Page 22 of Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 28)

“It better not,” I said, and there was an edge of threat in my voice that I didn’t try to hide.

“I wish you better luck than I have had with such things.”

I looked up at him then, studying his face. I don’t know what I would have said next, because I felt the energy coming down the hallway toward us. Happy, wonderful energy of two of the loves of my life.

Micah and Nathaniel came walking up the hallway,hand in hand, and suddenly it was like the sun had risen in my chest so that it was hard to breathe. My reaction felt over the top, ridiculous. I’d never been one of those people who let myself get carried away, until Jean-Claude and these two walked into my life and stayed. Micah was my height, the only man I’d ever dated who was as short as me. Nathaniel was taller at five foot nine. He’d grown three inches taller and suitably broader through the shoulders since I met him. His auburn hair had also been down to his ankles; now it fell just past his shoulders, shining and perfectly straight. Micah’s hair was the same length, but his dark brown hair was so curly that it was inches longer when it was wet. I didn’t usually think of Micah as the more delicate of the two men, maybe because I was usually beside them and didn’t see them together from a distance that often.

Micah was built like a swimmer with that upside-downVof shoulders down to narrow waist and hips. He could spend as much time as Nathaniel did in the weight room, but he didn’t muscle up like our shared man did. They were both strong, but in T-shirt, jeans, and boots Micah could hide it, Nathaniel couldn’t. Nathaniel was the male equivalent of an old-fashioned pinup, lush and masculine, but with a face that was closer to beautiful; before he’d filled out with more muscle and extra growth, he’d been beautifully androgynous, and now he was still beautiful, but even from the back with the long hair he was finally and completely male. Micah on the other hand still treaded that androgynous line, and he sort of hated it. We were both over thirty, so there wasn’t going to be a growth spurt for him or me.

Rafael squeezed my hand, which made me look at him. I had a second of wondering if I’d dropped a polyamorous ball by ogling my men this way, but he smiled. “Go to them. It does my heart good to see all of you sohappy together, gives me hope that I’ll find my own crazy happy someday.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I left him with Benito and Claudia and almost ran toward them. We’d been together five years now, and I still wanted to be as close as possible to them every time I saw them. I didn’t run to them, but I might have power-walked, and I was in their arms, because it was their arms. We’d been a threesome from the beginning, never just a couple. We put our faces together before we kissed, forehead to forehead for Micah and me, and Nathaniel bending over us so that we touched, our arms interlocked in a circle of just us. Then Micah kissed my cheek, which made me move so that he could kiss me on the mouth. It was a good kiss, soft and complete but still okay for public consumption. We could have kissed like that standing on the sidewalk and not offended anyone. I drew back from the kiss to stare into his chartreuse eyes, green and gold at the same time the way a cat’s could be, because they were the eyes of his leopard trapped forever in his human face. Too long in animal form and sometimes you don’t come back all the way. It was why he needed glasses, because leopards don’t see distance that well; if it’s too far to hunt or attack, then it’s far more important to see up-close movement. The sunglasses he still wore to hide his eyes in public were prescription, and I’d never known. It had explained why he’d worn them inside so often.

I looked at him almost eye to eye, though my boots were more combat/police, so his club boots gave him a couple of extra inches of height. He didn’t wear them to be taller, he wore them because Nathaniel had picked them out for him. Left to his own devices Micah was running shoes and nice dress shoes. We both had things in our closets that our third had bought for us.

Nathaniel used our joined hands to turn me towardhim as if there was music in his head I couldn’t hear, and it was the beginning of a dance. Micah let go of both of us and stepped back to give him room to do what he was going to do, because just that one dancelike move said he had something planned that was less tame than Micah’s kiss.

From a distance Nathaniel’s eyes looked deep violet blue, but up close you realized they were just violet. He had to put blue on his driver’s license because purple wasn’t a choice. His normal color was a paler lavender; the eye color alone let me know his mood was up. He put one hand at the small of my back and the other in my hand and he literally started to waltz. I had a moment of awkwardness that I almost always did when I danced, but I stopped trying to shield so hard at the connection between us and suddenly I could dance, because Nathaniel could dance.

