Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Richard has agreed to this, ma petite.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t believe it, he’s angry.”

  Richard looked even angrier, but he said, out loud, “Jean-Claude’s telling the truth, Anita, I agreed to feed the ardeur.” His face was dark and frowning with his rage. He’d agreed, but he didn’t want to do it. Come to think of it, neither did I. I did not want to go down this metaphysical path again. We’d worked so hard to separate ourselves out, and sex with Richard would bind us close again. I didn’t want that, wasn’t sure my heart would survive being broken again. There’s only so much emotional super glue in a person’s soul, after that everything just stays broken.

  “I cannot hold Moroven’s fear off forever, ma petite, you must act before my strength fails us all.”

  “Easy for you to say,” and it almost sounded like my own voice, not breathy with terror, but nicely sarcastic. Good. “It’s not your lily-white ass on the line.”

  “If I could fly to you, I would, but it is broad daylight, and I cannot. You and Richard must do this, for already I am losing against Moroven. I can feel her nightmare coming closer, and when it comes close enough, I will flee and save myself, in hopes that when darkness falls there will be something left to rescue. But if you and Richard do what I fear you will do, then darkness will come too late, too late for Damian, too late for Nathaniel, and if you do not survive the deaths of your servant and your animal, then Richard and I may never see moonrise again. Is it so horrible to feed from our Richard, ma petite, is that a fate worse than death?”

  Put that way, no, but… damn it. Why did it always come down to sex? Why wasn’t there ever another way to fight?

  Jean-Claude answered inside my head, “Because we can only fight with the tools at our command. I am an incubus, ma petite, and seduction is both my curse and my greatest power. If I had another magic to offer you, I would, but it is what I know. It is almost all I know.”

  “If the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” I said.

  Jean-Claude started to ask something, but he was swept away. Everything was swept away by terror. My heart was in my throat like I’d swallowed a fish. I was choking on my own heart. My skin was cold with the iciness of her power. So afraid, so very afraid.

  Richard jerked away from my hand, stepped back from me, and I couldn’t read his face now. It wasn’t anger.

  Gregory knelt closer to us and stretched his upper body out, over Nathaniel and Damian, stretched out until his half-leopard face was only inches from mine. He sniffed the air in front of me. “Smells, so good, so yummy. Fear and flesh,” he let out a long sigh that tickled his breath along my skin, “fear and flesh.”

  I wasn’t afraid of Gregory, I knew that, but I was afraid, and the fear was formless, but it didn’t want to be. When Gregory drew his lips back from his teeth in what was supposed to be a smile, I gasped. The fear coalesced around that flash of fangs, that hungry gleam in those eyes. I was suddenly not just afraid, I was afraid of Gregory. Afraid of the claws, the teeth. I was afraid in a way that I’d never been of him, or any of my leopards. He licked my face, one quick movement.

  I yipped, a small, high-pitched, frightened sound.

  Gregory growled next to my skin, “Hmm, do it again.”

  Richard grabbed him and pulled him away from me. “Stop playing with her.”

  Gregory stayed crouched on the floor, as if he were half-thinking about springing up and turning it all into a fight. But what he said was, “Alright, I won’t play with her.” He turned and put his face next to Nathaniel’s. Gregory snapped his teeth just short of his skin, and Nathaniel screamed. Our fear had found a cause to wrap itself around. There was no logic to it. Anything fearful would have done, we just happened to have a leopardman so conveniently at hand.

  Gregory laughed.

  Richard jerked him back and dragged him as far away as the bathroom would allow. “I said stop playing with them.”

  “You said, stop playing with her. I did.”

  “Leave them all alone,” Richard said.

  Gregory stood, and in leopardman form he was as tall as Richard. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to play with them, too?”

  “Yes, yes, I want to play, but I’m not going to.”

  “Why not?” Gregory asked.

