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 surpise 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 mlady 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.