Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Richard made a move toward her, but she was already backing up, and not toward us. She was backing up toward the open front door. There was something about the way she was moving that made both Richard and I say something. Richard had time to say, “Clair, don’t…” I had time to say, “Don’t run.” But it was too late. She ran, just as Damian turned to see her. It was like putting a cat into a room full of mice; they’ll chase the running one first.

  Richard was moving, but even with his speed there wasn’t time to get ahead of Damian and block the door. All Richard had time for was to rush Damian, to crash into him and take them both to the floor.

  He had the vampire down but not pinned. Richard screamed. His shoulders blocked my view, and I had to move around to their heads to see Damian’s mouth buried into Richard’s upper chest.

  I knelt to help pry Damian’s mouth from his flesh, but Richard made the preternatural rookie mistake. He grabbed Damian by the hair and pulled him off of him. Vampire bites are like snake bites; if the snake has a good grip, you don’t just yank it off. Yanking it off causes more damage than letting the snake let go on its own, or prying it loose. I guess the exception would be a venomous snake, if you go on the assumption that the longer it bites you the more poison it pumps in, which may or may not be true, but vampires aren’t venomous. It was an impressive show of strength, tearing the vampire’s mouth away from his flesh, but impressive shows of strength have their price. Richard’s shirt ripped away from that entire side of his body, and a great, bloody hole showed in his upper chest, almost to the shoulder. His hand, which had been pushing against Damian’s shoulder, suddenly went limp, and all that kept Damian from sinking teeth into Richard again was Richard’s grip on his long red hair.

  I put a hand on Damian’s shoulder and pressed, and unlike every other time I’d tried to hold down a rampaging vampire, this time it worked, at least a little. Let’s hear it for preternatural strength.

  A gobbet of flesh fell out of Damian’s mouth as he tried to turn and sink fangs into me. Richard yanked on his hair and kept those straining fangs from me. He tried to use his left arm again, and it moved, but he couldn’t push with it. Something important had gotten torn up. Super strong or not, he was suddenly fighting with only one arm.

  Between the two of us we could keep Damian from sitting up completely, but we couldn’t keep him pressed to the floor. He kept straining upward, teeth slashing the air, sounds coming from his throat that were more animal than human. We weren’t losing the fight, but we weren’t winning either. We needed a different plan of attack.

  I moved off of his shoulders enough that he raised up more, and Richard’s eyes were wide. “I can’t hold him one-handed, not alone.”

  “I’m going to put an arm around his neck to control his head,” I said, “but I need him higher off the ground.”

  “A choke hold won’t work on a vampire. They don’t breathe.”

  That was half true, but I let it go. We could argue later. “I’m just trying to control his head, that’s it.”

  He gave a small nod. He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue about it, and that was good enough. I slid in behind Damian, and he was so busy straining after Richard, that he didn’t seem to notice. I knelt behind the vampire, and for the first time was very aware that I was nude. The fight had sort of made it unimportant. What made it important now, was that Richard’s hand was still in Damian’s hair, and his hand had to stay there until I had my arm wrapped around the vampire’s neck. I needed to have one arm wrapped around Damian’s neck and the other arm holding my wrist, and I needed to be squeezing like a son of a bitch, while my face was buried against the back of his head, so he, theoretically, couldn’t reach me. Only Richard’s grip and the vampire’s desire to bite him would keep him from tearing into me during the process. So Richard had to keep his hand there, but now, suddenly, my bare breasts were going to be pressed into the back of his hand and arm. The fact that that bit of knowledge froze me for a second tells you how badly I behaved around Richard, or how screwed up about him I was. A life and death struggle and I was worried about pressing my breasts against his hand. Focus, Anita, focus. Survive first, be embarrassed later.

  “Hurry,” Richard said, and there was strain in that one word. Super strong doesn’t mean you don’t get tired.

