Jean-Claude had even left a list of people he thought were appropriate to the job. Byron had not been on the list, nor had Clay. It had been a damn short list, actually, basically Requiem and Graham. The last thing I wanted to do was be trapped in a car with Requiem, but I didn't have time to argue. I'd gone from having plenty of time, to having to call my clients and tell them to hold fast in the cemetery, I really was on my way.
I was wearing Byron's leather jacket to take the place of my bloodied suit jacket. His was the only one that came close to fitting me and not making me look like I was wearing the upper half of a gorilla. It smelled faintly of his cologne.
Buzz's eyes left me and went to the audience. The man who had been arguing with his date was still standing, but now so was the woman, and she was starting to make a scene. "Sorry, gotta catch that."
"Be my guest," I said.
Nathaniel seemed to appear from nowhere. He escorted me toward the outer door. He was smiling and seemed terribly at ease, more so than I'd seen him in a long time, maybe ever. It seemed an odd night for him to be happy. "You promised to get back in time to see some of my act," he said, smiling.
"I've got two clients stuck in cemeteries," I said.
He gave me the look that was half-pout and half-he-knew-he'd-already-won-the-argument. "You promised."
"Can't we just fuck at home later?" I asked.
He gave me a frown. "I'll be furry, you don't do furry."
I had an idea, an awful idea. "I promised to mark your neck tonight. Oh, no, you so are not planning on me doing it in front of an audience?"
He smiled, and there was something in that smile that I hadn't seen before. Some hint of confidence, of security that hadn't been there before. He'd watched me have sex with two near strangers, and suddenly he felt more secure. Go figure.
"You little exhibitionist, you," I said, "you like the idea of me marking you for the first time in front of all these people."
He gave an aw-gee-shucks shrug, which was all act, because his eyes were bright with the answer. "I like a lot of things, Anita."
I tried to frown at him, but couldn't keep it up. "You got me to promise I'd mark you, and now you're taking advantage of it."
"You're running late," he said, "clients waiting in the cemetery." He looked solemn except for the glint of humor in his eyes, which spoiled the effect.
I shook my head, smiling. "I've got to go."
"I know," he said.
"Would it ruin the illusion if I kissed you good-bye?"
"I'll risk it," he said.
I kissed him. It was chaste, a touch of lips, a little pressure, barely any body language. I drew back with a suspicious look on my face. It made him laugh and push me toward the door. "You're late, remember."
I went, but I went out into the October dark even more certain that I knew absolutely nothing about men. Alright, to be fair, that I knew absolutely nothing about the men in my life. I glanced back to see Jean-Claude on stage with another woman, kissing her as if he were trying to find her tonsils without his hands. Most people looked disturbing or awkward when they kissed that deep. He didn't. He made it all seem suave, erotic, and perfect. I realized I'd kissed Nathaniel good-bye, but not Jean-Claude. Didn't want to interrupt, but didn't want him to feel left out, either. I blew him a kiss as his arms emptied of the woman. He returned the gesture with one pale hand. The lower half of his face was smeared bright crimson with lipstick. It didn't really look like blood, not if you'd seen enough of the real deal, but it was still a less than comforting image to take away into the night. One of the other men in my life was smiling at the door, looking forward to having me do foreplay on him in front of an audience. Sometimes the parts of my life that are weirdest to me aren't the parts dealing with vampires and werewolves and zombies. Even vampire politics didn't confuse me as much as my own love life.
39
We were on Gravois, trapped between an endless line of storefronts that had seen better days. The entire area was doing that slow slide into not being a good area to be in after dark. It wasn't quite a danger zone, but if nothing saved it, in a couple of years it would be. The Bevo Mill restaurant, an honest-to-God windmill, loomed like a ship in a sea of lesser buildings and harder times. The Bevo Mill still served great German food. The slowly turning windmill was just ahead, and suddenly we were driving under the stone overpass blocks past the mill. I didn't remember passing any of it. That wasn't good. I was missing things, like my attention was going in and out. Not good at all, since I was driving. Graham squeaked a second time, you know, that sharp intake of breath that comes out when you're trying to swallow the sound.
I glanced at him. "What? What is your problem?"
"You've almost hit two cars," he said in a strangled voice.
"No I haven't."
"Yes," Requiem said from the back, "yes you have."
There was a white car in front of me, like magic, it just appeared. I slammed on the brakes, and Graham squeaked again. My pulse was thudding in my throat. I hadn't seen that car. I signaled that I was turning right. Right meant I didn't have to cross any lanes of traffic. The suddenly appearing white car had scared me.
I eased us into Grasso Plaza, which held the Affton Post Office, a Save-A-Lot, and a lot of empty storefronts. This whole area along Gravois seemed tired, as if it had given its best and its best hadn't been good enough. Or maybe it was projecting. I cut the engine, and we sat in silence for a minute.
"Are you well?" Requiem asked, his voice was very quiet and deep like he was talking from inside a well.
I actually turned around and looked at him, and even turning around seemed to be slower, as if I wasn't moving at the same speed as the rest of the world.
