Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (35 page)

“There may be a way around the tigers,” Jason said.

I looked at him. He looked away again. “What could be so bad that you keep looking away?”

“I’m afraid you’ll be mad at me.”

I sighed. “It’s too late to be mad, Jason. If there’s a way to avoid a war between St. Louis and Vegas, just tell me. I am like all ears.”

“If there is a baby, it could just as easily be mine. That would make it human, or to the tigers,
lukoi
. They’d have no interest in the child of a werewolf.”

I was back to thinking again. If Jason hadn’t told me all the weird and bad news about the weretigers I might have been mad, or at least upset.

“You told me all the shit about the weretigers first so this would seem like better news.”

“Yes,” Jason said, still not looking at me.

“If we can convince the tigers it’s your problem and mine, then can I get a morning-after pill?”

“Your body, your choice.”

“How do we convince them it’s mostly yours?”

“We lie.”

“You can’t lie to wereanimals; they smell a lie.”

“You’re so upset today that you smell like shock and fear already. Even your heart rate is up and down. They won’t be able to read you right now.”

“What’s the lie?”

“That we had an accident with a condom before we left. Hell, Anita, we could bring in the fact that you had sex with Nathaniel just before we came here. He’s a wereleopard; they wouldn’t want a leopard any more than a wolf.”

I thought about it. “Okay, wait, can you lie well enough to fool two wereanimals?”

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“Five,” he said.

“What?”

“We can’t bring Richard, Jamil, and Shang-Da in here to tell them the plan. We have to lie to everyone in the room about this, or it won’t work.”

“Richard will…be…” I couldn’t even finish the thought.

“Pissed,” Jason offered.

“He’ll be pissed I didn’t tell him we had an accident with the condom.”

“Yes, but if it gets the tigers off our backs then he’ll forgive us when we have a chance to explain. But Richard and Shang-Da don’t lie well enough for this.”

“Jamil does?” I asked.

“Jamil lies like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth; he can even control his pulse.”

“Nifty,” I said.

Jason nodded.

“Can you control all that, too?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Then it won’t work,” I said.

“Anita, I got mind-fucked too. I’m a little shocky myself. But more than that, I am worried that it’s mine. I mean, how do I tell my best friend in the world that I took the love of his life off for a weekend and got her knocked up? I mean, Micah will be pissed, but it’s Nathaniel I can’t face. Trust me, Anita, I’ve got enough emotion about this to hide any lie in all the truth.”

I reached out and touched his shoulder. He leaned his face against my hand. “I should have protected you better. I’m so sorry, Anita.”

“You couldn’t have protected me against this, Jason.”

He looked at me, his eyes haunted. “We go out there and lie our asses off, Anita. We get you to a pharmacy and we undo what we can. I can’t undo it all, but we can do this much.”

I nodded.

He took my hand in his and it wasn’t scary or bad. He was my friend, and we both needed the touch of someone’s hand.

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47

I COVERED MYSELF
in towels and Jason and I went out there and lied. He was right, it was easy. I was still damn near in shock. Even I couldn’t tell what I was feeling from moment to moment. In a way it was the first time I’d ever met the red tiger. I wondered if he felt the same way about me, or if he had more memories of the last two days than I did. Part of me wanted to ask, and part of me never wanted to know.

Knowing how tall everyone else was, I could estimate his height at around five-ten. His hair was the deep red of his tiger fur. It looked like a good dye job, if you were into shades of red that didn’t occur in human hair. I think he understood that, because the cut was short and designed, I think, to look spiky on top. If your hair doesn’t conform, you might as well get a haircut that doesn’t conform either.

He’d found the other white robe. I think his clothes were part of the mess on the floor, well, except for the jacket I’d borrowed.

His eyes were the deep, rich golden yellow with an edge of deep red-orange that I remembered from my…dream. But it hadn’t been a dream. It was a memory. A memory that Marmee Noir had fucked with. If I hadn’t had Richard to tell me, and too much evidence to the contrary, would I have been like any other human? Would I have simply thought it was a dream? If I had woken up with the weretigers not in the room with us, would I have just thought it was a funky nightmare and the claw marks were Jason’s? Maybe, no, yes. That thought scared me a lot, because if she could do this, what else could she do to me?

