Kiss the Dead (29 page)

We stood just inside the heavy, dungeon-looking door that led into the underground. The gauzy curtains started just feet inside the doorway. The gold, crimson, and silver of the cloth was a bright surprise after the bare stone of the entryway and the long stairs that led to the door. I stood there looking at the pretty curtains and didn’t want to go any farther. If Nathaniel and Micah hadn’t already been staying here for the night, I might have turned around and gone back up the stairs and home.

We could all hear Mephistopheles and Asher arguing. Asher was upset that Devil, Dev, Mephistopheles’ nickname, wanted to sleep with someone else. Then I heard the voice of Kelly, one of the other female guards: “Stop it, both of you, it’s over, okay? I won’t sleep with him, Asher; he’s yours, all yours.”

“I have a right to sleep with women,” Dev said. “That was our agreement.”

“Asher may have agreed you could sleep with women, but he’s going to cause you so much grief about it that you won’t be able to do it.”

“Kelly…”

“No, Dev, sorry. You’re cute, but no one’s cute enough for this kind of grief; besides, I don’t poach other people’s men, and you definitely belong to Asher, or you wouldn’t put up with this.”

Mephistopheles’ voice: “I’m bisexual, not homosexual; that means I like women, too. I’m not giving them up, not even for you.”

“It’s all been a lie, then.” Asher’s voice, and his voice held despair and anger like hot ashes against the skin. His voice held negative emotions the way Jean-Claude’s could hold sex and love.

My heart dropped into my stomach, so that it hurt from chest to gut. They call it a broken heart, but it’s not your heart that breaks, it’s more like your insides are carved out from chest to gut, so you feel hollow. I
loved Asher, but I was also beginning to hate him just a little. This insecure, almost insane jealousy of his was driving us all crazy.

The curtains were jerked apart and Kelly strode through. She was only a few inches taller than me, long yellow hair back in a high, tight braid; the black T-shirt and black jeans were a little too harsh for her coloring, making her look as if the fight had paled her out with anger, but I knew that wasn’t it. Kelly didn’t pale out; she flushed when she was angry enough.

She snarled her words, a trickle of her inner lioness growling through them. “They are so yours, Anita. I don’t know how the hell you put up with all of them.”

“The sex is really good,” I said, and shrugged.

She shook her head, making her long, tight braid bounce. “There isn’t a sex trick in the book that could make me put up with this level of shit from anybody.”

I said the only truth I had. “Love makes you do stupid things.”

She looked at me. “You love them all? How can you love them all?”

I thought about it. I thought about trying to explain that I loved them, but not all the same kind of love, but I sure as hell knew it was more than just lust, or friendship. “Yeah, apparently, I do.”

She waved a hand sort of vaguely in the air, as if erasing something I couldn’t see. “Well, I’m not touching another one of your men. They are way too complex for me. None of them know how to just fuck and leave it alone.”

“I think Dev does,” I said.

“Yeah, but he’s in love with Asher, and that is one screwed-up dude.”

“I can hear you,” Asher called.

“Good,” she yelled back at the curtain. “I hope you fucking can. Dev and I would have just fucked, just fucked, you insecure bastard, but no, it has to be about emotion, because you are more of a freaking girl than I will ever be!”

Jean-Claude said, “Mephistopheles does care for you, Asher, you know that he does.”

“As you do, but the first bit of pussy that comes along and you chase it like a dog after a bitch, and I know you are there, Anita.”

I sighed and just pushed the drapes aside. Apparently, Asher was going to pick a fight with all of us. “As one of the bitches in question, I think I resent that,” I said, as I stepped through with Nicky and Claudia at my back. I didn’t want to fight, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t fight.

I got a glimpse of Dev as he strode through the curtains on the other side, going toward the bedrooms, the kitchen, everything else. Apparently, he was leaving the fight to us, or maybe he was simply too angry to trust himself, or maybe too puzzled. I knew that Asher confused me more than any other lover in my bed, and that included Cynric. At least with him I knew what my issues and his were, but with Asher… I knew some of his issues, and Jean-Claude knew others, but honestly, he was like an emotional minefield; you never knew when you’d step in it again, or how much of your relationships it would blow up. I realized as the first real anger stirred in my gut that I was tired of it.

