[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade (67 page)

Crispin was standing beside the bed with a condom in his hand. “Anita made me promise, after the first time we were together.”

Domino and I came out of the kiss, gasping. I stared up at Crispin as if I didn't know who he was or what he was saying.

Domino went up on his knees, and I could suddenly see what I'd been touching. It brought an, “Oh, my God” from me.

Domino took the condom and slid it over himself. He went to all fours over me. He glanced at himself, then at my face. “We haven't done any prep work on you, and I'm . . .”

I finished for him, “Not small.”

He shook his head.

Crispin said, “She's tight, but she'll be wet.”

I frowned at him.

“Do you need foreplay for this?” he asked, hands on hips, as if chastising me.

I thought about it. “Foreplay is lovely, but”—I looked down Domino's body, and all I could think of was—“no, I want that inside me.”

“I don't want to hurt you, not our first time.”

“I'll tell you if it hurts, but,” and I stopped, because no man wants to hear that you have other lovers more well endowed than he is, especially not at this moment, “Please, Domino, just fuck me. Now.”

He didn't ask again. He let his body fall on top of mine, spreading my legs a little wider with a movement of his hips and thighs. He had to use his hand to guide himself in, but once he started, he didn't need any more help. He was wide enough that he did have to work his way in, the first few strokes.

He started above me, on his hands, his lower body pressed between my legs, so that I could look down the line of my body and watch him push his way in and out of me. Just the sight of it made me cry out, again.

“God, you're right, she's so tight, but wet.”

Crispin had gone back to his side of the bed, and was simply watching. “I told you.”

Domino's body worked me a little more open, and he could suddenly find his rhythm. I watched his body slide faster, smoother, deeper, inside mine. This was a position that if the man was of any size, it usually hit the spot, and he was, and it did.

I felt that growing weight between my legs. I whispered, “Oh, God, almost.”

“Almost what?” he asked, but not like he was really listening to the answer. His voice was breathy, and his eyes were shut with concentration.

Then between one stroke and another, that weight spilled up and over, bathing my skin in warmth and pleasure. It tore a scream from my mouth and dug my nails into his lower arms. He froze above me.

Crispin's voice, saying, “Don't stop.”

He started again, but he'd lost just that edge of ground. He gasped out. “I thought I'd hurt you.”

“She's a screamer,” Crispin said.

I might have frowned at him, but Domino was back to that rhythm above me, and I didn't care about anything else. He fought to keep that rhythm, trying for another orgasm for me, I think, but his body began to lose the smooth motion of it. His breathing grew ragged. He fought, one stroke, two, four. That weight built between my legs again.

I gasped, “Close, close again.”

He fought his body to keep pumping, and forced himself back into a smoother rhythm. I pushed myself up on my elbows, so the view was even better, and the angle a little sharper, and that was it. He spilled me over the edge again, and I screamed the pleasure of it at the ceiling.

He didn't stop this time. His rhythm changed, but it didn't matter now, as long as he continued to go in and out of me. The orgasm grew, and flowed from one sensation to another, as his rhythm grew more desperate, his body moving harder, faster, and he finally lowered his body so that he could use all that length and bump the end of me. It was a different pleasure, but he'd worked me enough that it was pleasure.

I gasped, “Harder, deeper.”

He didn't ask if I meant it this time; he just took me at my word. He pounded himself into me, as hard and deep as he wanted, as I wanted, the weight and strength of him pinning me under him, pinning me to the bed, while his body shuddered above mine. He opened his eyes, suddenly, inches above me, and we stared into each other's eyes as his widened, and his breathing grew ragged again, and his body began to buck, fighting for one more rhythm. Then he hit me deep enough, and it was just pleasure. I screamed and dug my nails down his back, wrapped my legs around his waist, and painted my orgasm down his body in blood and screams.

