Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,175

slammed me against the lockers. But I was ready for it, and my head didn’t slam back into them, which would have stunned me, and my back had had worse done to it. I wrapped as much of my small hands around his arms as I could, but it wasn’t to keep him from slamming me again; it was to get skin-to-skin contact. The moment I touched him, I fed. All that anger, all that rage, that red haze that could have pounded me against the lockers until I broke, was mine to drink down from his skin to mine.

He looked confused, and then he began to collapse as his knees buckled. I was set back on my feet as he sat down heavily on the benches in front of the lockers. His hands dropped to his lap, as if he had lost strength in his arms. His face was soft and confused. The heat of his wolf was gone, siphoned away with his anger. Oh, he was still a werewolf, but he wouldn’t be able to shapeshift until he recovered a little more of himself; until then it was almost like being human. Some of the guards I did trust had been working with me in private, discovering the limits of this new ability to feed on anger by touching someone. I could drain from a distance, too, but it wasn’t as powerful or as satisfying a feeding.

“What did . . . what did you . . . do to me?” he asked, and he couldn’t quite make his eyes focus on me, or much of anything.

I felt so much better. “I fed on your anger.”

“What . . . are you?”

“Wrong question, Ricky,” I said.

“What?” He was still fighting to focus his eyes, his hands limp at his sides.

“It’s not what am I. It’s who am I?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m Anita Blake.”

“Oh, fuck,” he said, softly, trying hard to look at me without his gaze wandering to the side.

“You’re lucky, I’ve gotten better at eating anger; when I first started doing it I took people’s memories, so it was like being rolled by a real vampire, but you remember everything that just happened, don’t you, puppy?”

“Don’t . . . call me that.” He managed to focus his eyes.

“Then prove to me that you’re more wolf than puppy. The next time I ask you what make and model a gun is, I’ll expect you to know. Don’t ever wave your junk in the face of any of the female guards again, unless you know, absolutely know, they want you to do it. Don’t ever call any of your fellow guards chickie, or whore, ever again. Just because a woman thinks you’re a horse’s ass doesn’t mean she’s a whore; it just means she sees through your bullshit.”

“I didn’t know who you were,” he said, but the anger was already back.

“Anger, back so soon, puppy, maybe I’ll just make you my bitch for feeding on rage.”

His eyes showed fear for a minute; that scared him.

“Oh, you don’t like that idea at all, do you?”

“No,” he said, and there was a little bit of snarl to the word.

“Then learn your guns, respect your fellow guards regardless of gender, and don’t be a sleazebag about the women you’re fucking.”

“Anything else . . . ma’am?”

“Yeah, be careful who you piss off here; not everyone is as nice as I am.”

That made his eyes widen and that flash of fear return. He buried it under the anger again, but it was in there, behind the bravado and the macho posturing.

I shut my locker, gathered up a towel, and headed into the showers. The men cleared the way for me with silence, or “Ma’am.” There were other men, nude or in towels, in the doorway to the showers; apparently we’d had more of an audience than I’d realized. That was okay; I didn’t have a problem with all the men now, nude or clothed. I’d been scary and that was what they’d remember, not that I was small and a woman. Peppy followed behind me, smiling. Girls rule; boys drool.

44

I HADN’T REALIZED just how much stuff had dried in my hair until I tried to get it out. I was still peeling it out of my curls when Peppy told me she’d wait for me. “If you’re done, go ahead, and tell Micah that I’m running late, trying to get cleaned up.”

“Having trouble getting it out of your hair?” she asked.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“You had so much