Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [72]
Put that way, no, but . . . damn it. Why did it always come down to sex? Why wasn’t there ever another way to fight?
Jean-Claude answered inside my head, “Because we can only fight with the tools at our command. I am an incubus, ma petite, and seduction is both my curse and my greatest power. If I had another magic to offer you, I would, but it is what I know. It is almost all I know.”
“If the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” I said.
Jean-Claude started to ask something, but he was swept away. Everything was swept away by terror. My heart was in my throat like I’d swallowed a fish. I was choking on my own heart. My skin was cold with the iciness of her power. So afraid, so very afraid.
Richard jerked away from my hand, stepped back from me, and I couldn’t read his face now. It wasn’t anger.
Gregory knelt closer to us and stretched his upper body out, over Nathaniel and Damian, stretched out until his half-leopard face was only inches from mine. He sniffed the air in front of me. “Smells, so good, so yummy. Fear and flesh,” he let out a long sigh that tickled his breath along my skin, “fear and flesh.”
I wasn’t afraid of Gregory, I knew that, but I was afraid, and the fear was formless, but it didn’t want to be. When Gregory drew his lips back from his teeth in what was supposed to be a smile, I gasped. The fear coalesced around that flash of fangs, that hungry gleam in those eyes. I was suddenly not just afraid, I was afraid of Gregory. Afraid of the claws, the teeth. I was afraid in a way that I’d never been of him, or any of my leopards. He licked my face, one quick movement.
I yipped, a small, high-pitched, frightened sound.
Gregory growled next to my skin, “Hmm, do it again.”
Richard grabbed him and pulled him away from me. “Stop playing with her.”
Gregory stayed crouched on the floor, as if he were half-thinking about springing up and turning it all into a fight. But what he said was, “Alright, I won’t play with her.” He turned and put his face next to Nathaniel’s. Gregory snapped his teeth just short of his skin, and Nathaniel screamed. Our fear had found a cause to wrap itself around. There was no logic to it. Anything fearful would have done, we just happened to have a leopardman so conveniently at hand.
Gregory laughed.
Richard jerked him back and dragged him as far away as the bathroom would allow. “I said stop playing with them.”
“You said, stop playing with her. I did.”
“Leave them all alone,” Richard said.
Gregory stood, and in leopardman form he was as tall as Richard. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to play with them, too?”
“Yes, yes, I want to play, but I’m not going to.”
“Why not?” Gregory asked.
“Because you don’t torment your friends, Gregory,” Micah said from the doorway with Richard’s newest girlfriend beside him. She was about my size with dark brunette hair cut just above her shoulders. She was wearing a pale blue skort and a white blouse with little blue flowers all over it. Sandals and carefully painted toenails completed the outfit. She was clinging to Micah’s hand and arm with both her hands. You didn’t usually hang on to someone like that unless they were your boyfriend. I realized there was an emotion I could feel through the fear—jealousy. What the hell was she doing hanging on to Micah?
She shivered in the doorway, and her eyes lost focus, as if she was hearing things no one else could hear. She whispered, “What is