Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  Was she right?

  Then Michael the man stepped back, to put himself in harm’s way again. He faced that overwhelming ocean of darkness, when it had given him the chance to be left out of it. It wasn’t even thought; I moved forward, because he was trying to take my harm, my blow, my fate, and I couldn’t let him do that. I stepped into that fire and expected to be blinded by the light, but it wasn’t like that. It was as if the world were light, and I could only see the light, flickering and real around me. The man in front of me was real, and the fire was real, but . . .

  “Necromancer, help me!”

  I didn’t understand what she meant, but it didn’t matter. Evil always lies. I finished the prayer: “And all other evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

  It was as if the power around us took a breath, the way you’d do before blowing out a candle. The power took a breath, then let it out, but this breath was like standing at ground zero of a nuclear bomb. Reality blew outward, then re-formed. I half-expected the house to be destroyed around us, but we were left blinking in the living room of Phoebe Billings’s house. Not so much as a teacup had moved.

  Edward was standing very close to us, but Phoebe was holding him back. Telling him, “Wait, Michael knows what he’s doing.”

  I was standing behind Michael, as I had been in the “vision”; there was no burning sword in his hand, but somehow I knew, if he needed it, it would be there.

  He turned around and looked at me with dark brown eyes, but there was a glimmer in them, a hint of fire, down in their depths. Not the light of vampires but of something else.

  “Anita, talk to me,” Edward said.

  “I’m okay, Edward, thanks to Michael.” And I meant the double entendre. I’d find a church and burn a candle for the Archangel Michael. It was the least I could do.

  “Someone explain what just happened,” he said, and he sounded angry.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  “You looked up and saw something, something that scared the hell out of you. Then he”—and he shoved a thumb in Michael’s direction—“went to stand by you. I tried to go to you, but she told me it wasn’t a matter of guns.”

  “She was right,” I said.

  “Then every holy object in the room burst into flame.”

  “You mean they glowed,” I said.

  “No, flame, they burned.”

  “Bernardo panicked,” Olaf said, “and threw off his cross.”

  I looked at the big man. I almost asked him how he justified faith in God with being a serial killer, but didn’t. Maybe later if I wanted to piss him off.

  “Once I lost the cross,” Bernardo said, and I realized that he was the only one not standing close to us, “I saw . . . things.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Light, darkness.” He stared at me from the edge of the couch. “I saw . . . something.” He looked pale and shaken.

  I started to ask What? again, but Michael touched my arm. I looked at him. He shook his head. I nodded. Okay, let Bernardo’s vision alone. It had scared the shit out of him, and that made it private. He’d tell, or he’d get drunk and try to forget it. It’s not every day you see demons and angels. Marmee Noir wasn’t technically a demon, but she was an evil spirit.

  “What is it that hunts you?” Michael asked.

  “You saw it,” I said.

  “I did, but I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  I stared up at him. “You stepped in her way, twice, and you didn’t know what she was, or what she could have done to you?” I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice.

  He nodded. “I am the black dog, the circle guardian. You are our guest, and no harm shall befall anyone in my care.”

  “You have no idea what she could have done to you.”

  He smiled, and it was the smile of a true believer. “It could not have touched me.”

  “Is he talking about . . . ,” and Edward hesitated.

  “Marmee Noir.”

  “Mother Dark,” Phoebe said.

  I nodded.

  “The dark goddess is not always fearful; sometimes she is restful.”

  “She isn’t a goddess, or if she is, there’s no good side to her; trust me on that.”

  “This was not goddess energy,” Michael said.

  “Couldn’t you see it?” I asked.

  “I could feel it, but I concentrated on repairing the damage to our wards so that more would not follow her. I trusted Michael to chase out that which had crossed our borders and to keep you safe.”

  “That’s a lot to trust someone with,” I said.

  “You’ve seen him armed for battle, Marshal; do you believe my trust is misplaced?”

  I flashed back on the image of Michael with the burning sword and that shadow of wings over him. I shook my head. “No, it’s not misplaced.”

  “Someone talk to me,” Edward said, “now.”

  “I lowered my shields to see if the vampire was ours, and Michael here tried to taste my power by making the opening a little bigger.”

  “You mean like what happened with Sanchez earlier,” Edward said.

  I nodded.

  “I did not damage your shields deliberately,” he said.

  “I believe you,” I said. “And the Mother of All Darkness tried to eat me again. But Michael stopped her, cast her out.”

  “To hell?” Bernardo asked, still looking haunted.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so, just out of here.”

  “How did it get through our wards?” Michael asked.

  “I think I carry a piece of her inside me all the time now,” I said. “Once you let me inside your wards, she had an in.”

  “You don’t taste evil, Marshal.”

  “She did something to me earlier today. It’s messed with my psychic abilities, opened me up, somehow.”

  “I think we can help there, and I would love to hear more about what she is and how you came to her attention.”

