“I’ll call for a doctor,” Micah said.
I nodded. “Good, good.” I suddenly had to not be there, naked, smelling of fresh sex, with Richard and Micah in the same room. Having Damian and Nathaniel naked didn’t help my comfort level. I was fairly comfortable around nudity in general now, but specific nudity, that was still a problem. For more reasons than I was comfortable with, I needed to leave the room.
“By the way, there’s a woman crying in your car in the driveway,”
Micah said.
“My car?” I asked.
“No, Richard’s, or at least I assume it’s Richard’s. I know Gregory’s car, and that’s not the one she’s in.”
Richard cursed under his breath, something he rarely did. “Clair, I forgot about Clair.”
“Who’s Clair?” I asked.
He hesitated, then said, “My girlfriend,” then he was walking to the door holding his arm like it hurt to walk that fast.
His girlfriend, and I’m buck naked the first time she sees me.
Great. Well, at least she hadn’t seen me fuck Damian. That helped.
Sure, great. Just great. I was shaking my head as I went toward the bathroom.
It was Gregory, in his growling voice, who said, “I guess it’s none of my business, but should Richard really be in front of the house where cars could see him? He is covered in blood.”
I turned and looked at the leopardman and said, “Shit, no.” I started for the door, and Micah stopped me. “I’ll go. I’m the only one that they wouldn’t call the cops on right now.” He squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me.
I realized that I hadn’t kissed him hello, I always kissed him hello. Of course, I was still covered in blood and other bodily fluids, and none of them were his, but he might not understand that that was why I hadn’t wanted to get too close. Some of my confusion must have shown on my face, because his smile widened. He turned me around by the shoulders, gave me a little push toward the bathroom, and slapped me on the ass. “Get cleaned up, I’ll take care of things here.”
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said.
“Did what?” he said, and he was grinning at me.
I could probably count on one hand the number of times Micah had grinned at me. His eyes were sparkling with laughter as if it were all he could do not to let it out. I was happy to see him having this good a time, really I was. But I wasn’t sure what was funny, and I didn’t have the courage to ask. It was probably something that would be at my expense, or something I’d just done that he found cute. I was not cute. Confused, fucked-up, bruised, but not cute. Nathaniel and Damian knew better, but as I passed Gregory, I had to say, “If you touch my ass, I will rip you a new one.” I said it as I moved past him, not even pausing.
“You’re no fun,” he growled.
I looked back just before I turned out of sight of him. “Oh, I’m a lot of fun, just not for you.”
He snarled at me. “Bitch.”
“Woof, woof,” I said, and finally made it into the bathroom.
19
I tried not to think in the shower. Thinking bad; hot water good.
I turned the shower head to as hard as the water would go and the let the water beat against my body, finding bruises I didn’t know I had.
Once I would have been hurt, really hurt, by the beating that Damian had given me. Thanks to Jean-Claude’s vampire marks I was just a little stiff. The bite would take the longest to heal, and even that would be gone in few days, a week at the outside. The healing was great, the rest of it… well, let’s just say the jury was still out.
I heard a noise over the pounding water. It took me a minute to realize that someone was knocking at the door. I tried to ignore it.
The knocking stopped for a second, and I thought, oh, good, but it started again, louder, as if whoever was knocking thought I hadn’t heard the first time.
I sighed, turned off the water, and called, “What?”
“Damian isn’t doing well,” Nathaniel said through the closed door.
I stood there a second water dripping into my eyes, and said, “What do you mean, Damian’s not doing well?”
“Can’t you feel it?”
I thought about it. I thought about Damian, and suddenly fear was like a crushing weight on my chest. It staggered me for a second, and I was glad there was a safety bar in the shower to grab on to. It was a shadow of what had driven him to run screaming through the house. I wasn’t sure we’d all survive him doing it twice. “I’m coming.”
I squeezed out my hair, wound a towel around it, and was trying to towel off enough for a robe, when the door sprang open. Gregory came first in his fur suit, one clawed hand under Damian’s arm. Richard had the other arm. They half-dragged, half-carried him through the door.
They carried him toward me, and his fear rode before him. I’d felt fear before, but not like this. It crushed my chest so that I couldn’t breathe, closed my throat. The fear had weight enough to slam me to the floor, as if something had smashed into me. It wasn’t my pulse I was choking on, it was as if the terror itself were wet silk, and I was trying to swallow it. Slick, wet, suffocating, more real than any fear I’d ever felt. Not real the way an emotion is real, but real the way a rock, a chair, or an animal is real. Fear had become something… more.
They dropped Damian into my lap, and it was as if every part of my skin ran with chills, and then every inch of my skin tried to crawl away. Tried to crawl away and leave my body to die. My skin would have saved itself if it hadn’t been trapped against my body. The rest of me would have gone with it, but we were trapped under Damian’s weight.
Trapped in his fear, frozen in it. If I could have breathed, I would have screamed, but all I could do was drown. Drown in Damian’s fear.
Someone touched my shoulder, but it was distant. As if no one’s skin were as real to me as Damian’s. Someone shook me, sharp and hard.
My breath came in a huge gasp, as if I hadn’t been breathing for a long time, when my breath came out, it was a shriek.
I was staring up into Richard’s startled face. It was his hand on my shoulder. Him kneeling beside us. “Anita, Anita, can you hear me?”
I grabbed Richard’s arm, my other hand clutching Damian to me, as if I were afraid if I let him go he’d be lost. As if the fear were some horrible beast that could literally eat him up, and destroy him.
Richard shook me again. “Anita, say something.”
“God, it’s so… awful.”
Damian nodded his head against my stomach. He’d been lying almost limply against me, but now he grabbed me around the waist and hip, his hands holding on as if I were the last solid thing in the world. I felt a burst of emotion from him, and it was gratitude. He was grateful that I could share his fear. Sharing it seemed to make it less, or make it more bearable.
That thought, that sharing fear made it easier to bear, brought a memory. It wasn’t my memory. It was a face that I had never seen before, but one that Damian knew as well as his own. All high angles and strong lines, a scar from his forehead to his cheek, where he’d been cut in the first raid we’d gone on. She-who-made-us said once that the scar saved his life, because without it, his hair was more blond than hers, his eyes more blue. That scar ruined his handsomeness enough for her to leave him whole. For even men who were too fair were not safe from her envy. The only name I heard in my head was Perrin, but I knew that wasn’t right. That hadn’t been his name, anymore than Damian had been mine, ours, his.
I smelled vanilla and felt something thick and warm glide over my skin. I blinked awake, ifawake was the right word. Nathaniel was kneeling beside us. He’d undone his braid so that the vanilla scent of his hair had perfumed around me. His hair cascaded around him and spilled over the side of my body, pooling into my lap, covering Damian like a blanket, if a blanket could flow like liquid over a body.
Nathaniel had covered us in his hair, but had very carefully avoided touching our skin with his. He was so close to us that not touching took effort, so close it was as if a sigh would have pressed the line of his body against mine. But he stayed that near painful inch away, letting only scent and the furred glide of hair reach us. The only thing he gave me of his skin was the warmth of it, which even from a distance I could feel. Heat trembling against my skin, as if the warmth of him breathed outward and wanted to touch me. Maybe it did.