Skin Trade(92)

Victor stared down at me with those perfect eyes. He swallowed hard enough that I heard it. His voice was a little shaky as he said, “You really are another queen, aren’t you?”

I leaned in toward him. I wasn’t aiming for a kiss. It was more as if there were gravity to his power, and it drew me in.

He stood up, stumbling a little. I reached for him, and it was Crispin who drew me back. He and Domino pulled me back into their arms, but it was like I could hear music in my head that I’d never heard before. Victor’s power drowned out their touch.

Victor put the glasses back on and turned to his mother. “Father expressly forbade you from calling her power until he had met with her.”

“I am Chang here, not you,” she said.

“You rule the clan of the white tiger. I have never disputed that, but Father has put me in charge of other parts of his domain. When you put the tigers’ power above the good of this city and the other citizens, then you have broken your master, my father’s, rules.”

“Would you deny Domino and Cynric the only queen of their clan they may ever meet?”

“I would never stand in the way of another clan’s destiny, Mother, but you cannot feed Cynric to her. Look at what she has already done to Crispin and Domino.”

Something about the way he said it made me look at the two weretigers still beside me. Crispin had looked at me with that devotion before, but to see it in Domino’s face was just wrong. A look of puppyish devotion in that angry, arrogant face; it hurt my heart to see it. Not because I cared for him, because you can’t care for someone you’ve just met, but because no adult should look at anyone like that. It was a look I’d seen before, on the faces of vampires. I was a true necromancer and called to all the dead, but I wasn’t supposed to call to the wereanimals like this, not like this.

“Oh, God,” I said, and tried to stand up. Domino clung to me, and I fought the urge to slap at him in a kind of panic. “I fed on your anger, damn it. I fed on your anger so you wouldn’t look at me like that!”

He gave me calm eyes, and he shouldn’t have.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Talk to me, Anita, Bernardo. What’s happening?” Edward asked.

“Wait, Edward, just wait.” I turned to Victor. “Can you fix this?”

Bernardo said, “Anita has it under control.” The look on his face didn’t match the surety of his words, but he was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Victor looked where I was pointing, at Domino. “You mean undo your possession of him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You are queen,” Bibiana said, “you do not ask any male for such help.”

“Fine, can you undo it?” I asked.

Victor studied me some more. “You said you fed on his anger. I thought the ardeur was all about sex.”

“I can feed on anger, too. I thought if I didn’t feed on lust, or love, for your people that I wouldn’t bind them to me. I don’t want any more men, damn it.”

“Jean-Claude can’t feed on anger, can he?” Victor asked.

That was a little too close to truths we didn’t want to share with anyone. That I had powers that my master didn’t share. I tried to be cool about it, but my pulse had sped. Weretigers are like living lie detectors. They can sense, smell, all those little involuntary body functions.

“Can either of you make it so he isn’t”-I waved a hand at Domino-“like this?”

“It may pass on its own,” Victor said.

“Are you sure?”

He smiled. “No, but what you’ve done seems to be a combination of vampire and Chang tiger. You’ve rolled him. If you leave him alone, he may recover. If it’s more vampire than wereanimal, then you know that you’ll be able to repossess him anytime you want.”

I licked my lips and said the only truth I had. “I don’t want to possess anybody.”

“I felt your power. I felt you shove it into my mother. I felt it blocks away.”

“Would it sound childish to say she started it?”

He gave a quick smile. “It’s a little childish, but I know my mother.”

“Victor,” Bibiana said.

“You know you tried to raise her tigers, Mother. You know you provoked her power. Don’t deny it.”

“I would never deny it,” she said.

Bernardo said, “Chang-Bibiana promised that if Marshal Blake could call Crispin away from her, she would answer our questions.”

Bibiana wouldn’t look at anyone in the room.

“Did you promise the marshals that, Mother?”

She gave a little nod, still not looking at anyone.