Skin Trade

Chapter 33-34

  Chapter 33

  I DIDN'T USUALLY try to call the wereanimals that were tied to me metaphysically. It just sort of happened. My psychic mentor, Marianne, told me that my natural abilities were so strong that I did most things without thinking about it first. That could be good and powerful, or bad and a weakness. But I'd been learning how to be a grown-up psychic and do stuff on purpose. It was the difference between driving really fast on a public street, or driving really fast on a track with professional drivers. One was for kids; the other was for grown-ups.

  I tried simple first. "Crispin, come to me. " I held my hand out.

  He stood up. Bibiana's hand fell away. He actually took a step my way before her power breathed through the room. It stopped my breath in my throat, made me taste my pulse on my tongue. Crispin's face was almost pained. His eyes looked at me with such longing, but he didn't move closer.

  But the white tiger inside me did move. She began to pad eagerly up along that well-worn path inside me. She began to trot, and I knew once she started running, when she hit the "surface" of my body, it would feel like getting hit by a truck from the inside out. I hadn't had it happen in months, and I had seconds to stop it, if I could.

  I tried to call wolf, but tiger was too close. The tigress was running full out, a white blur, streaking toward me.

  "Fuck," I said.

  Rick and Domino had moved closer to us, as if they couldn't help themselves. Only Ava seemed able to resist, but then she wasn't the same. . . color.

  I called black tiger, I called it with a scream and a roar inside my head. The black form smashed into the white inside me and sent me spinning across the room. I ended up on the floor near the windows, with the two tigers snarling inside me, trying to tear each other apart, but my body was their battlefield.

  I cried out. I couldn't help it.

  Crispin yelled, "Anita!"

  Bernardo was beside me, kneeling. I heard Edward yelling in my ear. "Anita, talk to me, or we're coming in. "

  "Don't. . . don't come. Not yet. " My voice held the pain I was feeling. There was nothing I could do about that.

  Crispin was halfway across the room, but she was beside him. I could not force him to me with the white queen beside him. Domino was walking toward me with a scowl on his face. The black tiger and the white hesitated in their battle. They looked up and used my eyes to see him. They both liked him.

  I said, "Domino, come to me. "

  He shook his head, but the black tigress broke free of the fight, and the white tigress let her. The black began to stalk closer to me. I put that energy into the man I could see. I called him with images of dark fur and eyes like fire in the night.

  He came to me as if each step hurt. He came to me with a look on his face that mirrored Crispin's when Bibiana kept him from me. But I didn't have time to care or think it through. I had to satisfy the tigers or risk becoming one for real. That was the real danger of what I was, that I might finally pick an animal that wasn't Jean-Claude's animal to call. If I did, then I might end up controlled by someone else, like Bibiana and her Max. To keep that from happening, I would mind-fuck Domino. Was it evil to think it all the way through and still do it? Maybe. Was I still going to do it, if it would keep the white queen from mind-fucking me? Oh, hell, yes.

  Chapter 34

  BIBIANA TRIED TO call his white side, but the black tiger was so hungry. So hungry to find another black-furred side to rub up against. So lonely, so terribly lonely. The black tiger didn't try to burst out the way the white was trying to with Bibiana's urging. The black was sniffing the air and making low eager noises as Domino came to us.

  He dropped to his knees beside me, as if someone had cut his strings. He just fell to his knees beside me on the white tiled floor. His face was a mask of anger and fear and longing.

  His voice came out strangled. "You are a black queen. You really are. "

  I held my hand out to him. He reached out to me. Bibiana yelled, "Roderic, stop him!"

  But it was too late. Our fingers touched, and the black tiger made a sound that spilled out of my throat. Domino let me pull him in against my body. He stared down at me, and those fire-colored eyes were still afraid, and still angry, but underneath that was a glimpse of something that felt better.

  He whispered, "You smell like home. " He lowered his face, not to kiss me but to rub his cheeks, his mouth, his nose, against my skin. He drew in the scent of the black tiger inside me, like a cat trying to roll in catnip. Except that this catnip was me, my body.

  I felt the black tiger want to take him. There was sex in there, but also to force him into his tiger form, but the black tiger was content, happy even, just from his closeness. I think I could have calmed things down. It would have been all right, but then the power of the white queen breathed through the room like the wind from the open door of hell. Bibiana's energy hit us both. It made the white tiger snarl and begin to creep forward.

  "No," and I yelled it. The white tiger hesitated. I stared up into Domino's face. "Give me permission to feed on you. "

  "What?" he asked.

