Touch of Darkness (20 page)

I started giggling. I couldn’t help it. But the giggles turned to a gasp of pleasure as he began kissing his way down the front of my body. His hand stroked between my thighs. “Ah. Fur.” He shifted position, spreading my thighs and then moving between them. Using his hands he raised my knees and began kissing, and licking, the sensitive skin behind the bend, moving ever so slowly to the inner thighs.

“Is this a wabbit hole?” he teased. But before I could answer he blew a breath of air against the sensitive skin of my moistened opening. I whimpered, my body writhing against the strong hands that pinned my hips to the bed. He teased me with his tongue, flicking it against me, sucking, bringing me to the delicate edge of orgasm, then pulling back, slowing down. I was whimpering, begging him with my words and my body.

“Please, please, please”

There was no more joking, no laughter. Only need that stole coherent thought, made me want to scream. He covered my mouth with his, and I could taste myself in that kiss, a kiss that softened my cries because I couldn’t seem to help myself and he knew I wouldn’t want the others to hear.

Slow and gentle, he began pushing his way inside me. It felt right, so good, so … incredibly … good. The orgasm started with the first thrust. I’d been hovering on the verge, so the feel of him moving inside me pushed me over the edge. It hit me in waves, building, then ebbing, building again. His speed increased. Each thrust harder, faster, moving against me. I clawed frantically at the bedding, my body struggling against the intensity of sensation at the same time that I craved it. I felt the rhythm change, knew that he was close, so close. I shifted, moving my hips, and that small change did it. I came again in an explosion of pleasure that spasmed my body around him, bringing him over with me. He cried out my name as he collapsed onto the bed, almost too spent to even pull himself free of my body. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The orgasm had left me literally limp and sweaty with pleasure. If I could ever move again I’d need another shower.

16

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It was probably because of the nap, but I was wide awake at 2:30 in the morning. Tom needed his sleep. He would be going on shift in the morning. Being exhausted can be actively dangerous for a firefighter, so I slid carefully out from under his arm and pulled on some clothes. As quietly as I could, I padded downstairs. Mary had left the downstairs hall light on. It was enough light for everyone to be able to find their way around, but dim enough to allow for sleep.

Bryan was sacked out on the couch, mouth open, snoring softly. Rob was curled up on an air mattress on the floor next to the bassinet.

I didn’t know when they had arrived, but it didn’t matter. They were here now. It made for quite a houseful and I promised myself I’d find somewhere for Tom and me to live before we wore out our welcome. I didn’t see Dusty, but I figured out where she was by following the sounds of soft crooning coming from the direction of the kitchen. Ah, right: middle of the night, baby, feeding. I padded across the carpet in the direction of the noise, hoping that maybe she’d have fixed some coffee. Probably not. I didn’t smell any. But hey, it was worth a shot. I stepped through the swinging doors and found her sitting at the kitchen table. She was wearing a long white nylon nightgown that had an elastic top. One side had been pulled down, and the baby was breast-feeding. From the noises Robby was making you’d have thought he was famished. She looked down at him, her expression so content that I felt a stab of intense jealousy.

“Good morning,” I whispered, my voice light, pleasant, hiding the darker emotion as best I could.

“Pfft. It’s morning, anyway.” She looked up and gave me a smile that made me feel guilty as hell. “It’s a little too early to be good in my opinion.” She pulled him away from her breast, and he wiggled, his face screwing up to cry out in protest, little fists shaking in rage at the unfairness. But she knew what she was doing, because almost as soon as she set him against her shoulder and began patting his back he let out the kind of belch that would do a beer-guzzling frat boy proud.

“That was a good one, Robbie.” She kissed him on his forehead and moved him back into position. He settled back in, feeding more calmly this time, and she reached over to take a sip from a glass of milk. She gave me sad eyes. “No coffee for me any more. It makes him hyper.”

“Ugh. That sucks.” I pulled out the chair directly across from her and took a seat.

“Tell me about it.”

“Still, it’s worth it.” I nodded toward the baby suckling at her breast.

“Absolutely.” She smiled down at him contentedly for a moment before looking back up. “Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a present for you at the end of the counter.” She gestured in the general direction, and I saw a pair of big bags. One bore the logo of a local bookstore. The other had a padded mat sticking out of the top.

