Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  I managed to say, “You won’t hurt me.”

  “I’m bumping your cervix; I will hurt you unless I’m careful.”

  “I like it.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve done the prep work, Wicked, it feels wonderful.”

  “Let the ardeur out, and I’ll go faster.” He kept that careful rhythm going, though I could feel the tension in his body as he fought himself.

  “Harder,” I said.

  “Ardeur,” he said, in a voice that showed the strain, like the trembling of his muscles, as he fought to be so careful of me. I didn’t want him to be careful.

  I did what he wanted, I did what I needed, I reached into that part of me that was the ardeur, and it wasn’t a shield that came down, it was more like I simply stopped fighting it. The ardeur broke over us both in a rush of heat that made us both cry out.

  “Fuck me, Wicked, just fuck me.”

  He stopped being careful, and used all that length, all that width, hard and fast, pounding himself into me until the sound of flesh hitting flesh was loud, and I screamed for him, shrieked for him, orgasming from the feel of him hitting that spot deep inside me, and having to stop, and still he wasn’t done. He started again, this time a little more shallow, a little different twist of hips, and I felt the warm, heavy weight growing inside me again. I started to say his name, over and over, my words growing in the ryhthm of my body and his, “Wicked, Wicked, Wicked, Wicked. God!” The orgasm screamed out of my mouth, left my hands scrambling at his coat and the ground underneath. If I could have reached him, I would have cut my pleasure on his skin, but I was left scrambling to find ways to get all that passion out.

  He cried out above me, and his body lost that practiced rhythm and suddenly he was fucking me as hard and fast as he could. I’d thought he’d already done that, but he proved that even there he had been careful. I felt the impact of his body inside me, and without the ardeur, it might have been something besides amazing, but the ardeur took away anything but lust and the joy of it. He brought me one more time, and only then did he lose control. Only then did his body thrust that one last time deep into mine so that we cried out together, and I felt his body shudder inside me, and only then did I feed.

  I fed on the thrust of his body deep inside mine, I fed on the feel of him spilling inside me, I fed on the strength of his body as he rose above me on his knees. I fed on his hand as it gripped my shoulder and braced him for one last shuddering thrust. It made me cry out again, and then he collapsed against my back. He caught himself with his arms, and was tall enough that he could bridge his body over mine, the dampness of his naked chest pressed to my bare back, his body still deep inside me, so that we knelt on all fours together, pressed as close as bodies could touch, our breathing thundering in our ears, and his heartbeat thudding against my back. His heart was beating for me now.

  He pulled himself out of me, with a laugh and a shudder. I gave one last, soft cry, and collapsed to my side, with him curled around me. We lay there, relearning how to breathe, and only then did I look out into the night and see Truth standing in the starlight.

  58

  TRUTH STOOD THERE with his serious eyes, and his dark hair in contrast to his brother’s. He stared at us with gray eyes and a face that was a match for his brother’s under the partial beard that hid that nice jawline and let him be a little more invisible than Wicked.

  I expected him to look away, our modest Truth, but he didn’t. He looked at us, his face cold and pale in the starlight with that edge of dark hair. He looked at us, and there was something I’d never seen on Truth’s face: hunger. He looked at us like a starving man, or maybe a drowning one.

  Wicked ran his hand down the front of my body, uncurling my legs so that the front of me was bare to his brother’s eyes.

  I started to tell him to stop teasing his brother, but the words died unspoken because Truth was walking toward us. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, and his black T-shirt followed. Their upper bodies were almost identical, broad and strong; only a long curving scar, shiny with age, showed a difference. His hands were at his belt when I tried again to say something. It was when he dropped his gun, holster and all, on the ground without a backward glance that I knew something was wrong. Truth and Wicked were always careful of their weapons, always.

  I started to say something, but his hands were at his belt and the pants were peeling back, and I found that it wasn’t just their upper bodies that were almost identical.

  I said, “Truth,” and I felt it then. The ardeur wasn’t gone. When I fed, it went back to sleep, always, unless it had spread to others in the room. But I had to touch someone to have it spread like that. Truth had been too far away, but even as I tried to think that logic all the way through, he was balancing on one leg to pull off first one boot, then the other, and he was in front of us, spilling his pants over his ankles and stepping out of them.

  Still lying on the ground, held against his brother’s body, I stared up at him. I had a moment to decide how I felt about that, and then he was kneeling beside us, reaching for me.

  I managed to say, “Truth,” and then he pulled me away from Wicked and spilled me to my back. I was left gazing up at him. He fell on top of me, putting his mouth to mine, and kissed me as if he would climb inside and flow down my throat. I kissed him back, kissed him with mouth and arms around his back, tracing his spine, spilling down to the swell of his body where waist ended and other things began. I couldn’t reach beyond that; he was too tall.

  He kissed me, long and hard, until soft, protesting noises spilled out of his lips, then he rose off me, too tall to both kiss me and make love to me. He spread my thighs with the strength of his hands. I had a moment to see all that hard, thick length, and then Wicked’s hand was there, holding a condom.

