Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [152]
I took that anger, not to wash over me, but to drink, to swallow, to bathe in it. I drew his rage around me like a coat of fire, and I opened up a part of me that I kept hidden from everyone. I let Primo’s rage meet the great seething mass of my own rage. The rage I’d carried inside me since my mother’s death. The deep endless seas of my anger welcomed his anger embraced it, fed on it. I ate his rage and let him feel me do it.
I laughed, laughed while I stood there and burned with our twin furies. Laughed while I felt his anger falter and begin to pull back. Laughed while I let his anger mingle with mine. I already carried a bottomless pit of it, what was a few more buckets?
He stared up at me with sightless eyes, and then he did half of what I’d expected. He moved forward, but not in a mindless rush. He moved forward with a speed that was breathtaking, and I’d seen speed. He was blind, so he grabbed in the dark, and it was Nathaniel he grabbed. Nathaniel who was standing near us. I don’t know if that was who Primo was aiming at, or if he missed. He grabbed Nathaniel’s wrist and tried to yank him in against his body, but Nathaniel braced and would not go.
We were suddenly all moving. I was aware that the security guards were moving, but they’d be too late. My gun was almost free of its holster, but Primo had started forward as soon as he felt Nathaniel’s resistance. I was closest, and I moved faster than I planned. I wasn’t used to being more than human quick. I was reaching out for Nathaniel’s arm, but I got too close to the vampire’s face.
Primo sank fangs into my wrist, and I knew better than to try and jerk free. It would have torn my wrist open. I had my gun out as I screamed. Screamed as his mouth fed on me. Screamed as I put the gun to his head.
My finger had started that pull on the trigger, when Primo’s mind slammed into mine. It wasn’t his rage. It was his memories. Roman army, the murder that got him condemned, the arena where he could murder to his heart’s content, where he could slack that rage, or feed it. Death after death after death. And each one fed him in a way that nothing else did.
Then one dark night a noblewoman requested he come to her bed with the blood and sweat of his victory painted on his body. He went, and found so much more than he’d ever dreamt of. She offered him freedom and a new way to feed his rage. A new way to kill. He did not know her real name. She had simply said, “I am the Dragon, and you will serve me,” and he had.
Abruptly, the memories stopped. It staggered me, and I had a moment to fight not squeezing the trigger. A moment to point the gun skyward and try to relearn how to breathe and use my body at the same time.
Primo still had his mouth pressed to my wrist, but now there was healed flesh, and sight in his eyes. I knew with Jean-Claude’s knowledge that Primo could heal almost anything with a little special blood. He’d been aiming for a lycanthrope. But my blood had done the trick. I understood why Jean-Claude had wanted him. Such a powerful soldier, if you could control him. The calmness in my head wasn’t me.
Primo released my wrist, and his eyes rolled white with terror. “What are you?” he whispered.
“Not what, Primo, who,” I said, and I reached the hand he’d wounded out to him. I meant to touch his face, but he cringed back from me as if I’d offered him harm. “Who am I, Primo?”
That great body cowered before me. He abased himself before me, and I remembered him doing it long ago for the one who had made him. “Master,” he whispered, and the word seemed to be forced from his lips. He hated it, that he would never be his own master. When he took that bloody kiss, he had always assumed that someday he would rule, and now he knew different. “You are my master.”
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