Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I was alone with the feel of Nathaniel’s pulse in my mouth. His flesh was so warm, so warm, and his pulse beat like something alive inside his skin. I wanted to free that struggling, quivering thing. I wanted to break it free of its cage. To free Nathaniel of this cage of flesh. To set him free.

  I fought not to bite down, because some part of me knew that if I once tasted blood that I would feed. I would feed, and Nathaniel might not survive it.

  A hand grabbed mine, grabbed mine and held on. I knew who it was before I raised my face from Nathaniel’s thigh. Damian knelt beside us. His touch helped me get to my knees, helped me think, at least a little. But the ardeur didn’t go away. It pulled back like the ocean drawing back from the shore, but it didn’t leave, and I knew it would come back. Another wave was building, and when it crashed over us, we needed a plan.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said, and my voice shook. I held on to Damian’s hand like it was the last solid thing in the world.

  “I felt the ardeur rise, and I thought, great, just great, left out again. Then it changed.”

  “It felt wonderful,” Nathaniel’s voice came distant and dreamy, as if all he’d been having was good foreplay.

  “Didn’t you feel it change?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “No,” he said, “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “I’m glad one of us was so sure.”

  He raised up onto his knees, from where he’d half swooned. “Trust yourself. Trust what you feel. It changed when you tried to fight it. Stop fighting it.” He leaned in toward me. “Let me be your food.”

  I shook my head, and clung to Damian’s hand, but it was as if I could feel the tide rushing back toward the shore. Feel the wave building, building, and when it came, it would sweep us away. I didn’t want to be swept away.

  “If Jean-Claude told you to feed the ardeur, then feed it,” Damian said. “What I felt from you just now was closer to blood lust.” His face was very serious, sorrowful even. “You don’t want to know what blood lust can make you do, Anita. You don’t want that.”

  “Why is it different tonight?” It was a child asking someone to explain why the monster under the bed has grown a new and scarier head.

  “I don’t know, but I do know that for the first time when you touch me, I feel it. A dim echo, but I feel it. Always before, Anita, when you touched me, it went away.” He made a movement with his fingers like putting out a candle, “snuffed out. Tonight…” He leaned over my hand, and I knew he was going to lay his lips across my knuckles. One of the gifts of the ardeur is that it lets you look inside someone’s heart. It lets you see what they truly feel. When his lips touched my skin, I felt what Damian was feeling. Satisfaction. Eagerness. Worry, but that was fast fading under the feel of his lips on my skin. He wanted. He wanted me. He wanted to feed the hunger of his skin. The hunger of his body not so much for orgasm but for that need to be held close and tight, that need we all have to press our nakedness against someone else’s. I felt his loneliness, and his need, even if it was only for one night, not to be lonely, not to be exiled down in the dark, alone. I saw how he felt about his coffin down in the basement. It was not his room. It was not his in any way. It was just the place he went to die every dawn. The place where he went to die, alone, knowing that he would rise as he had died, alone. I saw the endless stream of women that he had fed on, like pages in a book, a blonde, a brunette, the one with a tattoo on her neck, dark skin, pale skin, the one with blue hair, an endless stream of necks and wrists, and their eager eyes, and grasping hands, and nearly every night, it was in public view, as part of the floor show at Danse Macabre. So that even his feedings were not private. Even that was not special. It was eating so you wouldn’t die, with no meaning to it.

  In the center of his being was a great emptiness.

  I was supposed to be his master. I was supposed to take care of him, and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t asked, and I’d been so busy trying not to be tied to another man through some weird metaphysical shit, that I hadn’t noticed that Damian’s life sucked.

  “I’m sorry, Damian, I…” I don’t know what I would have said, because his fingers touched my lips, and I couldn’t think. His fingers held heat and weight that they’d never had before.

  His eyes widened, surprised, I think, as surprised as I was at the sensation. Or did my lips give heat to his skin, too? Did my lips suddenly feel swollen and eager as his fingertips did to me, as if both mouth and fingers were suddenly more?

