“I heard that,” Richard said, and there was a sullen note under his breathless exertion as if he’d thought I’d only thought it to keep it from him, or maybe I was just projecting. I was always willing to believe that Richard was being difficult. As he was always willing to believe I was being bloodthirsty.
Jean-Claude didn’t ask stupid questions or try to discuss metaphysics. If we all knew that somehow I’d managed to forge a second triumvirate, then we could move on. “When you shielded from Damian’s fear, you shielded too well. You have cut him off from your power, as you did by leaving once.”
“I’m right here,” I said, trying to turn my face away from the blood that had decided to trickle down Damian’s face and onto mine.
“There physically, but not metaphysically, and your servant needs both.”
“How do I fix this?” I asked.
“Drop your shields,” he said, and even in my head, his voice was matter-of-fact.
It sounded so simple, so obvious. I remembered shielding from Damian’s fear. I had thought of metal, hard, cold, solid, unpenetrable. Not a metal wall, or door, but truly just the essence of metal. It had taken me months of work to understand how to shield not with an imaginary door or wall or building, but just to think, rock, water, metal. Block the things you don’t want to get through, or drown them. Marianne could also shield with air and fire, but I didn’t get that. Air just wasn’t strong enough for shielding, and fire, well, fire’s fire. I used the tools I understood.
How do you unshield? Once I’d had to picture the wall crumbling, or the door opening, but very lately, I’d understood something that Marianne had been saying, but I hadn’t been understanding. I simply stopped thinking about metal. I stopped. It went away. Poof, gone. One second I was safe behind my thought of metal, the next I was drowning in Damian’s rage. No, not rage, rage implies anger, human emotion, and that wasn’t what roared through my head. I’d thought more than once that I was going crazy in a detached sort of sociopathic way, but I’d been wrong. That hadn’t been being crazy-this was.
I forgot about holding Damian down. I forgot about why I’d dropped my shields. I forgot about everything. There were no thoughts. No words. There was just sensation, and impulse. The smell of fresh blood. The taste of our own blood in our mouths, bitter. Hands pushing us to the floor, crushing us. Hunger, hunger like fire in our gut, like something that would eat us alive if we didn’t feed, and feed, and feed. The smell of fresh blood, the warmth in their hands pushing on us, all that was maddening. Pain, my body was just pain. Like a fire that was burning me up from the inside. I screamed, and the sound was loud and not loud enough. It didn’t help. Only one thing would quench that fire, fill me up, stop the pain. Blood. Fresh blood. Warm blood.
My hands touched warm skin, and if it hadn’t been Richard, I’m not sure I would have stopped. But the feel of Richard’s muscled arm under my hands called something of me up through the hunger. I was staring into Richard’s solid brown eyes from inches away, almost as if I’d moved in for a kiss, but it hadn’t been his mouth I’d been aiming at.
Even now, the long solid line of his neck beckoned to me. The smell of fresh blood overwhelmed the subtler scent of the blood that pulsed under his skin, but somehow lapping at the bloody wound wasn’t enough.
It needed to be fresh. I needed my teeth in flesh. I needed to make my own hole to tear at. Only that would satisfy. Only that would be enough.
I forced my gaze up to Richard’s face. I looked into his wide eyes, made myself look at his face, trace the line of his jaw, the fullness of his lips. I looked on the face of someone I’d loved once, and I had to work harder than I’d worked at almost anything ever, to see him as something other than food.
Damian bucked, and Richard had to pay more attention to the vampire he and Nathaniel were still pinning to the floor than to me. A cool voice flowed through my mind. “I am helping you shield, ma petite. Forgive me, I did not understand what dropping your shield would do to you.”
“He’s a revenant,” I said, and I don’t think I said it out loud.
“Oui.”
“How do I help him?”
“You must rebind him as you did when he came out of the coffin.
Let him taste your blood and say the words over him.”
“Are the words really important?” I asked.
I felt him shrug, where he sat on his silk-covered bed. “They are the words that masters of the city have spoken over their followers for thousands of years. I would not want to chance that the words are not part of the magic that will bind master to servant, by leaving them out.”
I nodded. “Did Richard hear this?”
“Non.”
“Tell him.” A moment after I said it, I was still cool and a little distant from what was happening, but I could hear it again, see it. I was sitting on my living room floor, not too far from the door, and Richard and Nathaniel were still trying to keep Damian on the floor. They were mostly succeeding, though it was hard to tell through the blood if there were any new wounds. They were all three covered in blood.
I stared down at myself and realized that the front of my body was covered in it, too. I didn’t remember getting that messy. For a moment I wondered if I’d done something that I didn’t remember, but I pushed the thought away. Time later for too much truth. Survive, keep moving, worry about what you did later. Yeah, that’s the ticket. But after a peek inside Damian’s mind, a ticket to the Situational sociopath express didn’t look half bad. I knew now, for dead certain, that there were worse things.
17
Damian bucked so hard that he threw Nathaniel to one side.
Richard’s weight alone wasn’t enough. Damian sat up, and Richard rolled off of him to keep the vampire from sinking fangs into him again.
I waved my arms and yelled, “Damian, here, I’m here!” I don’t think it was his name that attracted his attention, I think it was the movement. I’d been in his mind, I knew he was past words.
He rushed toward me, so fast he was a blur of white and red, and his eyes like green streaks. Nathaniel ran for him. I yelled, “No, let him come!”
Richard hesitated still on the floor but with his hand outstretched toward the vampire’s legs. They could have caught him again, but why? It was my blood he needed. I was calm, peaceful, it was like that quiet place I went when I killed. No fear. Nothing. I watched the vampire come at me like a comet streaking across the heavens, something elemental and otherworldly.
To say he smashed into me didn’t come close to the impact of flesh on flesh. I was on the floor breathless, sightless, and only years of training on how to fall kept me from smacking my head against the floor, or breaking a bone. I caught my breath in time to scream.
Damian plunged his mouth low in my neck, just above the shoulder. It had been a long time since I’d been vampire bit without head games or sex. It hurt.
A wereleopard appeared over us, standing on crooked, almost-human legs. He was yellow and pale gold and white, with beautiful black rosettes scattered over a body that was more than a foot taller than he was in human form. The color told me it was Gregory, because Nathaniel was black in leopard form. Gregory’s chest was broader, his arms were longer, muscled, and tipped with talons like frightening knives. The face was leopard, but with something strangely different around the muzzle and the neck. He towered over us, snarling and reaching down for the vampire’s pale back. He was going to pull Damian off of me, like Richard had pushed the vampire off of himself.
I wrapped my arms around Damian’s shoulders and back, got one leg free to wrap around his waist. I held him to me and said, “No, Gregory!” If he pulled him off I’d end up hurt as bad as Richard.
“You’ll tear me up worse.”
The leopardman hesitated, growling. He said in that thick voice they all had in half-human form, “He’s hurting you.”
Damian snuggled his mouth deeper into my flesh, forced a sound that was not happy out of my mouth. But I said, in a breathy voice, “When I need your help, I’ll ask for it.”