  “We don’t have time for this, Anita,” Edward said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “The Darkness has tried to eat her twice in the same day,” Olaf said. “Eventually, if Anita doesn’t learn how to guard herself better, she will lose.”

  Edward and I stared at the big man. “How much did you see or feel?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “Then why are you the one encouraging me to get all metaphysical?”

  “Marmee Noir wants you, Anita. I understand obsession.” He stared at me with those cave-dark eyes, and I fought not to look away. I couldn’t decide which was more unsettling, the intensity in his gaze or the lack of any other emotion. It was as if, in that moment, he was simply pared down to the need in his eyes. “She’s chosen you for her victim, and she will have you unless you can fix what she damaged inside you, protect yourself better, or kill her first.”

  I gave a harsh laugh. “Kill the Mother of All Vampires? Not likely.”

  “Why not?” Olaf asked.

  I frowned at him. “If she can do all this to me from thousands of miles away, then I do not want to see what she’s capable of if I’m physically closer. All vampire powers grow with proximity.”

  “A bomb would do it, something with high heat yield.”

  I searched his face, trying to read something in it that I could really get a handle on and understand, but it was almost as bad as staring into the faces of the shapeshifters in their half-human forms. I just couldn’t decipher him.

  “I’d still have to get to the city she’s in, and that would be too close. Besides, I don’t know anything about bombs.”

  “I do,” he said.

  I finally got a clue. “Are you offering to go with me?”

  He just nodded.

  “Damn it,” Edward said.

  I looked at him. I shook my head. “I won’t ask you to go.”

  “I can’t let you go off alone with him to hunt her.” He said
it as if it were a done deal, a given.

  I shook my head, and waved my hands as if erasing something in the air. “I’m not going either. None of us is getting any nearer to her.”

  “If you do not kill her first, she will surely kill you,” Olaf said.

  “Should we be talking about this in front of witnesses?” Bernardo asked. He had finally moved closer to us.

  We looked at Phoebe and Michael as if we’d forgotten them. I almost had. Edward never forgot anything, but as he looked at me, I realized that there was guilt in his eyes. I’d never seen that for anyone but Donna and the kids.

  I reached out and laid fingers on his arm, a gentle touch. “You dying trying to kill Marmee Noir would not have helped me now. You’d be dead, and I’d be alone with these two.”

  That almost earned me a smile. “Or she’d be dead, and you’d be safe.”

  I gripped his arm, tight. “Don’t second-guess yourself, Edward, you’re not good at it. Certainty is all we have on shit like this.”

  He did smile, then. “Look who’s talking, Ms. Doubting-All-My-Choices.”

  “Are you saying that thing has a physical body, on this plane, right now?” Michael asked.

  I thought about the question, then nodded. “I’ve seen where her body lies, so yeah.”

  “I thought you’d never been physically close to her.”

  “Only in dreams and nightmares,” I said.

  Music started—“Wild Boys” by Duran Duran—and it still took me a minute to realize it was my cell phone. I fumbled it out of my pocket, vowing to pick a different song for Nathaniel to put into the phone so I could get rid of this one.

  “Anita,” Wicked said, “are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you being coerced?”

  “No, no, I’m fine, really.”

  “I cannot get inside. I cannot even step on the doorstep.” Wicked’s voice sounded afraid; other than for his brother’s life, I’d never heard him afraid.

  “You don’t have to, Wicked, just wait outside. I’ll come to you in a little bit.”

  “I felt the Mother of All Darkness, and then I felt . . .” He seemed at a loss for words.

  I almost helped him out, but he was a vampire, and it had been angels. I wanted to know what he’d sensed.

  He finally spoke again, “When I first arrived, I could have entered the house with an invitation, but now I wouldn’t dare. It glows like something holy.”

  “The priestess had to redo the shields,” I said, “to keep out Marmee Noir.”

  “If anything goes wrong in there, I cannot help you.”

  “It’s covered, Wicked, honest.”

  “I know you have Edward with you, but I am your bodyguard, Anita. Jean-Claude charged me with your safety. If I let you die here, Jean-Claude would kill me and my brother. He’d probably kill Truth first and make me watch, and then he’d kill me. And right this second, I can’t reach you. Shit.”

  “Isn’t that usually my line?” I said.

  “Don’t make a joke of this, Anita.”

  “Look, I’m sorry you can’t enter past the wards, but we are all right, and you couldn’t have kept me safe from Marmee Noir even if you’d been with me.”

  “And that is another problem. I could see her like some black storm towering over the house. She ignored me as if I didn’t exist, but I felt her power, Anita. All the weapons training in the world won’t stop her.”

  “Apparently, magic does,” I said.

  “Would the wards you are behind keep her out?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But they would also keep out every other vampire, and Vittorio has wereanimals to send for you, so Jean-Claude tells me.”

  “I’m pretty sure of that, yeah.”

  “Then we need to be with you,” he said.

  “Agreed.”

  “But we need to keep the Mother of All Darkness from you, too. How do we do both?”

  That he was asking me was not a good sign. “Wolves,” I said, finally.

