“That’s what destroyed your first pride,” Nicky said. “Didn’t you learn anything from that?”
“I learned that if you are king, then be king.” He kissed me, hard and fierce, so that I had to open my mouth, let him inside, or he’d have cut my lips on my teeth. He was all hands and mouth and need. My lioness didn’t like him. She snarled inside my head. He didn’t share; the pride was all about sharing. My life was all about sharing. The group mattered more than anything else. The group had to survive.
I pushed him back enough to break the kiss. I snarled into his face. “I rule myself! I don’t need another king.”
Something crashed into him, and I had a breath to realize it was Nicky, and then they were rolling on the ground fighting for real. I didn’t stay to watch. Jacob had dropped my big blade. I picked it up and ran for the door that Bennington had gone through. If he died, the job died with him. That worked for me.
A lion roared behind me, and I didn’t look back to see who it was, but I used the speed that my beasts had given me and ran. I had the speed but not all the senses, so I had a second before the door opened and I was staring at a tall, dark-haired man. He smelled like lion. The blade struck out in a blur of silver. Action was so far ahead of thought that I had sliced him from ribs to belt, and was starting to bring the knife back for a second blow, as his fist struck out at me. I was able to move back a little, but the speed was too much, and I was too committed to moving forward. His fist blurred out and hit me in the face. It was like being hit by a baseball bat: pressure, momentum, no pain, just a stop. The inside of my head just stopped like my brain had run into a wall. There wasn’t even time to think, Oh, he hit me. It was just the blow and I was down. The lights went out and so did I.
The first sensation I had was of bare dirt under my hands. The ground was cool against the backs of my thighs through the hose. I could feel walls around me, that enclosed feeling, but there was a thread of wind as if there were a window open somewhere. The wind smelled of trees and grass. The dirt smelled fresh and cool. A few night insects called, sluggish in the unusually cool summer temperatures. I drew in a bigger breath, and smelled soap and af tershave, and under that the nose-tickling scent of lion. That made me open my eyes to the sloping roof of a shed. The window above me was partially broken, and there were plenty of gaps between the boards on the walls, so the wind eased through at will. I heard the wind in tall trees high above us. It was blowing harder higher up. I’d expected whatever werelion was guarding me to say something, but I had to turn my head slowly to find Nicky sitting beside me in the dark. He had his knees drawn up to his chest, hugging them, his cheek resting on them so his good eye could see me. The moon was bright enough through the broken windows to let me see him clearly. The brightness of it reminded me that it was only two days until full moon. That might have been one reason they had so much trouble with my beast. The closer to full moon, the harder it was to control your beast.
Nicky gave a small smile. “Good, you’re not dead.”
“Was I supposed to be?” I asked.
“When Silas hit you and you dropped like that”-he shrugged-“it was a thought.”
“I didn’t even have time to worry about it. He was so fast.”
“You managed to move a little out of the way or he’d have snapped your neck.”
I started to try to get up, but he touched my arm. “Stay down a little longer. Once you get up, then you have to raise the dead.”
“Did you win the fight with Jacob?”
“You nearly dying sort of stopped it.” He grinned, a sudden whiteness in the dark. “And we had to help patch up Silas. You opened him up from”-he sat up so he could use his own body to demonstrate-“here at just under the ribs, across the stomach, to the upper intestine. I got to see his intestines on the outside. That is one sharp blade.”
I heard footsteps rustling the leaves, and the crooked door opened to show a dark shadow that turned out to be Jacob. “It wasn’t just the blade, Nick. She knows how to use a knife.” Apparently he’d heard us, too. He walked across the dirt floor and stood on the other side of me, looming over us both. I didn’t like that, so I tried to sit up.
“Slowly,” Nicky said, “you’ve been mostly dead all night.”
I stopped in midmotion. “Did you just quote Princess Bride?”
“I may not be able to quote books, but movies, those I can do.”
