Cravings by Laurell K. Hamilton, Eileen Wilks, REBECCA YORK, MaryJanice Davidson

answer before I leave."
    I sighed. "You need to get there before the wolf loses it. Go, we'll be all
right."
    He looked like he didn't believe me.
    "Go," I said.
    "It's not just you I'm worried about, Anita."
    "I will do my best for Nathaniel, Micah."
    He frowned. "What does that mean?"
    "It means what it says."
    He didn't look happy with the answer.
    "If you wait around for me to say, Oh, yes, it's fine that I'm going to feed
the ardeur and fuck Nathaniel; the wolf in question will have shapeshifted, been
shot by the cops, and maybe taken some civilians with him before you even leave
the house."
    "You're both important to me, Anita. Our pard is important to me. What
happens here tonight, could change… everything."
    I swallowed hard, because I suddenly didn't want to meet his eyes.
    He touched my chin, raised my face up to meet his gaze. "Anita."
    "I'll be good," I said.
    "What does that mean?"
    "I'm not sure, but I'll do my best, and that is the best I can offer. I won't
really know what I'm going to do until the ardeur rises. Sorry, but that's the
truth. To say anything else would be a lie."
    He took a deep breath that made his chest rise and fall nicely. "I guess I'll
have to settle for that."
    "What exactly do you want me to say?" I asked.
    He leaned in, and laid a gentle kiss against my lips. We rarely kissed so
chaste, but this close to the ardeur, he was being careful. "I want you to say
you'll take care of this."
    "Define take care of it?"
    He sighed again, shook his head, and stepped back. "I've got to get dressed."
    "Are you taking your car or the Jeep?"
    "I'll take my car." He smiled at me, almost sadly, and left to go get
dressed. He made a soft exclamation as he went around the corner. He spoke in
low voices with another man. The cadence was wrong for Nathaniel.
    Damian glided around the corner. "You must be very distracted not to have
sensed me sooner." He was right, I was good at sensing the undead. No vamp
should have been able to get this close without me knowing, especially not
Damian.
    Damian was my vampire servant, as I was Jean-Claude's human servant. The
ardeur was Jean-Claude and Belle Morte's fault, something about their line had
contaminated me. But Damian as my servant, that was my fault. I was a
necromancer, and apparently mixing necromancy with being a human servant had
some unforseen side effects. One of them was standing across the kitchen staring
at me with eyes the color of green grass. Humans didn't have eyes like that, but
apparently Damian had, because becoming a vamp doesn't change your original
physical description. It may pale you out, lengthen some of the teeth, but your
hair and eye and skin color remain the same. The only thing that was probably
more vibrant was his hair. Red hair that hadn't seen the sun for hundreds of
years, so that it was almost the color of fresh blood, a bright, fresh scarlet,
so that he moved in a swirl of crimson hair. All vamps are pale, but Damian
started life with that milk and honey complexion that some redheads have, so he
was even paler. Or maybe it was the quality of his paleness, like his skin had
been formed of white marble, and some demon or god had breathed life into that
paleness. Oh, wait, I was that demon.
    Technically, my power, my necromancy, made Damian's heart beat. He was over a
thousand years old, and he would never be a master vampire. If you aren't a
master, then you need a master to give you enough power to rise from the grave,
not just the first night, but every night.
    Damian must have come straight from work, because though he, like most of the
vamps fresh over from Europe, almost never wore jeans and tennis shoes, he also
didn't like dressing up as much as Jean-Claude insisted on.
    He was wearing a coat I'd seen before. It was a deep pine green, a frock coat
like something out of the 1700s, but it was new, designed to gape open to expose
the pale gleam of his chest and stomach. Embroidery