The far drapes moved, and Clair came back in from the deck, all smiles. “It’s a wonderful view.”
“Thanks,” I said, and went back to watching Nathaniel make coffee. If I just kept not looking anywhere else, maybe I wouldn’t let my anger get the best of me. I wanted to rant at Richard, to scream and accuse. And I so did not want to do that in front of his new girlfriend or my boyfriends. Did I just say boyfriends?
I put my hands on the coolness of the counter, closed my eyes, and just tried not to think again. Not thinking was good. Not feeling was better.
A hand laid itself over mine, and the moment it did, I was calmer. I knew without opening my eyes who it was, because only one man’s touch calmed me. Calmed me because he’d spent centuries perfecting his calmness. I opened my eyes and met Damian’s green gaze. I wanted to hate him. I wanted to be furious at being trapped with him, tied, but I couldn’t be. With him touching my hand, with his eyes so ready to fill with pain, I couldn’t be angry, not with him. Shit.
I couldn’t breathe, not a good solid breath. He took my anger, but he couldn’t take the fear. I jerked away from him. “I need to be angry right now, Damian, it’s all I’ve got.”
A hand touched my arm, and I jerked away from it. Nathaniel’s eyes were cautious rather than hurt. “What’s wrong?”
I moved back from both of them, bumping up against the island hard enough that the dishes rattled in the cabinets.
“Anita.” Micah’s voice. He was at the end of the island looking at me with his serious kitty-cat eyes.
I couldn’t seem to get a deep enough breath. It was as if the room was getting smaller. Nathaniel was in front of me, and either side of the island was blocked by the other two. I felt cornered, trapped in so many ways.
“Boys,” Dr. Lillian said, “I think Anita needs a little air.”
“I can’t leave Damian alone,” I said, but my voice sounded choked.
She came and moved them all away from me, shooing them back. “Come on, a little fresh air and some open spaces, doctor’s orders.” She held out her hand to me, but was careful not to touch me, as if she knew what I was feeling better than I did. She eased me to the drapes and pushed me through them onto the open deck.
The light was dazzling, and I was blind with it for a moment. When I could see again, she was as far away as the wraparound deck would allow her to be and still be on it. She didn’t say anything, just looked out at the view.
I started to say something, then thought, Fuck it, she’s right. I went to the rail and looked out at the trees. The trees were a kaleidoscope of color. The wind stirred all that gold and orange, and a cascade of leaves like an upturned bag of gold showered down around me. The sky was that flawless blue that only happens here in October, as if the sky were closer, fresher, newly minted blue, as if all the clear skies until now had been practice for these few weeks of blue, blue sky. I breathed in the heavy gold of the sun, like pale syrup on the leaves. It smelled like autumn, that crisp, clean, sharp smell, that is made up of dying leaves, chill nights, and the warm breath of the day before night falls. You could taste fall on your tongue like some kind of bread or cake, something thick and nutty and sweet. I took in as much air as I could and let it out slow, as if my body didn’t want to let it go.
I stood there leaning on the railing, drinking in the sunlight, the colors, and the rich scent of autumn woods. I was smiling and calm all on my own by the time Dr. Lillian spoke. She stayed on her end of the deck, as if she wasn’t sure how much room I needed. “Feel better?”
“Yes,” and I smiled at her, though I felt a little embarrassed. “Sorry that I lost it in there.”
“You’ve had some big changes in a very short space of time, Anita.”
“How much do you know?”
“That you’ve somehow tied yourself to Damian and Nathaniel, somewhat the way that Jean-Claude tied you and Richard to him. That you did it by accident. That it’s a miracle no one’s dead.”
I sighed, and the smile was gone. “Yeah, I could have handled it better.”
“No one could handle all that you handle, Anita, better or worse. You keep surprising all of us.”
“Us, who?” I asked.
She smiled. “All of us, the shapeshifters, the vampires, all of us. I can’t really speak for everybody, but I know you are a constant amazement to the wererats. We never know what you’re going to do next.” She leaned against the rail with her arms crossed over her clean white shirt.
