Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [2]
He grinned at me. “Going steady, you’re so cute.”
I frowned at him. “What else do you call it?”
Nathaniel kissed me on the forehead. “You really are cute.”
I moved away from him and scowled at them both. “I’m serious, what else do you call it? You aren’t just fuck buddies. She isn’t a one-night stand. She’s a serious girlfriend. If it’s not going steady, what do you call it?”
“You make it sound like I gave her my class ring, Anita. Perdy and I were lovers, and she wanted it to be exclusive.”
“I thought you were exclusive.”
“Except for you, I was.”
“Wait, you’re talking past tense. Are you saying you and Perdy broke up?”
“She gave him an ultimatum,” Nathaniel said. He trailed his hand down my arm as he moved away. “I’ll get you coffee.”
I went to the table and took the seat that Nathaniel had started in. “What kind of ultimatum?” I asked.
Jason stared into his coffee cup while he answered. “She wanted me to stop having sex with Jean-Claude and Asher, and you.”
“Wait, you aren’t having sex with Jean-Claude and Asher, unless there’s something I don’t know.”
He smiled at me. “The look on your face, man.” He raised his fingers in the Boy Scout salute. “I am not now, nor have I ever been having sex with Jean-Claude or Asher.”
Nathaniel set fresh coffee down in front of me and took a chair across the table on the other side of Jason, so we’d both be able to look at him. It also meant we wouldn’t be able to do more than hold hands, which was probably good; we tended to distract each other.
“But she didn’t believe you,” I said.
“Nope, she didn’t.” He took a sip of coffee.
“Why wouldn’t she believe you?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“If my feeding the ardeur off you through sex bugged your steady girl, you should have said something.”
“I am Jean-Claude’s pomme de sang, his apple of blood. I am his blood donor, and I go where my master tells me to go. The ardeur is your version of a blood feed and you’re his human servant. Jean-Claude shares me with Asher, his second-in-command, for blood and you for sex, and it’s his right to share me. I am his. I belong to him. Perdy knows that. She got kicked out of Cape Cod because she wanted to be more than just a blood donor to the master vampire there.”
“Samuel didn’t say anything about that. In fact, his son, Sampson, said that Perdy was here to spy on him for his mother.”
“Yeah, but Sampson went home, and Perdy didn’t.”
Sampson had gone home because St. Louis got invaded by some of the scariest vampires in the world. Jean-Claude had thought it was a bad idea to risk getting the eldest son of his friend and ally killed. Besides, Sampson was a merman, and they aren’t big on offensive abilities, at least not this far inland. Perdy was a mermaid, too. Though I’d never seen either of them turn all fishy. They just looked like people to me.
“Perdy stayed for you,” Nathaniel said.
Jason nodded. “She wanted me to be hers. She’s very jealous, very possessive. I’m just not into that.”
“So you have a woman who greets you like Anita greets me, but the rest doesn’t work.”
“No, Nathaniel. She used to greet me sort of like that, but for weeks now it’s been, Where have you been? Who have you been with? You fucked the master again, didn’t you? You fucked Asher, didn’t you? You were with Anita again, weren’t you?”
“I’ve put you on the back burner for feeding me,” I said. “I got the impression Perdy didn’t want to share you that much, but I had no idea she thought you were doing more than just donating blood to the vampires.”
“She’s like crazy jealous, and she won’t believe me when I tell her I haven’t been with anyone else. It’s why I asked Jean-Claude to take me out of your feeding schedule for a while. I thought if I stopped having sex with the only other person I was really having sex with that Perdy would calm down.”
Nathaniel and I exchanged glances across the table. He shrugged. I asked the question. “Did it work?”
“No,” he said. He took another drink of coffee, and it must have finished the cup because he got up and went for the