Page 85 of Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 29)

Sleep with me, notfuck me, notgo down on me, just sleep. It was both an innocent request and more intimate than people realizedwho hadn’t tried polyamory. There were lovers in our group that I still hadn’t figured out how to sleep with after the sex was over. It was a sweet request, romantic even, so Richard when he wasn’t being a dick. That was my last thought before I drifted off to sleep in his arms with his chest as my pillow.

33

WE WERE RUNNINGthrough the woods, so fast that the trees were just blurred shapes to fling ourselves between, around, through. The smell of the pack was everywhere around us in the trees. We ran together hunting something large that was crashing noisily ahead of us. The deer had forgotten all caution in the terror of the chase. Deer are always closer than we think, like slender brown ghosts, but this deer ran, trying to outrun us. It was no longer a ghost, but a desperate speed to escape its fate. We were fate on four legs, furred, tongues panting in the summer heat with the scent of pine everywhere so that the deer’s scent was intermingled with it and the scent of the other wolves. The push of our bodies against the ground, the crashing of the deer as it made another mistake. I could feel, or smell, the far wolves circling it, cutting off its escape. It turned and came running toward us but the entire forest smelled of wolf; the deer didn’t know where to run. We ran toward its panic and knew soon we would eat, but first there would be blood, death, and it would not be ours.

Then there was another smell in the forest; it wasn’t us, it wasn’t the deer. We ran for the deer, because whatever it was, it could not have our prey. We had worked hard for this deer, it was ours. Tiger, I smelled tiger, and the moment I thoughtI, notus, notpack, butme,the dream changed. Richard and I held hands on the edge of the forest, a bigger forest than still existed in Missouri. There was a grass-filled meadow decorated with wildflowers and sunlight. The grass was taller than my waist and it moved not with wind but as if something was moving in it. I thought it was one large animal moving toward us, and then it seemed to split so that the grass moved in three paths. I smelled tiger again, closer, and then it was like the wind shifted and brought the scent of... rat, but the stirring grass was too big for an ordinary rat.

Richard’s hand tensed in mine as the grass parted and a huge golden tiger glided into view. It was bigger than any ordinary tiger, big enough to ride on like a horse. The grass parted again, and a huge rat almost as big as the tiger stepped into sight. It was black except for one paw and a spot on its chest that looked almost like a star. It wasn’t just a rat, it was my rat, Astro. In real life he was the size of a normal rat, not this monster size. He didn’t even live with me but stayed with the wererats in their inner sanctum, their place of power, so what was he doing in my dream? He looked at me with his black, button eyes, showing brown in the strong sunlight.

The grass stirred again, and a monster-size hyena stepped out into the sunlight. It looked made of gold and bronze in the bright light, because the sun was sinking downward. I reached out my hand toward the hyena and it came to me like it was a pet. Its short fur was rougher than I’d expected, but the moment I touched it I felt better, safer. The gold tiger came to Richard’s hand; he rubbed it behind one ear, and it chuffed for him in a rolling, friendly sound. I scratched the side of the hyena’s face, and it made a low almost mooing sound, if a cow could growl in a friendly way... I’d never heard any sound like it before, but it was a good sound.

The giant rat that looked like the one that had chosen me sat up on its hind legs to look out over the grass, and then it was suddenly smaller and vanished into the grass. That was all the warning we got, and then the lion leapt onto the hyena. The growling moosturned to high-pitched chittering screams, the lion’s roar like a deep bass death drum.

Richard grabbed me and tried to pull me back from the fight. The gold tiger tried to stand between me and them, but it was too late, the monstrous beasts rolled over me. A massive claw caught my outer thigh; the hyena’s teeth missed lion and caught my shoulder in a crushing bite.

I woke screaming in the back of the car to find that the nightmare wasn’t gone, it was inside me. My inner lion and hyena were having a fight to the death inside my body where they couldn’t escape, and neither could I.

34

RICHARD AND WICKEDtried to hold me still, but it wasn’t my arms and legs that needed to be pinned. I was just the cage for the fight. Huge claws raked the hyena’s body, but I was the hyena. It was my throat that screamed in high-pitched sounds that were not human. The hyena darted in and tried to tear open the lion’s belly, but the big cat rolled away, and my body rocked with the force of that weight falling against my side. Wicked was thrown against the far wall of the car, as if the lion had rolled into him. He’d lost his grip on my arm and thigh. The hyena didn’t leap after the staggered lion, it stood there legs braced as if it had won something, but I knew the lion wasn’t finished. I wouldn’t have been finished and I was the lion. The hyena started running up that impossible path inside me. It wanted to be real, and the only way to do that was to get out of me.

Richard wrapped himself around me; the scent of wolf was everywhere. It should have called my own wolf and slowed the hyena down, but it didn’t. Instead, the hyena ran faster in that loping, rolling run that looked awkward but could eat up the miles.

