Narcissus in Chains ab-10 Page 14

  He knelt there supporting both our weights, while our breathing quieted, and the massive pulse of our bodies subsided into silence. And in that silence there was nothing but the feel of his flesh, the raw scent of sex, and in the distance, the satisfaction of the vampire.

  10

  THE SHOWER WAS one of those group ones, like you'd find in a health club. But I was the only one in it. I'd cleaned off, scrubbed myself thoroughly, but I felt like Lady MacBeth screaming "out, out, damned spot!" Like I'd never really be clean again. I sat on the tiles under the hot, beating water, hugging my knees. I hadn't planned on crying, but I was. Slow tears that felt cool compared to the water pounding my body. I wasn't sure why I was crying. My mind was blank. Usually when I try to be blank, I can't, but just then, there was nothing but the water, the heat, the smooth tiles, and the little voice in my head that kept running round and round like a hamster on a wheel. I couldn't hear what the voice was saying--I think I didn't want to. All I knew was that it was screaming.

  A noise behind me made me turn. It was Cherry, still naked. None of the leopards ever dressed unless I made them. I turned my head away from her. I didn't want her to see me cry. I was her Nimir-Ra, her rock. Rocks did not cry.

  I knew she was standing over me, could feel it, even before the water's rhythm changed. She knelt over me, the water sluicing around her, leaving me shivering in the sudden touch of the cool, waterless air. I kept my face turned away from her. She touched my water-soaked hair. When I didn't protest she hugged me, arms going slowly around me, as if she expected me to complain.

  I stayed stiff in her arms, with her body wrapped around me. She just held me, head pressed to the top of mine, her body sheltering me from the water, leaving me colder, even as her body stretched like heat against my wet skin. I leaned into her by painful inches until finally I let her hold me. I cried, and Cherry held me.

  The crying never grew, or got loud. It remained slow tears while Cherry held me, and I let her. Finally, there were no more tears, just the sound of the water, the heat, the feel of Cherry's body around mine. There was comfort in the touch of flesh that went beyond sex. I pulled away, and she drew back. I stood and turned the water off. The silence was sudden and complete. I could feel the press of the night outside. Even without a window, I knew it was the wee hours of morning--maybe two, or even three. It would be dawn in a few short hours. I needed to know why Jean-Claude was in jail. Everything else could wait. We had enemies in town, and I needed to know who they were, what they wanted. After that I'd think about what had just happened, but not yet, not yet. Avoidance is one of my best things.

  Cherry handed me a towel and kept one for herself. I wound the towel around my hair and retrieved a second towel for my body. We dried off in silence, no eye contact. It wasn't shower protocol; girls aren't as hung up about that as guys. I just didn't want to talk about what had happened. Not yet.

  I wrapped the oversized towel securely around my body, and asked, "Why is Jean-Claude in jail?"

  "For murdering you," she said.

  I stared at her for a few seconds, and when I could talk, I said, "Pass that by me again. Slowly."

  "Someone got pictures of Jean-Claude carrying you out of the club. You were covered in blood, Anita. He was covered in your blood." She shrugged, drying off a spot she'd missed on one long leg.

  "But I'm alive," I said. It sounded almost silly saying it.

  "And how would you explain that in less than a week you were healed of wounds that should have killed you?" She straightened, slinging the towel over one shoulder, not bothering to cover even an inch of her body.

  "I don't want him in jail for something he didn't do," I said.

  "If you go tonight, the police will want to know how you healed yourself. What are you going to tell them?" Her eyes were very direct. So direct it made me want to squirm.

  "You're treating me like a lycanthrope who hasn't come out of the closet yet. I'm not a shapeshifter, Cherry."

  She dropped her gaze then, wouldn't meet my eyes. It reminded me of the looks they'd all given each other in the room where I woke up. I touched her chin, having to reach up to do it. "What aren't you guys telling me?"

  A man's voice came from outside the showers. "Can I please come in and clean off?" It was Micah. I'd planned on running for the hills the next time I saw him, but there was something in Cherry's eyes that kept me frozen. She was scared. And there was something else, something I couldn't quite read.

