Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

Leo laughed. He raised his hands and his magic coiled into the room, less painful than before, but still hot and biting. “Jane Yellowrock, Enforcer to the Master of the City of New Orleans, approach and kneel.”

Beast peered out of my eyes, and I could see their yellow glow reflected in Leo’s. Leo would be mate.

Leo would be and do a lot of things if I let him. I stood and walked the few steps to the dais. I wasn’t real excited about kneeling to anyone, but I was taller than Leo, even with him on the step, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.

Beast took over and dropped me, but I caught myself as she started to roll me over. Beast shows belly to alpha.

No. No freaking way. I held myself upright on my knees.

Turning to the clan masters of the executive council, Leo said, “Jane Yellowrock cannot be bound. Jane Yellowrock is loyal by choice. Jane Yellowrock will know that the Master of the City is loyal as well.” With his little jade-handled blade, he cut his thumb again and turned back to me.

I stared at the welling blood. Crap on a cracker with toe jam. He expected me to suck his thumb. Which for some bizarre reason made me think of Leo sucking on a pink pacifier, which brought a grin to my face. Suddenly I was laughing.

And Beast ripped through the Gray Between. The half-shift was instantaneous. Violent. I would have screamed with the pain, but I had no breath. My back arched, then bowed, snapping both ways. My body threw itself to the floor, ramming my head on the stone. I saw stars. But no way was I lying on the floor at Leo’s feet. I put both hands out and shoved myself to my knees. My hands were half-Beast/half-human, knobby knuckled, furred on the back, with retractile claws, already extended. Swallowing down stomach acids and a taste so sour it made my cat nose quiver, I stood. I was taller, shoulders broader and bony. Waist thinner, hips rangier. My clothes still fit, though the shoulders were stretched out and the slacks were hanging on my hip bones.

Leo, eyes piercing, extended his hand and offered me his thumb. It was his right thumb, healed since one of the Mings had tasted him.

Alpha offers blood, Beast thought. Is not mating gift. Is not meat. Alpha offers blood. Blood is food but not meat food. Vampires are strange predators.

Staring at the blood dripping down his thumb and pooling in his palm, I dredged through what little I knew about blood sharing and blood offering. I’d fed on Leo’s blood when I was dying. On Ed’s too. I’d fed when Leo tried to force a binding, but that had included him forcibly taking my blood. This wasn’t a binding. There would be no pain, and without my blood as part of the bargain, no way to force anything.

Leo binding failed, Beast thought.

Yeah. He failed. And I/we are a lot stronger now. He could try to bind me again, but I had a feeling that my own magic would stop anything. Especially in half-form. I relaxed with a single exhalation and sank into my soul home. The cavern was palely lit, as if the sun was just beyond the stone walls, shining through, glowing, the way light glowed through the nacre of a pearl. In the cavern, I heard water dripping, steady and certain, the same speed as my heartbeat. I laughed again, and my laughter echoed off the stone walls, steady and confident. I looked up, to the angel wings that originated in the center overhead and feathered down the walls. Hayyel, standing guard. Yeah. I was safe.

I blinked and was still standing in the Council Chambers, still chuckling. I knelt and opened my mouth. Captured Leo’s eyes with my glowing golden ones. He might have flinched just a bit, hesitated just a microsecond, but he recovered. He placed his thumb between my lips and fangs.

Leo’s blood was salty and sweet. Tart. He reached out and cupped the back of my head in his other hand. He leaned down, breaking our gaze, and placed his lips on my forehead. I swallowed the blood of the Master of the City.

His magic shot into me. But this time I was ready.

Ice and fire, the heat of a volcano and the frigid air flowing from a glacier, twining together in a tornado of power. His magic whipped me, seared me. The pain of forge-heated needles stabbed and cut me. I reached out with a clawed hand-paw and put my magic over his. Pressed down, my claws cutting into his power. Held it still. Studied it the way Beast studied the movements of prey.

Leo magic is in his blood, Beast thought.

Yes. And he can control what he does with it. He can heal. He can seduce. He can bind. Probably other things. But this time, there was no attempt at binding, no attack.

Instead, with my claws hooked into his energies, images lanced through me.

Leo and his brother at play by day, racing on horseback through fields and woods.

The night they were turned, a night of fear and excitement, as they were sold by their father, who had two too many younger sons. The rage of the devoveo, the madness and thirst.

Later, fanged, the brothers rode finer horses, galloping by the light of the moon.

Leo and his uncle, reading by a campfire.

Leo and Katie, the night they first met. The instant attraction. The immediate desire.

Grégoire, the first time Leo saw him, old, though still in the form of a teen, on his knees, forced to service his master, in public, a shame and humiliation that was ruining him, destroying him. Leo’s instantaneous and urgent vow to free Grégoire from Le Batard. His uncle’s hand on his arm, the crushing grip stopping him from drawing his sword and challenging Le Batard to Duel Sang—personal combat—on the spot. Amaury telling him that Grégoire had gotten away once, had been free for over two hundred years. And when Le Batard found him, the old pedophile tortured the Mithran rescuer and laid waste to his entire town to teach the world a lesson.

The night Leo stole Grégoire away from Le Batard, the two of them riding through the darkness of a new moon night, racing their horses twenty miles before the sun rose. Falling into bed together in the safe house before dawn broke. Waking together, Grégoire crying with relief and fear and murmuring over and over, “Je suis libre. Je suis libre.” I am free. And Leo holding his new friend in his arms as Grégoire wept.

Battlefield after battlefield spread out before them—wide and clanging with the clash of war, or the boom of cannon, or empty, the army on the far side. Fires everywhere in the night. The sound of music and singing. Laughter. The smells of smoke and bread and gunpowder and human blood, of fear so strong on the air it was sour. Over and over, war after war.

Leo and Katie and Grégoire on the docks of New Orleans in the deeps of night, having been rowed ashore by blood-servants. Amaury Pellissier stalked just ahead, disappearing into the dark. The smell of the city and her sewers in the heat of the summer night. The clouds of mosquitoes. The sounds of revelry. “We are safe here,” Katie said. “We three, safe at last.”

Leo’s first sight of George’s mother. Then of George, in a small room near where his mother was dying.

The sight of Amaury dying, after drinking the silver-poisoned blood of George’s mother.

Holding George the night the boy saved his own sister and killed her attacker.

Dancing with Katie at Katie’s Ladies. Group sex and feeding in a room upstairs.

His first sight of a color television. Of seeing the sunrise on the screen. The shock and wonder and deep desperation to see it himself, with his own eyes, even if it meant true-death.

The sight of his brother dying, Leo’s sword in his side. Then his brother’s head flying from his shoulders as Leo beheaded him.

The darkness of depression and despair as the years spread out before him. Empty of the sun. Filled with only blood and those bound to him.

Leo’s first sight of the woman Jane Yellowrock. Her scent that screamed of danger, of predator, of the ruination of all his plans. The shock when the damned woman branded him with a silver cross. A lesser Mithran would have been scarred forever.