Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (29 page)

Crispin put an arm between his body and the charm. It touched his arm, and several things happened at once. The charm stopped glowing, and fell back like any other piece of jewelry. Crispin’s body flowed with fur, like white-and-cream water flowing over that tall body. I was drenched with clear fluid as his body remade itself above me, on top of me. But it wasn’t his beast that rode him, it was mine. I lay pinned underneath him as muscles and bone moved and popped and reknit themselves. Always before when I gave my beast to a shapeshifter in an emergency it had been more like an explosion. One second human, the next they’d been their beast. So violent that bits of flesh had decorated the room, and I had been drenched in that hot clear liquid that ran from their bodies. But this was different, slower, more controlled, more…powerful. The white tiger wasn’t tearing me apart anymore; it was filling up the man on top of me. I could feel his beast, or
a
beast, or a power, something warm and real, and more than just the shifting of forms. I had a flashback to the first time I’d been underneath a lycanthrope when they shifted. It had been Richard, and he had just won his fight to be Ulfric. He’d offered me the power to be bound to the pack. I could have ridden the power and run with the pack that night, but they were about to feed on human flesh, and I couldn’t do it.

Richard had said, “You refused the power.” He’d been right.

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Crispin stared down at me with a face gone white and fur-covered. His eyes were still in there, but the rest of him was that graceful half-man, half-cat shape. It was similar to the wereleopards, but different. The proportions were different, bigger, a little less human in the head shape, and a little more tiger.

There were brown stripes on the white fur, narrow but there; he wasn’t completely white like the tiger in my vision. He stared down at me with the blue eyes that he’d had all along, as if the eyes never changed the way Micah’s leopard eyes were always in his face in whatever form he chose. The only weretiger I’d ever seen in half-form had been female, and pale yellow stripes on white. Again, not like the color of a real tiger. Staring at the white-and-chocolate image above me, I wondered if none of the weretigers shifted into that classic orange-and-black design. Maybe I’d spent too much time with the wereleopards in their half-forms, but I gazed up at Crispin and noticed that his chest, like theirs, was less furred and more like an overly muscled human chest. The half-form was taller, more muscular, and edged by that white and pale-chocolate-striped fur, but the skin revealed was pale and human-looking down the center of his body. The wolves seemed to be furrier in halfform than the cats I’d met, so far. My gaze traveled down his body to find that, like in every halfform, everything was bigger. Noticing made me turn my head, and fight not to blush. I might have told him to get off me, but I saw who’d been watching the show. Chuck, Shadwell, and Rowe stood staring down at us, guns bare but not pointed at anything. Jason said, “You both screamed like you were being killed. I had to let them in or they would have busted down the door.”

I raised a hand and smoothed some of the clear, slightly thick liquid away from my forehead so it wouldn’t drip into my eyes. I wasn’t covered in it, but there was enough of it that I’d need a shower before I left the room. With as much dignity as I could muster, I said, “As you can see, I’m fine. Now get out.”

“What we just saw is a lot of things,” Rowe said, “and fine ain’t one of ’em.”

I think because I hadn’t told him to move, or maybe because things hurt, Crispin curled on top of me. He moved his much taller body down so that he wasn’t covering my face with his chest. It meant that certain things weren’t touching me as intimately as they had been through my jeans, which was fine, but it did mean that he was curled around me like some gigantic stuffed toy. A stuffed toy with a pulse that snuggled against me when I touched its furred back. But Crispin had saved me, saved me in a way that Jason couldn’t have—in fact, that no one in town could have done. I owed him, so I didn’t tell him to get up in front of the humans. I didn’t embarrass him, or react like some…mundane. I acted as if this were all just as ordinary as it could be, as if I did this all the damn time.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand; just leave so we can…” Several words went through my mind:
talk, finish, do what we have to do,
none of them sounded right. Jason finished for me. “There are things we need to do, and they’ll weird you out just as much as this. You should see your faces: white, shocked, horrified. You look like you’ve been to the freak show.”

