Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,118

feel my expression sliding away from blank. I decided I’d go for anger, always a good refuge for me. It was better than fear. “I don’t understand what he sees in Donna either, but he loves her to pieces.” I realized that, because I was talking to a serial killer, that might have been an unfortunate phrase, and just thinking that made me laugh. I think it was a stress reaction, but Olaf had never liked being laughed at.

His anger flared to life. “Do you think that is funny?”

“No, I mean . . .”

His anger burned hotter, and I felt the first stirring of his beast tickling along my skin. It made me tell the truth, because I couldn’t think of a good lie. “It was my comment about him loving her to pieces. I just had a moment of thinking that was maybe an ironic phrase to use with you.”

I fought not to rub at my arms where the goose bumps ran with his power, and the first stirring started deep inside me as my lioness woke to his energy. She was just a glimpse of golden fur in the dark sanctuary down inside me, where nothing should have been but me.

“Do you think that is how I like my women, in pieces?” Olaf said, and his voice was a few octaves lower. I wasn’t sure if it was his beast getting stronger or if something had excited him. I was kind of hoping for his beast in that moment, though logically I should have wanted it the other way.

I sort of shrugged. “I know you like to cut the bodies up, so maybe it’s not technically pieces.”

“There is no fear when you say that.”

My lioness flashed her amber eyes at me as she seemed to gaze up that long dark well that was my visual for where the beasts lived. She put one big paw on the ground that just suddenly appeared as part of my visualization. One of the ways you stayed sane with an inner menagerie was to have a visual that your human mind could understand, so my beasts always walked up a path toward me. It helped me keep them as their own separate beings and not deal with the fact that they were inside me like my tonsils or appendix, except that the beasts couldn’t be removed, and the tonsils couldn’t cut their way out of my body.

“I’ve watched your face while we cut up bodies together, Otto. I know that it excites you.” That thought quieted my anger and my nerves so that the lioness hunkered down on the path, but didn’t vanish back into the dark. She was waiting. We both were. We just weren’t sure for what.

“Doing it together with you excites me, Adler.”

“Come on, Moriarty, doing it on your own flips your switch, too.”

He nodded. “I enjoy my kills very much.” His voice was even deeper as he said the last two words.

“We’d better get inside before Ted runs out of charming things to say to Duke,” I said, trying for casual even though my pulse had sped up. I pushed away from the post to move toward the door.

“I believe that you and Ted are more than friends now.”

“Good,” I said, and reached for the door without taking my eyes from him.

Eventually the nervous tension was going to get to me, and I would need action to work it out. I was ready to go through the door or fight—something, anything, to stop the rising tension and the nearly burning energy of his beast against my skin.

“And cool your beast, or you’re going to change right here on the porch,” I said, voice low.

“I am not even close to losing control of my lion, and you know that—just as you are not,” he said, and sniffed the air like he was trying to get a stronger whiff of some delicious scent. “But I can smell your lioness.” He caressed his fingertips down his own arm like he was touching something else. “I can feel your power on my skin, as you can feel mine.”

If he’d been one of my fiancés, it might have been nice foreplay talk, but since it was him, it wasn’t that kind of exciting. My pulse sped faster, my heartbeat starting to thud, but not because of sexual attraction, unless you thought fear was sexy. Oh, wait. He did.

The door opened beside me, and I was concentrating so hard on Olaf that it surprised