Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said, frowning again, “why doesn’t it bother me?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, not even sure what I was saying no to.

  He’d gotten his jeans unbuttoned. “I can either lay you down on the very cold tile, or I can throw you over my shoulder for a few seconds while I take the pants off, lady’s choice.”

  The decision seemed too hard for me. “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t ask a second time, just tossed me, as gently as he could over his shoulder, sort of half a fireman’s carry. Being upside down made the world spin again, and I wondered if I was going to be sick all over his back. He balanced me there while he wormed out of his jeans.

  I was now staring down his bare back as the jeans slid down the top of his butt. The nausea had passed, and I giggled—I never giggle—“Nice ass.”

  He choked, or laughed. “I never knew you noticed.”

  “Underwear,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You had underwear, I caught a glimpse of it.” I had this horrible urge to run my hands over his butt, just because it was there, and I could. It was like I was drunk or high.

  “Yeah, I had underwear on, what about it?”

  “Can you put it back on?”

  “You don’t really care if I have underwear on, or not, do you?” and there was something in his voice that was almost teasing.

  “Nope.” I shook my head, which made the world spin again. “Oh, God, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Stop moving, it’ll pass. You wouldn’t be sick at all if you hadn’t fought to get out from between the two of them. Too much physical exertion right afterwards will make you sick as a dog. Sink into the feeling, just ride it, and it feels wonderful.”

  I felt a little silly talking to his ass, but it didn’t seem nearly as silly as it should have. “What feels wonderful?”

  “Guess,” he said.

  That made me frown. “Don’t want to guess.” God, what was wrong with me? “Tell me.”

  “Let’s get you in the tub, a bath will help clear your head.”

  He moved me back to his arms, and stepped over the edge of the tub. “You’re naked,” I said.

  “So are you,” he said.

  That had a certain logic to it that I couldn’t quite argue with, though I felt I should have argued with it. “Weren’t you going to put something back on?”

  “The underwear is silk, I’m not going to ruin it by wearing it in the tub, because you think I should put it on. Besides, you don’t really care if I’m naked or not. Remember?”

  A headache was beginning just behind one eye. “No,” I said, “but I should care, shouldn’t I? I mean . . .”

  Jason lowered us both into the water. It felt wonderful, so warm, so smooth, so good against my skin. Jason moved me gently in the water until I was sitting in front of him, cradled against his body.

  The water was so warm, so warm, and I was so tired. It would feel so good to just sleep.

  Jason’s arm on my waist jerked me back. “Anita, you can’t sleep in the bathtub, you’ll drown.”

  “You won’t let me drown,” I said, and my voice was thick with warmth and sleep.

  “No, I won’t let you drown,” he said.

  I frowned, as I half-floated in the water. “What is wrong with me, Jason? I feel drunk.”

  “You have been well and truly rolled by a vampire, Anita.”

  “Jean-Claude can’t, his own marks protect me,” my voice seemed to be coming from a long way away.

  “I never said it was Jean-Claude.”

  “Asher,” I whispered the name.

  “I’ve shared blood with him before, and it is the most amazing thing. Jean-Claude says he always holds back, because he knows I’m not his pomme de sang, I’m just a loaner.”

  “Loaner,” I said.

  “I don’t think Asher held back with you tonight.”

  “The ardeur, we . . . were doing . . . the ardeur.” Each word was thick with effort.

  “The ardeur could have made him careless,” Jason said. His hands were very solid on me, cradling me in the water more than against his body.

  “Careless?” I said.

  “Go ahead and pass out, Anita. When you wake up, we’ll talk.”

  “ ’bout what?”

  “Things,” he said, and his voice was sinking away into the candlelit dark. I didn’t remember him lighting the candles that Jean-Claude usually kept around the tub.

  I started to ask, what things? but the words never made it out loud. I fell into a warm, soft darkness, where there was no fear, no pain. So warm, so safe, so loved.

