I stared down the line of my body into those brown eyes. “Are you saying this was some kind of dominance display?”
“Not exactly.”
Strangely, it was Merle who answered. “When two such different beasts meet, and they are both strong dominants—such as a true Nimir-Ra, and a true Ulfric—the two animals must fight and test each other. I have seen it before. It is a type of taming of one beast by the other.”
I looked way up at the tall man. “No one tamed anyone.”
Merle knelt beside us. “I think you are right. It is as the Ulfric has said, a standoff. He could have kept fighting until one of you won, or lost, but he chose to let it be.”
I remembered someone telling Richard to control it, it being his beast. I looked at Richard. “You stopped, didn’t you?”
“I don’t care which of us is more dominant, Anita. Those kind of games have never meant anything to me, unless people forced me to play them.”
“You said something about helping Gregory. What did you mean?”
He started working his way a little higher up my body, sliding his body along mine. I could feel the slime from his shirt recoating my bare stomach and nearly bare chest. My disgust must have shown on my face, because he asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Your shirt is covered in slime, and I’m lying in a pool of it. I didn’t just want you to get off me to be off of me, I wanted to get up out of this mess.”
He came to his knees, his legs on either side of mine. I could feel our beasts stretched between us like something that should have been visible, as if each of their heads was buried in the other’s chest. He offered me a hand. I stared up at him.
“I know you don’t need the help, Anita. But our beasts are touching now. It’s a close connection and physical contact will help us keep it until we finish with Gregory.”
I didn’t need the earnest look on his face to know he was telling the truth. The marks were still open between us. I knew he was telling the truth.
I took his hand and he lifted me to my feet. Standing up hurt, and either he felt it or saw it on my face. “I hurt you,” he said softly.
“We hurt each other.” I could feel that he was stiff, aching, but he moved like he wasn’t, and I still moved human stiff.
He raised the bottom of his shirt, still holding my hand. “Touch me.”
I looked up at him, and he laughed. “Just keep physical contact, Anita. I don’t mean anything by it. But I need both my hands.”
I laid a hand on his side, very tentatively.
He shook his head. “I’m going to take my shirt off.”
If you can’t touch a person’s hands, arms, or much of their upper body, you run out of polite places to touch. I settled for sliding my hand under the wet shirt, touching the smooth firmness of his side. Even his skin was damp from the shirt having molded to it.
Richard drew the shirt over his head, and I was left standing inches from him as he revealed the flat plains of his stomach, the muscular swell of his chest, and arched his back to draw the shirt over his head. The sight of him, the pull of the lust that always came when I saw him without clothes pushed my beast against his. I felt furred sides roll against each other, a tentative roll of power that felt like someone had taken velvet and caressed the most intimate part of me.
Richard gasped.
I concentrated hard to stop the movement, but that I’d done it without thinking brought heat in a wash up my face. I looked at the ground; my hand was still only touching his side, just above his jeans, but the touch felt suddenly intimate. I wanted to take my hand away, and his hand covered mine before I could move. He pressed my hand to him, firm, but not forceful.
He touched my chin, raised my face until I had to look at him. “It’s alright, Anita. I love the fact that just seeing me moves you like that.”
The blush that had been fading, blazed harder. He laughed, soft, low, with that edge that a man’s laugh gets when he’s thinking intimate things. “I have missed you, Anita.”
I looked up at him. “I missed you, too.”
His beast moved through me in a wash of power and sensation that left me gasping. My beast responded to his. I couldn’t seem to stop it. Maybe I didn’t want to. Those shadow forms rolled in and out of each other, through us, until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. It was Richard who drew back first, and said, “Dear God, I never thought . . .” I felt the effort it cost him to draw back from me, to stop. His face showed a businesslike, no-nonsense look, but I could feel the trembling of other things inside him. His voice came out brisk. “I’ll call Jamil’s beast, the way it’s supposed to be done. Feel what I do, how I use my beast to call his.”
