Staring at the blood dripping down his thumb and pooling in his palm, I dredged through what little I knew about blood sharing and blood offering. I’d fed on Leo’s blood when I was dying. On Ed’s too. I’d fed when Leo tried to force a binding, but that had included him forcibly taking my blood. This wasn’t a binding. There would be no pain, and without my blood as part of the bargain, no way to force anything.
Leo binding failed, Beast thought.
Yeah. He failed. And I/we are a lot stronger now. He could try to bind me again, but I had a feeling that my own magic would stop anything. Especially in half-form. I relaxed with a single exhalation and sank into my soul home. The cavern was palely lit, as if the sun was just beyond the stone walls, shining through, glowing, the way light glowed through the nacre of a pearl. In the cavern, I heard water dripping, steady and certain, the same speed as my heartbeat. I laughed again, and my laughter echoed off the stone walls, steady and confident. I looked up, to the angel wings that originated in the center overhead and feathered down the walls. Hayyel, standing guard. Yeah. I was safe.
I blinked and was still standing in the Council Chambers, still chuckling. I knelt and opened my mouth. Captured Leo’s eyes with my glowing golden ones. He might have flinched just a bit, hesitated just a microsecond, but he recovered. He placed his thumb between my lips and fangs.
Leo’s blood was salty and sweet. Tart. He reached out and cupped the back of my head in his other hand. He leaned down, breaking our gaze, and placed his lips on my forehead. I swallowed the blood of the Master of the City.
His magic shot into me. But this time I was ready.
Ice and fire, the heat of a volcano and the frigid air flowing from a glacier, twining together in a tornado of power. His magic whipped me, seared me. The pain of forge-heated needles stabbed and cut me. I reached out with a clawed hand-paw and put my magic over his. Pressed down, my claws cutting into his power. Held it still. Studied it the way Beast studied the movements of prey.
Leo magic is in his blood, Beast thought.
Yes. And he can control what he does with it. He can heal. He can seduce. He can bind. Probably other things. But this time, there was no attempt at binding, no attack.
Instead, with my claws hooked into his energies, images lanced through me.
Leo and his brother at play by day, racing on horseback through fields and woods.
The night they were turned, a night of fear and excitement, as they were sold by their father, who had two too many younger sons. The rage of the devoveo, the madness and thirst.
Later, fanged, the brothers rode finer horses, galloping by the light of the moon.
Leo and his uncle, reading by a campfire.
Leo and Katie, the night they first met. The instant attraction. The immediate desire.
Grégoire, the first time Leo saw him, old, though still in the form of a teen, on his knees, forced to service his master, in public, a shame and humiliation that was ruining him, destroying him. Leo’s instantaneous and urgent vow to free Grégoire from Le Bâtard. His uncle’s hand on his arm, the crushing grip stopping him from drawing his sword and challenging Le Bâtard to Duel Sang—personal combat—on the spot. Amaury telling him that Grégoire had gotten away once, had been free for over two hundred years. And when Le Bâtard found him, the old pedophile tortured the Mithran rescuer and laid waste to his entire town to teach the world a lesson.
The night Leo stole Grégoire away from Le Bâtard, the two of them riding through the darkness of a new moon night, racing their horses twenty miles before the sun rose. Falling into bed together in the safe house before dawn broke. Waking together, Grégoire crying with relief and fear and murmuring over and over, “Je suis libre. Je suis libre.” I am free. And Leo holding his new friend in his arms as Grégoire wept.
Battlefield after battlefield spread out before them—wide and clanging with the clash of war, or the boom of cannon, or empty, the army on the far side. Fires everywhere in the night. The sound of music and singing. Laughter. The smells of smoke and bread and gunpowder and human blood, of fear so strong on the air it was sour. Over and over, war after war.
Leo and Katie and Grégoire on the docks of New Orleans in the deeps of night, having been rowed ashore by blood-servants. Amaury Pellissier stalked just ahead, disappearing into the dark. The smell of the city and her sewers in the heat of the summer night. The clouds of mosquitoes. The sounds of revelry. “We are safe here,” Katie said. “We three, safe at last.”
Leo’s first sight of George’s mother. Then of George, in a small room near where his mother was dying.
The sight of Amaury dying, after drinking the silver-poisoned blood of George’s mother.
Holding George the night the boy saved his own sister and killed her attacker.
Dancing with Katie at Katie’s Ladies. Group sex and feeding in a room upstairs.
His first sight of a color television. Of seeing the sunrise on the screen. The shock and wonder and deep desperation to see it himself, with his own eyes, even if it meant true-death.
The sight of his brother dying, Leo’s sword in his side. Then his brother’s head flying from his shoulders as Leo beheaded him.
The darkness of depression and despair as the years spread out before him. Empty of the sun. Filled with only blood and those bound to him.
Leo’s first sight of the woman Jane Yellowrock. Her scent that screamed of danger, of predator, of the ruination of all his plans. The shock when the damned woman branded him with a silver cross. A lesser Mithran would have been scarred forever.
The sight of his son, dead on the carpet in the doorway. A monster. A beast of darkness, half sabertooth cat, half Mithran. Dead at the hand of the woman he’d brought into his lands and charged with killing that same darkness.
His decision not to kill her. But to force her to love him.
Months later, the attack by his enemies, when the Naturaleza had been draining him dry. The woman led the charge to save him. When later, still drunk from his healing, he attempted to bind her by force. George’s rage and ferocity. The woman’s resistance. His realization that he had erred, the sensation of a small part of the soul he feared he no longer had, slipping away. He had never told her that she had bound him instead.
A vision of Jane, on the dance floor, a warrior woman of her tribe, dressed in vibrant silks. Dancing. Whirling. As sinuous as a snake.
The feel of her body against his as he led her in a dance of passion. Her refusal to become his in truth. Her ability to thwart him at every turn.
Her honor.
His honor.
Leo slid his thumb from his mouth.
I blinked. No. Not Leo’s mouth. Not . . . Leo’s.
My mouth.
The sensation became my own, his thumb sliding across my lips, the taste of Leo on my tongue. I blinked. Found I was gasping. Crying.
Alex grabbed my arm and dragged me away from him, whispering harshly, “Bruiser staked the MOC to protect you.”
The room was in an uproar. People shouting. The smell of blood and anger and battle. The ebony table was empty of clan leaders except for Sabina, wearing fresh whites, healed, her fangs schnicking down, all five inches of them. Her jaw was still unhinged. I was leaning limply across the table, entirely too close to the outclan priestess. Eli and Bruiser were squared off together against Leo, who was sliding to the floor in a boneless heap. It was the blood of the MOC that I smelled.
I wrenched my arm free and croaked, “I’m okay.”
Alex’s face said I wasn’t. I scrabbled, fighting for balance, my bare paws on the cold floor. I’d lost my shoes when I half-shifted. I fought for control. Bruiser raised the bloody stake high. I pulled the Mughal blade. Shouted, “Stop!” But my throat was dry, voiceless. So I pulled a gun and shot into the only thing dense enough to safely stop a fired round, damaging the antique carved table that was probably worth more than my house. But it worked. The table stopped the round, splinters flew, and the Council Chambers went still and silent. “I’m okay,” I said. “Bruiser. He didn’t attack me.”
Alex asked, “Janie?”
“Leo, did you give me that or did I take it?”
“I gave myself to you,” he said, as his blood pooled on the floor beneath him.