  Truth made a sound, low in his throat, but he took it and put it on. By the time he was finished he was making a sound that was almost a growl, low and persistent. Eagerness did not begin to describe that sound in a man’s throat. He pressed all that safely sheathed length against me. I watched him push himself inside me, one inch at a time. Just watching him slide inside me threw my head back and made me cry out. I could see the night sky and a million stars dancing overhead as Truth pushed his way inside me.

  He kept himself propped above me, back on his knees, so that almost the only thing that touched me was the long, slide of flesh that kept going in and out of me.

  I cried his name to the stars, and he began to pound himself inside me, harder, faster, his breathing growing ragged as he began to lose his rhythm. I stared up at his body above mine, his eyes looking out into the night and not at me. I started to tell him to look at me, but the orgasm caught me unawares, and I was left screaming, shrieking, hands reaching for any part of him I could, tracing my pleasure in his flesh. He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted my lower body off the ground as he made that last hard, shuddering thrust, burying himself as deep inside my body as he could, as he spilled inside me and the ardeur fed.

  I fed not just on the sex and the soft sweat of him, but on the fear in him. He’d been afraid of the ardeur since Belle Morte gave him a taste centuries ago. So afraid, yet it had caught him again, caught him in the desert night under a shine of stars and the sweet scent of naked bodies. He collapsed forward, still on his knees, his hands locked around my body, his head falling forward against my breasts. I managed to touch his hair; it was finer than Wicked’s, fine and silky under my hands.

  I petted his hair while I learned how to breathe again, and my pulse climbed back into my throat, so that the clean, desert air was like champagne, cool in my throat.

  His body started to shake, and I realized he was crying. I stroked his hair and said, “Truth, Truth, are you all right?”

  He raised his face to me, tears glittering in the hard light of the stars. “I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. I could not resist you naked in the moonlight.”

  “Oh, Truth, I’m sorry,�
� and I meant it. I knew what it was not to have a choice.

  Wicked came to us, putting an arm across the other man’s shoulders. “It’s all right, she’s not like Belle.”

  Truth pulled back from both of us. “The ardeur makes them all monsters in the end.”

  I sat up and, very carefully, very gently, went to him. He actually looked scared, and I wiped his tears away with my hands. He let me, but his eyes were wide, showing too much white, like a horse about to bolt. “Help me not to turn into the monster, Truth.”

  He frowned and looked at me, not like I was something to fuck, or something to be afraid of, but as if he were seeing me—whatever that meant.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked, voice still thick with tears.

  “I mean, you tell me if I’m becoming a monster. You tell me if the power is turning me into something else.”

  “Jean-Claude will tell you that.”

  “He told me once that he trusted me to kill him if he became as heartless as Belle Morte. That he counted on my not letting him be a monster.”

  “Are you telling me to kill you if you lose control?” he asked, slowly.

  I thought about it. “Not yet, but if the Darkness takes me, and there’s no more me left, then yes.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking,” Wicked said.

  “I know that everyone else loves me too much, but if all that’s left of me is the ardeur, then I’m already gone.”

  The brothers exchanged a look, then gave me almost identical looks back. “How do we know when you’re gone?” Truth asked.

  I thought about that. “I don’t know.”

  Truth touched a finger to my cheek and came away with a single trembling tear. “You mean it.”

  I nodded, and curled my arms around my knees, clutching me to myself. “I thought that it was the men. That living with Jean-Claude and all the others was making me lose control of myself, but they aren’t here. It’s me. It’s me, Truth, don’t you see? I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I don’t know how to control it.” I laid my head on my knees and cried. Knowing that I should get dressed, and there was a demon waiting, and I didn’t know where Edward was, but all I could think of in that moment was that I didn’t trust myself anymore.

  Truth wrapped his arms around me, and Wicked came at my back, so that they held me between them while I cried. They held me while I confessed to them something I wasn’t sure I could say to Edward, or any of the men I loved. How do you ask someone you love to kill you if you grow too powerful, too evil? Jean-Claude had asked it of me once, and I had cursed him for it. Now I let the two brothers hold me, and gave them my darkest fear.

  Truth whispered against my hair, “If the ardeur takes you and you become as evil as Belle Morte, I promise . . .”

  Wicked said, “We promise.”

  “We promise,” Truth said, “that we will not let you be that evil.”

  “You’ll kill me,” I said softly.

  They were quiet for a few breaths, and then their arms tightened around me, and they said in one voice, “We’ll kill you.”

  And that was the best I could get, that if the ardeur or the Darkness took me, that Wicked and Truth would kill me before I could do whatever it was that either of the evil bitches of the West wanted me to do. It didn’t matter that it might kill anyone metaphysically tied to me, because if Marmee Noir possessed me, or I became nothing but a vessel for the ardeur, whatever was inside me would spread to them eventually. The thought of what we could all do, if we became truly evil, truly without pity, was too awful to contemplate. We could rule the vampires and most of the wereanimals in this country, and then we could move on Europe. If Marmee Noir took me over and possessed all that belonged to Jean-Claude and me, there’d be nothing to stop us unless the two vampires holding me now could stop it early, stop it with me.

