Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [240]
I let it slide down my throat. I made it last, as if it were the last sip of liquid I would ever have. I’d craved blood before, but as with the beast, I’d thought that one part was all of it. In that one sweet taste I knew better. I’d tasted blood before, but I’d never enjoyed it or known that it could taste like this.
Power trailed over Nathaniel’s skin, and trapped under his body, that power marched over me in a skin-tingling, breath-stealing rush. It made me shiver, and my beast stirred, like something furred and half-asleep, disturbed from its nap.
Nathaniel bowed down toward me again, his eyes were pale gray with a hint of almost blue. I stared into his leopard’s eyes and felt his beast stretch inside his body, like it was rubbing against the bones of its cage.
My beast stretched inside my body, I’d had the sensation before, but I’d never been able to feel it as if my body were somehow hollow and this long shape stretched the length of me. It made me shiver, and it was hard to breathe for a moment, as if something truly was inside me and had reached up high enough to compromise my lungs. The pressure lasted for a moment, then it was gone, but I hadn’t liked the sensation of it.
“You smell of blood,” Nathaniel said, and there was an edge of growl to his voice.
“It’s your blood,” I whispered, and my heart was already beating faster.
“But it’s in your mouth,” he growled, just above my lips. His mouth was suddenly on mine, his tongue pushing between my lips. He kissed me, hard and long and deep, pushing his tongue so far into my mouth that it was almost like deep-throating. But his tongue was neither as long or wide as he was. But this had teeth that almost cut at my lips, a bruising force, that no amount of oral sex could equal. His tongue licked along the roof of my mouth, the inside of my cheeks. He was licking the taste of his own blood from my mouth.
The leopard screamed through my brain, he’s eating us! I knew better, but something moved inside me, in places that nothing was supposed to move. I felt it, not like some liquid amorphous shape, but as if something very solid and very real was sitting in the center of my body and moving around. It stirred, and this time I felt something like a hand stretch upward, and something else stretch down. It hurt, and I was suddenly choking on Nathaniel’s kiss.
He drew back, and the smile on his face was fierce and joyous, a savage beauty, as if the thoughts behind his face weren’t very human anymore. “You taste good,” he said, and his voice was painfully low. It didn’t sound like Nathaniel’s voice at all.
The leopard didn’t react to that growl, it was gone from my head. But that thing in the center of my body stretched, stretched legs and arms inside my body. I could feel it touching things that should never have been touched. I screamed and stared up into his eyes and wondered if there was enough of Nathaniel in there to help me.
“Anita, what’s wrong?” With leopard eyes and a voice of a stranger, but his face was all Nathaniel, all concern and worry.
“It hurts.”
“What? Did I hurt you?”
I shook my head, and claws tickled along my ribs, and made me struggle underneath his body. “Help me!”
He rolled off of me and yelled, “Jason!” He had to yell twice, before Jason came out, dripping from the shower, a towel in his hand. He looked at us, and the smile was gone instantly.