Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I don’t believe it’s permanent. I think if you could get enough space between yourself and Jean-Claude’s power, it would go away.”

  “Richard, this isn’t Jean-Claude’s power anymore; it’s mine.”

  He shook his head, his arms crossing over that lovely chest. “You aren’t a vampire, Anita. You can’t have vampire powers. They’re still part of the triumvirate we have with Jean-Claude.”

  “Richard, this is real. You can’t wish it away.”

  “What, that you’re some kind of sex-crazed demon? I don’t believe that. It’s more of Jean-Claude’s power, or Belle Morte’s, or even Marmee Noir. Jesus, Anita, you have had so many vampires running through your mind, you don’t know what is you and what is them anymore.”

  There was some truth to what he was saying, but…“Richard, I have forged a triumvirate of power with Nathaniel and Damian. That’s me, not Jean-Claude. That’s real.”

  He shook his head again. “There’s got to be a way to undo it.”

  I just stared at him. This was not the talk I thought we’d be having. “Richard, I am a succubus, me, not Jean-Claude, not Belle Morte, not Mommie Dark, me.”

  “Humans can’t be succubi.”

  “Maybe not, but then humans can’t have a vampire servant or an animal to call, and I have both of those.”

  “Because you’re Jean-Claude’s human servant.”

  “Richard, you saw what happened when I tried to undo that connection. I would have died and taken Nathaniel and Damian with me.”

  He settled back into the water, giving me angry eyes. “Jean-Claude told me the theory. That your version of the ardeur helps you see the deepest desire in someone’s heart and grant it, and make them into what you most need. Micah needed his people safe; you killed Chimera for him. You needed what from Micah?”

  “A helpmate, a partner, someone to help me run the furry coalition, and help me run the wereleopards that I’d inherited when I killed their old master.”

  “I could have been your partner,” he said.

  “You didn’t want to be my partner. You want your own life, not to be just an adjunct to mine.”

  “What does that mean? That I won’t give up my job for you?”

  “That I needed someone to do the coalition full time, and you have your career.”

  “That can’t be all Micah is to you.”

  “He’s there for me, Richard. He’s there for me and the people I love. He doesn’t fight me all the time. He says yes more than he says no.”

  “And I just say no.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Nathaniel needed to belong to someone; now he belongs to you. I get that. But what did he do for you?”

  “I needed a wife,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I needed a 1950s wife to make my life run smooth. I needed someone to be my wife, and he’s really good at it.”

  “And I want you to be my wife, is that it?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Why didn’t your ardeur look into my heart and see what I most needed, and make us into the perfect couple, too?”

  “I thought Jean-Claude explained all this to you.”

  “I asked him why not me, and he said the power was unpredictable. But that wasn’t the truth, was it?”

  “Not all of it,” I said, and cursed my vampire lover for being a chickenshit.

  “Tell me all of it,” Richard said.

  “Micah knew what he wanted: his people safe at any cost. He said from the moment he came to me that he’d do anything, be anything, to be in my life. The ardeur made that happen for him. Nathaniel wanted a home and to be loved for himself, not just for sex, and the ardeur made that happen. Both of those desires are very clear. Do you know what you want most, Richard? Do you have one single heart’s desire?”

  “I want you.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not your deepest darkest wish, Richard.”

  “I should know what my deepest wish is, Anita.”

  “Richard, if a genie appeared before you right now, what would you wish? Really, truly, if you could have anything, what would it be?”

  “You.”

  “Liar,” I said.

  He sat up, and that otherworldly energy swirled through the room. “How dare you?”

  “Richard, be honest with yourself. What would you have if you could have anything, no matter how impossible?”

  He blinked at me, and the energy level in the room seeped away. He stared at me. “I don’t want to be a werewolf.”

  “That’s your deepest wish, Richard, and the ardeur can’t give you that. I can’t be that for you, so the ardeur doesn’t work between you and me, because what you want most doesn’t have anything to do with sex and love.”

