Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [1062]
It took a little work to get the T-shirt out of the pants, but somehow I didn’t want to unbuckle or unzip anything. I got the shirt up and raised it over my belly, exposing the new wounds.
Peter made a surprised sound. “That can’t be real.” He whispered it. He reached out as if he’d try to touch, then drew his hand back, as if he wasn’t sure what I’d say.
I stepped closer to the bed. He took it as the invitation it was, and ran his fingertips across the new pink scars. “The scars may disappear altogether, or they may stay. I won’t know for a few days, or weeks,” I said.
He drew his fingers back, then put his whole hand across the biggest wound. The one where it looked as if she had tried to take a chunk of flesh. His hand was big enough to cover the mark and leave his fingers splayed out beyond the scars. “You can’t have healed this in less than, what…twelve hours. Are you one of them?”
“You mean a shapeshifter?” I asked.
“Yes.” He whispered it as if it were a secret. He slid his hand along my stomach, tracing the ragged marks of claws.
“No.”
He ran his hand over my skin until he came to the edge of the scars where they dribbled away just past my belly button. “They just changed my dressing. I look like shit. You’re healed.” He curved his hand around to the side of my waist that wasn’t scarred. His hand cupped my waist, and his hand was big enough to do it. That one gesture caught me off guard. The only man I was dating whose hand was big enough to do that was Richard. It seemed wrong that Peter’s hand was that big. It made me move back from him and let my shirt drop over my stomach. Which embarrassed him, which wasn’t my intent. I just suddenly realized I probably shouldn’t let him touch me that much. It hadn’t moved me or made me uncomfortable until that moment.
He took his hand back, and again wasted blood that he didn’t have in blushing. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and wouldn’t look at me as he said it.
“It’s okay, Peter. No harm, no foul.”
He gave me a quick upward glance of his brown eyes. “If you’re not a shapeshifter, how could you have healed like that?”
Truthfully, it was probably because I was Jean-Claude’s human servant, but since Dolph was wanting to know that, I just didn’t want to share it with people who didn’t know. “I’m carrying four different kinds of lycanthropy. So far I don’t turn furry, but I’m carrying.”
“The doctors told me you can’t get more than one kind of lycanthropy. That’s the point of the shot. The two different kinds of lycanthropy cancel each other out.” He stopped at the end of the speech and took a deeper-than-normal breath, as if talking too much hurt.
I patted his shoulder. “Don’t talk if it hurts, Peter.”
“Everything hurts.” He seemed to try to settle into the bed, then stopped as if that had hurt, too. He looked up at me, and the angry, defiant face was like an echo of almost two years ago. The kid I’d met was still in there, he’d just grown up. It made my heart hurt. Would I ever get to see Peter when he wasn’t getting hurt? I guess I could just go visit Edward sometime, but that was just weird. We did not just visit each other. We weren’t that kind of friends.
“I know it hurts, Peter. I didn’t always heal this fast.”
“Micah and Nathaniel have been talking to me about weretigers and being a lycanthrope.”
I nodded, because I didn’t know what else to say. “They’d know.”
“Do they all heal as fast as you do?”
“Some, no. Some faster.”
“Faster,” he said. “Really?”
I nodded.
His eyes filled with something I couldn’t decipher. “Cisco didn’t heal.”
Ah. “No, he didn’t.”
“If he hadn’t thrown himself between me and the…weretiger, I’d be dead now.”
“You couldn’t have taken the damage that Cisco took, that’s true.”
“You’re not going to argue about it. Tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t