Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

Except for Angel and one of the other males, all of them were dressed as guards, because that was their day job. They’d spent their lives being trained to keep up with whatever vampire master they ended up serving, so they could fight and do whatever their master might need.

“I need to talk business with Micah; excuse me for a minute.” I got up, planting a quick kiss on Jean-Claude’s lips.

“Police or zombie business?” Fortune asked.

I stopped and blinked at her. “Furry business,” I said.

Echo laughed. “Furry business, I like that.”

“Coalition business, you mean?” Fortune asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

“We like how hands-on you are with the local wereanimals,” she said.

“Thanks, I’ll be right back.”

“I doubt that,” Echo said, “but if I had all that waiting for me I might take my time, too.”

I glanced back at the golden tigers and Micah, then back at her. “They aren’t all mine.”

“They could be,” she said.

“Yeah, but think about the emotional upkeep.”

She laughed again. “Well, if you leave out Thorn and Angel, it wouldn’t be that much upkeep.”

I couldn’t argue that, so I didn’t try, just smiled vaguely at her and went for Micah. The fact that he was surrounded by the golden tigers meant I’d have to talk to them, too, but I was willing to brave the tall, gold crowd of them to talk to my other third.

He smiled that smile that was only for me and Nathaniel, and then I was in his arms and we kissed as if we hadn’t seen each other just a couple of hours before.

“She never kisses me like that.”

I broke from the kiss to look up at Dev, who was a foot taller than us. He was grinning to take the sting out of his words, but part of him meant it. He’d thought he was God’s gift to women, and men, before he came to St. Louis, and then I hadn’t been overwhelmed with his charms, and the man who was the first love of his life wasn’t bowled over either. It had given Dev his first-ever blows to his ego. It can be hard when a big, handsome man gets blown out of the water seriously for the first time, but he didn’t hold a grudge; he was just puzzled by it.

“I thought you’d sworn off girls for Asher,” I said.

A shadow passed over his very handsome face, and the one look was enough; there was more trouble in paradise. Nathaniel had said that Kane, Asher’s other main guy, was jealous of Dev; maybe that was the shadow. I didn’t envy Dev giving his heart to Asher; the vampire gave a whole new definition to moody lover.

I glanced at Micah to see if he knew what was up, but he shrugged. He was clueless, too. I didn’t ask What now? , not in front of everyone, but was betting I’d hear about it in private later, either from Dev or Asher.

“He told me that if you wanted to put a ring on my finger, he wouldn’t stand in our way.”

I touched his hand, my other arm still around Micah. “I’m sorry, Dev.”

He squeezed my hand and said, “He has Kane, so Kane thinks I should have someone else, too.”

“So you won’t take so much of Asher’s time away from Kane,” I said.

“You are so much handsomer than that werehyena,” Angel said.

I knew she was defending her brother, but . . . “And comments like that are part of what make Kane insecure,” I said.

“But it’s true,” she said, motioning at her brother. “Kane isn’t horrible-looking, but he isn’t in the same league as Dev, or Asher for that matter. Honestly, I don’t know what Asher sees in him.”

And that was one of the reasons I didn’t like Angel; even when she was trying to be kind, she managed to be mean about someone else. She was as moody as Dev was easy to get along with, which was why he could date Asher, and she wouldn’t have put up with it. I wouldn’t have put up with everything that Dev had taken from Asher either, so who was I to complain, but . . . “Kane is handsome, he’s just more Marlboro Man than Brad Pitt.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means he’s ruggedly handsome.”

“If that’s a nice way of saying he’s not pretty, then I’ll agree with you.”

“Kane is handsome in his own way, Angel,” Dev said.

“Why do you defend him?”

I studied Dev’s face, watched the discomfort cross his face, and wondered if he was attracted to Kane, too. If so, then Kane’s jealousy would be a double blow to him. There was such pain in his blue-hazel eyes. He let us see it raw and unfiltered for a heartbeat and then he closed his eyes, smiled, and hid behind that joking surfer-dude charm that was as fake as my cop face. Micah reached out to him, too, so that we were both holding his hands, and the moment we both touched him power flared across our skin. It raised the hairs on our arms, danced down our spines, and woke our beasts. I could feel Micah’s leopard, and I could see mine, staring up at me down that long tunnel where my mind showed me my inner beasts. I knew there was no tunnel, no landscape for the leopard to pad through, but it was part of what my human mind did to make sense of the impossible. Now, because I was touching Dev, another shape looked up at me. My golden tigress started trotting after the black shadow of my leopard, but if my human body couldn’t give release to one shape, it certainly couldn’t do it for two. It had been a while since my multiple beasts had tried to come forward together, and it never worked well. Cats don’t like to share.

It was as if the thought wanted to prove I was lying, because gold was joined by black, blue, white, and red so that the full rainbow of tigers stood gazing up at me, and the moment they were all there, the gold stopped moving. The tigers just stood there looking up, waiting. My leopard rose up, not as some mind game inside where you see dreams, but as power, rising as Micah’s beast rose in a spilling wave of power and magic, as if invisible velvet fur could flow as easily as air not just across our skins, but through the centers of our bodies. Our beasts could swim through both our bodies like great furred leviathans, but they didn’t take the logical route where Micah and I were touching each other; they flowed down our hands and into Dev. His tiger should have fought them off, but it didn’t. The great golden cat rolled onto its side and rolled in the power as if it were being petted.

It had happened once before, when we first met Dev, but never again. I’d thought it was just some metaphysical hiccup, but Dev’s face showed the same shocked pleasure now that it had that first time. The power flowed through the three of us in a continuous velvet rub of magic. I felt something deep in my body begin to build, and knew if we didn’t stop there might be more than just metaphysical pleasure.

“Let’s tone it down,” I said in a voice already gone breathy.

“God, let’s not,” Dev said, and dropped to his knees, hands holding tight to ours. His eyes were fluttering as if he were having trouble focusing on anything but the sensations flowing through his body.

“It isn’t that kind of party,” Micah said, trying to make a joke of it, but his voice was almost as breathy as mine.

I’d known the gold tigers were spread out like a fan around us, but it wasn’t until Fortune said, “That shouldn’t be possible,” that I realized there were others standing around us, so that we stood in a circle of weretigers.

“She smells like all of us at once,” Angel said.

“They both do,” Fortune said, and moved in closer to Micah, sniffing near his hair. That I hadn’t known.

“What would happen if we touched them?” Angel asked.

“No,” I said.

“No one touches us,” Micah said.

Thorn reached out toward us. His short curls were so dark a blond that I would have called it brown, but the day I said so he’d been deeply insulted.