I nodded, but stayed sitting. I was praying when I felt someone come into the room. Without opening my eyes, I knew it was Micah.
He waited until I raised my head, opened my eyes. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said.
“I’m finished,” I said.
He nodded and gave that smile of his that was part amusement, part sorrow, and part something else. “You were praying?” He made it a question.
“Yes.”
Some trick of the light made his eyes gleam in the dark, like there was a spark of hidden fire down deep in their green gold depths. The illusion lost his eyes and most of his face to shadow and darkness. Only that shimmering gleam remained, as if the color dancing in his eyes was more real than the rest of him.
Without seeing his face, I knew he was upset. I could feel it like a tension down my spine. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t remember the last time I prayed.”
I shrugged. “A lot of people don’t pray.”
“Why does it surprise me that you do?” he asked.
I shrugged again.
He took a step forward, and the light fell upon his face and that odd, mixed smile of his.
“I have to go.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“What makes you think anything’s wrong?”
“Tension level between you and your cats. What’s up, Micah?”
He pressed his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, rubbing, as if he were tired. He blinked those jewel-like eyes at me. “A pard emergency. We’ve got one member that couldn’t come tonight, and she’s got herself in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Violet is our version of your Nathaniel, the least dominant of us.” He left it at that, as if it explained everything. It did, and it didn’t.
“And?” I said.
“And I have to go help her.”
“I don’t like secrets, Micah.”
He sighed, running his fingers through his hair. He ripped the ponytail holder out, threw it on the floor, ran his hands through the shoulder-length curls, over and over, as if he’d been wanting to do it all night. The movement was harsh, frantic with tension.
He looked down at me, dark brown hair in disarray around his face, eyes gleaming. In an instant he went from being this nice, attractive man to something feral and alien. It wasn’t just the hair or the kitty-cat eyes. His beast bubbled against my skin like boiling water. I’d felt his power, but not like this, almost hot enough to scald. Then I realized that I could see that heat, see it. It flowed over him, invisible, but almost not, like something half-seen out of the corner of your eye. I could almost see the shape of something monstrous looming around him, like heat rising off of summer pavement, a rippling thing. I’d been around shapeshifters for years and never seen anything like it.
Merle appeared in the doorway. “Nimir-Raj, is anything wrong?”
Micah turned, and I got a swimming afterimage, as if something large and almost invisible moved around and just above his body. His voice came out low and growling. “Wrong, what could possibly be wrong?”
Gina pushed past Merle. “We’ve got to go, Micah.”
Micah put his hands up, and the afterimage moved with him. I couldn’t actually see claws and fur, just hints of it, swimming around him. He covered his eyes with his hands, and I saw those ghostly claws go through, into, past his face. Watching it made me dizzy, and I looked down at the tabletop to steady myself and reality.
I’d heard Marianne say she could see auras of power around people and lycanthropes, but I’d never been able to see one before.
I felt his power folding away, the heat, the skin-ruffling sensation pulling away, like the ocean going back from the shore. I raised my face to see, and that seen-not-seen shape was gone, swallowed back into his body.
He stared down at me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“You’re closer than you think,” I said.
“She’s afraid of your power,” Gina said, and there was scorn in her voice.
I looked up at her. “I saw his aura, saw it like a white phantom around his body.”
“You say that like you’ve never seen it before,” Micah said.
“I haven’t, not a visual.”
Gina took his arm, gently but firmly, and tried pulling him towards the door. He just looked at her, and I felt his presence, his personality, for lack of a better word, like something almost touchable. She dropped to the floor, gripping his hand, rubbing her cheek against it. “I meant no offense, Micah.”
The look on his face was cold. His power, his force began to trickle through the room again.
“Nimir-Raj,” Merle said, “if you are going, then you must go. If you are not going . . .” His voice was careful, almost gentle, a pitying tone of voice, and I didn’t understand why.
Micah growled at Merle, I think. Then his voice came out normal, human. “I know my duty as Nimir-Raj, Merle.”
“I would never presume to tell you the duties of a Nimir-Raj, Micah,” he said.
Micah suddenly looked tired again, all that energy draining away. He helped Gina to her feet, though it looked awkward since she was more than a head taller. “Let’s go.”
They all turned towards the door. “I hope your leopard is alright,” I said.
Micah glanced back. “Would Nathaniel be, if he’d called for help?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He nodded and turned back for the door. “Mine either.” He hesitated and said without turning around, “I’ll take Noah and Gina with me, but if it’s alright I’ll leave Merle and Caleb here?”
“Won’t you need them with you?”
He looked back, smiling. “I just need to pick up Violet. I don’t need muscle for that, and you might want some extra muscle.”
“You mean in case Jacob’s people get pesky?”
His smile widened. “Pesky, yeah, in case they get pesky.”
Then they were gone into the other room, and I was left alone at the table. Lillian came back in, her eyes narrowed.
“What?” I asked.
She just shook her head. “None of my business.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But if it were . . .”
“But it’s not,” I said.
She smiled. “But if it were, I’d say two things.”
“You’re going to say them anyway, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she said.
I waved her to go ahead.
