,’ Wicked said, ‘but I wouldn’t let Jean-Claude hear you talk about his beloved that way, Mischa.’

‘Wait, you can’t be both a sodomite and pussy, or did the slang change?’ I asked.

‘It didn’t change, he’s just trying to be objectionable,’ Truth said, and gave the other vampire an unfriendly look.

I walked toward the vampire and his big bear of a sidekick. ‘I can’t argue the sodomy part, but wouldn’t it be pecker-whipped, or maybe cock-whipped?’

Mischa glared at me; he knew I was making fun of him, but he wasn’t quite sure how. I’d noticed that almost all the older vampires had trouble with modern slang; even the ones who’d mastered some of it hadn’t mastered all of it. Slang didn’t travel well from one language to another either.

Truth was at my back, and Wicked was moving up through the coffins on the other side of the huge conference table that dominated the main part of the room. There was also a couch and coffee table pushed to one side of the room to make room for more coffins. The kitchenette wasn’t movable, so it just took up the room it took up.

‘The fact that our Dark Master is begging that sodomite to come back to St Louis is embarrassing to all of us.’

‘I let you call him that once,’ I said, ‘and I let you know I didn’t like it, but maybe I’m too tired for subtle.’

‘You yourself said that you cannot argue the charge of sodomy against them,’ Mischa said.

‘What we all do in the privacy of our bedrooms doesn’t matter to you unless you’re our lover, and since you’re not, why does it matter to you what we do or who we do?’

‘It is an insult to all of us who call him our prince that he lets another man use him so.’

I frowned at him. ‘So you’re objecting because you think Jean-Claude is bottoming to Asher?’

Mischa seemed to think about it, and then he nodded. ‘I’ve never heard it called that, but bottoming is quite accurate under the circumstances.’

I smiled, almost laughed, and was just too tired to not say what I was thinking. ‘Well, if that’s all that’s bothering you, don’t worry about it, Mischa. Jean-Claude isn’t bottoming to Asher; he definitely tops him, not the other way around.’ The fact that I was using BDSM terms that really had little to do with actual sex, homosexual or otherwise, went over the vampire’s head, way over.

‘You mean Jean-Claude uses him and is not used by him?’

‘If you want to put it that way, yeah.’ I had recovered myself enough to think, but not say, As far as I know, when I’m with them . If they switched the other way around when I wasn’t with them, that was their business and I wasn’t sure it bothered me anyway, but I hadn’t seen it swing that way, but that didn’t mean … oh, hell. I was too tired to worry about something that didn’t bother me anymore.

‘You know, Mischa,’ I said, ‘I like men. I like watching the men I love together, knowing that all that strength and beauty will be aimed at me later, so stop being all homophobic. I’m too fucking tired to mess with it tonight.’

I don’t know what he would have said next, because the door opened behind them and Jean-Claude stepped out. Mischa gave a look to us, and the look was enough. He would never have said what he’d just said to me to Jean-Claude. The ex-Harlequin might have been saying mean things about Jean-Claude and Asher, but he said them only to me, which showed a lack of respect for me. He feared what Jean-Claude would do, but not what I would do. I filed the thought away for later when I wasn’t achingly tired and covered in the drying blood and bits of the dead I’d helped make deader.