He hugged his arms tighter around his knees. “I don’t think touching you again would be a good idea, Anita.”
“You want to touch me, don’t you?”
“More than almost anything, which is exactly why it’s a bad idea.” He hugged his knees tighter until I saw the muscles in his arms bulge with the effort. I think he was holding himself tight so he wouldn’t give in to the urge to reach out his hand and close the small distance between us.
I sympathized, God knew I did. How many times had I fought against touching Jean-Claude before he finally won that battle? Hell, how many times had I fought not to touch a lot of vampires, or shapeshifters? So many of the preternatural powers grew worse when you touched, but in this moment I needed them to grow worse. They’d taken my weapons, and killing Nicky wouldn’t stop Jacob from making that fatal phone call. Without weapons I couldn’t kill everyone quick enough to save Micah. I might be able to do something to save two out of three, but at least one phone call would get through. That wasn’t an eventuality I was willing to play with, so violence was out for now. I’d put it in reserves for later, but for right now I needed something less violent, and more sneaky. I didn’t have a lot of sneaky in my arsenal of skills, but I had a few things. Things that had made Nicky fight his Rex over so little interaction with me. What would happen if I gave him a lot more interaction? What would happen if I used my vampire wiles and tried to take him over? Could I do it? Was I willing to do it? For Micah, yes; for all three of them, hell yes. I’d compromised my moral standards to save strangers’ lives, so what would I do to save someone I loved?
There was only one answer to that question: Anything.
I held out my hand. “Come to me, Nicky.”
“No,” he said, but it was a whisper.
I remembered this game. There’d been a time years ago when I’d fought every time Jean-Claude had wanted to touch me. I’d craved the feel of his hand on my body long before I’d been willing to admit it out loud. I realized with a start that sent jolts of electricity down my fingertips that I wanted to touch Nicky. I wanted the feel of his skin under my hand. Normally, this would have made me run the other way, but not tonight. Tonight I couldn’t afford to be afraid of this part of myself, because it was the only weapon I had left.
I thought I’d have to touch him first, but in the end he came to me. He wasn’t strong enough to force me to come to him.
He crawled on all fours, closing the small distance between us. Lycanthropes, especially the cat-based ones, can crawl like they have muscles in places no human ever possessed, all liquid grace and sensuality. Nicky just crawled, almost like he wasn’t sure it was a good idea. Maybe it wasn’t, but when you run out of good ideas, bad ones start to look better.
I expected him to use his hands to touch me, but he rubbed his cheek against the unbruised side of my face. The moment our skin touched the hunger rose inside me in a hot rush of need. I carried Jean-Claude’s blood hunger in me, and the hunger for flesh of several wereanimals, and the need in me would have been happy with either. Lucky for what was left of my humanity I had one other option for hungers. The ardeur was one of the most specialized abilities of Belle Morte’s bloodline, from which Jean-Claude descended. It enabled vampires to feed on sex so they could travel in countries where they were still illegal and not leave a trail of vampire-bite victims behind them. Other bloodlines fed on fear, or anger, and that last one I’d managed to find on my own. I could feed on anger now, but it wasn’t as a good a feeding and I didn’t want Nicky mad at me.
“Oh, my God, what is that?” He breathed it out in a trembling line of fear. His one visible eye was wide, flashing white in the dimness of the shed. The side of his neck was lost in shadows, but I could feel the beat of his pulse on my tongue like candy that I wanted to lick and suck, and finally bite down and let all that rich, hot center burst into my mouth. I leaned forward, aiming for his mouth and a kiss, but that would only be the beginning. His mouth wasn’t what I wanted him to open for me. It was a way to get closer to that throbbing heat in the side of his neck. A distant part of me understood that this was wrong, that tearing his throat out would be bad, and my chances of killing him faster than he could kill me were almost nonexistent, but the front of my head was screaming for food. I had planned on using the ardeur to roll Nicky and make him help me, but I hadn’t planned on the other hungers being this strong. That only happened when I’d used up a lot of energy. Healing used up a lot of energy. How hurt had I been, and how much of my reserves had gone into getting better?