Skin Trade

“What’s wrong?” I asked. My pulse was suddenly in my throat.

Bernardo looked at me, and I waved a hand, shaking my head, moving toward Edward and Olaf by the car.

“Why should anything be wrong, ma petite?” But his voice held anger, which it didn’t usually do. He could say nothing was wrong, but his voice said otherwise, and since he could make his voice as empty of emotion as a blank wall, either he wanted me to know he was angry, or he was so pissed that he couldn’t hide it. He was more than four hundred years old; you learned to hide a lot of emotion in that much time. So what had I done to piss him off? Or what had someone else done?

I suddenly wanted privacy for the call. So I got in the SUV and the men stood out in the heat. I offered to do it the other way around, but Edward had insisted, and when he insists there’s usually a reason for it. I’ve learned not to argue when he insists; we all live longer.

I turned on the air-conditioning and got comfortable while the three men seemed to be talking, quietly but intensely. Hmm.

“Ma petite, I wake and find you far away.”

“I’m not happy about it either,” I said. I thought about him, and that was enough to see him lying in our bed, the sheets draped carelessly across his body, one long leg clear of the sheets. One hand held the phone, but the other was playing idly along Asher’s back. He would be dead to the world for hours yet, but it never bothered Jean-Claude to touch another vampire when they were still “dead.” I found it disturbing. Maybe I’d been at one too many crime scenes.

He looked up into the air, as if he felt me watching him. “Would you like to see more?”

I drew my mind and attention back to the SUV, the Vegas heat pressing against the car. “I think it would distract me.”

“There are those who would give all they have to be distracted by me.”

“You’re angry at me.”

“We work so hard to make the vampire community think you are truly my servant and not my master, and then you do this.”

“Do what, my job?”

He sighed, and the sound eased over the phone and down my skin like a shiver of anticipation. “Leave without my permission,” but he made the last word sound dirty, as if asking permission could have been so much fun.

“Stop that, please. I’m working, or trying to.”

“I find that not only are you gone, but you have taken no food.”

“I fed this morning.”

“But tomorrow will come, ma petite.”

“Crispin is here.”

“Ah, yes, your little tiger.” He didn’t try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

I ignored the sarcasm. “I took your call in the middle of a murder investigation.”

“I am so grateful that you could be bothered.”

It was way too petty for Jean-Claude, but there it was, his voice, his call. What the hell was going on? But one of the good things about Jean-Claude is I didn’t have to protect him from the horrors of my job. He’d seen worse, or close to it, in his centuries of life. So I told the truth. “I’ve just been to the morgue and seen what’s left of some of the Vegas PD’s finest. I don’t need to fight with you, on top of that.”

He sighed. The sound shivered through my mind, down my body as if he were right there, just behind me, whispering, touching.

I threw metaphysical shields in place, though shielding from my master wasn’t easy. He had the keys to my shields if he wanted to push it. Today, he let me wrap my shields and my anger around me. “What the fuck was that? I am trying to solve a multiple homicide. I do not need your mind games.”

“My apologies, ma petite. I think my feelings are hurt.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, voice still angry, but the rest of me was calming down. I wasn’t sure he’d ever said out loud that his feelings were hurt.

“It means, ma petite, that I thought we had made progress in our relationship, and I find that the ground we had gained is not as secure as I had thought.”

I said the truth, again. “I have no idea what you just said. I mean, I heard it, and it was English, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” I rested my forehead on the steering wheel, closing my eyes, and trying to breathe in the coolness of the air-conditioning. “But I feel sort of vaguely like I should apologize, anyway.”

He gave that wonderful laugh. The one that made my body react as if he’d touched way too intimate a part and fed me candy at the same time. His laugh wasn’t just about sex; it felt so good, it should have been fattening.

I sighed, but it was just a sigh. I couldn’t do his voice tricks. “Please, stop messing with me. God, Jean-Claude, I can’t work like this.”

He gave a more ordinary chuckle. “I think I needed to hear that you missed me.”

“How can you posssibly be insecure? That’s my job.”

“You make me insecure, ma petite, only you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I tried. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you mean that, and it does help.”

How did I get off the phone without hurting his feelings again? I had no clue. Shit. It wasn’t like him to call when I was off with the police. I hoped, desperately, that it didn’t become a habit.

I realized I was hunching over the steering wheel. I made myself sit up straight and avoid looking in Edward’s direction.

Jean-Claude’s voice, when it came again, was almost neutral. “When I woke and heard where you had gone, I was not idle. There is a swanmane in Las Vegas. The Swan King, Donovan Reece, has already offered him to be at your disposal for feeding if the need arises.”

“Thank Donovan for me, and I do appreicate that you’re willing to share me with yet one more man. I know we’ve talked about not adding any more.”

“It’s not the feeding, ma petite, it’s that you seem incapable of sex without emotion. If you could fuck and feed, then I would have no problem with a hundred lovers. Feed, then never see them again, but you collect men, ma petite. You can fuck a dozen men, but you cannot date them all.”

“I’m sort of aware of that,” I said.

“Are you?” There was that edge of anger again.

“I’m just not good at casual sex. I’m sorry.”

“No, you are not,” and the anger was a little more.

I didn’t know what to do with his anger, or this fight, so I ignored it. Men will let you do that sometimes in a relationship because they’re not girls. “I may need something not feline that is one of the beasts I carry inside me. I don’t carry swan.”

“I tell you that I am tired of sharing you with other men, and that you collect them, and you ask for more?”

He was going to be the girl. Great. Fucking great. “I promise when I get back to St. Louis, we can have this fight. I swear. But right now, help me survive this case.”

“And how may I do that?”

“The weretigers are a little too much sometimes because of how many different flavors I’ve got inside me.” I’d been attacked by one tiger, but carried five different metaphysical colors of them. No one had been able to explain how that had happened. “Did you happen to find any wolves I could borrow while I’m here?”

“No wolves; the local pack seems to fear that you will be a disrupting influence on them, ma petite.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the news has gotten out that sex with you can be like a vampire’s bite. One taste and they belong to you.”

“That’s not true,” I said, but my pulse had sped.

“You lie to yourself, ma petite.”