by L. A. Banks
“Baby, listen—”
“Do not use that term of endearment,” a sullen voice replied, reverberating off the walls. “Not on me.”
“Okay,” she murmured, leaning on her sword, trying to get a bead on where Carlos’s unseeable form might be in the room. “That’s fair.”
Silence gathered the tension in the room as she formed her next verbal approach.
“I chose to come with you,” she said slowly.
“Why, because they finally put your ass out?”
The voice had shifted, almost seemed to be circling her. She followed it blindly, trying to keep it in front of her and not at her back.
“They wouldn’t have given me the Isis if they’d put me out, Carlos. You know better than that. It would be in my chest.”
Again, silence, but she could tell he was thinking.
“Remember when you just told me that I had no concept about the bite . . . what the different ones meant?”
There was no answer, just a low snarl coming from the corner of the room.
“You rightfully got angry about my lack of understanding,” she said, pressing on, her voice unfazed. “I should have trusted that you wouldn’t go off with some stray female vamp. Yes, and I should have trusted you. Just give me a chance to explain the soul-sharing ceremony to you, so at least you know how it went down. I wasn’t just playing with you, or working you,” she said, resolute. “It is no less sacred than a mate bite, for a Neteru.”
She waited, could hear the air crackle around her. “Just like I don’t have full master awareness from your line because I’m not fully turned, you don’t have full Neteru awareness from mine, because you haven’t been fully turned. And at the time we did what we did to each other, I had about as much self control as you—none.”
She could hear a heavy piece of furniture drag across the floor and smash into the wall. Good, at least she was getting some sort of reaction.
“You were warned about the dangers first, Damali. I wasn’t!”
“Yeah, but see, that’s just the thing, what I was doing to you wasn’t dangerous. It would pull you closer to the Light, not—”
“In case you haven’t already figured it out, pulling a master vampire toward the Light is lethal.”
More furniture banged, but at least she was starting to be able to see. The foreign darkness was abating and giving way to the mere absence of light. She could make out the beginnings of shapes and forms and started to gain her bearings in the room, but he was still invisible.
“Carlos, seriously. There was only good intent when I held your hands and looked into your eyes. It was a pure rush of passion to give you only the best of me . . . but I never meant to hurt you. That consequence never even dawned on me, or I would have warned you.”
“You should have given me the option, Damali.”
“Baby, I was so turned on, so into what was happening between us . . . you’ve been there, right? I lost perspective.”
When he didn’t answer but just breathed out hard, she spoke more gently. Everything she was saying was true—that he had to feel. She spoke slowly and softly, trying to heal his wounded male ego. “I wanted everything you had to give, and wanted to give that right back from me to you.”
“D . . . I don’t want to talk about it, or go back to that, right now,” the deep voice said, but with much less force. “What’s done is done, and you’re getting away from the subject at hand, namely, a solution.”
“I’m not going to apologize for wanting a full life with you . . . a future, and normal, healthy babies one day . . . and friends and family all around, unafraid of creatures of the night preying on them . . . I refuse to apologize about the fact that ever since the day we met, I’ve wanted to be in your arms day and night, and—”
“I wanted all those things, too, but you took my pride in the transaction, girl,” he said, cutting her off and materializing with his back to her. “My fucking respect. What good is a man with no respect?” He let his breath out hard. “My fucking nose ain’t no better than Rider’s now. No respect!”
“Respect?” This was some crazy man-shit that she knew she’d never figure out. Prowess bullshit was bad enough in normal human males, but she had no concept of what she’d be dealing with if she had to do circle logic with a master vampire. “Nadie duda de tu capacidad,” she said as gently as possible.
“Oh, right, no one doubts my ability,” he said in a low seethe, his angry breaths making his back expand and contract as he spoke. “You’d better stop trying to work me, D . . . talking to me in Spanish, and using that feminine bullshit on me. It won’t work. Not tonight!”
