Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,196

came out in a low, eager rush. Her body seemed to soften; the careful control of distance she’d maintained with me melted away. Her in my lap had only looked intimate before; now it was real. It was like she let go of some invisible tension that had been holding her away from me, like the tension on a pond that an insect skates across. She’d decided not to skate above the water anymore. She wanted to drown.

Phoenix kissed me like she meant to climb inside me through my mouth. I had a moment of kissing her back. We were all hands and arms, and finally her body was on the table with me above her. My feet were still on the ground, but her legs were around my waist. If I’d been a man, we might have passed the point of no return, but two women make fast sex harder. Girl-on-girl sex is about foreplay, not fucking. Just the confusion of how to give her the pleasure she wanted helped me climb back into control of myself, at least enough to stand up straight and stop dry-humping her against the table. That let me see Newman with our tray of food. He was staring at me like I’d grown a second, ugly head or maybe sprouted some other monstrous body part.

He said, “Your eyes, Blake. What’s wrong with your eyes?”

I looked down at the woman lying across the table with her legs still wrapped around me. Her lipstick was smeared like Goth clown makeup across her face, and her eyes seemed to shine. But it wasn’t her eyes that were shining; it was mine. I could see the glow of my eyes in hers like cognac diamonds reflecting sunlight into this room that never saw the light of day.

61

I STRUGGLED FREE of Phoenix’s hands so I could slide my sunglasses over my eyes. I told Newman, “Help me get her off of me.”

He laid the tray of food on a nearby table and came to help. I gave him points for that. I knew some fully human marshals who would have refused to touch her or me after they saw my eyes glow. He helped me peel her off without hurting her, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

She was saying, “No, no, please, please, don’t stop. Please!” She struggled in Newman’s arms, not trying to fight him, just trying to reach me. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d done to her, so I didn’t know how to undo it. It was like the ardeur, which was feeding off of lust or love, but it should have stopped when she wasn’t touching me or looking into my eyes. Why wasn’t it stopping?

My stomach cramped so hard from hunger that it nearly doubled me over. Oh, that was why. I went to the table where Newman had set the food down and picked up my hamburger. It wasn’t a great burger, but it was protein and the first food I’d had since breakfast, which was about seven hours ago.

“Blake, behind you!” Newman called.

I turned with the burger still in my hand. Barry the bartender was behind me with a baseball bat, as if being over a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me wasn’t enough of an edge. “Get out of my club! Badge or no badge, we don’t serve monsters in here!”

Had he seen my eyes? No, if he’d seen my eyes glow from across the club, there’d be more people panicking, and everyone I could see was still watching the show. I mean, a girl-on-girl make-out session and now a fight—it was like a double feature. So why was Barry saying monster?

Phoenix called out behind me, “Let me go! Let me go to her! Please, please!”

“Let’s all calm down,” Newman said from behind me, projecting his voice above her pleading.

I looked at Barry through my sunglasses, and he avoided direct eye contact even through the darkness of the lenses. He recognized the symptoms of someone who had been mind-fucked by a vampire. Technically I wasn’t one, but I was getting to the point of if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . . well, you know the rest. I swallowed my bite of burger and tried to think of what to say to de-escalate things. If he swung on us with a baseball bat, then we could shoot him, because one good hit to the side of the head with a