exactly, because she had to use my throat, but it wasn't my voice either. It was close enough to hers to widen Auggie's eyes, and make him go paler than death itself. I don't know if I'd ever seen a vampire go pale before.

"How is this possible?" he whispered.

"You called me," she said with my lips. "Your power and your blood called me."

He swallowed, rolling his lips when he did it, so that the blood seeped faster from the cut. The bite was healing as we watched, but it was still bleeding. "I did not mean ..."

"You caused her to love you, Augustine, as you tried to force me to do. But no one forces Belle Morte, no one."

"Forgive me, I did not know what my powers could do." He whispered it, hands still on my arms, but gentle now. His hold was so loose that I could have broken away easily, but it was too late for that to matter. We had bigger problems than the ardeur.

"But I can enjoy you again, here and now, and it will not be I who falls in love, but her. It will cause her pain, and Jean-Claude pain. It will even cause you pain." She laughed, sitting on her bed hundreds and hundreds of miles away. "For as Requiem can raise the body's lust in his victim, he also raises it in himself. So, once you force a woman to love you, you love her back. It is the nature of our bloodline that our powers are two-edged."

Again, I felt regret in her. I knew in that moment that once Auggie had used his power to its full extent, the effect wasn't temporary.

"No, Anita," she said inside my head, talking to me from the firelit edge of her bed. "It is quite permanent, I assure you."

"Then you love ..."

She lashed out again, with that sharp power. It stopped what I'd been about to say, and let her speak. "All love Belle Morte. All adore me. It is my nature to be loved."

But I'd been too close to her mind too often not to understand her better than that. "Lust," I said out loud, "all lust after Belle Morte."

"Lust, love, what difference the word, it means the same." But we were too deeply wedded together. She knew my thought on that, that lust and love aren't the same thing at all, and that thought was so loud that I felt her stumble in her mind. Felt her doubt; for half a moment, I felt doubt there. And it wasn't I who put that seed of doubt in her mind. It was already there, had been there since Jean-Claude and Asher left her side voluntarily centuries ago.

"They returned to me, Anita, don't forget that. They could not live with-