"She's gone, but you are here."

"Yeah, that's what I said. I won, she lost. I'm alive, she's dead."

He sighed and shook his head. "You talk about her as if she were a body you could stab and watch die, Anita, but she was pure spirit. She housed herself in the bodies of her followers, but she did not have to use a body."

"Yeah, the Lover of Death was able to pull that trick off, too, but he had to keep his original body unharmed, just like the Traveller, one of your other council members."

"The Mother of All Darkness is not a council member, Anita."

"She was their queen, I know."

"No, you don't know. You absorbed her, drank her down, and perhaps she is dead, but her power is not, because you took it into yourself."

"We all know that Anita took the power into herself," Damian said.

"We don't all know any such thing," Bobby Lee said.

We looked at him. "Oh come on, Bobby Lee, don't tell me you didn't know."

"I did, but I don't want you all discussing this out of this room in front of everybody."

"Kaazim already knows."

"Still, one of the debates against Jean-Claude being king is that it was you who killed the big bad, not him."

"Whatever belongs to the servant belongs to the master," Kaazim said.

"Yes, but the vampires that are against Jean-Claude argue that it's the necromancer that's the master, not the vampire."

Kaazim nodded. "They use Damian as proof that Anita makes vampire servants."

"You mean some of the vamps think Jean-Claude is my servant, too?"

"Yes."

"A vampire can only have one servant at a time."

"As a vampire, you can only have one animal to call at a time, but you have nearly a dozen animals to call, so it is not a large stretch of logic to think you could have more than one vampire servant."

I wanted to argue with him, but I wasn't sure how. "Jean-Claude is not my servant."

"How can you be certain of that?"

"It's totally not how my power works with Damian, and he is my servant."

"As your connection is different with Nathaniel, your leopard to call, and Jason, your wolf to call, and all your tigers to call."

I opened my mouth, wanted to argue again, but wasn't sure I could work my way to a logical argument. I wrapped Nathaniel's arms tighter around me and squeezed Damian's hand. I knew it wasn't true about Jean-Claude, but I couldn't prove it by talking, only by how it felt, and feelings make piss-poor testimony.

"And what does any of that have to do with what's happening with Damian?" Bobby Lee asked, while I was trying to think my way through the logic maze that Kaazim had put me in.

"Anita absorbed the power of the Mother of Us All, but she is young and inexperienced. It is as if you gave a baby an AR rifle. It is a perfectly safe tool in the right hands, but in the wrong hands, it can do much harm."

"What?" I asked.

"What if you are causing Damian's problem, Anita? The power that is flowing through you, that you don't know how to control. He is your vampire servant and you have avoided him in nearly every way, but a vampire's power is drawn to its servants. You ignore him, but your power doesn't."

"I am not doing this to him."

"This doesn't feel like Anita's power," Damian said.

"Have you not listened to me? It is not Anita's power. It merely resides inside her, but it is not her."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Wait," Damian said. "You're saying that the power is the Mother of All Darkness's power."

"Almost," Kaazim said.

"What do you mean, almost?" I asked.

"I'm not saying it's the Mother of All Darkness's power. I'm saying it is the Mother of All Darkness."

"No, she tried to take over my body, but I stopped her."

"Did you, or did you help her do the very thing she wanted to do?"

I shook my head. "She's dead."

"You ate her power, her magic, her spirit, and that was all she was, just spirit. Perhaps it didn't work the way she wanted it to, but she is inside you."

"She is not in control of me, and that's what she wanted."

"True, but if she's in there, Anita, she is trying to figure out how you work, like a new car. Maybe what is happening to Damian is her learning to use the gas pedal, or figuring out how to drift around a turn."

"No," I said, and sounded very sure of it.

"Then if it is not the Mother, it is her power, and by your not forging a tighter bond with Damian, that power is treating him like a runaway vampire."

"Runaway vampire, what the fuck does that mean?"

"When she was more physical and less spirit, sometimes vampires she wanted close to her would run away from her. They would run as far away as they could go. She used to send us to fetch them, but then her power grew. She was able to hunt them in their dreams, to torment them until they did what she wished."

I thought about everything he'd said and finally asked, "What do I do to make him closer to me? I mean, he's right here, holding my hand."

"You are of Jean-Claude's bloodline, or your power is, which means lust is your coin to exchange for goods, Anita."

I looked at him.

"Why that look, Anita? You have had sex with Damian before, and he seems handsome enough for a man. Why do you run from him so?"