My voice was a little breathy. “Then I’ll do Gregory.”
He nodded. “Or I can call Shang-Da’s beast, if you need to see it one more time.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
He slid a hand around my waist, drawing me against him. It didn’t seem as intimate as the roil of our beasts inside us. Jamil stood facing us. He’d stripped off his shirt and shoes, but kept on his pants. It occurred to me for the first time that I’d never seen him nude, except when he’d been injured and near death. Jamil didn’t do casual nudity. One of the few modest shapeshifters I knew.
“I’m ready, Ulfric.”
After what Richard had done to Stephen I thought Jamil was being awful trusting. But then, everyone trusted Richard; he was very trustworthy. No, lack of trust wasn’t the problem.
“I don’t need to physically touch anyone to do this, but it’s easier that way, so I’ll touch him, so you can understand better how it works.”
I nodded, wrapped in the circle of his arm, the firmness of his body, the velvet roll of our beasts like another arm to hold us against each other.
Richard touched Jamil’s bare shoulder, and I felt his power move outward like a warm wind. It caressed Jamil’s skin, and Richard’s beast flowed with it, pulling mine along for the ride. Richard’s power teased along Jamil, coaxing, and the best analogy I could think of was like someone trying to lure a cat down out of a tree. Beckoning, talking sweetly, promising caresses, and treats, if only it would come down. But Jamil’s beast didn’t come down, it came out. It rolled out of the center of his being like a pale golden fog, an almost shape. I saw his beast like I’d seen Micah’s earlier, for an instant, then Jamil collapsed to the deck, and his bare back began to ripple like water under a strong wind. The wolf drew out of his back in a long wet line, and his body dissolved into that dark furred shape, so that his human body became the wolf, like flipping over a coin, heads, tails, but still the same coin. I felt the rightness of it, the harmony of it. Jamil embraced what he was; there was no conflict between him and his beast. I’d never seen him in wolf form, man-wolf, but not this pony-sized black beast. He was like Little Red Riding Hood’s worst nightmare.
The wolf shook himself, and I realized that his fur was dry. There was more of that clear goop all over the deck, but very little of it had clung to the wolf itself. Yet another metaphysical mystery: How do werewolves stay dry when shapeshifting is such a mess?
I turned without a word, drawing Richard with me. I went to Gregory, still sitting on the picnic table, only Cherry and Dr. Lillian with him now. Zane had come to see what the matter was when Richard and I started writhing on the deck.
Gregory looked at me, blue eyes silvered in the moonlight. I smiled and touched his cheek, cupped the side of his face against my hand. I reached for his beast, not with my hand, but with that shadowy thing that swirled through Richard and me. I sent it shivering across Gregory’s skin, and he sat up, letting the quilt fall away from his bare upper body. Cherry moved away just enough so they wouldn’t touch, as if she was afraid to touch him now.
I tried to coax his beast, to call it with sweet caresses and gentle persuasion, but it remained stubbornly just under the surface, trapped by the drugs that still made Gregory’s body a prison and the shock that had further dampened everything I n
eeded to call. But I knew that it didn’t have to be gentle. I might not have been along for the ride when Richard brought Stephen’s beast, but I’d seen it, and I knew enough of power to guess what he’d done.
“I’ll try not to hurt you,” I said, but I thrust my power into Gregory. I felt it hit his chest and sink into him like a large flesh-and-fur blade.
Gregory gasped, back arching, just a little.
I found his beast like a curled cat, asleep, sluggish, and I grabbed it in my hand, sank claws in it and pulled it screaming into the air. I ripped his beast out of him, and Gregory shifted, as Stephen had shifted in an explosion of blood, flesh, and fluid. I was covered in it, so thick I had to scoop it out of my eyes to see. To see that yellow and black spotted man-leopard lying hunched on the table. I watched Stephen come to sniff along his brother’s shivering body.
“Gregory, Gregory, can you hear me?” I asked, and my voice was softer than I meant it to be.
