Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Yes,” I said, “if they take Raphael, then they own you all.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And we invited them here,” I whispered.

  Requiem’s bare shoulder appeared around Lillian. “Merlin, their dance master, rolled the human audience to make his dancers appear and vanish, but he did not try to roll the other masters. Until tonight.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. I’d felt Merlin’s mind. If he’d rolled them, then let them go, they might never have figured it out. I tried to explain it. “His mind, powerful enough. He could let them go. They might never know.”

  “You mean that he rolled them, and was so powerful that they don’t remember it?”

  “Yes.”

  I watched fear march over his face, swallowed by that perfect blankness that the old ones have. “Perhaps, but I do not believe that Marmee Noir appeared in the other cities.”

  “Who is Marmee Noir?” Lillian asked.

  “Our dark mother, the first of us. It was her power added to Merlin’s that did what was done tonight. It was her power that made Richard’s cross melt into Anita’s hand.”

  “Is she here, with the troupe?”

  “No,” I said, “she lies in the room with windows.” That probably made no sense to any of them, but they let it go. They took my drugged assurance that the nightmare of all vampires wasn’t physically in St. Louis. Drugged out of my ability to concentrate and they took my word about it. They shouldn’t have done that. But more than Mommie Dearest, there was Auggie and Samuel, and hell, Samuel’s wife, Thea. If these were the masters Jean-Claude trusted, then what would the other masters do to us? Jean-Claude didn’t need to be alone tonight. Something bad would happen.

  “Get out, doc.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t want you here when the wicked bitch comes.”

  “I’ll get out, and the only ones in the car will be people you’ve fed on before, Anita.” She glanced behind her. “With one exception.”

  “Exception?”

  “Go, Lillian,” Jason said. “Jean-Claude’s nervous. Something else has happened. Not as bad, but something.”

  Lillian moved out of sight, and Jason knelt beside me. He was as nude as Nathaniel. He was wearing the cuff bracelet that Jean-Claude had had commissioned for him. Wolves running over a gold and platinum landscape. The wolves looked so real you expected them to move. I stared at the bracelet. “Pretty,” I said.

  He grinned. “And the bracelet’s nice, too.” He looked down at me, and his face was so serious. I couldn’t feel what Jean-Claude was feeling; the morphine and my own earlier panic had shut the marks down. I didn’t like how serious Jason looked. What was happening to my sweeties while I was arguing?

  “Let’s get you out of the clothes. You’ve got to have something to wear back inside.”

  A moment ago, I might have argued, but Jason was scared, and I couldn’t feel Jean-Claude. I was too befuddled to risk opening the marks. Afraid I’d screw up Jean-Claude’s concentration as badly as mine was, and that would be a disaster. Bad things were happening, and it was our fault. The vampires had invited bad things to the city, and now everyone was in danger. “Help me out of the corset.”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Jason said, and he leered at me, the way he usually did, but I could see his eyes, and his eyes weren’t having any fun at all. Bad things, bad things, what was happening inside? I thought, Hold on, Jean-Claude. I felt him like a distant caress of wind against the door I’d used to shut us down. That breath of power smelled sweetly of his cologne. His words seemed to fill the car. “Feed before you come back to me, ma petite. Do not loose the ardeur on the crowd.” Then he was gone, shut down and tight, shielding his ass off. But he’d raised a good point. It was perfectly me to raise munin, heal, and not feed the ardeur, if I could stave it off. That brief message let me know that he wanted me back fed, and ready to fight, not hungry and dangerous to the crowd. Jason helped me sit up, and Nathaniel started unlacing my corset back. Was it too small-town Midwestern of me to think it was weird that my main squeeze was encouraging me to have sex with a limo full of men before I came back inside to him? We had the mother of all vampires lurking around. A master vamp powerful enough to roll every master in town. And mustn’t forget the blond dancer, Adonis, who had almost rolled me with his gaze. Powerful, dangerous shit going on, and the thing that made me squirm inside was the sex? It was one of those evenings when I’d really get to decide if it was a fate worse than death.

  The corset loosened enough to spill my breasts into the open air. “Requiem,” Jason said, “get over here.”