We danced in the hallway with him smiling down at me, his eyes shining with happiness, and along with the dancing skills came his mood. I laughed out loud from the joy that was bubbling through him. I wondered exactly what had made him this happy. He used his hand at the small of my back to press us closer together, so I could feel that there were other things up besides just his mood. The feel of him pressed so hard against the front of me made me miss a step; I got a string of visuals from the afternoon he and Micah had shared that made my knees so weak I would have fallen if he hadn’t caught me. I loved being in the middle of the two of them for sex, but as their own wedding approached, our mostly heterosexual Micah was trying to work on issues he was having with two men and no girl in sight.

I managed to say in a voice gone hoarse with just the memory feedback, “Sorry I missed it.”

“Next time,” Nathaniel said, and then he picked me up off the floor and spun me around, laughing.

“This is not just the shorthand of a couple, you shared what you are feeling and thinking,” Rafael said.

Nathaniel set me down, but kept his arms around me, and I kept hold of him. My knees weren’t weak anymore, but we hadn’t kissed yet. He’d wanted to share his delight, but he wasn’t done.

“Yes,” Nathaniel answered him, but kept looking at me. He leaned in to kiss me and I went up on tiptoe to help.

My eyes were closed, but I still knew that Micah had crossed behind me toward the wererats. He wasn’t bound to me like Nathaniel was, but he was still my Nimir-raj and that was its own magic. Then Nathaniel was kissing me, and I forgot about everything else.

It was like a continuous feedback loop of his mouth on mine, mine on his, his hands so strong on my back, and my smaller hands on the smooth muscles of his back, his hands having to find their way around the shoulder holster with the Springfield EMP nine-millimeter and the big knife in a sheath along my spine, the extra ammo on the right side of my gun belt, the inner pants holster of the Sig Sauer .380. Nathaniel even got the thought in there that I still felt like I was cheating on my old Browning BDM by carrying the Springfield nine-millimeter for every day, and the Springfield .45 when I was on duty as a marshal. I got that he missed my body under his hands without all the straps and weapons. There was a moment when I wasn’t sure whose thought, hands, mouth, body was whose. I was trying to climb back into control or something when I felt Damian wake for the night. Suddenly it was three of us and I felt that first gasp as he woke like a swimmer who had almost drowned and was fighting back to life.

Then we were looking down at him; the brightest green eyes I’d ever seen in a human being stared up at us, set in the milk-white skin of a natural redhead who had spent athousand years in the dark. It meant his hair had no gold highlights like most redheads, so it looked darker, a true red instead of the orangey color it might have been.

Rafael said, “What is that?”

Micah said, “Damian’s awake,” as Nathaniel and I broke from the kiss and looked at each other. Nathaniel’s eyes were green, and because I could still see/feel through him, I knew mine were, too. I had a moment to be truly creeped out by it, and Damian shut down the link and we were left alone in our bodies in the hallway, knowing that the vampire third of our triumvirate of power had his feelings hurt that it had bothered me to see his power in our eyes.

7

“IS THAT WHATit would be like if Anita made me her rat to call?” Rafael asked.

“No, it’s a more complete bonding because we have Damian hooked up to us. Only the triumvirate with Jean-Claude, Richard, and I can come close to this level of... intermingling. It’s not like this with any of the other animals to call unless we work at it.”

“At least if Anita’s power shows, we both have brown eyes, so it will not be so obvious,” Rafael said.

“Did we miss something?” Micah asked.

Nathaniel studied my face. “I didn’t see the decision in your mind.”

“You got distracted,” I said.

He grinned. “You always distract me.” He reached for me again, and Micah stepped in the way.

“I love you both, but this is serious. If Anita is going to make Rafael her rat to call, I need to know and so do Jean-Claude and Asher.”

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