“Neither do I, not anymore.”
“That loss of control issue again, isn’t it?”
“You know, I really don’t want to psychoanalyze myself right now.”
“Fine,” she raised her hands as if to show she was unarmed, “but the next time you start getting claustrophobic, and you need some air, get some air, okay?”
“It was that obvious?” I asked.
“If I say yes, you won’t like it, because you hate for anyone to be able to read you. If I say no, I’d be lying, and you hate that, too.”
“I’m just impossible to get along with, aren’t I?”
“Not impossible, but not exactly easy either.” She gave a small laugh to soften it, and said, “Do you feel up to going back inside?”
I took another deep breath and nodded. “Sure.”
She nodded, too. “Good, be careful when you move the drapes. Don’t want to flash too much of this beautiful sun onto Damian.”
I nodded and felt the good air leaving me. Before I stepped back through the sliding glass doors, I was wondering, what was I going to do with him? I couldn’t keep touching him all day. Could I? I was willing to do it up to a point, but all day would drive me mad. Especially if it was not just today, but every day. I suddenly saw an endless stream of days with Damian permanently attached to me. It was claustrophobic.
I half expected him to leech onto me when I came through the door, but he didn’t. I stood there in the sudden dimness of the curtained kitchen, letting my eyes adjust. My eyes automatically turned to where Richard had been, but I forced myself to look for Fredo first. He’d moved closer like a good bodyguard, leaning against the small two-seater table in the breakfast nook. The white roses that Jean-Claude sent every week framed Fredo’s darkness. His fingers were tracing the edges of his jacket again. I’d never seen Fredo use his knives, but something told me that he’d get to his blades faster than I’d get to my gun, not to mention my knife. The back sheath was really an emergency backup, not a main weapon. If I’d wanted a blade as a main weapon, I’d have put on the wrist sheaths.
I eased into the room away from Fredo, not because he meant me harm, but simply on principle. I wasn’t at my best, and he was the only professional bad guy in the room, so I treated him with the caution he deserved. Besides, I had to redeem my earlier stupidity somehow, and the days when I would have picked a fight just to reassure myself I was still tough were long ago and far away. Being a girl, that phase had been shorter anyway. We are much more practical creatures than men, as a general rule.
Richard was still at the table. Clair was beside him now. She had a hand on his good shoulder, her small hand very pale against the darkness of his skin. She was watching me. Her eyes were blue, a dark sort of gray blue, but blue nonetheless.
Micah stood at the side of the island closest to the table. He seemed tense, but it was a flicker of his eyes that helped me find Damian and Nathaniel.
The vampire had wedged himself into the corner between the cabinets and the sink. He was holding his knees tight to his chest, his face resting on them, so that he could hide his eyes. He’d managed to hide almost all of himself in the blue velvet dressing gown and the fall of his own hair. Nathaniel was beside him on the floor. He was touching Damian’s hands, but that was all.
Nathaniel looked up at me, and there was something in his violet eyes, pain, helplessness, something. I wasn’t mad anymore, and I didn’t feel claustrophobic as I crossed the kitchen to them. I knelt on the other side of Damian and
looked a question at Nathaniel. “I thought my touch might help him until you got back inside.”
I nodded. It sounded logical.
“He didn’t want me to touch him much.” He wasn’t hurt when he said it, it was just a fact.
I touched Damian’s bowed head. His hand suddenly wrapped around my wrist. The movement had been too fast to see, which didn’t happen often to me with vamps, and shouldn’t have happened with this one. The speed of it, and the strength in his hand made me gasp.
He raised up and gave me the full look of those emerald eyes. I was suddenly struck by the sheer beauty of him. It was almost a physical force. As if beauty were a hammer and I’d taken a hit directly between the eyes.
“My God,” Nathaniel whispered.
It took more effort than was pretty for me to tear my glance away from Damian. Once I saw Nathaniel’s face it was easier, and I could breathe again. “Do you see it, too?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s like a really good face-lift, not much change, but the changes are just right.”
