Nathaniel and I had discussed how bothered I was about the toddler's attitude, so he just let me go with a smile, raising my hand up to lay his lips against my knuckles, and then moving back to start cutting the cooling bread into thick toast-size pieces.
Nicky and Cynric came forward at the same time. They looked at each other. Cynric was nearly as tall as Nicky now, but Nicky was still almost three times as broad across the shoulders and chest, which meant the younger man looked almost fragile beside him.
"I'm her blue tiger to call," Cynric said. His hands were in loose fists at his sides. He was visibly fighting to keep his shoulders from hunching up, or to keep from giving any of those secondary clues that men do before a fight starts.
"And I'm just her Bride of Dracula, her cannon fodder," Nicky said, but there was nothing in his voice that said he thought that was a bad thing, or a lesser thing.
"Exactly," Cynric said.
"If we were doing some formal vampire thing, you'd go first, but this is just us in our kitchen, and by shapeshifter rules I can still beat the shit out of you."
I must have made some involuntary movement, because Nathaniel said, "Anita." It made me look at him where he stood across the kitchen. He shook his head. I was supposed to let them work it out. I trusted Nathaniel's opinion in that moment, but if it came to a fight I was stopping it.
"Almost everyone in Micah's pard can beat him up, but they let him lead, they respect him as their Nimir-Raj." Cynric didn't sound angry, just trying to understand.
Nicky nodded. "True, but you don't just earn leadership by beating up people; it's one of the reasons I wasn't the Rex of my old lion pride. I probably could have won the fight with our king, but he was a better leader than I was, and I knew that without having to fight him."
Cynric frowned, face going all serious. "But your old Rex was a fighter and a mercenary; Micah isn't."
It was Gina who spoke; her face wasn't happy now. Her dark eyes were haunted as she moved toward them. "Micah saved me; he saved us all. He offered himself to Chimera in our place. He was powerful enough that Chimera couldn't force him into animal form as a punishment like he could Zeke. Micah changed into his leopard form and took the punishment, even though he didn't know if he'd ever come back to human form again. That's why his eyes are leopard eyes. His eyes were brown before." The tall woman hunched in on herself, hugging herself as if she were cold in the warm kitchen.
Zeke spoke in that gravelly deep voice from where he sat at the table. "You have no idea what it's like to be trapped for weeks in animal form. You think you will go mad, and then you hope you become all animal, because then at least you won't know, won't remember being human."
The baby in his lap had stopped laughing and was watching his father's face in that solemn baby way, as if he were filing it all away.
Cynric went to Gina and hugged her. "I'm so sorry, Gina, I didn't mean to make you sad." He hugged her tight, stroking her hair like you'd soothe a child. He looked at the werewolf. "I'm sorry, Zeke, I won't bring it up again."
Gina hugged him back, and turned, wiping tears away, and went back to her husband and baby.
Cynric motioned to Nicky. "You get your kiss first, and not because you'd win a fight with me. You're right, dominance isn't just about who's stronger, sometimes it's about being smarter, and I so am not today. I knew better than to bring all that up in front of them."
Nicky gripped his shoulder. "You learn a lot faster than I did at your age, Sin."
Cynric grinned and rolled his eyes. "Is that a compliment, or should I be insulted?"
Nicky gave him a little push with his hand, grinning back. The small push moved Cynric back by inches. Nathaniel was smiling at both of them. Our eyes met across the kitchen and his seemed to say, See, I told you they'd work it out. I could only smile back.
Nicky turned to me, face still shining with humor. He wrapped me in his big arms, pulling us close together. I had other men in my life who were taller than Nicky, but no one as muscled up. Truthfully, it was a little too much of a good thing for my preference, but it had just become Nicky, and I knew how to wrap my much smaller body around him, cuddling in among all those muscles, all that strength. Every man in my life had his own feel, his own taste, his own style of... most things. Nicky was like a muscle sandwich of manly goodness.
I went up on tiptoe to meet him, his body and chest wrapping around me, so it was like sliding up between all that muscle to reach his lips, and kiss. The kiss was gentle, and then he turned us so that his broad back was all that Gina, Harold, and little Chance would see. Nicky changed the kiss from gentle to something with tongue and teeth, until my fingers tensed in his back and I fought against digging nails into him where they'd see. I drew back, my voice breathy. "Enough, Nicky, enough."
He grinned down at me. "I may never be your main honey-bun, but I love that you react to me like that."
My vampire powers came through Jean-Claude, and he was descended from the bloodline of Belle Morte, Beautiful Death, and her power was seduction and sex, but something had changed between her and Jean-Claude, so that his power wasn't just sex, but had love in there somewhere, and my power went further in that direction, like some kind of vampire dating evolution. Belle had been able to make her "victims" obsessed with her, addicted to her, and she felt very little in return, but Jean-Claude had to be careful not to care too much when he used his vampire powers, and Nicky had been one of the last of my victims where I hadn't had enough control to save myself completely. It felt good to touch Nicky, good to have his arms wrapped around me. If you hadn't had anything to compare it to, you'd think it was love, as in True Love, but it wasn't. It was more a kind of obsession, and no matter what the movies and books say, obsession isn't love, though as he held me, face shining with the kiss, my heartbeat still rapid from the touch of his lips, it was kind of hard to tell the difference. I didn't feel about him the way that I felt about Nathaniel, or Micah, or Jean-Claude, but did that really make it not love, or just love of a different kind? I tried to stop poking at what love was, and wasn't, but... sometimes you just gotta poke the badger with the spoon; I'd just learned not to poke it too often. Badgers get pissy when you poke them too much.
Part of the power of the ardeur, the fire of Belle Morte's line, was that you could control someone only as much as you were willing to be controlled, only force them to love you as much as you loved them, only make them lust for you as much as you were willing to burn for them. Belle Morte hadn't had that side effect, but Jean-Claude had an edge of it that he could control; I had more problems, but then I was still alive, still human. Maybe that made it harder for me to be cold enough to force someone to want me, love me, without risking my own libido and heart?
Nicky moved out of my arms and Cynric moved into them. I was suddenly looking up into his blue eyes with their circle of navy blue around the pupils and the pale sky blue in its outer ring of color. The morning sunlight made his hair in its loose ponytail very blue. In dimmer light you could pretend it was that shade of black that had blue highlights, but the light was too bright. There was no pretending that that thick, straight hair wasn't a rich, deep shade of blue. It wasn't dyed, but the mark of his other form, his blue tiger.
I wrapped myself around him, the feel of him familiar so that we both knew where our hands went, our arms wrapped, our bodies touched. We'd spent a year discovering how it all worked between us, but... I looked up into that handsome, but too-young face, and was still almost as conflicted as I had been a year ago.
"What?" he asked softly.
I shook my head. "You just seem fragile after hugging Nicky."
Cynric laughed, and glanced at the other man. "Everyone's fragile after hugging Nicky."
I nodded. "Truth," I said.
Cynric hadn't been my victim of choice. The Mother of All Darkness had bound us together because she'd had a plan that needed me distracted and powerful, and the fact that he was sixteen and a virgin, and we didn't know each other, hadn't mattered to a being that wanted to drown the world in blood and death. What was one person's innocence compared to all the death and terror she'd brought over the thousands of years of her existence? If you thought about it that way, what she'd done to Cynric and me was almost kind - almost.
He turned back to me, face still shining with the laughter of joking with the other two men. I hadn't even heard what they were saying, until he said, "I'm young; I still have growing to do. I'm already taller."