Requiem was just sitting in the backseat, with his hands clasped in his lap. He wasn't far away, or doing anything odd. He was sitting, very still, as if he didn't want to attract attention to himself.
"What did you say?" My voice seemed hollow, too, as if I had an echo in my head.
"Are you well?" he said, slowly, distinctly, and as I stared at his lips, watching them move; the sound and the movement seemed just a little out of sync.
I had to think about it as if it were a much harder question than it should have been. "No," I said, finally. "No, I don't think I am."
"What's wrong?" Graham asked.
What was wrong? Good question. Trouble is, I wasn't sure I had a good answer. What was wrong? I was having something close to a shock reaction, why? Had I lost more blood than I knew? Maybe. Maybe not.
I was cold, and I huddled in the borrowed jacket, burying my face in the collar. Byron's cologne, the scent of him, was there, and I jerked back from it, because the smell of his skin in the leather brought it all back. Scent brings memory stronger than any other sense, and I was suddenly drowning in the feel of Byron's body, the look of his face as he gazed down at me, the weight of him, the sight of him going in and out of my body.
I fell back against the seat, my head thrown back, and it was as if all the pleasure of it was suddenly there again, rolling over me, through me. It wasn't the exact experience, but like a strong, strong, echo. Strong enough to shake my body against the seat and leave my hands clawing at the air, as if I needed something to hold on to, anything to hold on to.
I heard Requiem's voice: "No, don't touch..." And I found something to hold on to.
Graham had tried to grab me, hold me down, keep me from hurting myself. I think he'd thought I was having a fit. His hand touched mine, and my hand convulsed around his, and it was as if from the moment our palms locked together that all that memory, all that pleasure, poured down my hand and into him.
Graham shuddered against me. I felt the shiver of it go down his arm, and it threw him against the seat so hard the Jeep shook from the impact. I let him have the memory, the pleasure, the sights and smells of it, I let it all pour away from me and into him. It wasn't a conscious thought, because I hadn't known until I did it that I could put it into someone el
se and not have to be pulled along for the ride. I didn't mean to do it, but I wasn't unhappy about it. I was glad, for once, to be the calm one on the other side of the seat, while I watched Graham writhing in just the echo of what we'd done. I was glad it wasn't me. Because I knew now why I'd had the shocky reaction earlier, before the metaphysics had gotten out of hand.
I killed without thinking much about it. Not in cold blood, but if it came time to kill, I had no real problem with it. I'd mourned the fact that killing had stopped bothering me. Then on my first trip to Tennessee to help Richard back when we were still a couple, I'd tortured someone. The bad guys had sent us Richard's mother's finger in a little box, along with a lock of his brother Daniel's hair. We had a time limit to find them, and we already knew that they'd been tortured. The man who'd delivered the box had bragged that they'd both been raped. I'd tortured him, made him tell us where they were, and when we were done with him, I'd shot him in the head, and made the screaming stop. I'd done it to save Richard's family, and because I couldn't see another way to do it. I'd done it because I never ask anyone to do anything that I'm not willing to do myself. It's a rule. Of course, before that, my rule had been I did not do torture. That was a line I did not cross, and I'd crossed it. The terrible part was that I hadn't regretted doing it, only having to do it. He'd raped Richard's mother, if I could have I'd have killed him slower, but that wasn't in me, not even for what he'd done. We'd saved them, but before all of it, the Zeeman's had been like the Waltons, and now they weren't. They weren't broken completely, but they weren't as fixed as when they started, either. I'd killed the men that did it, or helped them get killed, but all the revenge in the world wouldn't really fix what was broken.
How do you give someone back their innocence? That wonderful sense of perfect safety that only exists for people that have never really had anything bad happen to them. How do you give that back? I wish I knew.
I'd crossed a lot of lines over the years, but one line I'd never crossed until tonight had been I didn't have sex just to feed. I didn't have sex with strangers. Byron and Requiem were strangers. I'd known them for two weeks, give or take. I had fucked them because Jean-Claude needed me to feed.
Requiem had moved to one side of the backseat, so he was close enough to see my face and to watch Graham still twitching on the front seat, but not close enough so I could touch him easily. "You had a flashback, didn't you?"
I nodded, still staring at the werewolf in my front seat.
"Has that ever happened before?"
"Only after Asher rolled me completely with his mind, and we all had sex." I didn't look at him as I spoke, I watched Graham's body begin to grow quiet.
"But Asher was not involved tonight."
"No," I said, "he wasn't." My voice sounded very even, very neutral, empty. Empty, just like I felt.
"Did you know that you could send that memory into someone else?"
"No," I said.
Graham's eyes were fluttering, like butterflies trying to open, but not able to do it. He looked boneless, as if he could have slid into the floorboard, if his body had been a little less solid.
"You spilled it into him, then watched him writhe. How did it make you feel?"
I shook my head. "Nothing, just glad for once that it wasn't me twisting in the seat."
He moved to lean against the back of Graham's seat, a little closer to me. "Is that true? Is that really how you feel about it?"
I moved my whole head to meet his eyes, as if a glance wasn't enough. I let him see how dead my eyes felt, how empty I was inside. "You're a master vamp, can't you smell it if I'm lying?"
