“I’m not implying anything; I’m stating that you are beautiful and amazing, and a big fucking baby.” I wiped fresh blood on the back of my hand.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
“You’ve said that before. If you really meant it, Asher, you wouldn’t have to keep saying it.”
Nicky said, “And I gotta say, you’ve hurt Anita badly enough that no one will get oral sex from her until she heals. She’s not just yours. You can’t damage her so that it interferes with the rest of us having sex with her, and just expect that to be okay.”
“You are just a guard, muscle, and Anita’s Bride. I do not have to take chastisement from you.”
“But you do from me,” Jean-Claude said. “Nicky is right. You have spoiled fun for all of her lovers, and it is not your place to do so. I am her master.”
“You aren’t Anita’s master; that implies control, and you have none over her.”
“I do not need to own her to love her, Asher. You always treated lovers like a pet to be spoiled, abused, but above all-owned.”
“Why is it wrong to want to be certain of love?” Asher asked.
“I am certain that Anita loves me, as she is certain that I love her.”
“But she loves Nathaniel more, and Micah, and the boy adores her.”
“I love Anita,” Nicky said.
“But she doesn’t love you,” Asher said, and he spat it at Nicky. He meant it to hurt.
“I can feel Anita’s emotions most of the time,” Nicky said, “I know what she feels for me. I’m secure in my place in her life. How about you?”
Asher took a step toward Nicky where he stood over Ares’s still-unconscious body.
“Asher, you will need the hours until dawn to pack,” Jean-Claude said. “Go, and make use of your time.”
Asher looked from Jean-Claude to me, and then finally back to Nathaniel, who was helping Sin sit up. “I am sorry.”
Nathaniel said, “Jean-Claude is right. It doesn’t matter how much the rest of us love you; if you hate yourself, the self-loathing destroys everything.”
“Nathaniel…”
“Sin is my brother, Asher. I won’t lose him because you don’t feel loved enough.”
“I didn’t hit him that hard.”
Nathaniel cradled Sin against him, and the younger man still looked out of focus, as if he wasn’t quite sure what happened. “Your Master of the City told you to go do something; go do it,” Nathaniel said. He sounded as coldly angry as I’d ever heard him.
“Go,” I said.
“Now,” Jean-Claude said.
Asher started to say something, and then stopped himself. He nodded, and then turned and walked back into the underground toward his room, his clothes, his suitcases, and to do what he’d been told to do-it was about damn time.
30
I SAT ON the edge of one of the examining tables in the infirmary area deeper in the underground. Doc Lillian’s rubber gloves tasted like stale balloons as she fished around in my mouth. Her short gray hair was long enough to cover her ears now, but she was still the same smallish, thin, and terribly competent woman she’d been when I first met her. She’d thrown a white coat over her dress and hose. It was easier to trade the coats than to keep changing clothes. Lillian had a thriving medical practice in the human world, but that was because they didn’t know she was a wererat. Humans didn’t want to be treated by someone they were afraid would give them lycanthropy of any flavor, but rats had a double problem of not being “romantic” like werewolves, or wereleopards, et cetera… If you were going to be a shapeshifter, everyone wanted to be a big, sexy predator, not a scavenger.
“If you were human you’d need stitches,” she said, as she took her fingers out of my mouth. She took the gloves off and tossed them into a large trash can that had biological hazard stickers all over it. Blood from almost anyone here was usually either shapeshifter, or vampire, and though you couldn’t “catch” vampirism from being exposed to blood on gloves or bandages, it was still considered a contagious disease. You couldn’t become a vampire from touching dirty hospital waste, and come to think of it…
“Dr. Lillian, has there ever been a case of someone catching lycanthropy from hospital waste?”
She looked startled, then thoughtful, and finally smiled. “Not that I’m aware of, but we do hospital protocol anyway.”
The curtains parted, and Jean-Claude stepped through. He still looked perfect in his black leather pants and matching jacket, only the white shirt in the middle of all that leather was his typical lacy shirt. It was like an echo of his original century, though I had enough memories of that time through him to know that the shirt was modern material and sewn tight to the body, rather than loose and billowy. It looked antique in style, but it wasn’t. It was like a lot of his clothes, touches of olden days, but they were all actually sexy club wear, or at least sexy everyday wear. I’d never seen Jean-Claude in anything that wasn’t theatrical and/or sexy.
“Anita,” Dr. Lillian said, voice sharp.
I startled and turned away from Jean-Claude and looked at her.
She made a little unhappy mew of her lips, then turned to Jean-Claude. “She’s a little shocky. I think it’s a combination of the police work earlier, then the fight, being injured, and worried about Cynric, and…” She paused, looked down, and then said softly, “I’m sorry about Asher. I know he means a great deal to both of you.”
“Thank you, Lillian; I know that you do not care for him.”
“I try never to question who my friends fall in love with, Jean-Claude.”
“I’m happy that you think of me as a friend,” he said. His voice was lovely to listen to, but unemotional, as if he could have used the same tone to say almost anything. It wasn’t necessarily that he wasn’t happy about Lillian thinking of him as a friend, but more that it was the voice he used when he was being very careful not to show any emotion. It was his version of a cop voice and face, except that where my cop affect was hard to read, a little brittle and cynical, his “cop face” was beautiful, almost seductive. You had to know him like I did to realize that it was as empty and meaningless as the smile I could pull out of the air for customers at Animators Inc., when I had time to raise zombies. Lately, police work was taking all my time.
Lillian smiled, but studied his face, as if trying to see behind the pleasant mask. She was harder to fool than most people. “Take Anita to that big bathtub of yours and help her clean up. Enjoy the fact that she’s bleeding, before the wounds heal.”
“How many stitches would she have needed if she had been more human?”
Lillian looked down, then up, and met his eyes. No, I was wrong on that, she was staring steadily at the corner of his jaw, and not meeting his gaze. It was standard practice with vampires not to meet their eyes, unless you had natural resistance to vamp gaze like I did. Being a wererat didn’t keep you from being bespelled by a vampire, it just made you a little harder to “magic” than a standard human. Even though she considered Jean-Claude a friend, she still wouldn’t meet his eyes full on; interesting. But it was interesting in an almost disinteresting way; Lillian had said I was shocky, and she was right. Everything felt a little distant and unimportant.
“Ten, maybe fifteen stitches,” she said, as if she hadn’t wanted to answer the question. “Don’t let that make you angrier with Asher, please.”
“Why do you care how angry I become with him?”
“Because you’ve been fair, and just, and haven’t overreacted. I like that about you. It’s part of what makes you such a very good leader.”
“You flatter me, to try and get me to do what you want.”
She smiled, and all the lines in her face suddenly showed themselves as smile lines. It was a glimpse of a younger Lillian before sixty got so close. She was suddenly pretty. I hadn’t thought about her one way or the other, until that moment. I realized she was blushing, just a little. Jean-Claude did have that effect on most women.
“My feminine wiles aren’t up to your standards, but yes, I want you to keep being patient and fair, and the leader we need.”