Gregory blinked leopard eyes at me, but a growling voice came out of that furred throat. “I can hear you.”
Stephen threw his head back and bayed. Jamil echoed him, and the leopards’ screams of triumph filled the night.
36
DAWN WAS SLIDING through the trees in a wash of white, white light that left the trees looking like black paper cutouts against the shining sky when I pulled the curtains and filled the bedroom with twilight dimness. I’d put very heavy curtains in the room when Jean-Claude had been a frequent visitor. The bedside lamp seemed dim after the glow of sunrise. Nathaniel sat on the edge of the bed by the lamp. He was wearing the bottoms of silk pajama shorts. They were a pale lavender silk that echoed his eyes and looked too delicate a color for men’s sleepwear. I always suspected the shorts were originally designed for a woman, but shorts were shorts.
The lamplight caught red highlights in his auburn hair, where it gleamed down the side of his body like something warm and alive, almost separate. Strangely, in wereleopard form, he was a black panther, so that auburn hair vanished once he left human form.
Nathaniel was the only one of the wereleopards still in human form. So he was the only one that got to share my bed. If they were kitty-cats, they had to sleep elsewhere, but in human form we tried to be a big pile of puppies. Somehow it was less comfy with only Nathaniel than it would have been with more of them. Maybe it was the fact that his right nipple still had a circle of my teeth marks.
“Shouldn’t the bite marks have healed by now?” I asked.
“I don’t heal as quickly as some,” he said softly. “And marks made by another shapeshifter, or even a vampire, heal more slowly.”
“Why is that?”
He shrugged. “Why does silver kill us, and steel not?”
“Point taken,” I said. I ran my hand through my still-damp hair. I’d showered and was actually wearing pajamas, not an oversized T-shirt, which was my usual sleep attire. Though pajamas may have been too big a word for the emerald green camisole and matching short-shorts. There was a floor-length robe in the same vibrant green, so everything was covered, but Nathaniel knew I hadn’t dressed up for him. Or at least I hoped he did.
He watched me pacing the room with careful eyes. We had crossed a line, he and I, and the mark on his chest just kept reminding me of it. I didn’t think that Richard would tolerate Nathaniel and me sharing the bed alone, not that I really expected the three of us to bunk together, either. Oh, hell, I didn’t know what I expected. I had expected Richard to come to me after his shower. But he was a no-show, and it was dawn, and I was tired.
There was a firm knock on the door. I said, “Come in,” with my heart beating a little too fast. Merle opened the door, and I hoped my disappointment didn’t show on my face. His own face registered nothing, so I couldn’t judge what he saw on mine.
“The Ulfric is in the kitchen.” He did look uncomfortable then. “He is crying.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
Merle looked down, then up, almost defiant. “He has ordered his bodyguard out of the room, and he is crying. I do not know why.”
I sighed. Although I was tired, I was excited at the thought of Richard being in the house, of him coming to me, maybe. Instead of sex we were going to have another session of hand-holding, and shoulder-crying. Damn it.
I felt my shoulders slump and forced myself to stand upright again. I didn’t have to ask why Merle had told me. Who else would Richard take comfort from? I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure he’d take comfort from me.
I went for the door. Merle held it open for me, and I walked under his arm without having to duck. “Thanks for telling me, Merle,” I muttered as I went out into the darkened living room.
Shang-Da was leaning against the wall by the open doorway that led into the kitchen. He looked as uncomfortable as I’d ever seen him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. What was going on?
Caleb was settled on the couch with a blanket and an extra pillow. He was sitting up, the blanket bunched in his lap. He was nude from the waist up and probably nude from the waist down if no one had made him wear jammies. I hoped someone had remembered to put a sheet on the couch. He watched me walk across the room, and even in the dim light from the kitchen I didn’t like the way his eyes followed me.
“Nice robe,” he said.