“He’s right, though,” Jacob said, and he reached down to offer a hand, “move slow; there’s no way to tell how much you’ve healed.”
I thought about not taking the hand, but I still needed to get out of this with all my people alive, which meant friendly was still better than unfriendly. His hand closed over mine and it was just a hand. He’d shut down his shields on his power so tight that nothing leaked out. When you’re as powerful as he was, that’s a lot of shielding. The less powerful, or the newbies, will leak faster, and leak more the closer to the full moon it gets. For Jacob it was just hard to hide that much light under your bushel basket. He lifted me gently to a sitting position. The world stayed steady, but a headache started on the right side of my face from jaw to temple, as if it had waited for me to sit up.
Jacob knelt on one knee beside me, still holding my hand. “How does it feel?”
“My head and face hurt, but honestly I’m surprised that it’s not worse. Aspirin would be great.”
“No, just in case you’re bleeding inside your skull you don’t want something that thins your blood.” He took his hand back and I let him. “You seem steady enough. Sit here for a few minutes, and then Nick will help you try standing. I’ll go comfort our client again.” He sounded disgusted, but he walked out, having to lift the crooked door to close it behind him. It still left an outline of moonlight on almost every side of it. The shed was so old that I could have torn out a board from the backside and gotten out; maybe Nicky was in here with me to see that I didn’t do that very thing.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In an old shed,” he said.
I gave him the look the comment deserved. It made him smile. “You know what I meant, Nicky.”
“I think this used to be the caretaker’s shed, but now it’s a place to hide you out of sight, until you’re well enough to raise the dead.”
I took in a deeper breath and realized I could smell old marble. I’d been around it most of my adult life, and it actually did have an odor, if you were close enough to it, or surrounded by enough of it. “I take it this is the cemetery where Ilsa Bennington is buried.”
“How do you know we’re in a cemetery?”
I thought about lying, but decided to save my lies for later. “I can smell the marble headstones.”
He drew in a deep breath. “I can, too, but I wasn’t sure you could. You don’t shift, or that’s what we’re told.”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Why say it that way?”
I shrugged. “There’s always the chance that my body will complete the change someday. My situation is too rare to really know what will happen in the long run. So, is this where Ilsa is buried?”
“Yep, he found an old, out-of-the-way one so we wouldn’t be interrupted.”
“Yeah, without the right permits you can get arrested for disturbance of a corpse, or worse.” I turned my head, and the ache intensified as if some of the muscles or ligaments were bruised. Since I should have been dead, I was okay with that. Jean-Claude’s vampire marks had made me damn hard to kill. The thought made me realize that it was after dark and I could contact him by thought alone.
“You won’t be able to use metaphysics to contact your vampire master, or anyone else, Anita.” It was almost as if he’d read my thought, though I was pretty sure it was only coincidence.
“I didn’t…,” I said.
“You were stronger metaphysically than we planned, so Jacob called in our team witch. She’s done something so that while you’re on this land you won’t be able to contact an
yone mind to mind.”
“What if they try to contact me?”
He shook his head. “Nope, Ellen is good, and very thorough, and we’re also over two hours outside your city. Even if your guys break through, they’ll never be able to get to you in time to stop Jacob from telling the snipers to finish the job.”
It was my turn to try to tell if he was lying. I took a deep breath of the cool, earthy air, and there was nothing. He was as peaceful and empty as a still pool of water. It was strangely Zen, and very unlike most of the shapeshifters I knew.
“Besides, if Jacob or Ellen senses you trying to break through the barrier she’s put up, then Micah Callahan dies.” He said it with almost no change in inflection, and only the smallest speed of pulse.
My stomach clenched tight at that lack of inflection. It seemed worse that it didn’t bother him to talk about destroying someone I loved, someone who was a linchpin on which my happiness revolved. That it didn’t matter to him both helped and hurt. It hurt because lack of emotion can make people harder to manipulate, and helped because it made me calmer, made me understand the rules, or lack of them. I could play this game.
