“I did not want to give up our tie, but I did not know that we would find other golden tigers in time to help you.”

“We could part you from your master,” Jean-Claude said.

“If it is your will I don’t think we can stop you.” He seemed very calm about it.

“You really did come here to sacrifice yourself for the common good, didn’t you?” I asked.

“The gold tigers have hidden for centuries. We learned from our earlier ignorance. Now there are more of us than the black or the blue clans. We want you to be Master of Tigers, Jean-Claude. We need you to be, because if we do this we break with the Darkness that made us, and if she ever gains power again she will make us long for true death long before she gives it to us.”

“Why would you risk her anger to join with us?” I asked.

“She knows now what we did.”

“That it was her own beloved Harlequin who put her into that long-ago sleep,” Jean-Claude said.

He nodded.

“So the white tiger’s myth is true,” I said.

“It is,” he said.

I raised eyebrows at that. Jade hadn’t known that. I didn’t think he read my mind, but he said, “We heard how you divided master from servant with the lion and the Master of Chicago, and the two Vegas tigers from their queen and master. We knew that there was a chance that you would divide at least one of us from our masters. It was always one of the gifts of the Mother, to break all bonds and bind only to her.”

“Jade didn’t know your whole plan,” I said.

“No, because then her master would have known, and we considered him corrupt.”

“Without Jade’s energy to raise his level, you can kill him,” I said.

“We could not trust him.”

“You hoped we’d steal Jade from him and make him weak,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“And you wanted her free of him so that when he dies, she doesn’t die with him,” I said.

“She has endured enough at his hands. When we realized there was another vampire who could break her free of him, we moved to make it so.”

“She thought you did not see her suffering,” Jean-Claude said.

“We saw, but we could not free her from him.”

“You waited for another vampire to be created who could free her,” I said.

“Who could free us all,” he said.

I gave him the look that deserved. “We’re good, but we aren’t the immortal Darkness.”

“You don’t have to be. You just have to be able to cut bonds between master and servant, all servants, and that you can do, you have proved that.”

“What do you want of us?” Jean-Claude asked.

“So you would spare me and my master, even feeling the power you gain from each broken bond?”

“We have enough power,” I said.

He studied us. “You have a great deal of power, but to do what we need, more would be better.”

“We’ll find more,” Micah said.

He studied us all. “You would spare me and my master, because he and I love each other. You would spare us for love,” he said.

I looked at Jean-Claude and my other men out of habit more than need. “What else is there?” I asked.

He smiled up at us. It was almost a beatific smile, his face shining with love close to adoration. I didn’t think it was from looking at us. I thought he was more thinking of his master, his love. “That is the answer we hoped for.”

“So you gambled centuries of happiness, your free will, and your very existence, on love?” I said.

He shrugged with his arms still bound behind his back, and the guards still heavy on his shoulders. “As you said, is there really anything else worth gambling everything for?”

What could I say but, “No, there isn’t.” And standing there holding everyone’s hands, feeling the hum of the energy we’d raised between us, I believed that.

48

THE HARLEQUIN’S GOLD tiger went back to his master. Jake and Jade stayed with us. Jake joined us in the gym like all the good guards. Jade joined us in the gym, too, but she’s not a guard. She can fight and she’s fearsomely good, but the centuries of abuse have left her with a victim’s mentality, and that doesn’t make a good guard. Maybe I can introduce her to Richard’s therapist?

Cynric, who wants to be called Cyn, pronounced Sin, stayed in St. Louis. He’s the only blue tiger we have and we need him close to us. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but unless I want to divide the female blue tiger from her master, who she also loves, Cyn is the only one we have to bind to us. He’s hitting the gym, and we’re looking at enrolling him in his last year of high school. When I realized he was a junior I was totally creeped, but he’s legal, and his guardians Max and Bibiana did what they had to do to make his stay with us legally okay. I’m still working on my issues with it all. But one problem at a time.

They found the Master of Atlanta by using the cadaver dogs like I’d suggested. They fried him with an exterminator team and it made international news. He’d slaughtered another dozen people before they tracked him down. The few vampires that survived his death are in need of a new Master of the City. Jean-Claude and I are debating on who to send. Meng Die wants it to be her. She’s friendlier to me since we helped her up her power level. What she actually said was, “When you dance with the devil, it might as well be a devil who can give you your own corner of hell to rule.” Not a rousing endorsement, but it’ll do.

Richard has continued to be okay. I learned that the three men who tried to kill him were dead. I’d assumed the guards that we sent to rescue him had killed them, but they’d only helped dispose of the bodies. Richard as his wolf had hunted them through the woods and killed them. Jean-Claude and I held him one night while he cried about that. He didn’t cry about killing them so much as about how much he enjoyed killing them. In our ways, all three of us worry that we will be the monster.

It turned out that the effects of the ardeur and some of the odd pairings wore off. We offered every woman not on birth control a morning-after pill. I was thankful once again that I was on the pill. Condoms for me were an extra protection—not my only one. J.J. is back in New York, but she’s also back to being in love only with Jason. Bianca, the swanmane, is a little unhappy about that, but it’s not the ardeur that makes her miss J.J. She just liked J. J., and who could blame her?

Jake helped us hunt Padma, Master of Beasts. It wasn’t that hard to break the Mother’s hold on him. Jake thinks it worked so well because my power is similar to his. I’m not so sure. It was too easy, as the old saying goes. But we took our victory, and the Dragon and the Traveller are sending people of their line to St. Louis, so if the Mother does try to take them over we can have a leg up on breaking them free. We can’t find the Morte d’Amour. He still carries Marmee Noir inside him, but he’s stopped trying to take us over. If I didn’t know better I’d say he, and she, were afraid of us. He took over another of his descendants in Europe. The vampires killed nearly seventy people before they were stopped by the army. Countries where vampires are still illegal don’t have legal vampire executioners. They usually call in what amounts to the National Guard.

Some tigers of every color stayed with us. We have enough blood donors that most of our vampires can feed on shapeshifters. We’re the only vampire kiss in the country that can boast such rich food for all our bloodsuckers.

I still miss windows and light and air, but until we find and free the Lover of Death, the Circus of the Damned is the safest place to be. We’re doing the best to make it home.

I’ve rearranged my schedule so that I have three afternoons a week free of clients, so I can train with the guards. Nathaniel tries to have coffee ready for me in the kitchen when I come home so we have a few minutes to visit. One afternoon Matthew was at the kitchen table drinking milk and eating a freshly made peanut butter and jelly sandwich.