I GOT OUT of the Jeep, which was second in the line of cars behind the already filled garage. When we were all home, and the bodyguards had their own cars, it was a lot of cars. The guards tried to keep the cars down, and changing, so no one watching could figure out how many, and who was guarding us at any given time, but it was still a lot of vehicles.
I had a sense of movement to the side of the house and made eye contact with Bram for a second; his skin was dark and almost truly black, but in leopard form he was spotted. Since others with paler skin were black leopards, I'd asked, and learned that your animal's coloring had nothing to do with your genetics as a person, but everything to do with the genetics of the line of beasts you descend from, so if you come from a line of leopards that run high to spotted yellow leopards, that's what you'll be, no matter how pale or dark your human form may be. I didn't nod at that brief glimpse of him, as he melted back out of sight; there was just the "seeing" of each other. If someone was watching us, it was unlikely that my acknowledging him any more than what I'd just done would give him away. Bram was ex-military and had been a combat vet before a wereleopard attack had ended his military career for "health" reasons. He and his usual guard partner, Ares, a werehyena and ex-military sniper, had broken all of us of nodding, waving, or acknowledging the guards on duty in any way. They'd pissed and moaned about it, until we all learned better. I wouldn't have waved, but once I would have given the smallest nod.
I tried the door handle before trying the key, because not everyone locked the door. It opened and I stepped into my house. The living room was dim, curtains still pulled, but laughter, talking, and bright morning light spilled through the open archway that led to the kitchen. It was a happy murmur of voices, not that fake murmur you get at a party sometimes where people are struggling to have a good time, trying to find things to talk about; no, this was a group of people who knew and liked each other and had things to share. I put my equipment bags down by the door. The smell of baking bread and bacon filled the air.
Micah stood in our bedroom door across the living room. He was on the phone. He waved, smiling, his green-gold leopard eyes shining in the dimness, catching what light there was and magnifying it. He was my height, built so delicate that almost any clothes hid that there was muscle underneath, and only the athletic set of shoulder to slender waist and hips hinted how much he worked out. He was wearing a T-shirt that fit us both; we even had a few pairs of jeans that we could share. I'd never dated anyone as tiny as I was; I sort of liked it.
I started to go to him, for a kiss, but what he said into the phone stopped me. He was going to need to concentrate on the call. "Stephen, you are not your father. You will not abuse like he did." Micah pushed his dark brown curls back over his shoulder, frowning. Stephen was a werewolf, so he should have been making this comfort call to his Ulfric, wolf king, but Micah had become de facto leader for almost the entire furry community, because he actually led, and wasn't pretending to be anything but who and what he was; the Ulfric, Richard Zeeman, was still trying to have a Clark Kent life and hide that he was also Superman, um, wolf, so he was at school teaching college students about biology. At least he wasn't at the junior high anymore, where being outed as a werewolf would have certainly cost him his job. The college would have a harder time with it.
Stephen and his twin brother had been horribly abused by their father, so he was terrified that his fiancee wanted to have a baby. Stephen was convinced that he would abuse a child, as his own father had done. Therapy can get you only so far with exorcising your childhood nightmares; after that it's willpower, and you, and people you can trust to hold your hand along the way. "I have faith in you, Stephen," Micah said. "If you don't want to have a child, that's your choice..." He listened for a minute, and then said, "Vanessa is set on children, I know that. I'm sorry she's given you the ultimatum, Stephen, but that's her choice, too." You think being leopard king and queen, Nimir-Raj and Nimir-Ra, would give you power to rule, and it does, but you also end up being part parent, part therapist, part carrot, part stick, part cheerleader, and part disciplinarian. I did my best, but Micah was really good at it.
I blew him a kiss; he pantomimed one back and went into the bedroom and closed the door. He'd be talking Stephen down for a while. I was honestly beginning to believe that Stephen wasn't going to work through his issues in time to save his relationship with Vanessa, and that was sad, because they loved each other to pieces, but anyone who ever said love conquers all was a fucking liar. Love is a good place to start, but it's a start, not an end.
I washed my hands in the hallway bathroom before I went into the kitchen. You didn't go to breakfast with the possibility of blood under your fingernails. There wasn't any blood on my hands, but... there had been in the past, and washing my hands when coming in from work had just become a ritual, like I was cleansing myself of more than just germs and potential crime scene schmutz.