  The white tiger leapt onto the black, and they started trying to tear me apart again. I writhed and struggled not to scream in Domino's arms. I knew if I screamed, Edward and Olaf would come through those doors.

  Domino said, "My Queen, if by my flesh or my seed I can feed you, then feed. "

  I didn't understand everything he said, but the tigers stopped fighting. They panted and stared up at him, through my eyes. The black tiger growled low and soft, and it spilled from between my teeth.

  I had a few moments to realize that among the tigers, when they said feed, they meant either flesh or sex, or both. Domino had given me permission to take his life. The black tiger understood that, but she and I were in agreement. It had been so long since we'd found another of us. We didn't want to eat him. We wanted to save him. We wanted to keep him.

  Bibiana sent another wave of power over us, but this time the black and I were ready. We were both angry with her. Angry that she interfered in this. She had no right. He was ours. Ours!

  The anger became rage, the rage became my beast, but I had other uses for anger now. It didn't translate into shapeshifting for me. I called that part of me that was vampire powers, that was the ardeur, and there was a moment where it could have spilled to sex, but it wasn't sex I wanted. I was pissed, and now I could feed that anger. I'd tasted Domino's anger earlier in the casino. I knew it was in there. All I had to do was throw my anger into him.

  I let my rage spill into him. He screamed, head back, and the rage was so great, so long inside him. His beast began to rise with that anger. I drew him down into a kiss, and I fed through the touch of his mouth on mine, through the bruising grip of his hands on my arms, through the struggling of his body against mine. I held him and I breathed in his rage through his lips, his skin, his body. I breathed in his anger and let it join that seething mass of rage inside me.

  I fed on Domino's anger, and with that anger came knowledge. I got glimpses of what had filled him with such rage. I saw him as a child, alone in a foster home, crying. I saw the other children making fun of the eyes and the hair. I saw him saved by Bibiana, but even here, he wasn't white enough. He belonged, and he didn't. He was like the others, but he wasn't. Always, he was not quite home.

  He stopped struggling, and by the end of it, he was crying in my arms. I held him, and the black tigress snuggled close, so that we both held him.

  I saw Bernardo standing over us, uncertain, as if he wasn't sure if I was all right or not. I spoke to the uncertainty on his face. "I'm all right, Bernardo. "

  "Your eyes," he said, "they're all brown and black light, like a vampire. "

  I kissed Domino's forehead and tested the truth of his words. I could taste Domino's pulse like candy on my tongue. I had that urge to plunge teeth into flesh and see if the candy squirted red. You can't be a living vampir
e, but whatever I was becoming was close.

  But I didn't just taste blood and food. I felt the other tigers. Not just the one lying in my arms. I felt them all. I turned my head, and the moment Bibiana saw my eyes, she was afraid. Her fear appealed to both the vampire part of me and the beast. Fear means food. If something is afraid of you, you can control it, or kill it.

  I called Crispin to me. Not by using tiger powers, but the way a vampire calls its animal to call. "Crispin, come to me. "

  Bibiana tried to hold him by the hand. I said, "Let him go, or I'll see how many tigers I can call today. "

  "You would not dare try to steal the animal of another master vampire. "

  "You mean, like you didn't try to steal away the human servant of another master vampire. " I sat up, and Domino curled around me, utterly passive, utterly content.

  She didn't let go, so I reached out to her as a vampire would. A vampire that could call tigers. She let go of Crispin, and held her hand as if his skin had burned her.

  Bibiana's power reached out, but not to us. Rick came to her hand, and the far door opened, and more of the white tigers came to stand with their queen. But I didn't care. Crispin had taken my hand. I sat there with his hand in mine, and Domino curled around my waist, and it was nearly perfect, like being wrapped in your favorite blanket at the end of a long day's work. I'd learned that the ardeur could be about friendship and not just romance. In that moment, it was even more than that. It was about that feeling of belonging, of being home.

  Then I felt a different energy, in all that sea of white tiger power. I felt a thread of something new. Something unique. I didn't know what it was until the blue tiger inside me stepped from the shadows and started to pace forward.

  She was truly blue with black stripes, a deep cobalt color, almost a black, but it wasn't. She was true blue, and she'd smelled something that belonged to her.

  He stepped out from the rest, a puzzled look on his young face, because he was young. Young enough to make me start to swim up to the surface of myself. Young enough for me to know that whatever I had just done to Domino might destroy him.

  I stared at the short dark blue hair, a perfect match to the tiger inside me. I stared into his eyes that were two shades of blue, as if Crispin's eyes had married with Jean-Claude's, and knew he was mine to call.

  I asked, "How old are you?"

  "Sixteen," he said.

  "Shit," I said.