  He stared at me and sat back in the water, almost like he was faint. “Oh, my, God.” He whispered it.

  “We thought at first you were just too conflicted for the ardeur to pick and choose, but I was the one who figured it out.”

  “You’re right,” he said. A look of soft horror covered his face. He looked at me, and such pain filled his eyes. “I did this to myself.”

  I shrugged.

  “I was so afraid I’d become a monster that I took the inoculations against lycanthropy. That’s how I caught it.”

  “I know,” I said softly.

  “And I lost you because I hate what I am more than I want you.”

  “You haven’t lost me, Richard.”

  He looked at me, and I had to fight to keep meeting that look. “You’ll never be just mine. We’ll never have a life together.”

  “We can be part of each other’s lives, Richard.”

  “Not in the way I want.”

  “Maybe not, but, Richard, don’t throw away what we have. Was it so bad last night, sleeping with all of us? Was that so awful?”

  “No,” he said, “and if I hadn’t been in bed with you, then Marmee Noir could have done something awful to you. You need me to protect you.”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “But I can’t live with two other men, Anita. I can’t share my bed with them every night. I just can’t.”

  My eyes felt hot, my throat was tight. Damn it, I would not cry. I managed to say, “I know.”

  “Then where do I fit in your life?”

  “Where do I fit in yours?” I asked.

  He nodded. “That’s fair.” But that was all he said.

  I sat on my side of the tub feeling lost and horrible. Only Richard could make me feel this bad; only he managed to cut me this deep. Damn it.

  I felt Nathaniel like a distant tug. He wasn’t feeling well, which meant that Damian, in his coffin, would be feeling worse. Damian hadn’t woken for the day yet, and I needed to feed the ardeur before he tried to wake. Jean-Claude had explained to me that if one morning I didn’t have enough energy to make Damian’s body wake, he would never wake again. He would simply remain dead, forever.

  “I’ve got to feed, Richard, now. Nathaniel is starting to feel bad, and I won’t risk killing Damian.”

  Richard nodded. I expected him to say he’d get someone else for me to feed on, but he didn’t. “We need to do enough foreplay so you can feed from me.”

  “We’re fighting, that’s not good foreplay.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to be with me now?” He said it low, careful, as if he were balancing a world of emotions on a very thin stick. One wrong comment and the stick would break and the world would fall. Shit.

  “I’m saying I don’t have time for lengthy foreplay. I need to feed, right away. I’m trying not to cry; that’s not conducive to sex. Not for me, at least.”

  “I’m sorry, Anita.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Richard. Fix it. Fix yourself, fix us, or don’t fix us. But whatever you’re going to do, we need to do it now. I won’t risk lives because we’re having another fight.”

  He nodded his head as if that were fair. Maybe it was. He started moving towa
rd me through the water.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, and sounded suspicious.

  “I want you to feed off me, Anita.”

  “I’m pissed and hurt, and that doesn’t lead to sex for me.”

  “If I leave you’ll still be pissed and hurt. You’ll still have trouble concentrating on the sex, won’t you?”

  I couldn’t argue his logic. I almost said, But the others are smaller than you, and this is one situation where bigger isn’t better. But I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t want to hurt him that badly. I also knew that if Richard and I couldn’t come to some kind of understanding, one day we’d be finished as a couple. He’d always be Jean-Claude’s wolf to call. He’d always be bound to us in a triumvirate of power, but we’d be broken up. It would be like being trapped in a relationship with someone you’d divorced but could never completely get rid of. A little slice of hell, that.

