I swallowed, and it hurt, though I couldn't remember why it should. "Nathaniel, Damian." I was feeling a little better, well enough to be afraid. I'd almost drained both of them to death once, or twice.

"Do not fear for them. They are well enough, but they are feeding for you, giving you their energy as they are supposed to do in emergencies," she said, and stroked my forehead, tracing down the edge of my jaw. It was an idle movement, like the way you'd stroke the curve of a couch you were sitting on. "The masks of the Harlequin were in your mind, ma petite. Have they come to your territory?"

I wanted to tell her to stop calling me ma petite, but air was precious, so I answered, "Yes."

"Show me," she said.

Not Tell me, but Show me. I said, "How?"

"You are of Belle Morte's line. How do we trade power?"

I frowned up at her.

"Kiss me, and but think of it, and I will know what you know."

I don't know if I would have kissed her voluntarily, because I didn't get a chance to decide. She pressed those ruby lips to my mouth, and I was suffocating again. I couldn't breathe. I pushed at her, and she thought inside my head, "Think of the Harlequin." It was as if it were an order, and my mind did what she asked.

I thought of the meeting with Malcolm and his fear. I went back through the date with Nathaniel and the mask in the bathroom. The second mask with the musical notes on it, and the meeting planned. The mark on me, and the scent of wolf, and Jake keeping me safe. Then the last memory, where I saw my men dying, and the ghost on Richard, and the feeding with Rafael. She slowed the memory there, lingering on the rat king's powers, then let the memories go back to speeding along, and using Rafael's power to attack the one that had attacked us. It was the last memory that she slowed down completely. She stared at the pale faces of the vampires, the long dark hair, the glowing eyes, brown and gray respectively. Belle Morte studied the faces of the other vampires. She whispered, "Mercia, and Nivia." The memory ended, and Belle Morte was simply lying beside me, propped on the pillows.

I whispered, "You know them."

"Yes, but not that they were Harlequin. It is a deep, dark secret who is, and who is not, one of them. They are spies, and secrecy is their life blood. By their hands the Harlequin have broken their most profound taboo."

"What taboo?" I asked.

"They are neutral, ma petite, utterly neutral, or how can they dispense justice? Did they give you a black mask? I did not see it in your memories."

"No, only the two white."

She laughed, and her face shone with joy. My heart hurt, but not from a physical blow. It hurt the way it sometimes does when you see someone you once adored do something to remind you why you loved them, and you know that that laugh will never again be for you.

"They have broken the law then, the law they swore to uphold. Unless they deliver the black mask, they are not allowed to bring death. For Mercia and Nivia, it means true death, but for their fellow Harlequin it means something worse."

"What?" I asked.

"Disbandment. They will be no more, and those who are not killed will be forced to go back to their bloodlines, their old masters. To be neutral the Harlequin are freed of their ties to their creators. They are a law unto themselves, but if they are breaking the law, then they will be broken."

"Why does that"—I had to draw a breath to finish—"make you so happy?"

She pouted out that full lower lip and said, "Poor thing, so hurt. I will help you."

"Appreciate the offer, but"—and I had to work for breath—"help us, why?"

"Because you alive are witness enough to destroy the power of the Harlequin."

"Why," breath, "do you care?"

"They were once the private guards of the Mistress of the Dark. She is waking, I know that now."

"But when she wakes," breath, "she won't have them."

"Precisement," Belle said.

"But you need me, us, alive."

"Yes," she said, and she looked at me the way that a hawk must look at a wounded mouse, eager, anticipatory.

"Make you mad?" I whispered, and had to cough. It wasn't my throat that was closing off. I didn't think it was Jean-Claude's. Something bad was happening to Richard.

"I don't hate you, ma petite," she said. "I don't hate anything that is useful to me, and you are about to be very useful, ma petite."

"Anita," I whispered.

"Anita, Anita," she purred as she leaned our faces closer, "if I want you to be my ma petite, you will be. Jean-Claude is near death and he protected you from me. I will save you all, but I will do it in a way that you will not like." She leaned our faces close, and the hand that had been caressing my face was suddenly firm and solid as metal against my cheek, keeping me turned toward that lovely face. She began to lean in for a kiss.

I spoke before our mouths touched. "A win-win situation, for you."

"Oh, yes." She whispered it against my lips, then kissed me. But she didn't just kiss me, she opened the ardeur between us. One moment all I could think about was breathing, Just keep breathing, and that I really didn't want her to touch me, and the next she was kissing me, and I was kissing her back.

My hands slid over that satin dress, and the body underneath, and my hands knew that body—though my hands were smaller than they should have been. Jean-Claude's memories kept getting in the way, coloring what was happening. When her mouth found my breast, and sucked, it startled me, because the body I was remembering didn't have breasts. She bit me, driving dainty fangs around my nipple. It made me cry out, brought my body writhing off the bed. She raised a bloody mouth and smiled at me, her eyes filled with amber light. She climbed my body and pressed that bloody mouth to mine. I kissed that mouth as if it were air, and food, and water, all rolled into one. I marveled at how small her mouth was, how dainty. How I'd longed to kiss this mouth again. I knew in this moment what I had never known from Jean-Claude, how much it had cost him to leave her. They say that once you love Belle Morte you never stop, and I knew in that kiss, with her body on top of mine, that it was true. He still loved her, would always love her, and nothing would change that, not even me.

The ardeur started to feed then, at that bloody kiss, but this was Belle Morte, the creator of the ardeur. You did not feed from her and stop. You fed until she stopped you.

The knife cut us out of the dresses, and where it nicked the skin we licked and drank each other's blood, and it didn't seem wrong, or a bad thing to do. The taste of her blood was sweet, and slow, and I knew that vampire blood was not a meal, but it could be foreplay.

I ended up on top of her, and my body kept forgetting that it wasn't male. I pressed her to the bed, with my body between her legs. But I could not do what I was remembering. I swore in frustration, because more than anything in the world in that moment I wanted to pierce her body. I wanted to plunge parts that I did not have into parts of her that I did.

She lay underneath me with that dark hair spilling around her body, across the silk of the pillows. Her lips parted, her eyes filled with that eager light. I knew what she was, knew it better through Jean-Claude than most. I knew that she would slit my throat and make love in the blood while I died, but in that moment with her looking up at us, I didn't care. I just wanted her to keep giving us that look.

She laid me back against the sheets and began to kiss her way down my body. I watched her eyes roll up, watching my face, as she licked, and bit, and drew small pinpricks of blood where dainty fangs pierced too close. It wasn't my memory that made me writhe at the sight of her over my groin. At first, it felt wrong, because I was expecting a different sensation, but Belle had spent two thousand years learning about pleasure, and she knew this pleasure, too. I gazed down at her with her mouth between my legs, and her tongue found me, traced me, licked me, and finally she sucked me, lightly at first, then deeper and deeper, until fangs bit deep as she sucked me, and I wasn't certain if it was the pleasure that brought the orgasm, or the pain. The ardeur fed, and fed, and fed.