This Side of the Grave (#5 Night Huntress)

Bones’s pale body rising over mine, his mouth open in a moan . . . crimson drops of blood on his skin that I licked away before biting him again . .
. his hair, so dark against my thighs when he lowered his head between them . . . the restraints digging into my wrists while waves of pleasure and
need crested within me . . .
Yeah, I’d been involved, all right. And bitey, too, it seemed. “Well, um . . . sorry for accusing you of, ah . . .”
“Taking advantage of my own wife while she was out cold?” he supplied.
I winced. “I’m starting to get little glimpses of what happened—though why’d you chain me to a wall? Don’t tell me that Marie’s blood temporarily
turned me into a bondage junkie, too.”
If so, that begged the question of what exactly the voodoo queen was into for kicks, if I’d absorbed that from her, too . . .
Bones actually took in a breath before he spoke. “Kitten, let it alone for now. It’ll only upset you, and it wasn’t your fault.”
“What?” I burst out, dread replacing the lingering warmth those sensual images had evoked.
He sat down, taking my hand, his fingers stroking over my knuckles. The fact that he was being comforting made me even more nervous about
what he was about to say.
“In the rituals Marie was famous for back in the eighteen hundreds, she’d take her followers into the woods off Lake Pontchartrain,” he said, still
sounding like he was cherry-picking his words. “There they’d chant, watch Marie do tricks with a pet snake, and drink from a vat of wine sprinkled
with her blood. Due to Marie’s position as priestess of the voodoo god Zombi, her blood was supposed to give the participants some of Zombi’s
power over the dead, a side effect being uncontrollable lust, if you consider all the orgies that took place.”
Relief surged in me. “But that’s great news! Then I don’t have the ability to siphon ghoul powers like I do vampire ones, because Marie’s blood
could affect anyone that way—”
“Those rituals were a sham,” he cut me off. “They gave people the excuse to pretend any depravities they indulged in weren’t their own doing, but
none of them ever really received Zombi’s power over the dead from her blood. What happened with you was the real thing, however. Marie said
she’d never seen it before, except very rarely with other voodoo priestesses.”
“Mambos,” I supplied glumly, my relief turning to ashes as I remembered Marie’s earlier words. I am black magic, she’d said about turning from a
Mambo into a ghoul, so it stood to reason that her blood was potent magic, too. “So is that why you had to chain me up? Because absorbing
Marie’s powers turned me into a violent tramp? No wonder you said you’d earned that smoke.”
It made even the powers I’d absorbed from Vlad and Mencheres seem like a mild inconvenience by comparison. Shoot a little fire from my
hands when I was upset? No big deal, and hey, came in handy at times. Accidentally smash several pieces of furniture in our house through
telekinesis? Well, we’d needed a new couch and TV anyway, and that also had helped out against the bad guys at a critical time. But this? Not
useful at all, unless Bones had a deep sadomasochist streak.
“The good news is, she said this sort of blind hunger shouldn’t happen to you again,” Bones responded. “That it was just the initial, overwhelming
response to the gate opening between you and the dead. Similar to the blood craze new vampires experience, but that you’d be able to control
future twinges once you were yourself, as you clearly are.”
That was good news, but he’d avoided answering my question, I noticed. “Chains?” I prodded, my voice hardening so he’d know I wasn’t about
to drop the subject.
“All right, luv, if you won’t let it go,” he drew out. “As I said, you were crazed with hunger, and a lot bloody stronger than you normally are. Didn’t
seem to recognize anyone, either, which meant you weren’t being particular about who you sought to assuage that hunger with. Had to chain you up
because otherwise, you tried to find someone else to ease your needs if I wasn’t servicing you, and I did have to pause to feed a few times.”
My jaw dropped at “weren’t being particular” and hung lower at each subsequent word, until I was vaguely surprised it wasn’t resting in my lap by
the time he finished. I grabbed the sheet, pulling it around myself in a sudden rush of scalding shame.
“Oh. My. God. Please tell me I didn’t—”
“You didn’t,” Bones said, with a trace of a grim smile. “Though you did give a lucky bloke in the Quarter quite a thorough fondling by the time I
caught up with you after you broke free from me in the cemetery. Still wasn’t a hundred percent at that point, and I hadn’t expected you to be so
strong. I was able to fly us back to Tepesh’s after I’d fed, but by then, you were well and truly lost to the hunger. Marie warned me you’d be that way,
and I must admit, she didn’t exaggerate.”
I’d had to be dragged away from sexually assaulting a tourist? Why oh why hadn’t I listened when Bones told me not to pursue this subject? But
now that I knew this much, I had to know the rest.
“So, I attempted to rape a tourist and turned you into a sex slave for two days.” My voice was neutral because the embarrassment was so deep,
it transcended reaction. “Anything else I should get a heads-up about? Like, who else to expect a restraining order from? Are we still at Vlad’s?
Don’t tell me you had to drag me off of him, too?”
Bones made a sound like a delicate cough. “No, and we’re not at Tepesh’s anymore. It was a temporary residence, so it didn’t have the means
to restrain a vampire in it. Marie offered to take us in, but as you can imagine, I wanted far away from her. Mencheres had a place with a vampire
holding cell in West Virginia. He chartered a plane to Louisiana and helped contain you while we traveled here.”