Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [117]
“You don’t understand vampires; I do. The master won’t back down. There’s no quietly fixing this, Peterson. If his hired people don’t do the job, then he will. Your little bastard is a dead man.”
“No, Blake, my little bastard is too high-profile for the master to come after him personally.”
“He might not be thinking that clearly, Peterson.”
“I’ve told you all I can. If something happens, now you know.”
“I really do appreciate it, but let me help you. Tell me the name, or the city. I can do things you can’t.”
“Someone’s coming, I’ve got to go. Be careful, Blake.” He hung up.
I turned to look at Jason. His face was a little pale, as if he’d heard just enough to understand how deep a hole Keith Summerland had dug for himself.
“Did you catch all that?”
“Enough.”
Alex Pinn said, “Keith Summerland is involved with vampires. Oh, man, this is too sweet.”
I’d sort of forgotten about Alex’s job. “I was told you were too deep in cover to risk a story about this.”
“About wereanimals, yeah, but not vampires. I’m not one of those.”
“You cannot use this, Alex. Peterson risked his job warning me.”
“What are you talking about?” Richard asked.
I wanted to share with Richard, but one look at Alex’s eager face and I knew that I’d already overshared. I owed Peterson more than that. “I can’t say right now, Richard; later.”
“More secrets! More lies!” And just like that, Richard’s power filled the room. My skin ran with heat, as if I’d been thrown into a hot bath. It didn’t hurt, but it was hard to get a full breath. So hot, so thick, so powerful; Richard’s power filled the room.
It called to all the wolves in the room. They could not help but answer their Ulfric’s power with a little of their own. Jason was closest to me, so his power flowed along my skin first. It was like someone had turned on a second tap of hot water, to make warm water hotter. We didn’t need hotter. We needed to cool down. The question was how to do that.
Shang-Da’s power and Jamil’s hit me almost at once, and I was suddenly drowning in the scent of wolf. That sweet musk and I could feel it, my wolf, inside me. Not see her, but feel her like the brush of fur against parts of me that nothing should have touched but a blade.
The sensation was so uncomfortable, so eerie, that I shivered. Richard mistook the shiver, because he said, “You can protest all you want, Anita, but you enjoy the power. There are things that the wolves can do for you that the vampires cannot. You just keep fighting it.”
The wolf inside me moved through my stomach, like a hand in places it should never go. Nausea rolled over me. I had to swallow hard.
“She didn’t shiver from pleasure, Richard,” Jason said.
“Now you know her better than I do, little wolf?”
His power seemed to fill the room so there was no air left to breathe. My wolf didn’t come running up that long tunnel inside me. No, the wolf was too close for that. I felt it move inside me, brush fur and claws against the inside of my body.
“Richard, please, something’s wrong. Help me.”
It was Crispin who came to me. Crispin who walked through the rising power. Still nude, still a stranger, but it was he who came to me.
“Don’t touch her,” Richard growled.
Shang-Da, still on his knees said, “Ulfric, please, you will bring her beast, and we will have yet one more problem to deal with.” He looked up at Richard. I’d never seen Shang-Da look so imploring.
Jamil came to the other side and went onto one knee, as well. “Please, Ulfric, your power is choking us all. You will bring all our wolves.”
Crispin stood in front of me now. He had stopped short of touching me, as Richard had asked. That got him an extra point. He was not making anything worse. In fact, looking up into his blue eyes, his tiger eyes, helped still that sense of fur gliding on the wrong inside-out of my skin.
Jason was closest to us, but I think he could sense my wolf so terribly close under the skin. He knew better than to add his touch to Richard’s power. Jason walked toward the other werewolves. He stayed