Nathaniel was half bent over, taking something out of the oven. His auburn braid curled on the floor, because it was just that long, falling nearly to his ankles. He was wearing only a pair of jeans so worn they were almost white, and his dark purple chef's apron across his muscular upper chest. I knew the apron made his lavender eyes look very close to true purple. He'd been my live-in sweetie for nearly three years. I knew what his eyes looked like in the new apron, or the old ones.
Nicky was at the stove in a T-shirt that strained over his massive, muscular upper body. He had jean shorts on that had been cut down from an old pair of jeans, so they accommodated the swell of his thighs. He was tall enough to carry the extra muscle at just about six feet. He had a kitchen towel tucked into the front of his shorts, because aprons were not his thing. That he'd put on a shirt to protect himself from the bacon he was frying up in a pan was all the concession I'd ever seen Nicky make to domesticity. He didn't live with us, officially, but he was with us a lot. We always had bodyguards, and he was one of the best we had. He was also my werelion to call, and my lover, though not exactly my sweetie.
Nathaniel lifted weights because he was an exotic dancer, so only to a point. Nicky lifted because he was a bodyguard, and he liked lifting. His body showed how much. His blond hair was cut short in the back and halfway down the sides, a skater's cut, but the bangs were actually a wedge shape, one part in a straight, yellow triangle of hair that trailed halfway down his face. It looked very anime, but it wasn't just a fashion statement; it hid his empty eye socket from where he'd lost his eye long before he became a werelion, or my bodyguard.
Cynric - Sin - was the last one at the business side of the kitchen. His dark blue hair had grown long enough that he usually put it in a ponytail to cook. I got a glimpse of the blue-on-blue of his tiger eyes. Most people didn't catch that his eyes weren't human, because they didn't think that tigers came with blue eyes, but the clan weretigers were different from all the other wereanimals, because they were born with tiger eyes and hair that wasn't always human-normal, like Cynric's deep, almost navy blue hair. He was wearing dark blue jeans; he'd grown four inches in the last year, so we'd had to buy him new pants, so he had no old jeans that still fit. That tended to happen when you were eighteen. He was taller than Nathaniel, and almost the same height as Nicky, though his shoulders didn't have Nathaniel's spread, and he looked damn near willowy beside Nicky, but then most of the men did. I realized that with all three of them turned away from me, Sin didn't look like a little boy anymore. He'd filled out in the weight room and thanks to the new preternatural football league and track. He was Missouri's quarterback, and we had coaches from some serious schools scouting him. A preternatural college league had started last year, and the amateur preternatural adult men's league was one of the top money draws on pay TV, so the colleges had gotten on board, and we were probably only a few months away from a professional league.
Gina was setting the table. Her dark, nearly black hair was short and curled sort of artfully around her face. When my hair was that short, it wasn't artful, just messier, but then some curls are better behaved than others. Gina was tall, nearly six feet; her dark gray eyes were looking more at her husband and baby than at the dishes, so the settings were a little crooked as she moved around the table, but I didn't care; perfect place settings were overrated and the happiness on her face as she watched them was worth it.
Zeke was in half-man form, which meant he looked like most of the movie werewolves you've ever seen, except that his eyes were human. Usually when someone was stuck in animal form their eyes were the first things to go animal, and stick, but for some reason Zeke had done the opposite. His blue human eyes were trapped in the face of a movie monster. The baby in his lap looked up, laughing, and he had his father's eyes, except it was a very human face, with short dark hair just beginning to get long enough to prove he was going to have his mother's curls.
They were living with us because the baby hadn't been getting enough sunlight underneath the Circus of the Damned. The baby had started getting agoraphobic when he was outside the underground, like some kind of post-apocalyptic survivor. They'd been here two months and it had made a world of difference in Chance. He was getting some color in his cheeks and was just a much happier kid.
Nathaniel gave me a brilliant smile as he turned bread in his mitted hands and saw me. He put the bread on the cooling racks by the sink, and took the mitts off as he moved toward me. Sin turned from stirring something and smiled; some thought or emotion chased across his face so fast that I couldn't read it, but it wilted his smile around the edges for a minute, whatever it had been. He finally said, "Hey, Anita. Glad you're home."
There it was, a simple sentence that stood in for a whole bunch of words that might get said later, or might never get spoken out loud. At least he'd know not to say out loud, I was worried about you, or How could you scare me like that, or risk us, or... Richard Zeeman, my onetime serious boyfriend, had been the only one currently on the edges of my life who had said those kind of things out loud. It was why he was on the edge of my life, and not in the kitchen helping with breakfast.
Nicky started taking the bacon out of the pan with tongs. The bacon looked very crisp, just the way I liked it. He glanced back at me and said, "Breakfast is almost ready."
