Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [86]
He smiled at me. “Just surprised you want to stay.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to stay, or not want to stay.”
He kissed me from behind, pressing my face backward so it was a good, rough kiss. A good enough kiss that it left me a little breathless. “We go to our room and we can do this for real.”
I smiled at him. “You offering me a private dance?”
“The absolute most private I give.” He smiled when he said it, and it was a good smile. A smile that left only one answer.
“Let’s go.”
“Keith,” the vampire said, coming over to us, “I didn’t know you’d be here, and with another brunette.” Lucian glanced behind at the couch and the still-unconscious bride. “Won’t her friends tell?”
“He’s not Keith,” the white-haired dancer said. “He looks like Keith, but he doesn’t smell like Keith.” The dancer glided over to us and started trying to circle us, but Shadwell and Rowe moved up so the movement was aborted.
The dancer smiled at them, and us, and backed up a little. “You vampires, always relying on your eyes. Can’t you feel it? He’s one of us, and so is she.”
“Weretigers?” Lucian made it a question.
“No,” the dancer said, and moved close enough to invade our personal space. He sniffed the air in front of us. “Wolf, and something…” He moved a little closer, inches closer. I could feel his energy like heat rising off his skin.
“Back up,” I said.
He sniffed just above my face. The energy jump was bigger, harsher, like electric bugs biting along my skin. “I don’t know what you are,” he whispered.
“She said to back off.” Rowe moved in front of me and forced the weretiger back. I was glad of the help. Because there was a stirring of energy inside me in that dark place where my beasts hid. I breathed through it, concentrated. I could do this. I’d been practicing. I could control my beasts, all of them, most of them. Oh, hell, tiger was the newest and new always means a learning curve.
I licked suddenly dry lips and said, “Rowe, Shadwell, escort us to the door.”
“My pleasure,” Rowe said.
Shadwell moved up to join him. They moved the dancers back.
“Why leave?” the weretiger said. “Stay and play.”
“You have plenty of women to play with,” I said. “You don’t need me.”
“But they’re not as alive as you are,” the weretiger said.
Chuck said, “You’re being paid to entertain the bridal party, not…our visitors.”
They turned and looked at him. The vampire gave blank face. The weretiger gave him a speculative look, as if not quite sure what to do with him. But there was an implication in the eyes that eating him was a possibility. It was a very alien look out of a human face. But it wasn’t a cat look. It was what you might get if a cat could think like a human but still have the morals of a cat. It opened up so very many possibilities.
I got a flash of something down deep inside me. A flash of orange and a flash of gold. Oh, shit. One of the reasons I was having problems with the tigers was that I held more than one. One was a strain of lycanthropy that I’d gotten like you normally do by surviving an attack, but the other was a gift, or a warning, from Marmee Noir—the Mother of All Vampires.
Some said she was the oldest vampire in the world, the first of them—but having met one vampire that was an Australopithecus, I wasn’t sure how that was possible. But whatever she was, she was ancient, and she was powerful, and she scared the hell out of me. She was still mostly asleep in her room in Europe, where she’d been “asleep” for more than a thousand years. In her dreams, she terrified me, the other vampires, and anything she wanted to haunt. But her strain of vampirism was old enough that you could be both a vampire and a lycanthrope, which was not true of modern vampirism. The viruses killed each other off, so whatever you caught first, that’s what you were.
She had visited my dreams and put a piece of her animal to call inside me. Why had she done it? Because she could.
“Isn’t she part of the wedding party?” the vampire, Lucian, asked. His voice tried for that emptiness of the very old, but didn’t make it. He was younger than he was