“None taken. When our Dark Mother was still alive we were all slave to her plans and wishes,” Giacomo said.
“We have all been slaves to one vampire or another in our time,” Jean-Claude said.
Giacomo bowed to him. “True and wise words, Your Highness.”
“The main reason she has agents looking at foundlings across the world is to find any survivors of the lost clans,” Sin said.
“I would have said there would be no survivors, but here you are, my prince. The new genetic tests have proven that you are as pure of blood as Fortune, who is the last of the blue clan that I knew to be alive,” Giacomo said. There was something about the way he looked at Sin that I didn’t like. He was centuries older than Jean-Claude, so he should have been even better at hiding his expressions, but I’d noticed that a lot of the Harlequin weren’t that good at schooling their faces. I’d asked Echo about it and been told, We wore masks almost all the time; no one saw our face except when we played a part to gather information, and then we were playing human. We needed our faces to show emotions. It was as good an explanation as any.
“I was nearly two when someone left me at a church. I was well fed, well clothed, a happy well-adjusted toddler. Someone took care of me for all that time and then just left me.”
“There were rumors of clan tigers here in this country, but we were not the ones sent to investigate,” Magda said.
“Bibi figured that either my parents had left me to save me from what was hunting them, or they had died and whoever they left me with didn’t want to deal with a baby.”
I put my arms around his bare waist and hugged him. He looked down at me, but his face still held that edge of anger, sullenness, and deeper in those rich blue eyes was the uncertainty of it. How could they leave me? Why would they leave me? Was it something I did? Why didn’t they want me? All the questions that children who are lost ask about their past.
Jean-Claude gripped Sin’s shoulder tight. I expected him to hug us, but he didn’t. He kept that almost-artificial distance from us. I put an arm around both their waists and tried to draw us into a group hug, but Jean-Claude resisted.
Sin looked at him then. “You’re afraid to hug me now. Why?”
“Let us say that I am no longer certain of how to interact with you.”
A look of absolute pain came over his face, and the emotion of it crashed the shields between us. He was sad and scared that he’d screwed up a relationship that he valued. He suddenly felt very young in my head, because it hadn’t occurred to him that sleeping together even just this much would change things between them.
Nicky came over and wrapped us all in one huge group hug. “Don’t get weird about it, Jean-Claude.”
Jean-Claude hesitated for a minute and then finally hugged us all, so that we were entwined and it wasn’t sexual. It was comforting. It was . . . family. Sin’s muscled shoulders began to shake, and it took me a second to realize he was crying. Jean-Claude touched his face and dried the tears away with his hands. The look he gave Sin wasn’t romantic; it was very much Uncle Jean-Claude to his beloved nephew, and that was why he wouldn’t be able to put a ring on it. Sin had to decide if he was willing to lose Jean-Claude as his “uncle,” his father figure, to make him a romantic partner, but he had to decide, because he and Jean-Claude couldn’t do both.
32
WE SAID GOOD-BYE to everyone at the Circus rather than at the airport for a lot of reasons. One, it made more sense from a security point of view. Two, we were already needing two large SUVs to get the luggage and us to the airport; it would have taken even more to get everyone to the airport who wanted to say good-bye. Three, we could say good-bye as enthusiastically as we wanted to without someone snapping a picture with their cell phone and posting it on the Internet. Jean-Claude was the vampire of everyone’s dreams, which meant that just snapping a good picture with your phone could get you money from some gossip sites.
The luggage had been carried up the long steps by other guards like overly muscled ants trip after trip. They’d loaded everything into the cars outside, and it was time to go. Jean-Claude and I had kissed good-bye in private, but seeing him standing there made me want to do it again. He broke from the kiss to touch the ring on my left hand. It was platinum, white gold, channel-set with white diamonds and one large oval dark blue sapphire. All the stones were set into the metal and, it was all smooth so that it wouldn’t catch on anything, including the rubber gloves that I wore at crime scenes. The ring was still shining and beautiful, but it was practical, and I needed that for my job. Most cops wore plain bands or nothing to work, but Jean-Claude had wanted me to wear his promise ring always, and his promise would never be just a plain band of gold. No, he was all about the shiny.
“Ma petite,” he said as he turned the ring on my finger, “I never thought to see my ring upon your finger, and now all I can think of is how much I want to add a wedding ring to it.”
“We’re working on it,” I said, looking up into that almost painfully beautiful face.
“Yes. Yes, we are,” he said, smiling down at me. I’d shared enough of his thoughts to know that he thought I was beautiful and sexy and utterly desirable, but I didn’t understand it. I was good at sex, so maybe the sexy part, but I was also a royal pain in the ass in other areas. He had been one of the most beautiful men in the world for centuries. How does one mortal woman, any woman, compare to that?