Damali felt for the side of the lair bed and flopped down on it. She garnered her patience and drew from her human knowledge base, trying to soothe his wounded ego. “Baby, you’re tripping. All your vampire senses are intact. Marlene was just . . . she was just pissed when she said all that. Rider was, too.” Damali waved her arms about. “You can still do your vamp thing. There’s nothing wrong with your nose, okay? And anyway, I would never disrespect you. Why would I do that—or want to be with some brother I didn’t respect?”
“Not you,” he snapped, finally whirling on her to face her. His eyes blazed red, flickering intermittently gold. “I’m a damned head of state! When I go to council meetings, I already have to stop my fucking heartbeat just to enter chambers. I can’t go down there with the rest of my shit raggedy. They can’t think I have any soft spots, least of all in my heart, woman. And you are disrespecting me by insisting on going after the seal and the key, with or without me. Are you crazy?”
Damali squinted at him in the darkness. Okay, point well taken about him having to keep up appearances in front of the other vampires, but saving humanity was nonnegotiable. She needed him on her side, for them to work as a team, and she was not going to allow him to give in to some unnecessary drama.
“I’m a Neteru—a head of state, too, if you will. A ruler. And, trust me, brother, I’m not supposed to have fangs.”
She couldn’t believe he was being so stubborn. “You’ve got problems?” she said, standing. “Yeah, well, I can tell you there’s probably an angelic battalion up there ready to hand-deliver me to the other side. They’re done. They’ll probably drop-kick my butt into the pit, if this goes down wrong. I’ve temporarily disgraced my kind, too. But as long as we’re both still in the game, we can make something positive and honorable come out of both our indiscretions. So what are we going to do about this shit?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Mar can probably give you something or your system will purge it on its own. The good will purge the darkness, but the thing you forgot, Damali, is that the darkness can never completely banish the Light. It only works to your advantage, not mine. Metaphysics, baby, that’s what this whole war is all about on the grand level. Remember?”
“And how is it not in your best interest to ultimately have the Light banish the darkness within you?” She put her hands on her hips, leaving the Isis on the bed, and looked at his now-solid image hard.
“I liked my powers,” he said quietly. “All of them.”
She didn’t say a word, just stared at him.
“Girl, you know how I rolled. Even when I was alive, I always went top-shelf, was never no scrambler. I handled my business with authority. My territory was tight.” He walked away from her, and raked his fingers through his hair down to the scalp. “There were things I wanted to give you, to show you, now my resources are all jacked up.”
“You are going to have to explain that resource issue to me,” she said, her voice firm, but also gentle. “And you know I never cared about—”
“That’s the thing—you didn’t; I did,” he murmured. He turned and leaned against the wall, speaking to the floor. “You know, they tell young brothers to do the right thing . . . and yet, the options and results are really fucked up. Dead or alive, the people who say to do the right thing have the system rigged so that it’s almost impossibl
e to get your head above water by following their convoluted rules . . . rules that they never followed until after they’d gotten what they’d wanted.” He glanced up and held her gaze while speaking in a far-off tone.
“I didn’t have to become a vampire to see. A blind man could see it. I may not have been to college, but trust me, I’ve been schooled well. The powerful still plunder countries, neighborhoods, territories, for what they want to seize—by force. Robber barons, imperialists, mobsters turned presidents . . . then, they go legit. They’ve only cracked open the door to let a few not like them in, and under very controlled circumstances. Yeah, I messed up while alive, because I wanted the same power they had. I wanted the same respect. For me, then, like now, living or existing without that wasn’t, and isn’t, in my DNA.”
For a moment, she had no answer for him. The world was indeed unfair; there was no argument about it. She knew what he was talking about, that’s probably why she’d been created to tip the scales to bring forth the truth about a lot of things. Spoken word. However, getting sucked into the twisted game still wasn’t the answer. What she knew she had to get across to him. Carlos had to understand that the real issue was in finding a way to flip the script without going dark oneself. Spiritual Jujitsu. Leverage the dark against itself so that something positive would come out of any negative situation that occurred.
