Blue Moon   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

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I can teach you to ride not just the munin but this master vampire of yours, and even your Ulfric. You are their key to each other, Anita. Their bridge. Their feelings for you are part of the binding that has been wrought between the three. I can make you the rider and not the horse."

There was a fierceness in her face, a force that made my skin react. She meant what she said; she believed it. And strangely, so did I.

"I want to control it, Marianne, all of it. I want that more than almost anything right now. If I can't stop it, I want to control it."

She smiled, and it made her eyes sparkle. "Good; then let's begin with our first lesson."

I frowned at her. "What lesson?"

"Come into the house, Anita. The first lesson is waiting for you if your heart and mind are open to it." She went back inside without waiting for me.

I stood there for a moment in the summer heat. If my heart and mind were open to it. What the hell did that mean? Well, as the clichй goes, only one way to find out. I opened the screen door and walked inside. Lesson number one was waiting for me.



37

Marianne led me to the room where she'd settled Nathaniel. It was a large bedroom downstairs. Hours earlier, the room would have been filled with morning light, but now, at nearly three o'clock in the afternoon, the room was dim, almost dark. The window was open, and a breeze had finally found us, spilling the white lacy curtains into the room. A small oscillating fan sat on a kitchen chair so the fan could cool the bed. The wallpaper was off-white with a fine line of pink flowers. There was a large brown water stain in the corner of the ceiling like a giant Rorschach ink blot.

The bed was a brass four-poster that had been painted white. The bedspread was quilted and looked homemade with a lot of purple— and pink-flowered fabric. Marianne had folded the bedspread and placed it on top of a large cedar chest that was under the window. "Too hot for quilts," she'd said.

Nathaniel lay naked on the pink sheets. Marianne tucked the sheets to the tops of his thighs, patting his shoulder in a motherly sort of way. I would have protested his state of undress, but I could see the wounds clearly for the first time.

Something with claws had swiped him wide and deep, starting about the middle of his back and slashing downward across the right side of his buttocks. The wound was deep and ragged on his back, growing more shallow as it worked down his body. It must have hurt to have clothes over it, hurt a lot.

I was surprised that Nathaniel hadn't flashed me his wounds earlier.

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