  15

  I WOKE TO the phone ringing. I huddled in the sheets, trying not to hear it. God, I was tired. The bed moved, someone else fumbling for it. It wasn’t until Jason’s voice said, “Hello,” softly, as if he were afraid of waking me, that I woke completely. Why was Jason in my bedroom?

  That question was answered as soon as I opened my eyes. I wasn’t in my bedroom, in fact, I didn’t know where the hell I was. The bed was a kingsize, but it was only pillows and a bed, no headboard, no footboard, only a bed, very modern, very normal. The only light was from a small door directly across from the foot of the bed, I could catch a glimpse of a bathtub, or shower. I followed the dim light out and found bare stone walls and knew I was still inside the Circus of the Damned, somewhere.

  “She’s sick,” Jason said. He was quiet for a second. “She’s asleep. I’d rather not wake her.”

  I tried to remember why I was here and came up with nothing, just a blank. I started to roll over, I think to ask who it was, when I realized I was naked. I pulled the sheets up over my breasts and turned over to see Jason.

  He was laying on his side, his back to me, the sheet pulled down enough that I could see the top of his buttocks. What the fuck was I doing naked in a bed with Jason? Where was Jean-Claude? Okay, probably in his coffin, or his bed. I never shared the bed when he was stone cold. But why hadn’t I gone home?

  “I don’t think she’s going to be well enough to come out today.”

  I tried to sit up and found that the world wasn’t quite steady. Maybe sitting up wasn’t such a good idea. I stayed on my back, sheet clutched to my chest, and had to try twice to say, “I’m awake.” My mouth was incredibly dry.

  Jason turned towards me. The movement pooled the sheet into his lap and left the backside of his body bare. He covered the receiver with his hand. “How do you feel?”

  “How did I get here? Why am I here?” I asked in a voice so hoarse it barely sounded like me.

  “Do you remember anything?”

  I frowned, and that hurt. My throat hurt. I raised a hand and found a large bandage on the right side of my neck. There was a vampire bite under the bandages, I knew that, and with that knowledge, I remembered.

  I remembered everything, and it wasn’t just my mind that remembered it. My body convulsed against the bed, my spine bowing, hands clawing at the sheets, a moan tore from my throat, before my body stole all the breath from me, and I bucked against the bed, caught in a sensory memory. It wasn’t as good as the original, but damn it was close.

  I dug my fists into the sheets, balling the cloth up, trying to find something to hold on to. Jason was suddenly beside me, he grabbed my upper arms, tried to hold me still. “Anita, what’s wrong?”

  My hands came up, automatically, grabbing his forearms, holding on. My eyes rolled back into my head, my body convulsed, and my hands tore down his forearms. I felt my nails sink into his flesh, felt his skin give under me.

  Jason cried out, somewhere between a scream and a moan.

  I lay back against the bed, panting, eyes unable to focus. I held onto Jason’s arms, because it was the only solid thing I had.

  “Anita,” he said, his voice, strained, “are you alright?”

  I tried to say yes, but finally was reduced to nodding. He pried my fingers fr
om his arms, gently, folding my hands across the sheet and my stomach. I felt the bed move as he moved. I realized my eyes were shut. I didn’t remember shutting them.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked.

  I started to say, I didn’t know, but I did know. I remembered Asher sitting at a long banquet table with his hair in golden ringlets, dressed in gold and crimson. The wife of our host crushed her wine glass in her gloved hand, her mouth half-parted, her breath making the white mounds of her breasts rise and fall. A small sound escaped her, and when she could speak, she asked for her maid and to be helped to her room, for she was ill. She wasn’t ill. Asher had seduced her the night before, on Belle’s orders. He had complained to Jean-Claude that the woman simply lay there, eyes rolled back in her head, true, but with almost no other reaction. It had been most disappointing.

  She’d experienced a flashback of the orgasm the night before at the dinner table, but she was a quiet sex partner, which meant that her flashbacks could be explained away in public. Sort of.

