“What are the two of you talking about?” Cardinale asked.

“Sunlight,” I said.

He nodded.

I had shared the memory of his best friend, his shield mate, brother-in-arms, his heterosexual life partner, being forced outside into the sunlight by She-Who-Made-Them, to punish them, yes, but mostly just to cause them both pain, because she could. She’d done a lot of things because she could, and there was no one to stop her; some people are only good because there are rules and punishments in place to make them be good. Take that away and it’s amazing what people will do to each other if they think they can get away with it. I felt the weight of centuries of having no safety, no surety of what evil thing she’d do next, and still being forced to share her bed when she wanted it. I was impressed that Damian had been able to get it up for the evil bitch century after century.

“A man who couldn’t service her was tortured to death, or mutilated and left alive. It gave us all a great incentive to rise to the occasion.”

“Why are you talking about such horrible things?” Cardinale asked.

I felt the vampire behind me before she spoke, and knew it was Echo before I heard her voice. “They are speaking mind to mind, sharing emotions, memories, pieces of their heart and soul.”

“No,” Cardinale said, “no, no one gets a piece of his heart but me.”

“You are only his love. She is his master. It is a closer bond.”

I turned and looked at her then, because that last part was rubbing salt in Cardinale’s wounds. Was my new head of security at Danse Macabre here to make things worse, or better?

Echo was shorter than me tonight, because I was wearing heels and she was in flat boots, but then she was security tonight and I was hoping to have a date. Her hair was a brown so dark, it was almost black. It even looked black until you got her too close to Jean-Claude’s hair, or mine, but whereas we were curly she had waves that helped hers fall in a more orderly fashion to her shoulders, framing one of the most delicate triangles of a face I’d ever seen. She was one of the few women who made me think dainty, but once you looked into her dark blue eyes you stopped thinking dainty and started thinking dangerous. She wore no makeup when she worked security, which would have made most women’s faces look plain, but Echo’s natural black lashes and brows framing deep, rich blue eyes, and all that dark hair, well . . . plain was just never a word you thought of when looking at her. Beautiful maybe, but never plain. She did her best to dress down for the job, with a looser black T-shirt over a tighter-fitting black tank top. I couldn’t see the tank top under her T-shirt, but I knew it was there, because she didn’t like the weapons at her waist digging into her bare skin, so there’d be a layer of clothing to protect her bare skin. She’d had a business jacket thrown over all that, so that she hid as much of the trim figure underneath as she could, but you never forgot that Echo was a beautiful woman for very long, no matter how she tried to hide it. Since I was sleeping with her, that should have been a good thing, but she made me strangely nervous, like I was fourteen again and had my first crush.

“You don’t know anything! No bond is closer than true love! No bond!” Cardinale screamed it, and started walking stiffly toward us all.

“I think you are too emotionally overwrought to work tonight,” Echo said, her voice very calm.

“That is not your decision. It’s Damian’s. He’s the manager, not you!”

Echo looked past the tall, redheaded vampire who was still stalking toward us, to the tall redheaded vampire standing behind his desk, though since Ricky and Roger were the ones who would be in the line of her anger first, I guessed Echo and I could stay calm a little longer. I wasn’t sure I was capable of calm with all of Damian’s emotions boiling through my head. My mouth was dry, which meant his was, because he was afraid, so afraid. Afraid of losing Cardinale, afraid of not having enough of a relationship with me to take up the slack, afraid of giving up too much, to gain too little. I started to say aloud that he couldn’t use me as his next relationship, that I was booked up, but Echo touched my arm as if she’d read my mind, or my heart, or my intentions. Whatever it was, that one slight touch on my arm kept me from saying that bit of truth, and the moment passed and we were on to other things.

“Damian is a fine manager, but I’m the head of security here, and if I think you’re a danger to the peaceful workings of this club tonight, then you will not work tonight.”

“You have no right to treat me like that!” She turned and looked at Damian. “Tell her that I’m working tonight. Tell her that you want me at your side in the dance tonight.”

He looked at her, and then past her to Echo, and then at me. I felt his gaze like a weight, as if he’d touched me.

“Tell her, Damian! Tell her that she can’t treat me this way!”

“Echo is head of security at Danse Macabre, Cardinale,” he said, in a voice as empty and neutral as any I’d ever heard from him.

“But you’re the manager.”

“I am.”

“Then tell her she’s wrong. Tell her she can’t send me home like a child.” She was standing in front of him now, so tall that she blocked my view of Damian’s face and most of his body, but I could still feel him. He wasn’t sad anymore. He felt nothing, as if he’d locked all his emotions away along with his body movement; without seeing him clearly I knew he was standing there in that utter stillness that the older vampires could do. It was that stillness that made me want to stare at them harder, as if once I looked away they would just sink into that stillness and vanish. I’d thought it was a way of hiding what they were thinking, but now I could feel that it was more than that, that it was a way of being still all the way to the core of their being. It was like the quiet place I went in my head when I knew I had to pull the trigger and kill someone; in that moment, I felt nothing but the gun in my hand, thought about nothing but how best to use the gun and get the shot. It became very analytical, cold physical logic. I felt that from Damian now and knew he was either hiding away his feelings so the next few minutes wouldn’t hurt that much, or he was hiding them away so he could do what needed doing, or maybe both?