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I spoke before I had time to think, which I’d tried to stop doing. “You’re not mad at Damian about the sex are you? It wasn’t planned.”

“Non, ma petite, not the sex, though I do not lightly share you, no matter how reasonable I seem. No, it is that the three of you seem to have shared all four marks, though until I see you all together in the flesh, I will not be able to check that for certain. But if you share four marks and suddenly Damian is able to walk about in the sunlight, I must ask myself, if I had completed our triumverate, would I now be a daywalker?”

Oh. “I guess I can see that, but you’ve been as reluctant as I am to finish the fourth mark. You said you were no longer certain who would be master and who would be slave because of my necromancy.”

“And I am even less certain of it now, but to walk about in daylight as easily as moonlight might be worth the risk. If you have lost the ability to order Damian about, then that might be a telling thing.”

“I’ll try to order him around later and let you know.”

“Thank you.”

“But there is also that immortality thing, not aging, neither Richard nor I were sure we wanted to give up being mortal.”

“And if you have bound yourself to Damian with the fourth mark, might it already be a moot point, ma petite.”

I stood there in my kitchen and was suddenly scared. “Shit,” I whispered.

“Oui, if you have truly completed all the marks, then your mortality may be a thing of the past. If that were true, then taking the fourth mark with me would lose you nothing.”

“And gain you the ability to walk in the day,” I said, and my voice wasn’t friendly when I said it, because I’d heard the tiniest bit of eagerness when he talked about walking in the daylight. I couldn’t blame him, but Jean-Claude had been working on his power base for too long not to see the advantages of things. I couldn’t blame him, but part of me wanted to. Part of me still wondered if I was more important to him for the power or love. Most of me knew that I would never know for certain, and truthfully, probably neither would Jean-Claude. Love was not the nice, neat, linear thing I’d wanted it to be. It was not just one thing, but many things. I could admit that one of the reasons I loved him was that he was hard to kill. His chances of up and dying on me were smaller than if he’d been human. A large part of me really liked that. I’d seen enough of what death could do, and at too young an age, not to appreciate it.

“Perhaps, or perhaps not, ma petite, this is more art than science, or so it would seem.” His voice held a thread of anger in it.

“What are you pissy about? I’m not the one trying to pick a language you can’t understand so I can hide things from you.”

“And I am not the one, ma petite, that has fucked another vampire, a lesser vampire, one of my own underlings.”

Put that way, it did sound like he had grounds to be pissed. “Am I supposed to apologize?”

“Non, but I do not have to like it. He has come to your body, and now he is free of the tyranny of the dark. One I could forgive, but not both. Both is a bitter thing, ma petite.”

“I am sorry,” I said, “I didn’t plan any of this.”

“Of that I am certain. I am even certain that Damian planned none of it. Only you, ma petite, could keep having such accidental sex.”

Accidental sex. He made it sound like I fell down, and there just happened to be an erection in the way. I kept that observation to myself. See, I am getting smarter. Out loud I said, “Accidental sex. That’s one way of putting it. Am I ever going to inherit a vampire power that doesn’t have sex involved somewhere in it?”

“I would never say for certain with you, ma petite, your necromancy makes you too much the wild card, but it is doubtful. So far you have inherited my powers, or Belle’s, or some version thereof. To my knowledge Belle’s powers revolve around sex, as do mine.”

“Great, can you at least give me a list, so I’ll have some idea what to expect?”

“I could, if you truly desire one.”

I sighed. “No, just tell me in person when we see