Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [91]
39
CRISPIN LAY DOWN beside me so that we could look each other in the eyes. He gave me those human eyes with that tiger color, and just seeing his eyes like that calmed me. Calm usually meant that the beast in question would stop and begin to retreat, but the visual in my head showed the white tiger gaining speed the way they will do when they’ve committed to the hunt—that last burst of speed, strength, everything thrown on one leap.
Crispin put a hand on the side of my face, and the touch helped, quieted my pulse. He leaned over me and spoke just before he kissed me. “I hear the lady’s call and I answer.” It sounded more ritualized than anything we did at home, but it was as if he knew exactly what I needed from him.
The tiger hit the surface of my body, bucking me off the floor, slamming me into Crispin’s body. It was like being hit by a small car from the inside out. Crispin’s hands held my face secure, so the kiss didn’t hurt either of us. I had a fleeting thought, that he’d done this before, and then there was no thought, only pain.
The tiger roared through me, poured out of me. It felt as if it had made its own exit, as if it were tearing out through my stomach. I screamed, shrieked, and Crispin screamed with me.
He was up on his arms above me, as if he were trying to get farther away. The charm floated between us. It fucking levitated, and I don’t think either of us was doing it. The tiger flowed between us like a rush of white light that you could almost see between his stomach and mine. He should have changed by now. But he stayed human above me. The charm burned bright, and was almost touching his chest.
Crispin put an arm between his body and the charm. It touched his arm, and several things happened at once. The charm stopped glowing, and fell back like any other piece of jewelry. Crispin’s body flowed with fur, like white-and-cream water flowing over that tall body. I was drenched with clear fluid as his body remade itself above me, on top of me. But it wasn’t his beast that rode him, it was mine. I lay pinned underneath him as muscles and bone moved and popped and reknit themselves. Always before when I gave my beast to a shapeshifter in an emergency it had been more like an explosion. One second human, the next they’d been their beast. So violent that bits of flesh had decorated the room, and I had been drenched in that hot clear liquid that ran from their bodies. But this was different, slower, more controlled, more…powerful.
The white tiger wasn’t tearing me apart anymore; it was filling up the man on top of me. I could feel his beast, or a beast, or a power, something warm and real, and more than just the shifting of forms. I had a flashback to the first time I’d been underneath a lycanthrope when they shifted. It had been Richard, and he had just won his fight to be Ulfric. He’d offered me the power to be bound to the pack. I could have ridden the power and run with the pack that night, but they were about to feed on human flesh, and I couldn’t do it.
Richard had said, “You refused the power.” He’d been right.
Crispin stared down at me with a face gone white and fur-covered. His eyes were still in there, but the rest of him was that graceful half-man, half-cat shape. It was similar to the wereleopards, but different. The proportions were different, bigger, a little less human in the head shape, and a little more tiger.
There were brown stripes on the white fur, narrow but there; he wasn’t completely white like the tiger in my vision. He stared down at me with the blue eyes that he’d had all along, as if the eyes never changed the way Micah’s leopard eyes were always in his face in whatever form he chose.
The only weretiger I’d ever seen in half-form had been female, and pale yellow stripes on white. Again, not like the color of a real tiger. Staring at the white-and-chocolate image above me, I wondered if none of the weretigers shifted into that classic orange-and-black