I smelled his truthfulness. Saw it on his face. I said, “He didn’t try to bind me. Stand down.” No one relaxed from combat mode, but I ignored them. I was still holding a blade and a nine-mil. I checked in to my soul home. Everything there was peaceful. My soul was still my own. I was slightly deaf from the gunshot, but otherwise I was good.

“Leo,” I said. “How badly are you wounded?”

The Master of the City slid his hand into his black jacket and it came away scarlet. “Nothing immediately mortal,” he said, with the faintest of smiles. His fangs clicked back into the roof of his mouth; his eyes bled back to human.

Eli said, “Janie? You’re sure?” He still had a gun aimed at Leo. Bruiser still held the stake.

He had fought the MOC for me. That was so sweet it made tears gather in my eyes. “I’m good. He”—I looked at Leo again—“gave me a gift, I think. I’m fine.” A little teary eyed, a little weepy, a little off-kilter, but mostly okay.

Leo huffed out a breath he might actually need, and, with two fingers, removed a neatly folded white hankie from his pocket. After wiping his bloody hands, he folded the hankie and pressed it against his side. He said, “Jane Yellowrock, I cannot bind you. I cannot even know your mind. But you now know mine. Will the Dark Queen swear to me, to protect and guard my city, to guard me, to fight by my side, to avenge my death, should I fall and die true-dead?”

Except for the Dark Queen title, the last part was essentially what Leo had asked Ming. This was part of the swearing-in ceremony of a blood clan. My breath went fast and my heart rate sped, things I knew Leo could detect. This was the creation of a new clan. Of Clan Yellowrock, in the way of the Mithrans. Holy crap. This was really happening. And then it hit me. As Dark Queen, I could avenge his death . . . Plans within plans.

I looked at the floor, at the feet of the Master of the City of New Orleans. At the feet of the creature who had abused me. Who had crowned me. Who would always want to use me, whether I agreed to that use or not. Who would do evil in the name of good, horrible evil to protect his people. A creature who was rebuilding his own power base even as I was building my own to protect my people. In his shoes would I do any less? Softly, not sure who I was talking to, I quoted, “Because I’m a Scorpion. It’s in my nature.”

“From the traditional tale of the Scorpion and the Frog,” Leo said. “But scorpions are creatures of instinct. I am a man. While it is my nature to use you, I will not do so unless the need is urgent. I have learned and changed and evolved, thanks in large part to you, my Jane.”

It wasn’t likely, but it was remotely possible that Leo had grown emotionally and might change. Me? I was the city’s champion. Which was utterly ridiculous. I am an idiot . . . But I’m NOLA’s idiot. One who might, one day, do evil to protect it. “Yes. And yes, I accept and I so swear.”

As if I hadn’t kept him waiting while all that raced through my mind, Leo said, “George, please bring Edmund Hartley, Jane’s primo, back into the room. Meanwhile, Gee DiMercy, do you accept the position of Yellowrock Clan Enforcer?”

Gee dropped from the ceiling to the floor, landing beside me on the balls of his feet and one hand, like a monkey leaping from a tree. It shocked me so much that I nearly shot him. He flowed to his feet like a snake. “I do,” he said, holding out his hand. Leo cut downward with the blade. That was getting to be a pretty unhygienic, unsanitary thing and I was glad my part in the cutting was over. Except it wasn’t. Gee offered me his thumb to suck on.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Really?”

Gee waggled his thumb at me, blood trailing down it. And then he grinned as if this was the funniest thing ever. “Just think of it as sushi, my mistress,” he said.

“Bird blood? I hope you washed that thing.” I opened my mouth and Gee hesitated, meeting my eyes. The grin slid from his pretty face. The blood on his hand shifted from scarlet to sapphire blue, its true color. There was something vital, weighty, even imperative about the misericord of the city offering me his blood unglamoured. Black eyes intent, he placed his thumb into my mouth. His blood was thick and bright, sweet like agave syrup. Beast’s synesthesia flared, giving Gee’s blood the chill of deep blue water; the smell of midnight in a winter forest, thousands of stars overhead, shimmering through naked branches; the sound/vision of indigo or woad splashing in a vat, staining a pair of hands. The sensations shimmered into taste and texture of ground lapis lazuli and sugar on my tongue, the sound of sapphire wings in flight.

