Jean-Claude smiled up at me, because my visual was looking down at him as if I were a hovering camera; it was always the view from the mind-to-mind peeks. His black curls were back in a loose ponytail, but with or without the hair to frame it his face was still almost too lovely to be real. Once I thought it was vampire wiles that made him so beautiful, but it was just him.
He said, “I am soon to take my turn upon the field, and I need my concentration. The sweetness of your combined release will be most distracting.”
I didn’t try to talk anymore; I just lowered my shields enough so he could see Rafael and where we were in the process.
Rafael said, “What does Jean-Claude want?”
It made me startle and look at the other man, which made me lose the visual of Jean-Claude. I started to ask him how he knew anyone had contacted me, let alone knew it was Jean-Claude, then I realized he was rubbing at the goose bumps on his arms. “You felt the energy,” I said.
“I know when Jean-Claude is in your head.”
I didn’t have to file it away to share later, because Jean-Claude just knew what I knew, because he was in my head. “Interesting,” he whispered, and then was gone so that Rafael and I were alone again in the showers. Our thoughts and our feelings private and ours again.
“He’s at the new sword class the older vamps and shapeshifters are doing. He doesn’t want us to be feeding the ardeur while he’s on the practice mat.”
“I didn’t think they used live blades,” Rafael said.
“They don’t, but you can still get hurt even with a dull practice blade.”
“True enough,” he said.
“I know that the wererats like to use live blades for most of their practices,” I said.
“If it is not silver, then it will heal almost instantly if you are a powerful enough shapeshifter.”
“Yeah, you’re powerful as fuck, so you’ll heal, but I’ve seen some of your people after the wererat-only practices and they don’t all heal like you do.”
He smiled and it had that arrogance, or maybe confidence, that he hid most of the time behind a diplomatic, almost humble demeanor. But since I’d been his lover, I’d seen him when he wasn’t so controlled, and you didn’t get to be king without being confident or even arrogant.
“You do not always heal as quickly as I do, and yet you participate in knife practice with us.”
I shrugged and felt both embarrassed and proud. “I was surprised when Fredo invited me into the private lessons.”
“You should be honored, Fredo includes only the very best in his private classes.”
I smiled and then felt myself blush. It usually took something sexual to get me to blush, which meant that being invited into Fredo’s private lessons meant even more to me than I’d thought. It was stupid to risk myself with real blades, and even in the private classes we used practice blades most of the time, but not all the time, and sometimes we used silver-edged blades, which meant that even a shapeshifter or a vampire would heal human-slow. The wererats and the golden tigers both believed that if you didn’t practice with silver blades at least part of the time, you didn’t really know how good you were or how you’d react when you got hit for real. I’d been cut up in real fights before, so I knew what it felt like and how I’d react, but the theory was sound.
Rafael laughed. “I am sorry that I have not been able to be in the practices since you were invited into them.”
“What’s so funny?” I asked and felt prickly like an old reaction that I hadn’t quite outgrown.
“I did not mean to upset you.”
“Sorry, I know you didn’t mean it that way, but for a second it was like you were laughing at me; that whole smallest-kid-in-class, only-woman-in-a-man’s-profession thing, it’s put a serious chip on my shoulder.”
He touched my still-bare shoulder, very gently, almost as if he wasn’t sure I’d be okay with it. I didn’t tell him not to touch me, but I didn’t smile either. He had hit a serious issue by accident, but it was still hit.
“I would never laugh at you, Anita. I have benefited too often from that chip on your shoulder. It is what let you stand up to the Master of Beasts when he had me skinned alive. I will never forget that you risked yourself to save me. I never dreamed that we would ever be more than friends then, but if we had never been lovers, I would still owe you for that moment of bravery.”
I put my hand over his where he was touching me. I could still see the back of his body red and raw where they’d had him chained. They’d left his skin nailed to a door as a message. I could still see him bound facedown to the table with silver bands at wrist, ankles, and neck. Bands that were bolted to the table itself. He was nude, but more than his clothes were missing. The entire back of his body was one raw bloody mess. I’d found the owner of the skin on the door. Rafael’s darkly handsome face was slack, unconscious. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen done to another person.
“You were strong enough to withstand the torture until we could get to you, Rafael. If you’d done what they wanted and given them control of the wererats, they’d have had enough firepower to take over the city.”
“I could not give my people over to a such a monster, no matter what they did to me.”
I didn’t say out loud that most people, even strong ones, would have caved under that kind of torture. As my friend Edward says, everyone breaks eventually. Out loud I said, “I’m only sorry I didn’t get to kill the Master of Beasts before he left town.”
“You killed his only son; for a vampire as old as the Master of Beasts, that is revenge enough.”
“Yeah, his chances of ever having another child at his age is pretty slim.”
“Have any of the Harlequin found the Master of Beasts yet?”
I shook my head. “We freed him from the Mother of All Darkness, but after that he vanished. I think he’s afraid of what we and all his enemies might do to him when we find him.”
“All the old council members have many enemies, made over centuries,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, and stepped away from his hand. “Let’s get dressed and find a bedroom.”
“I have spoiled the mood talking about old enemies,” he said.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “A little, okay, maybe a lot, but let’s find a bedroom and see if you can get me back in the mood.” Honestly with the memory of him tortured dancing in my head, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. If he’d been an ordinary lover, I’d have just said, Let’s skip it today, but he was going to be fighting for his life later tonight. If I’d been in love with him, I’d have wanted sex just in case it was the last time, but that wasn’t what made me suggest the bedroom. If it was the last time I could feed on him, the last time I could share the energy of a country’s worth of wererats with Jean-Claude and all our people, then I needed to take it, but that wasn’t the only reason. If Rafael died tonight, I’d regret saying no. We’d been friends years longer than we’d been friends with benefits, but friendship is a type of love and I would miss him.