49

THE FIRST THING you need to know in order to control something is how it feels to do it. I was a natural psychic, which meant that my gifts weren't something I had to strive for, they just came to me. The problem with being a natural is that sometimes things come so easily that you don't know how, or even when, you're doing psychic stuff. It sort of sneaks up on you. You must understand a thing to truly control it. I'd relied for most of my life on the fact that I was just such a brute psychically that I could bull my way through things. But some things can't be controlled by brute force alone, or even by sheer power alone. You need control. It's the difference between being able to throw a baseball ninety miles an hour, and being able to throw it ninety miles an hour over home plate. The speed and skill is great, but if you keep throwing wild, it'll never get you into the majors. In fact, you may kill some poor fan in the stands. Getting hit in the head with a ball going that fast, well, not good. Raina wasn't my only ninety-mile-an-hour ball, but she was the second one I learned to control, after the necromancy.

Requiem was flat on his back on the seat. I didn't remember changing places with him. The last thing I remembered, clearly, was me naked on my back, on the seat. Now, it was him lying naked. Him, looking up at me, a surprised look on his face. What had I done to put that look on Requiem's face? What had I done, while Raina was in control and I was fighting off the morphine?

I was sitting on his waist, which was an improvement over lower, I guess. I looked behind me to Nathaniel and Jason. The look on my face must have been enough, because Jason said, "You body-slammed him down on the seat."

"Your hand is bleeding," Nathaniel said.

I stared at my left hand as if it had just appeared at the end of my arm. There was fresh blood soaking through the gauze. The moment I saw the blood, the hand began to hurt. It wasn't as bad as before Lillian gave me the shot, but it was a persistent, grinding pain, with twinges of sharper things. The sharper pains promised worse to come.

"I believe you injured yourself throwing me down on the seat," Requiem said. His voice was mild, almost politely empty. His face matched it, handsome, and blank. The surprise was gone as if I'd dreamed it. He was in control of himself, once more.

I felt Raina inside me. She didn't want him in control of himself, or anything else. She wanted to break him. I'd seen far enough inside his head with the ardeur to know he'd been broken centuries before, and more than once. I knew that breaking someone already broken wouldn't appeal to her as much as being the first one to do it. Jason had been right; Raina liked virgins, of every sort. She loved to be in on someone's first experience, especially if she could turn pleasure to pain, joy to terror. That just flat did it for her. Not my kink, which made it easier not to do it.

Her voice whispered through my mind, not as clear as it once had been, more a wind-in-the-trees kind of sound. Marianne had informed me that Raina had come close to truly possessing me, as in almost demonic possession. That had been a scary thought. Now I knew how to keep Raina from getting that intimate a grip on me. The wind of her voice blew through my body, smelling of forest, and fur, and perfume. "You know what I want, Anita."

"You know what I'm willing to give you." I said that part out loud, because talking mind-to-mind with her spirit could give it a stronger hold on you. I thought about how close Requiem and I had come to intercourse earlier today. I thought about him rolling off, unsatisfied, and unsatisfying.

"The first fucking between you," she laughed, and my concentration wasn't pure enough to keep that laugh off my lips. Her laugh was a low, throaty, alto sound, a joyous promise of sex. I didn't own a laugh like that.

Nathaniel said, "Concentrate, Anita. You can do this."

Raina wanted me to look behind me at him, and I fought not to do it. Not because it was a bad thing, but because I had to start fighting somewhere, and it was a place to start. It was also something that if I lost the fight, it wouldn't hurt anyone.

"Petty, Anita," she whispered.

I ignored her, as best I could. Always hard to ignore people who are sharing your consciousness. I tried to concentrate on my breathing, but the pain in my hand kept distracting me. I tried concentrating on each heartbeat, on the pulse in my body, and that was a mistake. It was as if each beat of my heart hit my injured hand like a spike. As if the very pulse of blood made it hurt worse.

I shook my head, and that was a mistake. I was suddenly dizzy. Requiem's hands caught my arms, kept me from falling. I let myself collapse on top of him, my head resting against his shoulder. He made no sound, but his body flinched. I was lying across his wounds. Raina liked that a lot.

I kissed his shoulder. The skin was warm. Warm with the blood he'd taken from me earlier, but not as warm as it should have been. I gazed up into those brilliant blue eyes, with their hint of green around the iris. "Your body is using more energy trying to heal your wounds."

"Yes," he whispered.

"Do you need to feed more often when you're this badly hurt?"

"Yes, m'lady."

I smiled at him. "Somehow m'lady doesn't work with me naked on top of you."

He smiled, and it even reached his eyes. "You will always be m'lady to me, Anita."

