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“What?” I asked.

“Disbandment. They will be no more, and those who are not killed will be forced to go back to their bloodlines, their old masters. To be neutral the Harlequin are freed of their ties to their creators. They are a law unto themselves, but if they are breaking the law, then they will be broken.”

“Why does that”—I had to draw a breath to finish—“make you so happy?”

She pouted out that full lower lip and said, “Poor thing, so hurt. I will help you.”

“Appreciate the offer, but”—and I had to work for breath—“help us, why?”

“Because you alive are witness enough to destroy the power of the Harlequin.”

“Why,” breath, “do you care?”

“They were once the private guards of the Mistress of the Dark. She is waking, I know that now.”

“But when she wakes,” breath, “she won’t have them.”

“Precisement,” Belle said.

“But you need me, us, alive.”

“Yes,” she said, and she looked at me the way that a hawk must look at a wounded mouse, eager, anticipatory.

“Make you mad?” I whispered, and had to cough. It wasn’t my throat that was closing off. I didn’t think it was Jean-Claude’s. Something bad was happening to Richard.

“I don’t hate you, ma petite,” she said. “I don’t hate anything that is useful to me, and you are about to be very useful, ma petite.”

“Anita,” I whispered.

“Anita, Anita,” she purred as she leaned our faces closer, “if I want you to be my ma petite, you will be. Jean-Claude is near death and he protected you from me. I will save you all, but I will do it in a way that you will not like.” She leaned our faces close, and the hand that had been caressing my face was suddenly firm and solid as metal against my cheek, keeping me turned toward that lovely face. She began to lean in for a kiss.

I spoke before our mouths touched. “A win-win situation, for you.”

“Oh, yes.” She whispered it against my lips, then kissed me. But she didn’t just kiss me, she opened the ardeur between us. One moment all I could think about was breathing, Just keep breathing, and that I really didn’t want her to touch me, and the next she was kissing me, and I was kissing her back.

My hands slid over that satin dress, and the body underneath, and my hands knew that body—though my hands were smaller than they should have been. Jean-Claude’s memories kept getting in the way, coloring what was happening. When her mouth found my breast, and sucked, it startled me, because the body I was remembering didn’t have breasts. She bit me, driving dainty fangs around my nipple. It made me cry out, brought my body writhing off the bed. She raised a bloody mouth and smiled at me, her eyes filled with amber light. She climbed my body and pressed that bloody mouth to mine. I kissed that mouth as if it were air, and food, and water, all rolled into one. I marveled at how small her mouth was, how dainty. How I’d longed to kiss this mouth again. I knew in this moment what I had never known from Jean-Claude, how much it had cost him to leave her. They say that once you love Belle Morte you never stop, and I knew in that kiss, with her body on top of mine, that it was true. He still loved her, would always love her, and nothing would change that, not even me.

The ardeur started to feed then, at that bloody kiss, but this was Belle Morte, the creator of the ardeur. You did not feed from her and stop. You fed until she stopped you.

The knife cut us out of the dresses, and where it nicked the skin we licked and drank each other’s blood, and it didn’t seem wrong, or a bad thing to do. The taste of her blood was sweet, and slow, and I knew that vampire blood was not a meal, but it could be foreplay.

I ended up on top of her, and my body kept forgetting that it wasn’t male. I pressed her to the bed, with my body between her legs. But I could not do what I was remembering. I swore in frustration, because more than anything in the world in that moment I wanted to pierce her body. I wanted to plunge parts that I did not have into parts of her that I did.

She lay underneath me with that dark hair spilling around her body, across