We danced in the hallway with him smiling down at me, his eyes shining with happiness, and along with the dancing skills came his mood. I laughed out loud from the joy that was bubbling through him. I wondered exactly what had made him this happy. He used his hand at the small of my back to press us closer together, so I could feel that there were other things up besides just his mood. The feel of him pressed so hard against the front of me made me miss a step; I got a string of visuals from the afternoon he and Micah had shared that made my knees so weak I would have fallen if he hadn’t caught me. I loved being in the middle of the two of them for sex, but as their own wedding approached, our mostly heterosexual Micah was trying to work on issues he was having with two men and no girl in sight.
I managed to say in a voice gone hoarse with just the memory feedback, “Sorry I missed it.”
“Next time,” Nathaniel said, and then he picked me up off the floor and spun me around, laughing.
“This is not just the shorthand of a couple, you shared what you are feeling and thinking,” Rafael said.
Nathaniel set me down, but kept his arms around me, and I kept hold of him. My knees weren’t weak anymore, but we hadn’t kissed yet. He’d wanted to share his delight, but he wasn’t done.
“Yes,” Nathaniel answered him, but kept looking at me. He leaned in to kiss me and I went up on tiptoe to help.
My eyes were closed, but I still knew that Micah had crossed behind me toward the wererats. He wasn’t bound to me like Nathaniel was, but he was still my Nimir-raj and that was its own magic. Then Nathaniel was kissing me, and I forgot about everything else.
It was like a continuous feedback loop of his mouth on mine, mine on his, his hands so strong on my back, and my smaller hands on the smooth muscles of his back, his hands having to find their way around the shoulder holster with the Springfield EMP nine-millimeter and the big knife in a sheath along my spine, the extra ammo on the right side of my gun belt, the inner pants holster of the Sig Sauer .380. Nathaniel even got the thought in there that I still felt like I was cheating on my old Browning BDM by carrying the Springfield nine-millimeter for every day, and the Springfield .45 when I was on duty as a marshal. I got that he missed my body under his hands without all the straps and weapons. There was a moment when I wasn’t sure whose thought, hands, mouth, body was whose. I was trying to climb back into control or something when I felt Damian wake for the night. Suddenly it was three of us and I felt that first gasp as he woke like a swimmer who had almost drowned and was fighting back to life.
Then we were looking down at him; the brightest green eyes I’d ever seen in a human being stared up at us, set in the milk-white skin of a natural redhead who had spent a thousand years in the dark. It meant his hair had no gold highlights like most redheads, so it looked darker, a true red instead of the orangey color it might have been.
Rafael said, “What is that?”
Micah said, “Damian’s awake,” as Nathaniel and I broke from the kiss and looked at each other. Nathaniel’s eyes were green, and because I could still see/feel through him, I knew mine were, too. I had a moment to be truly creeped out by it, and Damian shut down the link and we were left alone in our bodies in the hallway, knowing that the vampire third of our triumvirate of power had his feelings hurt that it had bothered me to see his power in our eyes.
7
“IS THAT WHAT it would be like if Anita made me her rat to call?” Rafael asked.
“No, it’s a more complete bonding because we have Damian hooked up to us. Only the triumvirate with Jean-Claude, Richard, and I can come close to this level of . . . intermingling. It’s not like this with any of the other animals to call unless we work at it.”
“At least if Anita’s power shows, we both have brown eyes, so it will not be so obvious,” Rafael said.
“Did we miss something?” Micah asked.
Nathaniel studied my face. “I didn’t see the decision in your mind.”
“You got distracted,” I said.
He grinned. “You always distract me.” He reached for me again, and Micah stepped in the way.
“I love you both, but this is serious. If Anita is going to make Rafael her rat to call, I need to know and so do Jean-Claude and Asher.”
Nathaniel wasn’t smiling as he shook his head. “She hasn’t decided yet.”
“And you know that how?” Benito asked.
“It wasn’t in her head just now.” He said it as if it was a perfectly reasonable answer.
“Do you know everything she’s thinking?” Rafael asked.
“No, but a decision that big would have been in the front of her thoughts, and it wasn’t,” he said, again so reasonable. Nathaniel had taken the new power level between the three of us in stride a lot more than I had, or even Damian had.
“I have never seen your eyes blaze with Jean-Claude’s blue when he wakes for the day,” Rafael said.
“He has more control over it,” I said.
Nathaniel said, “It’s not just that, some of the Harlequin’s eyes change when their masters wake and they have control.”
“It’s a shorthand for them to know everything that’s happened during the day while they slept. We can just tell Jean-Claude or Damian.”
“Why does it bother you so much when it happens?” Nathaniel asked. His eyes were fading from the deep violet of happiness toward the normal lavender.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you know everything that your moitié bêtes know?” Benito asked.
“No,” I said.
“But you could read their thoughts if you wanted to,” he said.
I thought about it and then nodded. “But it’s more sharing memories than thoughts.”
“Perhaps I have not understood all the possibilities of our king becoming your moitié bête, Anita,” Benito said.
“Unless you have a vampire who shares rat as their animal to call included in the mix, it won’t be as intimate as what Anita shares with Nathaniel and Damian,” Micah said.
“How do you know?” Rafael asked.
“I’ve talked to Jean-Claude at length about it.”
“But Damian is not a master vampire, so he has no animal to call,” Rafael said.
“One of them is the master vampire,” Micah said, motioning at Nathaniel and me.
“So, Anita,” Benito said.
“I’m not so sure,” Claudia said, and she was looking at Nathaniel as if she saw something in him she’d missed or hadn’t noticed before.