  I moved my lips against his touch, barely a movement, just enough to press my mouth against the ripeness of his fingers; barely enough to call it a kiss, but it wasn’t his skin I tasted, or not the skin I was touching. It was as if I laid my mouth against the most intimate parts of him. There was the hard, solid press of his fingers, but the taste, the smell of him, was the perfume of lower things, as if I were a dog on the scent of where I wanted to be.

  He drew his breath in with a shaking gasp, and when I rolled my eyes up to see his face, the look in his eyes was one of drowning, as if I already touched what I could taste. His eyes filled with emerald fire, and just like that there was a line of desire carved from my mouth down his fingers, his hand, his arm, his chest, his hips, to the center of his body. I could feel him thick and rich and full of blood. Could taste the warmth of him as if my mouth were nestled against his groin. I could taste him, feel him, and when I slipped my mouth over the tips of his fingers, slid something so much smaller, harder into my mouth; his green eyes rolled back into his head, ginger lashes fluttering downward. His breath sighed out in one word, “Master.”

  I knew he was right, in that one moment, I knew, because I remembered being on the other side of such a kiss. Jean-Claude could push desire through me as if his kiss were a finger drawn across my body, down my very nerves so that he touched things that no hand or finger could ever caress. For the first time I felt the other side of such a touch; felt what Jean-Claude had felt for years. He’d tasted my most intimate parts, long before he’d ever been allowed to touch them, or even see them. I felt what he’d felt, and it was wondrous.

  Nathaniel touched my hand. I think I’d actually forgotten about him, forgotten about anything but the sensation of Damian’s flesh against mine. Then Nathaniel touched me, and I could feel his body through the palm of my hand as if a line ran from the pulse in my palm down his body in a long line of heat and desire and… power.

  I felt that power flare outward from my mouth and hand to their bodies. It was my power, the power Jean-Claude had woken in me by his marks, but it was also my power, my necromancy that burned like some cold fire through Damian’s body, but when it hit Nathaniel’s body, the power changed, shifted, became something warm and alive. In the blink of an eye, the power flared through me, through all of us, but it wasn’t sex that I felt anymore, it was pain. I was trapped between ice and fire; a cold so intense that it burned, and the fire burned because that was what it was. It was as if half the blood in my body had turned to ice, so that nothing flowed, and I was dying; and the other half of my body held blood that was molten like melted gold, and my skin could not hold it. I was melting, dying. I screamed, and the men screamed with me. It was the sound of Nathaniel and Damian, their screams, not my own, that dragged some part of me above the pain.

  That one blinded, aching part knew that if I let this consume me, we would all die, and that was not acceptable. I had to find a way to ride this, to control this, or we would be destroyed. But how do you control something that you don’t understand? How do you ride something you can’t see, or even touch? I realized in that moment that I touched nothing. That somewhere in the pain I’d let go of both of them. My skin was empty of their touch, but the link between us was still there. One of us, or all of us, had tried to save ourselves by letting go, but this was not a magic so easily defeated. I knelt alone on the floor, touching no one and nothing, but I could feel them. Feel their hearts in
their chests as if I could have reached out my hand and carved those warm, beating organs from their bodies; as if their flesh was water to me. The image was so strong, so real, that it made me open my eyes, helped me ride down the pain.

  Nathaniel was half crouched, his hand reaching out to me, as if I’d been the one who pulled away. His eyes were closed, his face screwed tight with pain. Damian knelt, pale face empty; if I hadn’t been able to feel his pain, I wouldn’t have known that his blood was turning to ice.

  Nathaniel’s hand touched mine, like a child groping in the dark, but the moment his fingers brushed me, the burning began to fade. I gripped his hand, and it didn’t hurt anymore. It was still hot, but it was the beating pulse of life, as if the heat of a summer’s day filled us.

  The other half of my body was still so cold it burned. I took Damian’s hand, and the moment we touched that, too, ceased to hurt. The magic, for lack of a better term, flowed through me; the chill of the grave and the heat of the living, and I knelt in the middle like something caught between life and death. I was a necromancer; I was caught between life and death, always.

