Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

His anger flared to life. “Do you think that is funny?”

“No, I mean . . .”

His anger burned hotter, and I felt the first stirring of his beast tickling along my skin. It made me tell the truth, because I couldn’t think of a good lie. “It was my comment about him loving her to pieces. I just had a moment of thinking that was maybe an ironic phrase to use with you.”

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t not to rub at my arms where the goose bumps ran with his power, and the first stirring started deep inside me as my lioness woke to his energy. She was just a glimpse of golden fur in the dark sanctuary down inside me, where nothing should have been but me.

“Do you think that is how I like my women, in pieces?” Olaf said, and his voice was a few octaves lower. I wasn’t sure if it was his beast getting stronger or if something had excited him. I was kind of hoping for his beast in that moment, though logically I should have wanted it the other way.

I sort of shrugged. “I know you like to cut the bodies up, so maybe it’s not technically pieces.”

“There is no fear when you say that.”

My lioness flashed her amber eyes at me as she seemed to gaze up that long dark well that was my visual for where the beasts lived. She put one big paw on the ground that just suddenly appeared as part of my visualization. One of the ways you stayed sane with an inner menagerie was to have a visual that your human mind could understand, so my beasts always walked up a path toward me. It helped me keep them as their own separate beings and not deal with the fact that they were inside me like my tonsils or appendix, except that the beasts couldn’t be removed, and the tonsils couldn’t cut their way out of my body.

“I’ve watched your face while we cut up bodies together, Otto. I know that it excites you.” That thought quieted my anger and my nerves so that the lioness hunkered down on the path, but didn’t vanish back into the dark. She was waiting. We both were. We just weren’t sure for what.

“Doing it together with you excites me, Adler.”

“Come on, Moriarty, doing it on your own flips your switch, too.”

He nodded. “I enjoy my kills very much.” His voice was even deeper as he said the last two words.

“We’d better get inside before Ted runs out of charming things to say to Duke,” I said, trying for casual even though my pulse had sped up. I pushed away from the post to move toward the door.

“I believe that you and Ted are more than friends now.”

“Good,” I said, and reached for the door without taking my eyes from him.

Eventually the nervous tension was going to get to me, and I would need action to work it out. I was ready to go through the door or fight—something, anything, to stop the rising tension and the nearly burning energy of his beast against my skin.

“And cool your beast, or you’re going to change right here on the porch,” I said, voice low.

“I am not even close to losing control of my lion, and you know that—just as you are not,” he said, and sniffed the air like he was trying to get a stronger whiff of some delicious scent. “But I can smell your lioness.” He caressed his fingertips down his own arm like he was touching something else. “I can feel your power on my skin, as you can feel mine.”

If he’d been one of my fiancés, it might have been nice foreplay talk, but since it was him, it wasn’t that kind of exciting. My pulse sped faster, my heartbeat starting to thud, but not because of sexual attraction, unless you thought fear was sexy. Oh, wait. He did.

The door opened beside me, and I was concentrating so hard on Olaf that it surprised me. I even made that little eep sound that only women seem to make. My pulse thudded in the side of my throat like a trapped thing. I couldn’t swallow past it to say anything to Edward in the doorway.

His voice was Ted’s drawl. “Y’all going to join us in here, pardners?” The expression on his face went from Ted’s warm smile to Edward’s cold one in seconds, so his affect didn’t match his words at all.

Olaf spoke in a low, growling whisper. “You ran to him the way a woman runs to a man she thinks will protect her. Only prey runs to others for protection.”

And just like that, I saw the danger. If I’d changed lists in his head from fellow predator to prey, then we were in deep trouble—the kind that meant that at least one of the three of us would not leave this town alive, and if things went really badly, it would be two out of three.

40

I LOOKED AT Olaf and all I could think was This is it. We will have to kill him. My lioness crouched inside me as if readying herself for a real leap, as if she could help me fight him. My hand touched my gun, but Edward came up with a better idea. He called back to the others in the office and said, “Give us a minute, pardners,” and closed the door so we had some privacy.

“Anita trusted you to keep her safe in Florida when that car almost ran into us,” Edward said, the Ted slipping out of his voice the way it had slipped from his face.

Olaf actually startled, his whole body reacting to it. My pulse slowed down, the fear of the moment replaced with the memory of older fear. We’d piled too many of us in a car on a hunt in Florida. Long story short, I’d ended up sitting in Olaf’s lap because I didn’t fit anywhere else. It sounded stupid and careless now, but it had made sense at the time. A car had nearly crashed into us and only the driver’s car-handling skills had kept us from either being T-boned or flipping over. The fact that I had broken my solid rule about seat belts in that moment . . . I thought I was going to die, but Olaf had folded his arms around me. He’d kept me safe with the strength of his hands, his arms, his body wrapped around mine. His legs and body braced to keep us both in place. In that moment I had curled myself against him, burying my face against his neck, and held on to him, and weirdest of all, I had known that he would keep me safe even if it meant putting his body in harm’s way. In that moment all the strength that I normally feared had been my shield.

“I did,” I said, my voice a little breathy.

My lioness relaxed against the path inside me; she rolled herself on that dark ground, remembering the surety of Olaf’s strength. She’d made no secret of the facts that she liked his lion and that she wanted a mate. I’d told her she couldn’t have Olaf, but I hadn’t found anyone else to put in his place. Of all my unmatched beasts, she was the “loudest” about missing her other half.