Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [741]
I screamed, but the darkness filled my throat, cut off my air. I was choking on the scent of night, drowning in jasmine and rain. I tried to call my necromancy, but it wouldn’t come. The darkness in my throat laughed at me like the cold twinkling of stars, beautiful and deadly. I tried for my link to Jean-Claude, but she had severed it. I tried for my link to Nathaniel and Micah, but her animal to call was all cats, both great and small. My leopards could not help me now. The darkness whispered them to sleep.
I remembered the last time she’d been this close to me metaphysically, and thought of the only thing she hadn’t been able to control. I thought of wolf. It had taken Richard’s tie to me, and Jason’s closeness, to waken my wolf in me and chase the darkness back, but we’d grown closer now, my wolf and I, and it came. A huge pale wolf with markings of darkness leapt out of the darkness, its eyes filled with brown fire. It put itself between me and the dark. It let me wrap my fingers in its fur, and the moment I touched it, I could breathe again. The scent of night was there, but it wasn’t in me.
The darkness swelled around me like some great dark ocean, building up, up, to crash upon the shore. The wolf tensed against me, so real against my body. I could feel its bones, its muscle, under the fur, pressed tight against me. I could smell its fear, but knew it would not leave me alone. It would stay, and defend me, because if I died, so did it. It wasn’t Richard’s wolf, it was mine. Not his beast, but mine.
That black ocean reared above us, so that the bed was like some tiny raft. Then it fell toward us with a sound like a thousand screams. I knew those screams—victims, eons of victims.
The wolf sprang to meet that blackness, and I felt teeth sink into flesh. I felt us bite her. I had an instant to see the room where her real body lay, all those thousands of miles away. I saw her body jerk, saw her chest rise in a sharp breath. Her breath sighed through the room. “Necromancer.”
The dream shattered, and I woke screaming.
22
JEAN-CLAUDE’S BEDROOM WAS bright with lights. Micah was on his knees looking down at me, petting my shoulder. “Anita, thank God, we couldn’t wake you.”
I had time to see Nathaniel on the other side of the bed, and Jean-Claude standing beside him. I’d been out of it long enough for Jean-Claude to die and come alive again. Hours lost to the dark. Claudia, Graham, and others were in the room. It must have been hours; the shift should have changed. I had time to see and think all that, then the wolf from my dream tried to climb out my body.
It was as though my skin were a glove, and the wolf were the hand. It filled me, impossibly long. I could feel its legs stretching out and out into my arms and legs. But its limbs and mine weren’t the same shape; it didn’t fit. The wolf tried to make me fit.
My fingers curved, tried to form paws, and when that didn’t work, it tried for claws to come out of the human fingers. I screamed, holding my hands up, trying to get breath to explain. Then I didn’t have to, because my body started to try to tear itself apart. It was as if every bone and muscle were trying to tear itself free from every other piece of me. The pain of it was indescribable. Parts of my body that were never meant to move were moving now. It was like the meat-and-bone of my body was trying to move out of the way so something else could take its place.
Micah pinned my arm and shoulder. Nathaniel had my other arm. Jean-Claude pinned one leg, and Claudia had the other. They were yelling, “She’s shifting!” “She’ll lose the baby!” Claudia yelled. “Help hold her, damn it.”
Graham put his weight across my waist. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
I heard something in my shoulder pop, a wet sound that you never