Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (30 page)

I got up on all fours, debated on whether I could stand, thought I could, and tried it. I was a little unsteady but I managed. Away from the two wereanimals the beasts had slowed, but they hadn’t gone away. I could still see them behind my eyes like a waking dream.

“If it’s true,” Crispin said, “I volunteer to help in any way you need.”

I shook my head without looking back at them.

Jason said, “I’ve got it covered, thanks.”

“I don’t think you do.”

A low growl came from behind me, and I didn’t think it was Crispin. “Get out,” Jason said.

“I think if it comes to a fight, you won’t win,” Crispin said.

“Let me be clear here, tiger. I’m grateful for the help, but don’t threaten Jason. He’s my friend, my lover, and my master’s
pomme de sang
.”

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“He wants to kick me out, but I can feel your tiger, Anita. I can feel it. It’s not gone. I’m the only weretiger within a hundred miles or more. You need me tonight.”

“I need his wolf, too.” I finally turned and looked back at them. Jason was standing, but the weretiger was on the floor. He’d rolled away from the wet spot we’d made on the carpet, but he was lounging more catlike than human. If he’d been a cat it wouldn’t have been erotic in the least, but he so wasn’t a cat. All the fur in the world wouldn’t change what he was, and what he was not.

“I smell the wolf, but you can’t be both, can you?”

I shook my head, again. “Long story.”

“Anita, you need to feed,” Jason said.

“I know, but every time I’m close to you, Jason, the wolf seems stronger.”

“I’ll help,” Crispin said.

I gave him a hard look, which didn’t seem to faze him in the least. “The tiger reacts to you. I don’t know what’s wrong tonight.”

“I took you to a room that was so thick with sexual tension you could have walked on it,” Jason said. “We both know that can make it hard on the
ardeur
, on you. I wanted to see the girls. I wanted to flirt and be flirted with, and I forgot my duties.” He shook his head. “You and Jean-Claude trusted me to take care of you and I failed. We have to feed you again. I think once we do that the beasts will calm.”

“By the way,” Crispin said, “what the hell is with that necklace of yours?”

I glanced down at the charm on its chain. It was back to being dull and almost unreadable. But I had the image burned inside my mind, as if I would never forget it. Crispin went to all fours and started crawling toward me, in that graceful I-have-muscles-inplaces-you-can’t-see way that they could do in this form, or even human form. It was just a little more disturbing in this form.

“No closer, Crispin,” I said.

Jason stepped between us. “You heard her.”

Crispin growled, a sound that made my body react both for sex and for the tigers crowded at the back of my wolf.
No fighting
, I thought, as hard as I could. The beasts could fight inside me, and it hurt like hell. “Stop it; stop it, both of you. I am having real trouble here with both the tiger and the wolf. I don’t need you to make it worse.”

“Then you should stop calling to me,” Crispin said.

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.” He sat back on his haunches, hands hanging down between his knees so that at least he was covered and I could look at him without worrying about staring at his groin. I tried not to stare at strange men’s genitalia; just politeness, I guess. Or squeamishness. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

“You call to me like a little queen.”

“You don’t mean that as a pet name, do you?” Jason said.

He turned those strange blue eyes to the other man. “No,
little queen
is what we call our dominant females who would be powerful enough to eventually break off and form their own clan if our queen would allow it.”

“What happens if she doesn’t allow it?” I asked.

“She kills the little queen, or has her killed, after she’s bred at least once.”

I just stared at him. I couldn’t read the tiger face quite well enough. Jason said, “I think he’s serious.”

“I am.” He held his arm up, and showing through the white fur was a raw burn mark. “What is this mark on me?”

“Jason,” I said, “you look at it. I don’t think closer to the tiger is better.”

Jason did what I asked, and Crispin raised his arm up obediently. “It’s the charm. The symbols in a circle and the many-headed tiger inside it. You’ve branded him.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

“What is that charm supposed to do?” Crispin asked.

I debated on what to say. It was supposed to keep Marmee Noir from taking me over from far away in Europe. It was designed so she couldn’t be as big and bad a vampire as she truly was, but I was beginning to wonder if the charm could do other things that no one had told me about. Had the werewolf who gave it to me known that it had other magic in it? Was it a trap instead of a treasure?

Shit. I needed Jean-Claude. I needed to be home, not out here in some strange city with just Jason. If the metaphysical shit hit the fan, I needed more help.

“Your face,” Crispin said. “You’re afraid to tell me.”

“I can say this, that it’s never reacted to anyone like it did tonight.”

“Am I the first weretiger you’ve been around since you got the charm?”

A very logical question. “One other, but she…we’ve been very careful around each other.” I didn’t add that Christine was an attack survivor. I was beginning to wonder if a “born” tiger—their word for it—was different enough to make the charm react this differently. Maybe. Or maybe Marmee Noir was figuring out ways around its magic. I needed help.

“He is the first male you’ve been around,” Jason said.

I looked at him. “So?”

He gave me a look. “Anita, come on, your magic is based on sex, and girls just don’t do it for you. Not that that doesn’t disappoint me sometimes.”

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“Hey, fantasize about your little girl-on-girl ménage à trois on your own time. I’ve still got wolf and a herd of tigers staring at me in the dark inside my head. I don’t know what’s wrong, Jason, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You need to feed.”

I nodded. “We need some privacy, Crispin. Thanks for the help, and sorry you’ve got like a brand, but I need to feed now.”

“You mean you and the wolf are going to have sex.”

I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten, then said, calmly, “Yes, that is what I mean.”

“The tiger inside you may not like that.”

I looked at Jason. He hung his head. “Honestly, your beasts have been quiet. I would never have brought you with just the two of us, if I thought you needed all your animals with you. I mean, at least it’s only the two. This is a small town, Anita. There aren’t going to be that many wereanimals.”

