Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [89]
“You wouldn’t do that.”
There wasn’t just one tiger superimposed over the pale gold one now. It was like looking at a triple negative. Colors of stripes, and one that looked like a shadow of the others, so dark, all smeared over the face of the one strain that the doctors had found in my blood. The rainbow of tigers eased closer to my face. I knew one thing for certain: I did not want them to finish the movement. How do you stop something that isn’t solid, that isn’t even really there? I lay on the bed, but the tiger walked through it, or occupied the same space as it. It moved toward me as if the ghost of its body weren’t standing in the middle of a bed. It wasn’t real, but I’d learned years ago that just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.
I began to ease back on the bed, pushing with my hands, slowly, as if the tiger were real, and I were trying not to attract its attention. Claws ripped through my body from the inside. I screamed, “Jason!”
He was on the bed beside me, putting his body between me and the phantom tiger. Though the tiger seemed to be able to get through the bed just fine, Jason’s body was solid to it. He wrapped his arms around me. I buried my face in his chest and neck, breathing deep of the scent of him.
The sweet musk of wolf was there underneath the cologne, his skin. It was like the truth under all that civilization. He was Jason, but I needed what lay within. I needed the wild truth of him.
A shape moved within that dark part of me that held the animals. My wolf shone in the darkness, the white part of her fur ghostlike in the gloom. She had dark markings on her, but they blended into the darkness, breaking up her outline the way they were supposed to.
Shadwell’s voice startled her, made her look up, and begin to retreat into the dark, as if she’d been a real wolf. “I’ll call a doctor.”
“A doctor won’t help,” Jason said.
The wolf vanished into the gloom, and suddenly the darkness was alive with tigers. Tigers the color of rainbows, impossible colors, wending their way up through the darkness. It was as if instead of being a dark tunnel, it were some phantom forest of huge black, leafless trees. The tigers were coming, and it was more than just my own beast.
“Jason, there are lots of tigers, different colors that don’t occur in nature. What is happening?”
“Are they in the room or inside your head?”
“Inside,” I whispered, “for now.”
Jason rose up, pressing my face against his chest. “Unless you know a practitioner of the arts, you can’t help Anita, but you can hurt her.”
“Practitioner of the arts?” Rowe said.
“Witch, he means a witch,” Chuck said.
“Yes,” Jason said, “the metaphysical shit is about to hit the fan. Guns won’t protect us against anything that is about to happen, but you delaying me from doing what I have to do to stop this is hurting her.”
I’d thought this was just my tiger trying to get the upper hand because of the weretiger upstairs, but the shapes gliding through the dark and light were not my beast. Oh, maybe she was in there, but this wasn’t my body trying to finally pick an animal to turn into. Something else was happening. Something I had no words for, and no metaphysical experience with. That was bad.
“I don’t know what’s happening, Jason. This is wrong, different.”
He held me close. “Get out,” he told them.
“We have to tell him,” Rowe said.
“We can’t—” Shadwell began.
Chuck cut him off. “The threat says that vampires will try to hit the governor and his family. That means the window is an entry point, and not just the door.”
“The least of our problems right now is a vampire coming through the window,” Jason said.
I smelled rain and jasmine. Oh shit. The charm that rode under my shirt grew warm against my skin. It was supposed to keep Marmee Noir at bay, but it had never glowed before. That couldn’t be good.
I rose up away from Jason and jerked the chain out of my shirt. The lines of the carving on the charm glowed red like someone had taken a red pen and traced every character,