“First, it’s nice to see you letting yourself follow your heart with someone new. Second, you don’t know this man very well. Be careful who you give your heart to, Anita.”
“I haven’t given anyone my heart, yet.”
“Not yet,” she said.
I frowned at her. “You do realize that you’ve told me to follow my heart and not to follow my heart.”
She nodded.
“Those are contradictory bits of advice,” I said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Then which piece of advice do you want me to follow?”
“Both, of course.”
I shook my head. “Let’s go save Gregory and worry about my ever-sordid love life later.”
“I can’t promise that we’ll save Gregory, Anita.”
I held up a hand. “I remember the odds, doc.” I followed her out and into the darkened living room and tried to believe, really believe, in miracles.
29
WE DECIDED TO do it on the deck out back. My deck backed to a couple of acres of mature woodland. No neighbors. No one to see us. The deck was also twice the size of the kitchen, which was the only part of the house without carpeting. Once a shapeshifter changed on carpet it was either steam clean it yourself, or hire it done. I was not the one who suggested that Gregory would ruin the carpet; it was actually Nathaniel. He was, after all, the person most likely to be vacuuming between housekeeper visits. I wasn’t even sure I knew where the
vacuum was.
Gregory was curled in the center of the deck, his head in his brother’s lap, his arms wrapped around the other man’s naked waist. Only the curling yellow hair, paled by moonlight, covered Stephen’s upper body. He’d stripped to the waist in preparation for the change. He was going to go out into the woods with his brother. This presupposed that Gregory would survive the change. We had a fifty-fifty chance, not bad odds, if all you were about to lose was money, but when it was someone’s life, fifty-fifty just didn’t sound that good.
Stephen looked up at me. His cornflower blue eyes were silvered with moonlight. He looked pale and ethereal. His face was raw with emotion; his eyes held an intelligence and a demand that Stephen didn’t often show. He was submissive, fragile in every walk of his life, but in that moment he laid a demand on me with his eyes, his face, the pain that showed in the set of his shoulders, the fierce way he touched his brother, who was still huddled in his lap, just a fall of long pale curls and paler skin. Gregory was naked in the hot summer night, and until that moment I hadn’t noticed. The nudity didn’t make me think of sex, it made me think how terribly vulnerable he was.
Stephen looked up at me and asked with every line of his body, the desperation in his eyes, what he was too submissive to say out loud. I didn’t need to be telepathic to know what he wanted. Save him, save my brother, he screamed at me from his eyes. To say it out loud would have been redundant.
Vivian, who was as fragile as Stephen, as submissive, said it out loud anyway. “Please, try and call his beast, at least try before they use the drugs.”
I looked at her, and there must have been something in my face that frightened her, because she dropped to her knees and crawled towards me. It wasn’t that graceful stalk that the leopards could do. It was like a human crawling, awkward, slow, head down, eyes rolled up. She was displaying the leopard version of submissive behavior, and I hated it. Hated her feeling the need, like I was some ogre that needed placating, but I let her do it. Richard had shown me what happened in a were-group when the dominant refused to be dominant.
She leaned against my legs, pushing her body against me, head down. Normally, leopards would roll around my legs like huge cats, but tonight Vivian just pressed against my legs more like a frightened dog than a luxuriating cat. I leaned over to touch her hair and heard her murmuring under her breath, so soft, “Please, please, please.” You would have had to be colder than even I was to ignore that soft pleading.
“It’s okay, Vivian, I’ll try.”
Rubbing her cheek along my jeans as she raised her head, her eyes rolled up to me, again like a frightened dog. Vivian had always been timid around me, but I’d never seen this level of fear before. I didn’t think it was Gregory’s torture that had made the difference. I think it was the fact that I’d shot Elizabeth full of holes. Yeah, that probably did it. And I couldn’t undermine the lesson by reassuring Vivian now that I wouldn’t shoot her. Merle and Caleb were listening, and if we were really going to combine our pards, being feared was not a bad way for me to start.
I looked across the deck and found Merle watching me. He was still fully dressed, jeans, boots, jean jacket over bare chest, the scar showing like a flash of moonlit lightning across his stomach. We stared at each other, and the force in his gaze, the physical potential that shimmered around him, made the hair on the back of my neck crawl. I’d spent years around dangerous men, and dangerous monsters; Merle was both. If I could make him truly afraid of me, that would be a good thing.
Caleb on the other hand had started stripping off his clothes when everyone else did, and only my protest, backed by Merle, had kept his pants on. He walked barefoot, moonlight catching in the rings in his nipple and the edge of his belly button. He had to look directly at me for the ring in his eyebrow to spark. He was circling Cherry, who had never dressed after helping Gregory in his bath. She stood tall and comfortably nude, ignoring him.
The fact that he was paying attention to her nudity was a breach of protocol among the shapeshifters. You only noticed nudity if you’d been invited to have sex. Short of that, you pretended everyone was as neuter as a Barbie doll.
Zane stepped between Cherry and the circling Caleb, giving a low growl. Caleb laughed and backed off. I did not need another pain in the ass in my pard, and that’s what Caleb was.
