“No utensils?”
“Not until after the moon.” She walked back to her perch and sat, her back to him this time, giving him privacy. He dug into the beef, stuffing it into his mouth, and the taste exploded through him like a bomb going off. When he had licked the plate clean, he drank the water. Tap water—chlorine and dankness and something slightly salty. He licked the half-cooked, watery blood from his fingers.
Jane seemed to know he was done and swiveled around on the stool seat, the leathers squeaking slightly. He pushed the plate and cup back through the bars, waiting, reading her body language better than he ever had before, and he knew that she had a lot to tell him. But first she took a satchel and threw it at the bars. It hit with a quiet thud and slid to the floor. “Clothes,” she said. “Get dressed. You’ll have visitors at eleven thirty.”
He pulled the satchel through the bars and zipped it open. Inside were jeans, a T-shirt, and a package of new boxers, his size. They were made of some filmy material that seemed kind of girly, but he didn’t complain. The T-shirt hid his scars and the mangled tattoos that were all he had left of the art on his shoulder and arm. As he pulled the shirt on, he caught a flash of gold from the eyes of the mountain lion tattooed there, but when he pulled up the sleeve to inspect it, the glow was gone.
“Visitors?” he asked as he stepped into the jeans.
“Local witches. Leo called them, and they said they might have a way to spell you through the shift, force you into your cat.”
He stilled. Fear crawled up his spine like a snake up a tree. He’d been in the power of witches before. It hadn’t been pretty or easy. He zipped up the jeans, feeling her interest, her gaze on him. Without looking at her, he asked, “You’ll be here?”
“If you want me to.”
“Yeah. I do. And if they try something hinky, you stop whatever it is they’re doing.”
“I’m supposed to know what’s hinky with witches?”
He looked at her from under the too-long black hair that curled into his eyes. “I trust you to make an educated guess.” She nodded again, that little chin-drop thing. He used to love that. Still did. But the wary look in her eyes held him off from saying anything about them, about their relationship or current lack of one. They had unresolved business, but it had to take a backseat. He understood that. Jane was always all about business and let nothing stand in the way of that, except sometimes dancing. He had a memory of her dancing once as he played the sax, her body writhing like a cobra on ecstasy, like sex on a stick, hot and sweaty. He went hard again just thinking about it. Jane laughed low, and he could smell his own arousal.
The heavy wooden door opened, and Leonard Pellissier, the Master of the City, walked in, followed by three others, but Rick kept his gaze on the MOC. The stink of vamp, peppery and minty, and blood, thick and slightly chilled, filled the room. Rick’s arousal faded quickly, and he stepped back against the far bars, feeling the damp of the iron through his T.
Leo wasn’t vamped-out like the last time Rick had seen him, but Leo was still wearing the bloody shirt, which said something about his state of mind. Rick crossed his arms and tucked his hands under his armpits, knowing that made him look defensive, but looking defensive was marginally better than looking aggressive. He got in the first salvo. “I apologize to the Master of the City of New Orleans for hitting you. Him.” Rick wasn’t good at the royal third-person speech, and thees and thous had always just confused him. Of course, Jane talked to Leo like she would to any other person, but he had a feeling that Leo allowed a lot of smack talk from Jane that he wouldn’t from anyone else.
Leo, his chest not moving with breath, his eyes so black it was hard to read anything in them, studied Rick. Leo was dead. Or undead. Yeah. Standing there like a dead man, no sense of life left in him at all. Nothing in the room moved. No one coughed or sighed or shifted on the stone floor. It was so silent that Rick could hear his heartbeat and the sound of air breathing in and out of his lungs. A good two minutes too long later, Leo took a breath, and the movement startled Rick. He blinked, and that quickly, Leo was smiling.
“You have my blood. I have fed you more than once at the brink of death.”
Rick nodded once, unconsciously mimicking Jane’s little chin-drop nod. “The first time, I was on a slab of black stone, being spelled by a witch and drained by a vampire.” He saw Jane start. He had never told her the story. He needed to remedy that. He had a lot of things to tell her, if she chose to listen. Later. Much later.
“I feel the pain that crawls under your skin like acid, burning like flames, like silver through your blood. One of my blood-servants prepared the medicine”—Leo flicked a finger at the tranq dart—“but he did not know what dosage would be required. It helped?”