  I sat there in the starry night, held in the arms of the only two people who I thought might be good enough, ruthless enough, and honorable enough to kill me if I asked. I’d once thought that Edward would do it if it needed doing, but I knew now that even he would hesitate. He loved me too much. But Truth and Wicked didn’t love me, not yet, and if we were careful, they never would. I needed them to keep this promise. I needed to know that if I failed, utterly and completely, I had a fail-safe. A fail-safe made of swords and bullets, and two of the finest warriors that had ever walked the planet. As fail-safes went, it wasn’t bad.

  59

  WE GOT DRESSED, because strangely, when the ardeur left and the grief left, the desert night was cold. Truth gave me his leather jacket; when I protested, he said, “I don’t really feel the cold like a human.” Duh, I so knew that, but the emotional revelations had shaken me a little. When he held the jacket out to me, I saw his arms. His lower arms had nail marks on them, some bleeding. I’d even managed to bleed the back of his right hand.

  “God, Truth, I’m sorry.”

  He glanced down at the scratches as if he’d just noticed them, too. “It’s nothing.”

  “I’m still sorry I didn’t ask how you felt about nails.”

  He gave a small smile. “We didn’t have much time to negotiate.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I count it as a mark of my service to you and Jean-Claude,” he said.

  I flinched a little. “Don’t call it service, that sounds too much like . . .”

  “Don’t make more of what he said than there is to make, Anita,” Wicked said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

  I let the conversation die because it was all too confusing for me. Truth’s jacket was large enough that my hands kept vanishing in the sleeves, and the bottom of the leather hung down to midthigh. I looked like I was five and playing dress-up in my dad’s clothes, but I was warm. The fashion police could ticket me later.

  I called Edward on Truth’s cell phone. Mine was probably in Phoebe Billings’s yard. I hoped Edward had found it. I called to find out where he was, and if I was too late to help him hunt demons.

  “Anita,” and he sounded half relieved and half frightened, not something you hear from Edward often.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I should be asking you that,” and he lowered his voice, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “Last I see, you’re carried off by a vampire, and I let him do it, and it’s an hour and a half later, and you’re not back. I’d think if you had to feed the ardeur, a quickie would have done it.”

  I fought not to glance at the two vampires. “Trust me, Edward, it was a quickie. Did I miss it? Was there a demon at Bering’s house?”

  “You haven’t missed anything. Did you ever try to get a warrant based on a possible demon being in a house?”

  I almost said yes, then had to stop and think about it. “No, actually.”

  “Well, we got a judge who thinks that demons are just evil spirits. He’s arguing that demons couldn’t possibly have killed our cops.”

  “Normally, he’d be right, but it doesn’t matter. Our warrant of execution should get us in Bering’s house,” I said.

  “Shaw didn’t think so, and he’s the undersheriff.”

  “Let me guess, Bering is rich, or connected, or something.”

  “His family has been a big deal around here for as long as Max has been in charge. He’s the last of the family unless he breeds, which doesn’t seem likely if we can ever get into the house.”

  “You can just press the warrant; it’s federal, and that outranks local.”

  “I wanted to give you time to get back,” he said.

  “Shit, Edward, you didn’t have to delay the investigation because I’m having a metaphysical breakdown.”

  “Put it another way, have you seen anyone else but you and me that you’d want backing you against a demon?”

  I thought about that. “Lieutenant Grimes and his men are good,” I said.

  “They’re some of the best, but I haven’t seen them pray to the angels and have everything glow.”


  Oh. “Okay, tell me where you are, and Wicked will drop me nearby.”

  He was back at SWAT headquarters. “We’ve had the briefing about Bering’s house. We’re just waiting for the warrant, or for me to push the one we have.”

  “My weapons are stashed there; could you change out some things? I didn’t pack with demon in mind.”

  “I’ve already repacked for you, and I found your phone in the yard with your weapons. I can list what I packed for you,” he said.

  “That’s okay, I trust you to pack for me. Though, frankly, most of the time a demon isn’t solid enough for normal weapons of any kind to work. The rare ones that do get solid enough to attack may only be solid for the second of that attack, so we’ll have to be shooting around each other if it goes bad.”

  “See, none of their practitioners knew that, and neither did the priest they’ve got here that’s been blessing our bullets.”

  “The priest has been doing what?” I asked.

  “You heard right.”

  “Hmm, I’ve never tried that.”

  “Me, either,” he said.

  “I wonder if the bullets will glow?”

  “We’ll find out,” he said.

  I sighed. “Yeah, we’ll find out.”

  “You don’t sound so good,” he said.

  I opened my mouth, closed it, then said the only thing I could think of. “I’m tired of being a victim to my own metaphysical powers, Edward.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “I’ve fed the ardeur. I should be good for twelve hours at least, maybe twenty-four.”

  “Why double up?” he asked.

  “Let’s just say it was a good meal, okay.”

  “Okay,” he said, “get here as soon as you can.”

  “So what, I walk in and play the Fed card and piss everyone off, so that you come off as reasonable and I’m the bitch?”

  “I’d play the heavy if I could, but I’ve been too reasonable. I can’t explain the change.”