Anita Blake 19 - Bullet by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

exactly are you sorry for?”
    “What he said,” I said.
    “When you and I first met, Anita, I’d just gotten away from Raina and Gabriel.”
    “The vampires still speak of Raina, the old Lupa of your pack, and Gabriel, the ex-leader of the wereleopards. They make some of Belle Morte’s court sound kind, and they are not kind,” Asher said.
    Richard nodded. “They were both true sexual sadists.”
    “In that real serial-killer sort of way,” I added.
    Asher turned his head to look at me. “I heard you killed them both while they were trying to make a rape-and-snuff film starring you and Gabriel. I thought the story had grown in the telling.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know if the details have grown, but the basics are true.” I shivered. Gabriel and Raina had been the couple from hell, and it had been part luck that helped me kill them and save the others. I had some scars from Gabriel that I’d have for the rest of my life.
    Asher reached out and took my hand in his. “I am glad you killed them.”
    “We all are,” Richard said.
    “They are not a loss,” Jean-Claude said.
    “Like I said, when I met Anita I’d just gotten away from them. They’d tried to make me into a more dominant version of Nathaniel, just another pet.”
    “They never understood that you would never be that,” Jean-Claude said.
    Richard nodded and said, “I fought high enough in the pack structure to have more choices, and I beat the shit out of Gabriel one night. But that didn’t stop Raina from trying to hurt me in other ways. She made our Ulfric, Marcus, give me to Jean-Claude. I had fought my way into dominance enough to stay out of the beds of people I didn’t want to sleep with, and then they give me to a vampire whose power is all about sex. Raina told me that you’d seduce me eventually and she’d get to watch us together.”
    “I was Master of the City by then, Richard; I would not have let her do that to me, or to you.”
    Richard sat up, drawing his knees in, his strong, summer-tanned arms hugging them to his chest, making the muscles in his arms work. “I know that now, but she’d been my Lupa for six years. I believed her. So I looked at Jean-Claude as just one more person who was trying to corrupt me. I realize that he was just as trapped as I was, but I couldn’t see that then.” His eyes looked haunted.
    I sat up, still holding Asher’s hand, and reached across him to touch Richard’s arm. That made him smile, but he turned those serious, haunted eyes to Jean-Claude. “You were the only one left of the three of them. Almost every time I looked at you I thought of them. Then I blamed you for stealing Anita away from me. I know now that I drove her to you. I made her watch me eat Marcus.” He sat up a little straighter as if he’d realized he was hunching. He held my hand against his arm and looked at me. “I did everything I could to make sure the first time you saw me shift to animal form that it was frightening and terrible. I am sorry about that.”
    “You hate being a werewolf. You wanted me to hate it, too.”
    He nodded. “I did, I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time.”
    “Your doctor must be very open-minded,” Jean-Claude said.
    Richard looked at him. “My therapist, yes, she is open-minded. We didn’t really make a lot of progress until Anita was able to take back her anger this past summer.”
    One of the things about being a triumvirate of power is that you share parts of yourself and not just power. I’d gotten the
ardeur
and a craving for blood from Jean-Claude. From Richard I’d gotten his beast and a taste for flesh. Jean-Claude had gotten a certain ruthlessness from me; I wasn’t sure what he’d gotten from Richard, or what Richard had gotten from him, but what Richard got from me was my rage.
    I’d gained the ability to feed on anger, the way Jean-Claude could feed on lust. I could feed on sex, but found it harder to feed on the “emotion” of