Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17)

Chapter 58

TRUTH STOOD THERE with his serious eyes, and his dark hair in contrast to his brother's. He stared at us with gray eyes and a face that was a match for his brother's under the partial beard that hid that nice jawline and let him be a little more invisible than Wicked.

I expected him to look away, our modest Truth, but he didn't. He looked at us, his face cold and pale in the starlight with that edge of dark hair. He looked at us, and there was something I'd never seen on Truth's face: hunger. He looked at us like a starving man, or maybe a drowning one.

Wicked ran his hand down the front of my body, uncurling my legs so that the front of me was bare to his brother's eyes.

I started to tell him to stop teasing his brother, but the words died unspoken because Truth was walking toward us. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, and his black T-shirt followed. Their upper bodies were almost identical, broad and strong; only a long curving scar, shiny with age, showed a difference. His hands were at his belt when I tried again to say something. It was when he dropped his gun, holster and all, on the ground without a backward glance that I knew something was wrong. Truth and Wicked were always careful of their weapons, always.

I started to say something, but his hands were at his belt and the pants were peeling back, and I found that it wasn't just their upper bodies that were almost identical.

I said, "Truth," and I felt it then. The ardeur wasn't gone. When I fed, it went back to sleep, always, unless it had spread to others in the room. But I had to touch someone to have it spread like that. Truth had been too far away, but even as I tried to think that logic all the way through, he was balancing on one leg to pull off first one boot, then the other, and he was in front of us, spilling his pants over his ankles and stepping out of them.

Still lying on the ground, held against his brother's body, I stared up at him. I had a moment to decide how I felt about that, and then he was kneeling beside us, reaching for me.

I managed to say, "Truth," and then he pulled me away from Wicked and spilled me to my back. I was left gazing up at him. He fell on top of me, putting his mouth to mine, and kissed me as if he would climb inside and flow down my throat. I kissed him back, kissed him with mouth and arms around his back, tracing his spine, spilling down to the swell of his body where waist ended and other things began. I couldn't reach beyond that; he was too tall.

He kissed me, long and hard, until soft, protesting noises spilled out of his lips, then he rose off me, too tall to both kiss me and make love to me. He spread my thighs with the strength of his hands. I had a moment to see all that hard, thick length, and then Wicked's hand was there, holding a condom.

Truth made a sound, low in his throat, but he took it and put it on. By the time he was finished he was making a sound that was almost a growl, low and persistent. Eagerness did not begin to describe that sound in a man's throat. He pressed all that safely sheathed length against me. I watched him push himself inside me, one inch at a time. Just watching him slide inside me threw my head back and made me cry out. I could see the night sky and a million stars dancing overhead as Truth pushed his way inside me.

He kept himself propped above me, back on his knees, so that almost the only thing that touched me was the long, slide of flesh that kept going in and out of me.

I cried his name to the stars, and he began to pound himself inside me, harder, faster, his breathing growing ragged as he began to lose his rhythm. I stared up at his body above mine, his eyes looking out into the night and not at me. I started to tell him to look at me, but the orgasm caught me unawares, and I was left screaming, shrieking, hands reaching for any part of him I could, tracing my pleasure in his flesh. He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted my lower body off the ground as he made that last hard, shuddering thrust, burying himself as deep inside my body as he could, as he spilled inside me and the ardeur fed.

I fed not just on the sex and the soft sweat of him, but on the fear in him. He'd been afraid of the ardeur since Belle Morte gave him a taste centuries ago. So afraid, yet it had caught him again, caught him in the desert night under a shine of stars and the sweet scent of naked bodies. He collapsed forward, still on his knees, his hands locked around my body, his head falling forward against my breasts. I managed to touch his hair; it was finer than Wicked's, fine and silky under my hands.

I petted his hair while I learned how to breathe again, and my pulse climbed back into my throat, so that the clean, desert air was like champagne, cool in my throat.

His body started to shake, and I realized he was crying. I stroked his hair and said, "Truth, Truth, are you all right?"

