anita_blake | Incubus Dreams

First the nothingness of death, then a spark of power that burns and laps at him, searing at the edges of his raw spirit, and finally awareness beyond the pain and a rush of bright warmth.

Disoriented, all Damian is able to compute in his panic is the connection between the pain of Anita's power running through his soul and the burst of light that has enveloped him. He might be pulled from the golden rays quickly, but he knows those moments in the sunlight are more than enough to incinerate him.

And with the pain still stinging within, he believes that is exactly what is happening. The screams that leave his throat are harsh, filled with the terror of one who is living one of their worst fears.

There is no thought. There is no rationalisation. There is only that light, and his frantic attempts to remove it from his skin, to beat it off him before it makes his skin smoke and light up like dry tinder put to a raging blaze.

Anita does get him out of the kitchen, into the cool darkness of the living room. There are no flames, but Damian flails and bats at himself, and Anita is afraid he will hurt himself. She wrestles him down to the floor, but she's not nearly as strong as Damian.

"Nathaniel! Nathaniel, help me!"

In a flash, Nathaniel is there with her, trying to hold Damian down, and they're doing a piss-poor job of it. They couldn't compete with the strength of even a non-master vampire.

"Damian, you're all right. Damian, Damian! You're not on fire, you're all right!"

It's as if Damian is in another time and place. He can vaguely see Anita's lips moving, but if there's any sound from them, he can't hear it. All he can react to is the feeling of being restrained, and that makes the panic all the more acute.

Even in the dimness of the living room, he shrieks and struggles. The moment they release his arms he's back to beating at his skin. The flames will start any moment; he's sure of that. So sure that he has no room for any other thought, no room for any emotion other than terror.

Nathaniel tries to draw Damian's attention to him, get the vampire to focus. He's desperate to feel sense coming from Damian, not aimless panic about flames that simply aren't there.

"Damian," he begs softly near his friend's ear. "Please, Damian, you can't leave me. You let me close, and dammit, I'm not letting go. Damian..."

Anita tries to think past the fear choking her, but Damian's terror is thick in her throat. She can distantly hear the phone ringing; it's ignored in order to try and bring Damian back to himself.

"Safe!" she practically screams, kneeling in front of the panicking vampire. Anita looks into the wide, unseeing eyes. "Damian, you're safe! Safe, for fuck's sake, you're safe!"

But he can't hear her, and he isn't safe. Because the last time he had been forced into the sunlight was another demonstration of his former mistress' power. He fears those golden rays almost as much as he fears She Who Made Him herself.

His pupils are like pinpricks in a sea of green. It's like a state of shock. He can't see, can't hear, can't do anything except react on trained instinct.

When the front door bursts open behind Anita and bathes them all in sunlight again, it's that instinct that rips an inhuman sound from his chest. It's beyond a scream, and it trails after him as he recovers his feet and disappears down the hallway in a blur of white and red.

Nathaniel is up in a blur of motion, as quick as the predator he is, strength and speed enhanced by those marks. All the marks that burn between everyone, burn inside him, and he curses Asher for not giving him that third mark. If Asher had, maybe...

God, maybe what?

He's down the hall, sees Damian go up the stairs, and he curses, practically flying up the stairs himself. Nathaniel hears Damian screaming in the guest room and he's instantly in there. With a snarl, he pounces Damian, arms around the vampire's neck.

"For fuck's sake, Damian, down, not up! Christ!"

It's all instinct, and centuries of warrior training doesn't let him down when he feels the threat pounce him. He has to get out of the sunlight, and whatever has him is trying to stop him.

He grabs one of the arms around his neck, digging his nails into it as he runs into one of the walls. He isn't sure how much force he uses, but it works, and the restraining arms drop away. He's gone from the room in another instant, across the hall into the bathroom, but the sunlight streams in there, too.

Inhuman speed means you fall hard when you trip, and he ignores the pain of it as he crawls diagonally across the hallway again.

Another bedroom. Another bright window. Another scream.

"Was that Damian?" says a voice over her shoulder as Anita heads up the stairs after them. She looks quickly behind her to see Gregory following, and just nods.

"Close all the drapes up here, Gregory. Start at the far end of the hall."

Anita meanwhile heads into the room Damian had just entered. It was easy to tell which room that was because of the inhuman screams coming through the open door.

Nathaniel limps out of the bedroom Damian had slammed him into a wall in, and he can already feel his body healing the broken bone and torn muscle.

This, he decides, is just fucking insane. They were never going to get Damian under control. But, Nathaniel grits his teeth and heads down the hall, determined to help where he can.

Anita might be heading into the room, but Damian is most definitely heading out of the room, and he collides with her, slamming her into the wall on his way out. It isn't with intentional force, so he probably doesn't harm her badly.

Her touch doesn't calm him, though, and he has no calm to give in return. There is something pulling at his arm, and he twists, trying to run from it and only succeeding in slamming Anita into the other wall of the hallway.

Anita stubbornly refuses to let go of Damian's arm, and when he shifts to throw her into the wall again, she sets her feet, twists his momentum, and sends him crashing into it instead, hard enough to break the plaster.

It's not Damian that turns, snarling at her. Everything human and rational in him boils away as he drives Anita to the floor. Without the marks from Jean-Claude giving her that little extra burst of speed and resistance, he'd have torn her throat out. Fortunately, she has enough time to get a hand around his throat and one against his chest. His teeth snap at her as he bears down on her arm, slowly buckling it with the sheer brute force of his body weight.