Gina and Zeke said hello, and the baby laughed, that low gurgly laugh that some boy babies have, and girl babies never seem to.
I said hi to everyone, but walked to meet Nathaniel in the middle of the kitchen floor. He'd tossed his oven mitts on the kitchen island, and rolled toward me in that sexy, swinging walk that he used onstage, the roll of his lovely hips that made the customers at Guilty Pleasures scream with delight, but this show was all for me. It was also the real deal. It was hard to explain how it was different, but there was a difference, or maybe what was different was what happened next.
I smiled and he smiled back. His lavender eyes were darker and not just from the purple apron that covered his bare chest. His eyes showed his emotions; richer color meant happy him, though truly purple dark eyes were angry him. It would be three years together in about a month; I knew his face the way I knew my own, maybe better. I didn't spend much time gazing into my own eyes. The smile he gave me was one you never saw at the club; it was a smile that filled his eyes with... love. That he loved me was there in his eyes, in his face, and I knew my face reflected it back like water reflects the sun back at itself, in a blinding dazzle of happy light.
My arms slid around his waist, hands sliding over the rougher fabric of the apron, to the smooth, muscled glide of his bare waist and back. God, he felt so good, just that much, and it made me close my eyes for a moment. He pulled me into his body, so that we touched from chest to groin. He didn't press me too tightly, just touching, so to truly feel if he was happy to see me I'd have had to grind myself against him. I didn't, because we weren't alone, but he had a smile on his face that let me know that he knew I'd thought about it. The smile was mostly mischievous, with an edge of wicked fun, and in his eyes was a confidence that he knew exactly how he affected me, and just how beautiful he was. Once he'd believed that only his beauty and his ability at sex made him worth anything, but he knew he was so much more to me than just that; it had given him a confidence that he hadn't had when I first met him.
"Kiss," Cynric said, "so the rest of us can have a turn."
I gave him an unfriendly look, but Nicky added, "Food's getting cold, Anita."
Nathaniel just leaned his extra height downward, curving his body toward me. I would have argued with everyone, but Nathaniel just went with it, which made me rise up on the balls of my feet and lean my face up toward his.
We kissed, a brush of lips that became a caress of mouths, but chaste by our usual standards. I drew back from the kiss, my hand behind his neck, gazing up into his eyes at that startlingly close distance. I wanted to push my tongue between his lips, to do so much more with my hands, but we had an audience, and especially the baby. There was a time when I wouldn't have worried about a baby that young, assuming he wouldn't pay attention, but Matthew, who was now three, belonged to a widow of one of Jean-Claude's vampires, and we babysat Matthew sometimes. He insisted that he get a kiss from me every time I saw him. But what creeped me was that he wanted a kiss on the mouth, like the other big boys, because all the big boys kiss 'Nita. His mother, Monica Vespucci, thought it was cute. I didn't. Matthew had obviously formed very firm opinions of grown-up behavior, at what I thought was too young an age to care.
Nathaniel and I had discussed how bothered I was about the toddler's attitude, so he just let me go with a smile, raising my hand up to lay his lips against my knuckles, and then moving back to start cutting the cooling bread into thick toast-size pieces.
Nicky and Cynric came forward at the same time. They looked at each other. Cynric was nearly as tall as Nicky now, but Nicky was still almost three times as broad across the shoulders and chest, which meant the younger man looked almost fragile beside him.
"I'm her blue tiger to call," Cynric said. His hands were in loose fists at his sides. He was visibly fighting to keep his shoulders from hunching up, or to keep from giving any of those secondary clues that men do before a fight starts.
"And I'm just her Bride of Dracula, her cannon fodder," Nicky said, but there was nothing in his voice that said he thought that was a bad thing, or a lesser thing.
"Exactly," Cynric said.
"If we were doing some formal vampire thing, you'd go first, but this is just us in our kitchen, and by shapeshifter rules I can still beat the shit out of you."
I must have made some involuntary movement, because Nathaniel said, "Anita." It made me look at him where he stood across the kitchen. He shook his head. I was supposed to let them work it out. I trusted Nathaniel's opinion in that moment, but if it came to a fight I was stopping it.
"Almost everyone in Micah's pard can beat him up, but they let him lead, they respect him as their Nimir-Raj." Cynric didn't sound angry, just trying to understand.
Nicky nodded. "True, but you don't just earn leadership by beating up people; it's one of the reasons I wasn't the Rex of my old lion pride. I probably could have won the fight with our king, but he was a better leader than I was, and I knew that without having to fight him."
