"He was one of the vampire council, and one of the oldest vampires I'd ever met until Marmee Noir. He came to town to try to kill Jean-Claude and take over St. Louis."
"I thought the old council members gave up any chance at their own territories when they took a council seat," Sin said, looking at us over his knees, so that his dark blue eyes glittered in the artificial firelight.
"That's true," I said.
"The Earthmover did not come to rule St. Louis," Jean-Claude said. "He came to take over here and use my vampires as his tools to cause a vampire incident so terrible it would repeal the new laws and make us illegal monsters again."
"Why would a vampire want to go back to having no rights?" he asked.
I answered, "He thought that legal vampires would eventually spread across the earth and turn so many humans into vampires that they'd basically run out of food, and thus they'd die out along with the humans. Mutually assured destruction for humans and vampires."
"The Earthmover sought to make vampires illegal again, so we would go back to the shadows where he thought we belonged. He thought the old system guaranteed that vampire numbers would stay smaller, because we had to stay hidden, and thus we would not overpopulate and depopulate our only food source."
"Humans and wereanimals," Sin said.
Jean-Claude nodded. "He talked only of humans, but yes."
"I've listened to the Harlequin and most of the older vamps see us, all of us shapeshifters, as lesser."
"It is a sadly common attitude among the oldest of us."
"Well, it sucks," he said.
"Yes, it does, which is why I am doing my best to promote newer and more progressive attitudes among them."
One of the guards by the door cleared his throat. We looked at him. It was Emmanuel, one of Rafael's wererats; his hair was pale brown, cut short, and his pale gray eyes looked paler in the permanent tan of his face. He wasn't the tallest or the most muscled, but he excelled at everything physical: hand-to-hand, blade work, shooting; he was even good at undercover work. He was also handsome in that clean-cut sort of way. He looked like he should be walking around a college campus somewhere worrying about passing algebra and how it would affect his athletic scholarship, but he was actually a lot more deadly than some of the guards who walked around throwing attitude all over the place.
"Yes, Emmanuel?" Jean-Claude said.
"Some of us really appreciate how hard you try to make the older vampires treat us like we're people."
"Yeah, we do," said the second guard, and I realized it was the new guard, Harris, from yesterday, or was it the day before? Though he was all white-bread as far as I knew, his hair was almost the same shade of brown as Emmanuel's, and Harris was the one with brown eyes.
"It is good to know that our efforts are appreciated," Jean-Claude said with a graceful incline of his head.
"I know that some of the older vamps here in this country and in Europe aren't too happy about it, so I just wanted to say thank you."
Jean-Claude smiled. "You are most welcome, Emmanuel, and . . . Harry, is it?"
"Harris, sir."
"Harris."
"I see your pal Barry isn't with you tonight," I said.
He made a face and then fought back to bodyguard neutral. "He's not my friend."
"We let Barry and another guard go," Emmanuel said.
"I've got one more chance to prove I'm not like Barry," Harris said.
"Claudia and Fredo have decided to pair the new guards with more experienced guards--no newbies teamed up together."
I looked at Emmanuel and nodded. "Agreed."
There was a knock on the door, but it opened before we could say anything. It was Nicky with Magda and her master, Giacomo. He was taller than anyone else in the room except Sin. His shoulders were as broad as Nicky's, or damn close, but whereas Nicky had that upside-down triangle that bodybuilders had, Giacomo was built like an old-time refrigerator, a big rectangle of muscle. You wouldn't think he had the same kind of muscle that Nicky did, because his was hidden under an extra layer of flesh, but it was under there. I'd seen them lift weights in friendly competitions in the gym. The other guards would place bets on who could lift more, or do the most reps. It was like the room had shrunk around them.
Giacomo went to one knee in front of Jean-Claude. "My King, how may we serve you?"
Magda had gone to one knee beside him, though she almost never did it when Giacomo wasn't with her. If she thought it was excessive she kept her head lowered so it didn't show on her face. Giacomo was her master metaphysically, and that would be true until one of them died. Marriage had nothing on magic for longevity.
"Rise, Giacomo. I've told you such displays are not necessary in private."
He raised the nearly perfect roundness of his face, the dark brown of one eye and the pale milky blue of the other set in tight folds. The scar that bisected his right eye curved through his eyebrow and onto his cheek. I'd thought he was blind in the eye, and so had some of the other guards in fight practice. They'd tried to go for his blind side and he'd kicked their asses, because the eye worked, not as well as the other one, but he could see out of it.
Giacomo rose as he was bid and gave that nearly infectious smile of his. Nicky was just behind him and Magda. He still had his hair swept to one side so that the scars over his right eye were visible. The two big men stood there with their different scars over the same eye, and it was striking. Two such men with similar injuries on the same eye, what were the odds?
Nicky led Magda and Giacomo to where the floor was broken. They stared down at it and then Giacomo leaned into Nicky and whispered something. Nicky told Emmanuel and Harris to man the door from the other side, and they did it, though Emmanuel looked back as he closed the door.
"Why did we need privacy?" I asked.
"Because I know who did this," Giacomo said.
"Who?" Sin said, coming to stand beside Jean-Claude and me.
"You."
Sin blinked at him. "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have any ability to do . . . whatever this is," he said, waving vaguely in the floor's direction.
Magda said, "Did you feel a rush of power just before it happened?"
"We were having sex. I wasn't thinking about anything else."
"Actually, there was a rush of power from him," I said.
"It was just my beast, Anita. You know that orgasm is one of the times that the inner beast comes closest to the surface."
"I know. That's why all the good little boy and girl shapeshifters get chained up for their first orgasms so they don't kill anyone by accident."
"You were sensing that," he said.
"Did you change shape?" Magda asked.
He shook his head.
Giacomo looked at us. "My King, did you sense anything from him?"
"As he said, we were having sex with Anita between us. It is always magical to be with her when she feeds the ardeur. It tends to blind you to any other power."
"It can be quite overwhelming," Magda said.
"Then perhaps the young prince did not understand what was happening."
"I did not do that," Sin said, pointing at the floor.
"You are a pureblooded blue clan tiger."
"I know that."
"Earth is what your clan controlled."
"I know blue tiger is earth, red is fire, white is metal, black is water, and gold is sun, or controls all the other clans," Sin said, repeating it the way you'd say something you were forced to memorize in school but didn't really want to.
"Have you seen Crispin call the small lightning to his hands?"
"It's like super static electricity, is all," Sin said.
"But it is still the power of his clan manifesting since he became Anita's white tiger to call, and the prince of the red clan can now call fire to his hands after becoming Anita's red tiger."
"A little super static electricity and fire like a match appearing in your hand is not the same thing as crac
king the floor open," Sin said, pointing at the damage again. I could feel his fear bubbling along my own stomach.