  I remembered death. The smell of my mother’s perfume, Hypnotique, the taste of her lipstick as she kissed me good-bye, the sweet powdery scent of her skin. I remembered the feel of smooth wood under small hands, my mother’s coffin, the clove scent of carnations from the grave blanket. There was a bloodstain on the car seat and an oval of cracks in the windshield. I laid a tiny hand on that dried blood and remembered the nightmares afterward, where the blood was always wet, and the car was dark, and I could hear my mother screaming. The blood had been dry by the time I saw it. She had died without me ever saying good-bye, and I had not heard her screams. She’d died almost instantly, and probably hadn’t screamed at all.

  I remembered the feel of the couch, rough and knobbly, and it smelled musty, because after Mommy went away nothing got cleaned. In that moment I knew it wasn’t my memory. My father’s German mother had moved in and kept everything spotless. But I was still small and hugging the side of that musty couch, in a room I’d never known, where the only light was the flickering of the television screen. There was a man, a huge dark shadow of a man, and he was beating a boy, beating him with the buckle end of a belt. He kept saying, “Scream for me, you little bastard. Scream for me.”

  Blood spurted from the boy’s back, and I screamed. I screamed for him, because Nicholas would never scream. I screamed for him, and the beating stopped.

  I remembered the feel of Nicholas spooning the back of my body, stroking my hair. “If anything happens to me. Promise me, you’ll run away.”

  “Nicholas…”

  “Promise me, Nathaniel, promise me.”

  “I promise, Nicky.”

  Sleep, and the only safety I ever knew, because if Nicholas watched over me, the man couldn’t hurt me. Nicholas wouldn’t let him.

  The images broke then, shattering like a mirror that had been hit; glimpses. The man looming up and up; the first blow, falling to the carpet, blood on the carpet, my blood. Nicholas in the doorway with a baseball bat. The bat hitting the man. The man silhouetted against the light from that damned television, the bat in his hands. Blood spraying the screen. Nicholas screaming, “Run, Nathaniel, run!” Running. Running through the yards. A dog on a chain, barking, snarling. Running. Running. Falling down beside a stream, coughing blood. Darkness.

  I remembered battle. Swords and shields, and chaos. And try as I might, chaos was all I could see. A man’s throat exploding in a bright gush of blood; the feel of my blade hacking so deep that it numbed my arm; the force of running headlong into someone else’s shield with my own; being forced back down narrow stone steps; and over all that was a fierce joy, an utter contentment; battle was what we lived for, everything else was just biding time. Familiar faces swam into view, blue eyes, green, blond and red-haired, all like me. The feel of a ship under me, and a gray sea, running white with the wind. A dark castle on a lonely shore. There had been fighting there, I knew that, but that was not the memory I got. What I saw was a narrow stone stairway, that wound up and up into a dark tower. Torchlight flickered on those stairs, and there was a shadow. We ran from that shadow, because terror rode before it. The gate crashed down, trapped against it, we turned and made our stand. The crushing fear, until you could not breathe. Many dropped their weapons and simply went mad, at the touch of it.

  The shadow stepped out into the starlight, and it was a woman. A woman with skin white as bone, lips red as blood, and hair like golden spiderwebs. Terrible she was, and beautiful, though it was a beauty that would make men weep, rather than smile.

  But she smiled, that first curve of those red, red lips, that first glimpse of teeth that no mortal mouth would hold. Confusion, then the feel of small white hands like white steel, and her eyes, her eyes like gray flames, as if ashes could burn. The images jumped, and Damian was lying in a bed, with that terrible beauty riding him. His body was filling up, about to spill over and into her; riding the edge of pleasure, when she changed it, with a flex of her will, as a flex of her thighs could give pleasure; a thought and he was drowning in fear. A fear so great and so awful that it shriveled him, tore him back from pleasure, threw him close to madness. Then it would pull back like the ocean pulling away from the shore, and she would begin again. Over and over, over and over; pleasure, terror, pleasure and terror, until he begged her to kill him. When he begged she would let him finish, let him ride pleasure to its conclusion, but only if he begged.

