Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [459]
The leopard didn’t react to that growl, it was gone from my head. But that thing in the center of my body stretched, stretched legs and arms inside my body. I could feel it touching things that should never have been touched. I screamed and stared up into his eyes and wondered if there was enough of Nathaniel in there to help me.
“Anita, what’s wrong?” With leopard eyes and a voice of a stranger, but his face was all Nathaniel, all concern and worry.
“It hurts.”
“What? Did I hurt you?”
I shook my head, and claws tickled along my ribs, and made me struggle underneath his body. “Help me!”
He rolled off of me and yelled, “Jason!” He had to yell twice, before Jason came out, dripping from the shower, a towel in his hand. He looked at us, and the smile was gone instantly.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Nathaniel said, still in that low voice, “she says something hurts.”
The thing stretched again, stretched and stretched and my body stretched with it, as if it fit inside my arms and legs. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It was as if my body were a glove and it was seeing how much room it had.
“Did you feel that?” Jason asked. His body had broken out in goosebumps.
Nathaniel nodded. “It’s her beast.”
Jason knelt by the end of the bed. “Yeah, but it’s never felt like this before.”
My beast stretched to the limits of my body, then found that there was nowhere else to go. I’d gotten a tiny piece of Richard’s beast years ago, and somehow Belle’s line had given me an animal to call—the leopards. Through that I was Nimir-Ra to Micah’s Nimir-Raj. Nathaniel had been my pomme de sang, but now he was my animal to call, as Richard was to Jean-Claude. Now that part of me that was beast, cat, stretched inside my human body. I’d felt it as power before, more metaphore than physical, but this was very, very physical. I could feel it. Feel it struggling inside me, looking for a way out. It was as if I was a lycanthrope, except I lacked that last bit of the puzzle, that one last bit that would allow the beast to slip out of my skin and be real.
It shrank back into that small center of my body, where it stayed most of the time. But now it was like one of those leopards at the zoo in a small metal cage. It paced, paced, paced, and finally rushed the bars, slashing and clawing. But these bars were my body, and I screamed. I reached out, trying to grab something, anything that would help me. How do you fight something that’s inside your body? How do you destroy something that is in the very meat of you?
Jason grabbed my hand, and I was suddenly breathing in the sweet musk of wolf. But it was as if touching Jason’s hand acted like a conduit, and suddenly I could see Richard. He was in the bright sunlight of his kitchen, cooking something in a pan. He wore nothing but jeans, with a dish towel stuck into the waistband of his pants. His back was covered in claw marks, or really serious nail marks. It looked more like the result of good sex than an attack. His head came up, and he sniffed the air, and only then did he turn and stare behind him, as if he could see me. He said, “Anita, is that you?”
“Help me.”
“What’s wrong now?”
I squeezed Jason’s hand, and it was like that extra bit of contact took me closer to Richard. It was like I hovered just in front of him. He reached out, and his hand brushed through me.
My beast reacted to it, screaming and clawing, going wild. It didn’t want the wolf inside us, there wasn’t room for it. There certainly wasn’t room for both.
Richard drew his hand back, and said, “Anita, Anita can you hear me?”
I screamed his name, because screaming was all I could do. It felt like the leopard was cutting me up, trying to dig its way out, and it couldn’t get out.
“Give your beast to someone else, Anita. Someone who’s body can let it out.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. I started to tell him so, but he seemed to feel my puzzlement. Because he shared a memory