Anita Blake - 16 - Blood Noir.pdf

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I CAME HOME to find two men sitting at my kitchen table. One of them was my live-in sweetie. The other was
one of our best friends. One of them was a wereleopard; the other was a werewolf; both of them were
strippers. At least once a month they took off more than just their clothes on stage. They changed shape on
stage in front of a live audience. Those nights the club was standing room only. I mean, you can go to other
clubs to see men take their clothes off, but their entire skin and body…well, that was unique.
Nathaniel came to greet me with a kiss and a hug. I let my hands play in the long, thick auburn hair that
trailed down his broad shoulders, the curve of his waist, the tightness of his ass, and the long muscular legs.
He was five-seven now, an inch taller than when I’d met him. In my three-inch heels I was still an inch shorter
than him. At twenty-one he was finally growing into the promise of those shoulders. His face was less soft
than it had been, and more masculine. He would always be beautiful rather than handsome, but the bone
structure had changed minutely so he just suddenly looked his age, instead of like jailbait.
He blinked down at me with the soft lilac of his eyes. On his driver’s license it said his eyes were blue,
because they wouldn’t let him put lavender, or purple. His eyes were different shades of color, depending on
his mood, or what he wore, but blue was never the color of his eyes.
His hands slid underneath the jacket of my suit, and a little lower to trace the top of my skirt. His hands
hesitated a little at the Browning BDM in its shoulder holster. Guns do get in the way of cuddling.
I wrapped my arms around the bareness of his upper body, breathed in the scent of his skin. He was wearing
what he usually wore in his off time in the summer, little bitty jogging shorts. Most of the wereanimals would
go around nude if you let them. I wasn’t quite comfy with that, so he wore the shorts to save my delicate
sensibilities. There were some who thought I didn’t have any of those left, but they would be wrong, and they
would be jealous.
Holding him, breathing in the warmth and sweet vanilla of his skin, I understood the jealousy. Though frankly,
not all of it was about sex or even having found love at last. It was about power and them wanting it, and me
and mine having it. It was about me being the human servant of Jean-Claude, the Master Vampire of St.
Louis. It was about body count, and me having the highest kill count among the vampire executioners in the
good ol’ U. S. of A.
“I would give a less favored body part to have a woman greet me at the end of the day like that,” Jason’s
voice said.
I had to peer around Nathaniel’s body to see Jason. He was still at the kitchen table nursing a coffee mug. It
even smelled like coffee, but he huddled over it, as if it were something harder and more intoxicating.
Jason was two years older than Nathaniel, which made him twenty-three now. Strangely, I’d met them both
when they were nineteen. Jason was my height, give or take a half inch or so. His hair was that shade of
yellow blond that movie stars are fond of, but his was real, and didn’t have to come from a good salon. His
hair was cut businessman short. I liked long hair, but I had to admit that Jason’s face looked cleaner, better,
more handsome even, without the hair to distract. He was wearing a blue T-shirt that made his eyes even
bluer than they were. The color not of spring, but of summer skies, before the heat has gotten too hot, but you
know it’s not May anymore.
The clothes hid what I knew, that he looked even better out of them. It wasn’t for lack of cuteness and
desirability that Jason wasn’t my sweetie. He was my friend, and I was his.
“What about Perdita, Perdy? You and she are going steady, right?”
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 French press beside the sink. He took the coffee cozy off of it, then put it back on without filling his
cup. He set the cup in the sink.
“I don’t want more coffee.”
“You can never have too much coffee,” I said.
He turned and smiled at me. “You think so, but the rest of us get a little OD’ed on your level of caffeine.”
“What happened, Jason?” I asked.
The smile slipped a little more. He was solemn when he turned to us. He leaned his back against the
cabinets, crossed his arms across his chest, and again didn’t quite meet our eyes.
“She wanted me to marry her. Till death do us part and all that. She’s a mermaid, which means she’ll outlive
me. She can live for hundreds of years, not immortal like a vampire, but close.”
“You didn’t want to marry her,” I said, softly.
He shook his head. “She’s obsessed with me. She says she loves me, but it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like
I’m smothering.”
“She’s not the right one, then.”
He grinned, and it almost reached his eyes. “Look who’s talking about the right one. You can’t pick just one
either.”
“That’s different.”