  The vampire came, and he used his hands to hide his nakedness. He seemed embarrassed. I was uncomfortable with it, too, but the morphine took the edge off the embarrassment, like it took the edge off everything.

  They lifted the corset over my head, and other hands went to the top of my skirt. Nathaniel took the clothes away as they came off. They took everything but the diamond necklace. Apparently the jewelry was a theme tonight. There was plastic over the far seat, and he was putting the clothes under it. How messy was everyone expecting to be?

  I caught movement in the far back of the limo. It was Noel. “No,” I said, “get him out.”

  “Justin didn’t get here, Anita,” Jason said, “he’s the only lion we got except for Auggie’s bodyguard. If your lion rises, we need somewhere for it to go.”

  “He’s a baby.”

  Jason nodded. “Raina loved virgins.”

  I shook my head too hard, made myself dizzy. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. “He waits outside the car. If my lion rises, then I’ll bring his beast, but we are not feeding him to Raina.” I opened my eyes, and the world had stopped wavering. Good.

  Jason touched Requiem’s shoulder, drew my attention back to him. “I don’t think we’ll have to, Anita. Look at Requiem through her eyes. Look at those wounds, Anita. He’s fresh meat and he’s wounded. She’ll like that.”

  I looked at the knife wounds on his chest and side. His arms were cut up. “Silver blades,” I said.

  Requiem nodded. “Meng Die meant my death.”

  “A little power and she changes her mind.”

  “It is not a little power, Anita,” Jason said.

  I looked back at Requiem. “Do you know what Raina will do?”

  Nathaniel knelt by us. “I told him what she liked to do during sex.”

  I fought to focus on Requiem’s still face. “Is it”—I searched for the word I wanted—“all right?”

  “I have been at the court of Belle Morte, Anita, this will be as nothing.” He found a smile for me. “Heal me so that we may both serve our master well this night.”

  I nodded. “Okay.” I looked behind them all, at Noel. He was pressed in the far back of the limo, as far from the action as he could get. “Out, now.”

  “Wait outside with Fredo,” Jason said.

  “I was told to stay close,” Noel said. His eyes were big, his mouth a little parted. I realized I was naked in front of him. I’d known that, but the drugs or the emergency, or my collapsing morals, had made me not think about it. The look on his face wasn’t lust. It was fear.

  “Outside the car is close enough,” Jason said.

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Get out of the car, Noel,” Nathaniel said. He sounded angry.

  Noel got out of the car. When the door closed behind him, Nathaniel said, “How could Joseph have sent him for this job?”

  “Joseph didn’t understand,” Jason said.

  “Didn’t want to understand,” Nathaniel said. His eyes had gone almost purple with anger.

  “Protect the innocent,” I said.

  He gave me those angry eyes, then made a smile for me, and nodded. “You can control Raina. I know you can.”

  “The drugs…”

  “Will make it harder, but you can do this. I was there when you learned how to do this, Anita. Drugs or no drugs, your will is stronger than he
rs.”

  I stared into his face, studied that anger, that surety. I got that glimpse that I had sometimes, of what he might be in ten years. He was going to be something special at thirty, and I planned on being there to see it. I planned on us all being there to see it. Which meant we had to get through tonight. Whatever it took.

  Jason laid me back on the seat. Nathaniel gave me a quick kiss, then he moved away, too. Requiem sat on the end of the seat, like he was on an uncomfortable first date.

  I held out my hand to him. “Help me.”

  He took my hand, and knelt beside the seat, still covering as much of his nakedness as he could. “How can I help you?”

  “Use your power on me.”

  His eyes filled with rich blue fire, and my body jolted with it. It hurt my sore hand, but the mixture of pain and pleasure and confusion would appeal to her. I’d learned to control Raina, which meant she had to be coaxed inside me now. It was sort of like leaving a perfectly good house when you know a tiger is just outside, and oh, by the way, let’s strap a raw steak around your neck. This was all such a bad idea. Problem was, I didn’t have a better one.

