sunlit memory, and red silk on cotton sheets, and a woman who looked at him as if he were her world.
I felt her body underneath him, felt how much he wanted her, how much he loved her. The emotion was so strong, and just like that, I fed. I drew in the emotion of the moment.
But Cannibal didn’t give up; he pushed back, and I was in my bedroom at home. Micah’s face was above me, his green-gold eyes inches from mine, his body buried deep inside mine, my hands traced down his bare back until I found the curve of his ass, so I could feel his muscles working, pumping him in and out of me.
I shoved the power back at Cannibal, chased him out of my memory, and found us back in his sunlit bedroom. There were fewer clothes now, and I got a confused glimpse of his body inside hers, and then he threw me out. He jerked his hands out of mine, and the moment he stopped touching me, it was over, done. I was back in my own head, with my own memories, and he was back with his.
He got up too fast and knocked his chair to the floor with a loud clang. I sat where I was, hugging myself, huddling around the feeling of his power inside me, rifling through my head, though that didn’t cover how it felt. It felt intimate, and it wasn’t about the sex; it was about having his power force its way into me.
Cannibal went to the far side of the room, facing the wall and not looking at me.
“Sergeant Rocco,” Lieutenant Grimes said.
I heard Cannibal’s voice but wasn’t ready to look at him yet, either. “The reports are accurate. She felt the loss of the operators. She’s tired of killing.”
“Shut up,” I said, and got to my feet, but didn’t knock my chair over. Point for me. “That was private. That last memory had nothing to do with the deaths of the two men.”
He turned around, lowering his arms, as if he’d been hugging himself, too. He looked at me, but I saw the effort of that on his face. “You killed the vampire that killed Melbourne, you killed her while she begged for her life, and you hated doing it, but you killed her for him. I felt it; you took her life because she took his.”
“I took her life because I am duty bound by the fucking law to take it.”
“I know why you did it, Anita. I know what you were feeling when you did it.”
“And I know what you were feeling in that other room, Sergeant. Do you want me to share that?”
“That was personal, not the job,” he said.
I strode over to him, past the lieutenant. The men were on their feet, as if they felt that something was about to happen. I got close enough to hiss into Rocco’s face, a harsh whisper, “You overstepped the bounds and you know it. You fed off my memories, off my emotion.”
“You fed off mine,” he said. He kept his voice as low as mine. Technically what we’d done hadn’t been illegal, because the law just hadn’t caught up to the fact that you could be a vampire and not be dead. By legal definition, neither of us could be a vampire.
“You started it,” I said.
“You took my ability and used it against me,” he said. He was talking low, but not whispering now. I understood; we needed to talk about some of what had happened.
“If a vampire uses an ability against me, sometimes, I can borrow it,” I said.
“Explain, Cannibal,” Grimes said.
We both looked at him, then back at each other. I always hated trying to explain psychic ability to people who didn’t have it. It never translated quite right.
Cannibal started, “All I can sense, most of the time, is violent memories, fear, pain. When Anita tried to stop me, she drew a memory from me, and it wasn’t about violence. How did you do that?”
Grimes asked, “If it wasn’t violence, what was the memory?”
Cannibal and I exchanged another look. I shrugged. “It was personal, about my family.” He looked from the lieutenant to me and asked again, “How did you do that?”
“In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.” There, that was cryptic enough; one thing I did not want the police to know was that I was a succubus. The only thing that would keep Cannibal from spilling the beans was that he didn’t want me to tattle on him. We’d keep each other’s secrets, if we were smart.
A look passed over his face, as if he were trying to decide what expression to show me. “She showed me love, tenderness, like the girl version of what I can do.” Again, he’d told the truth, but not too much of it.
“You learned fast enough, Cannibal. The last memory you got from me wasn’t about violence, either.”
He nodded. “So you peeked at mine and I peeked at yours.”
“Yes.”
“Peeked at what?” Grimes asked.
“The people we love,” Cannibal answered.
Grimes frowned from one to the other of us.
“The man in your memory wasn’t a vampire,” Cannibal said. “I thought you were living with the Master of the City.”
“I am.”
Then who is he, the man? I saw his eyes; they weren’t human.”
“He’s a wereleopard,” I said.
“Don’t you have any human men in your life?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.
I thought of a lot of answers, but settled for, “Did you plan on falling in love with your wife?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, and said, “No, she was supposed to be a one-night stand.” He frowned, and the look was enough; he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “If you were a man, I don’t know what I would do right now.”
“What, you’d hit me?”
“Maybe.”
“You drag me through one of the worst kills of my recent past, and you stand there and bitch because I made you remember something wonderful. I think I’m ahead on karmic brownie points here. Don’t you ever mind-fuck me like that again.”
“Or what?” he asked.
“I can’t shoot you, but if you ever touch me and do that again, I will figure out something very unpleasant to do to you that will be just as legal as what you just did to me.”
We glared at each other. Grimes came beside us. “Okay, what went wrong, Cannibal?”
“She caught my power and turned it on me. I got it back, but I had to fight for it.”
Grimes’s eyes widened, then he looked at me. He looked at me the way he might look at a new weapon, or another shiny new truck to put in his garage from testosterone hell. “How good is she?”
“Good,” Cannibal said, “and controlled. We could have seriously hurt each other, but we were both careful. Honestly, Lieutenant, if I’d known she was this powerful I’d have been gentler. If she had been less in control of her abilities, you might be carting both of us off to the hospital for the day.”
Grimes continued to look at me, as if he’d only just seen me, but he talked to Cannibal like I wasn’t there. “You saw her range scores when she qualified for the badge.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is she as good psychically as she is with a gun?”
“Better,” Cannibal said.
Grimes looked pleased. “Better, really.”
“You know, Grimes, it’s a little unnerving to have you looking right at me but talking like I’m not here.”
“I’m sorry, really, that was inexcusable, but I’ve just never seen anyone take Cannibal on like that. He is the best practitioner of his kind we have.”
“Yeah, I bet he’s hell on wheels at an interrogation.”
“He gathers information that helps us save lives, Marshal Blake.”
“Yeah, I’ve felt how he gathers his information, Grimes, and I don’t like it.”
“I told you if you fought me, you might get hurt,” Cannibal said.
“No, you said if I fought to keep my shields up so you couldn’t get through, it might hurt me. I let you in, and frankly, I consider what you just did the equivalent of having an invited guest steal the silver.”
“Am I missing something?” Grimes asked.