  He was kneeling in front of me, the water just above his waist. The edges of his hair were wet, but the top was still dry, and still held some of the slick stuff that had gotten on us when I ripped Travis into his animal form. Truthfully, a little mess wasn’t enough to take away from how handsome he was, but the constant fighting was. The picking at it all, and his deep unhappiness with being a werewolf, that was unattractive. I gazed up at him, all that way to the nearly heart-stopping face, so handsome. Handsome enough that I’d have been embarrassed around him in high school. But handsome and well-endowed wasn’t enough to keep letting him hurt me like this. I stared up at him, and for the first time my heart did not leap up, and neither did my libido. I was tired of the fighting. I was tired of his inability to accept our reality. He didn’t believe I was a succubus. He thought it was something that would go away if we got me away from Jean-Claude. Didn’t he understand that there was no going away from Jean-Claude, not for either of us? His comments said no, he didn’t understand that, and that made me sad.

  He stood up. He stood up with water dripping down his body. I was suddenly staring at a certain part of his anatomy with water drops decorating it. We all have our weaknesses, and one of mine was water. Richard had dated me long enough to know that. He was betting that seeing him wet was enough to distract me from being mad at him. I had a moment to decide to hold on to that angry sadness, or do what I wanted to do. Do what the suddenly rapid pulse in my neck wanted to do. I felt Nathaniel sway against a wall. I went to my knees, steadied my hands against the warm, wet sides of Richard’s thighs, and lowered my mouth to his body.

  16

  I LICKED THE water off him with the tip of my tongue. I drank water from the looseness of his body, licking water from the testicles where they hung so heavy and large. I licked and drank the water until his body lengthened and hardened. I couldn’t reach the tip of him now, not without wrapping my hand around the base of him and lowering all that hardness toward my mouth. He made small noises for me, and when I gazed up his body, the eyes that looked back had changed to wolf amber. Sex was supposed to be about losing control, but all lycanthropes could never completely lose control—because to lose control for them meant to change shape. At least once a year some new lycanthrope lost control and cut up a lover during sex. Sometimes the lover survived, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they got to be furry, too.

  I drove my mouth over him until my lips met my own hand. I used the hand to squeeze and pulse around him, but it also kept me from having to try to take all of him in my mouth. I could deep-throat, but it wasn’t always the most comfortable position, not with someone Richard’s size. I could raise the ardeur and do it, do it all, but…

  I rose off his body, enough to talk. “I’d raise the ardeur and finish like this, but you’re too strong. You keep me out except during intercourse.”

  He looked down at me, and it was almost a look of pain. “I want you to do whatever you want to do.”

  “Will you lower your shields and let me feed?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I shook my head and squeezed him tight at the same time. It threw his head back, made his hands reach to empty air for something to hold on to. He liked to hold on to things when we did this. But his hands found only air, and he looked down at me with a shudder that ran up the length of his body. Just feeling him shudder in my hand brought a cry from me. “God, Richard, God!”

  He reached down and grabbed my arms, pulled me up out of the water. I had to let go of him as he came out of the water with me in his arms. He threw me onto the marble around the tub edge. It was cold and hard, and I started to protest. Richard’s fingers found my opening. He shoved his finger inside me, and just doing oral sex on him made me wet, but the water had kept me tight. Even one finger seemed big. He moved it in and out and around, and I cried out for him.

  He put two fingers inside me, and he actually closed his eyes, concentrating, searching, until he found that spot, no bigger than a fifty-cent piece, that spot just inside and to the front of the opening. He found it, and flicked his fingers back and forth across it. There hadn’t been enough foreplay for a full-blown G-spot orgasm, but it still felt good, so good. It made me spread my legs wider for him, made me angle my hips for him. He took that for the invitation it was, and drove his fingers inside me harder and faster, until I cried out for him again.

  “You’re wet,” he said, in a voice that was a little strangled with need.

  I nodded, breathless.

  He started to angle himself to enter me, but I put a hand on his chest. “Condom.”

  “Shit,” he said, but he went to his knees and riffled through the pile of towels behind us. Condoms lived in the bathrooms and bedrooms of any place I was alone with the men. The pregnancy scare in November had made me unwilling to count on just the birth-control pill. He was cursing under his breath by the time he got the condom on, but he turned back to me, his body hard, eager. Just the sight of him like that, knowing what we were about to do, made things low in my body tighten. Small orgasms before he even entered me.

