Crimson Death (40 page)

“I cannot speak to any of that, but I know that what you are describing would never have happened with M'Lady at her full strength. Something must be wrong.”

I almost asked if she had forced him to call her that, but I didn't. If she had, she had; no need for me to rub it in. “We're going to Ireland to try to fix what's wrong.”

“Do you know why she wanted me in Ireland with her, Anita?”

I shrugged. “You're beautiful and great in bed.”

Normally that would have made him smile, but not tonight. He swept his hair aside so that all his face was visible. He did that so rarely that it was almost startling. The scars really didn't cover that much of his face. We all found him still beautiful, but for him the scars were nearly everything.

He dropped his hair but didn't try to hide behind it again. “She wanted this, my beauty marred.” He lifted the edge of the oversize dress shirt up so that he exposed the much more serious scars that covered him from chest to belt on that one side. The scars were deep runnels in the roughened skin over almost every inch of that side of his upper body, but the other side was still smooth and perfect as it was the day that Jean-Claude met him. I'd shared some of those memories, so I knew what Asher had looked like before the Church had tried to burn the devil out of him.

“That is her great pleasure, to see beauty that is spoiled in some way. She whispered to both Jean-Claude and me what she would do to us if she could. After seeing what the inquisitors had done to me, M'Lady said she could not have done better herself, that it was perfect.”

Jean-Claude reached out toward him. “Do not torment yourself,
mon ami
.”

Asher let his shirt fall back into place. “Some think her kind, because she will collect those who are marred as her lovers. Many of us think we will never be loved again after we are deformed, so it is a miracle to some. I saw her collect a woman who had lost a limb in an accident. She was not a lover of women; she brought her to be the lover for others of us. But she grew bored easily with most of them and if there was not someone who had met some horrible fate as I had, or the woman had, then M'Lady would create her own.”

“What do you mean, create her own?” Nathaniel asked.

“She found another young woman, a dark beauty who would have been worthy of Belle's court. She was not when M'Lady finished with her. She kept her as a servant. The torture was sexual for her, but she seemed to enjoy just having the woman near her with that great beauty ruined.”

“Damian said that she couldn't bear anyone being more beautiful than she was,” I said.

“And you would take yourself, Nathaniel, Mephistopheles, and Damian to her. Even Echo should go nowhere near M'Lady. All of you would tempt her to create her ideal of marred beauty. Nicky would be perfect with his missing eye and scars. He would at least be safe from her adding to his injuries.”

“Wait. She had Damian with her for centuries and didn't do this to him and he's beautiful.”

“He was handsome enough, but not beautiful as you have made him, Anita. His nose had been broken before he came to her, and even that imperfection was enough to quiet her urges toward him, but your magic has straightened his nose and changed the very bone structure of his face. He is beautiful now, Anita. Do you not understand what she would do to him now if he ever comes into her power again?”

“We will be with the police the whole time,” I said.

Asher shook his head. “She thought I was even more beautiful like this, and the woman she scarred was one of the few vampires we managed to make while I was there.”

“Are you saying you brought over the woman she'd scarred?” I asked.

“I thought she would die like the others. I thought it was mercy to end her life and free her from M'Lady, but she rose. She lived when I wanted her, and she wanted herself, to die. Ironic, isn't it? God's little sense of humor, or perhaps the Devil's. I no longer know who rules in some places on earth. If God is a god of love, then He cannot rule over the evil that is M'Lady, and if the Devil rules her, he must pray that she never dies in truth because she would rule his kingdom in a hundred years.”

“Now you are just being overly dramatic,” I said.

He went down on his knees in front of us, raising his hands upward as if beseeching us. “I beg of you, Anita, do not take Nathaniel's beauty to Ireland.”

“I am standing right here,” Nathaniel said, and he was angry.

“I see you, my flower-eyed boy.”

“I am not a boy. I am a man, and you do not get to talk around me as if I'm not standing right in front of you.”

