Hit List - Laurell K. Hamilton [124]
She drew back from the kiss, but her hands were still on my face, and any skin would do. “Necromancer, you surprise me,” but there was no fear in the surprise. “I will gain so much power when we are one.” And I saw in my mind’s eye a great wave of darkness, as if the deepest, darkest part of night had suddenly formed a body and reared up above me, impossibly tall, impossibly everything.
I drank down the body I was touching. I drank his very “life” that made that sluggish blood pump, that body move. His skin began to run with fine lines as if he were drying out. I drained his energy, but he hadn’t fed for the night, and there wasn’t nearly the “life” to him that there was when I’d fed on lycanthropes, but I took what was there, and the energy filled my eyes until I knew they glowed with brown light, my eyes made blind with my own vampire power.
The Darkness crashed into me, and for a moment I thought I would drown in it. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t . . . I tasted jasmine and rain, and smelled the scent of a long-gone tropical night in a part of the world I’d never seen, in a city that no longer existed except as sand and a few wind-kissed stones.
One moment I was drowning and the next I could taste Jean-Claude’s lips on mine. He whispered through my mind, “Ma petite.” Down those long miles that separated us, he was there, and he offered me himself, his power to help me stand and remember that I was a vampire, too. The warm scent of wolf and Richard was there over the long miles. I could smell his skin and knew he was tucked in beside a woman’s body. I could feel the curve of her hip under his hand. I smelled vanilla and could feel the cloud of Nathaniel’s hair across my face, and a thousand mornings of waking up beside him. Damian’s green eyes above me as we made love, his hair the color of fresh blood, red hair when it hasn’t seen sunlight for nearly a thousand years. Neither of them was as powerful as Jean-Claude and Richard, but they were mine, and they added to who I was, what I was. Jean-Claude whispered, “We cannot drown if we drink the sea.”
It took me a breathless, terrifying moment to understand, and then I went back to drinking down the vampire in my arms. It didn’t matter that she was putting her energy into his; I would drink it all, and everything she offered. She wanted to put her energy into me, I’d let her.
She poured the deepest darkness into me, down my throat so that I choked on the taste of jasmine and rain, but I swallowed it down. I knew if I didn’t panic, if I just swallowed and breathed in between that shivering pour of energy down my throat, I could do this. She tried to drown me; I tried to drink the blackness between stars. It was like the immovable object and the unstoppable force—she wanted to pour into me, and I let the energy fill me, but I was eating her, and she wanted to eat me.
Distant as a dream I heard gunshots, but I had to trust to someone else for that. My battle was here in the dark, fighting not to drown in the jasmine sea. The world became darkness, and I was standing in an ancient night with the scent of jasmine thick on the air, and a distant smell of rain. “You are mine, necromancer,” she breathed.
I slid to my knees and it was her body, her first body, a dark-skinned woman who held me as we knelt in the sand, on the edge of palm trees and insects I’d never heard outside her memories. “You cannot drink the night, there is too much of it.”
And then there was a hand in the darkness, and Domino was in the vision, pressing himself against the back of my body, not trying to take me away from her, but adding his strength to mine.
She laughed, “White tiger and black is not enough, necromancer.”
And then there was another hand in the night, another figure that wrapped around me and Domino. Ethan, with one arm still broken from the fight, was there in the dream, and that was it, that was the key. He was all the other tiger colors