Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [98]
I spilled into the backseat. Nathaniel was sitting on his side of the seat now. I knelt over his body, straddling him. I could feel him stretched tight inside his shorts even through my jeans, but today that wasn’t nearly as important as the smooth line of his throat. He’d braided his hair before we left, so that his neck was bare.
The Jeep swerved again, and I fell onto the floorboard, at Caleb’s feet. We’d been lucky so far to avoid an accident or the concrete median on the road. Our luck would run out, and I wasn’t sure I cared.
“If you can’t take sex from Nathaniel yet, I don’t think you should take blood. He’s still weak.” I heard Jason’s voice, as though it were coming from far away.
I stared up at what sat above me, his jean-clad legs brushing my body. For sex, Caleb wasn’t desirable, but for blood . . . I came to my knees between his legs, and began to pull myself up Caleb’s body, fingers digging into the jeans, feeling the flesh underneath.
My hands slid under his untucked, button-up shirt with its loud comic book pictures. His skin was so warm. My fingers slid upward, touching the ring in his belly button. I hesitated there, tracing the edge of the metal ring, pulling on it gently, feeling the skin stretch, until he made a small sound of protest. I stared up into his face, and whatever he saw there widened his eyes, made his lips part in a small ooh of surprise.
I traced my fingers up his stomach, his chest, my arms lost under the oversized shirt, until when my hands slid over his shoulders, the shirt began to raise exposing his stomach. The sight of that bare skin began to raise other hungers, for flesh instead of merely blood. But Belle roared down that metaphysical leash she’d attached to me, and the beast receded before it had truly risen. She wanted me to want what she wanted, and in that moment I knew that though she had animals to call, she did not share their beast, their craving of flesh. The thought was too rational, and the leash loosened and I could think for myself.
“Why do you care if I take blood or flesh, you can feed off both energies? You’ve been feeding on Richard all day.” I asked.
“Perhaps I am tired of flesh.”
I had a flash, as if I read her thought. “You couldn’t make Richard feed. He fought you all day, let you suck him dry, but you couldn’t make him attack anyone else.”
Her anger was like hot metal shoved against my skin. It bowed my back, brought a gasp from my throat. Caleb grabbed my arms, or I would have collapsed.
Belle’s voice purred through my head, “The loup was surprisingly strong, but he is not my animal to call, nor is he attracted to the dead, but you are, ma petite, oh, yes, you are.” Her power poured over me, but it wasn’t the heat of blood lust, it was cold, the coldness of the grave. The moment the energy touched me, my own power flared to life, that part of me that raised the dead. It flared inside me as if Belle’s cold energy was some sort of fuel for my own cool fire. “You are mine, ma petite, mine in ways that the loup cannot imagine. His connection to the dead is accidental, yours was fated from the moment you were born.”
Her power was the power of the grave, of death itself, but so was mine. She meant to prove a point, but she’d wakened my necromancy, and she was just another kind of dead. I knew how to handle the dead.
I drew a breath, drawing in my own magic, getting ready to cast her out. I’d done it before. But her chill changed to heat before I could finish that breath. The blood lust washed my magic away, drowned it in a flood of need.
Her voice dripped across my skin like warm honey, as if the dark-power of her eyes had melted across my skin. “The power of the grave is yours to control, but not the power of desire. Desire, in all its forms, is mine to control.”
If I’d had air to breathe,