“Please, Nathaniel, I could not bear it if she destroyed your beauty. Please, do not go.”

“We're going to be late for the plane,” he said, and his voice was cold with anger. He started to walk away, but Asher grabbed his hand and mine.

The bodyguards were moving in, and one was touching his ear mic, which meant backup would be coming. There were four of them and four of us; if we needed backup from Asher, then things would have gone horribly wrong. I didn't think they'd go that pear-shaped, so I held up my free hand and waved them back. He hadn't hurt us . . . yet. If we were this afraid of him, then no apology in the world would matter, so I waved them back and hoped I didn't regret it later.

“Let go of me,” Nathaniel said.

“What he said.” I didn't try to tug my hand free, because I knew better than to try to outmuscle a vampire, but I wanted to pull a little. It was just automatic.

“I love you. I love you both. I could not bear either of you being at her mercy. The thought of it sickens me.” The tears that had glittered
in his eyes earlier were back, but this time they began to slide down his cheeks. The tears were tinged pink with blood like all vampire tears. The color was faint enough that if I hadn't known to look for it I might not have seen it, but I knew to look and so there it was. It took a little of the pitiful out of him crying to know that his tears were stained with the blood of whoever he'd fed off tonight. Yeah, they'd been a willing victim, but still.

“Don't make me use my safeword,” Nathaniel said.

Asher let go of his hand but clung to mine with both of his. “Please, Anita.”

“What Nathaniel said.”

Asher hesitated and then dropped his hands to his side, still on his knees with tears flowing faster down his face. They were leaving little pinkish trails down his skin so that I could see where every single one of them had fallen.

Jean-Claude couldn't stand it and reached out for him. Asher took his hands in his and started speaking rapid French. Jean-Claude shook his head. “
Non, mon ami
, they must understand your apology. I am weak when it comes to you, so it is them that you must win back. I will not come to your bed again unless they do, for they see you more clearly than I do.”

I felt Nathaniel startle beside me. I glanced at him and he was already looking at me. The love of several lifetimes was holding Jean-Claude's hands, but it was up to us whether they ever got back together. No pressure.

Asher kept Jean-Claude's hands but turned to us. “I miss you both.”

“You said that already,” Nathaniel said. I realized that he was angrier than I was at Asher, which meant that the other man was, or had been, more important to him than he had been to me. I knew part of it was that I liked bondage and submission, but it wasn't the serious need to me that it was to Nathaniel. Asher had been an almost-perfect top for him in the dungeon. Apparently, Nathaniel missed it more than I'd realized, which was probably a relationship dropped ball on my part, or Micah's and my part?

He let go of Jean-Claude's hands and knelt in front of us. We were left staring down into those perfectly pale eyes like winter skies are
supposed to be and almost never are; his lashes were darker than his hair, as were his eyebrows, so that the eyes were framed dramatically as if he'd used makeup to emphasize them, but I knew it was just natural coloring. He and Jean-Claude were both just that gorgeous; it was what had made Belle Morte collect them in the first place.

He lifted those large, long-fingered hands, thicker than Jean-Claude's through the fingers, and I'd thought for a while that Asher would bulk up more in the gym if he was willing to put the work into weights, but since he wasn't it didn't really matter. He wasn't a weight-lifting kind of guy. He spread those pale hands upward, let all those golden waves fall back so that his whole face was visible, both the beauty of it and the scars that he thought marred it.

“I miss you bound and waiting for me to cause you pleasure and pain. I miss the sounds that Nathaniel makes when I am flogging him, the way his skin parts underneath a whip and how he heals magically from it and asks for more. I miss the sounds Anita makes when we make love to her together. I miss the feel of our bodies piercing her at the same time. I miss sharing Anita with Jean-Claude in that way that we have done for centuries. I miss the feel and smell of your skin, Nathaniel, Anita. I miss plunging my tongue between her legs, and taking you in my mouth. I love the way you want me to use my fangs at the end and bleed you so that I drink you down twice.”

