Лорел Гамильтон - Incubus Dreams

It shrank back into that small center of my body, where it stayed most of the time. But now it was like one of those leopards at the zoo in a small metal cage. It paced, paced, paced, and finally rushed the bars, slashing and clawing. But these bars were my body, and I screamed. I reached out, trying to grab something, anything that would help me. How do you fight something that’s inside your body? How do you destroy something that is in the very meat of you?

Jason grabbed my hand, and I was suddenly breathing in the sweet musk of wolf. But it was as if touching Jason’s hand acted like a conduit, and suddenly I could see Richard. He was in the bright sunlight of his kitchen, cooking something in a pan. He wore nothing but jeans, with a dish towel stuck into the waistband of his pants.

His back was covered in claw marks, or really serious nail marks. It looked more like the result of good sex than an attack. His head came up, and he sniffed the air, and only then did he turn and stare behind him, as if he could see me. He said, “Anita, is that you?”

“Help me.”

“What’s wrong now?”

I squeezed Jason’s hand, and it was like that extra bit of contact took me closer to Richard. It was like I hovered just in front of him.

He reached out, and his hand brushed through me.

My beast reacted to it, screaming and clawing, going wild. It didn’t want the wolf inside us, there wasn’t room for it. There certainly wasn’t room for both.

Richard drew his hand back, and said, “Anita, Anita can you hear me?”

I screamed his name, because screaming was all I could do. It felt like the leopard was cutting me up, trying to dig its way out, and it couldn’t get out.

“Give your beast to someone else, Anita. Someone whose body can let it out.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. I started to tell him so, but he seemed to feel my puzzlement. Because he shared a memory with me.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words; a memory with complete sensory surround sound is worth so much more. Saves so much time, shares the pain faster.

We were in the center ring of the Circus of the Damned. I reached out to Richard’s beast, his rage, because if we couldn’t control it, the council would kill him. I reached out to that rage. That power that he called his beast came at my touch. I smelled like home to it, somehow, and it poured into me, over me, through me, like a blinding storm of heat and power. It was similar to the times I’d raised power with Richard and Jean-Claude, but this time there was no spell to use the power on. Nowhere for the beast to run. It tried to crawl out of my skin, tried to expand inside my body, but there was no beast to call. I was empty for it, and it raged inside me. I felt it growing until I thought I would burst apart in bloody fragments. The pressure built and built and had nowhere to go.

Richard had crawled to me on hands and knees, bleeding. He’d laid his lips against mine in a trembling kiss. A sound came from low in his throat, and he was suddenly pressing his mouth against mine, until it either bruised or I opened my mouth to him. I opened, and his tongue plunged inside me, his lips feeding on mine. The cut inside his mouth filled my mouth with the taste of him, salty, sweet. I held his face in my hands, my mouth searching his, and it wasn’t enough.

We moved to our knees, mouths still pressed together. My hands slid over his chest, his back, and something deep inside me clicked and relaxed. His power tried to spill outward, but I held it back…

Richard’s hands slid up my legs, finding the lace top of the black panties. His fingers traced my naked spine, and I was undone.

The power spilled upward, outward, filling us both. It flared over us in a rushing wave of heat and light, until my vision swam in pieces, and we both cried out with one voice. His beast slid inside of him. I felt it crawl out of me, pulled like a large, thick string, spilling inside of Richard, coiling into his body. I expected to feel the last bit of it spill between us, like draining the last drop of wine from a cup, but that drop remained.

The memory rolled back and left me gasping on the bed. Nathaniel was leaning over me. “Anita, Anita, are you alright?” His eyes had bled back to lavender.

Jason was nuzzling my hair. “You smell like pack.”

Richard was standing in his kitchen, one hand on the edge of the cabinets as if he were steadying himself. “Now, do you remember?”

“I remember,” I whispered.

“What do you remember?” Nathaniel asked.

“Can’t you smell it?” Jason asked. He was rubbing his lips against the side of my face.

Nathaniel leaned over me, his face very close to mine. “Wolf,” he sniffed my skin, “Richard,” he whispered the name against my skin.

The feel of their lips against me made me close my eyes for a moment. But once sight was gone, the scent of them covered me like a blanket. The sweet musk of wolf and the acrid sweetness of leopard were everywhere, like invisible water, and I was drowning in it. I expected my cat to complain, but it didn’t. It was strangely calmed by both scents.

“You’re still pack, Anita, as much as you’re pard. Give your beast to them.” Richard stared up at me, and I noticed for the first time that he had scratches low on his right cheek. Not usually a place you mark in the heat of passion.

I stopped seeing Richard’s scratched face in his sunny kitchen. I opened my eyes to a wisp of auburn hair across my eyes. Nathaniel was pressed against the side of my face, his mouth just under the line of my jaw. His body was back on top of mine, laying his weight along me.

He was so warm.

Jason still had my hand, and his mouth was rubbing along the side of my neck on the side opposite from Nathaniel.

I was warm and safe, and I realized that Richard had given me some of his control. He’d given me breathing space. I needed to use it before my beast shook free of this warm, comfortable lassitude.

I thought back over the memory of giving Richard’s beast back to him. How had it worked? A kiss, why did everything take a kiss, or a touch? Jean-Claude had answered that question last night. Because we could only use the tools we had available. Most of our tools came from Belle Morte’s line, and that meant that our tools, our skills, were going to have a certain theme. I waited to be tired of that theme, and part of me was, part of me thought we really needed some new skill sets, but most of me was warm and safe, and covered in the scent of pard and pack.

Their lips worked gently at each side of my neck, soft kisses.

Nathaniel’s body was so warm pressed the length of mine, warmer than any blanket, better than simply being held in someone’s arms. Jason’s hand smoothed along the edge of my hip, and I couldn’t help but cuddle into the feel of his touch. That one small writhing movement seemed to affect Nathaniel’s body. He was suddenly heavier than he had been, heavy in the way Richard’s kiss had been in the memory. Nathaniel’s hips pressed in against me, and as with the remembered kiss, he pushed against me, and I had a choice of opening to him, or keeping him outside my body.

Richard’s beast had left through a kiss. I could only kiss one of them at a time. The thought came that I could do other things, and still kiss. But I’d had enough of threesomes and more. My battered morals had had about all the multiples they could handle for awhile.

That little voice whispered, but it feels so good. And the voice that I’d learned at my grandmother’s hand yelled, Slut! You work so long and so hard to listen to your inner voice, but sometimes guilt or habit makes you listen to those other voices-the ones that beat you down. Sometimes you just can’t shake them.