Burnt Offerings - Laurell K. Hamilton [106]
I didn’t even want to know before I had some caffeine in me. I poured coffee into a mug that said “Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that bothering me before I’ve had my first cup of coffee is hazardous to your health.” The mug had been at the office until my boss accused me of threatening the clients. I hadn’t picked out a new mug yet. I had to find something suitably irritating.
There was a sparkling new espresso machine on the cabinet by the coffeemaker, with another card. I took a sip of coffee and opened this one.
“Something to warm your body and fill this empty cuisine.” The last was French for “kitchen.” He often did that in notes, as if even after a hundred years in this country he still sometimes forgot the correct English phrase. His speech was flawless, but many people speak a second language better than they write it. Of course, it could be his backhanded way of teaching me French. It was working. He’d write a note, and I’d hunt him down and ask what it meant. Having French sweet-nothings whispered in your ear is great, but after a while you wonder exactly what he’s whispering, so I asked. There had been other lessons, but nothing much that I could share in public.
“Nice flowers,” Ronnie said. Her voice was neutral, but she’d made herself very clear on the subject of Jean-Claude. She thought he was a pushy bastard. She was right. She thought he was evil. I didn’t agree on that one.
I sat down at the far end of the octagon, back to the wall, head below the level of the windows. “I don’t need any more lectures today, Ronnie. Okay?”
She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “You’re a big girl, Anita.”
“That’s right, I am.” It sounded petulant even to me. I settled the submachine gun beside me on the floor with the coat. I breathed in the coffee, black and thick. Sometimes I added cream and sugar, but for the first cup of the day, black would do.
“Jamil’s been filling us in,” Louie said. “Did you and Richard actually raise power in the middle of the Circus?”
I took a sip of coffee before answering. “Apparently.”
“There is no equivalent among the wererats for the wolves’ lupa, but is it common to be able to call power like that?”
Ronnie was glancing back and forth from one to the other of us. Her eyes were a little wide. I’d been telling her what was happening in my life. She’d been hanging around with me and the monsters long enough to meet Louie, but it was still a strange new world for her. Sometimes I thought she’d be better off keeping farther away from the monsters, but like she’d said, we were both big girls. Sometimes she even carried a gun. She could make her own decisions.
Jamil answered, “I have been a werewolf for over ten years. This is my third pack. I have never even heard of a lupa that could help her Ulfric raise power outside of the lupanar, our place of power. Most lupas can’t even do that. Raina was the first I’d met that could call power within the lupanar. She could do small powers without the full moon to boost her power, but nothing like what I felt today.”
“Jamil says you helped Richard raise enough power to heal him,” Louie said.
I shrugged, carefully so the coffee wouldn’t spill. “I helped Richard control his beast. It raised…something. I don’t know. Something.”
“Richard went into one of his rages, and you helped bring him back?” Louie asked.
I looked at him then. “You’ve seen him when he loses control?”
He nodded. “Once.”
The memory made me shiver. “Once is enough.”
“But you helped him control it.”
“She did,” Jamil said. He sounded pleased.
Louie looked at him and shook his head.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’ve been telling Richard that he won’t get better unless he gets you completely out of his system. I thought he had to forget you to heal himself.”
“You sound like you’ve changed your mind,” I said.
“If you can help Richard regain control of his beast, then he needs you. I don’t care what