Лорел Гамильтон - Incubus Dreams

I saw Gabriel like a technicolor ghost, with his black curls just long enough to touch his pale gray leopard eyes. The silver ring through his nipple glinted in the lamplight. I was lying back in the middle of a big bed, and Gabriel crawled from one side, and Richard crawled from the other, both moving in that graceful stalk as if they had muscles in places that humans did not. It was a younger Richard, less muscled, face a little less sure of itself, his hair cut neat and clean. Richard when he was twenty, before I ever met him. His face so open, eager, laughing. We’d told him it was a game. Raina wanted to have two men ravage her. A little rape fantasy among friends.

He pinned my wrists, her wrists, and as requested, there was no foreplay. It was supposed to be rough. I could see through her eyes, as she watched Gabriel come in behind Richard’s back. It was a rape fantasy, alright, but Raina wasn’t the victim.

Richard screamed, and stood up, dumping me to the floor. He took two shaking steps, and collapsed to his knees. Something about what Raina’s munin had done, had torn down his shields. I wasn’t getting the memory, just his reaction to it. Shame, anger, rage. I got glimpses of Gabriel and him fighting. Not struggling, but beating the hell out of each other. Both of them nude, slick with each other’s blood. Raina watching from the bed, her mouth wet, her tongue playing along her lips, enjoying the show.

Richard tried to shield, but he couldn’t. It was as if the emotions had stripped him of his shields. It was Jean-Claude’s cool touch in my head that shut it down. He shielded Richard from me, and I think from himself. He gave him back his metaphysical clothes, so that he wasn’t raw before us.

“I, too, have my memory of Gabriel,” Jean-Claude said, his voice was soft.

We both looked at him. Richard said, “You, and Gabriel?” The look on his face showed his disgust.

“Not by choice. It was her price for convincing Marcus that he should continue to ally with me.”

“A night with both of them?” I asked.

Jean-Claude nodded.

“Did you know?” Richard asked, “before, did you know what they wanted you for?”

He nodded again. “I negotiated that night as completely as any night I have ever bargained for.”

Richard was still on his knees on the floor. He looked back at Jean-Claude. “And you knew, you knew that she wanted to watch Gabriel… have you?”

“She wanted many things, but that was one she was most adamant about.”

“How could you let him do that to you?” A strange look came over Richard’s face. “Oh, but you don’t mind. You like men.”

Jean-Claude’s face went blank, him hiding away. “Actually, yes, I did mind. I minded very much, but it was one of the points that Raina would not give up. She wanted certain things, and that was one of them.” He raised his robe around his shoulders as if he was cold, and would not look at either of us. “I talked her out of a great many things that would have hurt a great deal more.”

“You didn’t enjoy it,” Richard said.

Jean-Claude gave him a look, such a look. It sent the vampire’s power like cool water through the room. “Rape is rape, Richard. Is a woman less raped because she likes men? That’s a question, Richard.”

“No, of course not,” he said.

“Then why is it less rape for a man who likes men to be raped by another man?”

Richard looked away at that.

I was left sitting on the floor not knowing what to say, or who to comfort, or even how to start comforting. “I didn’t know any of this.”

“My bargain with Raina was based on it not being known. It would have undermined my authority, which would have defeated the purpose of the bargain.”

I got up off the ground and went to Jean-Claude. I reached out to him, half-afraid he’d move away. No one’s good with this kind of pain, but men seem especially bad at it. I think it’s because they have a hard time thinking of themselves as potential victims. Women are raised with the possibility. Most of us understand from an early age that we are not the biggest or strongest. It’s why when women fight, they fight dirty; something’s got to make up for the lack of upper body strength.

I touched his face, and he gave me that blank beautiful look. As if he were a painting that held color and line, and beauty, but not life, as if telling the secret sucked something precious away from him. “I’m sorry,” I said, softly.

He smiled, and some tension left him, and something of him began to seep back into his eyes. “I thought you might be upset, find me sullied goods.”

I raised eyebrows at that. “You never blame the victim, Jean-Claude. Don’t you know that by now?”

He smiled a little wider and laid his face against my hand. “I have never thanked you for killing them both.”

“They were trying to kill me at the time, and film it for a snuff flick. Trust me, it was my pleasure to whack them both.”

Richard got to his feet and came to stand near us, just out of comfortable reach. “That night was why I broke up with Raina.” He laughed, and it sounded bitter, as if he would choke on it. “Broke up, God, that sounds so high school. Gabriel and I nearly beat each other to death, while she watched.” He was shaking his head, and even with his hair barely grown out, it was already longer than it had been in the memory. I wondered if that was one of the reasons that he grew it long, so it would help him feel different.

“I can find other food,” Jean-Claude said. “You do not have to do anything you are not comfortable with.”

Richard looked at us, my hand still on Jean-Claude’s face. “What I said earlier is still true. We need the three of us to be as close as the two of you are.”

“I do not believe you are ready to do what is necessary for such a binding,” Jean-Claude said.

“What is necessary, exactly?” he asked.

Jean-Claude licked his lips. “This is magic, not science. In truth I am not sure. We could do the fourth mark, that I know how to do, but what happened at the club last night was not the fourth mark. It was as ifma petite slipped into me. We were joined as never before, and it made us unbelievably powerful.”

“How did it work?”

“We touched.”

“We were in the middle of a crisis of police proportions,” I said.

“Oui, but I think it will work with touching. We are of Belle’s line, and most of her magic can be reached through physical closeness.”

“Physical closeness,” Richard said, and he shook his head. “Define physical closeness.”

Jean-Claude smiled. “Tell me what you would have of me, Richard.

What rules and restrictions would make you feel safe?”

“If I said, don’t touch me?”

“Then I say we are wasting our time. Ma petite and I were touching when it happened, not intimately, but the contact was important.

Physical contact makes most of my powers easier.”

“Define not intimate.”

“I think he was holding my hand,” I said.

Richard smiled, a quick flash in his tanned face, “Hand-holding I can manage.”

Jean-Claude smiled, and it was nice to see them smiling at each other for once. “I would ask that if I need to touch you for balance that that be allowed.”

Richard narrowed his eyes a little. “Depends on where you’re touching me, but okay.”

Jean-Claude shook his head. “That is not Richard’s look, that is your look, ma petite. Your look from our Richard’s face.”

“Well, you know what they say, couples start looking like each other after awhile.”

Richard looked at me. “Couple?”

I shrugged. “If I’m going to be lupa to your Ulfric, then yeah.

That’s how your pack will see it.”