Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [942]
18
SOMEWHERE DURING THE dressing process I came to my senses. I stayed up against the headboard, Asher’s robe belted securely over the red pajamas, my face averted, forehead pressed to the wood. Control was the heart of who I thought I was. I could do this, or rather not do this. I had to try and let this pass me by, because to do anything else . . . I could not do this.
The bed moved, and just the sensation of the men moving around on the bed was enough to tighten my body, speed my pulse. Dear God, help me. This couldn’t be happening. I’d feared ending up as a vampire. I’d come close many times, but I’d never thought it would happen like this. I was still alive, still human, but the hunger rose inside me like some great beast trying to dig its way out of me, and all that kept it from surfacing was my fingers digging into the wood, my forehead pressed against the carvings. I wasn’t sure which hunger I was fighting. But the ardeur colored all of it, whether I was craving flesh, or blood, the sex was there in all of it. I couldn’t separate them, and that was scary all on its own.
I felt someone crawling towards me, and I knew without looking that it was Jean-Claude. I could just feel him.
“Ma petite, all is prepared, we need only you.”
I spoke with my face still pressed into the wood, my fingers clinging to it. “Well, then you’ll just have to do without.”
I felt his hand hovering over my shoulder, and I said, “Don’t touch me!”
“Ma petite, ma petite, I would change this if I could, but I cannot. We must make the best of what is given us.”
That made me look at him. His face was too close, eyes that intense midnight blue, hair a dark glory around his pale face. I flashed on another face just as pale, just as perfect, with a wealth of black hair, but with eyes a rich brown like dark amber. They grew in my vision until the world drowned in the dark honey of her eyes, as if it were poured over my eyes, over my skin, my body, until it filled me, and when I raised my eyes to Jean-Claude’s worried face, his hand on my arm, I saw something close to terror in his eyes.
He scrambled back from me, and when I turned and stared at Asher, he spilled off the bed, to stand shaking. Jason and Nathaniel stayed on the bed because they didn’t know any better. “What’s wrong?” Jason asked.
Nathaniel whispered, “Her eyes.”
I turned and caught sight of myself in the standing mirror in the corner. My eyes had filled with pale brown fire, not the darkness of my own eyes, but hers.
“No,” I said, softly. I felt her thousands of miles away. Her pleasure at my terror rolled through my body, raised my beast and sent me falling onto the bed. My hands strained for something to hold on to, some help, but there was nothing to fight; it was power and it was inside me.
She explored me, raising my beast until it rolled just under the surface of my skin. She touched that part of Richard that was still inside me and raised his beast, until the two energies entwined and my body started to convulse.
I heard yelling. “She’s going to change!” Hands holding me down to the bed.
But Belle had learned what she wanted and let them slide back into my body. She separated out the powers inside me like you’d sort a deck of cards. She touched Jean-Claude’s link to me and it puzzled her, I could feel it. Until that moment she’d assumed I was a vampire, and now she knew I wasn’t. She let what puzzled her slide back deep inside me, then she called the ardeur, the incubus, and the moment I thought it, I realized it was the wrong word. Succubus, she whispered in my head, succubus. The hands that had been holding me down, poured over my body, responding to the ardeur. It was like being covered in pure lust, rolled in it, like flour on a piece of meat before you cook it.
Hands slid along my skin, a mouth closed on my mouth, and I couldn’t see who was right above me, kissing me. I could feel the weight