He raised his face to me, tears glittering in the hard light of the stars. "I wanted to say no, but I couldn't. I could not resist you naked in the moonlight."

"Oh, Truth, I'm sorry," and I meant it. I knew what it was not to have a choice.

Wicked came to us, putting an arm across the other man's shoulders. "It's all right, she's not like Belle."

Truth pulled back from both of us. "The ardeur makes them all monsters in the end."

I sat up and, very carefully, very gently, went to him. He actually looked scared, and I wiped his tears away with my hands. He let me, but his eyes were wide, showing too much white, like a horse about to bolt. "Help me not to turn into the monster, Truth."

He frowned and looked at me, not like I was something to fuck, or something to be afraid of, but as if he were seeing me-whatever that meant.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked, voice still thick with tears.

"I mean, you tell me if I'm becoming a monster. You tell me if the power is turning me into something else."

"Jean-Claude will tell you that."

"He told me once that he trusted me to kill him if he became as heartless as Belle Morte. That he counted on my not letting him be a monster."

"Are you telling me to kill you if you lose control?" he asked, slowly.

I thought about it. "Not yet, but if the Darkness takes me, and there's no more me left, then yes."

"You don't know what you're asking," Wicked said.

"I know that everyone else loves me too much, but if all that's left of me is the ardeur, then I'm already gone."

The brothers exchanged a look, then gave me almost identical looks back. "How do we know when you're gone?" Truth asked.

I thought about that. "I don't know."

Truth touched a finger to my cheek and came away with a single trembling tear. "You mean it."

I nodded, and curled my arms around my knees, clutching me to myself. "I thought that it was the men. That living with Jean-Claude and all the others was making me lose control of myself, but they aren't here. It's me. It's me, Truth, don't you see? I don't know what's happening to me, and I don't know how to control it." I laid my head on my knees and cried. Knowing that I should get dressed, and there was a demon waiting, and I didn't know where Edward was, but all I could think of in that moment was that I didn't trust myself anymore.

Truth wrapped his arms around me, and Wicked came at my back, so that they held me between them while I cried. They held me while I confessed to them something I wasn't sure I could say to Edward, or any of the men I loved. How do you ask someone you love to kill you if you grow too powerful, too evil? Jean-Claude had asked it of me once, and I had cursed him for it. Now I let the two brothers hold me, and gave them my darkest fear.

Truth whispered against my hair, "If the ardeur takes you and you become as evil as Belle Morte, I promise..."

Wicked said, "We promise."

"We promise," Truth said, "that we will not let you be that evil."

"You'll kill me," I said softly.

They were quiet for a few breaths, and then their arms tightened around me, and they said in one voice, "We'll kill you."

And that was the best I could get, that if the ardeur or the Darkness took me, that Wicked and Truth would kill me before I could do whatever it was that either of the evil bitches of the West wanted me to do. It didn't matter that it might kill anyone metaphysically tied to me, because if Marmee Noir possessed me, or I became nothing but a vessel for the ardeur, whatever was inside me would spread to them eventually. The thought of what we could all do, if we became truly evil, truly without pity, was too awful to contemplate. We could rule the vampires and most of the wereanimals in this country, and then we could move on Europe. If Marmee Noir took me over and possessed all that belonged to Jean-Claude and me, there'd be nothing to stop us unless the two vampires holding me now could stop it early, stop it with me.

I sat there in the starry night, held in the arms of the only two people who I thought might be good enough, ruthless enough, and honorable enough to kill me if I asked. I'd once thought that Edward would do it if it needed doing, but I knew now that even he would hesitate. He loved me too much. But Truth and Wicked didn't love me, not yet, and if we were careful, they never would. I needed them to keep this promise. I needed to know that if I failed, utterly and completely, I had a fail-safe. A fail-safe made of swords and bullets, and two of the finest warriors that had ever walked the planet. As fail-safes went, it wasn't bad.