I fought the urge to search for the barrier the witch had put up, the same way I’d try a locked door, just in case. If this Ellen was any good at all, she’d sense me trying her barrier. I couldn’t risk what her reaction would be; if it had been a real door I could probably have rattled it a little without my “guards” getting upset, but how do you rattle a metaphysical barrier just a little? My powers tended to rely on brute force more than subtlety. I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk Micah like that. My voice came out steady; point for me. “Not that I’m complaining exactly, but why do you keep threatening to kill him first?”
“He’s just your Nimir-Raj; the others are your animals to call. We aren’t sure exactly what powers you’ve gained from your vampire master, but if you are some kind of lesser vampire, then killing a wereanimal that you’ve bound to yourself can sometimes kill you both. We need you alive to raise the zombie, so Micah goes first.”
“If they die…”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll kill us all. I know.”
“Did I talk while I was unconscious?”
“No, but we know your rep, and if we kill someone you love there’s no going back, no more being friends.” He gave me a very direct look, ruined only by the fall of his pale bangs over the one side of his face. It gave him a perpetually young, frivolous glance, as if nothing that came out of that haircut could be serious. But the weight of his one eye, the face I could see, was very serious.
“If you have to kill Micah then you’ll kill me, too, because you know if you don’t I’ll hunt you down.”
“Yeah, Jacob doesn’t want to kill you for a lot of reasons, but he understands that if certain lines are crossed he’ll have no choice.” He leaned against the wall of the shed. “The wood’s solid even with all the cracks,” he said.
“Solid or not, it’s not exactly a secure prison for me. Why are we in here?”
His hands were looser on his knees as he said, “Jacob’s afraid you’ve rolled me like a real vampire. I’ve never challenged him before, Anita, never. I’ve been with his pride since I was nineteen, and I’ve never challenged him. I want to touch you. I mean, you’re beautiful and all, but this is more than that. My fingertips tingle with the need to hold you. What did you do to me?”
I was calm only on the surface; underneath was that bubbling fear. He might not be able to tell I was lying by smell or body language, but why lie when the truth will do? “I’m not entirely sure.”
He studied me, head resting on his knees. “I don’t believe you.”
“You could tell if I was lying earlier; can’t you tell now?”
“Your pulse sped up when I talked about killing your Nimir-Raj, and you’re scared for him, so, no, I can’t tell.” He frowned and shifted uneasily on the cool dirt. “Why did I tell you that? I should have just kept saying I didn’t believe you, and I definitely shouldn’t have offered so much information. Why did I do that?”
“I told the truth, Nicky; I don’t know.”
“You could be lying,” he said.
“I could,” I said, “but you’ll just have to take it on faith that I’m not.”
He gave me a look that even in the dimness of the shed was clear. It was a look that said he didn’t take anything on faith. He gave a sound halfway between a laugh and a snort. He was still smiling as he said, “What have you done to me, Anita?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and my body was growing even calmer, because no one was actively trying to hurt me or mine, and I needed to save some of the adrenaline for later. It wasn’t really a conscious thing; just if the violence wasn’t immediate, I calmed.
His smile began to slip away as he asked, “But if you had to guess, what would it be?”
“Touch me and maybe we’ll figure it out.” That was true, touch would help me understand what was happening more, but I was still trying to find an ally in all this mess. I needed help, and he’d sense if I called anyone mind to mind, which left him as the best chance I had for help.
He hugged his arms tighter around his knees. “I don’t think touching you again would be a good idea, Anita.”
“You want to touch me, don’t you?”
“More than almost anything, which is exactly why it’s a bad idea.” He hugged his knees tighter until I saw the muscles in his arms bulge with the effort. I think he was holding himself tight so he wouldn’t give in to the urge to reach out his hand and close the small distance between us.