Nathaniel was suddenly kneeling on the floorboard at my feet. He pressed his bare arm against my face, but the scent of leopard meant food to the hyena, either to steal their kill before they couldhide it or to eat the leopard, either worked for the hyena rushing toward the surface of my body. Always before when my beast ran for the exit my body reacted like it had with the lion rolling into me and Wicked, but there was something different tonight. It was like the hyena knew something I didn’t. It ran toward me giving that high excited giggling, gibbering cry that would raise the hair on your neck if you heard it in the dark, or, hell, in the light.

Then I felt something bigger running. The hyena looked behind it, and the lion rose like a semi truck coming up too fast behind you on the highway, dwarfing your car like a giant about to crush you. The hyena gave a squealing cry as the lion grabbed its rear leg and threw it around like it wasn’t one of the top predators in the world. If you think hyenas are scavengers you’ve watched too many cartoons. I screamed as if my own thigh had been grabbed, and I expected to see the blood, like something had bitten me for real.

Wicked was at my side again, not holding me down, but just holding my hand. He exchanged a look with Richard and Nathaniel; it was not a good look. I managed to say, “The lion is coming.” My voice was already hoarse from screaming.

“I know,ma petite, I know.” Jean-Claude was on his knees in the middle seat, reaching back toward me. I reached out, and the moment our fingers touched, the lion slowed; it didn’t stop, but it wasn’t running full out now. It came at a fast walk, as if it was less sure of what would happen when it got to the end of me. Certain victory was gone with the touch of my lover’s hand, no, my master’s hand. I had three lovers in the back seat with me, but only Jean-Claude’s touch had slowed the inevitable.

I didn’t realize the SUV had stopped moving until Jake opened his door and moved the seat forward so that Nathaniel could get out. Jean-Claude held my hand, and that one touch held the lion to a walk. Wicked cradled me in his arms and lifted me closer to Jean-Claude as Richard slid out of the car. Then Nicky’s shoulders filledthe opening; he almost didn’t fit through, his muscles gleaming in a tank top cut so wide through the neck and shoulders it was more flirtation than a real shirt. I saw his short blond hair and one blue eye above me. He’d worn an eye patch tonight where the scars had stolen his other eye.

He took me in his arms, smiling, and growled. The sound went through me like my spine was a tuning fork and he’d found just the right note. It made me shiver. He leaned in and sniffed above my face, and the next growl was deeper, more menacing. “That’s not your lioness I’m smelling,” he said in a voice that was more growl than speech.

“You’re my Rex,” I said in a voice ragged with screams.

He gave a fierce snarling smile. “You bet your ass, I am.”

That made me smile, but the huge lion was still walking up the path inside me. Nicky was right, it wasn’t my lioness, and it should have been. I couldn’t have a male lion inside me, because I wasn’t that, and yet there it was, with a huge dark, almost black mane encircling a rich gold face. The contrast made him look almost like a Valentine card, all dark lace and velvet lion. I thought,What a weird way to think of it, and then I felt my lioness behind him. It was how she thought of him. She’d shown me once before that she wanted a mate, but never this forcefully, or this painfully.

“Damn it,” I said, “I’ll look for a lion to call, just stop doing shit like this.” The big male sat down, and the lioness came up to rub her body along his like she was scent-marking him.

“I feel your lions,ma petite, Nicky. I feel them as I can feel wolves.”

We looked at him. “Wolves are your animal to call, lions aren’t,” I said.

“I am aware,ma petite.” He squeezed my hand, then reached toward Nicky, hesitating just short of touching him, playing his long, slender fingers above Nicky’s aura. The lions inside me looked up, the lioness sniffing the air as if Jean-Claude’s almost touching him had changed something.

Nicky rubbed his cheek against my hair. “That’s much more fun,” he said, voice already deepening with testosterone.

“What has changed,mon lionne?”

I put my face against Nicky’s and it was like something tight and angry inside me loosened and just floated away. God, it felt good to have him near me.

The male lion inside me faded away, and the lioness flopped down on her side on the path and gazed at me with big amber eyes. The expression in those eyes had completely changed. She rolled over, exposing her snowy white belly like a cat trying to lure you in for a belly rub so they could sink claws into you. She looked utterly relaxed as she flopped onto her other side and blinked those big golden eyes at me again. Her eyes were soft, and I’d never noticed before how thick and black her eyelashes were, framing the rich amber of her eyes. If she’d been human I’d have said she was batting her eyes at me. No, not at me.

“Anita’s lioness is in heat,” Nicky said. His face still pressed against mine, so it was the most natural thing in the world for him to kiss the side of my neck. I turned my head, exposing more of my neck to his kisses. I remembered that Nicky and his old Rex had told me my lioness was in heat when we met, but it had never happened again.

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