  I took a deep breath, let it out, and moved into both Damian’s body and Richard’s hand. I had to move fast and firm, no hesitations, because Richard’s grip wasn’t perfect control. If Damian noticed me before my arm was under his chin, I wasn’t sure there was anything Richard could do to save me some damage. My hand touched Damian’s blood-slick skin, and I had to follow through. I had to ignore the almost electric reaction I had when my bare breasts brushed the back of Richard’s hand. One small touch and my skin ran with goosebumps. But it was more than just physical attraction. It was as if the world held its breath. Even Damian went still for that frozen moment. I felt Jean-Claude wake. Felt his eyes open, knew he woke in a welter of silk sheets in the sunless dark of the underground in Circus of the Damned. He turned in that nest of silk and darkness and touched Asher’s body, found it still cold, still hours from waking.

  Jean-Claude’s voice echoed through my head. “What have you done, ma petite?”

  I don’t know what I would have answered, because in that moment the world came back into focus. I could still feel Jean-Claude all those miles away, but I was back to the here and now.

  Damian helped me concentrate on the here and now. He twisted in Richard’s desperate grip and lunged at me, mouth wide, fangs straining like a striking snake. I suddenly had my own grip on his hair and helped Richard hold him away from my skin by fractions of an inch. I snugged my right arm under his chin, tight against the front of his neck. And he reacted like the only danger was the arm sliding in from his right, so that he never tried to turn in against mine and Richard’s grip on the other side. There was no human thought to him in that moment. No human. No vampire. I wasn’t even sure animal was the word. I had no word for what Damian had become. In a different century it would have been demon, possessed, damned.

  Jean-Claude’s voice in my head again, “He will be damned if you cannot bring him back.”

  I had to shake my head, like his voice was an insect buzzing inside my skull. It distracted me. I thought very hard, stop talking. I don’t know if he heard me or figured out on his own that he was distracting me, but he stopped.

  I let go of Damian’s hair and used my arms to close around his neck in what would have been a choke hold, if he’d needed to breathe. Vampires do breathe, but they don’t have to. My arm slid into place more easily because of all the blood, but the blood also made it harder to hold him still, harder to maintain my grip. I put my head down, tight against the side of his head, using all my upper body to simply control his head.

  Richard let go of Damian’s hair, and the vampire sprang up off the floor. I tightened my grip around his neck, but was along for the ride. I could control his head from moving side to side, but I couldn’t choke him, and I didn’t weigh enough to slow him down.

  Damian was on top of Richard, pinning the bigger man to the floor. Richard had his good arm pushing out against Damian’s chest. I got my feet under me on either side of them. It was awkward, because I just wasn’t tall enough to do it comfortably, but I began to fight to pull Damian’s neck backward. I could feel that I could snap his neck. I was almost sure I could, but I could not simply fight him backward. I knew if you decapitated most vamps, they died. I’d never had the strength before to snap a neck this easily, so I’d never tried. If I snapped his spine would he die? Would he be crippled? Would spinal damage cripple a vampire?

  Richard’s arm was beginning to shake and collapse at the elbow. I pulled backward, and felt Damian’s windpipe begin to give. I was going to crush his neck before I broke his spine. I looked past us and found Nathaniel bent over Gregory at the foot of the stairs. Gregory wasn’t moving, but one problem at a time.
I screamed, “Nathaniel!”

  He turned, and there was blood all over the front of his body. I didn’t think most of it was his. His face looked surprised as if he had lost track of our fight, but he came to me. He grabbed Damian’s arm, and it was as if he’d given the vampire another target. Damian leapt off of Richard and was suddenly on top of Nathaniel. I was beginning to feel positively useless. If I couldn’t choke him, wasn’t heavy enough to slow him down, wasn’t willing to break his neck, I was useless. I used what weight I had to stagger him, throw him off balance so that Nathaniel had time to get his arms up and a leg into Damian’s stomach. If Nathaniel had known how to fight, he’d have been able to do more, but at the moment just keeping the vampire from biting him was good.

  Jean-Claude’s voice, soft, in my head, “You have done something to damage the bond between yourself and Damian. You must reopen it, ma petite.”

  “A little busy right now,” I said.

