Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [87]
“No, they aren’t part of the wedding party,” Chuck said. “The man is an old high school friend of the bride and this is his girlfriend.”
I thought it was interesting that he didn’t give our names. That, in fact, he introduced us as blandly as possible. That was very interesting.
“Just a friend of the bride’s?” Lucian said, and let his voice hold his doubt.
“I’m a distant cousin of the Summerlands,” Jason said.
“You look like a close cousin,” the weretiger said, and again he tried to move closer to us.
My tiger, tigers, reacted to it. They stalked through the darkness inside me like a glimmer of red-gold, and a swirl of palest yellow-gold. They, more than any of my other beasts, seemed to hide in the depths of that inner place. They used the shadows like trees and foliage to glide in and out of, so one moment there was a striped glimpse, then they were gone. I’m told that real tigers are like that in the jungle. Invisible until they want to be seen.
Jason turned me in his arms so that my face was buried against his shoulder and neck. I breathed in the scent of his skin. He smelled like Jason, but underneath was the musk of wolf. It helped keep those glittering shapes away.
“The scent of tiger comes and goes like a dream of wind in the desert,” he said.
“Poetic,” Jason said, “but we’re out of here.” He started moving us across the floor. I turned my head enough to see where I was going. I caught a glimpse of blue eyes, but they weren’t human. The color was, but there was something about the shade, or shape, that wasn’t human. The sight of those eyes clinched things low in my body, not sexually, but painfully. The tiger flexing its claws, letting me know that it resented being trapped in my human body with no way out.
“My name is Crispin,” the weretiger said.
Jason touched my face with the hand that wasn’t around my waist. “Don’t look,” he whispered.
I did what he said. I kept my eyes forward. Rowe and Shadwell moved with us. I felt Crispin moving up behind us without needing to look behind.
Chuck said, “Leave her alone.”
I felt someone behind us, and it was Sanchez. “Got your back,” he said. I wasn’t sure who he was saying it to, but my back, their back, our back, I’d take it.
My stomach felt like there was something more solid in it than food, like the heaviness of a phantom pregnancy. Except it wasn’t some ghostly baby inside me. It was something far more solid, and just like a real baby, it wanted out.
38
THEY GOT US out of the door and into the elevator. Sanchez waved us onto the elevator. Shadwell, Rowe, and Chuck got in the box with us.
“What was all that about, Marshal?” Chuck asked.
I shook my head and leaned into Jason. I drew in the scent of his skin, trying to use the scent of wolf to loosen the sensation in my gut that something solid was down there. I breathed through it, slow and even. I could do this. This sort of situation was what I’d been practicing for, so I could travel without an entourage of lycanthropes.
Jason answered for me. “I’m a lycanthrope, and Anita’s psychic abilities make her hit the radar as one of us sometimes.”
“What does that mean, her psychic abilities?” Chuck asked.
“She raises the dead for a living, and is a vampire executioner. You can’t do the first without the talent of necromancy, and there are no vampire executioners without psychic abilities that survive long.”
“What kind of abilities?” Chuck persisted.
The tightness in my abdomen was finally loosening. I could breathe without feeling like a weight was pulling at me. I spoke carefully, my face still close to Jason’s neck. “I’m good with the dead, Chuck. It’s what I do.”
“The tiger said you felt