Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,98

snakes. Micah put his hands on either side of Dev’s face and made him look at him.

“Close it down, Dev, shove them all back just like you do with your tiger. Do it! Do it now!”

Dev screamed again, his eyes tightly closed, seeing nothing but the shapes inside him trying to get out. Micah pressed his hands so hard I could see his fingers imprinting on Dev’s face. “Dev, look at me!” He shouted it.

The other man blinked at him. I held on, but I could feel something pushing against my chest where I was pressed tight against him, as if some huge thing were pushing against his stomach from the inside.

“Dev, it’s just like your tiger. Control it!”

“Too many,” Dev said, and screamed again.

Crispin said, “Stop this.”

Dev rolled his eyes at the other weretiger. “No!” It came out as another scream, but Crispin backed up and left us to it.

“Dev,” Micah said, “are you a golden tiger?”

“Yes.” The word squeezed out between clenched teeth.

“Then do what the golden tigers are meant to do—conquer and rule!”

I felt Dev’s body go still in my arms, as if the animals inside him heard the distant sound of hunting horns and froze. The next moment either they would fight harder, or they’d keep still, hoping the “hunt” would pass them by. I tightened my grip around his waist, one hand holding my other wrist, tightening my core, planting my feet. My only job was to keep him upright, that was it; Dev and Micah were doing the complicated part. I just had to hold on; I could do that.

Dev closed his eyes again, but I didn’t think it was from pain, more to help him concentrate on things that could only be seen clearly inside his head. I’d noticed that outer vision could interfere with inner vision sometimes.

People talk about flexing muscles, but willpower is a muscle, too. I felt Dev gather himself, felt it in his body, as if he were tensing muscles to do something wholly physical, and then his power, his beast, everything that had first attracted me to him roared back at all the beasts. I had a moment to see the pale gold of his tiger with its white fangs wide and snarling. It tried to come forward and be him, but he pushed it back and reached out with will alone to pull something else out of the snarl of animals.

It was pale and golden, too, but not the yellow of his tiger, and there were no stripes on this furred body. Modern lions didn’t have stripes. I wasn’t sure if I heard Micah, or just his thoughts were loud in my head: “Lion, of course, it would be a lion.” He was almost unhappy with the choice. I didn’t have time to ask him why, because Dev’s body began to shift. His human skin went from fever-warm to almost too hot to hold, and then all that smooth skin began to give way to fur. Thick, clear liquid ran hot as blood as his body re-formed itself. I was too close not to feel the bones migrate under his skin, the ligaments shift. I’d had lycanthropes shift on top of me before, but never when I was holding them as tight as I could. It was as if I could feel things move that I’d only heard, or guessed at, as his tall body remade itself in my arms. I closed my eyes as the hot liquid spilled over me, and his body grew taller than his human size. He was a big man, but he was a much bigger werelion.

I blinked my eyes clean of the liquid that I had all over me, but Dev rose above me with his fur dry except where it touched me. His thick mane was a pale yellow-blond, close to his own hair color, though I knew it didn’t have to match anything on the human body of the shapeshifter. He blinked large orange-gold eyes at me from a face that was a graceful mix of human and cat.

He was so tall in this form that his head almost touched the ceiling, which meant he was over seven feet tall. Half-man form for most wereanimals gained them between a few inches and over a foot in extra height when they were wolfmen, or lionmen, or whatever-men.

Like I’d said, Dev was a big guy, and the werelion was fucking massive.

“Holy shit,” Domino said from somewhere behind us.

“This isn’t possible,” Crispin