“Why, because you’re a living vampire who feeds off sex, so you have to have a bevy of lovers? The ardeur is
like the perfect excuse to never have to say you’re sorry.”
“I’d change it if I could, you know that.”
He came to me then, put his arms around my shoulders, and rested his cheek on the top of my head. “I didn’t
mean to make you sad, Anita. God knows I didn’t. Please, don’t tell me you’d change it if you could. You love
Nathaniel, and Micah. They love you. You love Jean-Claude and Asher, and they love you. You’re still a little
confused about what to do with Damian, but you’ll get there.”
I shook my head and stood up, moving away from him. “Don’t forget Requiem, and London, and sometimes
Richard. Oh, wait, and the swan king pops in now and then, no pun intended.” It sounded angry and bitter,
and I was glad.
“I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, or to have another woman mad at
me tonight. Please, Anita, please, don’t be mad. I’m upset. You have no idea how upset. Please, please, I’m
a bastard, but don’t be mad.”
He held his hand out to me. His face pleaded along with his words. I’d never seen his eyes full of quite this
kind of pain. The look in his eyes was more than just losing a girlfriend he didn’t want anymore.
I held out my hand, but made him take the step to close our fingers around each other. His eyes glittered in
the overhead lights.
I took his hand, held it. His breath came in a soft gasp, and I thought for a second he was going to cry, but he
just looked at me. His eyes that had glistened a moment before were almost dead, as if whatever he was
feeling he’d locked away somewhere. In a way, to me, that was worse. I went to him, and he wrapped his
arms around me as if he were at the edge of a cliff and I were his only handhold. That quiet holding on was
so…male. A woman would have cried, or talked more, but for a man, after a certain point this is their pain.
I held him back, tried to tell him it would be all right. I whispered it into his hair, against his cheek. “It’s all right,
Jason. It’s all right.”
Nathaniel came up behind him and wrapped his arms around us both. He pressed his cheek against his
friend’s hair and said, “We’re here, Jason. We’re here for you.”
Jason just held on wordless, motionless, the strength in his arms, shoulders, pressing against me, but it
wasn’t about sex. I’d never been pressed so close to any man and thought only, God, what’s wrong? Either
he had loved Perdy and now he was regretting letting her go, or the other shoe hadn’t dropped. What else
could be wrong?
We ended up on the floor of the kitchen, simply sitting in a row with our backs to the kitchen island. He still
hadn’t said what else was wrong, or that he was desperately in love with Perdy and how could he fix it? I kept
waiting for him to share. If he’d been a girl friend I’d have asked by now, but guy friends are different.
Sometimes you have to sneak up on them like some sort of wild animal, no wereanimal pun intended; all men
are leery of their emotions, spook them and they’ll shut down. If you’re careful, quiet, not too eager,
sometimes you’ll learn more. Of course, sometimes you have to club men over the head with some question
to get any sense out of them, but they prefer to speak from a quiet place.
Jason had his head against Nathaniel’s shoulder, and a hand on my leg. At least he, like most of the men in
my life, was cuddlier than most. I appreciated that.
Jason’s voice came flat, empty, as if he were afraid to let his voice feel anything. “My father’s dying of cancer.
My mom called last night just after Perdy and I broke up.”
I exchanged a glance with Nathaniel. His wide eyes let me know that it was news to him, too.
“Jesus, Jason, I’m sorry,” I said.
“We hate each other, of course, and now the cold bastard’s dying and I won’t have time to forgive him before
he dies.”
“What can we do?” Nathaniel asked, softly.
He smiled, a little weak, a little watered down, but he managed it. I thought it was a good sign. I hoped it was.
“You really want to know?”
“Name it,” I said.
He smiled again, but his eyes flinched, as if I’d hit him instead of told him I’d do anything he wanted if it would
take the pain away.
“Perdy isn’t here to tell me don’t, or to tell you don’t. I’m a free man again.” He tried for a laugh, but it was a
sound more like a sob.
“I get it,” Nathaniel said.
I frowned at him. “Then explain it to me, because I don’t.”
“He wants to have sex with you again.”
“What?” I said.
“Perdy can’t tell him, or you, no anymore. You can be lovers again.”
“You mean now, like in right now?”
Nathaniel gave a half-shrug. Jason moved his head off the other man’s shoulder. He dropped his hand away

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