Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [1009]
Sylvie filled the room with a prickling run of energy. She was small and female and had managed to fight her way to second-in-command of a large pack of werewolves. She’d have probably been in charge if I hadn’t interfered a few times. Richard could have beaten her physically, but Sylvie had the will to win, the will to kill, and there are fights when that will win the day over superior strength. Then, a while back, Richard had called her challenge, and he had hurt her, badly. He’d proven that he had the will to back the strength. On one hand, I was glad; it meant the question was answered. On the other hand, it had cost Richard a piece of himself that he’d never get back. I mourned that piece of him, almost as much as he did.
“You were afraid of what?” Edward asked from near the door. I hadn’t realized he’d followed Donovan back in.
“Anita is like a new lycanthrope. It means her hungers are not under her control completely. Donovan may be powerful, but he’s a prey animal, and her beasts smell that,” Sylvie said.
I nodded from the bed, my hand falling to the white sheet. “What she said.”
Donovan looked at me; his blue-gray eyes, as changeable as the sky, had gone to rainy gray. “Would you really tear my throat out?”
“Probably a gut wound, actually, soft underbelly.”
He raised those soft, pale eyebrows.
“No oral sex,” Sylvie said, and anyone else would have said it with humor; she was utterly serious.
The door opened behind them. I got a glimpse of some tall, dark-haired man who I didn’t recognize. He looked too young to be standing there, but then there were a couple of other guards that I thought the same thing about. Then the doorway was full of people and I had to look at them, but I promised myself that I’d talk to Claudia about putting an age limit on the guards here. I’d voted out Cisco for being eighteen, but apparently I hadn’t made it clear that it was the age, not Cisco himself, that was the problem. If we all survived today, I’d make that more clear. No, not if, when. When we survived. To think anything else, well, it had to be when.
I looked for Asher in the vampires who came first through the door, but he wasn’t there. It was as if Requiem read my mind, or at least my face, because he said, “Oh, my evening star, you look eagerly past me, as if I am not here. Asher wakes seventh among us. When dawn comes he will die, but those who stand before you now have a chance to remain awake long enough to see this through.” His face was a glimpse of white flesh between the black of his hooded cloak and the beard and mustache. His hair was lost in the blackness of the hood. The only true color to his face was the brilliant blue of his eyes, with that hint of green in them like sea water in the sunlight he would never see again.
London, with his short dark curls and black-on-black suit and shirt, came next. He always looked like a cross between an executive Goth and a movie hit man. His nickname for centuries had been “the Dark Knight.” Yeah, long before Batman, there was London. He was also almost perfect food for the ardeur. Feeding me actually gained him power, instead of draining him. But like all the secondary abilities in Belle Morte’s bloodline it was a double-edged blade. He was the perfect food, but he was also almost instantly addicted to the ardeur. One feeding had undone centuries of abstinence when he’d fled Belle’s slavery. One feeding and he’d been more tightly bound to me than any civil ceremony could have made us. But feeding, even from London, wouldn’t be enough for what we needed now. He smiled at me and came to take my