Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [378]
Nathaniel said, “Anita?” He came pressed as far from us as he could get and stayed where I could see him. “It’s like the ardeur, but worse, more.” He looked almost panic-stricken. He had an armful of gauze packets.
I wanted to say I’m sorry, or something civilized, but Byron moved his hips underneath me, and that one small movement brought my attention back to the man underneath me. His eyes had darkened like sky before a storm. And staring down into them, I wondered how I’d ever thought they were soft. He spent so much time being the charming youth, playing to the body he’d been given, but now suddenly out of his eyes I saw just how much grown-up I was dealing with.
“Fuck me,” he said, and it came out softer the second time, “fuck me, fuck me.” He whispered it over and over, softer and softer, until his breath itself whispered, “Fuck me.”
I leaned over him, pressed my mouth to his, and it was as if I could feel his soul down the long tunnel of his body, as if I knew how to reach in and snatch it away. I knew in that instant that I could feed on everything that Byron was. I could feed on that divine or infernal spark that made him vampire. I could eat him up, completely and utterly, and leave only the lovely corpse behind.
I came off his mouth screaming, because the urge to do it was almost overwhelming. The hunger wanted it all. All of him. It couldn’t have all of him. It couldn’t. I wouldn’t do that to him. I wouldn’t do that to anyone. For the first time I understood just what they meant by a fate worse than death, or rather that sex wasn’t it.
If I could feed the ardeur, then maybe this darker thing would go away, but even willing, I had trouble. I didn’t know Byron’s body. I tried to simply rock back onto him, slide him inside me, but twice we slid across each other but didn’t go in. I finally yelled my frustration, and he said, “Let me have my hand, lover, and I’ll help.”
A hand appeared between us, and it actually took me a moment to realize it was Nathaniel. He had a condom in his hand. “We don’t know where he’s been.”
I growled at him, but he growled back. “The only way you can catch something from a vampire or lycanthrope is if one of us has fucked someone who’s got something, then fucks you after. You want to take that chance?”
“Let me have my hands, lover, and I’ll put on anything you want.”
I let go of his wrists, and he moved himself just enough so he could open the foil packet and slip it on. Then he slid himself back where we’d started, with him pressed against me, but not inside. He put his hands on either side of my thighs and lifted me at the same time that he shifted his own hips. He slid inside me, in one smooth movement that threw my head back and made him yell, “Oh, yes!”
When I looked back at him, his gray eyes had lost focus, his lips were half-parted. I wanted to cover his mouth with mine, I wanted that brief sweet taste of his soul again. I finally realized it wasn’t the ardeur we were fighting, not entirely. Something else was happening, something darker, something worse. I’d thought the worst would be sex with strangers, but I was wrong. Byron wasn’t my friend yet, I didn’t make friends that quickly, but he wasn’t a bad man. I liked him, with his “duckie” and “luvs.” I liked that he had told me the first time we’d met, that no, he wasn’t that Byron, and that actually Lord Byron wasn’t one of us, that had just been a rumor spread by people that wanted an excuse to burn him at the stake in some backwater country. Though if he’d known the great poet was going to get himself drowned before the age of thirty, he’d have offered.
I liked Byron. He didn’t deserve to die. There was an angry echo in my head. I thought it was Primo, and then knew it wasn’t. He didn’t have the kind of power it took to interfere from a room away, not through my shielding and Jean-Claude’s. I asked myself the question, Where would the power go if I sucked Byron’s life away? I threw