Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [119]
I wanted to help him. I wanted to end this without bloodshed. I wanted a lot of things. Then everything got worse, because the ardeur stirred within me. Fuck, and double fuck.
I pushed away from Crispin. He let me, but was clearly puzzled. But not touching him made Richard’s power worse, harder to refuse. It felt like the wolf was trying to crawl up my throat, out my throat. I fell to my knees, the towel from my head falling away. My hair was cold and heavy around my shoulders, but the power was so hot I needed that cold. It was a good shock. A reminder that I wasn’t truly wolf. I wasn’t truly lupa. I was…a necromancer. But that wouldn’t help me now. What was I? What was I? I was…a vampire. I just didn’t feed on blood.
I’d gone two days without solid food; that made all hungers harder to control. Kneeling there with Richard’s rage, my rage, and his power, throbbing around me, pushing at me, pulling at the furred thing that seemed stuck in my throat…I needed to feed, but I didn’t feel sex. All I could feel was rage, anger. So familiar, so safe.
I knew anger, I liked it; it did make me feel safe, safer than sex. Jean-Claude had taught me how to feed the ardeur from a distance at his clubs. I could do it now, though it wasn’t always easy, or didn’t always work, but I knew how to feed on emotion. Feed on the emotion of lust, on love, and recently I’d learned that friendship is love done soft and pure. It wasn’t a conscious decision. One minute I was kneeling choking on fur and power, feeling the ardeur trying to rise faster than the wolf inside me. The next moment, the ardeur was upon me. My own power chased back the feel of fur in my throat. I could breathe again. I was me again, sort of.
But the rage was still there, beating against my skin, like some old familiar friend. I opened to it. I drank it down, let it soak into my skin. I stood and let the last towel fall away. I stood nude and drank the wrath in through every pore of my body, every inch of me coated with hate. Because he did hate it. Richard hated the anger. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it, because it wasn’t his. It was mine.
I took it back. I sipped it, rolled it on my tongue, enjoyed the bouquet of it, the sweet, ashy taste of it. Oh, yes, this was a vintage of wine that I had kept in the dark, at just the right temperature for a lifetime.
I drew it out of Richard like some kind of sickness, or possession. I drew it out, and felt him grow calm, under the weight of the other men. And at the end of that calmness, I felt the wall between Jean-Claude and me shatter. The anger had been mine, but the vampire marks that had given it to Richard had been Jean-Claude’s. I was trying to take away some of that mark, not on purpose, but in trying to remove what was not mine, I found my love again.
Jean-Claude looked up at me with those dark, dark blue eyes, as if the twilight sky could look back at you. He whispered, “Ma petite.” And with those simple words the marks between him and me were just there again. I could feel him again. I was his again. His and not hers. Though we both felt that she had left her own mark. We would deal with that another night. For that moment, there was nothing but Jean-Claude’s smile, and his voice, and the sense of coming home again.
49
JEAN- CLAUDE DIDN’T SO much whisper, as I just knew, that he was going to have to shield from my feeding. He could not drink anger as he could lust or love. Anger was not his food. It was mine.
I stood there with my hair still cold against my shoulders, so not much time had passed, but it was one of those moments when minutes turned to hours. I drank back in my anger, but it didn’t stay. It didn’t go into that dark pit inside me, where my grief and rage fought and mingled. I ate the anger as I could eat lust and love and heart’s desire. I swallowed the anger like food. But whereas lust confused me, and could get out of control and spread through me and to those near, anger…I was master of that. Anger I could control.
I stood there with my skin tingling