• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“It’s not all bad, Anita. Some of it can be wondrous.”

This from the man who had hated his beast for the entire time I’d known him. But I didn’t say that out loud. I just looked at him.

He smiled. “I know how strange that sounds coming from me.”

I looked at him harder.

He laughed, settling lower on the pillows until he was sprawled in front of me. One leg bent up so he wouldn’t touch me, but close enough that I could have touched him. He lay there unself-consciously nude, which I’d seen before, but it was more than that. He seemed bathed in a comfortableness that was rare for Richard. I’d seen it at the lupanar, that he’d accepted his beast. But it was more than that; he’d accepted himself.

“What do you want from me, Richard?”

This was his cue to get serious, to demand I be less bloodthirsty, or a half dozen other impossible things. He didn’t. “I want this,” he said, and I felt the prickling rush of his power a second before it passed through me like a warm ghost.

I shuddered with it. “I don’t know, Richard. I don’t know if this is a good idea.” It would have sounded better if my voice hadn’t had a tremble in it.

I expected him to question, or talk, but he didn’t. I felt his power like a brush of thunder a second before it smashed into me. I had a second of panic, a moment to wonder if his beast and mine would claw me apart, then his power rubbed through me like a velvet glove. My beast rose as if from a great, warm, wet depth, up, up to meet the warm, burning rush of Richard’s energy. He pushed his beast through me, and I could feel it, impossibly huge, the brush of fur so deep inside me that I cried out. I felt his beast as if it had crawled inside me and was caressing things from the inside that his hands would never have touched. My power seemed less certain than his, less solid. But it rose around the hard, muscled fur like velvet mist, swirling through his power, through my own body. Until it felt as if something huge was growing inside me, something I’d never felt before, swelling inside me. It felt larger than my body, as if I couldn’t hold it inside myself, like a cup filled to the brim with something hot and scalding, but the liquid kept pouring in, and still I held it, held it, held it, until it burst over me, through me, out of me, in a roar of power that turned the world golden and slow, drew my body to its knees, curved my back, sent my hands clawing at the air trying to hold on to something, anything, while my body spilled apart and remade itself on the bed. For a space of labored heartbeats I thought he’d brought on the change, and I had slipped my skin for real, but it wasn’t that. I felt like I was floating and only gradually felt my body again. I lay on my back, my knees folded under me, hands limp at my sides, so relaxed it was like being drugged.

I felt the bed move under me, and a moment later, Richard appeared above me. He was on all fours, looming over me, and I had trouble focusing on his face. He cradled my face, staring into my eyes, while I tried to look at him. “Anita, are you alright?”

I laughed then, slow and lazy. “Help me get my knees straightened out, and I’ll be fine.”

He helped me straighten my legs, and even then all I wanted to do was just lay there. “What did you do to me?”

He lay down beside me, propped on one elbow. “I brought you, using the beasts.”

I blinked at him, licked my lips, and tried to think of an intelligent question, gave up, and settled for what I wanted to know. “Is it always like that between lycanthropes?”

“No,” he said and leaned over me, until his face filled my vision. “No, only a true lupa, or a true Nimir-Ra, can respond to my Ulfric the way you just did.”

I touched his chest enough to back him up so I could see his face clearly. “You’ve never done that with anyone before?”

He looked down then, a curtain of his hair sliding over his face, hiding it from me. I pushed his hair back so I could see that nearly perfect profile. “Who?” I asked.

Heat washed up his neck and face.