Belle Morte, Beautiful Death’s voice echoed through us. “I told you they could not resist each other forever.”

12

WE WERE STILL in the bedroom under the Circus. We were still in the bed, still wedded to each other’s bodies, but I knew we could all see Belle Morte in our heads like a bad dream. She was dressed in gold, a deep rich satin that made her pale brown eyes look even more amber than they were, but I had Richard’s wolf amber to compare with and I knew that try as she might her eyes were not truly anything but brown. Her brunette hair was curled in careful ringlets on top of her head, to cascade around her oval face. It looked complicated and not touchable, as if she’d yell at you if you messed it up.

She spread her arms wide, chin coming up. “I am Belle Morte, I am Beautiful Death, gaze upon me, desire me, but come to me, my petite ones, and I will give you all you desire.”

I had a flash of memories of Jean-Claude and Asher and a speech like this for both of them separately. I saw her offer herself to others in front of them, countless others. But none of us wanted her, none of us were tempted, that had so not been the case the last time she’d visited us. Then I’d known that Jean-Claude would always love her; he could run away from her, but he could never be free of her. Now the three of us who had been touched by her didn’t want to be touched again, and Richard was the difference. He hadn’t been there through any of the other times, and now he was our rock in the tide of temptation, because he wasn’t tempted.

Jean-Claude took Richard’s lack of interest and built on it so we could all stare at her with cold eyes. We could pull ourselves apart from each other so that Richard lay beside me, holding me, and Jean-Claude could hug Asher and reach up to undo one wrist from the chains. In a way, we ignored her, though it was like ignoring a leopard that just happened to be walking through your living room. Maybe if you ignored it the cat would keep moving, but then again, maybe it would stop and want a snack.

Rejection wasn’t something that Belle Morte had dealt with much in the last two thousand years. She didn’t deal well with it. Her anger filled her eyes with pale, brown fire, like staring at the sun through dark glass, but as the sun can burn skin if magnified through glass, so could Belle’s power if you dared reject her.

Belle tried to flood us with the ardeur, but it was too well fed. We were sated. She held her hand out to the darkened room. I caught shadows and realized the only light was torchlight. Where was she? “Lust is no longer my only weapon, Jean-Claude. Feel my new power and learn to fear me again.” The scent of roses was thicker, but underneath that was the scent of jasmine, and that had never been Belle’s perfume.

A fresh thrill of fear painted my skin in cold goose bumps. Jasmine was the scent of the Mother of All Darkness, but she was dead, her body destroyed by the mercenaries the Vampire Council had hired to do the job. I’d heard her last scream in my mind from thousands of miles away. She was gone, so why did Belle Morte smell of roses and jasmine?

Jean-Claude had used Richard and his connection to the wolves to help us, but Belle’s animals were all cats. I smelled leopard. The leopard inside me woke and began to pad up that long path in my head. My beast liked the scent of the leopard touching Belle, and we liked Belle. For the first time she tried to call me as if I were just another wereleopard and she my master. “You are still warm, Anita. Jean-Claude can cut your vampire away from me, but he doesn’t hold leopard, and you don’t know enough to fight me.”

I thought about my leopards, Micah and Nathaniel, and I knew they were coming. I reached out and tasted Damian’s power. I called him to me. Belle had opened us too wide and I could feel so many people. It was as if she’d peeled away my shields, like breaking into a house by tearing down an entire wall. I couldn’t keep her out, but I was suddenly sensing people that I’d never been able to sense before. I knew that Rafael, the wererat king, was sitting at a table at a restaurant with others of his rodere, his animal group. I knew that the swan king was in St. Louis visiting our local swanmanes. It was as if anyone I had ever fed the ardeur on was suddenly clear in my mind. Face after face, body after body, and I realized that Belle was shifting through them like shuffling a deck of cards.

“You have done my bloodline proud, Anita; look at all of them, taste them, feel them,” she said.

Jean-Claude undid Asher’s other wrist, and Richard went to him, helped him hold the other man, who was still too lost in afterglow. The moment that Richard wasn’t touching me, the leopard inside me started to run. It would hit the surface of me and burst on my skin in a rush of pain and damage. Belle laughed that musical, slithering, seductive, frightening laugh.

Then Jean-Claude touched Richard’s skin, even a small brush and he thrust that coolness, that calmness that Richard had learned from the tigers into my leopard, and my beast did slow, but she was still walking toward the light with a sense of purpose. Jean-Claude and Richard carried Asher back to me, laid him on one side of me, and Richard laid down on the other. Asher slid down on the bed so he could cuddle his head against my shoulder, his arm around my waist. Asher was still boneless and fighting back to full awareness; as he’d said, he didn’t have a triumvirate so he didn’t have the energy we did to fight her. He needed a werehyena, which was his animal to call. I thought it to Nathaniel and Micah, and more-distant Damian.

Jean-Claude lay on the other side of Asher, but he put an arm across the bed, and Richard and he clasped wrists, and Jean-Claude put a hand across Asher to take my hand in his. The moment we touched we were more solid. The shadowy torch-lit room was foggy around the edges, beginning to recede like a bad dream.

Then the scent of evil flowers was stronger, like we were bathing in jasmine perfume, but underneath was heat, dry grass, and then lion. The scene in my mind came into focus again like crystal, all hard edges and unbelievably brilliant in color the way dreams so seldom are. She stood there pushing lion and leopard at us and we had only wolf touching us. It wasn’t enough.

She smiled, and the scent of roses and jasmine grew stronger. Jean-Claude said, “Belle, what have you done?”

“The roses are your scent, but jasmine is Marmee Noir,” I said.

Jean-Claude said again, “What have you done, Belle?”

“She was the Mother of us all. If we had let her power die with her, we would all have died,” Belle Morte said.

“That is a lie,” Jean-Claude said, “a lie to keep us from attacking those that made us.”

“We were not willing to take that chance,” she said, and I felt her power reaching out to us, almost visible like some evil fog. I didn’t know what she meant to do with it, but if she had truly swallowed some of the Mother of All Darkness, then I didn’t want any of that power to touch us. But it was as if the mist were a trick, a sleight of hand to keep me looking in the wrong direction, because her power was just suddenly there, against my body. I could feel a claw digging under my ribs. It tore a gasp of pain from me, and blood began to spill down the front of my body. Belle had never been able to cut from a distance with her animals. But it was more than that; it was as if the invisible claw were a hand being held out to my leopard, saying, Come, take my hand, let me free you, and no matter how much control I thought I had on the beasts inside me, they all wanted out. They were all frustrated with this human body that would not let them come out and play.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Belle said, and then she called it in French, but the language didn’t matter, only the power. I writhed and fought not to scream.