Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [96]
“He is the first male you’ve been around,” Jason said.
I looked at him. “So?”
He gave me a look. “Anita, come on, your magic is based on sex, and girls just don’t do it for you. Not that that doesn’t disappoint me sometimes.”
“Hey, fantasize about your little girl-on-girl ménage à trois on your own time. I’ve still got wolf and a herd of tigers staring at me in the dark inside my head. I don’t know what’s wrong, Jason, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“You need to feed.”
I nodded. “We need some privacy, Crispin. Thanks for the help, and sorry you’ve got like a brand, but I need to feed now.”
“You mean you and the wolf are going to have sex.”
I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten, then said, calmly, “Yes, that is what I mean.”
“The tiger inside you may not like that.”
I looked at Jason. He hung his head. “Honestly, your beasts have been quiet. I would never have brought you with just the two of us, if I thought you needed all your animals with you. I mean, at least it’s only the two. This is a small town, Anita. There aren’t going to be that many wereanimals.”
“Only the two,” Crispin said, standing. “What does that mean? Are there more inside you?” He started toward me, and again Jason moved in his way. The tiger gave a low, rumbling sound from that wide chest. He towered over Jason, but he, like me, was used to being towered over. It didn’t impress either of us. But we were used to playing these games at home with people we knew, or who knew us. Playing where we had other people to back us. Crispin didn’t know us, didn’t understand us, and we didn’t understand him.
He went from standing there to attacking Jason. One minute fine, the next claws and teeth, and Jason was still in human form. Blood spattered; Crispin hitting him too fast, too much for him to change. Fuck.
The Browning was on the floor on the other side of them, which said more than anything else how messed up I was. I had a choice of wading into a fight with silver blades, or going for the gun. I went for the gun.
I had the gun in my hand, was raising it up to aim at that tall white figure, when he threw Jason at me, literally. I had just enough time to point the gun up so that it didn’t accidentally go off into Jason’s body, and then I was on the ground with him on top of me, stunned by the force of the blow, and the weight.
His blood spattered my face, and my wolf started running. No, no!
There was a white blur above me like an out-of-focus mountain. Clawed hands pinned my gun hand and tried for Jason’s throat. Jason put up an arm to block the blow. I tried to move my hand for an angle that would let me fire into the weretiger. Jason’s hands fumbled at my sleeve, ripped it. He drew my silver knife and struck out at the tiger. Blood spilled across me in a hot arc. I waited for the tigers to chase my wolf, but they looked into the dark. There was something in the dark that was not my beasts.
I’d told Chuck and the guards that a vampire didn’t have to be in the room with you to fuck you over, but I hadn’t realized just how true that was about to be.
Marmee Noir had tried to mark me, and failed as a vampire, but she was truly a shapeshifter, an older strain of both that could live in the same host body. The darkness inside my mind wavered and I heard her voice. “Your control is formidable, necromancer. I need it gone.”
One moment there was a fight, the next the ardeur was free. She tore my shields down. She destroyed me. She made of me something that simply needed. If it had been blood lust she had raised, I would have torn out Jason’s throat, anyone’s throat. There was nothing but the need. It rose up out of the darkness that she had planted inside me. It hit the cross that shone on my chest, and I tore it off, threw it away. It hit the charm, made it glow, and that, too, went spinning away.
There was no gun, no knife. There