He cried out above me, a thick, throaty gasp of, “Oh, yes.” Then he thrust inside me one last time, as deep as he could go. That made me come again, so that our bodies trembled together, and I buried my mouth against his neck, muffling my screams with his flesh.

He lay on top of me, his heart pounding against my body, the pulse in his neck thudding in my mouth. I let go of his neck because I had the sudden urge to bite harder. I could already taste sweet metal and knew I'd bled him.

I lay back on the bed and held him with my arms, my hands, my legs still wrapped around him. I held him inside my body, as close as I could.

He finally rose up, and I unwrapped myself from him so he could spill himself into the middle of the bed, beside me. He lay on his back, trying to relearn how to breathe, having trouble swallowing past his pulse.

“If that was a quickie,” Crispin said, “I can't wait for a longie.”

Domino smiled, eyes still half-closed. He managed to say, in a breathless voice, “I wanted it to be good. Didn't want to disappoint.”

I lay on my side of the bed, his side of the bed, unable to move anything below the waist and unwilling to move much else. I managed a shaky laugh. “Disappoint, hell, I can't wait to see what it feels like to do that with foreplay.”

“So you do want me again?” And his voice was hesitant, his face lost.

I patted his stomach because that was the easiest thing to reach. “If I could move yet, I'd give you a kiss and tell you that every woman who ever turned you down was a fool.”

He patted my thigh. “I think that's the sweetest thing any girl's ever said to me.”

For some reason that struck me as sad, but I didn't say that part out loud. When we were able to walk, we cleaned up and crawled back into bed. They put me in the middle, and that was fine with me. I'd found that heterosexual men who are willing to have sex with another guy in the bed are still not usually secure enough to sleep with one of them in the middle. I valued the men in my life who didn't sweat stuff like that, but I didn't fault the others. I didn't like to sleep naked with another woman right beside me, as I'd discovered with some of the wereleopards in St. Louis. It was just a big naked puppy pile, or rather kitten pile, but still, I preferred to be sandwiched between beefcake, not cheese cake. So, who was I to bitch?

Some men spoon better than others; I'd found that Crispin was a stomach sleeper, so spooning really didn't work for him. But Domino curled up against my back and wrapped all that tall body around me, as if I were his favorite teddy bear and he couldn't sleep without me. I thought it would be awkward to sleep with a stranger. I mean, sex is one thing, when it's a new friend, but sleep . . . that's helpless. I don't like being helpless around people I've just met. But his body felt like it had been made to fit against mine, his arm tucking me in tight against him, the way Micah did at home. I had a thought for my leopard king. I missed him. I missed Nathaniel. I wondered how Domino would get along with them? I chased the thought away; one problem at a time. I had to kill Vittorio before I could go home. To do that, I had to find him. Later, Rocco and I would start looking for him.

But I didn't have to find Vittorio; he found me.

 

 

BUT HE DIDN'T find me first. She found me. I stood in the room where I knew her body lay. She looked small under the silk sheet; no, shrunken. For the first time, she looked like a corpse under a sheet. I waited for her to move or to hear her breathe, see movement, but there was nothing. She was gone.

Then I was in a night long ago, with the scent of jasmine and rain on the air. The air was hot, but not muggy, as if there wasn't a lot of moisture in it. But there was that edge of rain, and you could almost feel the ground underneath your feet, eager for it, like a lover waiting for an embrace.

She'd stepped into this night as a woman's figure, and as the night itself, but now she was a voice whispering against my skin. “Necromancer, they are coming to kill me. They are coming with modern weapons and things I do not understand. I have abandoned the shell in the room. That they may have it.”

The smell of jasmine grew stronger, as the rain blew closer, a thick, clean smell. “What do you want?”

“You, necromancer. I want your body.”

“No,” I said.

“No, because you have kept me out. You and your ties to your men. But I need power, enough to survive when my shell is consumed. I cannot take your body, Anita, but I think I can feed through you.”

“Feed how?” I asked, and felt the first tightness in my gut. The first hint of fear.

