Anita Blake 19 - Bullet by Laurell K. Hamilton Page B

feel of something that had been talked about a lot, but it was totally news to me. I looked at Jean-Claude and said what I was thinking. “How long have you known about Narcissus’s offer?”
    “Long enough,” he said.
    “And you were going to mention this when?”
    “He couldn’t tell you,” Asher said, “because that would have forced him to tell you the reason I want to leave, and that is a conversation he does not want to have, is it,
mon bellot
? Ah, but then you are not my pretty one, are you, not anymore?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
    “It means that if I cannot be loved, then I want the respect due me as a master vampire with his own animal to call.”
    “I’m still lost here, guys, explain,” I said.
    “I want a formal greeting,” Asher said.
    “We are all friends here,
mon ami
,” Jean-Claude said.
    “No, no we are not all friends here,” Asher said. “I am either a master vampire or your second-in-command or I am not. If I am all those things, then it is within my rights to demand a formal greeting from everyone in the room.”
    “I don’t think this is J.J.’s business,” Jason said.
    We all looked at him. I wasn’t sure what I would have said, but Jean-Claude said, “You are quite right. She is your guest and this does not concern her.”
    “I’ll be right back after I get her settled,” he said, and he led her away to the other side of the curtains and the hallway beyond. She was asking him questions as they walked, her voice low and serious. He just shook his head.
    “What do you mean, you want a formal greeting from everyone in the room? That’s what we have to do for out-of-town guests or other dominants and masters. We don’t do that to each other.”
    Asher looked at me and with the hair fallen over one half of his face, and all that blue silk, he was all beautiful arrogance, but I knew that was one of the emotions he hid behind. He’d come to us with that as his shield when he was afraid something would hurt too much.
    It made me look over the guards’ heads to the painting above the mantel that the whole room had been designed around. It was a picture of Jean-Claude and Asher, and their dead Julianna, back when everyone dressed like they’d stepped out of Dumas’s
Three Musketeers
.
    The Asher in the painting was all gold and white perfection with Juliana sitting in front of him, and Jean-Claude behind them both, in his signature black and white even then. The Asher in that painting was unscarred, and the artist had captured the arrogance I was looking at now.
    “When you say everyone in the room? Do you actually mean everyone?” I asked.
    “I do,” he said.
    “Jean-Claude?” I said.
    “We are an informal lot here, but he is within his rights as a master to be greeted formally at every entrance,” Jean-Claude said.
    “The formal greeting is a kind of pissing contest,” I said. “We don’t have to do that with just each other.”
    “I thought we did not,” he said, and his face was empty, telling me nothing. Shit.
    I turned back to Asher. “You’re seriously going to make all of us do this.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Because I can.”
    I stared at him for a moment, and then said, “Fine, fine, how do we do this?”
    “Whoever sees me as dominant to them can greet me, and whoever feels they are dominant or equal to me, well, we shall see.”
    “See what?” I asked.
    Micah answered, “See who offers up their flesh and blood.”
    “The greeting is just a formality,” I said. “The submissive offers up a blood point, the vampire or wereanimal sniffs or kisses it, and we move on.”
    “That is not always the case,
ma petite
,” Jean-Claude said.
    “What else is there?” I asked.
    “You know that some vampires use it as a way of trying their power one against the other.”
    “Yes, I’ve seen that.”
    “The ritual is an offering of blood. The dominant, or master, is within his rights to take what is