• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Why is it not?” she asked, and she looked genuinely puzzled.

“Because, you’re right, as far back as anyone can trace my family tree I have nothing but soldiers and farmers. I am good peasant stock and proud of it.”

“Why would you be proud of that?”

“Because everything we’ve gotten, we’ve made with our two hands, the sweat of our brows, that kind of thing. We’ve had to work for everything we have. No one has ever given us anything.”

“I do not understand,” she said.

“I don’t know if I can explain it to you,” I said. I was thinking it was like Asher trying to explain to me what you owed a liege lord. I had nothing in my life that prepared me to understand that sort of obligation. I didn’t say that out loud though, because I didn’t want to bring up the idea that I owed Belle Morte anything. Because I didn’t feel I did.

“I am not stupid, Anita, I would understand if you would explain yourself clearly.”

Asher moved from behind, to the other side of us, still as far as he could stay from Musette, but it was brave of him to draw attention to himself. “I attempted to explain to Anita earlier what one owes a liege lord, and she could not understand it. She is young and American, they have never had the . . . benefit of being ruled here.”

She turned her head to one side, disturbingly like a bird just before it takes a bite out of a worm. “And what has her lack of understanding of civilized ways to do with anything?”

A human being would have licked their lips, Asher went still, quiet. (Hold still enough, and the fox won’t know you’re there.) “You, lovely Musette, have never lived where you were not subject to a lord, or lady, or where you did not rule others. You have never lived without knowing the duties one owes one’s liege.”

“Oui?” she made that one word cold, so cold, as if to say, go on, dig yourself a deeper hole to be buried in.

“You have never dreamt of the possibility that being a peasant, owing no one, would be a freeing experience.”

She waved a carefully manicured hand, as if clearing the very thought from the air. “Absurd. ‘Freeing experience,’ what does that mean?”

“I believe,” Jean-Claude said, “that the fact that you do not understand what that means is Asher’s exact point.”

She frowned at them both. “I do not understand, thus it cannot be that important.” She dismissed it all with a wave of dainty hands. Then she turned her attention back to me, and it was frightening. I wasn’t sure what it was about the mere gaze of those eyes, but it chilled the marrow in my bones.

“Have you seen our present to Jean-Claude and Asher?”

I must have looked as confused as I felt, because she turned and tried to motion behind her, but all I could see was her very large human servant. “Angelito, move so she may see.” Angelito? Somehow the name, “little angel” didn’t fit him. He moved, and she finished the motion towards the fireplace.

It was only the fireplace with it’s painting above it, then something about the painting caught my eye. It was supposed to be a painting of Jean-Claude, Asher, and Julianna in clothing à la the Three Musketeers, but it wasn’t. If there hadn’t been new and strange vampires in the room, I’m sure I would have noticed it sooner. Oh, yes, I would have noticed it sooner.

It was a picture of Cupid and Psyche, that traditional scene where Cupid asleep is finally revealed to the candle-wielding Psyche. Valentine’s Day has robbed Cupid of what he was in the beginning. He was not a chubby sexless baby with wings. He was a god, a god of love.

I knew who had posed for Cupid, because no one else had ever had that golden hair, that long, flawless body. I had memories of what Asher had looked like before, but I’d never seen it, not me, myself. I walked towards the painting like a flower pulled towards the sun. It was irresistible.

Asher lay on his side in the painting, one hand curled against his stomach, the other hand flung outward, limp with sleep. His skin glowed golden in the candlelight, only a few shades lighter than the foam of hair that framed his face and