“That’s not fair,” Shadwell said. “We had no idea what was happening in here.”

“Now you do,” I said, still on the floor. “Go, just go.”

Shadwell licked his lips and glanced at Rowe. Rowe shrugged.

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“I think we should give the…marshal here some privacy like she asked,” Chuck said. I wondered what he’d been about to say before he came up with
marshal
? Better not to know. I half-expected the other men to argue, to say they didn’t take orders from Chuck, but they didn’t. I think they wanted out of the room, too. Sometimes the weird factor just goes too far for comfort.

Shadwell nodded, and holstered his gun. Rowe hesitated, giving the weretiger wide eyes, but a hard look from Shadwell made him holster his weapon. He didn’t like it, but he did it. Training; it will keep you alive, and out of trouble with your superiors.

“We’ll be outside,” Shadwell said, “until we’re relieved.”

Rowe said, “How do we know if there’s a problem? I mean the screaming…we really thought that was it. That you were being attacked.”

“Sorry about that,” I said, “I’ll try to be quieter.”

The weretiger moved against me in a motion that seemed to send a wave down his entire body. His tail rose up, to twitch, and then to curve back over the very human rise of his buttocks. He turned and gave the men the full look at that half-and-half face. His voice came growling low, “I’ll be good.”

Rowe swallowed hard and began to lose the little color he’d regained. He just nodded and started for the door. Shadwell followed him, and never looked back. Chuck was the last to leave. He hesitated with his hand on the open door.

“I didn’t think you knew our dancers tonight, Marshal Blake.”

“I didn’t,” I said.

He looked at the tiger on top of me. “Do you usually make friends this fast?”

What could I say? “Sometimes.”

He nodded. “Sometimes,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You go back to making friends, Blake. I’ll leave Shadwell and Rowe on the door. Though I think you’re right. If the vampire threat is real, I sort of hope he picks your window tonight, Mr. Schuyler. Nothing personal, but I think if he climbs in here, he won’t be climbing back out.”

Jason and I spoke at the same time. “No.” We looked at each other, and then he motioned at me, and I said, “He won’t.”

Crispin said, “Is there a big bad vampire around?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Oh, goody,” the weretiger said, “something to play with.”

Chuck shook his head again, and closed the door quietly, but very firmly behind him. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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40

THE WERETIGER SIGHED
and was suddenly heavier on top of me, as if some tension had left his body. “Always so hard in front of the humans,” he said in that growling voice.

“Off,” and I added, “please.” He had saved us; saved me, but he was still heavy. He half-rolled, half-fell off me, to collapse on his side beside me. He blinked those strange blue eyes at me.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” I said.

He smiled; it was a smile full of teeth that could have shredded my throat, but it was a smile. And I’d learned through working with the police on serial killer cases that humans had teeth, too. I had so learned things about my fellow human beings that I did not want to know. It made me calmer around the “monsters,” because I knew scratch us deep enough and we were all monsters.

“You fought your tiger. If you had just given it to me, then it wouldn’t have hurt either of us.”

It must have shown on my face, because his face looked curious, speculative. “You didn’t know that,” he said.

“I know that if a lycanthrope fights his beast, the change is more violent; I guess I just never made the logic leap.”

“You’ve done this before with someone,” Jason said.

“Of course I have. I’m an adult male of my clan. This is how we keep our pregnant females from losing our babies.”

Jason and I both looked at him. I said it out loud. “The weretigers do this routinely with their pregnant females?”

“Yes,” Crispin said, and then he frowned, though his face made it more of a snarl. “And you should know that.” He frowned/snarled harder. “Though your tiger was white, and we’re the only white tiger clan in the United States. You should be one of our females, but you’re not.” He rose up on one elbow, balancing with the other arm flat on the wet carpet as if he were still shaky. His face showed concern, all sympathy. “You survived an attack, but it can’t be one of our clan. We would never do that. It’s against the law of every clan to bring someone over against their will.” He went back to frowning. “And when our master says to attack, it is for killing. We don’t leave survivors.” He said it easily, as if he knew he could confess all his sins to me. I felt compelled to say, “I really am a federal marshal, Crispin. Be careful what you say to me.”

