Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton [14]
“Come.” Not a voice, but a sound inside my head. “Come to me.”
I tried to move back and couldn’t. My pulse thundered into my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I was choking! I stood with the force of his mind twisting against me.
“Don’t fight me!” He screamed in my head.
Someone was screaming, wordlessly, and it was me. If I stopped fighting, it would be so easy, like drowning after you stop struggling. A peaceful way to die. No, no. “No.” My voice sounded strange, even to me.
“What?” he asked. His voice held surprise.
“No,” I said, and I looked up at him. I met his eyes with the weight of all those centuries pulsing down. Whatever it was that made me an animator, that helped me raise the dead, it was there now. I met his eyes and stood still.
He smiled then, a slow spreading of lips. “Then I will come to you.”
“Please, please, don’t.” I could not step back. His mind held me like velvet steel. It was everything I could do not to move forward. Not to run to meet him.
He stopped, with our bodies almost touching. His eyes were a solid, perfect brown, bottomless, endless. I looked away from his face. Sweat trickled down my forehead.
“You smell of fear, Anita.”
His cool hand traced the edge of my cheek. I started to shake and couldn’t stop. His fingers pulled gently through the waves of my hair. “How can you face me this way?”
He breathed along my face, warm as silk. His breath slid to my neck, warm and close. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. His hunger pulsed against my skin. My stomach cramped with his need. He hissed at the audience, and they squealed in terror. He was going to do it.
Terror came in a blinding rush of adrenaline. I pushed away from him. I fell to the stage and scrambled away on hands and knees.
An arm grabbed me around the waist, lifting. I screamed, striking backwards with my elbow. It thudded home, and I heard him gasp, but the arm tightened. Tightened until it was crushing me.
I tore at my sleeve. Cloth ripped. He threw me onto my back. He was crouched over me, face twisted with hunger. His lips curled back from his teeth, fangs glistening.
Someone moved onto the stage, one of the waiters. The vampire hissed at him, spittle running down his chin. There was nothing human left.
It came for me in a blinding rush of speed and hunger. I pressed the silver knife over his heart. A trickle of blood glistened down his chest. He snarled at me, fangs gnashing like a dog on the end of a chain. I screamed.
Terror had washed his power away. There was nothing left but fear. He lunged for me and drove the point of the knife into his skin. Blood began to drip over my hand and onto my blouse. His blood.
Jean-Claude was suddenly there. “Aubrey, let her go.”
The vampire growled deep and low in his throat. It was an animal sound.
My voice was high and thin with fear; I sounded like a little girl. “Get him off me, or I’ll kill him!”
The vampire reared back, fangs slashing his own lips. “Get him off me!”
Jean-Claude began to speak softly in French. Even when I couldn’t understand the language his voice was like velvet, soothing. Jean-Claude knelt by us, speaking softly. The vampire growled and lashed out, grabbing Jean-Claude’s wrist.
He gasped, and it sounded like pain.
Should I kill him? Could I plunge the knife home before he tore out my throat? How fast was he? My mind seemed to be working incredibly fast. There was an illusion that I had all the time in the world to decide and act.
I felt the vampire’s weight heavier against my legs. His voice sounded hoarse, but calm. “May I get up now?”
His face was human again, pleasant, handsome, but the illusion didn’t work anymore. I had seen him unmasked, and that image would always stay with me. “Get off me, slowly.”
He smiled then, a slow confident spread