Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 21)

DAWN HAD WASHED the world in soft, golden light by the time I started driving for home. I had texted before I got in the car, letting Nathaniel and Micah know that I was headed their way. I got a typed "kisses" back from Nathaniel, and a "Putting on coffee now." I'd sent "kisses" back, and started driving.

Micah's ring tone sounded. I actually had a Bluetooth earpiece; it made me feel all high-tech. "Hey, my Nimir-Raj, I'll be home in about thirty."

"Good morning, my Nimir-Ra," and there was that edge of smile and just happiness that his voice had held for so long when he called me his.

"You guys should still be asleep. I texted instead of called, so I wouldn't wake you." I was driving on old Route 21 with the early-morning light streaming through the late-spring trees. The leaves were still that tender green, fresh, with its undertone of golds and yellows. It made me think of a poem. "Nature's first green is gold," I said out loud, too tired to just think it.

"What?" Micah asked.

"It's a poem; the trees made me think of it. 'Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only for an hour,' and I can't remember the rest."

Micah said, "I can. 'Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.'"

"How did you know the whole poem?" I asked.

"My dad's favorite poet is Robert Frost. He used to read Frost poems to us, and quote him a lot."

"I thought your dad was a sheriff."

"He was, maybe still is."

"A sheriff who loved poetry and quoted it in his everyday conversation, that's nifty."

"Hey, you quoted it first," he said softly, and again there was that edge of happiness in his voice, contentment maybe.

"True; you know, there's no reason you can't get in touch with your family now."

"What do you mean?" and the happy tone was gone, replaced by suspicion. Crap; I wished I'd kept my mouth shut, but I'd been meaning to say something for a few months, and...

"You estranged yourself from your family because Chimera used the other lycanthropes' families against them, but he's been dead a few years now."

"You killed him for me," he said, voice quiet, but still without that happy undertone.

I took a deep breath, let it out, and plowed ahead. I was nothing if not relentless. "And then you wanted to make sure you were safe here in St. Louis."

"And then the Mother of All Darkness started trying to eat us all," Micah said.

"But she's gone now, Micah. There's no one left to hurt your family if you show that you care about them."

"There will always be more bad guys, Anita; you've taught me that."

Just hearing him say that made me sad. "I hate that it's something you learned from me."

"Not just you," he said.

"It's just that you seem to like your family, and miss them. I don't see mine, because I don't get along with my stepmother or stepsister."

"I'll get in touch with my family after you take us to see yours," he said.

"Us?" I said.

"Yes, Anita, I love you, but who would you take home to meet your dad? One of us, both of us, more?"

"I wasn't planning on going home," I said.

"But if you did, who would you take as your boyfriend?"

"No vampires; my Grandmother Blake is a little crazy. She'd go apeshit around Jean-Claude."

"Okay, then who?"

"You, Nathaniel, I think."

"And who would I take home?"

I sighed, and wished I had left the entire topic the fuck alone. I was too tired for this kind of conversation. "Are you saying that you don't want to take Nathaniel home to meet your family?"

"No, I'm saying that if I go home to my family I need to take you and Nathaniel. The three of us have been a couple from the beginning, and it's been two years. Two years that have been wonderful, and that wouldn't have been as wonderful if Nathaniel hadn't been with us."

I said the only thing I could to that. "Nathaniel is part of our... coupleness. I mean, our menage a trois, or trio, or whatever you call it."

"Exactly," he said, "so how can I go home without both of you?"

"Are you saying you don't want to take both of us?" I asked.

"I'm not sure how my parents would take me bringing another man home, especially after the horrible things I said to them to convince Chimera I didn't give a damn about them."

I drove in the growing light, and the bright spring trees, and felt vaguely depressed. "I love you, and Nathaniel," I said.

"Me, too," he said.

He said he loved Nathaniel as often as he said he loved me, but for the first time I wondered if he loved us the same way. Did he love me more because I was a girl and he was heterosexual? Okay, technically because of Nathaniel he was heteroflexible, but still, the point was the same. Did Micah love me more, because I wasn't a boy? Did he love Nathaniel less because of it? I knew that Nathaniel love-loved Micah, just like he did me, but I had never asked my oh-so-once-straight boyfriend how he felt about having a male "friend." Had he ever introduced Nathaniel as his boyfriend? No. He'd kissed him in public, but... It was too confusing for me tonight. I was too tired to wrap my head around the complexities of it.

I finally said, "I just want to come home and wrap the two of you around me and hold on."

He was quiet for a moment, and then said, "You aren't going to push? You aren't going to make me declare undying love for both of you, or something like that?" He sounded surprised.

I was a little surprised, too, but out loud I said, "I don't think so."

He laughed then, and said, "Are you that tired?"

"I got called a monster by someone I thought was my friend once, and people died, cops died, and... I just want to come home and climb into bed between the two of you, and drown in the feel of your hands on me for a while, and sleep."

"That sounds perfect," he said, and his voice was relieved, as if he'd been dreading my pushing the topic.

"Good," I said, and knew I sounded relieved, too.

"But I'll warn you that Sin is awake and upset," Micah said. "You'll have to talk to him before you can do much of anything else."

I tried to not be angry about it. "Cynric knew what I did for a living, Micah. He met me as a U.S. Marshal on a job."