He licked his lips like he was nervous. "The last vampire I knew that could do what you just did, did it on purpose. She would recall a memory of pleasure, and she would pick someone to give it to. It could be a reward, and it was, but it could also be punishment. Sometimes she would choose someone who did not wish to feel such pleasures, and she would force them to experience it."
"A kind of rape," I said.
He nodded.
"You're talking about Belle Morte, aren't you?"
He nodded, again.
"She enjoyed watching them writhe, especially if they didn't want to do it," I said.
"You say that as a statement, not a question."
"I've met her, remember?"
"You are exactly right. She loved watching prim, proper women and men, forced to spill themselves upon the floor and flop about, experiencing a pleasure greater than any they had ever felt before. It pleased her to watch the righteous brought low."
"Yeah, that sounds like her."
"But you truly felt nothing. It did not excite you to watch Graham writhe."
"Why should it?"
He smiled then, and there was relief in his eyes. "That you would ask the question makes me worry less about you."
"Worry how?" I asked.
"It has been speculation for centuries whether Belle was formed into the type of," he seemed to search for a word, "creature she was by the ardeur and her powers running to flesh and pleasure, or whether she was always as she is, and the power simply made her more."
"It's been my experience, Requiem, that people become more of who they are in extremes, both good and bad. Give a truly good person power, and they're still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they're still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn't evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don't always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside."
He looked at me, with an odd expression on his face. "That was a very wise thing to say."
I had to smile. "You sound surprised."
He gave an almost bow from the neck, as much as he could sitting in the seat. "My apologies, but in truth I've always thought of you as more muscle than brain. Not stupid," he added hastily, "but not wise. Intelligent perhaps, but no, not wise."
"I guess I'll just take the compliment, and leave the insult alone."
"It was not meant as an insult, Anita, far from it." There was a look on his face, a feel to him, that was anxious.
"Don't worry, I won't hold it against you. A lot of people underestimate me."
"They see the delicate beauty, but not the killer," he said.
"I'm not a delicate beauty," I said.
He gave a small frown. "You are most assuredly delicate in appearance, and you are beautiful."
I shook my head. "No, I'm not. Not beautiful, pretty, maybe, but not beautiful."
His eyes widened a little. "If you do not think yourself beautiful, then you are using a different mirror from the one in front of my eyes."
"Pretty words, but I'm surrounded by some of the most beautiful men living or dead. I may clean up well, but when comparing beauty, I don't rank that high, not in this company."
"It is true, perhaps, that your beauty is not a flashy beauty, as is Asher's, or Jean-Claude's, or even your Nathaniel's, but it is beauty nonetheless. Perhaps the more precious, for it grows not at the first sight of the eye, but a little more each time one speaks with you or watches you move so commandingly into a situation, or watches the truth in your eyes when you say that you are not beautiful, and I realize that you mean it. That you are not being humble, or playing silly games, you simply do not see yourself."
"See, that's not beauty, that's pretty with a personality that you like."
"But do you not see, Anita, that there is beauty that hits the eye like a bolt of lighting, that burns and sears and blinds. It is more disaster than pleasure. But yours, yours is a beauty that lulls one into comfort, into not protecting one's eyes from the light, then one night you realize that the moon, too, has its beauty."
I shook my head. "I have no idea who you're talking about, but it's not me."
He sighed. "You are a very hard woman to compliment."
"You know, you're not the first person to say that."
He smiled. "That does not surprise me at all."
Graham let out a long, lo
ng sigh, and sort of spilled himself back up onto the seat. It was like watching liquid fall upward. He had that same liquid grace that all the wereanimals seemed to have. He leaned his head against the headrest, but at least he was upright again. He gave me a slow, lazy blink, and his eyes were a dark, wolf amber, almost brown, but I knew the difference. I'd seen it often enough.
He smiled, and even that was lazy. "That was amazing."
"I didn't do it on purpose," I said.
"I don't care."
I frowned at him.
"Can you do it again, is all I want to know."
I frowned harder.
Some of the laziness began to seep away from his face. "Look, you give me one of the most amazing orgasmic experiences of my life, and now you're acting like the injured party. You're the one that spilled all over me."
"Not on purpose," I said.
"You keep saying that, like you're apologizing, why? Why are you apologizing?"
I looked at Requiem for help, though I didn't hold much hope. But he did help. "I believe that Anita sees it as unasked-for sexual contact. A sort of rape, if you will."
"Can't rape the willing," Graham said, and he stretched himself taller in the seat, settling more into it, and his eyes were bleeding back to human.
"I didn't know you were willing, when it happened."
He nodded. "Okay, but I'm okay with it." He looked at me. "But you don't seem okay with it at all. What's wrong now?"
"What's wrong?" I asked. "I just had a flashback so strong that if I'd still been driving, we'd have wrecked. I fed it into you by accident. I didn't mean to do it. What else am I not going to mean to do?"
"She and Jean-Claude have hit a new power plateau," Requiem said.
"Oh," Graham said, as if that made perfect sense to him, "so you don't know what all the new power can do, yet."
Incubus Dreams ab-12 Page 38