«Forgive me,» I said, because I'd meant no disrespect. I hadn't meant I was as beautiful as she, only that we shared some traits.
The thought mollified her, but it also freed her to concentrate on why she'd entered me in the first place. Not good. «Augustine,» she said, her voice spilling in a lower alto purr than my normal voice. It wasn't her voice exactly, because she had to use my throat, but it wasn't my voice either. It was close enough to hers to widen Auggie's eyes, and make him go paler than death itself. I don't know if I'd ever seen a vampire go pale before.
«How is this possible?» he whispered.
«You called me,» she said with my lips. «Your power and your blood called me.»
He swallowed, rolling his lips when he did it, so that the blood seeped faster from the cut. The bite was healing as we watched, but it was still bleeding. «I did not mean…»
«You caused her to love you, Augustine, as you tried to force me to do. But no one forces Belle Morte, no one.»
«Forgive me, I did not know what my powers could do.» He whispered it, hands still on my arms, but gentle now. His hold was so loose that I could have broken away easily, but it was too late for that to matter. We had bigger problems than the ardeur.
«But I can enjoy you again, here and now, and it will not be I who falls in love, but her. It will cause her pain, and Jean-Claude pain. It will even cause you pain.» She laughed, sitting on her bed hundreds and hundreds of miles away. «For as Requiem can raise the body's lust in his victim, he also raises it in himself. So, once you force a woman to love you, you love her back. It is the nature of our bloodline that our powers are two-edged.»
Again, I felt regret in her. I knew in that moment that once Auggie had used his power to its full extent, the effect wasn't temporary.
«No, Anita,» she said inside my head, talking to me from the firelit edge of her bed. «It is quite permanent, I assure you.»
«Then you love…»
She lashed out again, with that sharp power. It stopped what I'd been about to say, and let her speak. «All love Belle Morte. All adore me. It is my nature to be loved.»
But I'd been too close to her mind too often not to understand her better than that. «Lust,» I said out loud, «all lust after Belle Morte.»
«Lust, love, what difference the word, it means the same.» But we were too deeply wedded together. She knew my thought on that, that lust and love aren't the same thing at all, and that thought was so loud that I felt her stumble in her mind. Felt her doubt; for half a moment, I felt doubt there. And it wasn't I who put that seed of doubt in her mind. It was already there, had been there since Jean-Claude and Asher left her side voluntarily centuries ago.
«They returned to me, Anita, don't forget that. They could not live without Belle Morte!» She was on her knees on the bed now, face beautiful in her anger. But I knew better than most what lay behind anger: fear.
«Enough of this!» she shouted, and that shout echoed through my mind, my body, and hit Auggie like a blow. He staggered, fighting to stay on his knees, to hold me. But her power was there, her version of the ardeur, the original. All that had come from Belle Morte were but pieces of her own power. We were reflections of her. The real thing roared over me, tore a scream from my mouth, and Auggie echoed me.
Her power tried to spill out from us, tried to fill the room and touch everything near us. Auggie threw up a wall around it. He used his will, his power as a Master of the City to hold it back. But it wouldn't last for long. I tried to call necromancy. I'd used it to chase her out before, but I couldn't shut down the ardeur. Until that was cleared, I was useless.
He found his words before I did. «Everyone out, out, all of you. We can't hold it like this for long. When we lose control it will fill this room.»
«It spreads by touch,» Micah said.
Auggie shook his head. «This isn't Jean-Claude's ardeur, this is Belle's. Proximity is enough.» He shuddered, shoulders hunching as if some great weight were beginning to crush him. «Samuel, get your family out. You don't know what this could make you do.»
A voice from behind us, with more French accent than I usually heard in it, said, «Augustine, what have you done to ma petite? The power, she presses…«I looked at him, and the words stopped. «Belle Morte.» He said it, flat, as if he'd just swallowed all the emotion he had.
He was dressed in his signature colors, black and white. A black velvet jacket barely touched the top of his waist. The white lace of his shirt spilled out between that blackness, held at the neck by the cameo that had been one of my first presents to him. The pants were leather and looked poured on. The knee-high black boots were some of the plainest he owned. Of course with his body gliding toward us there was nothing plain about him. We both knew the potential of his body too intimately to ever believe such simple camouflage. Because it was a we. And because it was a we, she knew why Jean-Claude had his black curls pulled back in a ponytail. She knew why the clothes were elegant but some of his least expensive. Why he wore almost no jewelry. He had planned to appear as the visiting masters had last seen him. He was going to hide what he truly was, let them wonder about his power. It was a gamble that I had disagreed with. I thought it was like baiting them. Look how powerless I am, try me. Jean-Claude said that he had never gotten in trouble when dealing with other masters by hiding some of his abilities. It was a strategy that had saved his life in the past.