Лорел Гамильтон - Incubus Dreams

It was that old, old problem of his and his line of vampires. If the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems begin to look like nails. If the only tools you have are seduction and terror, and you’re trying to be nice… well, there you go.

I could taste their pulses on my tongue. Not just one, but hundreds, as if I’d suddenly had a truckload of candy shoved in my mouth. Candy that was hard and sweet and melted slow across my tongue, but it wasn’t just cherry, or grape, or root beer. It was like a thousand different flavors filled my mouth, so that instead of being delicious, it was overwhelming.

I couldn’t pick one flavor, one pulse to follow. I literally couldn’t pick just one, because I couldn’t sort them out. I was choking on too many choices. Until I could choose one thread to follow, I couldn’t swallow any of them. I collapsed to my knees, drowning in a thousand different scents, different skins. I could smell their skin, that wonderful smell at the side of the neck where the skin smells sweetest when you’re in love. But it was a different scent for each neck: aftershave, perfume, cologne, soap, sweat. It was as if I’d walked up to each of them and put my face just above their skin-close enough to kiss-and breathed in the scent of them.

Zerbrowski was beside me, his gun out, but not pointed at anyone, sort of ceilingward. “Anita, what’s wrong? Did he hurt you?”

Who, I thought? Who washe? There were so many “hes.” Which one did he mean?

I tried to swallow past all those pulses in my mouth, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get this bite down. It was too much.

Jean-Claude’s voice was in my head. “Ma petite, you must choose.”

I managed to think, “Can’t.”

“Who did you go there to find?” he asked.

Who did I go there to find? That was a good question. Who? It all went back to who.

Zerbrowski grabbed my arm, hard. “Anita! I need you here. What’s happening?”

He needed me. I saw Smith and Marconi both with weapons drawn.

They needed me, because they couldn’t feel it. I had to function, to think, to speak, or things were going to get out of hand. I was a federal marshal tonight, I had to remember that. I remembered something else, something that had been washed away in all that scent.

Avery, I needed Avery. I thought the name, and just like that, it was his pulse on my tongue. His skin smelled like cologne, something expensive so that it was powdery and sweet, almost like good perfume, but underneath that was sweat. He hadn’t showered tonight. The thought made me wonder what else besides sweat he hadn’t washed away. It was as if I was close to him again, as if my face passed down his body just above his skin. My breath was warm against his skin and helped blow the scents back from his skin to my nose, my mouth. I didn’t simply smell the scents down his body, I tasted them. A faint taste, as if smell was the more important, but smell and taste were aligned differently than ever before. More intimately, somehow. That part wasn’t Jean-Claude’s power, but Richard’s and I fought not to think of him, not to open the links between us farther than they were already.

I did not want Richard in my head right now.

Jean-Claude let me know without words, or if with words, it was too quick to register, like a kind of telepathic shorthand, that he would guard me from Richard. He would not let me drown in still more sensation. But it was thanks to closer ties with Richard that I could smell and taste my way down Avery’s body and enjoy it, or rather not be disgusted by it. Wolves, like dogs, do not think of scent and taste as a human does. They like it when we smell like live things. Avery had had sex and hadn’t cleaned up afterward. I wasn’t disturbed by that, more curious, because, thanks to Jean-Claude’s marks and my own power, I knew Avery was as neat and meticulous in his person as he was in his housekeeping.

Zerbrowski squeezed my arm hard enough to bruise. “Anita, damn it, we can’t shoot him. The warrant doesn’t have our name on it. We’re not executioners. Anita, wake up!”

I blinked at him and saw Avery standing just on the other side of him. Marconi had stepped up and had his gun pressed against Avery’s chest. Avery wasn’t doing anything threatening, just standing and trying to walk forward against the press of the gun. He was trying to come to me. His face wasn’t empty like a zombie’s, in fact he was smiling, and so very present in his skin, but I’d called him, and even a gun barrel against his heart hadn’t stopped that order.

“Stop,” I said.

Avery stopped trying to move forward and just stood there, waiting. He stared down at me with a look that only your best boyfriend should have given you, but I didn’t mind. I wanted to pull his shirt out of his pants and rub his skin along mine. It was sexual, true, but it was also that urge that makes dogs roll in smelly stuff.

It just smelled so good, and I could carry the scent with me and explore it at my leisure. I knew in that moment that wolves and dogs collect scents the way people collect rocks or houseplants-just because they like them, and they think they’re pretty. Some smells just make you happy like a favorite color; the fact that sweat and stale sex was “pretty” to that part of me that was Richard was a puzzle for another day. Now, I just tried not to question it too closely and not to do physically what I’d already done metaphysically.

“I’m alright, Zerbrowski.” But my voice was distant and lazy with power. That I couldn’t help, but when he pulled me to my feet, I was able to stand. Yea for me. I took a step forward and said, “It’s okay, Marconi, I told him to come to me.”

Marconi had a funny look on his face. “Not out loud you didn’t.”

I shrugged. “Sorry about that.” But I wasn’t looking at Marconi, I was looking at Avery. I was looking at him like you’d gaze on a lover, but it was all tied up with food, and smell, and things that were so nonhuman that I was having trouble processing them. I wanted to scent mark him. He was mine. I wanted to wrap his scent on my body and think about those smells and what they meant. It was as if scent was like a photograph of a murder scene. I could carry it around and “look” at it over and over again, think about it. The sense of smell had jumped from somewhere near the bottom of my sensory list to just behind visual, and the only thing that kept it lower than sight was that I was too much a primate to trust my nose that much.

“Put up your guns,” Zerbrowski said, “welcome to the wide world of weird vampire shit.” He didn’t sound happy, but I didn’t look to see what face went with the tone, because that would have meant looking away from Avery, and I didn’t want to do that.

He was a little clean-cut for my taste. His hair was a soft, medium brown, cut short the way a father or grandfather would cut it.

The male hairstyle that has never really gone out of style for fifty years. His eyes matched his hair-a soft brown. His eyebrows were darker than his hair and arched in that way that men’s eyebrows will, perfectly, while most women have to pluck for that line above the eye.

He didn’t have enough eyelashes, but they seemed thicker than they were because they were dark. His face was a soft oval, only the dark scattering of beard stubble saving him from looking even younger than he was. He was almost six feet, but seemed shorter, though I wasn’t sure why. Everything about him said that here was someone who’d never had anything too bad happen to him. It wasn’t just his face and coloring that was soft and undramatic; it was him. He had that flavor in my head of someone who’d never really been tested. How did you get to be a vampire and not lose that soft edge?