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By Root 7058 0

’s line, and all our talents are double-edged blades. I felt his power dive as deep inside me as mine in him, and I couldn’t keep it out. And it wasn’t just my mind. Nathaniel’s and Damian’s memories flooded to the surface. Nathaniel as a little boy, a man holding his hand, food for a hungry stomach, then hands where…Malcolm broke the memory before he went further. He understood that I could not steer us through these waters. He couldn’t break what was happening, but his centuries of being a master helped us skim along the surface and not drown. Damian on the deck of a ship in the sunlight; the wind was so fresh, the sea smelled so good. The darkness of his creator’s dungeon. That dark stairway, the screams, the smells. Malcolm drew us away from it. My mother’s funeral, and I drew us away from that. It was like blinking; you see something you don’t want to see, and you blink, and look away. You look away, and there’s another picture.

Malcolm thought of his congregation, and just like that we had images to go with the scents and tactile explosion in our heads. I knew that the girl who smelled of soap and some sweet shampoo wanted to go to college, but was fighting to get enough nighttime classes to complete her degree. I knew that the family of vampires was trying for a house in a neighborhood that did not want them. I knew that the “child” was the master of the house. Malcolm gave us the problems and hopes. What we gave him back was the scent of their skin, the finger brush along a collar, a dozen different aftershaves, twenty different perfumes, from powdery sweetness to an herbal cleanness that was almost bitter. We gave him back sighs, as our power swept over them. We gave him back upturned faces as they shivered at the touch of power that was more sensuous than anything Malcolm had shown them. It didn’t have to be sexual, but it was a dance of the senses. To be touched by Belle’s line of vampires was to understand that someone’s breath against your arm, just your arm, could cover your body in shivers.

Malcolm drew back from Damian’s neck like a drowning man surfacing. We all came to the surface of that binding. Nathaniel and I ended in a heap on the carpeted aisle. Hands had to catch Damian or he would have fallen.

“You have not saved them, Malcolm. When I wrest them from you, you will come with them like a dog on a leash.” The voice was clear and bell-like, echoing to the ends of the big church. I didn’t think it was vampire powers. It was more like a voice that had been trained centuries before microphones existed.

Jean-Claude touched Malcolm to keep the other vampire from answering. He answered with a voice that sounded almost ordinary compared to Columbine’s. It was as bland and empty as his voice got, but somehow it filled the room. “We bargained that you would duel the first to use magic. Ma petite, my servant, did not know these rules.”

“We also promised not to use our servants to bolster our powers,” she said.

“So I was not allowed to contact her mind-to-mind.”

“You might have plotted behind my back.”

“But you did not attack ma petite, you struck at the congregation. That seems as if you have broken the bargain first.” His voice held a shiver at the end, and the entire congregation reacted to it, shuddering. They began to gaze at him, some reluctantly, but they heard him now, felt him now. In that moment I understood that Malcolm had been right in one thing. Blood-oathing to me was blood-oathing to Jean-Claude. Blood of my blood and all that.

“Your servant was using her leopards and her vampire. I could have reached out to my servant, Giovanni, but I kept to our bargain. But if she was allowed to gain power from others, then it seemed fair that I could do the same.”

“You can feed off the combined power of all the vampires.” Jean-Claude made it a statement.

“Yes,” she said, and sounded pleased with herself.

Edward and Olaf were standing on either side of us like good bodyguards. It was Micah who knelt and asked, “Are you safe to touch?”

I knew what he meant: Will whatever metaphysical crap is happening