  Richard wrapped his one arm around Damian’s waist and helped me pull him off of Nathaniel. The three of us rode him down to the floor. I changed my grip on his neck to a choke hold that wouldn’t have worked at all, if Nathaniel hadn’t been pressing on his shoulder and chest and Richard sitting on the rest of him. My body was curled around his neck, using my own weight as an anchor to make it harder for him to rise and strike. But I’d tried this hold on large human males in judo class before, and it wasn’t effective, not if they had the upper body strength to sit up with me dangling from their neck. I did it now, only to control his head, his mouth, those fangs, and because I had Richard and Nathaniel to help me.

  He fought us, but three on one, we had some control. Not much, but some. My voice came breathy, but clear, “What do you mean I’ve damaged the bond between Damian and me?”

  “Who are you talking to?” Nathaniel asked, through gritted teeth.

  “Jean-Claude,” Richard answered for me.

  “Can you hear him, too?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  I wanted to ask, “like now?” but Jean-Claude was answering me. “You have put up shields specifically against Damian, why?”

  “He woke up in a flood of sunlight. It seemed to terrify him. He was so afraid. The fear was choking Nathaniel and me.”

  “Both you and Nathaniel?” Jean-Claude asked. I could see him lying on the white silk sheets, his black hair spread out like a dark dream across the pillow. One hand idly touching Asher’s bare back, the way you’d drum your fingers on a desk or pet a dog, if you were thinking about other things.

  “Yes, both of us.”

  “I asked you when I woke, what had you done. Now, I may know.”

  For once I was at least up to speed on the metaphysical disasters in my life. I got to say, “We know already.”

  “Know what, ma petite?”

  Damian gave a particularly violent movement, bucking me up off the floor, slamming me back down only after I felt, rather than saw the other two men, force him back down. I thought it, because I didn’t have breath to speak at the moment, That we’re a triumvirate.

  “I heard that,” Richard said, and there was a sullen note under his breathless exertion as if he’d thought I’d only thought it to keep it from him, or maybe I was just projecting. I was always willing to believe that Richard was being difficult. As he was always willing to believe I was being bloodthirsty.

  Jean-Claude didn’t ask stupid questions or try to discuss metaphysics. If we all knew that somehow I’d managed to forge a second triumvirate, then we could move on. “When you shielded from Damian’s fear, you shielded too well. You have cut him off from your power, as you did by leaving once.”

  “I’m right here,” I said, trying to turn my face away from the blood that had decided to trickle down Damian’s face and onto mine.

  “There physically, but not metaphysically, and your servant needs both.”

  “How do I fix this?” I asked.

  “Drop your shields,” he said, and even in my head, his voice was matter-of-fact.

  It sounded so simple, so obvious. I remembered shielding from Damian’s fear. I had thought of metal, hard, cold, solid, unpenetrable. Not a metal wall, or door, but truly just the essence of metal. It had taken me months of work to understand how to shield not with an imaginary door or wall or building, but just to think, rock, water, metal. Block the things you don’t want to get through, or drown them. Marianne could also shield with air and fire, but I didn’t get that. Air just wasn’t strong enough for shielding, and fire, well, fire’s fire. I used the tools I understood.

  How do you unshield? Once I’d had to picture the wall crumbling, or the door opening, but very lately, I’d understood something that Marianne had been saying, but I hadn’t been understanding. I simply stopped thinking about metal. I stopped. It went away. Poof, gone. One second I was safe behind my thought of metal, the next I was drowning in Damian’s rage. No, not rage, rage implies anger, human emotion, and that wasn’t what roared through my head. I’d thought more than once that I was going crazy in a detached sort of sociopathic way, but I’d been wrong. That hadn’t been being crazy—this was.

  I forgot about holding Damian down. I forgot about why I’d dropped my shields. I forgot about everything. There were no thoughts. No words. There was just sensation, and impulse. The smell of fresh blood. The taste of our own blood in our mouths, bitter. Hands pushing us to the floor, crushing us. Hunger, hunger like fire in our gut, like something that would eat us alive if we didn’t feed, and feed, and feed. The smell of fresh blood, the warmth in their hands pushing on us, all that was maddening. Pain, my body was just pain. Like a fire that was burning me up from the inside. I screamed, and the sound was loud and not loud enough. It didn’t help. Only one thing would quench that fire, fill me up, stop the pain. Blood. Fresh blood. Warm blood.

