"Thank you," she said.
I felt her power, her magic, move over me, through me, like a rush of wind. She pulled away so abruptly it staggered both of us.
We were left standing a foot away from each other, breathing hard like we'd been running. My heart thudded in my throat like a trapped thing. And I could taste her pulse on the back of my tongue. No, I could hear it. I could hear it like a small ticking clock. But it wasn't her pulse. I smelled Richard's aftershave like a cloud that I had walked through. When the marks were working through Richard, it was often scent that let me know what was happening. I didn't know what had caused them to act up. Maybe the power of the other lycanthropes or the closeness of the full moon. Who knew? But something had opened me to him. I was channeling more than the sweet smell of his body.
"What is that sound?" I asked.
"Describe it," Marianne said.
"Like a clicking, soft, almost mechanical."
"I've got an artificial valve in my heart," she said.
"It can't be that."
"Why not? When I lean forward to the mirror to apply eyeliner, I can hear it through my open mouth, echoing against the mirror."
"But I can't hear it," I said.
"But you are," she said.
I shook my head. I was losing the sense of her. She was pulling away from me, putting up shields. I didn't blame her, because, for just a second I could feel her heart beating, limping along. The sound hadn't made me sorry for her or empathetic. The sound excited me. I felt it pull things deep inside my body. It was almost sexual. She'd be slow, an easy kill. I looked at this tall, confident woman, and for a split second all I saw was food.
Fuck.
25
We followed Marianne and her guard, Roland, through the darkened trees. I'd have caught that damn dress on every twig and deadfall. Marianne floated through the woods as if the trees themselves let her and the dress pass gently through. Roland paced at her arm, gliding through the woods like water down a well-worn channel. Jamil, Nathaniel, and Zane moved just as gracefully. It was the rest of us that were having trouble.
My excuse was that I was human. I didn't know what Jason and Cherry's excuse was. I tried to step on a log and missed. I ended up on my stomach, arms scraping along the rough bark. I straddled it like a horse and couldn't seem to get my leg over the other side. Cherry tripped on something in the leaves and fell to her knees. I watched her get to her feet and trip over the same damn thing. This time she stayed on her knees, head down.
Jason fell in a tangle of dry tree roots at the end of the log I was sitting on. He fell on his face and cursed. When he got to his feet, there was a scrape on his chest deep enough to show blood, black in the moonlight. It reminded me of what Raina had done to him. She'd cut his chest to rags, and there wasn't a scar on him from it.
I closed my eyes and leaned over the log, resting my forearms on it. My arms hurt. I raised myself slowly and looked at them. I'd scraped them up enough so that blood was slowly filling the wounds in spots. Great.
Jason leaned against the end of the log, far enough away that we wouldn't touch. I think we were all still afraid of that. Didn't want a repeat.
"What's wrong with us?" Jason asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know."
Marianne was just suddenly there. I hadn't heard her come up. Was I losing time? Was I that out of it?
"You cast out the munin before it was ready to release you."
"So?" I said.
"So, that takes energy," she said.
"Fine, that explains me stumbling around. What about them? Why do they feel like shit?"
She gave a very small smile. "You are not the only one who fought the munin, Anita. It was you who called it, and if you had not been willing to fight it, then the other two would have been helpless before it, but they fought it as well. They struggled against the memories. That costs."
"You sound like you know," I said.
"I can call the munin. These chaotic flashes are what happens when you have a munin that hunts you, and that you do not want to embrace."
"How did you know it was chaotic?" I asked.
"I caught a glimpse or two of what you saw. The merest touch," she said.
"Why don't you feel awful?" I asked.
"I did not struggle. If you simply allow the munin to ride you, it passes much more quickly and relatively painlessly."
I half-laughed at her. "That sounds like the old advice of lie back, close your eyes, and it'll be over soon."
She turned her head to one side, long hair sliding over her shoulders like a pale ghost. "Embracing the munin can be pleasant or unpleasant, but this munin hunts you, Anita. Most of the time, a munin that tries to bond with a pack member does so out of love or shared sorrow."
I just looked at her. "It isn't love that motivates this one."
"No," she said, "I felt both the strength of her personality and her hatred of you. She chases you out of spite."
I shook my head. "Not just spite. What little is left of her enjoys the game. She's having a really good time when I channel her."
Marianne nodded. "Yes. But if you would embrace her instead of fighting, you could pick and choose among the memories. Strong ones will come easiest, but you could control more of what comes and how strongly it comes. If you would truly channel her, as you put it, then the images would be less like a movie and more ... like wearing a glove."
"Except that I'm the glove," I said, "and her personality overwhelms mine. No thanks."
"If you continue to fight this munin, it will get worse. If you will cease struggling and meet her even partway, the munin will lose some of its strength. Some feed off of love. This one feeds off of fear and hatred. Was this the old lupa? The one you killed?"
"Yeah," I said.
Marianne shivered. "I never met Raina, but even that small touch of her makes me glad she's dead. She was evil."
"She didn't see herself that way," I said. "She saw herself as more neutral than evil." I said it like I knew, and I did know. I knew because I'd worn her essence like a dress more than once.
"Very few people see their own actions as truly evil," Marianne said. "It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not."
Jason raised his hand. "Evil."
Cherry echoed him. "Evil."
Nathaniel and Zane and even Jamil, raised their hands.
I raised my hand, too. "It's unanimous," I said.
Marianne laughed, and again, it was a sound equally at home in the kitchen or the bedroom. How she managed to be both wholesome and suggestive in the same breath puzzled me. Of course, a lot of things puzzled me about Marianne.
"We'll be late," Roland said. His voice was deeper than I thought it would be, low and careful, almost too old for his body. He looked peaceful enough, but I could look at him with things other than my eyes. You couldn't see it, but you could feel it. He was a mass of nervous energy. It danced along his skin, breathing out into the dark like an invisible cloud, hot, almost touchable, like steam.
"I know, Roland," she said. "I know."
"We could carry them," Jamil said.
A thrill of power flowed through the trees. It caught at my heart as if some invisible hand had touched me.
"We must go," Roland said.
"What is your problem?" I asked.
Roland looked at me with eyes that were a nice, solid darkness. "You are," he said. He spoke in a low voice, and it sounded like a threat.
Jamil moved between us so that my view of Roland was almost completely blocked, and I assumed, his view of me.
"Now, children," Marianne said, "play nicely."
"We will miss the ceremony entirely if they do not hurry," Roland said.
"If you were a true lupa," Marianne said, "you could draw energy from your wolves and give it in return like a great recycling battery." It sounded like she'd given this lecture before. I guess every pack needs a teacher. I know ours needed one sorely. I was beginning to realize that we were like children that had been raised by neglectful parents. We were grown-up, but we didn't know how to behave.
"You're psychic enough that you might be able to do it in a small way without being lukoi," Marianne said.
"I don't think I'd call being a necromancer the same thing as being psychic," Jamil said.