  49

  THE FIRST THING you need to know in order to control something is how it feels to do it. I was a natural psychic, which meant that my gifts weren’t something I had to strive for, they just came to me. The problem with being a natural is that sometimes things come so easily that you don’t know how, or even when, you’re doing psychic stuff. It sort of sneaks up on you. You must understand a thing to truly control it. I’d relied for most of my life on the fact that I was just such a brute psychically that I could bull my way through things. But some things can’t be controlled by brute force alone, or even by sheer power alone. You need control. It’s the difference between being able to throw a baseball ninety miles an hour, and being able to throw it ninety miles an hour over home plate. The speed and skill is great, but if you keep throwing wild, it’ll never get you into the majors. In fact, you may kill some poor fan in the stands. Getting hit in the head with a ball going that fast, well, not good. Raina wasn’t my only ninety-mile-an-hour ball, but she was the second one I learned to control, after the necromancy.

  Requiem was flat on his back on the seat. I didn’t remember changing places with him. The last thing I remembered, clearly, was me naked on my back, on the seat. Now, it was him lying naked. Him, looking up at me, a surprised look on his face. What had I done to put that look on Requiem’s face? What had I done, while Raina was in control and I was fighting off the morphine?

  I was sitting on his waist, which was an improvement over lower, I guess. I looked behind me to Nathaniel and Jason. The look on my face must have been enough, because Jason said, “You body-slammed him down on the seat.”

  “Your hand is bleeding,” Nathaniel said.

  I stared at my left hand as if it had just appeared at the end of my arm. There was fresh blood soaking through the gauze. The moment I saw the blood, the hand began to hurt. It wasn’t as bad as before Lillian gave me the shot, but it was a persistent, grinding pain, with twinges of sharper things. The sharper pains promised worse to come.

  “I believe you injured yourself throwing me down on the seat,” Requiem said. His voice was mild, almost politely empty. His face matched it, handsome, and blank. The surpise was gone as if I’d dreamed it. He was in control of himself, once more.

  I felt Raina inside me. She didn’t want him in control of himself, or anything else. She wanted to break him. I’d seen far enough inside his head with the ardeur to know he’d been broken centuries before, and more than once. I knew that breaking someone already broken wouldn’t appeal to her as much as being the first one to do it. Jason had been right; Raina liked virgins, of every sort. She loved to be in on someone’s first experience, especially if she could turn pleasure to pain, joy to terror. That just flat did it for her. Not my kink, which made it easier not to do it.

  Her voice whispered through my mind, not as clear as it once had been, more a wind-in-the-trees kind of sound. Marianne had informed me that Raina had come close to truly possessing me, as in almost demonic possession. That had been a scary thought. Now I knew how to keep Raina from getting that intimate a grip on me. The wind of her voice blew through my body, smelling of forest, and fur, and perfume. “You know what I want, Anita.”

  “You know what I’m willing to give you.” I said that part out loud, because talking mind-to-mind with her spirit could give it a stronger hold on you. I thought about how close Requiem and I had come to intercourse earlier today. I thought about him rolling off, unsatisfied, and unsatisfying.

  “The first fucking between you,” she laughed, and my concentration wasn’t pure enough to keep that laugh off my lips. Her laugh was a low, throaty, alto sound, a joyous promise of sex. I didn’t own a laugh like that.

  Nathaniel said, “Concentrate, Anita. You can do this.”

  Raina wanted me to look behind me at him, and I fought not to do it. Not because it was a bad thing, but because I had to start fighting somewhere, and it was a place to start. It was also something that if I lost the fight, it wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  “Petty, Anita,” she whispered.

  I ignored her, as best I could. Always hard to ignore people who are sharing your consciousness. I tried to concentrate on my breathing, but the pain in my hand kept distracting me. I tried concentrating on each heartbeat, on the pulse in my body, and that was a mistake. It was as if each beat of my heart hit my injured hand like a spike. As if the very pulse of blood made it hurt worse.

  I shook my head, and that was a mistake. I was suddenly dizzy. Requiem’s hands caught my arms, kept me from falling. I let myself collapse on top of him, my head resting against his shoulder. He made no sound, but his body flinched. I was lying across his wounds. Raina liked that a lot.