  “What?”

  “Wolf, she can’t control wolf, only cats.”

  “What about the werehyenas?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve only made wolf work for me.”

  “We have Graham.”

  “Any other wolves would be helpful,” I said.

  “I’ll call Requiem and see what we can find.” Then he hung up. I was left to turn back to the room and say, “Um, nope, no idea how to explain it, so I’m not going to try.”

  Phoebe said, “You are wearing something that was supposed to help you against the Darkness.”

  I almost touched the medallion on its chain with the cross, but stopped myself in midmotion.

  She smiled.

  “Fine,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, since it seems to have stopped working.”

  “If you will permit me to look at it, I believe it only needs to be cleansed and recharged.” There must have been a look on my face because she added, “Surely whoever taught you to shield well enough to keep Michael outside taught you this as well.”

  “She tried, but I don’t put a lot of stock in jewelry.”

  She smiled again. “Yet you believed in the piece of metal around your neck.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the cross or the medallion, but either way, she had a point. “You’re right, my teacher has talked to me about stones and stuff. I just don’t believe in it.”

  “Some things don’t require your belief to make them work, Marshal.”

  “I’ve got stuff on me,” Bernardo said, “that just works, Anita.”

  “Stones?” I made it a question.

  He nodded.

  Phoebe said, “It is supposed to help you see your prey, but when you removed your cross, you had only things that made you see more into the spirit world and nothing to protect you from it.”

  He shrugged. “I got exactly what I asked for; maybe I just didn’t know what I needed.”

  I looked at him. He’d put his cross back on, but there was still a tightness around the eyes. Whatever he had seen of Marmee Noir had spooked him. “I didn’t see you for the mumbo-jumbo type,” I said.

  “You said it yourself, Anita; most of us don’t have your talent with the dead. We get what help we can.”

  I looked at Edward. “Do you have help?”

  He shook his head.

  I looked at Olaf. “You?”

  “Not stones and magic.”

  “What then?”

  “The cross is blessed by a very holy man. It burns with his faith, not mine.”

  “A cross doesn’t work for you, personally?” I asked, then almost wished I hadn’t.

  “The same man who blessed the cross told me I am damned, and no amount of Hail Marys or prayers will save me.”

  “Everyone can be saved,” I said.

  “To be forgiven, you must first repent your sins.” He gave me the full weight of those eyes again.

  “And you’re unrepentant,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I thought about that, that his cross burned with the faith of a holy man who had told him he’d go to hell unless he repented. He didn’t repent, but he still wore the cross that the man had given him, and it still worked for him. The logic, or lack of it, made my head hurt. But in the end, faith isn’t always about logic; sometimes it’s about the leap.

  “Did you kill him?” Bernardo asked.

  Olaf looked at him. “Why would I kill him?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  Olaf seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, “I didn’t want to, and no one was paying me to do it.”

  There, perfectly Olaf, not that he didn’t kill a priest because it would be wrong, but because it didn’t amuse him at the moment, and no one had paid him. Even Edward at his most disturbing wouldn’t have had the same logic.

  “We’re talking in front of you too casually,” Edward said. “Why?”

  “Perhaps you sim
ply feel at ease.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve got a permanent spell of some kind on the room, or house.”

  “All I have cast is that people may speak freely if they desire to. Apparently, your friends feel the need, and you do not.”

  “I don’t believe confession is good for the soul.”

  “Nor do I,” she said, “but it can free up parts of you that are blocked, or help soothe your mind.”

  He shook his head, then turned to me. “If you’re going to have her do something with the medallion, do it. We need to go.”

  I fished the second chain from underneath the vest and all. I’d tried carrying the cross and the medallion on the same chain, but there were too many times when I needed the cross visible, and I got tired of people asking what the second symbol meant. The image on the metal was of a many-headed big cat; if you looked just right on the soft metal, you could discern stripes and symbols around the edge of it. I’d tried to pass it off as a saint’s medallion, but it just didn’t look like anything that tame.

  I held it out to Phoebe. She took it gingerly by the chain with only two fingers. “This is very old.”

  I nodded. “The metal is soft enough that it bends with pressure, and some with just the heat of the body.”

  She started walking toward the door that her daughter had come through with the tea. I expected us to go all the way to her altar room, but she stopped us in a small, bright kitchen. Her daughter, Kate, was nowhere to be seen.

  Phoebe answered as if I’d asked out loud, “Kate had a date tonight. I told her she could go after the tea was served.”

  “So she missed the metaphysical show.”

  “Yes, though many gifted in the area might have felt something. You do not call down such evil and such good without alerting those who can sense such things.”

  “I don’t usually pick up stray stuff,” I said.

  “But you are not trained for it. Tonight’s show would have attracted either the untrained, who cannot block it out, or the trained, who are open to the alert.”

  I shook my head. “Are we here for me to get lectured or to cleanse the charm?”

  “So impatient.”

  “Yeah, I know, I need to work on it.”