  I yelled back, "Just a minute!" Then I continued, "Cherry, tell me. Whatever it is, just tell me."

  She shook her head. She was afraid, but of what? "Are you afraid of me?" I couldn't keep the surprise out of my voice.

  She nodded, looking down again, avoiding my gaze.

  "I would never hurt you, any of you."

  "For this you might," she whispered.

  I grabbed her arm. "Cherry, damn it, talk to me."

  She opened her mouth, closed it, and turned towards the door a second before Micah Callahan walked through, as if she'd heard him before I had. He was still naked. I expected to be embarrassed, but I wasn't. I was beginning to have the proverbial bad feeling about whatever it was that Cherry didn't want to tell me.

  Micah had combed his hair. It was definitely curls, not waves. The curls were tight, but not small. The color was that shade of dark, dark brown -- almost black -- that comes to people who start out white blond as children, then darken. The curls fell to just below his shoulders, and, following the line of hair, my eyes found his chest. I quickly moved them up so I could concentrate on his face. Eye contact. That was the ticket. I was getting back to the embarrassment.

  "I told you we'd be out in a minute." My voice sounded grumpy, and I was glad. The fact that I was sort of clutching the towel to my body was purely coincidental.

  "I heard you," he said. His face, voice, were neutral. Not as neutral as a vampire's can become. They are the champs of blank expression. But Micah was trying.

  "Then wait outside until we're finished," I said.

  "Cherry is afraid of you," he said.

  I frowned at him, then at her. "Why, for God's sake?"

  Cherry looked at him, and he gave a small nod. She moved away from me towards the door. She didn't leave the room, but she got as far away from me as she could.

  "What in hell is going on?" I asked.

  Micah was standing about four feet away, close, but not too close. I could see his eyes better now, and they were so not human. I knew at a glance that they didn't belong in his face. "She's afraid you'll kill the messenger," he said, voice soft.

  "Look, all this tap dancing is getting old. Just tell me."

  He nodded, winced as if it hurt. "The doctors seem to think that you've been infected with lycanthropy."

  I shook my head. "Serpentine lycanthropy isn't really lycanthropy. It's not a disease that I can catch. You either are cursed by a witch into snake form, or it's inherited like a swanmane." That made me think of the three women I'd last seen chained to a wall in the room of swords. "By the way, what happened to the swanmanes in the club?"

  Micah frowned. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  Without warning, Nathaniel entered the shower. I was beginning to feel positively overdressed in my towel. "We rescued them."

  "The snake leader changed his mind after I got hurt?"

  "He changed it after Sylvie and Jamil nearly killed him."

  Ah. "So they're okay," I said.

  He nodded, but his face stayed serious, his eyes gentle, like someone who's about to tell you really bad news.

  "Don't you start, too. I cannot catch serpentine shit. It doesn't work that way."

  "Gregory isn't in to serpentine shit," he said, the voice as gentle as his eyes.

  I blinked at him. "What are you talking about?"

  Nathaniel started to come farther into the room, but Cherry caught his arm, kept him near the door for a quick getaway--I think. Zane appeared in the doorway behind them. He w
as still the six-feet, pale, overly thin, but muscular guy I'd met when he was trashing a hospital emergency room. But he'd dyed his hair to an iridescent pale green, cut short, spiked. The fact that he was fully dressed actually looked odd to me. Of course, it was Zane's version of street clothes that ran to leather, no shirt, and vests.

  I looked at the three of them in the doorway. They were so solemn. I remembered Gregory falling into me during the fight. His claws piercing me. "I've been cut up a lot worse by a wereleopard, and I didn't catch it," I said.

  "Dr. Lillian thinks it may be because the wound was a deep piercing wound, instead of a surface cut," Cherry said, in a voice that was almost shaky. She was scared, scared of how I'd take the news, or scared of something else, but what?

  "I am not going to be Nimir-Ra for real, guys. I can't catch lycanthropy. If I could ... I've already been cut up enough ... I'd have turned furry already."

