Kiss the Dead (24 page)

Micah’s head was turned away, his curls across my face, so that I saw Nathaniel’s face through Micah’s hair. I watched the concentration on Nathaniel’s face, that distant internal look as he fought his body to last, to keep going, to give me as much pleasure as he could, before his own body reached its limit. Then his eyes opened wide, and his hips began to do more than just in and out, adding a sort of sideways motion to each stroke like the difference between throwing a pitch hard and fast over home plate and a curveball. He didn’t last long when he started doing that, but that was okay, because neither did I. He brought me with that extra bit of movement, and while I was screaming at the headboard, his body thrust one last time as deep inside me as he could, and the first orgasm hit the second, and I held on to Micah’s arms, as if my nails in his flesh were an echo of Nathaniel’s body pinning me to the bed.

Nathaniel pulled himself out, which made me shiver, but I was too
far gone in afterglow to do much more. I was back to eye-fluttery blindness. He collapsed beside me, breathing hard and laughing softly. “That… was… amazing.”

I could only nod.

I felt Micah’s mouth against my face, and thought he was going to kiss my cheek, but he didn’t; instead he spoke in a voice gone growling deep. “My turn.”

T
HERE WAS A
reason that Micah had gone second. Most of the men in my bed were well endowed, but Micah was more than just well endowed. He’d had women in his past actually refuse to have sex with him, because they were afraid of his size. I’d had one man in my bed who gave him a run for his money, and that was Richard, but even he wasn’t actually as big. Micah could touch his belly button with the tip of himself, which meant that all of him didn’t actually fit into all of me in some positions; I wasn’t deep enough. They always said that you stretch to accommodate; well, you do, but there is a limit. Women vary in how deep and wide they are, just like men vary in length and width. He was thick around, too, but thankfully he wasn’t the thickest I’d had in my bed; if he’d won on width as well as length, I might have had to call the whole thing off. One of the reasons Micah loved making love to me was that I really did orgasm from deep, hard lovemaking. Nathaniel had already proven that today, but Micah was about to prove it better.

He was in almost the same position as Nathaniel had been: upper body angled upward, only his groin and hips pinning me to the bed. He started slow, keeping his stroke shallow so that I could feel the head of
him just touching the end of me, but Nathaniel had done the prep work, and I said, “Harder.”

Once, Micah would have argued with me, but now he just did what I asked. He began to pound himself into me; the thickness of him started to fill me up, not just with his body, but with that warmth, that thick, growing hint of pleasure, but it was the tip of him hitting deep that put me over the edge, that brought me screaming, and set my nails in his arms, digging into his upper arms, so I painted my pleasure the length of his arms, as he brought me screaming and writhing underneath him.

He pulled out, abruptly, his body still long and thick and hard. He said, in a voice gone breathless, and growling deep, “You need to feed the
ardeur
, Anita. You didn’t even try to feed.”

I panted up at him, and finally managed to say, “I forgot.”

Nathaniel laughed that deep guy chuckle. “He’d make anyone forget.”

We glanced at our other half, and he lay on the bed on his stomach, watching us with those eyes, face alight with emotion, pleasure, just the watching. Nathaniel was both an exhibitionist and a voyeur. He liked seeing me with other people, and he loved watching Micah and me together.

Micah said, “Over.”

“What?” I asked.

“Turn over,” he said.

My lower body wasn’t really cooperating, and Nathaniel helped me over on my stomach. Then Micah put his knees on my thighs, pinning me, which I liked, but I think it was incidental to the fact that the angle was deeper now. He’d spent most of his adult life with women who were always telling him it was too much, too deep,
fucking ow
; the fact that I liked it, orgasmed from it, made positions possible for him that most women would have tried to endure, but they wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

“If it’s too deep, tell me,” he said. He said that before any new position.

“I will,” I said, my cheek pressed to the bed. The pillows were gone; Nathaniel had moved them out of the way when Micah put me facedown on my stomach.

He didn’t just hit the end of me; the tip of him rolled over, caressing the deepest part of me more than hitting it, and I had to ask, “Is the tip of you bending over, like folding over?”