Cynric frowned, face going all serious. "But your old Rex was a fighter and a mercenary; Micah isn't."
It was Gina who spoke; her face wasn't happy now. Her dark eyes were haunted as she moved toward them. "Micah saved me; he saved us all. He offered himself to Chimera in our place. He was powerful enough that Chimera couldn't force him into animal form as a punishment like he could Zeke. Micah changed into his leopard form and took the punishment, even though he didn't know if he'd ever come back to human form again. That's why his eyes are leopard eyes. His eyes were brown before." The tall woman hunched in on herself, hugging herself as if she were cold in the warm kitchen.
Zeke spoke in that gravelly deep voice from where he sat at the table. "You have no idea what it's like to be trapped for weeks in animal form. You think you will go mad, and then you hope you become all animal, because then at least you won't know, won't remember being human."
The baby in his lap had stopped laughing and was watching his father's face in that solemn baby way, as if he were filing it all away.
Cynric went to Gina and hugged her. "I'm so sorry, Gina, I didn't mean to make you sad." He hugged her tight, stroking her hair like you'd soothe a child. He looked at the werewolf. "I'm sorry, Zeke, I won't bring it up again."
Gina hugged him back, and turned, wiping tears away, and went back to her husband and baby.
Cynric motioned to Nicky. "You get your kiss first, and not because you'd win a fight with me. You're right, dominance isn't just about who's stronger, sometimes it's about being smarter, and I so am not today. I knew better than to bring all that up in front of them."
Nicky gripped his shoulder. "You learn a lot faster than I did at your age, Sin."
Cynric grinned and rolled his eyes. "Is that a compliment, or should I be insulted?"
Nicky gave him a little push with his hand, grinning back. The small push moved Cynric back by inches. Nathaniel was smiling at both of them. Our eyes met across the kitchen and his seemed to say, See, I told you they'd work it out. I could only smile back.
Nicky turned to me, face still shining with humor. He wrapped me in his big arms, pulling us close together. I had other men in my life who were taller than Nicky, but no one as muscled up. Truthfully, it was a little too much of a good thing for my preference, but it had just become Nicky, and I knew how to wrap my much smaller body around him, cuddling in among all those muscles, all that strength. Every man in my life had his own feel, his own taste, his own style of... most things. Nicky was like a muscle sandwich of manly goodness.
I went up on tiptoe to meet him, his body and chest wrapping around me, so it was like sliding up between all that muscle to reach his lips, and kiss. The kiss was gentle, and then he turned us so that his broad back was all that Gina, Harold, and little Chance would see. Nicky changed the kiss from gentle to something with tongue and teeth, until my fingers tensed in his back and I fought against digging nails into him where they'd see. I drew back, my voice breathy. "Enough, Nicky, enough."
He grinned down at me. "I may never be your main honey-bun, but I love that you react to me like that."
My vampire powers came through Jean-Claude, and he was descended from the bloodline of Belle Morte, Beautiful Death, and her power was seduction and sex, but something had changed between her and Jean-Claude, so that his power wasn't just sex, but had love in there somewhere, and my power went further in that direction, like some kind of vampire dating evolution. Belle had been able to make her "victims" obsessed with her, addicted to her, and she felt very little in return, but Jean-Claude had to be careful not to care too much when he used his vampire powers, and Nicky had been one of the last of my victims where I hadn't had enough control to save myself completely. It felt good to touch Nicky, good to have his arms wrapped around me. If you hadn't had anything to compare it to, you'd think it was love, as in True Love, but it wasn't. It was more a kind of obsession, and no matter what the movies and books say, obsession isn't love, though as he held me, face shining with the kiss, my heartbeat still rapid from the touch of his lips, it was kind of hard to tell the difference. I didn't feel about him the way that I felt about Nathaniel, or Micah, or Jean-Claude, but did that really make it not love, or just love of a different kind? I tried to stop poking at what love was, and wasn't, but... sometimes you just gotta poke the badger with the spoon; I'd just learned not to poke it too often. Badgers get pissy when you poke them too much.
Part of the power of the ardeur, the fire of Belle Morte's line, was that you could control someone only as much as you were willing to be controlled, only force them to love you as much as you loved them, only make them lust for you as much as you were willing to burn for them. Belle Morte hadn't had that side effect, but Jean-Claude had an edge of it that he could control; I had more problems, but then I was still alive, still human. Maybe that made it harder for me to be cold enough to force someone to want me, love me, without risking my own libido and heart?
