He cried out above me, and then he screamed. I always valued when the men screamed for me. It was so damn rare. It all felt so good, so right, and then I felt power rushing over me, through me, and it wasn’t coming from Jean-Claude. It was Sin. I couldn’t see what was happening, because my face was still buried upside down against his body, but that body was doing some kind of magic that I’d never felt before. I had a moment to start to pull away from him, so I wouldn’t be choking on him when the ardeur left me and whatever this power was happened, but I was still blind against his body when the room started to shake and all I could think was Earthquake . . . St. Louis doesn’t have earthquakes, and then we were all scrambling to untangle ourselves and try to find cover, but how do you hide from an earthquake when you’re in a cave?
31
IT WASN’T AN earthquake, but the lump under the rug that Sin tripped over turned out to be the floor. It had cracked and buckled as if something had torn through the rock. All the floors in the underground were solid rock, some with flooring over it, but it was basically bedrock, or close to it.
“What the hell did that?” I asked, staring down at the rip in the solid rock. It wasn’t deep, just baring more rock underneath, but it was a nearly straight line about five feet long and maybe six inches wide. The rock stuck up on either side of it like a miniature mountain range just brought to life with a valley in between, waiting for grass to fill it.
I hugged myself, but the black silk robe wasn’t much for warmth. Jean-Claude was back in his much thicker black robe with the fur collar and cuffs. We’d put on the robes because the guards on the door had come into the room when they heard the noise of the floor cracking. It had sounded like an explosion, and the guards had hit their general alarm button before they came into the room pale and ready to defend us from the danger, except that there hadn’t been anything to attack. How can you protect your charges from something that can split the floor open without leaving a trace?
Nicky had gone to get some of the guards with the most experience with magic and metaphysics—the Harlequin. They’d spent centuries dealing with the Mother of All Darkness and the vampire council, who were all heavy hitters for stuff like this.
“If we had not killed him I would wonder if it was the Earthmover warning us,” Jean-Claude said.
“He could level a city with a real earthquake, but I didn’t know he could do things like this,” I said.
“I honestly do not know, but it has the appearance of his sort of power.”
I nodded. “Agreed, but I cut his heart out personally, so it’s not him.”
“Who’s the Earthmover?” Sin asked from the chair by the fireplace. He didn’t have a robe here, so he’d put his jeans back on and was sort of huddling in the chair. He’d managed to pull those long legs up so that he was hugging his knees. He reminded me more of the teenager I’d first met now than the confidently arrogant lover of earlier. It was almost comforting to see the younger Cynric peeking out of that handsome, muscular body.
“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.