Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

They gave each other another look, which irritated me, because it meant they were being careful around my mood, or my issue, and I hated that. I hated being difficult about my appearance. Thanks to a lot of things from my childhood, and a very ex-fiancé, I had trouble seeing myself as beautiful. People reacted to me as if I were beautiful, so I had to accept it, but I had trouble seeing it myself, so the jeweler’s flattery, insincere or not, wasn’t going to win points with me.

“Besides, rings don’t go near the face, so what does hair color have to do with anything, it’s just skin tone that counts,” I said, and I sounded grumpy, but I’d managed not to criticize myself, and that was an improvement.

“Let’s not keep the boss waiting,” Socrates said.

It took me a second to realize he meant Jean-Claude, and then Lisandro was opening the door and ushering me inside to the larger and more richly furnished office that screamed upper-level executive, from the rich wood paneling to the desk big enough to slaughter an ox on; there was no hint that it was the manager’s office for the Circus of the Damned. Nothing as garish as circus posters in here. I had a moment of wanting to ask one of the guards to stay with me, but they were bodyguards. They couldn’t guard me from my sudden case of nerves, as I glanced at the jewels laid out on velvet cloths and samples of different metal wedding bands. The huge desk was covered in them as if a very proper pirate’s treasure had been given over to the accountants to catalog. A tiny, dark-haired woman stood beside it, thin hands clasped in front of her; she could have passed for an accountant, or a servant in an old movie, but the eagerness in her face was another issue. The jeweler was way too excited about all of this. I must have made an involuntary movement for the door, because Jean-Claude said, “ Ma petite. ” Just that, nothing more, but it made me look at him.

Jean-Claude sat behind that huge desk and that gleaming display of matrimonial treasure, but none of it was as pretty as him. His black hair curled softly past his shoulders, mingling so perfectly with the velvet of his jacket that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The shirt that peeked from the jacket was scarlet, a red that looked fabulous with the hair and that unearthly white skin of his, a perfect whiteness that no living skin could rival. He was very pale tonight, no blush of color to his face at all, which meant he hadn’t fed yet. There was a time I couldn’t have told, but I’d been studying his face and moods for years. Once I had refused to be food for any vampire, even him. Now the thought that he hadn’t fed, and that it could be part of our foreplay, tightened things low in my body so hard and suddenly that I had to reach for the edge of the desk to steady myself, and I hadn’t even gotten to his face.

I raised my head to finally look into that face, that near perfect curve of cheek, the kissable lips, and finally the coup de grace of eyes. They looked almost black in the overhead lights, but some gleam always seemed to show that swimming blue, like deep seawater where the monsters swim and there are wonders to behold. His dark eyelashes were actually double-rowed on top so they looked like he’d used mascara, but he never had to, and then the perfect arch of black eyebrow . . . He looked too beautiful, too perfect, like a work of art instead of a person. How did this man love me? But the smile on his face, the light in his eyes, said plainly that he saw something wonderful when he looked at me, too. I didn’t know whether to be flattered, amazed, or ask, Why me? Why not a thousand more traditionally beautiful women out there? He could have had movie stars, or models, but he’d chosen me. Me, too short, curvy even with my gym workout, and scarred from my job, still struggling to heal all the issues life had saddled me with, and yet he smiled at me, held his hand out to me. I went around the desk to take his hand, but I didn’t feel like the princess to his prince; I felt like a clumsy peasant to his very regal king.

“I might as well not exist when you first enter a room for each other,” the jeweler said with a voice that still held the first echoes of her homeland. It had been somewhere in what would be the Middle East today, but I think had been Mesopotamia then, yeah, as in the cradle of civilization. She gave her name as Irene; I doubted it had been her birth name, but I’d learned that it was rude to ask a vampire or human servant’s original name. Whatever name they came with was their name. I guess you can’t go through centuries being mud-dabble-wat-wat, so Irene it was.

I blushed, but Jean-Claude continued to pull me close, and said, “But isn’t our very absorption with each other part of what fascinates you?”

“Yes, my lord king.”

I wanted to say, Please stop calling him that , but Jean-Claude had made me stop correcting her or her master. First, if someone wants to call you a king, or queen, let them. Second, when I suggested president , Irene had called him, “My lord president,” which sounded totally wrong.

He stayed seated, so for once I was the one who had to lean down to kiss him. In all the thousands of kisses we’d shared, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever been the one who had to bend to him. Sitting down, he couldn’t even go up on tiptoes like I did most of the time. I put one hand on the side of his face to steady me as I touched my lips to his, because even now sometimes just a kiss could leave me unsteady. It was a light kiss by our standard “hello,” but we had company, and business company at that. One thing I had learned over the last few weeks was that everything about a big wedding had some sort of business attached to it.

Irene’s thin, long-fingered hands were clasped in front of her, where she usually held them, unless she was touching something. It was as if she held on to herself to keep her from touching everything. She was shorter than me, barely five feet tall, with hair as black as ours, but coarser and intermingled with gray. Her face was thin and angular, her body bird-thin, not in the way that models who diet forever are, but as if there had just never been enough food. Her skin was brown both in color and from the sun, and her eyes were the black that both Jean-Claude’s blue and my own brown promised, but never quite delivered.

“My master has given me an impossibly long life, and I can say with long observation that it is rare for a couple to still be so taken with each other.”

Jean-Claude smiled at her, his arm pulling me down into his lap. I might have protested, but first I wanted to be as close to him as possible, and second there was nothing wrong with what we were doing. It was just a little far for modern American affection outside a club or party atmosphere. “We are searching for the perfect wedding bands; surely that is early enough, Irene.”

“But you have been dating for six years, isn’t it, my lord?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Something like that,” I said. It had been more off-again, on-again than most of the vampire community seemed to think, and definitely more than the human media did. I’d been a legal vampire executioner when Jean-Claude and I first met, and he’d been a vampire, so romance hadn’t been the first thought on either of our minds. I’d believed that all vampires were just walking corpses, and that killing them had been ridding the world of monsters. Then I’d met a few vampires who seemed nicer than the people I was dealing with, and I began to wonder just who the monsters were. Dominga Salvador had been one of the human beings who helped convince me that evil could have a heartbeat. Now, we had someone who was doing the most evil thing the Señora had imagined. She was dead, I knew that, I’d killed her, but if the animator talking offscreen had been female I might have wondered if someone had raised her from the grave and gotten some secrets. Of course, since I’d technically murdered her, self-defense or not, her zombie should have tried to come after me first. Murder victims crawl from the grave with only one thing on their minds—vengeance. They will tear through anyone in their way in an attempt to hunt down and kill their murderer. It was the reason you couldn’t just raise the victim of a homicide and ask them who killed them. It had been tried and the death count was always higher than just the one murder they’d been trying to solve.