“Oh.” I licked my lips; they were bruised and tender. “What orders did Kem give?”
He shoved the comforter away and gathered the hem of the tank. Pulled it from me. The air, though warm, was still cooler than Rick, and I tightened as it swept over me. His hands skimmed lower, warm, calloused fingers sliding into the top of the boy-shorts. “Later,” he whispered. And I forgot everything else.
Much later, Rick was lying beside me, his head braced on one arm, the comforter pulled half over us. The firelight still dancing with the shadows, I stroked my fingertips up and across his chest, across the bruises old and new that discolored the flesh over his ribs. “Explain,” I said, pressing gently in the center of one blacker than the others.
Rick flinched slightly. “Kem in a temper.” I frowned. Rick shrugged. “I heal fast now.”
I didn’t dispute that, but Kem was full were. Even in human form, he’d be hard for Rick to defend against. Slowly, I traced across his ribs, up his chest to his shoulder with the mountain lion and bobcat tattoos and the scars that marred them. He tensed when my fingertip traced the mountains in the background, almost pulled away, but reined in his reaction. My fingernail scraped lightly across his bicep and up to his collarbone, back down to circle the eyes of the mountain lion. Rick stilled, watching me with the intensity of a hunting leopard. Curious, rapt.
The eyes of the lion and the bobcat, and globes of blood on their claws, were the only unmistakable things left of the exquisite tattoo. In the mass of scar, warped design, and distorted colors, I could make out the shape of the teeth that had bitten him, the werewolf bitch trying to tear the tattoo from his flesh. Firelight lit on the irises. I touched one. My fingertip stilled as the texture of witch magic tingled up from his skin. The eyes glowed hotly, as if throwing back the flames, a molten gold, and seemed to look at me. The taste of magic sparked, tart, citrusy.
I lifted my fingertip and the irises returned to the gold of expensive ink. I tapped it again and the glow returned. The tattoo had been put into his flesh by a witch, a spell that had been interrupted, but I didn’t know the whole story. “The witch who made this, who put a spell into your skin using a tattoo.” Rick made a hmmm of encouragement, the sound half purr. My heart hammered unsteadily. How could I ask this without sounding needy or whiny or stalker-nuts? “Was she a seer?” Which was marginally better than asking him if she saw me in his future. How else would he have my two cats on his body? I wondered if—
“I don’t think so.”
My heart plummeted. Of course not. That was stupid.
“Her name was Loriann. She was doing the dirty work of a half-crazy vampire named Isleen, one of Katie’s get.”
I settled deeper in the pillows and pulled the comforter higher, thinking, Okay, I don’t get some kind of proof that we belong together. But then no one ever does.
“Isleen wanted scions, but there was something wrong with her blood. Hers either never rose or died while chained. So she found herself an old witch, a crone, living out on the bayou with her two grandchildren, and tried to force her to create a spell of binding. When Gramma refused, she killed the old woman in front of the kids and told the eldest, Loriann, she’d kill her brother, Jason, if she didn’t do the job.”
I flinched slightly. One side of Rick’s mouth quirked up with an expression that said, Yeah, life’s a bitch. “Then she fed from Jason and took him away. He was seven.”
I watched his face. “She fed from a child?” A first feeding was almost always sexual in nature, vamp saliva tightening all the pleasure centers in the body and working on the brain like a drug. Feeding from a child under twelve was against the Vampira Carta.
“Yeah. She did. Couple nights later, Isleen and I met up in a bar. And I spent the next few days in an abandoned horse barn, stretched out on a black marble square, chained inside a witch circle as Loriann’s spell was built into me. Then, just like in the movies, at the ninth hour, I was saved and Isleen died.”
Rick had been tortured before, long before the wolves got to him. But he wouldn’t want pity. His eyes held mine, and the breath I took was steady and slow as I forced my emotional reaction to his tale deep inside. “You were saved?”
“Yeah, I was partially free by day and I managed to make some stakes. Isleen and I fought, and I was losing just when Leo and Katie blew the barn doors in and finished her off.”