6
SHANG-DA STAYED BY the two werehyenas near the loveseat, his trench coat swept back to show the weapons more clearly. What was going on? Jamil stayed at his Ulfric’s side, and there was something way too formal, too dangerous, about all of it for our normally less-than-action-oriented Richard.
The guards by us fanned out and looked a little uncertain. They’d picked up on the urgency, too.
“Richard, what has happened?” Jean-Claude asked.
“I’m in time, so nothing yet,” he said.
Truth and Wicked moved in front of him and Jamil. “You’re moving like you have a purpose, Ulfric,” Truth said. “What is that purpose?”
He let them stop him. “I’m here to complete Jean-Claude’s triumvirate of power.”
“I expected you tomorrow for the weretigers,” Jean-Claude said, “but tonight is a surprise.”
“Did I interrupt something?”
“Yes,” Asher said, and that one word was very unhappy.
“Then I am just in time.”
Micah came to me with Nathaniel literally in his hand. Micah offered me his free hand, and I let go of Jason to take it. Micah and Nathaniel were the ones who had held me the most when Richard cut me up. Since he’d left Jean-Claude when he left me, it had seemed wrong to cry on Jean-Claude’s shoulder.
“Who did you bring the guards for, Richard?” Jean-Claude asked.
“Hopefully, no one, but Anita is always complaining I’m not cautious enough; I’m trying to change that.”
“Truth, Wicked, enough.”
The vampires looked at me, and I nodded. Only then did they move aside.
Micah squeezed my hand, and I leaned in against him with Jean-Claude’s hand still in mine. Richard looked at Micah. “I guess I’ve earned that look, Nimir-Raj, Micah.”
“What do you want?” Micah asked.
“To help. I swear to you, I’m here to make things better instead of worse.”
“That would be a change,” Micah said.
There was a flash of anger across Richard’s handsome face, and then he nodded. “I deserved that.” He looked at me then and said, “Anita, I don’t know what to say to you.”
I sighed. “You said you came here to make things better; do that, make them better, and we’ll go from there.” I met the perfect brown of his eyes, and he nodded.
He turned to Jean-Claude. “I don’t know what to say to you either, Jean-Claude.”
“Start with what you are doing here, Richard,” he said.
Richard moved into the group of us. Asher actually moved a little closer to Jean-Claude, as if he would block the other man. Normally that would have been enough to stop Richard in his tracks, but tonight he kept coming. He swept his hair to one side to expose the long, smooth, muscled line of his neck. “First, I would greet the Master of the City.”
I felt Jean-Claude go very still beside me, sinking into that stillness that the old vampires could do. It proved that he was as unsure of what was happening as I was, and that he didn’t trust this new, more cooperative Richard. We were both expecting him to come in and try, but in the end he would leave us more hurt than when we started, and he would fail us at the critical moment. He had taught us that.
Jean-Claude let go of both my hand and Asher’s. He would take the greeting offered—the very kind of greeting that Asher had been trying to force on all of us just minutes ago. It was an almost surreal turn of events, because Richard didn’t offer this greeting to anyone, or never had before, not willingly.
Jean-Claude put his hands on the other man’s shoulders to steady himself, and leaned in and laid the barest of kisses on the other man’s neck. Then he leaned back and studied Richard. “Why are you here?”
“I would stand at your side tonight as I will tomorrow. You need your wolf tonight, Jean-Claude.”
“We do not need you tonight, Ulfric,” Asher said, and he came up behind Jean-Claude, sliding his arms around the other man’s waist and putting his face next to Jean-Claude’s. Asher hid his scars with his hair, but the face that showed was arrogant, sensual, and possessive.
I expected Richard to react with disgust, or anger, and he wasn’t comfortable with it, but he said, “Oh, I think Jean-Claude does, and Anita does. I think they need me a lot tonight.”
“They’ve agreed to bed me tonight, Ulfric. Jean-Claude and I will be lovers tonight with nothing denied us.” He smiled, most unpleasantly, at the other man.
Richard smiled back, and his held anger as Asher’s held cruelty. Really, when you came down to it, they could both be pretty unpleasant. I’d never thought of it that way before, but it was true.
Richard had swallowed his power back as he came through the door, being polite to shield. Now the first trickle of warm, vibrating power flowed over us. I shivered where it touched, clutching at Micah’s hand. Jean-Claude didn’t so much shiver as just smooth the lapels of his jacket, but it was a nervous gesture, I knew that.
“I won’t offer sex to you, Asher, but other than that, I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Richard,” I said, “you don’t mean that.”
He looked at me and held his hand out to me. “If you and Jean-Claude are going to do it, then I do mean it.”
I stared at his hand. “What are you offering?” I asked.
“Take my hand, Anita, please, for power, for shared power let Jean-Claude’s triumvirate be everything it was meant to be tonight while he embraces Asher.”
Micah squeezed my hand. I looked at him, and his eyes told me, Do it. I trusted him, and so I reached out. The moment Richard’s hand touched mine, the power rushed over my skin like a warm bath that raised every hair on my head. My head went back, eyes closed, and the power hit Micah’s hand in mine and kept spilling into Nathaniel. Leopard was my animal to call, and Nathaniel was to me what Richard was to Jean-Claude. The last time we’d tried to combine my triumvirate with Jean-Claude’s, Richard hadn’t cooperated.
Jean-Claude’s hand touched my shoulder, and the power spread to him. He moved his hand to the side of my face, and bare skin was always better. It was like the power was a deep, still pool of water, and that last touch was a huge rock. The water crashed upward, spilled outward, and the rings of power went out and out and out.
Someone whispered, “Oh, my God,” and it was none of us who were touching because we had no words yet. Jason wasn’t touching us, but I felt the power stagger him, and he reached out, put his hand on my back so he could become part of that circuit. It was like throwing another, smaller boulder into the waters before they’d settled from the first. I felt Wicked and Truth when the power hit them, because they were ours, and Jamil was Richard’s wolf, and his body reacted to the power, and then the wererats resonated with the power because we’d fed on them through their rat king, so we knew the taste of the wererats and it was good, and then Shang-Da grabbed the back of the loveseat; I felt his hand close on the cloth to steady him. And finally the power found Asher, because all the vampires in this city were ours, but he must have moved away from us to be near Shang-Da. We felt him touch the werehyenas and he was protected from us, from the spill of our power, our heat, our warmth, our mix of death and life. He and his hyenas were like boulders in the wash of it, standing firm and not being swept along.
I heard one of the werehyenas say, “We need to go, Asher.”
I had to blink to clear my vision, almost like you do after really good sex where the orgasm leaves you blind and unable to focus. But it wasn’t sex, it was pure power.
Asher spoke into the stunned silence. “You’ve been holding back on us, Ulfric.”
Richard’s hand tightened on mine and on Jean-Claude’s, and for a moment I couldn’t tell which hand was mine, or if they both were. We’d had moments of this kind of sharing before, and always Richard or I panicked and broke the power, but there wasn’t enough of me solid to be afraid, and Richard was exhilarated as if it had worked even better than he’d planned.