I sympathized, God knew I did. How many times had I fought against touching Jean-Claude before he finally won that battle? Hell, how many times had I fought not to touch a lot of vampires, or shapeshifters? So many of the preternatural powers grew worse when you touched, but in this moment I needed them to grow worse. They’d taken my weapons, and killing Nicky wouldn’t stop Jacob from making that fatal phone call. Without weapons I couldn’t kill everyone quick enough to save Micah. I might be able to do something to save two out of three, but at least one phone call would get through. That wasn’t an eventuality I was willing to play with, so violence was out for now. I’d put it in reserves for later, but for right now I needed something less violent, and more sneaky. I didn’t have a lot of sneaky in my arsenal of skills, but I had a few things. Things that had made Nicky fight his Rex over so little interaction with me. What would happen if I gave him a lot more interaction? What would happen if I used my vampire wiles and tried to take him over? Could I do it? Was I willing to do it? For Micah, yes; for all three of them, hell yes. I’d compromised my moral standards to save strangers’ lives, so what would I do to save someone I loved?
There was only one answer to that question: Anything.
I held out my hand. “Come to me, Nicky.”
“No,” he said, but it was a whisper.
I remembered this game. There’d been a time years ago when I’d fought every time Jean-Claude had wanted to touch me. I’d craved the feel of his hand on my body long before I’d been willing to admit it out loud. I realized with a start that sent jolts of electricity down my fingertips that I wanted to touch Nicky. I wanted the feel of his skin under my hand. Normally, this would have made me run the other way, but not tonight. Tonight I couldn’t afford to be afraid of this part of myself, because it was the only weapon I had left.
I thought I’d have to touch him first, but in the end he came to me. He wasn’t strong enough to force me to come to him.
He crawled on all fours, closing the small distance between us. Lycanthropes, especially the cat-based ones, can crawl like they have muscles in places no human ever possessed, all liquid grace and sensuality. Nicky just crawled, almost like he wasn’t sure it was a good idea. Maybe it wasn’t, but when you run out of good ideas, bad ones start to look better.
I expected him to use his hands to touch me, but he rubbed his cheek against the unbruised side of my face.
The moment our skin touched the hunger rose inside me in a hot rush of need. I carried Jean-Claude’s blood hunger in me, and the hunger for flesh of several wereanimals, and the need in me would have been happy with either. Lucky for what was left of my humanity I had one other option for hungers. The ardeur was one of the most specialized abilities of Belle Morte’s bloodline, from which Jean-Claude descended. It enabled vampires to feed on sex so they could travel in countries where they were still illegal and not leave a trail of vampire-bite victims behind them. Other bloodlines fed on fear, or anger, and that last one I’d managed to find on my own. I could feed on anger now, but it wasn’t as a good a feeding and I didn’t want Nicky mad at me.
“Oh, my God, what is that?” He breathed it out in a trembling line of fear. His one visible eye was wide, flashing white in the dimness of the shed. The side of his neck was lost in shadows, but I could feel the beat of his pulse on my tongue like candy that I wanted to lick and suck, and finally bite down and let all that rich, hot center burst into my mouth. I leaned forward, aiming for his mouth and a kiss, but that would only be the beginning. His mouth wasn’t what I wanted him to open for me. It was a way to get closer to that throbbing heat in the side of his neck. A distant part of me understood that this was wrong, that tearing his throat out would be bad, and my chances of killing him faster than he could kill me were almost nonexistent, but the front of my head was screaming for food. I had planned on using the ardeur to roll Nicky and make him help me, but I hadn’t planned on the other hungers being this strong. That only happened when I’d used up a lot of energy. Healing used up a lot of energy. How hurt had I been, and how much of my reserves had gone into getting better?
I kissed my way down the side of his face, and then laid my lips against the warmth of his neck. I breathed in the scent of his skin, and it was all mixed together with the trees and the grass, and the distant scent of water on the summer air. He smelled like outside, like the summer had seeped into the pores of his skin and made him sweet and fragrant with its warmth.
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