Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [170]
“Are you well?” he said, slowly, distinctly, and as I stared at his lips, watching them move; the sound and the movement seemed just a little out of sync.
I had to think about it as if it were a much harder question than it should have been. “No,” I said, finally. “No, I don’t think I am.”
“What’s wrong?” Graham asked.
What was wrong? Good question. Trouble is, I wasn’t sure I had a good answer. What was wrong? I was having something close to a shock reaction, why? Had I lost more blood than I knew? Maybe. Maybe not.
I was cold, and I huddled in the borrowed jacket, burying my face in the collar. Byron’s cologne, the scent of him, was there, and I jerked back from it, because the smell of his skin in the leather brought it all back. Scent brings memory stronger than any other sense, and I was suddenly drowning in the feel of Byron’s body, the look of his face as he gazed down at me, the weight of him, the sight of him going in and out of my body.
I fell back against the seat, my head thrown back, and it was as if all the pleasure of it was suddenly there again, rolling over me, through me. It wasn’t the exact experience, but like a strong, strong, echo. Strong enough to shake my body against the seat and leave my hands clawing at the air, as if I needed something to hold on to, anything to hold on to.
I heard Requiem’s voice: “No, don’t touch . . .” And I found something to hold on to.
Graham had tried to grab me, hold me down, keep me from hurting myself. I think he’d thought I was having a fit. His hand touched mine, and my hand convulsed around his, and it was as if from the moment our palms locked together that all that memory, all that pleasure, poured down my hand and into him.
Graham shuddered against me. I felt the shiver of it go down his arm, and it threw him against the seat so hard the Jeep shook from the impact. I let him have the memory, the pleasure, the sights and smells of it, I let it all pour away from me and into him. It wasn’t a conscious thought, because I hadn’t known until I did it that I could put it into someone else and not have to be pulled along for the ride. I didn’t mean to do it, but I wasn’t unhappy about it. I was glad, for once, to be the calm one on the other side of the seat, while I watched Graham writhing in just the echo of what we’d done. I was glad it wasn’t me. Because I knew now why I’d had the shocky reaction earlier, before the metaphysics had gotten out of hand.
I killed without thinking much about it. Not in cold blood, but if it came time to kill, I had no real problem with it. I’d mourned the fact that killing had stopped bothering me. Then on my first trip to Tennessee to help Richard back when we were still a couple, I’d tortured someone. The bad guys had sent us Richard’s mother’s finger in a little box, along with a lock of his brother Daniel’s hair. We had a time limit to find them, and we already knew that they’d been tortured. The man who’d delivered the box had bragged that they’d both been raped. I’d tortured him, made him tell us where they were, and when we were done with him, I’d shot him in the head, and made the screaming stop. I’d done it to save Richard’s family, and because I couldn’t see another way to do it. I’d done it because I never ask anyone to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself. It’s a rule. Of course, before that, my rule had been I did not do torture. That was a line I did not cross, and I’d crossed it. The terrible part was that I hadn’t regretted doing it, only having to do it. He’d raped Richard’s mother, if I could have I’d have killed him slower, but that wasn’t in me, not even for what he’d done. We’d saved them, but before all of it, the Zeeman’s had been like the Waltons, and now they weren’t. They weren’t broken completely, but they weren’t as fixed as when they started, either. I’d killed the men that did it, or helped them get killed, but all the revenge in the world wouldn’t really fix what was broken.
How do you give someone back their innocence? That wonderful sense of perfect safety that only