  My hands touched warm skin, and if it hadn’t been Richard, I’m not sure I would have stopped. But the feel of Richard’s muscled arm under my hands called something of me up through the hunger. I was staring into Richard’s solid brown eyes from inches away, almost as if I’d moved in for a kiss, but it hadn’t been his mouth I’d been aiming at. Even now, the long solid line of his neck beckoned to me. The smell of fresh blood overwhelmed the subtler scent of the blood that pulsed under his skin, but somehow lapping at the bloody wound wasn’t enough. It needed to be fresh. I needed my teeth in flesh. I needed to make my own hole to tear at. Only that would satisfy. Only that would be enough.

  I forced my gaze up to Richard’s face. I looked into his wide eyes, made myself look at his face, trace the line of his jaw, the fullness of his lips. I looked on the face of someone I’d loved once, and I had to work harder than I’d worked at almost anything ever, to see him as something other than food.

  Damian bucked, and Richard had to pay more attention to the vampire he and Nathaniel were still pinning to the floor than to me. A cool voice flowed through my mind. “I am helping you shield, ma petite. Forgive me, I did not understand what dropping your shield would do to you.”

  “He’s a revenant,” I said, and I don’t think I said it out loud.

  “Oui.”

  “How do I help him?”

  “You must rebind him as you did when he came out of the coffin. Let him taste your blood and say the words over him.”

  “Are the words really important?” I asked.

  I felt him shrug, where he sat on his silk-covered bed. “They are the words that masters of the city have spoken over their followers for thousands of years. I would not want to chance that the words are not part of the magic that will bind master to servant, by leaving them out.”

  I nodded. “Did Richard hear this?”

  “Non.”

  “Tell him.” A moment after I said it, I was still cool and a little distant from what was happening, but I could hear it again, see it. I was sitting on my living room floor, not too far from the door, and Richard and Nathaniel were still trying to keep Damian on the floor. They were mos
tly succeeding, though it was hard to tell through the blood if there were any new wounds. They were all three covered in blood.

  I stared down at myself and realized that the front of my body was covered in it, too. I didn’t remember getting that messy. For a moment I wondered if I’d done something that I didn’t remember, but I pushed the thought away. Time later for too much truth. Survive, keep moving, worry about what you did later. Yeah, that’s the ticket. But after a peek inside Damian’s mind, a ticket to the Situational sociopath express didn’t look half bad. I knew now, for dead certain, that there were worse things.

  17

  « ^ »

  Damian bucked so hard that he threw Nathaniel to one side. Richard’s weight alone wasn’t enough. Damian sat up, and Richard rolled off of him to keep the vampire from sinking fangs into him again.

  I waved my arms and yelled, “Damian, here, I’m here!” I don’t think it was his name that attracted his attention, I think it was the movement. I’d been in his mind, I knew he was past words.

  He rushed toward me, so fast he was a blur of white and red, and his eyes like green streaks. Nathaniel ran for him. I yelled, “No, let him come!”

  Richard hesitated still on the floor but with his hand outstretched toward the vampire’s legs. They could have caught him again, but why? It was my blood he needed. I was calm, peaceful, it was like that quiet place I went when I killed. No fear. Nothing. I watched the vampire come at me like a comet streaking across the heavens, something elemental and otherworldly.

  To say he smashed into me didn’t come close to the impact of flesh on flesh. I was on the floor breathless, sightless, and only years of training on how to fall kept me from smacking my head against the floor, or breaking a bone. I caught my breath in time to scream. Damian plunged his mouth low in my neck, just above the shoulder. It had been a long time since I’d been vampire bit without head games or sex. It hurt.

  A wereleopard appeared over us, standing on crooked, almost-human legs. He was yellow and pale gold and white, with beautiful black rosettes scattered over a body that was more than a foot taller than he was in human form. The color told me it was Gregory, because Nathaniel was black in leopard form. Gregory’s chest was broader, his arms were longer, muscled, and tipped with talons like frightening knives. The face was leopard, but with something strangely different around the muzzle and the neck. He towered over us, snarling and reaching down for the vampire’s pale back. He was going to pull Damian off of me, like Richard had pushed the vampire off of himself.