Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

“Anita smells like all her beasts at once,” Crispin said, and just that let me know he was closer to us than he had been.

I tried to turn to see how close. Dev’s big hand touched the side of my face so the energy kept flowing across our skin as we both broke from the kiss to look. Micah was only holding our hands, so he just had to turn and look. Crispin was on all fours on top of the conference table. He was sniffing the air, his hands still solidly on the wood, like a much smaller cat when it smells something interesting and wants to investigate without actually touching it first.

“Micah smells like all her beasts and more. Something more, that I don’t understand. Domino, what do you smell?”

Domino spoke from behind me, and I turned in the circle of the men’s hands, and the invisible rush of that flaming energy, to see him on all fours on the floor, leaning in toward us in an almost identical pose to Crispin.

“Their beasts, all their beasts.”

“Does Micah smell like more than leopard to you?”

Domino leaned in closer to Micah’s leg. “Yes.”

Crispin leaned further, stretching that long torso out, until he could almost have licked Dev. The golden tiger growled softly at him. Crispin backed up a fraction. “Can you smell everything on Dev, too?”

Domino crawled around my legs so he could sniff closer to Dev. It should have looked awkward to see the guard, still carrying all his weapons, crawling on all fours, but he moved as if the tigers inside him knew exactly how to move this human shape so it was graceful even without paws. He sniffed loudly, drawing in the scent, and then reached out as if to caress the energy. Dev growled louder this time.

“Easy, big gold, I’m just trying to taste the energy.” Domino raised those red and orange eyes to us. “Dev smells like all the beasts, too.”

“That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” Crispin said.

“How is it supposed to work?” Jean-Claude asked. He was leaning against the wall closest to the three of us. His hands were behind him, so they were pinned between his body and the wall.

“Anita is a panwere, so she has other beasts, but it shouldn’t transfer to anyone else,” Crispin said.

“I think it’s just the power of them, not the true beasts,” Micah said. His voice was half breathy with that edge of growling undertone.

“What if it’s not?” Domino asked, still on all fours at our feet.

The three of us didn’t truly look at each other, but we shared what the look would have meant in an instant of emotion. The marks were open between us, not all the way, but we were already beginning to think as a unit—three people, one mind, one heart, if we weren’t careful.

“Try to change,” Domino said.

“What?” I said.

“One of you try to change shape into something you’re not.”

We all looked down into those startling fire-colored eyes, and then Micah said, “I like these clothes.”

“I don’t care about mine,” Dev said.

“Then you change,” Crispin said.

“While we’re all still touching?” he asked.

“Yes,” all the wereanimals said at once. Jean-Claude and I weren’t sure, but we didn’t say no.

“Okay,” Dev said, “what should I be?”

“What do you want to be?” I asked.

He smiled; it was fierce, more a flash of teeth than a true smile. He knew exactly what he wanted to be.

I’D SEEN DEV shapeshift before, but only in a very special type of weapons practice. The fastest shape change often was the deciding factor in a fight between wereanimals, so our guards practiced that just like they did on the gun range, or hand to hand. So I’d seen Dev and all the guards shapeshift, but never while I was touching him. Never while Micah and I were sharing our beasts with each other, and the metaphysics between us all was wide open like a river flooding its banks.

The heat began in his hand, going from warm to hot as if he’d spiked a sudden deadly fever, and then the heat ran through his body so that it radiated even through his clothes as he wrapped himself around me and drew Micah closer by pulling on his hand. I felt Micah hesitate, and then his body relaxed in against me. He let go of some issue that was holding him back and just relaxed into me and Dev, because the other man was holding me so close that he couldn’t really get nearer to me without getting closer to us both. I felt Dev’s happiness spike, as if he appreciated Micah letting go; whether it was Micah’s giving himself to the moment, or Dev’s emotion, something spiked the power higher like gasoline thrown on a fire.

That invisible colored fire flared around us, so bright inside my head like a waking dream, but this dream had heat, and the solidness of the two men, so that it was an intermingling of reality and the images inside of my head.

“Do you see the colors?” I asked in a voice that was more breath than anything.

“Smell them,” Micah whispered.

“Feel them,” Dev said, and he reached a hand out, as if he expected to actually be able to touch the flames. The colors reacted to his hand, brightening as his fingers touched the energy and fading as he ran his hand further through the air.

“It’s reacting to your touch,” I said.

“Like I said, I can feel the different beasts.”

“Pick one, mon ami , let me see your clothes vanish and you slip this mortal skin,” Jean-Claude said, in a voice that caressed along my skin even with all the energy that was already there. I had a moment to realize that he was flirting with Dev, either to get him to hurry up and choose a form, or for the reason anyone flirts.

I felt Dev startle, his body reacting to Jean-Claude’s voice more than Micah or I did, but then we spent more time with him and had built up our endurance. Dev had been Asher’s boyfriend, so Jean-Claude had put him on the “do not touch” list. Maybe Dev wasn’t the only one tired of Asher and Kane’s tantrums.

“Choose,” Micah said. “Choose, or I will.”

Dev chose, or tried to, but he made one mistake. He tried to choose by simply letting his beast rise, except now he had nine animals trying to get out all at once. I’d learned they did not share well.

They spilled up into his body like a flood being forced into a narrow passage, except this flood had teeth and claws. Dev screamed and started to fall, the strength of his hands dragging at us, as we fought to keep our feet and tried to hold him up. I could feel the claws and teeth trying to fight through him, but I didn’t feel the pain of it the way Dev obviously did.

I glanced at Micah. “Are you protecting us?”

“Yes, can you hold him by yourself?”

I wrapped my arms more firmly around the bigger man’s waist and held on. I nodded, and Micah took me at my word like he always did. He stopped trying to hold Dev up, and I was suddenly holding up nearly twice my body weight of a supernaturally strong man whose body was bucking and writhing against itself. It was like holding a muscular bag of huge snakes. Micah put his hands on either side of Dev’s face and made him look at him.

“Close it down, Dev, shove them all back just like you do with your tiger. Do it! Do it now!”

Dev screamed again, his eyes tightly closed, seeing nothing but the shapes inside him trying to get out. Micah pressed his hands so hard I could see his fingers imprinting on Dev’s face. “Dev, look at me!” He shouted it.

The other man blinked at him. I held on, but I could feel something pushing against my chest where I was pressed tight against him, as if some huge thing were pushing against his stomach from the inside.

“Dev, it’s just like your tiger. Control it!”

“Too many,” Dev said, and screamed again.