Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [139]
“Yeah, I know. If I deny the ardeur the beast wants meat more, or the vampire wants blood. I know all that.”
“So what happens if you don’t feed your human stomach, you get hungry, right?”
The light changed, and I eased forward. Saturday night traffic on Olive was always fun. “Yeah,” I said. I was looking for the trick, and didn’t see it.
“So if your body gets hungry for normal feeding, then doesn’t that make all the other hungers worse?”
I almost hit the car in front of me, because I was staring at him. I had to slam on my brakes and endure much horn blowing, and, if it hadn’t been so dark, I’m sure I’d have seen some hand gestures. “What did you say?”
“You heard me, Anita.”
I sighed and started paying better attention to the traffic. But inside I was kicking myself, because it was so simple. So terribly simple. “I don’t eat regularly when I’m working, and that usually means that I’m running home with the ardeur riding me every night.”
“Sometimes twice a night,” he said. “How much do you eat on those nights? Real food, I mean.”
I tried to think, and finally had to say, “Sometimes nothing.”
“It would be interesting if you kept a food diary to see if there was a correlation between starving your human body and the other hungers rising.”
“You talk like you know this already,” I said.
“Haven’t you noticed that lycanthropes cook and eat?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I thought about it. Richard cooked, and had always been either taking me out to dinner or wanting to cook for me. Micah cooked, though Nathaniel did more of it. We usually had a house full of wereleopards for at least one meal a day.
“You mean there’s a reason that all the lycanthrope men I’ve dated have been domestically talented?”
He nodded. “We need to eat a nice balanced diet, heavy on protein. It helps keep the beast at bay.”
I glanced at him, and in the near dark of the streetlights, he was mostly in shadow. His lavender shirt was the palest thing about him. “Why didn’t someone mention this to me before?”
“We’ve been treating you like you’re mostly human, Anita. But what I saw today . . .” He seemed to be searching for words. Finally he said, “If I didn’t know that you were human and couldn’t slip your skin and be a leopard for real, I’d think you were one of us. The way you felt, the way you fought, the way you smelled, everything was shapeshifter. You did not come off like a human. Turn into the parking lot here,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we need to talk.”
I did not like the sound of that, but I turned in to the strip mall that had Culpeppers at one end. I parked in the first space I found, which was far away from any restaurant. Most of the stores were dark and closed. When I turned off the engine, the world was suddenly very quiet. The traffic on Olive was still snarling by, and in the distance was music from one of the restaurants, but inside the Jeep it was quiet. That silence that you get inside cars after dark. With one switch of a key, the space inside a car becomes private, intimate.
I turned to face him, having to work against the seat belt, but I wasn’t comfortable taking if off until I was ready to get out of a car. “So, talk,” I said, and my voice sounded almost normal.
He turned in his seat as far as his seat belt would allow. He knew my thing about seat belts. He faced me, putting one knee up to prop himself against the center panel. “We’ve been treating you like you’re human, and now I’m wondering if we were right.”
“You mean I’m going to shift because I’m in a new triumverate?”
He shook his head, and his long braid slid across his lap like a heavy pet. “Maybe what happened with that has made it worse, but I think one of the reasons you haven’t been able to get a handle on the ardeur is because you’ve been taking