“Thank you,” I said, knowing I thanked him more for the return of a memory than for healing. I reached slowly toward him with my healed arm, fingers brushing the skin of his neck. He breathed out with the touch. I curled the tendril of his hair around my fingers, my tendons restored, healed, the motion pain free.
When his eyes were not human but no longer fully vampy, he turned his face into my palm and rested his cheek against my fingers, his black hair caught between hand and face. “What are you?” he asked, wonder in his voice. When I didn’t answer, he whispered, “Your blood tastes of oak and cedar and the winter wind. Tastes wild, like the world once was. Come to my bed,” he breathed on my hand. “Tonight.”
I watched, knowing he was using his vamp voice on me, but not minding so very much. Not right now. He kissed my palm, his hair still tangled in my fingers, his lips cool, but soft. His eyes took mine, his gaze velvet lined but powerful, like a gilded cell. “Come to my bed.”
“No,” I murmured. “Not gonna happen.”
Slowly, he took my wrist in his chilled hand and pulled me from his hair, bending my arm and draping it across my body. He pressed my hand there, his cold, dead hand on my living warmth. His eyes searched mine. “Tell me what manner of supernatural you are,” he asked. “You are not were, I think. You are something I never tasted. Never heard told of.”
I let a faint smile steal over me. “Again,” I said, knowing I was risking whatever harmony currently existed between the head of the vamp council and me, “I’ll share my secrets with you, if you’ll tell me where the vamps came from. Originally. The very first vamp.”
He seemed to consider my bargain. “Why do you wish to know this?” he asked.
I settled into the couch, feeling rested and lethargic and vaguely happy, as if I’d downed a single chilled beer on a hot afternoon. “Because all supernaturals fear something. According to the mythos, weres, if they still exist, fear the moon, the planet Venus, and the goddess Diana, the huntress. A witch I know fears dark things that go bump in the night, demons and evil spirits and fickle djinns. And vamps fear the cross,” I said. “Not the Star of David, not the symbols of Mohammed, not the sight of a happy Bud dha, no matter how strong a believer’s faith or how certain his devotion. But the symbols of Christianity all vamps fear, even if wielded by a nonbeliever. So it isn’t faith that gives the symbols power. Theologians disagree about why. So I’ll trade. Tell me why vamps fear everything about the Church.”
“Our curse is different from the weres’ ancient curse, and different again from the elvish curse—and curses are what made us all.” Pain shadowed Leo’s face.
Elves? Crap. There are elves? And . . . weres. His words claimed that weres were real.
“No,” he said. He stood, fluid and sinuous, more graceful than a dancer. “You ask too much.” He looked around the room. Squared his shoulders as if they carried a burden. “George, I’m ready to leave.”
Bruiser rose from a chair at the table, the chair legs scraping on the wood floor, and crossed the room. Without glancing my way, he lifted and shook out a suit coat, the silk lining gleaming softly as he held it. Leo Pellissier unrolled his shirtsleeves and shrugged the jacket on. “Have the car brought around,” he said.
George flipped open a cell phone and punched a button. A moment later, he said, “Car,” and flipped the phone closed. Succinct, was our Bruiser.
Leo looked at me from his full height as I lay on the couch, unconcerned by the disparity in our positions, knowing, without understanding why, that I was safe, though my soft underbelly was exposed to his dominant position, his claws and teeth. Leo’s eyes burned into me, unvamped, human looking, yet still forceful, piercing, as if he would cut through the layers of my soul and uncover the secrets at the heart of me.
He said, “I heard drums. Smelled smoke. And there was this . . . mountain lion? Sitting beside you? But it didn’t kill you.” In a seeming non sequitur, he said, “They say you were raised by wolves.”
I let a smile fill my eyes. “No wolves.”
His head tilted slightly to the side as he studied me. As he considered whatever it was that he had picked up from my memory. “The cat. It wasn’t you.”
He was getting close. Beast stirred, uneasy. I let my smile widen, as if I found his statement even funnier than the news accounts that I was raised by wolves. “No,” I said. “It wasn’t me.” It was my father. It was a memory of my own lost past. And this, this vampire, gave it back. “Thank you,” I said again, offering no enlightenment.
“Healing is one responsibility of the elders among us. A . . .” He paused, his gaze turning inward, far away, as if caught still in my memories. Or his own? He seemed to shake himself mentally and looked at me, his black eyes faintly mocking. “A duty to those who serve us.”