  A voice broke through the memories, shattered it. “Anita, Anita!”

  I blinked, and I was still kneeling between Nathaniel and Damian. It was Damian that had called my name. “No more,” he said.

  Nathaniel was crying and shaking his head. “Please, Anita, no more.”

  “Why are you blaming me for the tour down bad memory lane?”

  “Because you’re the master,” Damian said.

  “So it’s my fault we’re reliving the worst events of our lives?” I searched his face, while I kept a tight grip on his hand. It wasn’t erotic anymore, it was more like their hands were safety lines.

  “You are the master,” Damian repeated.

  “Maybe it’s over, whatever it was, maybe it’s finished.” He gave me a look that was so like one of Jean-Claude’s that it was unnerving. “What’s with the look?” I asked.

  “I can still feel it,” Nathaniel said, and his voice was hushed, thick with fear.

  “If you would stop arguing and start paying attention to what’s happening, you’d feel it, too,” Damian said, and he wasn’t talking to Nathaniel.

  I shut my mouth, it was the best I could do for not arguing, but even silence was enough. Into that brief silence I felt power like something large had pushed against a door in my head. A door that would not hold for long.

  “How did you break us free of it this much?”

  “I’m not a master, but I am over a thousand years old. I’ve learned some skills over the years, just to stay sane.”

  “Alright, Mr. Smartie-Vampire, what’s happening to us?”

  He squeezed my hand, and something in his eyes said plainly that he didn’t want to say it out loud. I realized that I couldn’t feel his emotions.

  “You’re shielding us all, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “But it won’t hold.”

  “What is it? What’s happening to us? Why are we sharing memories?”

  “It’s a mark.”

  I frowned at him. “What?” Marks were metaphysical connections. I shared them with both Jean-Claude and Richard.

  “I don’t know what number, but it’s a mark. It’s not the first, maybe not even the second. Maybe the third? I’ve never had a human servant, or an animal to call. I’ve never been part of a triumvirate. You have, so you tell me.”

  “Us,” Nathaniel said, in that breathy, scared voice.

  I looked into those wide lavender eyes. He was waiting for me to make this better. The problem was, I
didn’t know how. I didn’t know how it had begun, so how could I end it? I turned away from the utter trust in his face, because I couldn’t think looking into his eyes. I tried to think back to the third mark. There had been a sharing of memories, but it had been benign. Glimpses of Jean-Claude feeding on perfumed wrists, sex with women wearing way too many undergarments; Richard running in wolf form in the forest, the rich world of scent that he had in that form. They had all been sensual, but safe memories. It had never occurred to me to ask either of them what memories they’d gotten from me. I probably didn’t want to know.

  “Third mark, I think. Though with Jean-Claude in charge it was just flashes of memory; mostly sensual, nothing too serious. Why are we trapped in therapy hell?”

  “What did you think of just before the memories began?” Damian asked.

  “Death,” I said, “I was thinking about death, I don’t know why.”

  “Then think of something else, quickly.” His voice held a hint of panic, and I could feel why. I could feel that door in my head beginning to bow outward as if it were melting. I knew that when it went, we better have a plan.

  “I didn’t try to mark anybody,” I said.

  “Do you know how to stop it?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then think of something else, something better.”

  “Think happy thoughts,” Nathaniel said.

  I gave him a look. “Who do I look like—Peter Pan?”

  “What?” Damian asked.

  “Yes, I mean no, but think,” Nathaniel said. “Think happy thoughts. Think like you need to fly. I survived what happened after… after Nicholas died. But I do not want to live through it twice. Please, Anita, think happy thoughts.”

  “Why don’t one of you think happy thoughts?” I asked.

  “Because you’re the master, not us,” Damian said, “your mind, your attitudes, your desires, are what will rule how this goes, not ours. But for God’s sake, stop thinking about the worst things that ever happened to you, because I don’t want to see the worst that I remember. Nathaniel’s right, think happy thoughts.”