Burnt Offerings - Laurell K. Hamilton [127]
I felt movement. The vibrating energy of the shapeshifters was getting closer. I knew without looking that they were crowding around me. The energy tightened like a circle drawing closed. It was hard to breathe.
I felt someone’s cheek brush my face. I moved my head enough to see Kevin inches from me. I’d expected Nathaniel. Teddy’s large hands stroked down my bare arms. He brought his hands to his face. “You smell like pack.”
Lorraine was on her back staring up at me with eyes gone strange and wolfish. “She smells like Raina.” She rolled her face so that her lips brushed the knee of my jeans.
I knew that if I allowed it, we could sleep in one big communal heap like a litter of puppies, that touching was part of what kept the pack together, like the mutual grooming that primates do. Touching, comforting, it didn’t have to be sexual. That had been Raina’s choice. They were wolves but they were also people and that made them primates. Two animals really, not just one.
Kevin laid his head in my lap, cheek resting on my legs. I couldn’t see his eyes, to tell if they’d gone wolf on me. His voice came thick and low, “Now I do need a cigarette.”
It made me laugh. Once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I laughed until tears ran down my face. The werewolves ran their hands up and down me, faces rubbing my bare skin. They were taking my scent, rolling in the lingering scent of Raina. Marking me with their scent.
Stephen kissed my cheek, the way you’d kiss your sister. “Are you all right?” It was hard to remember, but I think he’d asked that before.
I nodded. “Yes.” My voice sounded tinny and distant. I realized I was on the edge of shock. Not good.
Stephen shooed the wolves away from me. They moved languorously, as if the energy we’d raised had been some sort of drug, or maybe sex was a better analogy. I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.
“Richard said that Raina wasn’t truly gone as long as the pack lived. Is this what he meant?” I asked.
“Yes,” Stephen said, “though I’ve never heard of a non-pack member being able to do what you just did. The spirits of the dead should only be able to enter lukoi.”
“Spirits of the dead,” I said. “You mean you don’t have a fancy name for them?”
“They are munin,” Stephen said.
That almost started me laughing again. “Memory, Odin’s raven.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“What exactly was it, is it? It wasn’t a ghost. I know what a ghost feels like.”
“You’ve felt one of them,” Stephen said. “It’s the best explanation I can give you.”
“It’s energy,” Teddy said. “Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It exists. We have the energy of everyone that has ever been pack.”
“You don’t mean all lukoi, do you?”
“No,” he said, “but from the first member of our pack to now, we have them all.”
“Not all,” Lorraine said.
He nodded. “Sometimes one of us will be lost to accident and the body cannot be recovered and shared. Then all they were, all their knowledge, their power, is lost to us.”
Kevin had gone back to the chair, still sitting on the floor, leaning his shoulders against the chair seat. “Sometimes,” he said, “we decide not to feed. It’s sort of like excommunication. The pack rejects you in death as in life.”
“Why didn’t you reject Raina? She was a twisted sadistic bitch.”
“It was Richard’s choice,” Teddy said. “By rejecting her body that last time, he thought it would have angered some of the other pack members who aren’t wholeheartedly on his side yet. He was right, but…now we have her inside us.”
“She’s powerful,” Lorraine said, and she shivered. “Powerful enough to possess a lesser wolf.”
“Old wives’ tales,” Kevin said. “She’s dead. Her power survives but only when called.”
“I didn’t call her,” I said.
“We might have,” Stephen said softly. He lay back on the floor, hands covering his eyes as if it was too horrible to look at.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’ve never