  Even wet and eager, he had to work himself inside me. I writhed around him, just from the feel of him working his way inside. I gazed up at him, let my eyes see his face, the wolf eyes in his face as he fought himself, his arms supporting him above me, so that most of his body was above me, so that I could see him as he pushed his way into me.

  “Feed, Anita, feed, please.”

  A please like that usually meant that a man was close. I called the ardeur to life. I called it, like coaxing a spark to life, to flame, to burn. The power spilled over me, through me, and into him. The ardeur poured over us in a warm wash of power. It opened my body to him so that he could push in and out of me. I could watch him in the mirrored walls around us, his body above mine, pushing in and out, in and out. He knew with the ardeur on us he didn’t have to be careful, and he wasn’t. He pushed all that length into me as hard and fast as he could. He grabbed my hips, lifted my lower body off the marble, held me in his big hands as he pounded himself into me, so hard and fast that our bodies made a wet, thudding noise. The end of him found the end of me, so that each stroke hit as far into my body as it could, and still he came in and in, so hard, so fast, he was almost a blur in the mirrors. He wasn’t human, and he had speed and strength that wasn’t human. Once he’d worried that he’d hurt me, but we’d found that I wasn’t human-fragile anymore. We’d found that Richard could be as rough as he wanted, and he wouldn’t break me. He was that rough now, then he found a new speed, a new hardness. It was as if he’d always been holding back, and I just hadn’t known it. Faster, harder, until he was a blur in the mirrors, pounding himself inside me, until I cried out, orgasming around him, body spasming. I felt his body spasm inside me, felt his body buck against mine. All movement ceased, his head flung backward, eyes closing. His fingers dug into my ass, holding us both in that moment, as his body spasmed and went inside mine, with him buried as deeply inside my body as was possible to be. In that frozen moment, as our bodies rode each other, the ardeur fed. I fed. I fed on Richard’s
energy, fed on the part of him that was wolf, and human. I fed on all of him, took in every last delicious inch of his power, as I took in every last delicious inch of his body. When he let himself go like this, he gave so much energy.

  He lowered me back to the edge of the marble tub. He slid out of me, and even that made me writhe. He collapsed onto his side, because there wasn’t enough room for his shoulders otherwise. He lay gasping with his head near my waist. I managed to move my hand enough to touch his hair, but that was all I could manage. My pulse was still thundering in my ears.

  He found his voice first. “Did I hurt you?”

  I started to say no, but the endorphins were fading around the edges. There was already an ache beginning between my legs. To Micah I would have said, A little, but to Richard I said, “No.” He had more issues than Micah did.

  I felt his hand slide clumsily over my thigh, as if he couldn’t quite make his hand work just yet. He brushed between my legs. I said in a voice that was half-laughing, “Not again, not yet.”

  He raised his hand so I could see that he had blood on his fingertips. “Did I hurt you?” His voice sounded surer of itself and less post-coital.

  “Yes, and no,” I said.

  He managed to raise himself up on one elbow. “You’re bleeding, Anita. I hurt you.”

  I looked at his fingertips. “A little, but it’s a good hurt. I’ll remember what we did with every ache.”

  His face closed down, and he stared at the blood on his fingertips as if it were an accusation.

  “Richard, it was wonderful, amazing. I didn’t know you’d been holding so much of yourself back.”

  “I should have kept holding back.”

  I touched his shoulder. “Richard, don’t do this. Don’t make it bad when it was good.”

  “You’re bleeding, Anita. I fucked you so hard you’re bleeding.”

  I thought of one thing to say, but wasn’t sure if it would make things better or worse.

  He moved away from me to sit on the edge of the tub with his legs dangling over the side. He washed the blood away.

  “I’ll be all right, Richard, honest.”