Page 24 of Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 29)

“I thought vampires couldn’t carry a pregnancy,” McKinnon said.

I said, “They can’t, but we’ve got a surrogate lined up. If it works it will be the first surrogate for a vampire couple in the world.”

“And you’re good with all this?” he asked Dolph.

He nodded. “I am. Erica is only twenty years dead, she can talk all the same memories that Lucille and I have. Would I have chosen differently, yes, but I’ve never seen my son happier, and that’s gotta count for something.”

“That’s great, but last we talked in detail you said that you suspected that damn vampire had more of a hold on Anita than she let on, and if you learned he could see through her eyes at a crime scene you’d yank her badge if you could.”

I stared up at Dolph. “Really?” I said.

He looked embarrassed. “I wasn’t rational about vampires and shapeshifters back then, you know that. I’ll never be able to apologize enough for some of what I did while I was working through my grief about what I thought my son’s life would be versus the reality. You could have had my badge for some of what I did to you and your werewolf friend.”

“We worked it out,” I said.

“We did.” He looked at the other man. “I know she can contact her people mind to mind. She did it in front of me, Zerbrowski, and the SWAT people she works with most often. Not sure any of us shared that information with the other cops.”

“You’re all that loyal to her?”

“She’s earned it.”

“Even from the SWAT officers?”

“Apparently so, or more of the other cops would have talked by now,” Dolph said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

McKinnon looked away from me again, hiding his eyes. He did worry I could use Jean-Claude’s powers to read him or maybe even bespell him. I filed it away for another day.

“Does it matter?”

“It does, but right this second nothing matters as much as contacting my people, but put a pin in it, McKinnon, because I will ask again.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

I didn’t have to reach out to Jean-Claude, just focus on him more. He breathed through me, letting me know he’d heard most of it. He was incredibly careful when I was with the police, because there were a surprising number of them that had at least low-level psychic ability. It was their gut instinct that kept them from going down that dark alley, though they didn’t know why, and later they’d find the bad guy waiting for them. “Magic” could make their skin creep, or itspiked through them in a rush of adrenaline like an attack. Either way, Jean-Claude had learned to work around it more than anyone else I was metaphysically connected to, but then he’d had centuries more practice except for Damian. The redheaded vampire was over five hundred years older than Jean-Claude, but he’d never be a master vampire like Jean-Claude or even like Asher. Damian had no animal to call and had never even tried to make a human servant like I was for Jean-Claude. Who’s best at something isn’t always about age and experience, sometimes it’s about ability. Jean-Claude had it, Damian didn’t.

Out loud I said, “You can be louder in my head than this, the room is all friendlies.”

Jean-Claude just opened the link, and I was suddenly inside his head. It was disorienting enough that I reached out to steady myself but wasn’t standing close enough to anything. I felt a hand on my arm and wasn’t sure if it was Dolph or McKinnon, because my “eyes” were somewhere else. I saw the dressing table in front of him and had a sense of the mirror surrounded by lights. He was backstage at Guilty Pleasures; I’d almost forgotten he was going to do one of his rare stage appearances, which explained the array of eye shadows and other makeup scattered in front of him. He usually just introduced the acts and spoke with the crowd in between the other dancers taking the stage, but once a month he took center stage. It had been about every three to four months, but some of the older vampires had complained he was their king and kings shouldn’t shake their booty onstage, but since they bitched, he did it once a month instead of four times a year. There was more than one reason we worked as a couple; a shared finger in the eye to other people’s expectations was one of them.

“You okay, Blake?” McKinnon’s voice.

Dolph’s voice was closer. “She’s okay.”

Knowing it was Dolph being such a good sport about the vampire powers helped me draw back enough to let Jean-Claude know whatI’d learned in the last few minutes without being so far into his head that I couldn’t tell where he and I were separate. The ability to share this deeply, almost a body swap, had been one of the things that terrified me in the beginning. It still wasn’t my favorite part, but because we could do it, Jean-Claude knew the danger that he and all our people were in like magic, or maybe by magic. The line between psychic abilities and magic was thin and getting thinner, or maybe my ability to call my abilities psychic as opposed to magic was just the lady protesting too much.

My hands touched the makeup on my... his hands touched his makeup table, and he drew me out far enough that I was hovering like an invisible camera just above him. It was always the visual if we stayed separate from each other, like we hovered in the air and gazed down. Jean-Claude had done dramatic stage makeup around his eyes; something in all the blues, blacks, grays, and silver coaxed his eyes from a blue so dark it was almost black to something lighter, if you could call cobalt blue light. It was as if he’d taken his eyes from the blue just before the last light fades into night to twilight, when the sky hovers between cerulean and sapphire. It took me a few seconds to take in the perfect black curls that fell around his shoulders, or that he was wearing a shirt I’d never seen on him. The thought came through my head that it was a costume that went with the makeup.

“Anita, you okay?” Dolph said.

I closed my eyes for real, which didn’t do a damn thing to make me not see Jean-Claude inside my head. Sweet Jesus, and I was about to marry him. I was in love with him, had cohabitated with him for years and still there were moments like this when his beauty undid me. No wonder I’d fought so long and hard not to fall under his spell.

“I’ll see you at the club tonight,” I said. I knew it sounded abrupt, but it was one way to fight through the reaction I was having. Hell, I had used being cranky and unimpressed as a way to fight off my reactions to Jean-Claude for years.

“Is she still talking to someone else?” McKinnon asked.

“Yes,” Dolph said.

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