Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(71)

“We were victorious, ma petite.”

“Whatever attacked us tonight, I’ve never felt a vampire like it, and it left its power in the audience. I didn’t even know that mass hypnosis was possible without the vampire being bodily in the building.”

“It was more curse than vampiric powers,” Jean-Claude said.

I looked at him. “Curses don’t work like that; at best you can influence one person at a time.”

“You speak of modern magic, ma petite, but what I felt tonight was old magic.”

“Older than you know,” Jake said from the hallway. Wicked stepped into the room to clear the way for Jake to move into the doorway. Jake looked short compared to him, but in the exercise clothes he’d had to come to the club wearing, the muscles that he usually hid under layers were on full display. Wicked and his brother Truth, like Richard, always looked muscled in any clothes, but Jake didn’t. His physicality, like everything else about him, wasn’t noticeable unless he wanted it to be or didn’t care if it was. Jake more than any of the other Harlequin made me remember they’d been spies as well as assassins.

“What do you mean, older than we know?” I asked.

“Not you, Anita, older than Jean-Claude would know.”

Jean-Claude went very still beside us. It wasn’t human stillness or even the way snakes can freeze in place, but like I was suddenly holding the hand of a marble statue, pale and perfect, but not alive. I fought the urge to shake him to make him blink, anything for him to not be standing there like he would never move again or need to breathe. The old vampires could just cease, like if I let go of his hand and blinked he’d just vanish.

His voice came distant and careful as if he was trying to move as little as possible when he spoke.

“That would be very old indeed.”

“You are not yet seven hundred years old, Jean-Claude, that is not so very old.”

I looked at Jake’s ageless face. If you’d asked me how old he was I would have said he hadn’t seen fifty yet, and barely forty, but I knew he was one of the oldest of the Harlequin. I knew for certain that some of them were thousands of years old, which meant . . . “How old, Jake?” I asked.

“Millions,” he said.

“You aren’t that old,” I said.

“I am not, but the power that I felt tonight is,” he said.

“What are you hinting at?” Richard asked.

Jake’s eyes flicked to him, then back to Jean-Claude and me. “How much do you want me to say in front of others, Jean-Claude?”

“I asked you to stop hinting and tell us what you know,” Richard said.

“Technically you asked what I was hinting at,” Jake said.

Richard’s skin ran warm with anger. It was like my hand had just been plunged into warm, nearly hot water. “I am your Ulfric; if I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it.”

“You are indeed my Ulfric; what would you have of me?” The tone was neutral, but somehow it translated to Go fuck yourself. I’d been accused of having my neutral tone imply the same sentiment, so I really couldn’t throw stones. The thing is, I did it by accident; Jake didn’t do anything by accident.

Richard’s skin ran hot and trailed power up my arm in a skin-tingling rush that made the wolf inside me materialize behind my eyes. She opened golden wolf eyes surrounded by white fur and shook herself like a dog getting up from a long nap.

I pulled free of Richard, and the wolf sat down as if she were looking at us both, waiting for us to figure out what we were doing. Weren’t we all? Nathaniel drew me in closer to him so that I could bury my face against the bare skin of his shoulder. Usually that was enough to make the wolf fade, but not tonight. Watching Richard glare at Jake, who looked calm and unruffled, I realized that things might have been happening among the werewolves that I didn’t know, because leaving Richard alone had meant leaving the pack alone, too.

Jean-Claude remained cold and still in my other hand. What the fuck was going on? I drew my hand out of his, which made him blink and turn toward me and like magic he was “alive” again. “Ma petite, do not pull away, s’il te pla?t.” I knew that last part meant “please.”

Nathaniel drew me closer to Jean-Claude, whom he was still touching. Richard was back for one night and I’d pulled away from Jean-Claude and him. Only Nathaniel was still holding on to us—

well, two of us. He and Richard didn’t hold hands.

I reached out to Jean-Claude, and he took my hand in his with a squeeze and a smile. I felt his relief that I closed the distance and didn’t force him to stand there alone in the face of Richard’s return. I squeezed his hand back and promised myself I wouldn’t let whatever shit Richard brought with him tonight distract me from the happiness that we’d all built together without the Ulfric.

“Tell us whatever you know about the power that attacked us tonight,” Richard said.

“You are here tonight, Ulfric, but unless you will be here to see this tale to its completion, I do not wish to speak in front of you.”

“How dare you defy me.”

“Has he defied you before?” Wicked asked.

That made Richard stop and think, and then he shook his head, saying, “No, he’s stayed as neutral as pack politics allow.”