Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [382]
I found that I could move my arm again. I reached around Byron’s curls, and touched Requiem’s face. “You didn’t end up with Belle,” I said.
His eyes lost their remembering look, but they didn’t regain the shine of pleasure. “If Jean-Claude had not offered me a home when our old master got himself executed, Belle Morte would have had me. If any other master had offered for me, anyone less than a le sourdre de sang, then I could not have refused her. You have no idea how rare it is that Jean-Claude has gained enough power to be his own fountainhead of blood. Not more than three vampires in nearly eight hundred years have gained that kind of power. It protected all of us when our old master lost his mind and went against the council’s orders. An entire court of nearly all Belle’s line, when it fell apart, she tried to pick up all the pieces.”
Britain was the only other country in the world where vampires were legal. They had rights, and you couldn’t just kill one of them simply because they were a vampire. It was murder. But in America we’d been doing it almost four years, and the Brits were newer at it. There’d been some hitches. Hitches that the human media and powers that be didn’t know about. The Master of the City of London had been very old. He’d been one of the first master vamps that Belle Morte made, oh, so long ago. Sometimes the really ancient vampires don’t take well to newfangled ideas. You know, electricity, modern medicine, and the fact that they were supposed to expose themselves to public view in a very modern, rock star sort of way. London had had more of Belle’s lovely vampires than any but three other groups, and that included Belle’s own court. So when the vamps got legal, the vampire council wanted the Master of the City to play to the human media. He called himself Dracula, because once the real vampire Dracula was assassinated, the name was up for grabs. Only one person at a time can hold a name per country, and only one person per time can hold some of the more well-known names. Dracula wasn’t really Dracula, but the news media didn’t seem to understand that, and they’d enjoyed talking about how they had the real Dracula as their Master of the City. They’d only wanted him to be as politically correctly visible as Jean-Claude and a lot of the masters in this country, but the new Drac didn’t take well to it. In fact, he went buggers and started slaughtering humans.
The council managed to hush most of it up. To assassinate Dracula again, and just to prove that vampires can be as superstitious as the next bunch, they declared Dracula a dead name. No other vampire was allowed to choose it, or hold it. There had been two of them, and both had broken council law and had to be assassinated. Two was enough.
Jean-Claude had offered the London vamps a home. Not all of them, but many of them. All of them that could trace their lineage to Belle Morte. Who better to be strippers and dancers than the most beautiful and seductive vampires in the world? I couldn’t argue with his logic. But lying there trapped under the weight of two of those vampires, I had to wonder if part of what was happening was just too damn many of them in one place. Was there such a thing as vampire pheromones? Probably.
“You’re safe now,” I said, “so everybody off the animator. I need to get up.”
“That I did not offer means I am no gentleman,” Requiem said, and he came to his knees with more grace than I was going to manage.
Byron got to all fours, head hanging down like a tired horse. I could see down the line of his body, and he looked tired, spent. “I can’t feel my legs below my knees, so I’m as far up as I’m getting for awhile.