"Jean-Claude, you cannot allow them to go to her island," said a voice from behind us. It was Asher. He was tall, pale, handsome, with long golden hair spilling around his shoulders. Nothing would ever make Asher physically less than gorgeous, but physical wasn't everything.
The bodyguards around the room came to attention, because the last time we'd interacted with Asher it had gotten nasty. I knew they were under orders to not let us be alone with him. His emotional instability made him dangerous, and sometimes that danger wasn't just to your heart.
"This is for my job, Asher. Jean-Claude doesn't control that." My voice was as angry as I felt. Nathaniel was right--we missed Asher topping us in the dungeon. I missed him being part of a threesome with Jean-Claude and me. I hated that I hadn't found anyone to replace Asher in those two places in my life. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference, and I wasn't indifferent to him yet. Which pissed me off, because I knew better.
Asher had spilled his hair across half his face like a golden veil, and like most veils, it was hiding things. His eyes were as pale a blue as Jean-Claude's were dark, a brilliant, icy blue. I caught the gleam of one through the lace of his hair, but the other eye was bright and visible, set in a face that was so gorgeous that he'd been the artists' model for paintings of angels and gods. "I have always respected your job, Anita. Whatever mistakes I have made in the past, I never presumed to tell you your job, and I am not now, but do not take Damian back to his old master and do not give her Nathaniel."
"We aren't taking him back to his old master, and we sure as hell aren't giving her anyone, let alone Nathaniel."
Asher held his hand out toward us, but it was to Jean-Claude he was giving the weight of those eyes, that face. "Jean-Claude, you have been at her mercy as well as I. You know what she is and what she is capable of. Please, by all that is holy, all that is left us, do not put our flower-eyed boy within her grasp."
"I'm not your flower-eyed boy anymore, Asher," Nathaniel said.
Asher's eyes glittered and I realized it was unshed tears. "And that is my fault, my flaw that drove you away. You have no idea how much I regret what I have done in the past few months. Only Julianna's death is a greater regret to me."
We all stared at him. Julianna's death had been the great tragedy that had driven a wedge between him and Jean-Claude. She had been their heart, and when she'd died it died with them.
"That is a bold statement, mon ami, if only you meant it."
"I swear to you, Jean-Claude, that I mean every word."
"Your word of honor?"
"Yes."
Asher was an old enough vampire that his word of honor meant something. An oath breaker was not trusted among the older vampires, and for some broken oaths it was a death sentence.
"Sudden contrition does not seem like something you would feel," Jean-Claude said.
"I have been full of regret for weeks, but I could not . . . decide . . . create . . . a way to convince you of my deep regret until I heard what you are planning, and then I did not care if you believed. I would rather give up Nathaniel forever than let him go to that cursed . . . beast."
That was the first thing he'd said that I was really interested in. I asked, "Do you mean that literally? Is She-Who-Made-Damian old enough to be a lycanthrope and a vampire like the Mother of All Darkness was? And do you mean a real curse, or are you just being dramatic?"
Asher shook his head so that his hair swung just enough to give a glimpse of the scars that he was using it to hide. He used his hair a lot like Nicky did, except Asher simply let the long waves spill down over his scars; of course he had more of them to cover. He had two good eyes, but an inch or two out from the corner of his kissable mouth were burn scars. They trailed down his cheek and skipped his neck, but the right side of his chest looked like it had melted and re-formed. Holy water acts like acid on vampire flesh, and that was what the Church had used to try to burn the devil out of Asher centuries ago.
"She is a beast in the old sense of being a monster, but she cannot transform her physical body. She is a vampire and we are all cursed, but beyond that I am being dramatic, as you say."
"We were with her a few centuries ago. You are being overly dramatic," Jean-Claude said.
"I was with her longer than you, Jean-Claude."
Jean-Claude drew Nathaniel and me into his arms so he could hug us both. I don't know if it was to comfort himself or to rub Asher's losses in his face. I didn't care. I was good with both. Asher deserved to be reminded that he'd behaved so badly he'd lost all of us and more in one fell swoop.
"After you fled to the New World, Belle had less use for me. She could not use me to torment you anymore."
"We have been through this," Jean-Claude said, his voice very serious and very unhappy, but his arms tightened around us, so that we both curled an arm around his waist to let us be as close as he seemed to want. He could look and sound calm, justified, but he didn't feel it.
"I am not saying you were to blame. I am merely explaining that she was less careful of me after she could not use me against you."
"You know I am sorry for everything that happened between us back then."
"I know, and I am sorry that I blamed you for so many years, but that is beside the point tonight, Jean-Claude. I was not traded for Damian for a few hours a night as you and I were, but given to her for months. Damian was there while I was her prisoner."
"Neither of you has ever spoken of this to me."
"We vowed we would not speak of it even to each other. Do you remember how frightening she was when we were with her for only a few hours at a time in Belle's court?"
Jean-Claude lowered his face against Nathaniel's hair, as if he were smelling the vanilla of his hair to comfort himself. I did it sometimes, too. "That I remember those terrible hours is why I bargained for Damian's freedom from her and brought him here." He almost managed to keep his voice even--almost.
"Then imagine being with her for months."
Jean-Claude just shook his head. "I cannot. I do not wish to dwell on the horrors that did not happen to me, for there are enough that did."
"Three months was my sentence to serve as part of her entourage in Ireland. I was warned that I might die at my first dawn there and not wake again. That frightened me until I had been there a few weeks, and then I began to half-hope I would not wake again."
"We've shared some of Damian's memories, and they're pretty terrible, but wait. . . . Why wouldn't you wake at dusk? Did they tell you that just to scare you?" I asked.
"Not every vampire that traveled to Ireland woke the first night they slept there. No one knows why, but it's as if the land itself is not friendly to our kind."
"People keep telling me that my necromancy may not work in Ireland, or it's not supposed to, and that vampirism isn't as contagious there."
"I do not know about zombies. If anyone could call them from the grave there, it would be you, but they are right about vampires. Even if you give the three bites over the three different nights and drain them dry on the third, it does not guarantee they will rise as one of us. I saw half a dozen humans who should have risen as vampires there that did not."
"Did their bodies start to rot?" I asked.
He had to think about that for a minute. "I know that she kept two of the bodies for quite some time and they did rot. The others were discarded sooner."
"Why did she keep the bodies until they rotted?" I asked.
The look on his face was all for Jean-Claude, as if the look should be enough without words. It wasn't for me. "What are you trying to tell each other?"
"Did she hope that the bodies would rise as something?" Jean-Claude asked.
"One of the reasons she wanted me, other than the obvious one, was to have a vampire that wasn't of her making. She had hoped that I would be able to make more vampires for her, but it worked no better for me than it did for her own vampires."
"Did you ever see her try to bring over a vampire herself?" I
asked.
"I did. She was able to create one of us, but the second one did not rise for her any more than the others."
"You know, you being in Ireland might have been good information for Damian to share with me."
"He and I were never friends, but we vowed that each of us would tell our halves of the story but not mention the other if we ever spoke of it at all."
Nathaniel said, "I think Damian's fighting his own fears so hard that he's not thinking clearly about what information might be helpful to you and the police."
I glanced at him and felt the beginnings of my irritation fall away. If Asher was this scared of the Wicked Bitch of Ireland, then Damian must have been petrified. "He's hiding it really well then, even metaphysically," I said.
"He's being very brave," Nathaniel said.
"Yeah, he is," I said. I added, Damn it, to myself.
"So are we risking Echo and Giacomo by taking them to Ireland?" Nathaniel asked.
"Shit," I said.
"I do not believe so," Jean-Claude said.
"How do we know they'll be okay?"