29

JEAN-CLAUDE'S FACE ABOVE me. "Ma petite, what have you done?" He looked into my eyes and he saw it, felt it, but he dragged me away from it. He shut the link down. He left Richard bleeding and alone.

I gasped air in with lungs that worked, and said, "No! They'll kill him. They'll drag him out of the truck and kill him." I dug my hands into his white shirt.

"If he dies, I can keep us from dying with him, but if I open the link between us all to feed him enough energy to heal in time, if it does not work, one or both of us will die with him."

"We can't let him die knowing we didn't even try. Let me feed the energy; you pull me back if it doesn't work."

I watched the struggle in his eyes.

"Jean-Claude," I said.

He nodded. "What energy will be enough to get him up and moving in time? Nathaniel is still hurt; you cannot give the energy of your own triumvirate. It could kill them both."

"He is our Ulfric and we are sworn to protect him with our lives," Shang-Da said, kneeling all that long, dangerous body down next to us. "If by my life, or my death, I can save him . . ."

"Do it," Jamil said, and he was kneeling closer to my face.

"There isn't time for sex," I said.

"We saw what you did to Chimera. We felt the power you took from that feeding. Do it," he said.

There should have been time to look into his handsome face, admire the cornrowed hair and all that he offered, but the one thing we didn't have was time. I said, "I'm sorry."

"I know," he said.

I put my hands on his arms, bare skin to bare skin, and just as when I'd  done it the one and only time to Chimera, there was no time to find the power, or worry over morals, it was a moment of do or die. To raise zombies I put energy into the dead; the more energy the better the zombie, the more completely the dead will rise. This power was almost a polar opposite to that. One second it was just Jamil's warm skin under my hands, and the next my necromancy spilled down my hands and onto that dark, muscled skin.

Jamil's brown eyes widened. His lips parted. He whispered, "God, it hurts." Then his smooth dark skin began to run with fine lines. I was taking back whatever it was that let me fill out a corpse so it was plump and smooth and rosy-cheeked. I took that from Jamil, and he stayed on his knees and let me do it. The first time I'd done it I'd thought it was watching decades catch up with the man, but watching Jamil's skin collapse around his bones, I realized it wasn't time I took from it, but literally life. I fed on the very essence of what made his body move and function. I fed on him, and the rush of power was as strong as and felt better than I remembered it. I think I'd been afraid to remember how good it felt. Afraid that if I remembered, I'd crave it.

The power poured down my skin and into my body. It spilled into Jean-Claude where his body touched mine, so that rush of life and energy, and everything Jamil was, filled us both. It was as if every fiber of my body filled with his essence, and I spilled that into Jean-Claude, until it felt as if our bodies should have glowed like stars with it. Jean-Claude opened that window inside me, inside us, and I was suddenly back in the truck with half my upper body not working, and one lung gone to a painful emptiness inside me. I could hear the men, at least two of them, crashing through the trees toward the truck. Jean-Claude helped me feed the power into Richard. His body convulsed on the seat of the truck, the energy almost too much for his wounded body to take in. He coughed blood, and so did I, spilling it around Jamil's withered skin. That spark that was Jamil's beast reacted to the scent of fresh blood and gave a surge of heat. I felt the balance of it. I could drain all of his life, or I could leave something behind to save later. It made me hesitate.

Richard opened the passenger door and fell out into the bushes. We had to get away from the truck before they got here. I felt him crawling through the underbrush, fighting to get farther away, but we could use both arms now. I realized I was afraid to take all I could from Jamil. I knew how to put it back, theoretically, but I'd never done it.

Jamil was suddenly gone, pulled away, and Shang-Da laid his hands against mine. I didn't have time to think it was brave of him, I just fed. I fed on him without hesitating. I fed on all that strength and warmth and life, and Richard was on his knees, and then on his feet and moving farther into the trees. If he could get far enough away he could shapeshift and heal the rest of the damage. He was willing to do that, but there would be moments during the shift where he would be helpless, and we couldn't afford that.

