“I didn’t do it to help you,” I said.

“But it did help me, Anita, so much more than you will ever know.”

“You ate his power when he died,” I said.

The two vampires nodded.

“Belle Morte,” Jean-Claude said, “you must fight her.”

“She cannot,” the vampires said together.

I felt Jean-Claude open the ardeur and thrust it into Belle Morte. Belle’s head went back, her spine bowing, and when she looked up her eyes were their human brown. “She doesn’t understand the ardeur, but she understands lust, Jean-Claude.”

Then Belle’s eyes were drowned in power darker than her own, her eyes like a sea of night sky, and I’d seen those eyes before, and not from the Mother. Belle and Padma spoke in unison. “Lust we know of old, Anita. Remember what we did in your Las Vegas with the weretigers? I can raise the ardeur and drown you all in it for hours until the sun does rise and my power grows by every tick of your clocks.”

Richard’s fingers dug into my shoulder, and I realized that as each man had come into the room he’d been pushed farther away from me, no, not pushed, had moved farther away from me. He understood it was a choice now, because I felt him understand that as his thoughts touched me. Fear ran through Jean-Claude like cold water, and I was feeling almost nothing yet, shoving my emotions away as I did in a crisis. Only Richard, of the three of us, was calm, no, Micah, I could feel him, calm, too, and Nathaniel beyond him. Micah was calm because he was almost always that way, and we got a glimpse of the years and the work that had gone into that calm. He was like a deep, still pool where all the trouble could go. Nathaniel was calm because he honestly believed that I would not fail him, that I would find a way. His unshakable faith had saved us before, but as always it frightened me, too, my fear that I would fail him, and his deep, abiding belief that I wouldn’t. And then there was Richard, calm at last, and his was like Micah’s, a calm built of work, therapy, effort; he’d built his calm the way he built his muscles, one weight at a time.

I felt Richard’s version of the ardeur for only the second time ever. It was about possession, but not demonic, just about till death do us part, belonging to you and no other. Once upon a time that had been my heart’s desire, but by the time the ardeur had risen in me, I needed more help in my life than any one person could give, so the ardeur had given me Micah, and Nathaniel, and finally made me someone who could be with Jean-Claude.

I reached out to Jason, because I knew he was still in the room somewhere even though my vision was drowning in the sight of Belle and Padma in that dark room so far away. Jason’s hand met mine, as if he’d sensed what I needed. The last time I’d faced Richard’s rice-and-roses ardeur, it had been Jason’s fear of being consumed by a single person that had helped me fight it off. I had a moment to doubt, to wonder if J.J. had made him change his mind, but she hadn’t. One of the reasons he and J.J. were working better for each other than anyone else ever had was that they didn’t want monogamy, but they did want to belong to each other, to be special, just not in that burn-your-bridges kind of way.

But Richard didn’t throw his wedding-veil ardeur into me; he aimed it at that distant room. He aimed it at Belle Morte. In all the centuries of the ardeur, some had tried to trap Belle in love. Augustine of Chicago had done that, and Jean-Claude and Asher had been her obsessions, but no one had offered this, only Richard. Only he could have turned something that was meant to feed on lust and make it about fiftieth wedding anniversaries and make it sound like a good idea.

He lay on the bed, curling himself around Jean-Claude, Asher, and me, and sent the thought out that you could have this forever, and with the offer to Belle it meant forever. It was that kind of love, and Belle didn’t understand it, and if she had no clue, Marmee Noir was lost.

Belle looked at us with her own brown eyes. “Richard,” she said, and she’d never said his name with that kind of heat behind it. He stared up at her through that long line of vision and let her see him lying there nude. It was no small promise, what he offered. “Belle,” he whispered back. She smiled at him, but spoke to Jean-Claude. “I keep calling you foolish, but you find strength where I have only found weakness. Any power the Mother possesses is hers to command. She feeds on negative emotions, follows them into your mind and heart.”

Padma was behind her with a sword in his hands. His eyes were black fire, not his color, not his eyes. I cried out, reached toward them. I wasn’t sure if I screamed or if it was Jean-Claude. We cried, “Behind you, Belle!”

We felt her ardeur drown Padma. He fell to his knees, overwhelmed by too much desire. I watched Gideon and Thomas hesitate. They hated Padma and they understood now that having him dead might be better. But when he ordered them to help him, they had no choice. Belle picked up her skirts and ran. They let her run, and I knew Padma would make them pay for it later. She said, “Save yourself if you can, Jean-Claude. Contact the Traveller if you can find him. Maybe he can help you. Run if you can. Hide if you can. We are not descended from the Darkness, remember that.” Then it was as if someone had turned off the picture. We were all suddenly lying on the bed with just ourselves and no sense of Belle, or Padma, or Mommie Dearest. The world didn’t smell like flowers anymore.

We all just lay there in a silence so thick I could hear the blood in my own head. Into the silence, I heard myself say, “Motherfucker.”

“Exactement, ma petite, exactement,” Jean-Claude said.

13

IF I HAD ever wanted to give in to hysterics, it was then. How do you fight something with no body to kill? How do you fight something that can possess the most powerful vampires in the world and use them like puppets? How the fuck does anyone fight something like that?

I think we were all lying there thinking about the same thing when someone’s cell phone rang. It was playing the theme to the old Mike Hammer show. Nathaniel spilled off the bed and started rummaging in the clothes on the floor. “It’s the ring tone for Max, the Master of Las Vegas,” he said.

“On your phone?” I asked.

“On yours,” he said, and raised my phone from the mess of clothes. He opened it and said, “This is Anita’s phone, Max, just hang a minute.” He handed it toward me. I mouthed, “The theme to Mike Hammer?” He wiggled the phone at me and frowned. I took the phone, but we were so going to have to talk about what new ring tones he’d put on my phone. I’d just gotten “Wild Boys” off it as my main ring tone and put it to a default peal of church bells.

“Max?” I said, and made it more question than statement. Nicky was still mostly on top of me, not recovered from my forcing his beast. Violent change hurt. I took the phone as I lay wedged between Jean-Claude and Asher.

“Anita, what the fuck are you guys doing tonight?” His voice was an unhappy bass growl. He was a big man to go with the voice, almost totally bald in that I’ve-lost-my-hair kind of way, not a fashion-statement way. He was built big and solid like an old-time linebacker. If you didn’t know what you were looking at you might say fat, but it wasn’t; the muscle just hid itself, but it was there.

“Well, hello to you, too, Max,” I said, and my voice was unhappy, ready to be grumpy right back to him. It made me feel a little better that I could be grumpy about a rude tone of voice. If I could still be pissy about small things, then maybe the world hadn’t ended because the Mother of All Darkness was still “alive.”

“Bibi woke up screaming about the dark trying to eat her. She made me call you, Anita, said you and Jean-Claude would know what was happening to her. Do you—know, I mean?” His voice was uncertain now. He’d started life as a mob boss and never lost the job even after death; in fact, he was one of the reasons that Vegas was still an old-fashioned mob town in spite of new blood from Ukraine and other places east. But he loved his wife and he was worried about his little tiger queen.