Her power was the power of the grave, of death itself, but so was mine. She meant to prove a point, but she'd wakened my necromancy, and she was just another kind of dead. I knew how to handle the dead.
I drew a breath, drawing in my own magic, getting ready to cast her out. I'd done it before. But her chill changed to heat before I could finish that breath. The blood lust washed my magic away, drowned it in a flood of need.
Her voice dripped across my skin like warm honey, as if the dark-power of her eyes had melted across my skin. "The power of the grave is yours to control, but not the power of desire. Desire, in all its forms, is mine to control."
If I'd had air to breathe, I would have screamed; but there was no air, and no sight for a swimming, dizzying moment. But I was drowning in sounds, blood rushing through my body, my heart wet and thudding, my pulse like a second heartbeat in a thousand places under my skin. I could hear, and I could feel.
I could feel Caleb's chest under my hands, feel the roughness of the hair that traced the edge of his nipples, and finally the nipples themselves, growing hard and firm under my fingers. The tiny metal barbells that pierced them were a distraction. I wanted to roll his nipples between my fingertips, and the metal interfered. Like a toothpick in your sandwich, they got in the way. I had a moment where Belle thought about ripping them out, and that was so not my thought that it helped me crawl back into my own head, at least a little.
When my vision cleared, Caleb's eyes were unfocused, his lips half-parted. Through me, it was almost as if Belle herself touched him, and her touch spread lust, lust of every kind.
I was in my own head, my own skin, but Belle's hunger was inside me, too, and I couldn't push it out. She was right; the blood hunger was not death.
I tore my arms through Caleb's shirt, popping the buttons loose, baring his upper body. When I channeled Jean-Claude's blood lust, I was always attracted to neck, wrist, bend of the arm, sometimes the inside of the groin, all nice major arteries or veins, but Belle didn't look high, or low. She gazed at Caleb's chest like it was a prime piece of steak, cooked just right.
My own logic tried to argue. There were other places where there was more blood, much closer to the surface. The sheer surprise of not going for someplace more usual helped me push her back.
Caleb's voice came heavy, "Why did you stop?"
"I don't think it's sex she's wanting," Nathaniel said, voice quiet.
His voice turned my gaze to him. If what was driving me had been the ardeur, it might have been enough to have me crawl to him. But Nathaniel was right, this wasn't about sex, this was about food, and Nathaniel wasn't food. Did that mean that Caleb was food? Not a pretty thought.
"What do you mean?" Caleb asked.
I gazed up at Caleb's bare chest, that young, half-finished face. He looked so puzzled. I said it out loud, though I wasn't talking to anyone in the car. "He doesn't understand."
Belle's whisper, "He will soon enough."
"It looks like it's your turn to take one for the team," Jason's voice from the front.
"What?"
"You're going to get munched on," Jason said.
The combination of my own moral dilemma with the fact that Belle had picked an odd spot for taking blood, one that just didn't make sense to me, was helping me swim to the surface. I knelt back in the floorboard, pulling a little free of Caleb's body.
"No," I said out loud, and none of the men answered me, as if they'd all caught up to the fact that I wasn't really talking to any of them.
Belle's voice in my head. "I have been gentle until now, ma petite."
"I am not your ma petite, so stop fucking calling me that."
"If you will not take kindness from me, then I will cease to offer it."
"If this is your idea of kindness, then I'd hate to see..." I never finished the thought, because Belle showed me that indeed she had been kind.
She didn't roll over me, she crashed into me, in a mind-numbing, breath-stealing, heart-stopping, swat of power. For an instant, or for an eternity, I hung suspended. The Jeep was gone, Caleb was gone, I couldn't see, or feel, or be. It was neither light, nor dark, nor up, nor down. I'd had near-death experiences, I'd fainted before, passed out, but that moment when Belle's power fell through me, that was the closest to true nothingness that I'd ever experienced.
Into that nothingness, that void, Belle's voice fell, "Jean-Claude has begun the dance, but he has left it unfinished between you, the wolf, and himself. He has allowed sentiment to cloud his judgment. It makes me question how well I taught him."
I tried to speak but couldn't remember where my mouth was, or how to draw a breath. I couldn't remember how to answer her.
"I discovered this with the wolf, but could not mend it, for he is not my animal to call. I do not understand dogs, and a wolf is very much a dog." Her voice whispered through me, low and lower, trembling through my body, but for her voice to dance through my body, I had to have a body for her to use. I fell back into my body as if falling from a great height. I was left gasping on the floorboards, eyes staring up at Caleb's startled face and Nathaniel's worried one.