A rational being would use arms and legs to overpower, but Damian isn't rational. He's lost to the madness now. Pressing down only with his weight, he snarls and spits, his fangs bared as he mindlessly struggles to sink his teeth into the threat he has pinned on the floor.

Anita's arms start to shake from the effort of holding him back, and Damian's teeth continue to press closer to her throat. She screams for help, and suddenly sees Gregory above her, pulling on Damian's arms. It's enough to slow, but not stop, the descent.

If Damian were just a rouge vampire, Anita could probably have killed him, even unarmed as she was. Damian not being a master vampire, it was possible that the metaphysical boosts she's built up would have been strong enough to tear his throat out with her bare hands. Simply stopping him, though, was a much harder proposition.

Ignoring the pain shooting through his shoulder, Nathaniel grabs Damian, helping Gregory, pulling the feral vampire back from Anita. Blood is still dripping down his arm, though, the arm currently yanking on Damian.

But he doesn't think about that.

He just needs to get Damian away from Anita before the vampire does something Jean-Claude will have to actually punish.

That thought would normally have given Damian pause. Jean-Claude doesn't punish unless it's earned, but the punishment is harsh. If he'd been sane before, he would never have done the things that sent him to the cross-lined coffin for six months. If he were sane now, he wouldn't be doing any of this.

But alas...

Sane or not, all vampires react to fresh blood, and Nathaniel's is all to close. He turns his head toward Nathaniel's arm with a snarl, but Gregory is quick to anticipate. The other wereleopard is a fraction too slow, though, and his arm only manages to get halfway around Damian's neck.

The wrist is right in front of Damian's mouth, and he bites hard. When the wrist tries to pull away, he follows it, leaving Nathaniel and Anita behind so he can pin Gregory and gnaw on his arm, feeding on the blood and flesh like a wild animal instead of a vampire. He doesn't hear the screams. He doesn't care about them. He just wants the blood and takes what he wants.

Edited 2009-10-02 21:53 (UTC)

Nathaniel beats her to where Damian and Gregory had landed farther down the hallway. He manages to get arms around Damian's waist and pull him back, but it's not enough to dislodge the fangs from Gregory's arm, broken now by the impact with the floor.

Suddenly, Damian shoots straight up into the air, slamming them both into the ceiling. When they hit the ground again, Damian is able to shake them off easily and turn his attention back to Anita.

She's managed to get to her feet by now, and when Damian barrels toward her, all of her judo training takes over. She catches his arm, pivots across her hip, and tosses him like a rag doll all the way back to the top of the stairs. Strength is good. Leverage is better.

With everything that happened last night, Richard headed to Anita's as soon as he was up for it. He'd heard the commotion almost as soon as he'd hit the front porch. So he let himself in and hit the stairs to see what was going on.

There's a blink as he registers that Damian had landed in front of him. The thought running through his head is that Damian shouldn't even be awake at the moment.

And that moment of thoughtful hesitation will cost the werewolf dearly. He barrels into the Ulfric, unbalanced from Anita's throw, and they both topple down the stairs.

Damian isn't at all rational, so all he does is react to the presence of a powerful were in his way. He recovers his footing, crouches, and attacks. The threat backs off, but he follows it. The walls expand out into the living room, and he charges again.

The living room gives Richard the room to move, to use his arms and legs and to brace himself a little more. The pause that Damian takes gives Richard time to set up for a roundhouse kick to catch Damian's face.

And catch it he does. One kick to one side of Damian's head, and then a second kick to the other side.

Pain explodes at Damian's face, and blood flies from him in a thin arc. The kicks are so well placed and carried out that he staggers backward into the wall.

There is a gash on the side of his face, along with cuts from where his own teeth have slashed through his lip. The kicks must have hit hard because he doesn't recover immediately, but stays leaning against the wall for several seconds.

Anita makes it down the stairs just in time to see the kick and Damian still manage to make it to the wall without falling. Damian may not be master level, but that didn't mean he was weak.

Richard sets up for another kick, and Anita catches herself staring at him, impressed with the easy stance that belies the strength behind it. Unlike Nathaniel and Gregory, here was someone with preternatural strength and the fighting skills to use it effectively.

She snaps her head back to Damian, inwardly cursing herself for having lost focus in the middle of a crisis, but the vampire still hasn't moved away from the wall. As a matter of fact, he's been standing there for a good thirty seconds or so, so maybe Richard's kick did some good and knocked a little sense back into the vampire.

Richard's hands are held up in a loose defense stance, watching Damian warily. He knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he can't actually put the vampire down. So, he was really hoping that he'd knocked some sense into Damian, but because he wasn't sure he didn't drop the defense. Nor did he let the thought stop him from shifting into a stance so he was ready if Damian came at him again.

Unfortunately for Anita and Richard, Damian proves them wrong in a blur of white and red as he charges Richard again.

The lights are on, but nobody's truly home. There is no reason in Damian's blazing, emerald eyes. All there is is the instinct to attack back at something that hurts him.

Richard reacts, almost all instinct, with a kick to Damian's chest. Aiming there means he won't miss with Damian coming right at him. The power behind the kick would have dropped a human, almost all his strength behind it.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject