Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [951]
The wolf crouched, but Marmee Noir was right, there was no body to bite here now. I had to find a way to visualize a target for my wolf. I struggled to believe that my wolf could bite the night itself.
Richard grabbed my shoulders, turned me to him. His eyes were still amber and inhuman. He kissed me. He drew back enough to say, “I can taste her power in your mouth.”
I nodded.
He kissed me again, and this time he stayed with our mouths pressed together. He poured that warm, rising energy that was shapeshifter into me. He pushed it into me through our mouths, his hands, our bodies. I kept my grip on my wolf, but the rest of me I gave to Richard, and gradually I could taste pine, and leaf mold, rich and thick and foresty. I smelled the musk of wolf fur. I smelled pack. I smelled home, and the last taste of jasmine vanished under the taste of Richard’s power, Richard’s wolf, and finally, at the end, simply the taste of Richard. The sweet, thick taste of his kiss. The dream ended with a kiss.
13
I WOKE ON the floor of Jean-Claude’s bedroom with Nathaniel staring down at me. I glanced to my right and found Richard on the floor with Micah beside him. There were guards in the room, and the smell of burning.
Richard’s first words were, “You all right?”
I nodded.
His second words were, “What’s burning?”
“The bed,” Micah said.
“What?” I asked.
“The cross in its bag that you have underneath your pillow got hot enough that it set the pillow on fire,” Micah said.
“Shit,” I said.
Claudia appeared above me with a fire extinguisher in her hands. “What the hell happened, Anita?”
I stared up at her, and there was a lot of her to stare up at. She was one of the tallest people I’d ever met, and lifted weights in a serious fashion. Her black hair was in its usual tight ponytail, her face free of makeup, and still strikingly beautiful.
“That bitch queen vampire came again, didn’t she?” Remus said.
I tried to sit up, but if Nathaniel hadn’t caught me, I’d have fallen back to the floor. The last time I’d fought off the darkness, I’d been damn near killed by my own beasts trying to tear their way out of my human body. Apparently today I’d just be weak. I could live with that.
Remus was standing scowling at the foot of the bed. He was tall, muscled, and blond, but his face was a crisscross of scars, as if he’d been badly broken and put back together again. When he was angry enough, his face mottled, and you could see the pale lines against the flushed skin of his face. He almost never made eye contact with anyone. I think because he didn’t want to see in others’ faces what they thought of his own. But when he got upset enough he’d meet your eyes, then you could see how lovely the eyes were, all green and gray with long lashes. Tonight I got a good dose of the eyes.
I leaned into the warm curve of Nathaniel’s body and said, “Yeah, it was the Mother of All Darkness.”
“At least your beasts aren’t trying to tear you apart this time,” Claudia said.
“Yeah,” I said, “at least.”
Then I felt something stirring inside me, as if something big and furred had brushed the inside of my body. “Oh, shit,” I whispered.
Nathaniel leaned in and sniffed just above my face. “I smell something. Cat, but it’s not leopard.” He closed his eyes and breathed in deep. “It’s not lion.”
I shook my head.
Richard said, “She said it was a parting gift.”
I looked inside myself, in that place where the beasts waited. There was a gleam of eyes, then a face came out of the shadows. A face the color of night and flame: tiger.
“Oh, shit,” I said louder, “tiger.”
“Crap,” Claudia said.
To my knowledge there was only one weretiger in the entire St. Louis area. Christine worked as an insurance agent and was miles away. She’d never get here in time for me to share my beast with her and keep it from tearing me apart. Either Marmee Noir had decided it was time for me to finally be a shapeshifter