“What are the two of you talking about?” Damian asked.
His talking made me look at him again, and I was held spellbound. He’d always been handsome, but not like this. “It’s vampire powers, somehow. I thought as my servant he’d be less able to do that, not more.”
“I don’t think it’s mind games, Anita,” Nathaniel said. He reached out to touch Damian’s face.
Damian pulled back. “What? What’s wrong with my face?”
“Absolutely nothing,” I said, “Richard beat the shit out of you, but there’s not a mark left.”
He raised his own hand up and touched his mouth. “It’s healed,” he said.
I nodded, and it was as if I was mesmerized by him. Was it mind tricks, or had more than just the damage healed? I couldn’t tell, and I wasn’t sure whether Nathaniel was a better judge than I was. “Micah, can you look at him?”
Micah came to stand at the end of the island closest to us. The look on his face was enough, before he said, “Wow.”
But was it mind tricks? That’s what I wanted to know. I reached up to touch his face, and he didn’t lean away from me, as he had Nathaniel. I’d seen part of his memory of what had happened to him at the hands of other men, men that she-who-made-him had given him to, so she could feed off his pain and fear. So I understood some of the homophobia, but Nathaniel wasn’t a threat to him, not in that way. In other ways, he was a threat to everyone who saw him. Oh, well.
I touched Damian’s cheek, and it was solid. But it was all solid. Nathaniel was right, it was like a really good face-lift; there wasn’t that much difference. What was it about his face that was different? What had kept Damian’s face from being this heart-stopping before? I’d never made a study of his face, I wasn’t sure I knew him well enough to know what had changed. Maybe my confusion showed on my face, because Nathaniel said, “His mouth, his lips were too thin for his face, now they’re full and… they match.”
Now that Nathaniel had said it, I could remember Damian’s mouth, and this wasn’t it. Was it just mind glamour? It had to be, didn’t it? I closed my eyes and touched his mouth, but I’d never run my fingers over his lips. I didn’t remember them. I kept my eyes closed and used my hands to guide me. I kissed him, soft but firm. I’d kissed this mouth less than two hours ago, and it wasn’t the same mouth. The lips were fuller, as if he’d gotten a collagen injection while we weren’t looking. I drew back just enough to see his face clearly. There was a slight up-tilt to his eyes, and they were bigger, not much, but just a little, or was it that his eyebrows had a wider arch to them? Were his lashes thicker, darker? Shit.
“What’s wrong?” Damian asked again, and this time there was a thread of fear in his voice.
“I’ll get a mirror,” Micah said, and turned and went for one.
“This isn’t possible,” I said.
“Is there anything I can do?” Dr. Lillian was at the far end of the island. Damian looked up at her, and she said, “Oh, my.”
“What?” he asked, and his voice was frantic.
I patted his hand. “You’re fine, in fact you’re… beautiful.”
The fear spread from his voice to his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
Micah came back in with a hand mirror. He simply held it out toward me. I took it, but Damian shut his eyes tight, as if he were afraid to look. “It’s okay, Damian, I promise, you look wonderful.” But I sort of understood the fear, because even if it was an improvement, how weird would it be for the face you’ve had for a thousand years to suddenly change. I’d have had trouble with changes to the face I’d only had for part of a lifetime.
He was shaking his head over and over again.
“Please, Damian, just look. It’s good, not bad. I promise.”
He opened his eyes a little at a time, but once he saw enough, his eyes went wide, and he took the mirror from me. He moved it around so he could see his eyes, his mouth, and there was some change to his nose that he could see and I couldn’t. Like I said, I hadn’t made a study of his face, but he had.
He touched his face tentatively, as if he expected it to feel different than it looked. He dropped the mirror, and Nathaniel caught it before it hit the floor. “What is happening to me?”
I opened my mouth to say, I don’t know, but Micah said, “I think we need to call Jean-Claude. We know he’s up.”
Good idea, I thought. “Yeah, I think so.”