  “Because you don’t torment your friends, Gregory,” Micah said from the doorway with Richard’s newest girlfriend beside him. She was about my size with dark brunette hair cut just above her shoulders. She was wearing a pale blue skirt and a white blouse with little blue flowers all over it. Sandals and carefully painted toenails completed the outfit. She was clinging to Micah’s hand and arm with both her hands. You didn’t usually hang on to someone like that unless they were your boyfriend. I realized there was an emotion I could feel through the fear—jealousy. What the hell was she doing hanging on to Micah?

  She shivered in the doorway, and her eyes lost focus, as if she was hearing things no one else could hear. She whispered, “What is that?”

  “Fear,” Gregory said.

  “Oh,” she said in a small voice, and she pulled away from Micah and walked into the room. She stopped staring down at us, then looked away. She blushed and met Richard’s eyes, and blushed harder.

  Gregory came to stand beside her, his furred form towering over her. “You want to play, too, don’t you?”

  She looked down at us again, and this time her eyes weren’t human. I’d seen that particular trick a thousand times, but this time I screamed. Screamed like a tourist, and Nathaniel pressed himself against me as if he were trying to push himself out the other side. Damian just lay in my lap, like the fear had already killed him.

  “Get Clair out of here,” Richard said, and his voice held that first edge of growl. “She’s too new, if you bring her beast like this, she’ll bleed people.”

  I made a small sound in my throat, a helpless sound.

  Micah took Clair by the arm and started leading her toward the door. She didn’t fight him, but she made him pull a little, while her animal eyes in that pretty face stared at us. She wasn’t embarrassed anymore, there was nothing human enough left in her to be embarrassed about nudity.

  “What’s happening to them?” Micah asked.

  “Damian’s first master is trying to kill them,” Richard said.

  “How?” I wasn’t sure if he were asking how she’d kill us or how it had happened.

  “Scare them to death.”

  Micah almost had Clair to the door. “How can you stop it?”

  Richard looked at Micah then. “I let Anita feed on me, and Jean-Claude comes riding to the rescue.” The growl had left his voice, and all that remained was tiredness and a sort of world-weariness, as if he’d seen too much, done too much, and didn’t want to do it anymore.

  Micah and Richard stared at each other for a moment, then Micah gave a small nod. “Keep everybody alive,” he said, and he pulled Clair through the doorway.

  She grabbed the door frame. “They smell so good.”

  Micah threw her over his shoulders, and the movement startled her enough that she let go of the door and he carried her out of sight. Her words floated back, “No, I don’t want to go.”

  Richard tried to get his jeans unfastened one-handed, and it wasn’t working. “I need some help here Gregory.”

  The leopardman looked at him. “Going to fuck while you have the chance?”

  Richard growled at him, and I made a small sound. Nathaniel whimpered. I knew in the front of my head that this was stupid. That Richard would not hurt me, not in that way, but the fear had a mind of its own. Nathaniel was a wereleopard, but he was terrified, too. No logic, just fear.

  “If I shift, the pants will shred, and I don’t have extra clothes over here anymore,” Richard said.

  “I thought your control was better than that, Ulfric,” Gregory growled.

  Richard turned some of that anger loose and yelled, “I can taste their fear on my to
ngue, down my throat, as if I’ve already swallowed them.” He balled his good hand into the torn front of his T-shirt and pulled. He was suddenly standing over me naked from the waist up, with a look in his eyes that would have frightened me even if I’d been myself. It was a wild, fierce look, made up of hatred and lust. Hatred and lust in a man’s eyes is a bad combination.

  It seemed to take physical effort for him to turn away from me and look at Gregory again. “Did you feel that?”

  Gregory’s only answer was a low growl that made Nathaniel whimper again.

  “God help me, she’s afraid to see me nude, and I fucking love it. I love that she’s afraid of me, and I hate myself for loving it. The ardeur will rise, but God alone knows what we’ll do before it does. With this much fear, with her, I don’t trust my control. And whatever happens I want clothes when it’s over, because I’m going to want to get the hell out of here.”

  He undid his belt with one hand and squeezed the top button of his pants. The button popped open, and, still gripping the top of the pants, he made a rolling motion with his hand and the buttons snapped open in a long rolling line. The front of his pants spilled open, and he spilled out. Either he wasn’t wearing any underwear, or it couldn’t keep him contained.

