Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [954]
Then I had other things to worry about, because the wolf decided she wanted a chance. She ran up that tunnel like a pale ghost. I had time to say, “Wolf,” then she hit me, and I was back to writhing on the floor.
I reached out, and Richard was there. He wrapped his arms around me, held me tight while my body tried to tear itself apart. He pinned my face with one strong hand. He called his beast. His power hit mine, and it felt like my blood was boiling. I shrieked, tried to tell him to stop. He leaned in to kiss me, while his power combined with mine to boil me alive. I tried to give him my wolf, but I couldn’t. It couldn’t get past the weight of his power.
His power began to push my beast back like boiling water pushing a forest fire back. It worked, but it felt like my skin was singeing and smoking as he forced my beast back. He drove it back to that place deep inside me. He drove it back, and it went whimpering. I whimpered with it, because it felt as if my body had been burned with power. I tried to look down at my body, and the world swam in streamers of color and nausea. I’d seen Richard force people to swallow their beasts before, but I’d never known that it hurt.
When my vision cleared, Richard was smiling down at me. He looked pleased. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work,” he said, and there was strain in his own voice as if it had cost him something, too.
I whispered in a voice that was broken from screaming, “That hurt.”
His smile faded around the edges, but I didn’t have time to worry about his hurt feelings, because the leopard spilled up into me like poison trying to find a way to drip out of my skin.
Nathaniel’s arms found me, but Micah took me from him. Micah wrapped his arms around me, pinned me to his body. My leopard knew his, knew the smell and taste of it. The energy went into him like a huge hot breath. It washed over his human body, and fur followed the power, like turning a shirt inside out. Micah was one of the smoothest shifts of any wereanimal I’d ever seen. Only Chimera had changed more easily and less messily than he did.
I was left clasped to the front of his furred body. Held by a body that was half man and half leopard. Travis had only two shapes: lion and human. Every other wereanimal in the room had three: animal, human, and half-and-half. Once I’d thought you had to be powerful to do the half-human form. But I’d been spending too much time around really powerful wereanimals. Now, I thought that only the weak couldn’t do it.
I let Micah hold me, but I was too weak to hold him back. He laid me gently on the floor and lay down on his side beside me, propped up on one elbow. I stared up into his black-furred face, a strangely graceful mix of cat and human. His eyes looked just as at home in this face as his other one. They were both Micah to me.
“Did you do that to make a point?” Richard’s voice, angry.
Micah looked up at him and spoke in that gravelly purr that he had in this shape. “What point would that be?”
“That I caused her more pain making her swallow her beast than you did by taking it.”
“I took her beast because I’m not powerful enough to make her swallow it, and because being forced to swallow it can hurt, a lot.”
“So I cause her more pain, and you come off the hero.”
If I hadn’t been exhausted, and aching from head to toe, I’d have told Richard to stop it, not to fight, but I was too tired. He’d slept over. He’d helped me with Marmee Noir. It had all been going so well. I didn’t want it to go badly. Damn it, damn it.
“I called her leopard, instead of letting Nathaniel do it, because I can do this.” He moved away enough so he wasn’t touching me, and then it was like magic. It was as if the black fur were tiny flames that spilled off and blew away in the wind of his power, and everywhere the black blew away there was skin underneath. Everyone else looked as if they were being torn apart and remade, or pulled