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I didn’t have enough air to say what I wanted out loud. I fell back toward the bed, and only his arms caught me. I knew what I wanted, what I needed. I willed it, I commanded it, and I shoved that command into him. I was losing my words, and it was a wordless longing that I filled him with. That longing flared like heat across my skin, threw me off the bed, gasping. My body was suddenly swollen with need, wetness dripping between my legs. My breasts ached with the need to be touched. The ardeur rose to that ache, and I welcomed it, embraced it. I threw the door of my self-control open wide, and didn’t care where it landed.

It was Jean-Claude’s mouth that found mine first. I knew the taste of him with my eyes closed tight. He gave himself up to the ardeur, and I fed through his kiss, fed in a rush that flowed through my body, in a tingling rush of energy. I’d fed the ardeur a hundred times, and it had never been like this.

He drew back from the kiss, eyes filled with midnight fire. “How do you feel?”

I tried to think past the pulse of my own body. I’d fed the ardeur, but the swollen longing in my body wasn’t gone. I felt for Nathaniel’s energy, and found him still there, still alive. Distant as a dream, Damian’s spark like a match flame in a wind.

“More,” I whispered, “I need more.”

He nodded. “I gave you enough to bring you back to us.” He moved back from me, and I tried to hold him against me. “Non, ma petite, you need food.” I kept my arms locked around his neck, and he reached out, and brought Requiem into view. “When you helped him raise need in yourself, you raised it in him, as well. Would you deny him?”

I frowned at him. I couldn’t think. I whispered, “No,” but wasn’t entirely sure what I was saying no to: no, I wouldn’t deny him, or no, to other things?

Requiem’s hand slid over my bare arm. That one touch threw my head back, fluttered my eyes shut. I knew where my need had come from, I could taste it on my tongue, taste his need.

Jean-Claude slid away, and Requiem was above me. So lonely, so heart-wrenchingly lonely. Lonely for so long. You feed the ardeur on sex, but its gifts are more than that. Sometimes you can see into people, see what they most desire, most need, and you can offer it to them. You can offer them their heart’s desire, and sometimes you can even give them exactly what you promise.

I had an instant of seeing so far into Requiem that I started to cry. Weeping not my tears, but his. He wanted the ardeur again, yes, but more than that, he wanted a place of refuge. A place where he could stop being afraid; he’d been afraid for so very long. Afraid that Belle would drag him back, and make him suffer for all eternity for falling in love with someone else. I felt his fear, his loneliness, his loss, like blows to my heart, and in the end, I did the only thing that would keep him well and truly safe. I made him mine.

32

MOST OF THE clothes vanished in a blur of hands and bodies, but it was when he wrapped his hands around my belt, and tore it in two, jerking my body up off the bed, that I remembered. I had just enough presence of mind to make sure he didn’t destroy the shoulder rig, but it fell to the floor with the pieces of the jeans and T-shirt. Requiem, with his poetry, his gentlemanly restraint, vanished under the crash of the ardeur, and the power of his own magic.

I fed on the touch of his hands, the brush of his lips, the sensation of his naked skin brushing along mine, the weight of him above me. Requiem and I had never been nude together, and that first time was shared with Nathaniel and Damian. They knew what I was doing, they could feel it, because I’d opened that mark between us, so that each touch, each kiss, each movement, fed energy to them. Nathaniel’s heart began to beat sure and strong, but Damian’s spark still flickered, hesitating between life and death. Nathaniel could make his own heart beat, but Damian couldn’t. Damian needed more than these small touches of ardeur. I’d gotten to