  I lay there staring up at Jason, seeing him now instead of candlelit rooms long deserted and people long gone to dust. I found my voice, and it was more hoarse than before, as if the screaming had taken the rest of my voice.

  “It was a flashback.” I coughed.

  “To what?” he asked.

  “Water, please?”

  He hopped off the bed and knelt by a small refrigerator next to the bed. He got out a small bottle of some athletic juicer. “It helps replace the electrolytes better than water.”

  “I don’t like this shit.”

  “Trust me, you’ll feel better if you drink it than if you drink water. Water can make you nauseous.”

  Suddenly the neon blue drink looked a whole lot better. He opened it and handed it to me. Blood had filled the scratches on his forearms and was slowly seeping down his skin in red rivulets.

  “Jesus, Jason, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you up.” I took a sip of the neon bright liquid. The taste was as bad as I remembered, but a few small sips, and I did feel a little better. When I talked, my voice didn’t sound like I’d been in the desert for a month.

  He held his arms up. “It’s okay, though normally when I get this cut up it’s because I did a wonderful job entertaining a friend.” He smiled.

  I shook my head, and I wasn’t dizzy this time. Good.

  “You said this was a flashback, a flashback to what?” he asked.

  “To what happened with Jean-Claude and Asher.”

  He raised eyebrows at me. “You mean that was a flashback to what, the orgasm?”

  I felt heat creep up my face. “Something like that,” I muttered.

  He laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t think so.” I drank some more of the vile drink, and avoided looking at him.

  “I’ve served as refreshment for Jean-Claude for years and I’ve never had any reaction like that.”

  “It’s something Asher can do.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’re bleeding all over the place,” I said.

  “I’ll doctor myself in a minute. First I want you to finish this explanation.”

  “You know, Asher’s bite can be . . .”

  “Orgasmic,” he finished for me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’ve experienced the mild version of it,” Jason said. “So have you once in Tennessee when Asher was dying. He rolled your mind. If I remember right, you didn’t like it much.”

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, Jason, it was that I liked it maybe too much, so yeah, it scared me.”

  “Jean-Claude said that Asher always holds back unless he can keep the person, whatever that means.”

  I nodded, took a drink, nodded again. “I think, no, I know that Asher didn’t hold back last night.”

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “I’ve got some of Jean-Claude’s memories. I’m reacting like a woman that Belle had Asher seduce once.”

  “Acting how?” he asked, “Slicing people up?”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, one knee tucked up, the other down, so that he was pretty much flaunting himself at me. Generally I don’t have trouble making eye contact with a man, but it was sort of eye catching.

  “I’m just teasing, Anita.” He seemed totally unaware of his nudity, like most of the shape-shifters I knew.

  I handed him an edge of sheet. “Please cover up a little.”

  He grinned. “Why, we slept for,” he glanced at the bedside clock, “four hours naked together. Why should I dress now?”

  I frowned at him, and suddenly it was easy to have eye contact. It usually is when I glare.

  “How are you acting like this other woman?” he asked.

  “Echoes, flashbacks to the pleasure that happened when Asher took blood.”

  “Is that going to keep happening?” he asked.

  I blushed again. “Off and on, fuck.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “The woman I’m remembering was quiet in bed, she didn’t jump around a lot, not according to Asher.”

  “So?”

  “She could hide it better than I can.”

  He laughed out loud. “Are you telling me that all this jumping around is normal for you?”

  I glared at him. “You should know, you’ve seen me in bed once, you helped bring me, remember.” I was blushing so hard my head was beginning to hurt.

  His smile faded. It had taken me months to be comfortable around Jason after that. “The ardeur was riding all of us,” he said, “we were all a little jumpier than usual.”

  I shook my head, not looking at him, tucking my knees and the sheet to my chest. “Except for wanting to tear out your throat, that was about normal for me.”