  The three of them just looked at me with wide eyes. I turned from them to Micah. His face was still neutral, careful, but there was a shadow in his eyes of ... pity. Pity? I did not do pity, not as the object of it, anyway.

  "You're serious," I said.

  "You're exhibiting all the secondary symptoms," he said. "Rapid healing to the point that your muscles cramp. A temperature hot enough to boil the brain of a human. Yet when they lowered your temperature you nearly died. You needed to bake in the warmth, the heat of your pard to heal. That's how we healed you. It wouldn't have worked if you weren't one of us."

  I shook my head. "I don't believe you."

  "That's okay," he said, "you've got two weeks until the full moon. You won't change for the first time until then. You've got time."

  "Time for what?" I asked.

  "Time to mourn," he said.

  I turned away from the compassion in his eyes, the pity. Shit. I still didn't believe it. "How about a blood test? That should prove it one way or the other."

  Cherry answered, "Wolf lycanthropy shows up in the bloodstream anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, sometimes seventy-two. Leopard lycanthropy, most of the big cat lycanthropies, take anywhere from seventy-two hours to over eight days to show up in the bloodstream. A blood test won't prove anything yet."

  I stared at them, trying to wrap my mind around it, and it just wouldn't wrap. I shook my head. "I can't deal with this right now."

  "You're going to have to deal with it," Micah said.

  I shook my head. "Tonight, I have to get Jean-Claude out of jail. I have to show the police he didn't murder me."

  "Your pard told me that you wouldn't want to be outted. That you wouldn't want your police friends to know."

  "I am not a wereleopard," I said. It sounded stubborn even to me.

  Micah smiled, gently, and that pissed me off. "Don't look at me like that."

  "Like what?" he asked.

  "Like a poor little deluded girl. There are things you don't understand about me, about where my power comes from."

  "You mean the vampire marks," he said.

  I looked past him to the three wereleopards in the doorway. Something on my face made them all flinch. "So nice to know that we're just one big happy family with no secrets."

  "I was in on the discussions with the doctors on whether your rapid healing could be merely a side effect of the vampire marks," he said.

  "Of course it is," I said. But the first thread of doubt was worming its way through my stomach.

  "If it will make you feel better," he said.

  I stared into that compassionate face and felt anger wash over me in a line of heat, and with the anger came that trembling energy. Richard's beast ... or mine? I let myself think the thought all the way through for the first time. Was it my beast that I'd felt with Micah? Was that why I hadn't gotten a sense of where Richard was, and what he was doing? I'd thought of him several times during all the hoopla, but had never felt the mark between us open completely. I'd assumed it was Richard's energy, because it was lycanthrope energy. But what if it hadn't been? What if it had been mine?

  Someone touched my arm, and I jumped. It was Micah, his fingers barely touching my arm. "You look pale. Do you need to sit down?"

  I took a step back and nearly stumbled. He had to grab my arm to keep me from falling on the slick, wet tile. I wanted to jerk away from him, but I was dizzy as if the world wasn't quite solid. He eased me to the floor.

  "Put your head between your knees."

  I sat Indian fashion on the floor, the wall to my back, my head bent over my folded legs while I waited for the light-headedness to pass. I never fainted. Not just from shock--occasionally from blood loss--but never from shock.

  When I could think again, I raised up slowly. Micah was kneeling beside me, all attentive and compassionate, and I hated him. I laid my towel-wrapped head back against the wall, closed my eyes.

  "Where are Elizabeth and Gregory?"

  "Elizabeth wouldn't come to help," Micah said.

  I opened my eyes at that, turning just my head to meet his eyes. "She give a reason for that?"

  "She hates you," he said, simply.

  "Yeah, she loved Gabriel, their old alpha, and I killed him. Hard to be friends after that."

  "That's not why she hates you," he said.

  I searched his face. "What do you mean?"

  "She hates that you're a better alpha as a human than she is as a wereleopard. You make her feel weak."

  "She is weak," I said.

  He smiled, and it had humor in it this time. "Yes, she is."

  "Where's Gregory?"

