Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

He shoved her back down against the table. "Of course," he said, "you're family. Families don't murder one another." He looked up at Justine and said, "They share."

She met his eyes. A very small, very hard smile graced Justine's features.

"You wanted to taste her," Thomas said, his fingers twining with Justine's rubber-clad ones. "Well, Madeline. Be my guest."

Justine leaned over and kissed Madeline Raith's forehead, her silken silver hair falling to veil them both.

The vampire screamed.

The sound was lost in the pounding rhythm and flashing lights.

Justine lifted her head a few seconds later, and swept her hair slowly down the length of Madeline's form. The vampire writhed and screamed again, while Thomas held her pinned to the table. Wherever Justine's hair glided over exposed fleshed, the skin sizzled and burned, blackening in some places, forming blisters and welts in others. She left a trail of ruin down one of Madeline's legs and then rose together with Thomas, two bodies making one motion.

Madeline Raith's face was a ruin of burn marks, and the imprint of Justine's soft mouth was a perfect black brand on pale flesh in the center of her forehead. She lay on the table, still pinned by the chopsticks, and quivered in jerking little motions, gasping and breathless with the pain.

Thomas and Justine walked, hand in hand, to the stairs leading down from our platform. I followed them.

They passed beneath an air-conditioning outlet, and a few strands of Justine's hair blew against Thomas's naked arm and chest. Small bright lines of scarlet appeared. Thomas didn't flinch.

I walked over to them and passed Justine a pair of pencils, taken from my coat pocket. She took them with a nod of thanks, and quickly bound up her hair again. I looked over my shoulder as she did.

Madeline Raith lay helpless and gasping-but her white eyes burned with hate.

Thomas took his T-shirt from where he'd stowed it on a belt loop, and put it back on. Then he slid his arms around Justine again and pulled her against his chest, holding her close.

"Will you be all right?" he asked.

Justine nodded, her eyes closed. "I'll call the House. Lara will send someone for her."

"You leave her there and it's going to make trouble," I told him.

He shrugged. "I couldn't get away with killing her. But our House has rather stern views on poaching." Something hard and hot entered his eyes. "Justine is mine. Madeline had to be shown that. She deserved it."

Justine clung a little bit tighter to him. He returned the gesture.

We all started down the stairs together, and I was glad to be leaving Zero.

"Still," I said. "Seeing her like that, I feel like maybe somebody went too far. I feel a little bit bad for her."

Thomas arched an eyebrow and glanced back at me. "You do?"

"Yeah," I said. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. "Maybe I shouldn't have said that Jessica Rabbit thing."

Chapter Ten

The hot summer night outside Zero felt ten degrees cooler and a million times cleaner than what we'd left behind us. Thomas turned sharply to the right and walked until he'd found a spot of shadow between streetlights, and leaned one shoulder against the wall of the building. He bowed his head, and stayed that way for a minute, then two.

I waited. I didn't need to ask my brother what was wrong. The display of strength and power he'd used on Madeline had cost him energy-energy that other vampires gained by feeding on victims, as Madeline had done to that poor sap inside. He wasn't upset by what had happened in Zero. He was hungry.

Thomas's struggle against his own hunger was complicated, difficult, and maybe impossible to sustain. That never stopped him from trying, though. The rest of the Raith family thought he was insane.

But I got it.

He walked back over to me a minute later, his cool features distant and untouchable as Antarctic mountains.

He fell into pace beside me as we began walking down the street toward the lot where he'd parked his car.

"Ask you a question?" I said.

He nodded.

"The White Court only get burned when they try to feed on someone touched by true love, right?"

"It isn't as simple as that," Thomas said quietly. "It's got to do with how much control the hunger has over you when you touch."

I grunted. "But when they feed, the hunger's in control."

Thomas nodded slowly.

"So why'd Madeline try to feed on Justine? She had to know it would hurt her."

"Same reason I do," Thomas said. "She can't help it. It's reflex."

I frowned. "I don't get it."

He was quiet long enough to make me think he wasn't going to say anything, before he finally spoke. "Justine and I were together for years. And she... means a lot to me. When I'm near her, I can't think about anything else but her. And when I touch her, everything in me wants to be nearer to her."

"Including your hunger," I said quietly.

He nodded. "We agree on that point, my demon and I. So I can't touch Justine without it being... close to the surface, I suppose you could call it."

"And it gets burned," I said.

He nodded. "Madeline is the other end of the spectrum. She thinks she should get to feed on anyone she wants, anywhere, anytime. She doesn't see other people. She just sees food. Her hunger controls her completely." He smiled a bitter little smile. "So for her it's reflex, just like for me."

"You're different. For her it's everyone," I said, "not only Justine."

He shrugged. "I don't care about everyone. I care about Justine."

"You're different," I said.

Thomas turned to face me, his expression rigid and cold. "Shut up, Harry."

"But-"

His voice dropped to a low snarl. "Shut. Up."

It was a little scary.

He stared hard at me for a while longer, then shook his head and exhaled slowly. "I'll get the car. Wait here."

"Sure," I said.

He walked away on silent feet, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed. Every woman he passed, and some of the men, turned their heads to watch him go by. He ignored them.

I got a lot of looks, too, but that was because I was standing on a sidewalk near a lot of Chicago's night spots on a hot summer night wearing a long leather coat and carrying a quarterstaff carved with mystic runes. Thomas's looks had all been subtitled: Yum. My looks all said: Weirdo.

Tough to believe I was coming out ahead on that one.

While I waited, my instincts nagged me again, a hairs-on-the-back-of-my-neck certainty that someone was focused on me. My instincts had been on a streak, so I paid attention to them, quietly preparing my shield bracelet as I turned my head in a slow, casual look up and down the street. I didn't spot anybody, but my vision sort of flickered as it passed over an alley across the street. I focused on that point intently for a moment, concentrating, and was able to make out a vaguely human shape there.