“Yes,” he said. Which meant from this angle he was a couple of inches too long for me now, maybe more.

“Does it hurt you?” I asked.

“No, does it hurt you?” he asked.

“No, it just feels different.”

“Different good?”

I thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Yes.”

He found a rhythm then, a stroke that carried him into and past the end of me, so that at the end of each stroke I could feel him rolling over, as if he were able to caress me with the tip of himself. It was like he hit the end of me, and then caressed over me, and then stroked upward, and that was at the end of each movement.

“Harder,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He took me at my word, and began to move faster, harder, but each stroke ended in that caressing roll of his body, as if he were petting, massaging deep inside me. It was an amazing sensation. I felt him hesitate, and looked back over my shoulder to see his face. He had his eyes closed; one, so he could concentrate on his body, feel his way inside me, but the other reason was so he could last. Most men are visual, and without being able to see himself going in and out of me, he was able to fight off that last moment a little bit longer. I watched the concentration on his face as my body rocked and moved against the bed under the push and power of him. I had a second of warning, and then the orgasm caught me. It dug my fingers into the bed, it screamed its way down my throat, and out my mouth.

In a voice thick with strain, Micah said, “Anita, feed!”

I dropped the metaphysical leash on the
ardeur
and let myself feed. Micah could feel when I dropped my shields and released my hunger, and he released himself. He stopped fighting to last, and finally let himself go. He pounded himself inside me, hard and fast, caressing, and then as the tip of him rolled upward with that last extra bit of stroking pleasure he went, and because of the
ardeur
I could feel it. I could feel him hot and liquid inside me, because my body fed on it, fed on the feel of him thrust so deep inside me; he bent himself a little back, and if he’d been a different kind of man, that might have hurt, instead of feeling so very good, and if I’d been a different kind of woman, having him so deep inside would have turned from pleasure to not, but we were ourselves, we liked it deep and hard, and all the extras that went with it.

He shuddered above me, and I fed on his energy as he collapsed on top of me. I fed on the sweat on his chest, the frantic thudding of his heart against my back, the weight and feel of him in me, on me, with me—I fed on it all. When we could breathe enough to talk, he said, “Every time I think you can’t get more amazing in bed, I’m wrong.”

I wanted to say something profound, to let him know how exquisite he was, how delicious, but what came out was, “Right back at you, babe.” Not exactly poetry, but it made him push back my hair until he could kiss my cheek and say, “I love you, Anita.”

“Love you more,” I said.

“Love you most,” Nathaniel said, as he cuddled in beside us.

I smiled, and we said the next part together, all three of us: “I love you mostest.” And we did.

T
HE PHONE DRAGGED
me from a deep, dreamless sleep. There was the tiniest thread of sunlight in the dark room, proving we hadn’t shut the blackout curtains quite right. If they were closed, the room was cave dark. Micah moved beside me, groping on the nightstand for my cell phone. The ring was loud and harsh, an old-fashioned phone ring. Nathaniel made a protesting wiggle on the other side of me, his hand trying to hold Micah in place even in his sleep.

Micah’s voice came with only a hint of sleep to it, “Hello.”

I lay in the dark of the blackout curtains, with Nathaniel curled around me; he’d pulled me in even tighter to his body, his front to my back, but there was a tension to his body that let me know he was awake.

“Just a moment, Marshal Brice.” Micah had said the name out loud so I’d know who I was talking to and have a chance of knowing what it was about. He rolled over and handed me the phone. The line of sunlight slashed across his upper body, so that it looked like it was cutting him like some sort of golden blade. I took the phone but shifted the covers over Micah, so that the line of light didn’t touch his skin.
Maybe it was years of dating vampires and knowing what sunlight did to them, but the sight of that line of sunshine across his skin had unnerved me. Micah was a wereleopard; sunlight didn’t hurt him, but… it was almost as if I’d dreamed something bad and didn’t remember it, but it had spooked me just the same.

“Hey, Brice, what’s up?” I said, and my voice sounded normal. I’d had time to wake up for the phone.

“While you and Zerbrowski went home to the family, I found a clue.”

I leaned higher up on my elbow. “What?”

