Skin Trade(166)

I petted his hair while I learned how to breathe again, and my pulse climbed back into my throat, so that the clean, desert air was like champagne, cool in my throat.

His body started to shake, and I realized he was crying. I stroked his hair and said, “Truth, Truth, are you all right?”

He raised his face to me, tears glittering in the hard light of the stars. “I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. I could not resist you naked in the moonlight.”

“Oh, Truth, I’m sorry,” and I meant it. I knew what it was not to have a choice.

Wicked came to us, putting an arm across the other man’s shoulders. “It’s all right, she’s not like Belle.”

Truth pulled back from both of us. “The ardeur makes them all monsters in the end.”

I sat up and, very carefully, very gently, went to him. He actually looked scared, and I wiped his tears away with my hands. He let me, but his eyes were wide, showing too much white, like a horse about to bolt. “Help me not to turn into the monster, Truth.”

He frowned and looked at me, not like I was something to fuck, or something to be afraid of, but as if he were seeing me-whatever that meant.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, voice still thick with tears.

“I mean, you tell me if I’m becoming a monster. You tell me if the power is turning me into something else.”

“Jean-Claude will tell you that.”

“He told me once that he trusted me to kill him if he became as heartless as Belle Morte. That he counted on my not letting him be a monster.”

“Are you telling me to kill you if you lose control?” he asked, slowly.

I thought about it. “Not yet, but if the Darkness takes me, and there’s no more me left, then yes.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Wicked said.

“I know that everyone else loves me too much, but if all that’s left of me is the ardeur, then I’m already gone.”

The brothers exchanged a look, then gave me almost identical looks back. “How do we know when you’re gone?” Truth asked.

I thought about that. “I don’t know.”

Truth touched a finger to my cheek and came away with a single trembling tear. “You mean it.”

I nodded, and curled my arms around my knees, clutching me to myself. “I thought that it was the men. That living with Jean-Claude and all the others was making me lose control of myself, but they aren’t here. It’s me. It’s me, Truth, don’t you see? I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I don’t know how to control it.” I laid my head on my knees and cried. Knowing that I should get dressed, and there was a demon waiting, and I didn’t know where Edward was, but all I could think of in that moment was that I didn’t trust myself anymore.

Truth wrapped his arms around me, and Wicked came at my back, so that they held me between them while I cried. They held me while I confessed to them something I wasn’t sure I could say to Edward, or any of the men I loved. How do you ask someone you love to kill you if you grow too powerful, too evil? Jean-Claude had asked it of me once, and I had cursed him for it. Now I let the two brothers hold me, and gave them my darkest fear.

Truth whispered against my hair, “If the ardeur takes you and you become as evil as Belle Morte, I promise…”

Wicked said, “We promise.”

“We promise,” Truth said, “that we will not let you be that evil.”

“You’ll kill me,” I said softly.

They were quiet for a few breaths, and then their arms tightened around me, and they said in one voice, “We’ll kill you.”

And that was the best I could get, that if the ardeur or the Darkness took me, that Wicked and Truth would kill me before I could do whatever it was that either of the evil bitches of the West wanted me to do. It didn’t matter that it might kill anyone metaphysically tied to me, because if Marmee Noir possessed me, or I became nothing but a vessel for the ardeur, whatever was inside me would spread to them eventually. The thought of what we could all do, if we became truly evil, truly without pity, was too awful to contemplate. We could rule the vampires and most of the wereanimals in this country, and then we could move on Europe. If Marmee Noir took me over and possessed all that belonged to Jean-Claude and me, there’d be nothing to stop us unless the two vampires holding me now could stop it early, stop it with me.

I sat there in the starry night, held in the arms of the only two people who I thought might be good enough, ruthless enough, and honorable enough to kill me if I asked. I’d once thought that Edward would do it if it needed doing, but I knew now that even he would hesitate. He loved me too much. But Truth and Wicked didn’t love me, not yet, and if we were careful, they never would. I needed them to keep this promise. I needed to know that if I failed, utterly and completely, I had a fail-safe. A fail-safe made of swords and bullets, and two of the finest warriors that had ever walked the planet. As fail-safes went, it wasn’t bad.