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“I’m going to go to my cabin, now, Richard. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Afraid?” he asked.

I shook my head and answered without turning around. “Tired.” I kept walking, knowing he was watching me. The parking area was empty. I didn’t know where Jamil and the others had gone, and I didn’t care. I needed some alone time.

I walked through the soft, summer darkness. There was a spill of stars overhead, glittering and edged by the dark shapes of leaves. It was going to be a beautiful evening. Somewhere off in the distance, a high, clear howl rode the coming dark. Richard had said something about arcane werewolf shit. We were going to have a moonlight jamboree. God, I hated parties.

10

I LEANED AGAINST the door of my cabin, eyes closed, breathing in the cool air. I’d turned the air-conditioning on for my two guests. The coffins sat in the middle of the floor between the desk and the bed. Under the Circus of the Damned, deep underground, neither Damian nor Asher slept until full dark. I hadn’t been sure if they would aboveground or not. So the air. Though, actually, it had been partly selfish. Vampires in a closed, hot space tended to smell, well, like vampires. They didn’t smell like dead bodies. It was like the smell of snakes, and yet that wasn’t it, either. It was a neck-ruffling smell. Thick, musky, more reptile than mammal. The smell of vampires.

How could I be sleeping with one of them? I opened my eyes. It was dark in the cabin, but there was still a faint push of illumination through the two windows. A faint touch of light against the gleaming feet of the coffins. Had that small touch of natural light been enough to keep both vampires comatose, dead in their coffins, waiting for true dark? Something had, because I knew that they were still and waiting inside the coffins. A small amount of concentration, and I knew they were still dead to the world.

I strode between the coffins into the bathroom, closed and locked the door. The darkness seemed too solid. I turned on the light. It was white and harsh after the darkness. I was left blinking in the brightness.

Getting a good look at myself in the mirror was almost startling. I hadn’t really seen the bruises yet. The corner of my left eye was a wonderful shade of purple black, swollen, puffy. Seeing it made it hurt worse, like seeing blood from a cut that doesn’t sting until you notice it.

My left cheek was a wonderful shade of greenish brown. It was that sickly green that usually takes days to accomplish. My lower lip was puffy. You could still see the edge of darkened skin where it had bled. I ran my tongue inside my mouth and could feel the ridge where my cheek had been forced against my teeth, but it was healed. I stared into the mirror and realized as sore and awful as it looked, it wasn’t as bad as it should have been.

It took me a few moments of staring to figure it out. When I did finally realize what was happening, a rush of fear ran through my body from my toes to the top of my head. I felt almost faint.

I was healing. I was healing days worth of injury in only hours. At this rate, the bruises would be almost gone by tomorrow. I should have been wearing the fight marks for days, a week at least. What the hell was happening to me?

I felt Damian wake in his coffin. I felt it like a stab through my body. It staggered me against the sink. I knew he was hungry, and I knew that he sensed me near at hand. I was Jean-Claude’s human servant, bound by marks that only death would break. But Damian was mine. I’d raised him and another vampire, Willie McCoy, more than once. I’d called them from their coffins during daylight hours, safely underground, but the sun had been burning bright when I did it. One necromancer had said it made perfect sense. We could only raise zombies after the souls had fled the bodies, so I could only raise vamps when their souls had fled for the day.

I wasn’t even going to debate the vampires and soul issue. My life was complicated enough