“Anita,” Jamil said, “Anita, did you hear that?”

I blinked and looked up into the solid brown of his eyes. “No, I’m sorry, but no. Can you repeat it?”

“She’s in shock.” This from the man in the robe. This from…Alex. I studied his face, tried to “see” him, but it was as if I was only getting pieces of what I was seeing. What I saw was crystal-edged clear, but what I wasn’t seeing was fuzzed and indistinct. His eyes seemed to distract me from the rest of his face. “You had contacts, brown contacts,” I said, and even my voice sounded disconnected, flat.

He nodded. “You made me take them out.”

“I wouldn’t let you touch me until I saw your tiger eyes,” I said, voice soft. “Why?”

Crispin answered, “Your tiger acts like a true-blood queen. Most of the time they won’t mate with anyone who doesn’t have the eyes.”

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“Why not?” I turned to him, and found that he was still nude. Unselfconsciously so. Strangely, I had no trouble keeping eye contact. In fact, I seemed unduly fascinated with the pale blue jewel color of his eyes.

“The eyes mark us both as natural-born, and they prove our bloodline is closer to pure,” Crispin said.

“I don’t know what that means,” I said, in that strange, unemotional voice.

“The clans have started to try to intermarry with other bloodlines in the last few years,” the other tiger said.

“Why?” I asked, but again my voice made it sound as if I didn’t really care about the answer.

“Our queens are having trouble getting pregnant, and the rate of birth defects was going up,”

Alex said.

“My queen has forbidden our clan to talk about it,” Crispin said.

“I’m so high on my queen’s shit list, it doesn’t matter for me. Let me be very clear, Anita.” He smiled and shook his head, and only then could I really notice that he was handsome. It was the smile, the turn of the head, a flash of personality that helped me see his whole face and not just the eyes. “I feel like we need to be introduced before I use your first name. Seems weird when you may be…” He stopped in midsentence, suddenly looking uncomfortable.

I finished for him. “Weird when I may be pregnant with your child.” Just saying it out loud made me feel colder.

He nodded, and he looked very unhappy. “I don’t know exactly what happened here, but I am sorry about my part of it. I thought when the call went out that my clan had found me and found a queen strong enough that I couldn’t not come to her. I thought they were going to try to trap me into a pregnancy so I’d be forced back into the clan. But you look less happy about this than I am; you didn’t want this either.”

“No,” I said, voice almost too low to be out loud.

He held out his hand to me. “I’m Alex Pinn, and I don’t even know what else to say.”

I almost smiled, which I guess was a good thing. “I’m Anita Blake.” We shook hands, like civilized people.

His hand was large enough that he had to work to shake mine, but he did it. He didn’t make it awkward just because my hand was small in his. I liked that.

“I can’t do this.” It was Richard. Of course, it was Richard.

I let go of Alex’s hand and turned to find him leaning against the far wall. I’d avoided looking at him while Jason and I lied. One, it was a lie. Two, I did not want to see his face while he thought it was the truth. His face didn’t disappoint me.

He’d undone his hair and put it back in a tight ponytail that left that painfully handsome face naked for the eye. All the men in his family had the kind of cheekbones and jaw that other men went to plastic surgeons for, perfect bone structure. If you were into that utterly masculine handsome look. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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He leaned against the wall, his hands pressed behind him. He was flexing his hands behind his back, because I could see it in the muscles of his shoulders and the glimpse of upper arm. Flexing his hands over and over, which he did sometimes when he was angry. Angry, and fighting himself not to be.

Something about the lack of lamps in the hotel room had put his eyes in shadow so they looked even darker than the brown I knew they were. The shadows took the gold from his hair and made it seem simply chestnut brown.