“I hear you,” she said after a while. “But there are a lot of ways to get and keep respect without doing the terrible things the oppressors of people have done. We saw how that messed up the were-demon in Brazil. You’ve gotta be creative, faster than them, smarter than them. You have been dead long enough to see where that leads, so why—”
“Because as a woman, you will never understand this thing that men need called respect.” He looked up at her, his eyes hard but his tone calm and logical. “I liked being able to provide for me and mine,” he said flatly. “I liked having motherfuckers step out of my path, afraid. Yeah.” He pushed himself off the wall and stood proud. “I liked being able to take my woman wherever knowing that I could afford to get her anything she wanted; even if she didn’t want a thing, it was, and always has been, about power. Dead or alive. I do not like going anywhere with a question in my mind about what if. I must have total control of my shit.”
“All right,” she said, losing patience. “Then who’s to say you don’t have more power now?” She swept her arm out, motioning toward the room. “What has changed, except your level of confidence?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with my confidence,” he snarled, folding his arms over his chest.
“You haven’t even expended the energy to fix the house after you went off. Got the damned dogs locked in your lair—”
“They need a hundred and eighty pounds of raw flesh a night to keep fed, and my resources could be—”
“Why? What’s messed with your resources? Not me.”
He grumbled and walked away from her. “If I want to go somewhere, I want to be able to roll with authority. I can’t have some lower-level try me because they sense a power fluctuation or dip. Right now, because I have been messing with you, and not handling my business, my borders are raggedy, I don’t have a strong inner circle to depend on if some madness jumps off, and—”
“Stop this male bullshit now!” she shouted, walking up to him, then stomping away. She was so angry with him for being so shortsighted that she almost couldn’t speak. Words collided inside her head, nearly making her stutter, they wouldn’t come out fast enough.
“They took my Isis from me, Carlos. You don’t think that rocked my confidence and hurt my pride? I have to earn back my team’s trust, rightfully so. I lost in this transaction; you gained. The Light always adds, the darkness always subtracts—basic cosmic law, metaphysics, or don’t you remember?”
“How,” he said, slapping his chest, “did I gain anything but aggravation and grief from all this drama, D? Tell me!”
“You have just been made the baddest mutha in the valley, and you are telling me I jacked your power? Brother, pulleeease!”
She stormed away from him again. “If you can’t, then I’ll feed your fucking dogs. What? They each need a vamp body a night? Done. No problem, and on my agenda anyway.” She grabbed her Isis blade off the bed, huffing as she spoke. “What I gave you allows you to cross prayer barriers, walk on hallowed ground, and dulls the blood hunger! No other vampire on the planet can do that—oh, my bad! And so what if you like the way I smell, and it turns you on—my bad. But when you get like that, your ass still gets as strong as shit. Ask me how I know.”
She leveled her blade at him, speaking from across the room, both because she needed space to think, and because she had to resist the urge to gore him. “Silver probably won’t even burn you! And you’re mad at me because I gave you that extra immunity? Oh, and you’ve got an attitude because you’ve been around ripening Neteru so much that you’ve built up a semi-tolerance—it doesn’t get you cold blitzed, like it will any other master vamp? My bad!”
The look of surprise in his eyes grated her. Torches went on in the room, and his eyes flickered gold, then went normal deep brown.
“That’s deep,” he said slowly. “I, uh—”
“You and I are supposed to go to Australia to clean out that major nest, together to bring the stolen key back to the church—”
“Are you nuts?” he said quickly. “You still wanna go, with me, after all this?”
“Yes, to both questions. I am crazy and I want to go.”
Neither of them spoke, but just stared at each other in a standoff.
“First of all, I’d need an international pass. You don’t just roll up as a head of state on another territory unannounced. This ain’t Brazil,” Carlos finally replied, his tone irritable. “The empire is currently in a fragile peacetime truce. We have borders, and there’s just basic protocol. Respect, master to master. And how am I going to keep you—”
“We work as a team,” she said, lowering her blade. Her breathing was becoming steadier as she realized she’d broken down a bit of his resistance. “Look, I don’t have to obey you just because you temporarily made me. I’m not that kinda girl,” she said, swallowing away a sly smile that was about to cross her mouth. “I’m going to Australia, with or without you. But I’d prefer to go with you.”
