Danse Macabre chapter 49

And now it's time for Anita Must Feel Special.

THE FIRST THING you need to know in order to control something is how it feels to do it.
 

 How it feels to do what? Do the thing or control the thing? And I'm kind of inclined to think that by "do" Anita means fuck. Because she has literally done nothing else this entire book except have flavors of non-con.

 I was a natural psychic, which meant that my gifts weren’t something I had to strive for, they just came to me.

 Yes. Anita is just fucking special that way. Those of us who have to work for shit? Yeah, we're not naturally talented. We are SOL. I guess if you're not born with the ability to draw realistically, or do complex algebra, or play piano music from memory, you aren't actively talented.

The problem with being a natural is that sometimes things come so easily that you don’t know how, or even when, you’re doing psychic stuff. It sort of sneaks up on you. You must understand a thing to truly control it.

ONLY ANITA UNDERSTANDS PSYCHIC SHIT GUYS.

Yeah. Apparently even Laurel K. Hamilton realized she'd done enough morally ambiguous sex scenes, because Anita auto-pilots through having Rania in charge and all the healing and shit happens between chapters. THANK YOU GOD I DO NOT HAVE TO READ ANOTHER RANIA SEX SCENE.


But apparently Anita just blacked out, and Rania is still here. Fucksticks. Also:

She loved to be in on someone’s first experience, especially if she could turn pleasure to pain, joy to terror. That just flat did it for her. Not my kink, which made it easier not to do it.

NOTE WHAT ANITA'S BIG CONCERN IS. It's not that this is something horrific that I would rather bleed than allow. It's that overt torture Isn't Her Kink. YKINMK should only count when IT DOES NOT INVOLVE ACTIVELY HURTING PEOPLE. A kink is liking feet or, at the worst, inflation. TORTURE AND RAPE DO NOT GET TO COUNT.

I was suddenly drowning in the scent of wolf. The beast inside me stirred, as if Raina’s power were a spoon and I were some kind of soup. Stirring, looking for just the right tidbit.

It's official. Laurel needs to fucking eat before she starts writing. STOP WITH THE FOOD METAPHORES THEY ARE GETTING FUCKING OLD.

The skin had blistered, and hardened, and begun to slough off. Days, or weeks, of healing in minutes. I moved the hardened skin to one side. I wasn’t quite brave enough to pull at it. I moved all that truly dead skin aside until I found the palm of my hand. The skin of the palm was soft, baby soft, but there was a new cross-shaped scar in the middle of my hand. That skin was shiny and not soft, not rough, more slick. Weeks of healing.

RANIA DID NOTHING YOU INVOKED THE PSYCHOTIC GHOST OF TORTURE PAST WITHOUT USING HER AT ALL WHAT THE FUCK LAUREL WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.

However, Anita has not healed Requiem, so much more petting occurs. And...Anita has to invoke the ardeur because she is too weak to have it permanently damage people, and somehow this means that she is up to healing Requiem, since Rania has offically booked for the evening. And she's shut down the marks, which takes up pages because Anita has to make sure she hasn't hurt anybody, but she doesn't dare open the marks so everybody has to psychally call everybody else and it takes a while.

...I am completely lost.

Anita and Requiem position to have more sex and that is the end of the chapter.