His power tried to spill outward, but I held it back. I held it like I could hold my own magic, letting it build until I couldn't hold any longer.
Richard's hands slid up my legs finding the lace top of the black panties. His fingers traced my naked spine and I was undone.
The power spilled upward, outward, filling us both. It flared over us in a rushing wave of heat and light, until my vision swam in pieces, and we both cried out with one voice. His beast slid inside of him. I felt it crawl out of me, pulled like a large, thick string, spilling inside of Richard, coiling into his body. I expected to feel the last bit of it spill between us, like draining the last drop of wine from a cup, but that drop remained.
Somewhere in that rush of power, I'd felt Richard take control of his beast and send that pulsing warmth outward into Jamil. I wouldn't have known how to do it, but Richard did. I'd felt Jamil heal under the thundering rush of power.
Richard knelt with me in his arms, my face pressed to his chest. His heart beat against my cheek like a living thing. Sweat had broken over his body in a light dew. I licked the sweat from his chest and stared up at him.
His eyes were heavy-lidded, dazed. You'd almost have mistaken the look for sleep, but not quite. He cupped his hands on both sides of my face. The wound on his mouth was healed. The rush of power, his beast, had healed it. He lowered his soft lips to mine and just barely brushed my mouth. "What are we going to do?"
I held his hands against my face. "We're going to do what we came to do."
"Then what?" he asked.
I shook my head, rubbing my face against his hands. "Survive first, Richard. Worry about the niceties later."
Something filled his eyes with a sudden rush of panic. "Jamil, I could have killed him."
"You also healed him."
He let that take some of the panic from his face, but he still got to his feet and went to his fallen enforcer. An apology at the very least was needed. I couldn't really argue with that.
I stayed kneeling, not sure I could walk yet, for a variety of reasons.
"Not the way Gideon and I would have done it," Thomas said, "but in a pinch it will do."
I felt heat rush up my face. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize," Gideon growled. "It was a lovely show." He crawled towards us, one arm cradled against his body. Blood dripped down the arm and shoulder. The red showed brilliantly against the white shirt. I had absolutely no desire to lick the blood off his body. I was grateful for that.
"Richard did that?" I asked.
"He was beginning to change form when you called him. You drank his beast and he calmed." He sat leaning to one side, bleeding a little puddle on the floor, but he never asked for help, not by word or expression. But Thomas reached out to him. Touched his shoulder in a neutral, almost brotherly gesture. Their power strengthened in a skin-prickling rush that oozed over me like a cold wind, but if I hadn't been able to sense it, I'd have never known.
"Is this just European reserve?" I asked, "or are Richard and I doing something terribly wrong?"
Thomas smiled, but it was Gideon who answered. "You do nothing wrong. In fact, I feel quite cheated." He patted Thomas's hand and smiled flashing fangs. "There are ways to share power that are quieter, and less ... showy. But for today you did what needed to be done. It was a desperate thing and called for desperate measures."
I let it go. No need to explain how often being around Richard ended in such "desperate measures." Across the ring Jamil sat up with Richard's help. Zane had untied both the wereleopards. He'd led Vivian over to Gregory. They both knelt by him, Vivian hugging Zane and crying.
I got my feet under me and found that I could walk. Great. Richard got there before I did. He stroked Gregory's tangled hair out of his face until the wereleopard looked up at him. "We have to set these legs."
Gregory nodded, lips in a thin tight line that reminded me of Cherry.
"We need a hospital for this," I said.
Richard looked up at me. "The legs have already begun to reknit like this. Anita. Every minute the bones are out of alignment is another minute that they heal, badly."
I stared down at Gregory's legs. He was totally nude, but the wounds were so fearful that it wasn't embarrassing; it was just piteous. His legs from the knees down bent the wrong way. I had to close my eyes and look away. If it had been a corpse, I could have looked at it, but Gregory was still bleeding, still hurting. Made it worse somehow.
I looked back. "You mean the legs would heal like that?"
"Yes," Richard said.
I stared down into Gregory's frightened eyes. They were still the surprised cornflower-blue of Stephen's. They looked even bluer from the mask of blood that covered his face. I tried to think of something to say, but he spoke first.
His voice was thin, scratchy, as if he'd screamed until he was hoarse. "When you left without me the first time, I thought you were going to let them keep me."
I knelt beside him. "You're not something to keep. You're a person. You deserve to be treated ... " To say, "better than this" seemed too obvious. I tried to hold his hand the way you'd comfort a child, but two of the fingers were broken so badly, I didn't even know how to touch him.
Vivian spoke for the first time. "Is he dead?" Her voice was breathy, husky, somewhere between that of a little girl and a seductress. She would be great on the phone. The look in her eyes was neither childish nor seductive; it was frightening. She stared past us to where Fernando lay, and her hatred was a hot, scalding thing.
Not that I blamed her. I went to check on our little rapist. Gideon and Thomas got to him first. I noticed that they hadn't gone near him until I did. Why did I think that they didn't like him much better than we did? Fernando just had a way of pissing people off. It seemed to be his only talent.
His bare stomach was a bloody mess where Richard had tried to dig his intestines out, but the wound was healing. Filling itself in like a fast-forward motion picture. You could actually see his body rebuild itself.
"He'll live," I said. Even to me, I sounded disappointed.
"Yes," Thomas said, and that one word sounded as disappointed as I felt. He visibly shook himself, and turned sad brown eyes to me. "If he had died, then Padma would have destroyed the city, seeking you. Make no mistake, Anita, Padma loves his son, but more than that, he is his only son. The only chance he has of having an heir."
"I wouldn't think a vampire would sweat that," I said.
"He comes from a time and a culture where a son is an incredibly important thing. No matter how long we live or what we are in the end, we start out as people. We never quite lose all that we were during life. It haunts us over the centuries, our humanity."
"You're human."
He smiled and shook his head. "Once, perhaps."
I opened my mouth to ask something, but he held his hand up. "If there is time, Gideon and I would enjoy speaking with you and Richard at length on what a triumvirate can be, but now, you must leave before Fernando awakes. During daylight hours he is in charge of us."
My eyes widened, and I looked at Gideon. "But he's not alpha enough to take on Gideon."
"Padma is a harsh master, Anita. We obey or we suffer."
"Which is why," Gideon said, "you must all leave as soon as possible. What the petit bâtard would order us to do to you if he awoke now is best left unsaid."
He had a point. Gregory screamed, a high shrieking, that ended in whimpering. Richard had said the legs had begun to heal, bent backwards. I suddenly realized what that meant. "If the legs had healed broken, Gregory would have been crippled," I said.
"Yes," Gideon said. "It was Padma's idea of punishment."