Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [69]
It had been such a smart way to bring me out of Damian’s memory without risking Nathaniel being dragged into it himself. So smart, but a plan is only as good as everyone in it. Damian moved in my lap, and I had a second to realize what he was going to do. I drew a breath to warn Nathaniel, but didn’t have time to breath out. It was that quick.
Damian grabbed Nathaniel’s arm, and that one touch was enough. It was like drowning in light. As if the world had caught fire and become heat, and heat was golden like the color yellow had spilled out and covered everything. Yellow warmth, golden heat. Our eyes were dazzled by it. We were blind in the light. There was nothing but the light and the touch of her small hands, and Perrin’s hand in mine. His hand so large, firm, an anchor in the nightmare of the light. Her hands caressed, but it wasn’t real. She’d dragged us into the light to drink our fear, not our sex.
She tore his hand away from mine, and her voice, which once I’d thought beautiful, sounded like an evil whine in my head, poisonous, because I could not tell her no. “One to burn, one to keep.”
Perrin turned, framed for a moment in the light. His hair as yellow as the light itself, his eyes like the sky beyond the window. He was tall, his shoulders so wide that he filled most of the window. He’d always been a big man even among big men. Some of the towns we’d raided, people had run screaming, “Giant!” or their word for it.
Perrin stood, covered in the light. Covered in the light, but not burning. The words that had begun this folly came back, “Perhaps the reason they can walk out with you in the sun, Moroven, is not you sharing power with them, but that they have gained power of their own, to sun walk.” A messenger from the council had said the evil words and left it as a poisonous flea in she-who-made-us’s ear. For a heart’s beat we thought the messenger had spoken true. We thought Perrin stood in the light on his own power. For one glorious second, we believed. But the look on his face wasn’t triumphant, it was frightened. That one look was enough. Something was wrong.
The smoke began to curl off his skin, just like in the movies. The part that was still me, still Anita, thought but that’s not right. All the vampires that I’d seen die by sunlight just burst into flames. No smoke, no waiting, just instant inferno, poof. My puzzlement helped drag us back from the edge of terror. It helped us watch smoke rise from Perrin’s skin, kept the horror from choking us. Flames burst along his skin, and for the blink of an eye he was haloed by rich orange and gold flames. His long yellow hair fluttered in the wind of the heat. A moment to think, how pretty, then the flames ate over him and his skin crawled with fire.
Perrin shrieked. Shrieked, for scream did not describe that sound coming from a man’s mouth.
We screamed because we had to. All the horror, the sorrow, the fear had to come out our mouths, or it would have burst out of our skin and shattered our minds. We screamed because it was all that kept us from going mad.
I suddenly smelled forest, that rich green smell of the deep woods—half Christmas tree pine and half fresh-turned earth. I stared at the burning vampire, my lifelong friend, my brother, but I was calm. All I could smell was forest, not the salt of ocean, not anything, then there was something else—wolf. The sweet musk of wolf. Richard.
The thought of him made the scent of forest and fur override everything else. The memory began to fade. Literally, the images became misty, and we began to draw away from that awful room. Perrin’s voice floated down all those years, his scream turned distant by the fading. He began by screaming her name, the name I’d heard used for she-who-made-them, “Moroven, Moroven,” but the screams changed,