“Only the two,” Crispin said, standing. “What does that mean? Are there more inside you?” He started toward me, and again Jason moved in his way. The tiger gave a low, rumbling sound from that wide chest. He towered over Jason, but he, like me, was used to being towered over. It didn’t impress either of us. But we were used to playing these games at home with people we knew, or who knew us. Playing where we had other people to back us. Crispin didn’t know us, didn’t understand us, and we didn’t understand him.

He went from standing there to attacking Jason. One minute fine, the next claws and teeth, and Jason was still in human form. Blood spattered; Crispin hitting him too fast, too much for him to change. Fuck.

The Browning was on the floor on the other side of them, which said more than anything else how messed up I was. I had a choice of wading into a fight with silver blades, or going for the gun. I went for the gun.

I had the gun in my hand, was raising it up to aim at that tall white figure, when he threw Jason at me, literally. I had just enough time to point the gun up so that it didn’t accidentally go off into Jason’s body, and then I was on the ground with him on top of me, stunned by the force of the blow, and the weight.

His blood spattered my face, and my wolf started running.
No, no!

There was a white blur above me like an out-of-focus mountain. Clawed hands pinned my gun hand and tried for Jason’s throat. Jason put up an arm to block the blow. I tried to move my hand for an angle that would let me fire into the weretiger. Jason’s hands fumbled at my sleeve, ripped it. He drew my silver knife and struck out at the tiger. Blood spilled across me in a hot arc. I waited for the tigers to chase my wolf, but they looked into the dark. There was something in the dark that was not my beasts.

I’d told Chuck and the guards that a vampire didn’t have to be in the room with you to fuck you over, but I hadn’t realized just how true that was about to be. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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Marmee Noir had tried to mark me, and failed as a vampire, but she was truly a shapeshifter, an older strain of both that could live in the same host body. The darkness inside my mind wavered and I heard her voice. “Your control is formidable, necromancer. I need it gone.”

One moment there was a fight, the next the
ardeur
was free. She tore my shields down. She destroyed me. She made of me something that simply needed. If it had been blood lust she had raised, I would have torn out Jason’s throat, anyone’s throat. There was nothing but the need. It rose up out of the darkness that she had planted inside me. It hit the cross that shone on my chest, and I tore it off, threw it away. It hit the charm, made it glow, and that, too, went spinning away. There was no gun, no knife. There was only flesh, and hands, and mouths, and bodies. Then there was only darkness.

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41

A SLIVER OF
light across my eyes woke me. I blinked up into a lamp. I tried to turn my head away from it and found the pillow stiff and sticky with some fluid. That made me open my eyes wider, and I found that there was a wolfman in bed with me. The long snout, the furred body, all so much taller than Jason in human form.

I had this jumbled memory of sex and him changing in the middle of it. It was a first for us, and I wondered if he’d remember any more of it than I did. Why couldn’t I remember?

The bed moved on the other side of me. It made me tense and turn like you do in those horror movies when you hear something and know, suddenly, you aren’t alone. The white-haired stripper from the party last night lay on his stomach beside me, nude. I had a confused image of him in tigerman form above me. The memory was definitely sexual. What the hell had happened last night?

I looked down at my own clothes, and it looked like they’d been torn off me. I had bits and pieces of cloth and leather clinging to parts of me, but for the most part I was nude, too. I tried to think back to the last clear memory, but it made no sense. It was a fight. Crispin, that was the tiger’s name, he had attacked Jason. Jason was hurt, and I was trying to shoot the weretiger, but he’d pinned my arm to the floor. Jason had gotten one of my silver knives from my free arm, and cut the weretiger. Blood on my face, so hot. Then…then nothing. Nothing. Just bits and pieces. Sex, and…something. But it was as if the harder I tried to think of it, the fuzzier it all got. I remembered feeding the
ardeur
. I remembered sex with Jason and him shifting in the middle of it. I remembered sex with Crispin already in half-man form. The visual of him going in and out of my body was embarrassingly clear. But how we got to the sex was a blur, no, worse than a blur, missing. Shit.

Missing, something was missing, but what was it? I touched my neck and found my hair plastered to my shoulders with that clear gunk that the lycanthropes lose when they shift. The bed was thick with it. Jason had shifted on the bed, I remembered that now. Had the
ardeur
risen up and stopped the fight? Had it just overpowered us? It had never done that before. Which raised the question, was Crispin our enemy? When he woke, would he try to hurt us again? Where was my gun? Where were my knives? My cross, that was it, I was missing my cross. I needed off this bed. I needed my cross. I needed weapons. Shit. My weapons were still in the hotel safe, but my gun was here, somewhere, and at least one extra magazine of ammo, and my knives. I needed to be armed, and then I’d worry about the rest. Jason was still in wereanimal form, which meant he was probably still hours away from waking. Crispin was in human form, which meant he would wake first. I needed to be armed before that happened.

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I tried to ease to a sitting position and let out a small pain sound before I could stop it. I ached deep inside my body almost up to my belly button. I knew what the sensation was: really good, but really rough sex with someone well-endowed enough to put the
deep
into deep fucking. Jason was very good, but he wasn’t big enough for this. Not in human form anyway. I glanced at him, but he was lying on his stomach, and I wasn’t touching anyone in this bed. I wanted out.

I started easing out from between them and had to bite my lip not to make more noise. I was actually a little raw between my legs. What the hell had we done last night?

I hurt other places, too, like I’d been in a real fight. My right arm had fresh claw marks covered in dried blood. From the feel of things there were other marks on my back and legs. I fought not to look for what hurt, but just to keep inching closer to the end of the bed. Once I was armed I’d look at all my injuries.