“Do they know you’re one of us?”

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I looked at Jason. What could we tell this stranger? What was safe to share? He seemed to understand the look, as he so often did.

“You’re one of Max’s tigers from Las Vegas, right?” Jason said. Crispin moved his gaze to the standing man. “Yes.”

“Max knows what Anita is, and isn’t. If he didn’t share that with you, it’s probably not something he wants shared with you. Nothing personal, but I think my master would have to talk to yours before we could explain.”

“Are you hinting that she’s not a weretiger?” Crispin asked.

“The humans say a picture is worth a thousand words. We know a smell is worth a hell of a lot more.”

Crispin just nodded.

Jason knelt in the damp carpet on the other side of me from the weretiger.

“The beasts are quiet,” I said. “I really don’t want you both to go furry on me, literally or figuratively.”

“Do you feel well enough to sit up?” he asked.

I thought about it, explored my body not with hands but with thought. I hurt, but not as bad as I’d feared. I started to struggle to sit up, and Jason’s arm was there only seconds before Crispin’s longer one. They looked at each other over my head, and I had a moment to feel the testosterone rise.

“Don’t even think it,” I said.

“Among our people a female mates with only one male. It’s all about competition.”

Jason swallowed a laugh, which puzzled the weretiger and made me frown at him. “Sorry,”

Jason said, “but I’m just thinking that tiger would so not be Anita’s animal.”

I frowned harder at him.

“Just think about your wolf, just enough to bring it to smelling depth.”

“Smelling depth?” I made it a question.

“Trust me, Anita, just a little thought, and he’ll get the idea.”

“I don’t want to, Jason. I’m tired, and I hurt, and I don’t want this to get out of hand again.”

He tried to hug me to him, but Crispin’s arm was in the way. Crispin’s long, clawlike hand curled around my waist, between my body and Jason’s.

I leaned in against Jason’s body as much as that furred and muscled arm would let me. Jason cradled my face against his chest, pressed me to the scent of his skin underneath the T-shirt. I got a glimpse of dark gold eyes surrounded by white and dark fur. My body reacted to it, and the wolf simply started trotting up the metaphysical path inside me. I thought,
No. Back.
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She hesitated, the wolf, then looked at me. There was suddenly something in her eyes that said
No
right back at me.

“You smell of wolf now,” Crispin said. He leaned in, snuffling along my hair and face. It brought the scent of tiger again. Tiger should have been quiet, but there were still tigers inside me. Still striped faces to move in the dark.

I clung harder to Jason, but the wolf wasn’t cooperating either. The wolf gave me that flat look, as if to let me know that she obeyed me because she had to, but she still wanted out. She still wanted freedom.

“She can’t be both wolf and tiger,” Crispin said.

“You have no idea,” Jason said.

Crispin snuffled against my neck, tickling with fur and almost nibbling. It made me shiver, made my body react low and hard. It wasn’t a fear reaction. The wolf started trotting harder, and the tigers trailed behind, not too close, but coming. The only thing that made it not an absolute complete clusterfuck was that leopard and lion were still in hiding. But we didn’t need them to have it go horribly, horribly wrong.

“You have to feed the
ardeur
, Anita, now. That’s part of what’s wrong.”

“We fed the
ardeur
before the party.”

“You’re acting like we didn’t, like you need to feed again.”

I pushed away from both of them, trying to breathe in things that didn’t smell like either animal. God, it was like I almost needed someone who wasn’t furry to quiet the beasts tonight.

“The
ardeur
was the talk of everyone who came back from St. Louis after the big meeting. That you have to feed off sex like a real succubus. I thought it was just rumor. Are you saying it’s true?”