  I’d seen Richard nude enough times to lose track. The sight of him nude had excited me, made me nervous, afraid in that oh-my-god, where-am-I-going-to-put-it-all sort of way, envious when I’d lost my naked privileges, angry when he was being shitty, or trying to rub my face in the fact that I still found him handsome, but he wasn’t mine anymore. All those emotions, and lust, and love, but never fear. Never that feeling that he was physically so much larger than I was, so much stronger, so much… he’d never hurt me physically, and I’d never been afraid of him physically, but I was now. I was afraid the way virgins are supposed to be afraid when white slavers snatch them away. Afraid of being ravished. Afraid of him using that body in mine. Afraid in a way that I’d never been afraid of anyone that I loved.

  I put my hands over my eyes like a child. If I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t hurt me. Stupid, silly, but I couldn’t stop the way I felt. Couldn’t change the way I felt. I felt a scream growing in my throat. A scream that was waiting to be touched. I knew I was going to do it, and I couldn’t stop it.

  But it was as if he felt that scream waiting to come out, because he didn’t touch me. I felt his face on the other side of my hands like heat, a moment before I felt his breath against the back of my hands. If he’d touched me, the fear would have spilled out my mouth, but he didn’t touch me, not with his body.

  His breath was hot against my skin, so hot. I felt Damian being lifted out of my lap. I wasn’t sure how I knew he hadn’t crawled out on his own, but I did.

  “Anita, look at me.” His voice was very soft, and very close, each word breathing out against my hands. “Please, Anita, please look at me.”

  His voice floated through the fear, eased the tightness in my throat, relaxed the muscles along my shoulders.

  “Anita, look at me, please,” he whispered.

  I could breathe past my pulse again.

  “Please,” he whispered, and he touched fingertips to the back of my hand. The lightest of touches, and my hands lowered an inch, two inches, and I could see his face from between my fingers. His eyes were pure chocolate brown, and at that moment, they were gentle. There was no trace of anger, or lust, nothing but patience and gentleness. This was the part of him I’d fallen in love with once.

  He touched my wrists, gently, and lowered my hands away from my face. He smiled and said, “Better?”

  I started to nod, then Damian grabbed my leg, and the fear roared back, and the scream ripped out of my throat. It wasn’t just Moroven’s power, it was Damian’s fear of that power, and the fact that I couldn’t shield against it.

  21

  « ^ »

  I screamed, and Richard’s mouth was suddenly on mine. He kissed me, a gentle press of lips. Fear thrilled through me, all the way to my fingertips, as if terror were an electric current. I shoved him away from me.

  I waited for the anger to come rushing through me, to ride over the fear and everything else, but it didn’t come. In fact the fear blossomed into panic. Panic that freezes your body, numbs your mind, makes you forget everything you’ve ever learned about how to make your body a weapon, and all that is left is a small screaming voice inside your head that makes you a victim. If you can’t think and can’t move, then you are a victim. That’s why panic will get you killed.

  Richard knelt in front of me, only as far away as my arms had moved him. There was nothing gentle in his face now. He looked eager, anticipatory. He was on one knee, the other leg turned so that he shielded himself from my view. The body language was modest; the look on his face was not.

  He leaned in toward me and sniffed, drawing the air in deep, so that his chest rose and fell with it. His eyes closed as if he’d smelled the sweetest of flowers, his head thrown back, just a little. When he opened his eyes, they weren’t brown, they were amber, dark orange wolf amber. There was a moment where seeing those eyes in the tan of his face was breathtaking, then Damian’s fingers dug into my leg. A fresh wave of panic poured through me, tore a scream from my throat, and Damian echoed it. I had a confused image of bodies, hands, being held down, cloth ripping, the weight of a body pinning us to the table and…

  A hand wrapped around my wrist and jerked me up and away. Damian’s nails ripped through my skin as he tried to hold on. Richard tore me away from Damian’s hands, his horror, his memories, and his fear.