“I am yours, my mistress, my little goddess,” he whispered.

I encircled his wrist with my long knobby fingers and pulled his thumb away. Irritated, I said, “I’m not a goddess.”

“As you say, my mistress. I swear loyalty to you above all others, in every circumstance outside of my misericord duties. In your absence, I swear to your clan and to its scions and cattle.”

“Backatcha, little bird.” But it didn’t come out flippant, as I intended, but somber, unsmiling, and resolute. Gee stepped back and when he was about five feet away, he bowed, bending one knee and sweeping with one hand, as if to push a cape back. Or his glamoured wings. He took a seat.

Crap. This was getting heavy.

Leo said, “Edmund Hartley, you have claimed to be bound to your mistress. Is this so?”

I whipped my head to the side and saw Edmund, a nondescript, brown-haired, brown-eyed man, small statured, at least compared to modern-day norms and my own height. He had been healed of the stakes in his belly and was now sober, wearing a tux, when Eddie had been drunk and wearing a navy suit last time I saw him. Edmund looked pretty good in a tux, his dark hair swept back with goop, his expression strangely gentle.

Ed stared at me, his lips up in the smile that had surely been the reason he was turned. “It is. We are bound. She called me back from true-death and I answered.”

It hadn’t been my intent. I didn’t want a slave. But it had kept him alive and at the time that had been a bargain worth making.

Leo said, “You have sworn privately to Jane Yellowrock. Do you renew those vows now?”

“I do.” Ed’s smile widened and he pretty much quoted what he had said more privately, not so long ago. “Jane Yellowrock. I, Edmund Killian Sebastian Hartley, do hereby swear fealty to you and to yours, to your entire extended and many-peopled and many-creatured family, and to Clan Yellowrock. I swear to provide for, protect, care for, fight for, and die true-dead as you may need. I place all my needs second to yours and to theirs. I place my hunger second to yours and to theirs. I place all that I am and all that I can be and all that I can do at your disposal, into your hands, for the duration of the next nineteen years. I am yours in life and undeath and in true-death.”

Those danged tears gathered in my eyes again. But Eddie wasn’t done.

“I swear fealty to the Everharts and Truebloods, for as long as Jane Yellowrock is theirs and the Everharts and Truebloods are yours, one clan, placing my own well-being beneath your own. I promise that I shall protect your godchildren and their parents and their children’s children unto the laying down of my own undeath.”

Edmund smiled slightly. “Since I first spoke these words, I have become heir to Clan Pellissier. Jane Yellowrock has become the Dark Queen and I am primo to Jane Yellowrock. You no longer must protect me, my mistress. It is my job to protect you. Our lives are now intertwined. My blood is yours to spill.”

Leo stabbed Ed’s thumb. Red blood welled and ran down, fast, faster than most vamp blood would run, since their hearts didn’t beat much. I had been fed Edmund’s blood. I knew its taste, its power. I took his wrist and guided his thumb to my mouth, wondering for a single instant what outsiders would think of this ceremony, so nonhuman, so foreign to any culture of any group of humans, so . . . sacrificial.

Such blood drinking had guided the actions of Torquemada and the Inquisition for so many years, fueling fear and hatred and torture. And then Ed’s flesh was in my mouth, between my fangs, his blood on my tongue, his power open and moving, fast as a mountain stream. I swallowed and took in his magic. It was a river of might, raging but held in check, the way water thundered down a gorge, kept in its bed between massive boulders. Whitewater, powerful enough to destroy, but full of life. Held into its course and purpose by tall and mighty rock walls.