  I kissed his shoulder. The skin was warm. Warm with the blood he’d taken from me earlier, but not as warm as it should have been. I gazed up into those brilliant blue eyes, with their hint of green around the iris. “Your body is using more energy trying to heal your wounds.”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Do you need to feed more often when you’re this badly hurt?”

  “Yes, m’lady.”

  I smiled at him. “Somehow m’lady doesn’t work with me naked on top of you.”

  He smiled, and it even reached his eyes. “You will always be m’lady to me, Anita.”

  I was suddenly drowning in the scent of wolf. The beast inside me stirred, as if Raina’s power were a spoon and I were some kind of soup. Stirring, looking for just the right tidbit.

  Her voice sounded inside me. “Your very own wolf, Anita. What have you been doing while I’ve been away?”

  The wolf, my wolf, appeared inside me. I could see it forming. No, I thought, no. I turned my face into Requiem’s neck where his pulse should have beat, but didn’t. I pressed my mouth to that chilled flesh, and chased away the warm, prickling energy. I did not run from my wolf, for if you run things will chase you, but I turned to colder things. Things that the wolf neither understood nor entirely approved of. My wolf quieted, under the brush of dead flesh and the scent of flesh unmoving. The trouble with quieting my wolf was that Raina fled, too. I rose up from Requiem’s body, enough to see his face.

  “Your eyes, they are like brown diamonds, so much light in the darkness.”

  “Raina’s gone,” Jason said, softly.

  I didn’t look at him. I only had eyes for the vampire. I began to kiss down his body. A light kiss on his shoulder, and with each kiss, my body slid lower, and because we were both nude, that raised interesting things. And I knew that his body was swelling with blood that he’d taken from my veins. That without that ruby kiss, he would have been dead in so many more ways than just undead.

  I raised my lower body enough so that we weren’t touching below the waist. It felt wonderful, so much promise of things to come, but I wanted to concentrate on the feel of my mouth on his chest. I
couldn’t do that and have him brush the front of my body with the swelling richness of his. It distracted me.

  I wanted to enjoy the smooth perfection of his skin. Cool, and moving, but not pulsing. Not alive, not completely, not really. It was like kissing my way down a dream, faintly unreal, as if Requiem’s pale body should have evaporated into the first alarm of the day. Did Jean-Claude and Asher play human for me, more than this? Did they make their hearts beat, their blood pump, so I would not feel this amazing stillness? Requiem’s arms caressed down my back, my sides. His chest moved, writhing with the pleasure of being touched, but he did not breathe. He did not play alive for me. He was a moving dead thing. It should have bothered me, but it didn’t. The power that filled my eyes understood what he was, and liked it, liked it a lot.

  I kissed down that smooth, cool flesh, until I came to coarseness, and a faint metallic taste. It made me open my eyes, and look at what I was kissing. It was the knife wound. It looked so smooth, but my lips told the truth. The edges of the wound were rough. The wound could look as pretty and neat as it wanted to but it had been violent. The knife had torn his skin, even around the edges, minute tears that the eye couldn’t see, but the mouth could feel. I traced a fingertip across the lip of the wound. It drew small pain noises from him. Part of me liked the noises, and part of me worried that it hurt too much.

  I gazed up at him. The look on his face as he stared down the length of his body at me wasn’t a pained look. There was a tightening around his eyes that showed it hurt, but the look in those eyes was still eager. Which meant I hadn’t crossed that thin line, yet. It still excited him more than it hurt him. Cool.

  I concentrated on the sensation of the wound under the barest tip of my finger. I closed my eyes so that I could concentrate on it. It was coarse under my finger, not as instantly noticeable as my lips had found it, but the skin was torn and roughened by the violence of the blade. Touch also didn’t give me that sweet, faint taste of blood. Was this Raina’s thought, or mine? No, Jason was right, Raina was gone. I realized I was using my hand, both hands. It made me lean back from Requiem and stare at my burned hand. I’d had burns before, almost this bad, and for similar reasons. Admittedly, it had been because a vamp had pressed his flesh into the holy item. I guess this was the first time it had been just my body involved. Had it been because Marmee Noir had been possessing me, or had it been because I was using vampire powers? Huh? That was an interesting thought. I pushed it back, for so many reasons. I’d look at the implications later. Much later.