  The moment Damian couldn’t touch me, the panic faded, a little. I could breathe again. The fear was still there, pulsing through me, but it was diminished some. It was like the difference between drowning in the ocean and drowning in a fish pond. Better, less frightening, but just as dead.

  I looked back at Damian, and he lay on the floor, his hand outstretched, and even from a distance, I reached back for him. I could feel his need.

  Richard pulled on my arm, sharp, sudden. It threw me off balance, and he used that momentary stumble to swing me in against his body, my arm behind my back with his hand still on my wrist. I should have been more interested in the pain, but it was the sensation of being suddenly pressed against his naked body that overwhelmed me. It was not just being pressed against a man’s body, even a lovely body, that unnerved me, it was as if my body remembered him. Remembered what it was like to be pressed against this flesh, these arms, and with the skin memory… it was as if the emotional scars tore open and spilled my heart out into my skin. You fight so hard, so long, to cut someone out of your heart, but it’s not always your heart that betrays you.

  But in among the emotional debris I felt Moroven pull back. We hadn’t needed the ardeur to confuse her, all we’d needed was how Richard and I felt about each other. Just as Moroven didn’t understand pure lust, she didn’t understand love, no matter how broken. I don’t know if the emotion frightened her, or if she simply couldn’t understand it. She wasn’t the only one.

  We were touching, and the triumvirate was working just fine. We’d both thrown down our shields to help Jean-Claude raise the ardeur and save us, but shields protect you from so many things. What is love? What does it feel like in its rawest form? Lust, need, desire, and that aching want, as if the center of your body was carved out and hollow, and the only thing that can fill it is the person that you’re touching.

  I loved Richard. I couldn’t hide how I felt, couldn’t deny it. I was laid bare in his arms in every way. For a moment, I felt him feel the exact same way, then I felt something else… shame. He was ashamed, not that he loved me, but that part of him was angry that Moroven had fled. He’d wanted to drink my fear while he fucked me. That was the thought that came, not in words, but in confused images. I felt that to him my terror was almost the same as the terror of the deer he’d chased down and killed. Fear, even a little fear, made everything better—food and sex.

  He
let me go, stepped away so we wouldn’t be touching. He clanged his shields tight into place and left me standing alone. I was shaking and couldn’t understand why.

  Richard’s face got that angry look he used to hide what he was thinking. He grabbed his pants and went for the door. “You’re as horrified by it as I am,” he said, and was gone.

  I wanted to say he was wrong, but in a way he was right. I wasn’t horrified by the fact that he liked a little fear with his sex, a little rough play, most of the shapeshifters did. I think it had something to do with them being programmed to chase animals and kill them. If they didn’t get off on the fear, their human sides might come to the forefront and cripple them for the kill. Or maybe, that wasn’t it. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was that Raina and Gabriel had been attracted by latent talent. I don’t know, but I wasn’t horrified with what Richard had wanted. The fact that he thought of taking me while Moroven’s fear rode me hadn’t bothered me. It was mild compared to some of the things that my wereleopards liked. Just because I didn’t participate didn’t mean I was blind.

  No, that wasn’t the problem. I dropped to my knees and stayed there. I’d felt that he loved me, still, but I’d also felt that his hatred for everything he was, was stronger and more important than his feelings for me. I’d thought he loathed his beast, but it was more than that. He hated what he liked in the bedroom. We’d been lovers for months off and on, and I’d never known that he was a closet sadist. How tight he must have to hold his own leash for me not to have known.

  A hand touched my shoulder, and I jumped. Nathaniel was staring at me with those lavender eyes. “Are you okay?”

  My eyes felt hot, and my throat tight. God, I didn’t want to cry. I shook my head, because I didn’t trust what would come out if I opened my mouth. No sobbing, no screaming, no hysterics. I hadn’t realized until moments ago that somewhere in the depths of my soul, I’d held out hope. Hope that Richard and I would work out, somehow. I thought I’d moved on—stupid. I hadn’t moved on, I’d just hidden it away. I couldn’t give myself completely to anyone, because I was still in love with Richard. How fucking stupid was that?