He leaned over Damian and patted my hip—okay, my ass—and closed the window. I swear that the lights in the plane dimmed; I knew they hadn’t, but it just seemed darker. Crap.
Echo kissed my cheek. “Thank you, Anita.”
“I’m a big, grown-up necromancer. I can do this.”
She smiled and went to find a seat to strap herself into, because once the sun rose she would drop like the corpse she almost was; Giacomo joined her in moving toward the back of the plane. Damian unbuckled and stood up. Nathaniel reached up and drew him down into a kiss, which he gave without any hesitation. Whatever magic Nathaniel had worked on the vampire, it was still working. He went back to join the other vampires while everyone else rearranged their seats so the vamps could have the seats farthest to the back of the plane where it was a little bit dimmer, just in case.
Fortune hugged me, just the two of us; I had to look quite a bit farther up to meet her pale blue eyes with their almost bright blue eyelashes like the coolest mascara ever to frame the forget-me-not blue of her eyes. It had been her eyes that had made me take Sin to the side and stand him in bright light to discover that his eyelashes weren’t black like I’d always thought, but an incredibly dark navy blue. It was a very small sampling, but so far only the blue tigers all had eyelashes the same color as their clan name. The gold tigers certainly didn’t all have golden eyelashes, or even eyebrows.
“Thank you for taking care of her,” Fortune said.
“You’re supposed to take care of your lovers, aren’t you?”
She smiled down at me from a face that looked about twenty-five and would look that way forever, but she suddenly looked beyond cynical as if the years that didn’t show on her face were still there in the depths of her blue eyes.
“Yes,” she said, “you are, but a tremendous number of people don’t seem to know that. Thank you for not being one of them.” She kissed my forehead as if I were a child, and then kissed my mouth like a lover. She left me to go give Echo a good-bye kiss, before the sunrise stole her master and lover away. We had coffins packed in the belly of the plane for the vampires traveling with us, and I knew that Fortune and Magda both had duffel bags big enough to put their masters in and carry them out on their backs if they had to, but that was for short periods of time or if something went horribly wrong. There was a third duffel bag in the cabin for Damian, just in case he died at dawn again. If he did we’d treat him like all the other vampires, though neither Nathaniel nor I had had time to practice carrying him like that. Damian wasn’t a big guy, but he was tall, so Nathaniel would probably do the carrying just because he was taller and broader than me.
I took my seat beside Nathaniel again. I could see Magda checking Giacomo’s seat belt as he reclined the seat back so he was lying down. She wouldn’t be giving him a good-bye kiss, because they didn’t kiss, so far as I knew. They weren’t lovers. They were fellow warriors, battle buddies, partners in that police way, maybe even best friends, but there was nothing romantic between them. Magda had proved with us that she was bisexual, so I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t added fuck buddies to their list, but with them it seemed to be strictly mutual respect and a partnership somewhere between the ones I had with Edward and Sergeant Zerbrowski, who was my partner when I worked with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team back home. Edward and I were about to be best “men” for each other. Zerbrowski had put me and Nathaniel on the short list of people who could come get his kids from school in case of emergency. It would never have occurred to me to cross the line romantically with Zerbrowski. Edward and I had decided long ago that our friendship meant more to us than any friendship with benefits could gain us. You can be friends with your sexual partners, but you can’t be best friends, because the sex gets in the way, and if you’re trying for a romantic relationship, that means regular friendship is almost impossible. I’m told there are people who can pull off both, but I’ve never met them. Maybe Magda and Giacomo had done the same relationship math and partnership won, too. Or maybe I didn’t understand either of them well enough to hazard a guess yet.
I watched the two moitié bêtes tuck their vampire masters in, in very different ways. Damian buckled himself in and started lowering the seat back. I guess if he died at dawn, it would be less disturbing than watching his body slump sitting up. Fortune and Echo were each other’s primaries, but Magda didn’t seem to have a serious lover outside of us, and none of us were very serious with her. Did she want to be serious with someone?
Nathaniel got up to see if Damian wanted him to hold his hand the way that Fortune was doing for Echo. I remembered Jean-Claude asking me years ago to be with him at dawn. Watching him “die” as the sun rose outside the hotel room had been my first confirmation that vampires really did die at dawn. I’d heard his breath rattle out and felt his energy change from alive to not. I knew from medical write-ups that vampires’ brain activity didn’t go dead like true death and in fact didn’t even go as low as most coma patients’, but when you were just watching it happen without monitors to tell you different, it looked the same as anyone else dying in front of you. I’d seen people die for real and I’d seen vampires die at dawn, and I’d killed vampires for good. It all looked pretty much the same.
Nathaniel came back to his seat. “Damian’s afraid that if he holds my hand he won’t die at dawn.”