“Look at me,” he said.

   “Look at us,” Damian said, but I couldn’t look at both of them at the same time. I stared down into the drowning lavender of Nathaniel’s eyes and couldn’t look away. Jean-Claude couldn’t capture me with his eyes—no vampire could—but staring down into Nathaniel’s eyes I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t do anything but stare down as his eyes started to glow like that streak of lavender in a sunset. I fell into that glowing sunset as if the world had become light and all I could do was fall into the light and wait for something to catch me.

14

   I WOKE IN a welter of sheets on the bed in our room. I didn’t remember leaving the bathroom, or getting into the bed. Nathaniel’s arm pinned me around the waist, his hair lying in a tangled mass as if he’d gone to sleep with it wet. Damian lay on the other side of him. He was on his back, his face peaceful with sleep. Nathaniel’s other arm was flung across his waist, so he had gone to sleep hugging us both. I lay there trying to remember what had happened earlier. I remembered getting in the shower. I remembered some foreplay, and then . . . nothing.

   My body was letting me know that we’d had sex, because what goes in has to come out eventually. From the feel of things we hadn’t used condoms. I didn’t use them with Nathaniel, but I would have with Damian. Had I? Had I just had multiple intercourse with Nathaniel and that was what I was feeling? I’d check the trash can in the bedroom and bathroom to make certain. If I didn’t find a used condom in any of them, then I’d know we all forgot the most important safety rule of safe sex. I was on birth control and neither the vampire nor the lycanthrope could carry any sexually transmitted diseases, but still . . . what the fuck were we all thinking?

   I tried to sit up, but Nathaniel snuggled tighter so that his arm pinned me to the bed and tight to his body. Damian hadn’t moved at all. I looked at him and held my breath while I looked to see if he was breathing, but his chest never moved. Vampires didn’t have to breathe. I stretched out a hand across Nathaniel’s shoulders until I could touch Damian’s arm. His skin was cool to the touch, and for the first time ever, I found my lover’s flesh gone cold comforting. He’d died like a good vampire should. There’d be no nightmares for us the rest of today, so at least whatever we’d done had helped.

   But what had we done to cure him? I couldn’t remember a damned thing after we got in the shower. Okay, we got in the shower, and then . . . What?

   I lay there with Nathaniel hugging us both while he slept, and there was something. A memory, a thought, a . . . something. It was like the harder I thought at it, the more my mind shied away from it. Sex, even sex with the ardeur, had never been like this unless something else was interfering with us. The Mother of All Darkness could cause blackouts, and so had Belle Morte and the Lover of Death. Two of the three were dead, because I’d helped kill them; that left Belle Morte, but this was too subtle for her. She liked you to know that she’d fucked you over. So if it wasn’t another vampire, then why couldn’t I remember what had happened?

   I glanced at the bedside clock and had to do a double take. It said it was almost one p.m., which meant we’d been in here almost seven hours. That wasn’t possible. The first trickle of fear tightened my stomach and made it a little harder to take a deep breath. The last time I’d lost this much time had been because of the vampire council, or Mommy Darkest. We’d destroyed the power of the first and killed the second. I remembered Kaazim’s words, that the Mother’s power was inside me, and that her power might be acting in ways that I didn’t understand at all.

   I tried to move and again Nathaniel’s arm tightened around me, holding me in place, but this time it panicked me. I had one of those claustrophobic moments where I had to get out of the bed. I had to find out what had happened and how long we had really been in this room. I was able to sit up, but Nathaniel’s arm squeezed around my waist, so that moving off the bed wasn’t happening. Nothing was wrong, no one was hurting me, but I was suddenly choking on panic. I pushed at Nathaniel’s shoulder hard enough that he raised his head and blinked at me groggily.

   “Up!” I said, my voice strident.

   “Up what?” he mumbled.

   “I need up, out of bed.”

   He rose up on one elbow, letting me go and asking, “What’s wrong?”

   I looked down into his lavender eyes and I remembered his eyes glowing in the shower. I backed out of the bed so fast I half-fell to the floor. He came to the edge of the bed and looked down at me.

   “Anita, what’s wrong?”

   “I don’t know.” But that was a lie. I did know, or thought I did. I just didn’t want to say it out loud.

   “Did you have a nightmare?” he asked.

   I got to my feet and shook my head. “No. Did you?”

   “No, I slept great. How about you?”

   “I’m not sure.”

   “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

   “What do you remember from after we got in the shower?” I asked.

   He gave a very self-satisfied grin, like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. “Everything.”

   “Define everything.”

   “The sex was amazing, even for us.”

   “We had sex with Damian,” I said.

   Nathaniel’s smile began to dim. “Are you saying you don’t remember having sex with Damian?”

   I shook my head.

   He sat up in the bed, and without him to hold Damian in place the vampire slid down the pillows to lie awkward as a broken doll. The angle of his head alone let me know for certain that he was dead to the world, because asleep he’d have changed position. The angle of his neck was so awkward that it looked almost broken. If I could have changed it without getting back on the bed I’d have done it, but at that second nothing would have gotten me back on the bed. I was so scared my skin was cold.

   My voice was only a little breathy as I said, “I don’t remember the actual sex.”

   He frowned and sat up in bed, the sheets pooling behind him so that he was nude as he sat there looking concerned. “I don’t understand.”

   “Neither do I,” I said.

   “You look scared.”

   I nodded.

   “Are you scared of . . . me?”

   “I’m scared of whatever made me not remember the last few hours.”

   “Are you seriously saying you don’t remember any of the sex?”

   “The last thing I remember was your eyes glowing and you said, I want this.”

   “Then we had amazing sex,” he said.