“Tom told us that someone stole your meditation mat and the books Henri Tané had given you. Rob and I figured if they were important enough to steal, you needed to get another set pronto.” I rose, crossed the kitchen, and began rummaging in the bags. It was all there. The incense, the mat, candles, even the hard-to-find reference books. It had to have cost them a fortune, and they probably shouldn’t have done it, but damn I was grateful. Because you couldn’t fault the logic. If the vampires didn’t want me to have it, then I probably needed it.

“I got myself a set too.” She stroked the baby’s cheek gently as she spoke. “I figure, I’d better learn how to use my gift right so that I can teach this little guy when the time comes.”

It made sense, I supposed, but I wouldn’t have expected it. Dusty had always shied away from using her powers before, only stepping up when it was a life-threatening emergency. I’d always figured she’d been scared off by the fact that her stepfather had tried to give her to the vampires because of them. But if she was right and the baby had talent, it would probably … no, make that definitely be a good idea to train him.

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

She shook her head. “You’re thanking me! Excuse me. Who’s the one who nearly got herself killed saving my baby?

Please. There’s nothing Rob and I can ever do that will be enough.” She gave me a wicked grin. “Incidentally, it shut up your detractors in the pack pretty damned thoroughly too. When Janine gets back she’s going to have one hell of a time drumming up support.”

“That’s good to know. I’ve been really nervous about the Conclave.”

“Yeah. So has Tom and everybody else. Nobody likes that they’re sticking their noses in our pack business, but there you go.”

The baby was finished eating, and seemed to be fading off to sleep in her arms. She let out a slow, wide-mouthed yawn. “I think I’ll put this little guy to bed and see if I can get some more sleep.” She adjusted her nightgown to cover herself. Rising to her feet, she carried Robbie in the crook of her arm toward the swinging door. “We’ve got a rough couple of days ahead of us.”

“Night, Dusty.”

“Good night.”

The room seemed oddly empty after they left, the silence so thick that I could hear Bryan’s snores from the other room, and the ticking of the clock hanging above the sink. I hoped Mary wouldn’t mind, but I needed coffee. I rummaged in the cabinets until I found what I needed and set a pot to brew. That done, I pulled the books from their bag and moved them over to the kitchen table.

I knew for a fact that there had been a few times these past few days that the queens had successfully blocked my gift, effectively locking me inside my own mind. I needed to find out how they’d done it and, more importantly, how to counteract the effect. I was pretty sure the answer was inside one of these books. Now was as good a time as any to start looking for it.

Three hours and two mugs of coffee later the household was stirring. I could hear a shower running upstairs, which probably meant Tom was getting ready. Bryan was still out of it, but Dusty and the baby were making noises, and I could hear Mary talking to Joe in the other room about running to the store to get breakfast food for the resident horde. She was joking, but there was an edge to it. I couldn’t blame her. Company had descended, disrupting their quiet life with no warning, and no end in sight.

“Find anything?” Dusty appeared in the kitchen doorway with Robby on her shoulder. She was jiggling him a little the way mothers do sometimes to keep the baby from crying.

“Actually I did.”

She walked over to the table to look at the paragraph I was pointing to. It was in the section on shielding, and it talked about how a shield could be used offensively to trap an opponent inside their own mind. It would cut off the abilities in such a way that the person might not even notice for days, or weeks, by which time it could be made strong enough that it would be nearly impossible to break from the inside. It could only be lifted by the caster, or broken from outside.

“Oooh, nasty.” She shifted the baby to a more comfortable position. “You think that’s what they’ve done to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I ran my hand through my tangled hair in frustration. “I’ve been trying to think if I’ve used my talent lately, and I don’t know. I’ve done a couple of things, but they could just be chalked up to observation. Maybe I heard the vampire moving in the trees rather than sensed him. Maybe yesterday’s nightmare was just a dream. Or maybe the fact that I was touching Tom at the time counteracted what they’ve been doing. I don’t know!”

“Want me to look? It says here I should be able to sense it.”

“Unless they did it to you too.”

“No harm in trying.”

“Yeah, if you only look. The book also says that if you try to break it there’s a good chance the power could backlash onto you. Depending on how much energy they’ve put into it you could be seriously injured.”