  He coughed, laughed, and finally said, “No way.”

  I kept my eyes firmly on the sheets. “Fine, make fun.”

  He took the bottle from me. “I need a drink.”

  I hugged my knees to my chest, huddling in the sheet. “You are so not funny.”

  He slid to his knees beside the bed, so I’d see his face. “I’m sorry, really, but . . .” He gave a small shrug. “You can’t blame me. You cannot tell me that you have these violent, amazing, orgasms, then expect me not to tease you. It’s me, Anita, you know I can’t really help it.”

  He looked so boyish, so innocent. It was all an act. By the time I’d met Jason he’d been ridden hard and put up wet, and his innocence had been long gone.

  He handed the drink back to me. “Forgive me, okay, maybe it’s just envy.”

  “Don’t go there,” I said.

  “Not of you,” he said, “but hell if Asher’s bite is that good, why didn’t I get the full treatment?”

  I tried to frown at him, and only half-succeeded. “You said it yourself, you’re not his pomme de sang, you’re only a loaner.”

  “And you’re Jean-Claude’s human servant, not Asher’s, so why do you rate the full orgasmic blowout?”

  He had a point, a good point. I shrugged. “I think the ardeur overrode things. I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to ask them when they wake up.” Why would Asher do this to me? Had it been on purpose? I knew only Asher could do with the mere taking of blood what most men couldn’t do with their whole bodies. Asher had done something to me that Jean-Claude alone couldn’t duplicate. The memory of it tightened my body, and I had just enough time to shove the bottle at Jason before I threw myself back on the bed.

  It wasn’t as violent as the last time, and Jason made no move to try and touch me. I guess he’d had enough scratches. When I was done, panting on the bed, with the sheet down around my stomach, and my vision clearing, Jason asked from the far side of the bed, “Is it safe now?”

  “Shut up,” I managed.

  He laughed and bounced back on the bed. He raised me up with one hand and offered the bottle with the other. “Lean against the pillows, drink this slowly, I
’m going to put some bandages on my arms.”

  “Antiseptic cream, too,” I said.

  “I’m a werewolf, Anita, I don’t get infections.”

  Oh. “Fine, then why bother with bandages at all?”

  “I don’t want to bleed all over my clothes, and I can’t let the police see me like this.”

  “Police, why police?”

  “That was who was on the phone when you woke up. That is who’s been calling for about the last hour. Lieutenant Storr and Detective Zerbrowski have both called, and have requested your presence. The lieutenant made noises about coming to find you and drag you out of my bed.”

  “How did he know I was in your bed?”

  He grinned at me in the door of the bathroom, opening it wide so the light framed his body. “I don’t know, maybe he guessed.”

  “Jason, you did not tease Dolph, please tell me you didn’t.”

  He put a hand to his chest. “Me, tease someone?”

  “Sweet Jesus, you did.”

  “I’d call him back ASAP, if I were you. I’d hate to have the SWAT team crash our little party.”

  “We are not having a party.”

  “I don’t think your lieutenant friend will believe that if he finds us naked in the bedroom together.” He held his arms up. “Especially if he sees this.”

  “He’s not going to see your arms, or any other part of you. Just give me my clothes and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “And if you have another flashback while you’re driving, what then? And let me just add that I’ve been donating blood to vampires a lot longer than you have. I know how hard it can be when you lose as much as you lost. You may feel fine, but if you overdo it, you’ll get dizzy again, and nauseous. That wouldn’t be good at a crime scene, would it?”

  “Dolph does not let civilians at his crime scenes.”

  “I’ll sit in the Jeep, but I can’t let you drive yourself around today.”

  “Call Micah, or Nathaniel, they’ll come pick me up.”

  He shook his head. “Nathaniel passed out at the club last night.”

  “What!”

  “Micah thinks that feeding the ardeur at least once a day for three months has taken its toil on Nathaniel.”

  “Is he alright?”