Richard put his hand on my stomach and I felt that soothing power again. He stroked my leopard as he’d petted the wolf before. The leopard snarled at him, but it stopped racing for the surface. It circled, snarling in frustration. My leopard was stopped, but Belle wasn’t. She clawed at my skin, and faint red lines appeared across my stomach.
“I am not so easily stopped now, necromancer. I have the power of the Mother of us all in me, and you cannot stand against it.”
The door opened and Nathaniel, Micah, and Damian were there with one of our new female vampires holding Damian’s hand. Her name was Cardinal after her red curls, though they were more gold-red than Damian’s; nothing was quite as bloodred as his long straight hair, just as his eyes were the green of a cat’s eyes, inhumanly beautiful, though I knew that the eyes were the color he’d had in life. He was almost six feet tall, which made Cardinal very tall for a woman in the century she’d died in, thin and small breasted, boyishly hipped under her silk robe. In her day she’d have been too thin, but now she looked like a model.
Micah and Nathaniel reached the bed first and just climbed onto it. Micah was wearing purple silk boxers, but Nathaniel was nude, which meant they’d been in bed sleeping, or trying to; most of the wereanimals wore nothing to bed if I didn’t make them. Lately I’d stopped insisting on it. It was only the group leaders who seemed to throw something on for walking around in the Circus.
I held my hand out and Nathaniel touched me first. The power flared like a warm wind over my skin. The moment his power touched mine the claws hurt a little less, but Nathaniel flinched and I saw red lines appear on his skin. He was sharing the damage but not stopping it. Micah knelt by my legs, putting his hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder and my thigh. His power was like a soothing wash of water, a calm deep pool, and his beast swirled up through his body and crossed that barrier into me. There was a moment of feeling his beast slide into me and then I could feel it rubbing its silken fur against my side. I could feel our beasts greeting each other with that long sinuous cat rub from cheek to hip, and at the same time it felt as if the fur was rubbing along the inside of my human body, so there was a moment of disorientation, of being my leopard, his leopard, and me at the same time. The two leopards turned as one, snarling, at the power that was trying to dig its way into us.
Micah and I had been enough to chase Belle out once before. She hadn’t been prepared for us to be a true Nimir-Ra and Nimir-Raj. With Nathaniel as my leopard to call, we were enough. We pushed her back. The scent of jasmine and roses began to fade.
“Not this time, Anita,” Belle said, and I smelled sun on dry grass, and a beating, pulsing heat, and there were bigger claws pushing at my stomach. The lioness looked up from deep inside me and began her walk up the road. “You have no lion to call yet, and you have not joined yourself to the local Rex. You cannot win this. I will bring your beast and make you my animal to call, Anita.”
I thought lion and I felt two of them, distant but reacting. One was Haven, our local Rex, and the other was Nicky, who was something less than an animal to call, and something more. He was a Bride, my Bride. It didn’t mean marriage; it meant I’d rolled his mind so completely that he was worse than a slave. I’d meant to roll him, but the results were frightening even to me. To Nicky I said, Come, but to Haven I said, Don’t. The local Rex was off my feeding schedule for starting a fight with Nathaniel and Micah one morning, and for “marrying” a female werelion and lying to her and me that she was his Regina. It had been a ploy to make me jealous; when it hadn’t worked he’d annulled the marriage and sent her packing. It was like he was stuck in a sitcom mentality and didn’t know how to behave in the real world. He projected the thought that he was coming. I thought back, No, don’t. I had a werelion closer; I didn’t need two.
Damian stood beside the bed in a new silk robe that was almost the same green as his eyes, with Cardinal pulling on his hand. He turned to her and I heard him say, “You’ve seen Belle’s court. Do you want her in charge here, too?”
She blinked big blue eyes, shook her head over and over, but she let go of his pale hand and let him crawl onto the bed. He had the palest skin of any of the vampires in our kiss, our group, because in life he’d probably been paler, too. Damian lay down, putting his upper body across my bare legs, and the moment that he and Nathaniel touched me, while Jean-Claude and Richard touched me, it was as if we were a wind, a storm edge that forced back whatever Belle was trying to do. Damian was my vampire servant, an impossibility, but through him and Nathaniel I had my own triumvirate. I was the equivalent of the master vampire for them, and Jean-Claude still had his triumvirate with Richard and me. Triumvirates of power were rare among vampires; to have two that we could draw on was unheard of. Belle’s image began to grow dim again.
“I told you it would take more of us,” said a man’s voice from Belle’s vision. I smelled the grass and heat of lion, and the thick pine of forest and the musk of wolf, and rain and jungle, thick and exotic and leopard. I knew who it was before the vision cleared and the Master of Beasts stood with Belle Morte. He was one of the darkest-complected vampires I’d ever met, pale with death, but he’d been dark enough in life that he could only be so pale. He was Indian, as in the country, not Native American. He wore what I used to think of as harem pants with a matching sparkly vest over a silk shirt. It would have looked like a cheap costume except that the sparkle on his clothes wasn’t sequins but real small jewels sewn in patterns. He was another Vampire Council member. He’d actually come to St. Louis once and tried to take over, or at least torment us. We’d killed his son, who he’d brought with him, for raping and torturing some of our people. It didn’t surprise me that he’d be willing to help Belle possess us. It only surprised me that he hadn’t tried to do something to us sooner.
He could call almost every kind of wereanimal, and he had three of them clustered around him now. He smiled out at us. It was a very unpleasant smile. “Jean-Claude, Master of the City of St. Louis, greetings from the Council on High. We have come to tame you tonight as I have tamed all my beasts.” Except for his wife, who had been a wererat and given him his now deceased son, he ruled by fear and power, as Belle ruled by seduction, power, and fear.
“We are not so easily tamed as all that,” Jean-Claude said, and he settled back against the bed with all of us clustered around him, touching and being touched. I felt him think that the sight would bother Padma, Master of Beasts, because his line of vampire didn’t use sex as their tools. Nothing we would be willing to do would scandalize Belle Morte.
“You say that, but you have two triumvirates of power in your bed. We are still using only our beasts to call, and yet the vision remains even,” Padma said, and I knew before he called them who would come to his hands. Captain Thomas Carswell was still dressed in a version of the British uniform he’d worn when he was a soldier for Queen Victoria in the 1800s. His dark gold hair was still cut short and neat, but the brownish mustache that curled across his upper lip and up to meet his sideburns always made me unable to really see his face. Still, you had to admire a man who had worn the same look for more than a century. He was Padma’s human servant, but the only time I’d seen them in person, well, it hadn’t been a love match between him and his master. In fact neither he nor Gideon, Padma’s animal to call, liked their master very much. Gideon’s hair was still somewhere between brown and blond, but it was longer than last time, shoulder length now, thick and straight with an edge of wave to it as if the longer it got the more it would wave. His eyes were still yellow with orange pinwheels, tiger eyes. I knew he had kitty-cat fangs upper and lower in his mouth. His master had forced him to stay in tiger form too long and now Gideon didn’t come completely back.