  "Are you going to punish him for contaminating you?" Micah asked.

  I glanced back at the other three waiting in the door, silent. I realized suddenly what the group dynamics meant. They were treating Micah as their Nimir-Raj, letting him deal with me, like calling in the husband when the wife had one too many drinks. I didn't like that much. But if I concentrated just on the moment, the question at hand, no speculation, no looking for the future, maybe I'd survive.

  "If Gregory hadn't interfered I'd be dead right now. They would have clawed out my heart. It was an accident that he fell into me during the fight." I was watching Micah's face, but I felt the relief sweep through the others, felt it from yards away. I glanced up at them, and it showed in the lines of their bodies.

  "So where is he? Where's Gregory?"

  The three of them did that hot-potato eye-flick game again. "Did he refuse to come help save me like Elizabeth?"

  "No, of course not," Cherry said. But she didn't explain, didn't add to it.

  I looked at Nathaniel. He met my gaze, no flinching, but I didn't like what I saw in his eyes. There was more bad news to come, you could smell it in the air.

  I turned to Micah. "Fine, you tell me."

  "When your Ulfric found out that Gregory had made you their Nimir-Ra in truth, he ..." Micah spread his hands.

  "He freaked." Zane said it.

  I glanced at all of them. "What do you mean, he freaked?"

  "He took Gregory," Cherry said.

  "What do you mean, he took Gregory?"

  "He treated Gregory as an enemy of the pack," Micah said.

  I looked at him. "Go on."

  "If you had been their lupa in truth, if someone injured you it is within the Ulfric's rights to declare them an enemy of the pack, a criminal."

  I kept staring into those yellow green eyes. "What exactly does that mean?"

  "It means that the wolves have your leopard, and they will pass judgment on him for injuring you."

  "No way, I mean, even if I am turning into a wereleopard, which I'm not. It doesn't hurt me. I mean, I'm just going to be a shapeshifter like them now."

  "Not like them," Micah said, "like us."

  I tried to read his face, but I just didn't know him well enough yet. "You have a point, make it."

  "You can't be the wolves' lupa and the leopard's Nimir-Ra."

  "I've been both for a long time."

  We shook his head, and again he
winced as if his neck hurt. "No, you were a human dating the Ulfric, who declared you lupa. You were a human that was taking care of the wereleopards until you could find a true alpha leopard to take over the job. Now, you're truly Nimir-Ra, and the pack won't accept you as one of them."

  "Are you saying Richard dumped me because I'm going to be a wereleopard?"

  "No, I'm saying that the pack won't accept you as his lupa." Micah glanced down, then up. I could see him trying to put his thoughts into words. "My understanding of what's been happening with your local wolves is that Ulfric has taken them from a monarchy where his word was law, to a democracy where the majority rules. He gets a decisive vote, but not the last word."

  I nodded. It sounded like what Richard had wanted for the pack. "It sounds like something he'd do. I've sort of been out of touch for the last few months."

  "He has succeeded too well. The vote went against him, against you. The pack will not accept you as lupa when you're wereleopard and not werewolf."

  I looked past him at the others. "Is that true?"

  They all nodded. "I'm so sorry, Anita," Cherry said.

  I shook my head, trying to concentrate and not succeeding. "Alright, fine, fine. Richard can't make me lupa. I never wanted to be lupa, just his girlfriend. Fuck the wolves. But what have they done with Gregory?"

  "Richard went ape-shit when he found out what Gregory had done," Zane said. "He thought Gregory had done it on purpose, because we were all afraid to lose you as our Nimir-Ra."

  "He accused Gregory of doing it on purpose?" I asked.

  Zane nodded. "Oh, yeah, then they took him."

  "They, who?"

  "Jamil, Sylvie, others." He wouldn't meet my eyes.

  "Didn't anyone try and argue with him about this?"

  "Sylvie tried to tell him it wasn't right, that you wouldn't like it. He hit her, told her never to argue with him again, that he was Ulfric, not her."

  "Shit."

  "Do not blame your leopards for not fighting the wolves," Micah said. "They are sorely outnumbered."