"I promised Cardinale and Damian that I would honor their monogamy."

"She took her clothes, Anita. I think they're done," Bobby Lee said.

I shook my head. "Cardinale is like the ultimate drama queen, an extreme girl."

"What does that mean?" Damian asked.

"That I wouldn't put it past her to move her stuff out as a sort of test to see how much you love her."

"You mean she wants me to see how much I'll miss her."

"Something like that."

He shook his head. "I spent centuries crawling for She-Who-Made-Me. I won't do it again." He motioned around the room, which looked like it belonged to anyone but him. "I've crawled enough for Cardinale already."

"If the relationship is at an end, then your promise to honor their monogamy is at an end," Kaazim said.

"I've felt how much you love her," I said.

"You're holding my hand. I'll lower my shields. You can feel exactly what I'm feeling."

"If you lower shields now, I'll feel it, too," Nathaniel said.

"I know," Damian said.

"Why do you want me to know how you feel about Cardinale?" I asked.

"Why are you nervous, Anita?" Kaazim asked.

"I'm not sure."

"If you don't want me, that is your right." Damian pulled away from my hand and lost the physical connection to both of us. He was still covered in his own dried blood like an extra from a horror show. I guess all three of us looked like horror show escapees.

"It's not that I don't want you, Damian. You're beautiful."

"Then why do you hesitate?" Kaazim asked.

"This is really none of your business."

"When you asked for my help, you made it my business."

"Well, thank you, and now back off."

"You destroyed our queen, Anita. You ended our way of life and our reason for existence. Now, you are our dark queen, and Jean-Claude is our king. We are your bodyguards. How can your well-being not be our business?"

When he put it that way, it was hard to bitch at him, but I so wanted to. "And how is who I have sex with your business?"

"If you were descended from a bloodline that thrived on violence, I would tell you to hurt him. If a bloodline of terror, I would say make him fear you. If anger, then rage at him. But it is lust that holds your power."

"I can feed on anger," I said.

"Then make him angry, and bind him to you with screams of rage. Perhaps hit him. It will give you more food to siphon out of him."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather just have sex," Damian said.

"I vote sex," Nathaniel said. I waited for Damian to protest that sex would include all three of us, but he just kept looking at me.

"Anita," Bobby Lee said, "why are you being weird about this?"

"I don't think avoiding adding another name to my list of regular lovers is weird. I think I'm over my limit for giving enough attention to the ones I have."

"If that's all that's worrying you, Anita, I'm a big, grown-up vampire. I'm not expecting hearts and flowers." Damian looked around the room at the decor and added, "I think I've actually had enough flowers for a while."

"I don't believe you."

He held out his hand. "Touch me, lower your shields and I'll prove it."

"Anita, just touch him and then we'll know how he really feels. No commitments, no promises, just touch him," Nathaniel said, hugging me close and saying the last almost against my cheek.

I sighed, then reached for Damian. His hand was strangely warm for his having lost so much blood and not having fed yet. We wrapped our hands together, looked into each other's eyes, and lowered our shields. Nathaniel held on to me but made no move to touch the vampire.

I was very carefully feeling nothing much, but Damian was feeling a lot of things. Sad, tired, angry, confused, but mostly tired. Cardinale had done what a lot of intensely jealous people do; she'd worn him down, worn him out emotionally. I tried to feel that love that I'd gotten a glimpse of just a few hours earlier in his office, but I couldn't find it. What did that even mean? That it hadn't been real, or that Cardinale had used up the last of it, as if love could be a cup that you both filled up with love, kindness, joy, sex, all the things that made you a couple, but if you could fill the cup up, you could also drain it dry with cruelty, sorrow, pain, jealousy, and anger.

"I'm so sorry, Damian," I said, finally.

"We're so sorry," Nathaniel said.

"I just feel used up. I can't do this anymore," he said.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Cardinale and me."

"You feel done."

He nodded. "I think I am."

"Okay then, let's get cleaned up."

We were still hooked up emotionally so I felt the flash of hope, and then the desire right behind it. His need for sex with me was so intense that it made me catch my breath for a second. I slammed my shields back in place, and we were suddenly just holding hands. It was nice, but it wasn't the intimacy of a second before.

Nathaniel's body jerked against me as if my slamming the shields had actually hurt him. "Are you all right?" I asked.

"Warn me next time we're all hooked up before you do that, Anita; that fucking hurt."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt anyone."