Nicky moved out of my arms and Cynric moved into them. I was suddenly looking up into his blue eyes with their circle of navy blue around the pupils and the pale sky blue in its outer ring of color. The morning sunlight made his hair in its loose ponytail very blue. In dimmer light you could pretend it was that shade of black that had blue highlights, but the light was too bright. There was no pretending that that thick, straight hair wasn't a rich, deep shade of blue. It wasn't dyed, but the mark of his other form, his blue tiger.
I wrapped myself around him, the feel of him familiar so that we both knew where our hands went, our arms wrapped, our bodies touched. We'd spent a year discovering how it all worked between us, but... I looked up into that handsome, but too-young face, and was still almost as conflicted as I had been a year ago.
"What?" he asked softly.
I shook my head. "You just seem fragile after hugging Nicky."
Cynric laughed, and glanced at the other man. "Everyone's fragile after hugging Nicky."
I nodded. "Truth," I said.
Cynric hadn't been my victim of choice. The Mother of All Darkness had bound us together because she'd had a plan that needed me distracted and powerful, and the fact that he was sixteen and a virgin, and we didn't know each other, hadn't mattered to a being that wanted to drown the world in blood and death. What was one person's innocence compared to all the death and terror she'd brought over the thousands of years of her existence? If you thought about it that way, what she'd done to Cynric and me was almost kind - almost.
He turned back to me, face still shining with the laughter of joking with the other two men. I hadn't even heard what they were saying, until he said, "I'm young; I still have growing to do. I'm already taller."
"Enjoy the height, kid," Nicky said, "because that's all that's going to be bigger."
"So not," Cynric said.
"So too," Nicky said.
Nathaniel walked laughing between the men, carrying the freshly cut and richly scented bread on a serving plate. We all followed the wonderful aroma of the bread like lions scenting a gazelle. My stomach suddenly let me know just how hungry I was.
Zeke joined in the masculine laughter, and even Gina laughed, that higher, pleasant woman's laugh. The baby joined in, totally not getting the joke, but Chance had already learned that when everyone laughed, you laughed. He'd had a lot of practice at laughing living here. I smiled up at Cynric as he turned back to me. He laughed a lot more here than he had when he first came from Vegas. That was a good thing.
He studied my face, still smiling, but his eyes were trying to read mine. "What?" he asked, and even his voice held that edge of happiness.
I shook my head. "Kiss me, so we can eat."
He grinned, and it made his face look even younger and less perfect in some ways, but there was the faintest edge of smile lines beginning around his mouth. There was a grown-up in there beginning to carve its way out of the boy; I liked that it was laughter that was beginning to paint its way across his face, not sorrow. I'd had enough of that in my life a few years back. I liked standing here in the kitchen with the smell of breakfast all around, and the sunlight streaming bright and warm, and the man in my arms smiling down at me, while everyone else's laughter filled the air like some kind of happy perfume.
Cynric bent down that extra height that he'd been teasing Nicky about, and I went up on tiptoe to meet his kiss with mine. Was he taller than he had been last week? It seemed like I was higher up on my toes as his lips found mine. It was a gentle caress of lips, that never quite involved tongue, but there was some body English to it, and chaste was not a word I'd have used for it. I broke the kiss first, letting myself fall back to flat-footed. Cynric blinked at me, his eyes a little unfocused. "Wow," he whispered. I loved that he was still young enough to say it out loud. It made me smile.
"Good morning, Cynric."
"Anita," he said, and he gave me the look, it was his you-know-better look. It wasn't nearly as good as my look, or Micah's, but it was getting better.
I gave a little nod, smiled, shook my head, and said, "Good morning, Sin."
He grinned, and hugged me, tight, fast, not sexual, just - happy. We went to the table, and everyone knew where they sat at breakfast when it was just the eight of us. Chance's high chair took up the space of a chair, so we were eight, or would be when Micah joined us. I had a moment of wondering if Ares and Bram could smell the food outside on guard duty, and knew they could, but they'd eat after when their replacements clocked in. Micah came into the room smiling, bending over to kiss me, quick, chaste, squeezing the hand that I raised up to him. The sunlight flared in his eyes, bringing out the yellow and shrinking the green around the pupil so his eyes were golden for a moment. The look in those eyes promised that later there'd be kisses that weren't so chaste. He took his seat beside me, and we held hands under the table. Nathaniel sat on the other side of me, and I gave him my hand under the table, too, so that for a moment the three of us all held hands. Now, we were eight. It wasn't a bad number to be.