Dr. Lillian was standing behind us holding a huge needle all ready to go. The two wererat bodyguards, Claudia and Igor, were behind her. They’d surprised me by putting on guns in the car on the way over. Guns weren’t allowed in the lupanar, but they were bodyguards, and guns were a good thing for bodyguards. Claudia had a 10 millimeter Beretta tucked behind her back. The fact that she could carry a 10 mil anything said how much larger her hands were than mine. Igor had a shoulder rig with a Glock 9 mil. They were both good guns, and the two wererats handled them like they knew what they were doing. Rafael had insisted that they stay just in case Jacob, or his allies, got some wild idea about a preemptive strike.
Claudia and Igor stood in typical bodyguard pose, hands clasped in front of them, one hand holding the opposite wrist. It’s usually a guy thing to stand like that, or a jock thing, but bodyguards do it too. It’s like they hold their own hands for reasurrance.
Their faces were neutral. They were here to protect me, not Gregory. Didn’t matter to them, or didn’t seem to.
Nathaniel leaned against the railing, wearing a pair of shorts, his hair hanging like a dark curtain around his body, still wet from the bath. It took forever for his hair to dry naturally. His face was serene. It reflected an almost zen-like pleasantness, as if he trusted me to make everything alright. Of all their faces, his was the most unnerving. I was used to people being afraid of me, eventually, but soft adoration—that I was not used to.
I looked back down at Vivian, still pressed against my legs. There was fear in her eyes, but there was also hope.
I touched her face and managed a smile. “I’ll do what I can.”
She smiled, and it was radiant. She was always beautiful, but when she smiled like that there was a little girl peeking out, someone more joyous and more free than the Vivian I knew. I valued that little girl smile from her, because I saw it so rarely.
I walked the few feet to the two men. Stephen was still kneeling, his brother huddled against him. He watched me with cautious eyes. He was rubbing his hand on Gregory’s bare back over and over in small circles, the way you stroke a sick child when they want some touch to let them know they’re going to be alright. Looking into Stephen’s eyes, I knew he didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe Gregory would be alright, and it terrified him.
I knelt beside them and was almost the same height as Stephen. I met that pale gaze, that demand, and said, “I’m going to try and heal him.”
It was Caleb who said, “If Micah couldn’t heal him, why do you think you can?”
I didn’t even bother glancing back at him. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
“You haven’t seen your first full moon,” Merle said. “You can’t call flesh and heal him, not yet, maybe not ever. Calling flesh to heal is a rare talent.”
I did look at Merle. “I’m not going to call flesh, I’m not even sure how that works.”
“Then how will you heal him?” Merle asked.
“With the munin.”
“How will a werewolf ghost help you heal a wereleopard?”
I shook my head. “I’ve healed the leopards before using the munin.”
“You’ve healed Nathaniel,” Cherry said, “twice, but no one else.”
“If it works for one of you, it should work for all of you,” I said.
Cherry was frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
“You heal with Raina, everything was sex with her, and you want Nathaniel in that way. You’ve never been attracted to Gregory.”
I shrugged. She was pretty much voicing the same doubts that I had, but hearing them out loud made them sound worse. I felt more doubtful that I could do
it and more slutty because I needed sexual attraction to heal. But I was getting over the slutty feeling. If I could save both Gregory’s hearing and his life, a little embarrassment wasn’t too high a price to pay.
I looked down at Gregory, still huddled in a tight fetal ball around Stephen’s lap and waist. He held on as if his brother were the last solid thing in the universe, as if, if he let go he’d swirl away and be lost.
I touched his hair, lightly, and he moved his face so that he could see me through a tangle of pale curls. I swept the curls away from his face. It was a gesture you used for a child. I’d hated Gregory once because of some things he’d done when Raina and Gabriel were still alive. But the moment they were dead and he knew he had a choice, he’d stopped doing most of them. Had he made me Nimir-Ra on purpose? Staring into his wide blue eyes I didn’t believe that. It wasn’t naı¨veté, it was a surety that Gregory just wasn’t that dominant. To decide, even in a split second, to change the status quo that profoundly was just beyond him. He’d debate, or ask advice, or ask permission, but he wouldn’t make a unilateral decision without some feedback. I knew this about Gregory. Richard didn’t.
I touched his face, cupping it, raising it so he’d meet my eyes without having to do that eye roll that unnerved me. Just too subservient for my taste. I stared into that beautiful face, let my gaze glide over the fall of curls, the line of his back, the curl of his hip, but I felt nothing. I could appreciate his beauty, but I tried very hard to think of my leopards as neuter. You can be someone’s friend and have sex with them. The trick is you have to want their emotional and physical well-being more than you want to fuck them. If you cross that line and want sex more than their happiness, then you aren’t their friend. Their lover maybe, but not their friend.
But it was more than that. Cherry was right, Gregory had never moved me in that way. I sighed and moved my hand back from him. “What’s wrong?” Stephen asked.
“He’s pretty to look at, but . . .”
Stephen almost smiled. “But you need more than just a pretty face to lust after.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes my life would be simpler if I didn’t, but yeah.”
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 234