He turned around, his hair flaring around his shoulders and face in a foam of golden waves. It spilled over one half of his face, leaving one perfectly beautiful half bare to the light, so that only one of his ice-blue eyes showed. He was angry, but not so angry he had forgotten to use his hair to hide the scars on one half of his face. When he was happy, sometimes he forgot to hide the scars, but most of the time I saw his face through a veil of his hair, like a golden cobweb between him and the world. His jacket was a pale blue that brought out the color of his eyes, and was cut at the waist so that it emphasized the broad shoulders narrowing down to slender waist, and the curve of his hips in a pair of painted-on satin pants that matched the jacket. The shirt that showed in a line at his waist was white, and probably silk. He was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn as ringmaster in the Circus above us. There would be a matching top hat around here somewhere, all blue satin and white ribbon band. He didn’t always wear the same outfit, but I’d seen him perform in this one, so I knew it was for work, not just because he looked yummy in it, but he still looked yummy in it.

Was it shallow to say that some of my anger vanished because he
came through the curtains looking heart-stoppingly beautiful, or just true? Even as I thought it, I felt Jean-Claude in my head, and knew it wasn’t just my seeing him as lovely that made me patient, that unmanned me in front of his beauty. It was Jean-Claude who loved him more than I did, and had for centuries. They didn’t always get along, and they’d been estranged for more than a hundred years at one point, but Jean-Claude was almost helpless before the beauty of the man in front of me.

Asher’s eyes bled to pale blue fire, the hidden one gleaming like iced flame through the waves of his hair. His power rode down my skin like a cold chill.

Nicky and Claudia were at my back, the curtains closing behind them. I heard my bags hit the floor as they dropped them to have their hands free. Asher and I never came to blows, but I wasn’t the only one tired of his shit, and neither of the guards was getting sex out of him, or had Jean-Claude’s happy memories. It made them crankier than I was, made them sort of ache to smack some of the shit out of him.

I felt rather than saw other movement farther into the room, blocked by Asher’s tall figure, and Nicky looming up at my side. But I knew the movement was Jean-Claude’s bodyguards. We both had at least two of them with us most of the time. I had no memory of Asher ever hitting anyone he loved, and thanks to Jean-Claude that memory went back a few hundred years, but there might have been more than one reason that no one got physical with us.

Asher turned those glowing eyes to me then, and I felt the push of his power like an invisible wall was trying to move through me. Once his power would have just rolled over and through me, but that was then; this was… different. I hadn’t had him try his luck against me since the Mother of All Darkness had died. Asher had nearly killed me once, by accident, because I was so vulnerable to his particular flavor of vampire wiles. Now I stood there, and his power did not move me. His beauty moved me. The memory of great sex and bondage moved me. But looking into that amazing face from feet away, with all that potential that I knew was hiding under the fancy clothes, I felt cold, as cold
as the power that rolled off him and tried to cloud my mind. He was trying to calm me down, or make me not care about his bad behavior by using vampire wiles. It was so cheating.

“How many times have you used vampire wiles on me to win a fight?”

He blinked, his eyelids coming down over the fire of his eyes, so that his golden lashes were framed against the bright blue, and for a second it was like looking into the hot heart of some demonic oven with the door half closed.

“If your holy object does not glow, then I’m not harming you, isn’t that what you said?”

I nodded. “I did, but maybe I was wrong, or maybe if I want to be fooled hard enough romantically, my cross just lets me do it; free will and all that.”

“Are you saying your cross is intelligent enough to make judgment calls?”

“No, I’m saying the power that my cross is hooked up to, that I believe in, is intelligent enough to make judgment calls.”

“Or perhaps your God sees no harm in me.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

Asher moved closer to me, so that my vision was full of all that gold hair, that heartbreaking face, and the glow of his eyes. His mouth was still the same pouting perfection that it had been when Jean-Claude first fell in love with him. The Church fathers who had used holy water to try to burn the devil out of Asher so long ago had skipped that full mouth, as if even they couldn’t bear to ruin the angelic beauty of his face. The scars on his face that he was so self-conscious of actually touched only a small part of his right cheek. Only one long, white line of scar reached out toward the perfect curl of his mouth. It was as if when they’d seen what the holy water had done to his face, they hadn’t been able to bear what they’d done. Sometimes when you do evil, you have a realization so bright, so harsh, that you mend your ways. I’d always wondered if the priests who tortured Asher had been converted
to a better brand of Christianity, or if their faith had died as they trailed the burns down the right side of his body?

