[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
body raised and shivered.
"Are you all right?"
"Sure," but my voice was a breathless whisper.
Page 247
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
He took me at my word. Some barrier went down, and Richard's energy crashed into me like a fist. I
remembered falling, and the feel of Richard's arms around my waist, catching me, then it was like I was
elsewhere. I was everywhere. I was over there in the trees, staring at us with eyes that tried to turn and
see me, but I wasn't there. It was like the wind that opened inside me when I walked a cemetery, except
it wasn't power that was spreading outward. It was me. I flashed through a dozen eyes, brushed bodies,
some furred, some still skinned. I hurried outward, outward, and touched Raina. I knew it was her. Her
power lashed out like a shield, casting me away from her, but not before I felt her fear.
Richard called me back, though call implies a voice. I slipped back inside myself in a rush of curling
golden energy. I could see the color behind my eyes, though there was actually nothing to see. I opened
my eyes, though I wasn't a hundred percent sure that they'd been closed. That golden energy was still
there, swirling inside, along my skin. I curled my hands over Richard's shoulders and felt an answering
energy in him.
I didn't have to ask what I had just experienced. I knew. It was what it meant, at least for someone as
powerful as Richard, to be alpha. He could fling his essence outward and touch his pack. It was how he
kept the werewolf from changing form two days ago. It was how he could share blood. Marcus couldn't
do it, but Raina could.
Jean-Claude's power, even my own power, never felt so alive. It was like I was drawing energy from
the trees, the wind, like being plugged into a vast battery, as if there was enough magic to go on forever. I
had never felt anything like it.
"Can you run?" Richard asked.
The question meant more than just the words, and I knew that. "Oh, yeah."
He smiled, and it was joyous. He took my hand and flung us into the trees. Even if he'd been human, I
couldn't have kept up with Richard in a dead run. Tonight, he didn't run so much as flowed into the
woods. It was like he had sonar telling him where every branch, every tree root, every fallen trunk would
be. It was like the trees moved away from him like water, or maybe moved into him like something else
that I had no words for. He pulled me with him. Not just with his hand, but with his energy. It was like
he'd entered me and tied us together somehow. It should have been intrusive and frightening, but it
wasn't.
We spilled into the great clearing and Richard's power filled it, flowed over the lycanthropes like a fire
springing from one dry branch to another. It filled them and made them turn to him. Only Marcus, Raina,
Jamil, Sebastian, and Cassandra were untouched. Only they kept him out by force of will. He swept
everyone else before him, and I knew that part of what let him do that was me. Distant as a dream or a
half-remembered nightmare, was Jean-Claude, down that twisting power that was almost buried under
Richard's shining light.
I felt every movement. It was like the world was suddenly crystalline, almost like the effect from an
adrenaline rush, or shock, where everything seems carved and hard-edged and terribly, frightfully clear. It
was like being dipped in reality, as if anything else would forever be a dream. It was almost painful.
Marcus sat in a chair that had been carved from rock so long ago the edges were rounded with weather
and hands and bodies. I knew that this clearing had been the meeting place for the lukoi for a very long
time.
Page 248
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Marcus wore a brown satin-lapeled tux. The shirt was of gold cloth, not gold lam, but the real deal, as
if they'd melted down jewelry and beaten him out a shirt. Raina curled on the edge of the stone chair. Her
long auburn hair was done in an elaborate swirl of soft curls on top of her head, down along her face. A
gold chain cut across her forehead with a diamond the size of my thumb in it. More diamonds burned like
white fire at her throat. She was absolutely naked except for a sprinkling of gold body glitter, done thick
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]