Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [997]
I felt Jean-Claude’s power, felt it like a cool soothing wind. I still hurt; the wolf was still there trying to fit all that tooth and claw into my smaller body, but it was better. I could hear again, and what I heard was chaos. Screams, shouts, Claudia’s voice above the rest, “Ulfric, don’t do this!”
Jean-Claude’s voice floated through my head, and through Richard’s, because Richard had tied us that close. “My marks keep her human, Richard; all you can do is destroy her.”
Richard bellowed, “She’s mine!” He was standing over me. I didn’t even remember being on the floor. Richard wasn’t human anymore. He was that movie wolfman, except that his fur was the color of cinnamon, and he was very male, not that smooth sexless Barbie-doll look from the movies. From my angle everything about him looked monstrously large. Partly the angle, and partly the pain.
The wolf inside me stretched my body, trying to force claws out from under my nails. Trying to stretch more body out than I had to give it. I had air now, thanks to Jean-Claude, and I used it to scream. I finally screamed the pain, shrieked it, and somehow it helped. I was still human, I could still speak. I screamed, “Nooo!”
Clay appeared above me, face scared. “Give me your wolf, Anita.”
A clawed hand appeared and jerked him back, out of sight. Richard had pulled him back. “No,” he growled, “no, my pack does not stop this.”
“Not your pack,” Jean-Claude’s voice now, in the room somewhere, “my pack, for all that is yours is mine; by vampire law, they are my wolves, not yours.”
I turned my face and saw him in the doorway. He stood there, beautiful, cold, his eyes glittering with that cool fire. I reached out to him with my bloody hands. I screamed, “Help me!”
Richard was suddenly airborne. Too quick for the bodyguards, too quick for anyone. He hit Jean-Claude, and they both rolled out of sight into the bedroom beyond.
Clay was back at my side. He was bloody, and I couldn’t tell if he was wounded or had just gotten blood on him. “Give me your beast,” he said.
He was disobeying a direct order from his Ulfric. But in that moment I didn’t care. I grabbed his arm, and he pressed himself to my mouth, let me kiss him. More than ever before I felt the wolf pour out of my mouth. I choked on fur and blood and things that couldn’t be real. I choked, and Clay stayed pinned to me while his body struggled to get away. He forced himself to stay against me, forced his body to take my beast, but it hurt too much not to struggle. I knew now just how much it hurt, and I was sorry, but I didn’t stop.
His body exploded above mine; wet, thick things covered my eyes, and only my hands told me that fur and muscle were above me now. My body still ached, but the wolf was gone, gone like a hole in my heart, an empty space where something should have been.
Someone else’s hand smoothed the gunk from my eyes so I could blink up into Rafael’s face. He was crying. I’d never seen him do that. It scared me. What would make Rafael cry? What was happening?
Gunshots exploded in the other room, so loud, so horribly loud. I sat up and fell back down. “Help me,” I said to Rafael.
He picked me up, as if I were a child, and carried me to the other room. I didn’t protest, I would have been too slow; but what I saw in the bedroom said that we’d all been too slow.
The first thing I saw was Jean-Claude sitting on the floor, his white shirt in bloody tatters, blood trickling from his mouth. The guards were standing in a semicircle