The power needed to go somewhere, and I found Nathaniel still in his bed, still cuddled with Stephen, and I poured the energy into him. Poured it in until his body ran with fur, and the last of the injury was washed away in a roll of muscle and skin and leopard. The power was so much, so much, as if the two of them together made the same kind of energy that I'd taken that first time. It had been enough to heal so many. I found the lions lying in their beds. Rosamond was very still, with Jesse curled beside her. The power filled her, making her body flow with fur until a great lion filled the bed and chased Jesse out of it. Kelly sat up in bed with Payne naked beside her, her arm in a cast, which meant it was badly broken. I spilled the energy into her and watched her body become the lioness I'd seen in my head, the huge paw cracking the now-useless cast.

I thought of Claudia and the power found her. I shoved the power into her, too, and her skin ran to black fur, and she cried out as the energy forced her broken body to heal almost too fast. I knew even as it felt good, it also hurt. I was losing the ability to be gentle with it. So much power, so much energy. Jean-Claude helped me reach out for Richard again. He was far into the woods now. Far enough he couldn't hear or smell them now. He took the energy we offered and his body shifted into a huge, shaggy wolf. I'd always seen him in wolfman form, never this, and I felt him think that in this form he'd be less likely to be reported to the police as a stray werewolf. He'd be able to hunt in the woods and not frighten people. He didn't say any of it, he thought it, and I thought it, too.

One minute I was padding through the leaves on all fours, the world alive with smells that I'd forgotten, the next I was in Jean-Claude's arms. He held me close, rocking me. "Ma petite, ma petite." And just from the level of emotion in him I knew that what we'd done hadn't been without risk, that there had been a moment, or two, when he'd felt both of us going.

I pushed at him, so that I could turn in his arms to see what I'd done to  Jamil and Shang-Da. They looked like mummies, shriveled and dead, corpses desiccated in some dry desert, but they weren't dead. Jamil was making a high keening noise.

"God," Nicky said, "they aren't dead." He was pressed against the far wall, as if he weren't sure he wanted to be near me right that moment. Maybe there were things terrible enough that even my hold on him couldn't make him see it as all right. I found that oddly comforting.

"No," I said, "they're not dead." I crawled toward Jamil.

"Ma petite, you gained a great deal of power, but we cannot afford to lose more vitality, or you will kill one of us."

"There's power in raising the dead, Jean-Claude. You should know that by now." Obsidian Butterfly, the vampire that I'd learned this nasty, useful piece of information from, had thought she was a goddess, for real, and part of what made her think that was that she gained power from taking life and from giving it back. Jamil's eyes were dried and blind, but as I leaned over him, he screamed, high and buzzy, but louder. Maybe he smelled that it was me, and he was afraid of me now. I didn't blame him for being afraid, because I could have killed him with this second touch just as easily as helped him. Both would be energy. Both would feel good.

I prayed. I prayed that I could give this back and gain energy through it. I'd never actually reversed the process. I'd only seen it done. I touched his face, and it felt like dried leather; the strong bones of his face felt fragile like sticks, as if I could have broken his bones if I held his face too tight. I was as gentle as I knew how to be, as I called my necromancy. This was a type of that energy, and it hadn't occurred to me at the time, but Obsidian Butterfly was the first vampire I'd ever met who could work with this kind of energy.

There was a rush of warm wind as if early summer suddenly filled my skin and the man underneath my hands. It was like watching one of those films where flowers bloom, except this was his skin, his flesh, his very bones filling back out, blooming into the strong, muscled, handsome man I'd known. He came to himself, eyes wide, and screaming. When he could move, he pushed me away and scrambled on hands and feet backward, away, until he hit the wall, and then he screamed again. He held his hands out in front of him as if to ward me off.

I should have felt bad that he was that afraid of me, but the energy felt too good to feel bad. I laid my hands on Shang-Da's shriveled face, his  shiny black hair reduced to straw. That warm wind raced over my skin and into him. The energy filled him, plumbed him, like water returning after a horrible drought. He gasped back to himself, coughing and staring up at me with his brown eyes wide and panic-filled. I'd never seen him panic over anything.

"Your eyes," he whispered, "they're black and full of stars."

They weren't my eyes. They were Obsidian Butterfly's eyes. All power comes with a price. I turned to Jean-Claude and found his eyes filled with a night sky that had spilled over South America when the conquistadors had conquered the New World. I felt Richard's wolf in the woods miles away, and I knew that his eyes weren't wolf amber, they were night-sky black.

Damian staggered around the corner, wiping the blood of a fresh feeding from his mouth. His eyes were filled with blackness and stars.