I was suddenly drowning in the scent of wolf. The beast inside me stirred, as if Raina's power were a spoon and I were some kind of soup. Stirring, looking for just the right tidbit.

Her voice sounded inside me. "Your very own wolf, Anita. What have you been doing while I've been away?"

The wolf, my wolf, appeared inside me. I could see it forming. No, I thought, no. I turned my face into Requiem's neck where his pulse should have beat, but didn't. I pressed my mouth to that chilled flesh, and chased away the warm, prickling energy. I did not run from my wolf, for if you run things will chase you, but I turned to colder things. Things that the wolf neither understood nor entirely approved of. My wolf quieted, under the brush of dead flesh and the scent of flesh unmoving. The trouble with quieting my wolf was that Raina fled, too. I rose up from Requiem's body, enough to see his face.

"Your eyes, they are like brown diamonds, so much light in the darkness."

"Raina's gone," Jason said, softly.

I didn't look at him. I only had eyes for the vampire. I began to kiss down his body. A light kiss on his shoulder, and with each kiss, my body slid lower, and because we were both nude, that raised interesting things. And I knew that his body was swelling with blood that he'd taken from my veins. That without that ruby kiss, he would have been dead in so many more ways than just undead.

I raised my lower body enough so that we weren't touching below the waist. It felt wonderful, so much promise of things to come, but I wanted to concentrate on the feel of my mouth on his chest. I couldn't do that and have him brush the front of my body with the swelling richness of his. It distracted me.

I wanted to enjoy the smooth perfection of his skin. Cool, and moving, but not pulsing. Not alive, not completely, not really. It was like kissing my way down a dream, faintly unreal, as if Requiem's pale body should have evaporated into the first alarm of the day. Did Jean-Claude and Asher play human for me, more than this? Did they make their hearts beat, their blood pump, so I would not feel this amazing stillness? Requiem's arms caressed down my back, my sides. His chest moved, writhing with the pleasure of being touched, but he did not breathe. He did not play alive for me. He was a moving dead thing. It should have bothered me, but it didn't. The power that filled my eyes understood what he was, and liked it, liked it a lot.

I kissed down that smooth, cool flesh, until I came to coarseness, and a faint metallic taste. It made me open my eyes, and look at what I was kissing. It was the knife wound. It looked so smooth, but my lips told the truth. The edges of the wound were rough. The wound could look as pretty and neat as it wanted to but it had been violent. The knife had torn his skin, even around the edges, minute tears that the eye couldn't see, but the mouth could feel. I traced a fingertip across the lip of the wound. It drew small pain noises from him. Part of me liked the noises, and part of me worried that it hurt too much.

I gazed up at him. The look on his face as he stared down the length of his body at me wasn't a pained look. There was a tightening around his eyes that showed it hurt, but the look in those eyes was still eager. Which meant I hadn't crossed that thin line, yet. It still excited him more than it hurt him. Cool.

I concentrated on the sensation of the wound under the barest tip of my finger. I closed my eyes so that I could concentrate on it. It was coarse under my finger, not as instantly noticeable as my lips had found it, but the skin was torn and roughened by the violence of the blade. Touch also didn't give me that sweet, faint taste of blood. Was this Raina's thought, or mine? No, Jason was right, Raina was gone. I realized I was using my hand, both hands. It made me lean back from Requiem and stare at my burned hand. I'd had burns before, almost this bad, and for similar reasons. Admittedly, it had been because a vamp had pressed his flesh into the holy item. I guess this was the first time it had been just my body involved. Had it been because Marmee Noir had been possessing me, or had it been because I was using vampire powers? Huh? That was an interesting thought. I pushed it back, for so many reasons. I'd look at the implications later. Much later.

The skin had blistered, and hardened, and begun to slough off. Days, or weeks, of healing in minutes. I moved the hardened skin to one side. I wasn't quite brave enough to pull at it. I moved all that truly dead skin aside until I found the palm of my hand. The skin of the palm was soft, baby soft, but there was a new cross-shaped scar in the middle of my hand. That skin was shiny and not soft, not rough, more slick. Weeks of healing.

I hadn't used Raina to heal Requiem. I'd used her to heal me. But I understood why. I'd asked something of her munin that it could not do. She healed lycanthrope flesh, living flesh, and Requiem was not living flesh. No matter how alive he seemed, it was a trick, or a lie, or something I had no name for.

I stared down at Requiem. He gazed up at me with eyes that had gone back to their normal swimming blue. There was no power in him now. If it hadn't been silver blades, his body would have smoothed the damage over by now. But it was silver, and that meant healing would be almost human-slow, unless he had help.

