Skin Trade

I saw Bernardo standing over us, uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure if I was all right or not. I spoke to the uncertainty on his face. “I’m all right, Bernardo.”

“Your eyes,” he said, “they’re all brown and black light, like a vampire.”

I kissed Domino’s forehead and tested the truth of his words. I could taste Domino’s pulse like candy on my tongue. I had that urge to plunge teeth into flesh and see if the candy squirted red. You can’t be a living vampire, but whatever I was becoming was close.

But I didn’t just taste blood and food. I felt the other tigers. Not just the one lying in my arms. I felt them all. I turned my head, and the moment Bibiana saw my eyes, she was afraid. Her fear appealed to both the vampire part of me and the beast. Fear means food. If something is afraid of you, you can control it, or kill it.

I called Crispin to me. Not by using tiger powers, but the way a vampire calls its animal to call. “Crispin, come to me.”

Bibiana tried to hold him by the hand. I said, “Let him go, or I’ll see how many tigers I can call today.”

“You would not dare try to steal the animal of another master vampire.”

“You mean, like you didn’t try to steal away the human servant of another master vampire.” I sat up, and Domino curled around me, utterly passive, utterly content.

She didn’t let go, so I reached out to her as a vampire would. A vampire that could call tigers. She let go of Crispin, and held her hand as if his skin had burned her.

Bibiana’s power reached out, but not to us. Rick came to her hand, and the far door opened, and more of the white tigers came to stand with their queen. But I didn’t care. Crispin had taken my hand. I sat there with his hand in mine, and Domino curled around my waist, and it was nearly perfect, like being wrapped in your favorite blanket at the end of a long day’s work. I’d learned that the ardeur could be about friendship and not just romance. In that moment, it was even more than that. It was about that feeling of belonging, of being home.

Then I felt a different energy, in all that sea of white tiger power. I felt a thread of something new. Something unique. I didn’t know what it was until the blue tiger inside me stepped from the shadows and started to pace forward.

She was truly blue with black stripes, a deep cobalt color, almost a black, but it wasn’t. She was true blue, and she’d smelled something that belonged to her.

He stepped out from the rest, a puzzled look on his young face, because he was young. Young enough to make me start to swim up to the surface of myself. Young enough for me to know that whatever I had just done to Domino might destroy him.

I stared at the short dark blue hair, a perfect match to the tiger inside me. I stared into his eyes that were two shades of blue, as if Crispin’s eyes had married with Jean-Claude’s, and knew he was mine to call.

I asked, “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” he said.

“Shit,” I said.

35

EDWARD’S VOICE IN my ear said, “We’ve got Max’s son, Victor, out here with bodyguards. We’re letting Victor through, but we’re keeping the bodyguards.”

“We’ve got another half-dozen tigers in here with us. They came out of the far rooms,” Bernardo said.

“This just keeps getting better,” Edward said, and the sarcasm came through the earpiece loud and clear.

The blue tiger inside me pressed closer to the surface of me. I had an image of her face against mine, trying to get closer so she could sniff the air.

The doors opened and a tall, broad-shouldered man in an expensive tailored suit strode through. His white hair was cut very short, and in one of those cuts that looked like it had been done one hair at a time. He actually wore those pale yellow sunglasses over his eyes. The glasses weren’t dark enough to do a damn thing against the Vegas sun. Was he trying to pass for human? If that was the idea, then he needed to tone down the energy that boiled off him.

That wash of energy turned the blue tiger snarling toward him. I would have fallen forward if Domino and Crispin hadn’t caught me.

“You’re going to bring her beast, Mother,” he said, and he kept coming toward us. The blue tiger didn’t like that. The white one did. Black was just content to cuddle Domino. The blue tiger tried to turn me toward the boy. The white liked Victor. The black was fine. It was like having three different roommates inside me, and all of them liked different guys.

“You have no right to interfere,” Bibiana said.

“Father warned you against this,” he said, and he was at our side. He knelt in the dark suit, his eyes hidden behind the glasses, but no amount of colored glass could hide the power spilling off him. The power was enough that the white tiger knew what we’d find behind the glasses.

I came to my knees. Crispin had to let go of my hand, but he touched my shoulder. Domino slipped lower down my body like a reluctant piece of clothing. My hands went to those glasses.

Victor caught my hands in his. He stared into my face as if he were trying to see through me. He raised my hands to his face and sniffed my skin. “Impossible.”

“I told you, Victor, she carries them all,” Bibiana said.

He rose up from my skin. I could see his eyes clearly, but the pale yellow lenses stole what I needed to see. My voice sounded like a stranger in my head when I said, “Take them off.”

He blinked at me. “What?”

I repeated it. “Take them off.”

“Why?” he asked, and let go of my hands.

I shook my head because I wasn’t sure, and then the answer came, “I have to see your eyes.”

“Why?” he said, again.

I reached upward, and this time he didn’t stop me. I touched the thin wire frames of his glasses and pulled them gently down, until I was looking into pale blue tiger eyes. They were a deeper blue than Crispin’s eyes, but still a color and a shape that you wouldn’t mistake for human unless you wanted not to see what was there.

I knelt in front of him, with his glasses in my hands, and stared up into those eyes. But it wasn’t just the eyes; they were only a sign of what my tigress needed. It was the power in him. I hadn’t understood until that moment how weak every other weretiger I’d touched had been.

Victor stared down at me with those perfect eyes. He swallowed hard enough that I heard it. His voice was a little shaky as he said, “You really are another queen, aren’t you?”

I leaned in toward him. I wasn’t aiming for a kiss. It was more as if there were gravity to his power, and it drew me in.

He stood up, stumbling a little. I reached for him, and it was Crispin who drew me back. He and Domino pulled me back into their arms, but it was like I could hear music in my head that I’d never heard before. Victor’s power drowned out their touch.

Victor put the glasses back on and turned to his mother. “Father expressly forbade you from calling her power until he had met with her.”

“I am Chang here, not you,” she said.

“You rule the clan of the white tiger. I have never disputed that, but Father has put me in charge of other parts of his domain. When you put the tigers’ power above the good of this city and the other citizens, then you have broken your master, my father’s, rules.”

“Would you deny Domino and Cynric the only queen of their clan they may ever meet?”

“I would never stand in the way of another clan’s destiny, Mother, but you ca

Something about the way he said it made me look at the two weretigers still beside me. Crispin had looked at me with that devotion before, but to see it in Domino’s face was just wrong. A look of puppyish devotion in that angry, arrogant face; it hurt my heart to see it. Not because I cared for him, because you can’t care for someone you’ve just met, but because no adult should look at anyone like that. It was a look I’d seen before, on the faces of vampires. I was a true necromancer and called to all the dead, but I wasn’t supposed to call to the wereanimals like this, not like this.