"But he's never seen fresh bodies on the ground and known that you were part of the firefight. It's hard the first few times, Anita, and he's terribly young."

"He's eighteen," I said, and now I sounded defensive.

"I'm not saying he's too young for... dating. I'm saying he's too young to cope with seeing you striding through a bunch of freshly dead vampires without freaking out a little, that's all."

"You weren't going to say dating, were you?" I sounded almost sullen, and I couldn't seem to help it.

"You know how you don't want to push about how I feel about Nathaniel meeting my family?" he asked.

"Yeah," and sullen turned into wary in my voice, and in my stomach.

"I feel the same about your guilt over having someone this young in your bed. You didn't set out to make him yours, any more than I planned on being part of a threesome with you and Nathaniel. Sometimes things happen, but just because you didn't plan them doesn't mean they aren't good things."

I sighed. "You're right, I do feel guilty about Sin, and I so hate the nickname."

"His full name is Cynric, and he doesn't want to be Rick."

"I know, but I'd send him home if I could."

"You can send him back to Vegas, Anita. He's your blue tiger to call and he obeys you."

I had to focus on the sharp turn between all the morning-lit trees, almost like I'd lost concentration on the driving for a second. He'd surprised me again. "I thought you were one of the ones who told me it would be cruel to send Sin back?"

"I did, but just because I disagree with it doesn't mean you can't do it," Micah said.

I thought about the wording of what he'd just said. Was he hinting that if I did something stupid and all guilt-ridden about my youngest lover, he might do the same about his only male lover? Or was I overthinking it? Well, yeah, I was overthinking it, but Micah tended to overthink, too, so maybe I was thinking just enough? God, that was too convoluted.

"Truce," I said.

"What do you mean?" he asked, and he sounded cautious, maybe even suspicious.

"No issues that will implode any parts of our personal life tonight, okay?" I said.

I could almost hear him smile over the phone. "That sounds good, Anita; that sounds very good." He sounded tired, too, and I realized that while I'd been out catching bad guys, he'd been home calming down a teenage weretiger and being the rock of calm for Nathaniel and anyone else who had stressed about the danger in my job tonight.

"Thanks, Micah," I said.

"For what?" he asked.

"For being you, for being there, for being my sweetie, for being in my life."

"You're welcome, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, or with anyone else."

"Even with the danger and the preternatural politics?" I asked.

"I dragged you into the preternatural politics the first time we met."

"I was already pretty deep into them before you came along," I said.

"Maybe, but I'm good at the politics, and you help me be better."

"I could argue that you help me be better at them, but okay."

"Hurry home," he said.

"I am," I said.

"I love you," he said.

"I love you, too," I said. We did that couple thing where neither of you wants to hang up, but it finally felt silly and I hung up first. I loved Micah and Nathaniel. I loved us as a "couple." We worked. We worked better than any relationship I'd ever tried. Hell, the two of them helped my other relationships work better. Micah donated blood to Jean-Claude, and let him be on his short list of men he was willing to be naked with, and in bed with, though only Nathaniel was allowed to cross certain barriers. Nathaniel was Micah's exception as Jade had become mine. My life had become something that I could never have planned even a year before, but as Micah said, just because you didn't plan something didn't make it a bad thing. It was just a thing, and one of the unintended things in my life was an eighteen-year-old weretiger who was having his first how-could-you-risk-your-life-and-scare-the-hell-out-of-me moment about my job. I was not looking forward to trying to reassure him, because Micah was right, I had serious issues about Cynric, Sin, God, what a nickname. It just drove home everything that bothered me about the kid, and that was the problem. I still saw him as a kid, and yet he was my lover, so I guess I didn't really see him as a kid, but he was so young. Not just young in years, but sheltered, inexperienced... young in that wet-behind-the-ears, haven't-seen-enough-or-done-enough way. I'd been his first lover, and yes, we'd all been mind-raped by the biggest, baddest vampire of them all. It had been done in a cold bid to keep me busy while nefarious plotting went on, but whatever or whoever had done it, I'd still taken Cynric's virginity as part of a metaphysical orgy. It still embarrassed me to think about it, what little I could remember of it. It had been like being blackout drunk, with only glimpses remembered even now.

I'd been his first, and I hated it. No, I felt guilty, because I didn't love him. Even after almost a year of him being with us, I still didn't love him. I liked him, and I had sex with him often enough, so I guess I like-liked him, but I didn't love him. I didn't come close to caring for him the way I cared for others in my life; a long list of others in my life were ahead of him in my affections, and that was why I felt guilty. I'd been the white knight riding in to rescue him and give him all his firsts, which meant I was supposed to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after with him, but I'd done that once with Nathaniel, and that had worked out really well. Come to think of it, I'd worked really hard to not love Nathaniel, too. He'd made me feel guilty for other reasons, but still I'd fought long and hard against loving him. Hadn't I fought against loving Jean-Claude, too?

I was almost at the driveway to the house. Crap, did I always fight before I loved someone? No, not always. I'd tried to love Richard from almost the beginning, and I had loved Micah from the beginning. Two men out of how many? Too many. Crap, I wished I hadn't thought of it that way, because now I felt guilty and stupid. Was Cynric just one more guy that I'd fight against caring for and eventually I'd feel for him what I felt for Nathaniel, or Jean-Claude? Crap, crap, crap, crap! I soooo wished I hadn't thought of it like that.