"You are healed?" He made it a question.

I nodded. "A little trimming away of dead skin, but yeah."

"Trimming away the dead," he said, voice soft. He sighed, and said, "I can go back inside as I am. I will not be at my best, but it was your wounds that were most important."

I stared down at him, the two nearly fatal wounds in his upper body, the dozens of cuts and slashes on his arms. But I looked lower and found the rest of his body still hard and ready. "You should walk around nude more often," I said.

He actually frowned at me. "Why, m'lady?"

"Because you are beautiful."

He smiled. "I thank you for that."

"You say it like it's not true."

"If I were truly beautiful you would have found your way to my bed weeks ago."

I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. My necromancy was still here, but it was changed somehow. It was like calling the munin or something about chasing out the Dark Mother had changed my own power. It was still necromancy, but it held an edge of... life. It was more alive, this energy. I didn't understand it, exactly, but I understood one thing: always before when I'd healed damage on vampires, small wounds, it had been in the daytime when they were dead. Once they rose, their own personality, or soul, or whatever, kept my power from recognizing them as a dead thing, the way it recognized zombies. They always hit the radar as dead, no matter how mobile they were.

I could feel the wound I had touched. I could feel it, and knew that it was a little like gathering up the bits of a zombie. One of the things I did most often in my job was to make the dead whole again.

It seemed important to do this thing. As though if I didn't heal Requiem now, I would forget how to do it. It was like a gift offered once, and wiped away if you don't use it. I wanted to use it; it would feel good to use. It always felt good to work with the dead.

I set my fingertips over his wound, and thought about it like clay. Like smoothing clay back into place. I closed my eyes so I could "see" the deeper tissues of the body knitting together, things I could not touch with my physical fingers.

There was a wind in the car, a wind that was chill, but held an edge of spring. I thought someone had opened a door, but when I opened my eyes, the car was closed. The wind was coming from me. I looked down at Requiem's body, and found my hands touching smooth, healed skin. There wasn't even a scar. I moved my hands to the wound on his side, at the ribs. I did it before my conscious mind could say, Gosh, that's impossible. I pressed my hands to his side, and I smoothed the wound away. The wind blew bits of my hair around my face. The hardened skin of blistered flesh fell away on its own from my hand, as I healed him. Dead flesh, all of it, dead flesh.

I grabbed his arms, and smoothed my hands from elbow to wrist, to hold his hands, and the skin smoothed behind my touch like a fast-forward camera trick. It wasn't possible, but I was still doing it.

The wind faltered, and I fell forward onto him. He caught me or I might have slipped to the floor of the car. Working with the dead always felt good, but it had its price, too. It was especially trying if there was no blood magic involved. It hadn't occurred to me it would be that similar to raising the dead in price.

Jason and Nathaniel were beside us. "What's wrong?" Jason asked.

Nathaniel answered, "She's exhausted."

I blinked up at him. "Are you exhausted, too?"

He shook his head. "When you shut the marks down, you shut them down. I can tell you're exhausted, but you aren't draining me. I don't think you're touching Damian either."

"I didn't want to risk the two of you again tonight."

"You shut everybody out," Jason said. "Jean-Claude is sensing more through me, right now, then you. A pomme de sang is not nearly the connection that you are to him."

"Too much happening," I said.

Requiem hugged me. "What can I do to make this right, m'lady? How do I repay such a miracle?"

"If we ever do this again, I need to have you take blood during it, just like a sacrifice at a zombie raising. Blood magic helps the energy."

"You need to feed," Jason said, and he had an abstracted look as if he were listening to something I couldn't hear. It was probably Jean-Claude whispering in his ear.

"Okay," I said, settling heavier onto Requiem's chest.

Jason and Nathaniel looked at each other, then back at Requiem. "Call your power, Requiem," Jason said, "call her ardeur. She's too weak to bind you with it, like she tried to do earlier. Feed her first, and you will be safe."

"It's like a ventriloquism act," I said, "your mouth moves but Jean-Claude's words come out."

Jason gave me the grin that was all his, and shrugged. "His words, or not, it's still true."

I rolled my head to look up at Requiem's face. "Is that why you stopped before? You were afraid I'd own you through the ardeur?"

"Yes," he said, "I feared I would end as London has ended, and I do not truly wish that."

"I don't think I'm up to binding anyone right now."

A look passed over his face that wasn't gentle, or hesitant. It was a very male look for a moment. "Then I can do as I wish with you."

I thought about arguing with the way he'd phrased it, but I just didn't have the energy for it. Too tired, and too drained. "Yes," I said, "you can."