Shang-Da was standing beside him. He was the only person in the room taller than Richard. Shang-Da glanced at Richard, then back to the room. There was a moment when Shang-Da’s eyes met mine. Was it just shock, or had he, for a split second, felt sorry for me? Surely not. Richard repeated, “I can’t do this.”

“Can’t do what, Ulfric?” Jamil asked.

“I can’t watch her take another man to her bed. I can’t do it.” His voice was calm, no anger, not even any of that otherworldly energy coming off him. Only the tensing and untensing of his muscles in his upper body showed the emotional turmoil under all that calm.

“I’m not planning to do anything with either of them again,” I said, and there was the tiniest hint of some emotion in my voice.

“You never plan it, Anita. I know that. It’s weirdly never your fault. If you just cheated on me and couldn’t keep it in your pants, I think I could deal with it, or walk away, but you, honestly, don’t do it on purpose.” He pushed himself away from the wall. Shang-Da took up his post just behind him.

“What do you want me to say, Richard?” There, a little more emotion. I knew the emotion now: anger. I should have fought it. Anger is bad when you carry beasts inside you. But I didn’t fight it, I welcomed it. I fed it sweet words and coaxed it hotter. Anger was so much better than the other emotions running through me—emotions so awful I didn’t want to look at them, let alone feel them.

“I want to see you recoil from his touch, but you didn’t.”

“He was mind-fucked, too, Richard, you know that.”

He nodded. His big hands were in plain sight now, flexing and unflexing. You could see the muscles work all the way from his hands to his upper chest now. “I know. I can’t even hate him. I want to, but you’re right. He didn’t mean to…have sex with you for two days. He didn’t mean to make you forget to take your pill. He seems as horrified as the rest of us.” He took another step into the room, and the first warm prickle of energy tiptoed through the room.

“Don’t you understand, Anita? You steal my self-righteousness away. You make me have to swallow so much, because if I react like a guy, I’m a bastard. But I am not saint enough for this. I’m just not. I’m sorry, but I’m not.” His energy swirled out through the room like being too close to an oven.

Something stirred inside me, in that dark place. No, not this soon, not again. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. I let it out slow, counting as I went.

Jamil’s voice came. “Ulfric, please, you’ll bring her beast again.”

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“I’ll bring her wolf, you mean. I can’t bring all her beasts, just like I can’t be all she needs anywhere else in her life.” For a moment the pain on his face was so raw, it hurt my heart to see it. Then he mastered himself, but the effort was visible. That made me feel bad, too.

“Richard, I—”

He waved a hand at me. “Don’t, Anita, don’t even try. It’s not good, or bad, it’s just the truth.”

He looked at me then, gave me the full force of those perfectly brown eyes. Only they showed the pain that had a moment ago decorated his entire face. Only his eyes showed how much he hurt. How much I had hurt him. I never meant to cut him up like that, just as he never meant to hurt me. We just seemed to keep doing it, by accident.

“I came here to check on you. I’ve done that. Our master sent me on one more task.” He held out his hand to me. “But we need privacy for it.”

I hesitated staring at that offered hand. “If it has anything to do with sex, Richard…”

He let his hand fall away. “You’re rejecting me?” His power slapped against my skin like the opening of an oven door, set far too high to do anything but burn.

“I’m sore, Richard. I hurt. Anyone would be getting a turndown for a little while.”

“You like it rough,” he said.

And just like that, my pity was gone. The tenderness wiped away with that one oversharing comment in front of strangers. Yes, I’d had sex with them, but not while any of us were in our right minds. They were still strangers to me and my body.

“And there you go, Richard, there you go.”

“What?” he said.

“You don’t get it. None of us remember what happened except in snatches. What I like and what I don’t is still something they don’t know, unless you want to continue to overshare.”

He took a deep breath in, then let it out slow. His shoulders hunched as if he’d taken a blow, and then he straightened up, shoulders back.

“I’m sorry, you’re right. But you can’t blame me for thinking that these two are just like the other lovers in your bed. That they know you in every way.”