Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [358]
I turned to face him, having to work against the seat belt, but I wasn’t comfortable taking if off until I was ready to get out of a car. “So, talk,” I said, and my voice sounded almost normal.
He turned in his seat as far as his seat belt would allow. He knew my thing about seat belts. He faced me, putting one knee up to prop himself against the center panel. “We’ve been treating you like you’re human, and now I’m wondering if we were right.”
“You mean I’m going to shift because I’m in a new triumverate?”
He shook his head, and his long braid slid across his lap like a heavy pet. “Maybe what happened with that has made it worse, but I think one of the reasons you haven’t been able to get a handle on the ardeur is because you’ve been taking almost all your advice from a vampire. He doesn’t need to eat, Anita. There is only blood lust and the ardeur for Jean-Claude, that’s it. A lycanthrope doesn’t stop being human. You still have to eat like a person, you just add the hunger of the beast, but you don’t lose a hunger, you just add on to it.”
I thought about it. “So you mean that since I’m already fighting off normal hunger pangs, that it makes it harder to fight the ardeur?”
He nodded, and his hair slid across his lap again, as if the braid were moving closer to me. “Yes.”
I thought about it, and it seemed utterly logical. “Okay, say you’re right, what do I do? I’m still running late tonight. I’m usually running late.”
“Tonight we go through a drive-up. You get something easy to eat behind the wheel, and I get a salad.”
I frowned at him. “A salad, why? Most drive-up salads suck.”
“I have to eat before I go on tonight.”
“So you’ll be able to control your beast better,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But why a salad? I thought you needed protein.”
“If you were going to take off all your clothes in front of strangers, you’d get a salad, too.”
“One burger a few hours before you go on won’t make you gain weight.”
“No, but it might make me bloat.”
“I thought only girls did that.”
“Nope.”
“So you’re eating a salad so you’ll look good tonight,” I said.
He nodded, and his hair slithered over the edge of his leg and across the gear shift. I had this horrible urge to touch that heavy band of hair. A little voice in my head said, Why not? After what we’d done this afternoon, what’s a little hair touching. Logical, but logic didn’t have much to do with how I acted around Nathaniel.
I clasped my hands together in my lap to keep from touching him, then felt silly. What the hell was I doing anymore? I reached out to that heavy curl of hair and pet it, like it was more intimate to him than it was. The hair was soft and warm. I petted his hair while I talked. “The beast isn’t conflicted about anything, is it?”
“No,” he said, and his voice was both loud and soft in the quiet dark.
I began to pull his braid, gently up from around his body where the end had slid. “It’s not just the hunger for flesh and blood that you fight, is it?”
“No,” he said.
I got to the end of his braid and spilled it into my hands. “I thought that the hunger was the beast. That desire to chase and feed; I thought that was all of it.”
“And now?” he asked.
I stroked the tip of his braid across my palm, and just that made me shiver. My voice was shaky when I said, “Richard always talked about his beast like it was all his baser impulses, you know, lust, sloth, the traditional sins, but to sin implies a knowledge of good and evil. There was no good or evil, there was nothing like normal thought. I hadn’t really understood how all my thoughts are based on things. I’m always thinking about how one thing affects another. The consequences of your actions.” I lifted more of his braid in my arms, and it was like holding a snake, a soft, thick serpent. I gathered his hair into my arms and let myself cuddle it against my body. I was about at the limit