“Right.” She turned to hand the baby to Rob, who’d come into the kitchen to join us. “Look but don’t touch. I can do that.”

I sat still, watching her reread the paragraphs we needed. I was nervous as hell and trying not to show it. After all, psychic stuff isn’t baking cookies. It couldn’t possibly be as simple as following a recipe, could it?

I wriggled in my seat, watching impatiently as she closed her eyes and steadied her breathing. I knew better than to distract her, but it was hard to just sit. Patience is not, and has never been, my best thing. I actually saw it when she “hit the wall.” Her face reddened, screwing up in frustration, her breathing growing ragged.

“Dusty,” I reached out to touch her hand, to tell her to stop before she hurt herself. At the same instant the baby reached for his mother.

It was like being at ground zero of a nuclear blast—only we were the bomb. Our power, which had been dammed and blocked, joined with the backlash, racing outward. My mind’s eye saw a queen vampire, her fangs bared to sink into the throat of a former Eden zombie at the same instant as a lesser Thrall thrust a needle into his arm. The power hit her in a burst of white-hot pain; her mind and body snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane. At least three others fell, and their hives with them, and still the power was not done. It raced forward, like flame along a fuse. But this time it didn’t reach its goal. The Thrall hive might have changed, but it still was a hive. The caster felt the other deaths, and with that split-second warning managed to pull away from the collective, shield herself and the host she lived in from the blast by throwing a score of lesser vampires in the way of the blast. It killed them in an instant, but left the power with nowhere else to go. So it doubled back, coming straight for the three of us. I heard myself screaming in terror, felt strong hands grab me, hauling me bodily across the room. I knew it was Tom. Dripping wet, still naked from the shower. He’d sensed what was happening and raced downstairs to help. Rob held the baby, who was shrieking as hard and as fast as his lungs could draw air while Mary grabbed onto Dusty.

It was the wolves who saved us. Their magic, their power, deflected the worst of the energy, grounded it somehow. It hurt like hell, like fire burning through every nerve ending in a white-hot rush. It had to have taken only a minute, but it felt like an eternity.

“What the fuck was that?” Rob’s voice was shaky. At least he could talk. Now that I’d stopped screaming I couldn’t have said a word if my life depended on it. I was shaking like a leaf, and the only thing holding me upright was Tom. Dusty was sobbing incoherently. Mary steered her gently over to Rob and the baby. The three of them huddled together, comforting each other. Almost immediately the infant’s screams calmed to whimpers. Mary turned away from them. She stalked across the kitchen until she was barely an inch away from Tom and me.

“This was your fault.” There was a growl underlying the words, and her eyes glowed eerily with her magic. “I want you out of my house. Now!”

“It was an accident.” Joe stood in the doorway. I knew he’d come as quick as he could, but he’d arrived too late to help. He stood, leaning hard against the swinging door, wearing only a pair of striped boxers. The scars on his legs were hideous, and his knee bent oddly sideways without the brace to support it. He spoke softly, trying to calm Mary down. But there was no calming the rage in her eyes, and power poured off of her in waves. I couldn’t imagine how she was holding her beast in check. Hell, I didn’t know how any of them were managing. There was so much magic, so much tension in the room I could barely breathe. It was as if the air itself had grown hot and thick. Tom turned, putting the bulk of his body between me and his Acca. “Do we at least get to get dressed?” His bitterness was palpable, but he stood with his head held high, his jaw thrust forward.

“You have ten minutes.” She turned on her heel, and stalked from the room.

“Mary—” Joe turned, as if to follow, but I stopped him.

“Let it go, Joe. It’s all right.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” He gave me a look that was equal parts frustration and sadness. I shook my head. He couldn’t know that. He hadn’t been here to see. But he believed it, trusted that I would never deliberately put Dusty or Robby in danger. That meant a lot to me, because it wouldn’t have always been the case. Just a few months ago he’d have been more than happy to believe the worst of me. It did my heart good to know that had changed. But now was not the time to argue. Mary was simply too angry to be reasonable. She’d been frightened badly. Hell, we all had. And like me, she reacts to fear with good old-fashioned anger. Given a choice of fight or flight, she’d chosen fight. If the circumstances had been reversed I might well have done the same thing.