I ignored him and went for the doorway. Richard sat at the kitchen table. He’d opened all the curtains so that the room was filled with the soft light of dawn. His shoulder-length hair had been blow-dried to a soft, fluffy mass. I could never blow-dry my hair without it turning to something thick and awful-looking. The early morning light made his hair look more golden than normal, less brown. He looked up, and I realized the gold glow was a halo effect of the rising sun. It painted a nimbus of shining gold around him, leaving his hair light brown around his face, making the skin at the center of his body look even darker than it was, almost like it was in shadow.
I had a moment to see the shine of tears on his shadowed face, then he lowered his head and twisted in his chair so I couldn’t see. The movement placed more of his body in the burning golden light, but the illusion of halos and shadow was gone.
I walked to the table, stood close enough to touch his bare shoulder, not sure if I should. “Richard, what’s wrong?”
He shook his head, still not looking at me.
I reached out, touched the smoothness of his shoulder gently. He didn’t tell me to go away, and he didn’t pull away. Okay. I touched the tears on the cheek closest to me, smoothed them away with my hand. It reminded me of comforting Nathaniel earlier.
I touched Richard’s chin, turned his face to me, and dried the tears on his other cheek with the sleeve of my robe. “Talk to me, Richard, please.”
He smiled. Maybe it was the “please.” I didn’t use that word often. “I’ve never seen this before.” He touched the sleeve very gently.
I wasn’t going to be distracted, not even by him noticing what I’d worn with him in mind. “You have to be as tired as I am, Richard. What’s keeping you up?”
He looked down, then up, and there was such sorrow in his dark eyes, that I almost said, no, don’t, but he needed to talk. “Louisa is in jail, and Guy is dead.”
I frowned. “I don’t know the names.”
“Louisa is one of our newest wolves.” He looked down again, not meeting my eyes. “Guy is her fiancé . . . husband. Was her husband.” He covered his face with his hands, shaking his head over and over and over.
I held his wrists, lowered his hands so I could see his eyes. “Richard, talk to me.”
His hands turned in my grip, holding my hands. We held hands while I watched the pain in his eyes spill out in words. “Louisa killed Guy on their honeymoon, yesterday. I got the call just before I came here.”
“I still don’t understand. It’s awful, tragic, but . . .” I said.
“I was her sponsor. I trained her to control her beast, and she lost that control on her honeymoon in the middle of . . .” He lowered his
head, and raised my hands so that his forehead rested against the back of my hands.
“She lost control in the middle of sex,” I finished for him.
He nodded, his face still pressed to my hands. “Losing her virginity,” he said, voice muffled, low.
“Did you say virginity?”
He pulled away from me then, dropped his hands in his lap, and I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a towel knotted at his waist. “Yes.”
“You mean she’d never tried to control her beast during intercourse?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They’d been engaged for more than two years before Louisa was attacked and became one of us. They both wanted to wait for the wedding night.”
“Commendable,” I said. “And orgasm, to a certain extent, is orgasm. If she could control herself during nonintercourse orgasm, then she should have been able to control herself during intercourse, too.” I touched his shoulder again. “You did all you could for her.”
He jerked away as if I’d burned him, coming to his feet so suddenly that the chair crashed back against the kitchen island, then the floor. I sensed rather than saw people in the doorway. I said, “We’re alright.” I turned to see Shang-Da, Merle, and the two wererats, still hesitating in the doorway. “We’re alright, go away.” They all pulled back, but I knew now that we had an audience, because they wouldn’t go far.
Richard stood in the middle of my kitchen wearing nothing but a towel and the golden first light of dawn. Normally it would have distracted me from anything reasonable, but not this morning. The pain in his face was more important than his body right now. Looking at him, standing there so defiant, so hurt, I had an idea, an awful idea.
“Please tell me you don’t mean she wanted to wait for any sexual contact until the honeymoon?”
His chin raised, and that arrogance tried to slide over him. But it was a mask, and I saw through it now. Underneath he was scared and guilty. “I taught her to control the beast during anger, sadness, fear, pain, every extreme of emotion, but not sex. I respected her convictions.”
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 239