“Not yet.” His power pushed at me again; it was like drowning, when you think you’ve made it to the surface, only to have another wave hit you full in the face. But the trick to not drowning is not to panic. I would not give him my fear. The memory couldn’t hurt me; I’d already lived through it.
I tried to stop the memory, but I couldn’t. I pulled on my hands, still in his, and got a flicker of image, like flipping channels on a televison. The briefest image of him, his memory.
I pulled on my hands and got more, a woman under his hands, him holding her down. She was laughing, fighting not for real, and I knew it was his wife. Her hair was as dark as his, and curled like mine. It flung across the pillow, and her tan looked wonderful in the red silk. Sunlight spilled across the bed as he leaned down for a kiss.
I was suddenly back in that other bedroom, in the dark with the dead. I turned my hands in Cannibal’s, caressed a finger across his wrist, just where the skin is thinnest and the blood flows close. We were back in the sunlit memory, and red silk on cotton sheets, and a woman who looked at him as if he were her world.
I felt her body underneath him, felt how much he wanted her, how much he loved her. The emotion was so strong, and just like that, I fed. I drew in the emotion of the moment.
But Cannibal didn’t give up; he pushed back, and I was in my bedroom at home. Micah’s face was above me, his green-gold eyes inches from mine, his body buried deep inside mine, my hands traced down his bare back until I found the curve of his ass, so I could feel his muscles working, pumping him in and out of me.
I shoved the power back at Cannibal, chased him out of my memory, and found us back in his sunlit bedroom. There were fewer clothes now, and I got a confused glimpse of his body inside hers, and then he threw me out. He jerked his hands out of mine, and the moment he stopped touching me, it was over, done. I was back in my own head, with my own memories, and he was back with his.
He got up too fast and knocked his chair to the floor with a loud clang. I sat where I was, hugging myself, huddling around the feeling of his power inside me, rifling through my head, though that didn’t cover how it felt. It felt intimate, and it wasn’t about the sex; it was about having his power force its way into me.
Cannibal went to the far side of the room, facing the wall and not looking at me.
“Sergeant Rocco,” Lieutenant Grimes said.
I heard Cannibal’s voice but wasn’t ready to look at him yet, either. “The reports are accurate. She felt the loss of the operators. She’s tired of killing.”
“Shut up,” I said, and got to my feet, but didn’t knock my chair over. Point for me. “That was private. That last memory had nothing to do with the deaths of the two men.”
He turned around, lowering his arms, as if he’d been hugging himself, too. He looked at me, but I saw the effort of that on his face. “You killed the vampire that killed Melbourne, you killed her while she begged for her life, and you hated doing it, but you killed her for him. I felt it; you took her life because she took his.”
“I took her life because I am duty bound by the fucking law to take it.”
“I know why you did it, Anita. I know what you were feeling when you did it.”
“And I know what you were feeling in that other room, Sergeant. Do you want me to share that?”
“That was personal, not the job,” he said.
I strode over to him, past the lieutenant. The men were on their feet, as if they felt that something was about to happen. I got close enough to hiss into Rocco’s face, a harsh whisper, “You overstepped the bounds and you know it. You fed off my memories, off my emotion.”
“You fed off mine,” he said. He kept his voice as low as mine. Technically what we’d done hadn’t been illegal, because the law just hadn’t caught up to the fact that you could be a vampire and not be dead. By legal definition, neither of us could be a vampire.
“You started it,” I said.
“You took my ability and used it against me,” he said. He was talking low, but not whispering now. I understood; we needed to talk about some of what had happened.
“If a vampire uses an ability against me, sometimes, I can borrow it,” I said.
“Explain, Cannibal,” Grimes said.
We both looked at him, then back at each other. I always hated trying to explain psychic ability to people who didn’t have it. It never translated quite right.
Cannibal started, “All I can sense, most of the time, is violent memories, fear, pain. When Anita tried to stop me, she drew a memory from me, and it wasn’t about violence. How did you do that?”