“Neighbors saw the same van between the locations we have, but the plate is registered to an address that our vampire snitch didn’t give us.”

I sat up; Nathaniel’s arm slid down around my waist, his face snuggling into my bare back and ass. He nuzzled a little, and I did my best to ignore it. “Where?” I asked.

“Out near you, which is why you get invited to the party, otherwise I’d just grab SWAT and you’d hear about it afterward. We can pick you up as we drive past.”

Nathaniel was kissing softly against my body. It wasn’t exactly distracting me from what Brice was saying, but it wasn’t exactly helping me focus either. I put a hand behind me between him and my body. I frowned at the clock on the nightstand. “Crap, Brice, we’ve only got two hours until sunset, and there could be as many as twenty vampires to execute. We are going to be cutting it close.”

“If we use guns, we can do it,” he said.

“If they’re all out in plain sight and we don’t have to play
hunt the vampire hiding place
, maybe.”

“What choice do we have?” he asked.

“None. Get your asses out here; if you’re late, I go in without you.”

“I don’t remember giving you the address,” he said, “just that it’s out by you.”

Shit, I was more tired than I knew. “Give it to me.”

“Nope, Captain Storr and Kirkland both warned me you’d go all Lone Ranger if I did, and they were right.”

I cursed silently. “Are you really picking me up, or will you give me the address when you’re closer?”

“I’ll pick you up; it really is on the way.”

“I’ll be ready; hurry, Brice. You do not want to be inside the place when that many vamps wake for the night.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, and hung up.

Nathaniel hugged me tighter around the waist, nuzzling past my fingers to kiss along my hip. He knew better than to say,
Don’t go
, but the tightness of his arm said it for him.

Micah looked at me and took my hand in his. “Be careful.”

“I will be.”

We had a moment of them holding me, and me not wanting to go. I’d have much rather snuggled back down into the warm nest of sheets and body heat. Once I’d enjoyed hunting the monsters, taken a lot of pride in being the best at killing them, but lately, I just wanted to go home and be with the people I loved. Zerbrowski said I was having the ten-years-on-the-job moment. I told him I hadn’t been on the job that long. His reply: “You work what amounts to serial killers, or sex crimes, violent crimes; everyone burns out on those details, even you.”

I sat there in the dark with that thread of sunlight across the sheets, giving enough light for me to see Micah and Nathaniel by, let them wrap me round with the warmth and strength of them both, and I didn’t want to go. Twenty vampires minimum was a lot to kill in less than two hours. I was pretty sure that Jean-Claude could keep my death from dragging any of my other metaphysical sweeties down to die with me, including Nathaniel, but… I’d never been as happy as I was right now. Does happiness make us cowards? If someone had threatened the people I loved, I would have been ruthless to protect them, but there was no threat to me and mine. I was about to leave this warm bed, these warm arms, this happy family, and the rest of our family that stayed mostly at Circus of the Damned, for my job.

It was great to get the bad guys. Wonderful knowing I’d saved them from killing other innocent victims, but Nathaniel was so warm cuddled against me, his lips so soft on my skin. Micah felt solid and real, and so good in my arms. I snuggled against them, and we held each other, and for the first time ever, if one of them had asked me not to go, I might have done it.

I let myself think in the front of my head what I must have been thinking in the back for a while. Maybe the world would be safe without me being Marshal Anita Blake. Maybe new Marshals like Arlen Brice could save the day and I could find a different way to… live.

I
HAD TIME
for coffee, which is usually a good thing, but it turned into a trap, as if the coffee were the goat the hunter had staked out to lure the leopard into firing range. I stood in my kitchen with the fresh cup of perfect coffee in my favorite baby penguin mug, and was so not happy. Cynric had made the coffee, and it was perfect, but it was a trap. I knew the feel of “the talk” in the air, and I didn’t want to have it. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to do it, or talk about it, or deal with it. I especially didn’t want to deal with it when Brice and SWAT could be outside in just moments. I’d even said that, and his reply had been, “There’s never a good time to talk about us, Anita. You’re always ass-deep in alligators.” It was hard to argue with that, so I didn’t try. Arguing when someone says something so very true just makes you look stupid.