I felt Nathaniel give a little shudder beside me. I was pretty sure it wasn't a bad shudder. My own heart was beating faster. Damn it.

“If you miss me at all, then I beg you to give me one more chance. I know I do not deserve it.”

“How are we ever going to trust you again?” Nathaniel asked, and his voice was a lot more even than the pulse in the side of his throat. I gave him points for that. I was pretty sure that my own voice would shake if I tried right now.

“I do not know.”

“How will we ever trust you to tie us up and hurt us, if we can't trust you to value us at all?” His voice was part anger and part loss, which pretty much summed up being in a relationship with Asher.

“I do not know, but I want more than anything else in the world to win back your trust. What can I do to prove my sincerity to you both?”

Nathaniel and I exchanged glances. He said, “I'm not sure.”

I looked down at Asher. Those eyes, those lips, that face, that hair, the hands reaching out to me that knew so many secrets about what I enjoyed. “I don't know, Asher. Every time I think we've found a way for all of us to be together, you manage to find a new way to screw things up.”

“I know it is me. My need to have Jean-Claude put me above all others continues to destroy my own happiness. I also know that is never going to happen, not only because he needs a woman in his life, but because neither of us is content with only each other. I am no more happy being with only one person than Jean-Claude is. I thought that if I could have one person put me above all others, then this continuous need inside me would be filled and I would be happy, content at last, but I have had that for months and I am miserable.”

“Maybe that's who you're with,” I said.

“I thought that at first, but I understand now that no one person meets all the needs and demands I put upon them. I am too much for one person to bear, like a weight that needs more hands to carry.”

I wasn't sure what to say to that, because it sounded damned accurate.

“You really are working your therapy,” Nathaniel said, and his face showed how surprised he was; me, too.

“I resented you forcing me to go away at first, but as I became less happy with Kane I finally realized that I was with a man who was as needy and jealous as I was; it was a taste of my own medicine, as they say. It was a very bitter pill. Kane was as obsessed with me as I had thought I wanted first Belle Morte, and then Jean-Claude, and finally Julianna to be with me, but obsession is not love. It is insecurity, possession, and it leads to misery.”

It was the dream apology that you always sort of want, but you never get. It was like a Hallmark moment, or maybe a Dr. Phil moment. The kind that never really happens, but here he was, our problem child, offering up everything we could have wanted in an apology. It was great and unsettling as hell, like there should be cameras rolling and someone to jump out and say
Just kidding
.

“I love you, Anita Blake. I love you, Nathaniel Graison. I miss
making love to you both. I miss fucking you. I miss chaining you up and doing nefarious things to you until you beg me to stop, or until I make the decision that all dominants must make with such charming pain sluts, though Anita will safeword when needed, but you, my . . . Nathaniel, you do not know when to say when, and I love that about you.”

Nathaniel held out his hand, and after a moment so did I. We let him wrap his hands around us and pulled him to his feet. I don't know what I would have said, but it was Nathaniel who spoke first. “Are you going to apologize to Dev, too?”

“God, yes. I have treated him the worst of the three of you, I think. Jean-Claude, having put up with me for centuries, is ahead in needing me to apologize for so many things, but I owe Mephistopheles something truly . . . I do not know how to apologize to him. I was so cruel, and I let Kane be cruel to him as well.”

“Are you just apologizing to him, or are you wanting him back in your life, too?” I asked.

“I did not appreciate how easy Mephistopheles made the relationship. I thought love had to come with fights and drama, so what I had with him couldn't be love.”

“And now?” Nathaniel asked it ahead of me.

“Now I see him in Jean-Claude's bed, all smiles and a very content cat, and it hurts me.”

“Does it hurt you to see Jean-Claude with another man, or to see Dev happy with someone else?” Nathaniel asked.

Asher sighed, and it was for effect, but he was always going to be a bit of a drama queen. It was just part of who he was as a person. You can modify yourself and learn to do better, but your basic personality remains.