Burnt Offerings - Laurell K. Hamilton [55]
“Perhaps she did her best, ma petite.”
“Then her best isn’t good enough.” I looked at Jean-Claude’s careful, unreadable face. His body was still, calm. I laid my hand above his heart underneath his shirt. His heart was pounding.
“You think Damian’s dead,” I said.
“I know he is dead.” He stared down at me. “Whether it is permanent, that is the question.”
“Dead is dead,” I said.
He laughed then and hugged me to him. “Oh, ma petite, you above all should know that is not true.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t kill us tonight,” I said.
“So I thought,” he said.
Great. Every time I thought I understood the rules, they changed. Why was it that the damn rules always seemed to change for the worse?
17
WILLIE CAME OVER to us, leading Hannah by the hand. “Thank you, master, Anita.”
There were gashes in his thin face, part of the initial fight for the Circus, I guess. They were already healing. He looked awful, even more like the walking dead than usual. “You look like hell,” I said.
He grinned at me, flashing fang. He hadn’t been dead three years yet. It takes a little practice to smile without flashing fang. “I’m okay.” He looked at Jean-Claude. “I tried to stop them. We all did.”
Jean-Claude had tucked his shirt back in his pants. He smoothed his hands down the front of the shirt and touched Willie’s shoulder. “You fought the council, Willie. Win or lose, you did well.”
“Thanks, master.”
Jean-Claude usually corrected anyone when they called him master, but tonight, I guess we were going formal.
“Come, we must attend Damian.” He offered me his wrist, and when I didn’t know quite what he wanted, he laid my fingertips over the pulse. “You touch me as if you were taking my pulse.”
“Is there some significance to this?”
“It shows that you are more than my servant or my bed partner. It shows I consider you an equal.”
“What will the council think about that?” I asked.
“It will force them to negotiate not only with me, but with you. It will complicate things for them and give us more options.”
I rested my hand on his wrist. His pulse was steady under my fingers. “Confusion to our enemies, eh?”
He nodded, making it almost a bow. “Indeed, ma petite, indeed.”
I walked beside him towards the hallway, my right hand in my pocket on the Browning, which I’d rescued from the floor. When we got a clear view of the hallway, Jean-Claude’s pulse sped under my fingers.
Damian lay on his side curled around a sword. Blood had soaked around the blade into the dark material of the vest he wore as a shirt. The point came out his back. He’d been spitted. Hard to be a hundred percent sure, but it looked like a heart blow.
There was a new vampire standing beside him. He held a two-handed sword in his hands, point down, like a cane. I recognized the sword. It was the one Damian slept with in his coffin.
The new vamp was tall, six foot six or more, broad-shouldered. His hair was cut like a bowl of yellow ringlets around his face, leaving his ears bare. He wore a white tunic, white trousers, white on white in layers. He stood rigid, at attention, like a soldier.
“Warrick,” Jean-Claude said. “I had hoped you escaped Yvette’s tender mercies.”
The tall vampire looked at us. His eyes flicked to my hand on Jean-Claude’s wrist. He dropped to one knee and held Damian’s sword across his hands. He bowed his head and offered the sword to us. “He fought well. It had been too long since I had such an opponent. I forgot myself and slew him. I would not have wished death on such a warrior. His final death is a great loss.”
Jean-Claude took the sword from the vampire’s hands. “Save your apologies, Warrick. I come to save Damian, not to bury him.”
Warrick raised pale blue eyes to us. “But I have pierced his heart. If you were the master that had made him, then there would be a chance, but you did not call him from his grave to his second life.”
“But I am Master of the City, and Damian took a blood oath.”
Warrick laid the sword on the ground near Damain’s still form. “Your