“Why are you so stubborn? Just determined to keep baiting disaster until you get yourself smoked.”
“Because you messed around and bit a Neteru, not some average Jane. So learn to work with the Light, and get as strong using it as you’ve gotten while leveraging the dark. Use the new shit you’ve got to make you mo’ betta, man. As your partner, I’ll show you some new moves that are actually pretty cool.”
Indignant, he walked toward her. “See, right here, is the major problem. We can’t be partners, because you have never listened to me, and don’t follow my lead when—”
She shook her head and made him stop speaking.
“What?”
“That’s not the definition of an equal, somebody to do what you say, just ’cause.” Damali let out a short huff, now totally indignant herself. “You didn’t want a love slave. You wanted an intelligent partner.” She drew out the word for emphasis and thrust her chin up higher. “You wanted somebody who could work the room as good as you can, who was smooth, had finesse, and could go out swinging. Right? Am I lying?”
He gave her a grudging smile as he cut his eyes at her.
“I thought so,” she said, triumphant. “That’s what you asked the universe for and you got that. Now deal with it.” A slight smile came out of hiding on his face. “The power of prayer is deep.”
“Do not ever mention that again. It ain’t right, D, and you know it. Not even in front of my dogs, and definitely not over with the Aussies!”
They held each other’s line of vision, neither breaking eye contact nor conceding.
Carlos finally let out a weary sigh. “I’d be going over there without an entourage. They�
�d know the moment we got there that you were still vulnerable, still human. Not to mention that, after the Raise the Dead concert, every vamp on the planet knows who you are, okay.”
She cast the blade onto the bed. Both hands went to her hips, and she cocked her head to the side in a challenge. “So, when we were in bed in St. Lucia, and you were leaning on me, breathing hard on my throat saying, ‘Yeah, baby, I’ll help you dust whoever you want, whenever you want,’ was that just a love-jones talking, or—”
He held up his hand. “No, see, that’s just the thing, D. I figured we’d take our time, that bad idea might work its way out of your—”
“You never intended to go hunting with me, tell the truth! And you hid critical information from me, then jump on my case because I don’t trust you?” Her neck bobbed as she leveled the charge. “Lying ass, no-good vampire—”
“See, you got this all twisted, girl. I’m the one right now who’s got the right to have an attitude, not you, and besides, half of a good ruse is presentation, subterfuge, illusion. Gotta have strong game to do an international hit. They’d wanna know where my bodyguards were, if I tried to pass you off as a vamp.”
“In the other battles,” she said coolly, studying her fingers like she’d seen him do so many times before, “we took the male approach. Direct force. Let’s use some feminine wiles. That type of energy has felled nations, brother. Use my flux to your advantage to mess with their minds. You down?”
Intrigued, he walked around her, studying her, but unconvinced. He wasn’t sure if it was Damali’s street sense talking, her vamp self, or her crazy go-for-broke Neteru self. Whatever it was, he didn’t like how she’d flipped the script on him. Female master or not, this was some tricked-up woman-type circle logic. “Talk to me.”
“What kind of message do you think it would send if you came into town with only two Hell-dogs and your woman . . . the Neteru, who you’d turned?”
He rubbed his jaw, working the strategy like worry beads.
“To my way of thinking, Carlos, they’d have to assume that if you had the hounds, then you were authorized by the council to turn me, and if it was an accident, then you were still in their favor. You’d be going in-country not as a visiting master, but a council-level master who’d turned the Neteru. Big props. Plus, if I show up with fangs, and you haven’t been smoked by council, then they might think you’re in possession of the seal. They’d have to believe that if the Neteru, the council’s only source of daywalkers, was turned and council was cool with it, then you had an ace up your sleeve. It raises a big question, which raises the odds. They won’t want to assassinate you or me until they know what you’re holding for sure, which buys us time to find the key and do them before they try to do us. Before they try to smoke either of us, they’ll want to know if you or council already has the seal.”