He sat up, cradling me against the front of his body. He sat up, and half-carried me, until I was lying on the other end of the seat, and he was kneeling over me. His power danced over my body, and even that was energy, that was food. I watched his eyes drown in the blue depths of his own magic, until he stared down at me like one blind.

"Is this truly what m'lady wishes?"

I stared down the length of his body. So hard, so ready, almost hard enough that it must have hurt him a little. Too hard for too long is not always a good feeling. With his body practically screaming with need, he asked, asked permission one more time.

"Requiem," I said, "I promise I will always think of you as a gentleman, but I've already said yes."

"It is good to be certain," he whispered.

"Whoever taught you this caution, it wasn't me." I stroked my hand not across his chest, but just above it, playing in the energy of his aura. So much energy to play with. It made him close his eyes for a moment. "I promise, Requiem, I'll still respect you in the morning."

That made him smile, and he said, "And you will always be m'lady." That made me laugh. Then he poured his power over my body, and the laughter changed to other sounds.

50

HE HELD ON to the door to raise himself above me, so that only the long, hard length of him touched me at first. His own magic had made my body tight and wet, and more than ready, so that each thrust was exquisite pleasure. A pleasure so great it was almost painful that his movement was slow, and shallow. He'd found that spot inside me, and he meant to work it, but I could feel his body fighting his own rhythm, wanting something harder, faster, less controlled. I was torn between wanting him to never stop, and knowing that we needed to hurry. But every time I opened my mouth to tell him to hurry, to let me feed, he thrust inside me again, or moved his hips just a little, and the thought died before I could say it.

The ardeur was raised, but even the ardeur seemed weak. I'd had it spread to most of the people in a room before; now, with Nathaniel and Jason trapped in a car with us, it hadn't spread to them. They were untouched. I needed to feed, not just to be strong enough to help Jean-Claude tonight, but to make certain I didn't start to suck Damian's life away.

I watched Requiem's body glide in and out of mine. In the dimness of the car I couldn't see that he was wearing the condom that Nathaniel had given him. I was glad someone was thinking about safety, because all I was thinking about was sex and food. Trouble was, they were the same thing right now. I curled my legs back, rose up so I could see him sliding in and out of me. The sight of him inside me for the first time, finally, bowed my spine back, closed my eyes, drew small sounds from me. That warm, delicious weight began to build inside me.

I found my words, and managed to say, "When I go, you go."

"I would soak your body in all the pleasure it could take," he said, voice full of the strain of all that control.

Jason said, "We don't have time to give Anita all the pleasure she can take, Requiem. Jean-Claude needs us."

Requiem nodded, but never changed his rhythm, that relentless gentle thrusting in and out, over and over that spot just inside my body.

"God, you're good," I whispered.

His hands convulsed on the car, so that it creaked under his strength. "If I get to go when you do, then I must let go of some of my control, or I will still be fighting my body."

"Can you keep doing this until I go?"

"Yes," he whispered it.

It built, and built, and built, and then came the stroke of his body inside me that spilled me over. It brought me screaming, digging nails into the leather of the seat. It bucked my body against his, and he thrust deep inside me, as hard and fast as he could. He brought me again with that deep thrust, a different kind of orgasm, before the first had finished. I raked nails down his sides, and screamed.

The pain didn't make him come again as it did sometimes for Nathaniel, or even Micah. He took it, but he was done, and the pain didn't change that.

He drew himself out of me, and even that was a wondrous sensation that made me writhe on the seats. Someone touched my face and the ardeur jumped to him. I smelled wolf and knew it was Jason before I saw his face.

He swallowed hard, voice breathy. "You're feeling better."

I nodded.

"No offense, but we need you fed and all of us back inside, as soon as possible."

"Yes," I said, and my voice was hoarse.

"If we double up, you feed faster, and we're done faster."

I frowned at him, part postorgasmic haze, part the rising ardeur, and part just me. "What?"

Nathaniel appeared over his shoulder, and touched my hand. The ardeur leaped to him, but it had taken touch for it to transfer. My powers were still weak. "I want you to go down on me while the ardeur rides you."

I began to have a clue. "And what will Jason be doing while I'm going down on you?"

"Fucking you," Nathaniel said.

Jason tried to look embarrassed, but never quite managed it. He finally grinned at me. "You want me to be all gentlemanly about it."

I shook my head. "I want you to fuck me."

He looked startled for a moment, then his eyes filled with that knowledge, that darkness, that is all male. That look that is almost predatory, but not when you want it, when you've asked for it, then it's something to tighten your body low and hard. I cried out just from the look on his face.

"Let's fuck," he said.

"Let's," I said.