Beast, who had been oddly silent since Leo appeared, came alert and sank her claws into my mind. Dead meat fingers. Trap! Beast thought, drawing up power to fight or run. I am not prey, Beast said. I gripped the door and pulled back. It was too late. Bethany's hands stopped me, hands cold and hard as black marble. My heart rate trebled. I sucked air to scream.
She licked my throat. As quickly as her cold tongue touched me, Bethany's fangs struck. I stiffened, stopped, one hand raised, held up in silent protest; Beast hissed. An electric cold suffused my chest, seeming to fill my lungs, my heart, and travel through my arteries like a freezing river, or like the finest rum, poured over dry ice, crackling and burning. My nerves and muscles spasmed.
I had known the damage to my body was there, but the pain had been blunted by shock. Now it hit me with a slashing charge, as if every nerve at once was scraped raw by frozen steel. It lasted one brutal moment. The pain mutated into something chilled and euphoric, like iced vodka swimming with snowflakes. The sensation flushed through me and pooled in my middle like satisfied hungers, like the sensation of falling through frigid air at the top of the world, like nothing I had ever experienced.
I drew in a slow breath, my throat and ribs moving carefully. I was held in the bite of a predator, and moving too quickly could tear out the rest of my throat. Again.
CHAPTER 11
Biting things, too small to eat
Strength poured in, filling my veins and arteries, a stunning, exhilarating, arctic force, as potent as the night sky at the top of a frozen mountain. The weakness that had drained me was gone. Power shuddered through me, cold force and might. Though it reminded me of Molly's magic, it wasn't witch power, not exactly. It was something else. Something uniquely Bethany, or uniquely shamanistic. Beast panted in my mind, her breath a frozen mist, killing teeth exposed. As if she lay in a powdery snow, she rolled over, cold, cold, cold beneath her, her rough pelt brushing inside my skin, scoring along bones and nerves. Needing to shift, she was pushed close to the change by the rising energies.
As suddenly as she struck, Bethany slipped back from me, her teeth and mouth and hands sliding away, leaving me slumped in my seat, my head rocked against the side window. Slowly, my vision cleared, the dim night sky coming into focus. The waxing moon rested in the limbs of a young oak. City lights glowed in the near distance.
My heartbeat was a wet susurration, a faint movement through me. My skin was tingling, tight and expectant, as if waiting for the next pain or the next pleasure. I took a breath and the night air was damp, muggy, though the Porsche's air conditioner hummed steadily. I placed my palms on the seat, pushed myself upright, and swallowed gingerly. I touched my neck, finding crusty blood and tight new skin beneath my fingertips. Healed. I felt . . . pretty good. I looked at Bethany and couldn't think of a single thing to say.
She sat across from me, swiveled at an angle in the seat, her back to the door, her depthless dark eyes on me. No trace of emotion hovered on her face. She didn't breathe, didn't move at all. She might have been a black marble statue.
When she moved to draw breath and speak, it was a shock. "You taste of several vampires. And violence. And the wildness of trees and rock and rushing rivers. You are not human and never have been." Her head cocked to one side, more lizardlike than birdlike. "I do not think I have tasted one such as you, and I have tasted many." When I didn't respond except to wrap my fingers around my own throat, she said, "I gave you a bit of my essence. You will be energized, more powerful for a time."
I swallowed again and forced out the worrying words. "What is essence? Hope you didn't try to turn me. I don't want to wake up all dead and fangy."
Bethany laughed, and her eyes opened wide as if the sound surprised her. When it passed, a small smile rested on her mouth. "Many would choose to be one of us, even with the ten feral years. No. I did not turn you. If I had, you would be in the near-death sleep of the turned. I shared with you a drop of my own essence, not my Mithran essence."
I thought about that for a moment, remembering the cold power, then guessed, "Shaman? Were you an African shaman?"
"Yes. You know of my world?"
She seemed almost pleased with the thought, and though that wasn't what I had meant, I agreed. "Um. Some. A little." I mean, I could pick it out on a map.
Bethany said, "I was shaman of the Odouranth tribe, a peaceful, farming people." Her face fell, nearly human pain in her expression, and her voice carried the weight of old, dusty pain when she said, "We were destroyed by the Masai, long before they were called Masai, in the mountains of what is now southeastern Africa."
I blinked and a picture of sere grass, burned huts, bodies on the ground, bloody and hacked, flashed over the backs of my lids and was gone, leaving only the memory of ancient agony and grief. She looked puzzled. "You saw this. This memory, just now. Yes?"
I nodded once, the motion jerky. Her eyes watched me, her face inert. "No one has seen inside my memories in over a century."
"I saw," I said. "But I don't know why or what it meant."