Asher took me in his arms, and the moment he touched me that much, his vampire wiles got a boost of power. Most vampire powers got a boost through touch. He held me and it was as if he were my Prince Charming. I gazed up at him and I couldn’t “see” that his eyes were still glowing, or feel the cold march of his power. He was just suddenly perfectly gorgeous. There was no stop in my head, no cautionary statement, no warning. He kissed me, pressing those full, soft lips to mine. I kissed him back, falling into that kiss with my lips, mouth, tongue, and teeth, until it was more a tasting than a kiss. My hands, arms, body, entwined, pressed, wrapped—I couldn’t get close enough, and when his hands started to pull my shirt out of my pants I reached under the back of his satin jacket and pulled on his shirt, too. Pressing bare skin to bare skin sounded like such a good idea. Pain, and I tasted sweet, copper pennies. It took me a second to realize I was tasting blood, but once I knew what I was tasting I started swimming up through the mind games.

I pushed at Asher, trying to stop the kiss, but the blood that had made me want to stop had him pulling me tighter, his mouth locked on mine, as he kissed me deeply, thoroughly. If his fangs hadn’t been bleeding me, it would have been a great kiss.

I pushed harder, trying to pull away from his painful, sensuous kiss, trying to unlock his arms from behind me. I was making protest noises as if his mouth were a gag, keeping me from telling him,
Stop, don’t
. One of the reasons I didn’t like gags during bondage sex was that it stole your safe word away. You couldn’t tell whoever was topping you,
No
. A gag meant you trusted the person to behave themselves, or, you wanted your
no
taken away. You wanted to leap off the cliff and let the dominant do whatever they wanted to you. Nathaniel found that relaxing somehow; I didn’t.

If he’d been human I could have struggled free without hurting him. I was more than human-strong, but if he’d been only human, there
wouldn’t have been dainty fangs to cut my mouth. If he’d been human I wouldn’t have loved him, because he wouldn’t have been Asher.

He was holding me too close, too tight, so the only options I had to get away were things that would injure him permanently, or injure parts of him that I might want to play with afterward. He tightened his arm against my back and moved one hand to the back of my head, grabbing my curls tight. In the right head space, the right moment, it was enough to switch me to a submissive mind-set, but this wasn’t the right anything. Asher deepened his kiss and drove those dainty fangs into my lips again. I made a pain sound, yelling against the tender gag of his mouth on mine. I stopped trying to push farther away from him, and pushed my body closer to him. He seemed to think that meant I was enjoying myself, because his hands loosened on me, not so much trapping me as holding me. I put my leg behind his, hooked his knees, and drove him toward the floor, but he didn’t let go, so we both fell, but if I was falling, and he was going to keep kissing, I should have made sure my knee went into parts of him he wouldn’t enjoy, but I liked those parts of him. I didn’t want to hurt Asher. It’s hard to get away from someone who’s stronger than you are, if you don’t want to hurt them. Shit!

I felt a trickle of warm energy before a hand grabbed my shoulder, and Asher’s. I had a moment to smell the hot, burned-grass smell that meant lion; a second to know it was Nicky, and then Asher’s power swatted outward like a slap, but it wasn’t aimed at Nicky, or me.

Other hands were on Nicky, and I saw a flash of blond hair and summer-tanned skin, enough to know that it was Ares, and then the fight rolled away from us. Asher’s animal to call was hyena. He’d reached out to the nearest one, and Ares’s loyalty of paycheck or preference hadn’t been enough to overcome the magic of Asher’s power over him.

I was still armed to the teeth, had more hand-to-hand training than Asher, but if I wasn’t willing to hurt or kill him, it was all useless. The sounds of snarling, snapping, and grunts of effort let me know that Nicky was fighting to get back to my side.