“The tigers, little necromancer, did you think they found you by accident?”

“No, I knew you had done something to me.”

“Simply feed on all the colors of their rainbow and give the energy to me. It will give me enough strength to survive until I can find a host.”

“Are you asking me or telling me to do this?”

“Would asking make you do it?” the voice asked.

“No.”

“Then I tell you to do it.”

“No,” I said.

“I can make you do it, necromancer, but it will be less pleasant.”

“I won't help you find another body, just because you can't have mine.”

“Remember, necromancer, I gave you a choice. You have chosen the path of pain. Now, if you become pregnant, it is too late to help me.”

“What did you say?”

“When I realized I could not get inside you, I tried to have you pregnant by one of the weretigers, but you stayed too far away from them for too long. Now you lie with two of them, and have a blue tiger close at hand. A color even I thought was lost. There are even two kings of two different pure bloodlines within walking distance of you. I would have given you a choice to use your protection when you fed for me, but if you will not do it willingly, then I will do what I did when you first met the white tiger.”

“Wait,” I said, because now I was afraid. I'd met Crispin in North Carolina, when he'd been traveling for a VIP bachelorette party, and I'd been a guest at the same hotel. I'd woken up two days later, naked, bruised, scratched, sore, with three naked men passed out around me. One had been Jason, but the other had been Crispin, who I'd just met, and Alex, who was just an innocent reporter covering the wedding, who also happened to be a red tiger. I could suddenly taste my pulse in my throat.

“Don't,” I said.

“Either feed on the tigers voluntarily and let me take the power, or I will take you again. I will not make it days, though; as I said, pregnant now does me no good. So the sex will be quicker.”

“Why me pregnant by a weretiger?”

“Because I was a necromancer in life, Anita, like you, and a wereanimal. The tigers are the most powerful cat left on this earth. I thought if the baby was part weretiger and part necromancer, I would have a greater chance of taking it's body.”

I was still scared, but the first anger was there, too. “You had no right.”

“You've been inside my mind, little necromancer; do you really believe I care about right and wrong?”

The scent of jasmine was thick on my tongue. “No,” I whispered. The rain was almost here, the wind cool with it. The night was so dark.

“This is your last choice to make, Anita. Is it willing you are, or is it force?”

“If I help you, you'll use the energy to escape the assassins and hide in someone else's body. You'll take them over and escape.”

“Yes,” she said.

The rain blew the thin dress against my body. I was wearing sandals that I'd never owned. My hair blew across my face. All I could taste was jasmine, as if I'd drunk perfume. The first spatters of rain rode the wind.

“Time grows short, necromancer. Your answer?”

I knew what the jasmine on my tongue meant. It was her power growing in me, like the trigger on a gun with a finger on it, already moving to squeeze.

I swallowed, and it was like it hurt to swallow past the sweet taste of it. “I can't help you take over another person's body. I can't sacrifice someone else to save myself.”

“They would be a stranger to you,” the voice in the dark said.

I shook my head. The wind hit me, and the rain came like a wall, so that one moment I was dry, and the next I was soaked to the skin. The rain was cold, and the world tasted of jasmine.

“I can't,” I said.

“Oh, you can, and you will, necromancer. You will feed me. You will save me. I am the Mother of All Darkness; I will not die because one stubborn girl said no.”

I stood there in a desert night that had existed longer ago than books or cities. I shivered in a cold rain that hadn't fallen for thousands of years. I tasted jasmine on my tongue and felt her cut off my breath as she slid her power down my throat.

I managed to say, “No means no, bitch!” Then there were no more words.

 

 

THE RAIN STOPPED abruptly, like someone had turned a switch. The jasmine retreated from my throat. I drew a huge gasping breath. The world didn't smell like rain anymore. There was still the scent of flowers, but the rain had gone. The air was dry, and a wind came off the desert that the palm trees hid from view. The desert that I'd always known was there in this vision.