Circus of the Damned   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

"Dying from vampire bites is only temporarily fatal, ma petite . Wait until the third night when the victim rises, then question him." The humor died from his eyes. "What is it that you are not telling me?"

"I found at least five different bite radiuses on the victim."

Something flickered behind his eyes. I wasn't sure what, but it was real emotion. Surprise, fear, guilt? Something.

"So you are looking for a rogue master vampire."

"Yep. Know any?"

He laughed. His whole face lit up from the inside, as if someone had lit a candle behind his skin. In one wild moment he was so beautiful, it made my chest ache. But it wasn't a beauty that made me want to touch it. I remembered a Bengal tiger that I'd seen once in a zoo. It was big enough to ride on like a pony. Its fur was orange, black, cream, oyster-shell white. Its eyes were gold. The heavy paws wider than my outspread hand paced, paced, back and forth, back and forth, until it had worn a path in the dirt. Some genius had put one barred wall so close to the fence that held back the crowd, I could have reached through and touched the tiger easily. I had to ball my hands into fists and shove them in my pockets to keep from reaching through those bars and petting that tiger. It was so close, so beautiful, so wild, so. . tempting.

I hugged my knees to my chest, hands clasped tight together. The tiger would have taken my hand off, and yet there was that small part of me that regretted not reaching through the bars. I watched Jean-Claude's face, felt his laughter like velvet running down my spine. Would part of me always wonder what it would have been like if I had just said yes? Probably. But I could live with it.

He was staring at me, the laughter dying from his eyes like the last bit of light seeping from the sky. "What are you thinking, ma petite ?"

"Can't you read my mind?" I asked.

"You know I cannot."

"I don't know anything about you, Jean-Claude, not a bloody thing."

"You know more about me than anyone else in the city."

"Yasmeen included?"

He lowered his eyes, almost embarrassed. "We are very old friends."

"How old?"

He met my eyes, but his face was empty, blank. "Old enough."

"That's not an answer," I said.

"No," he said, "it is an evasion."

So he wasn't going to answer my question; what else was new? "Are there any other master vampires in town besides you, Malcolm, and Yasmeen?"

He shook his head. "Not to my knowledge."

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what I said.