I actually got up to go for the phone, but Richard was at the end of the island, across from the phone, and I suddenly didn’t want to be that close to the phone. His right arm was taped to his chest, completely immobile, like Lillian had started to mummify him and stopped. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking lower, at Damian.
“Healing and a little facial reconstruction, you are good,” he said, and his tone made it not a compliment.
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know,” and those two words just sounded tired. “Jean-Claude told me once that he couldn’t remember what he and Asher looked like before Belle, but he’d seen others before and after. Belle never chose people who weren’t pretty, but some afterward were more beautiful than before. It wasn’t a common thing even in her bloodline, but it happened often enough to start the legend that it always happened to her blood.”
I looked at him. “And when did you and Jean-Claude find time for all this information sharing?”
“When you deserted us for more than half a year. We had a lot of time to talk, and I had a lot of questions.”
I couldn’t argue with the “deserted us” part, so I ignored it. “I asked him once if his body and face were vampire tricks, and he said no.”
“Vampire tricks aren’t real,” Richard said, “this,” and he motioned at Damian with his good arm, “is.”
“But Damian’s been a vampire for a long time; if this kind of change was going to kick in, then it should have done it by now.”
“I’m not of Belle’s line,” Damian said. He was touching his face with just the tips of his fingers, as if that made it less awful, or something.
“But Anita is,” Richard said. “Through her ties to Jean-Claude, she is a part of Belle’s line.”
“I’m not a vampire,” I said.
“You feed like one,” he said.
Anger was finally rearing its ugly comforting head. If I could get mad, I’d feel better, and Richard’s presence wouldn’t bother me so much. “You’re as tied to Jean-Claude as I am. It’s only luck that’s kept the ardeur from you, Richard. Next time we get an extra special treat, maybe it’ll be your turn.”
“I can’t heal with sex, and it looks like you can.”
“Did you raise the munin when you were with Damian?” Dr. Lillian asked.
I shook my head. “I’d have noticed Raina being around. She’s sort of hard to miss.” I heard a distant echo in my head, Raina’s “ghost” saying, so glad you noticed. I shut that particular metaphysical do
or tight, locked it, and bound it with silver chains. All metaphorical, or metaphysical, but all real just the same. A part of Raina lived inside me, and nothing I could do seemed able to rid me of her completely. I could control her to a point, but not exorcise her from me. God knows I’d tried.
“If it wasn’t Raina, then one of you was able to heal during the sex,” Dr. Lillian said. She said it like it was just logical. Two plus two is four, that kind of thing.
I was shaking my head long before I realized I was doing it. Shaking my head over and over. “I didn’t do this.”
“Then who did?” Richard asked. His face wore the arrogance of his anger. When he looked like that, he was both more handsome somehow, and less approachable. It was one of the few times I was sure that Richard was aware of just how handsome he was, when he was angry enough to want to strike out and cause someone pain. Why does anger make people pretty? Rage doesn’t. Rage makes you ugly, but a little anger, that just seems to add spice. One of nature’s cruelties, or maybe it’s to keep us from killing each other more often.
“I don’t know, but he didn’t look like this after the sex. He didn’t look like this in the bathroom when Mor… she-who-made-him popped up. He didn’t look like this in the hallway,” I took a step closer to Richard, “or the bedroom,” another step, “or the living room.” Another step, and I was as close to him as I could stand and still see his face comfortably. He was almost a foot taller than I was, there were angle issues.
“The closest person connected to Jean-Claude in this room at that moment wasn’t me.”
He looked down that perfect profile at me. “I didn’t go near him.”
“Jean-Claude might know the answer to this,” Micah said. He was behind me, not too close, but close enough that if I’d done something stupid, I wondered if he’d planned on interfering.
“Micah is right,” Dr. Lillian said.
“Yeah, Micah is always right,” Richard said, and his voice held emotions the words didn’t even hint at. It was the first real sign of jealousy I’d seen. Part of me was happy about it, and the moment that tiny glad spark reared it’s ugly head, I knew better. I was ashamed of myself, and I hate that.
Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams Page 19