Warrick stood very straight. You could see him preparing for the torment to come. He stood shining and white and he looked like a holy warrior. There was a peace in his face that was lovely to look upon.
Yvette’s power surged forward and I got just the faintest backwash. But Warrick stood there untouched, pure. Nothing happened. Yvette turned to all of us. “Who is helping him? Who is protecting him from me?”
I realized what was happening. “No one’s helping him, Yvette,” I said. “He is a master vampire and you can’t hurt him anymore.”
“What are you talking about? He is mine. Mine to do with as I see fit. He has always been mine.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
Warrick smiled and it was beatific. “God has freed me from you, Yvette. He has finally forgiven me for my fall from grace. My lusting after your white flesh that led me to hell. I am free of it. I am free of you.”
“No,” she said. “No!”
“It seems our brother council member was limiting Warrick’s powers,” the Traveler said. “As he was giving you power, Yvette, he was keeping it from Warrick.”
“This is not possible,” she said. “We will burn this city to the ground and take credit for it. We will show them we are monsters.”
“No, Yvette,” Warrick said. “We will not.”
“I don’t need you for this,” she said. “I can be monster enough on my own. I’m sure there is a reporter out there somewhere that I can embrace. I’ll rot in front of his cameras, on him. I will not fail our master. I will be the monster he wants us to be. The monsters we truly are.” She held out her hand to Harry. “Come, let us go find victims in very public places.”
“We cannot allow this,” the Traveler said.
“No,” Padma said. He pushed to his feet with Gideon’s and Thomas’s help. “We cannot allow this.”
“No,” Warrick said, “we cannot allow her to tempt anyone else. It is enough.”
“No, it is not enough. It will never be enough. I will find someone to take your place at my side, Warrick. I can make another of you. Someone who will serve me for all time.”
He shook his head slowly. “I cannot allow you to steal another man’s soul in my place. I will not ransom another man into the hell of your embrace.”
“I thought it was hell you feared,” Yvette said. “Centuries of worry that you’ll roast in punishment for your crimes.” She pouted at him, exaggerating her voice. “Centuries of listening to you whine about your purity and your fall from grace, and the punishment that awaited you.”
“I no longer fear my punishment, Yvette.”
“Because you think you’ve been forgiven,” she said.
He shook his head. “Only God knows if I am truly forgiven, but if I am to be punished, then I will have earned it. As we all have. I cannot allow you to put another in my place.”
She came to him, trailing fingers across his white tunic. I lost sight of her behind his broad back, and when she came back around she was rotting. She trailed decaying hands down his white suit leaving black and green globs, slimy trails like obscene slugs. She laughed at him with a face covered in sores.
Richard whispered, “What is happening to her?”
“Yvette’s happening,” I said.
“You’ll return to France with me. You’ll continue to serve me even though you’re a master now. If anyone would make such a sacrifice, it is you, Warrick.”
“No, no,” he said. “If I were truly strong and worthy of God’s grace, then perhaps I would return with you, but I am not that strong.”
She wrapped her rotting arms around his waist and smiled up at him. Her body was running to ruin, leaking dark fluids over her white dress. Her rich pale hair was drying out before our eyes, turning to crinkling straw. “Then kiss me, Warrick, one last time. I must find your replacement before dawn.”
He encircled her with his white robed arms, hugging her against his tall body. “No, Yvette, no.” He stared down at her and there was something almost like tenderness on his face. “Forgive me,” he said. He held his hands out in front of him.
Blue fire sprang from his hands, a strange pale color, paler even than gas flame.
Yvette turned her rotting face to look behind her at the fire. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.
Warrick closed his arms around her. Her dress caught first. She screamed, “Don’t be stupid, Warrick! Let me go!”
He held on, and when the fire hit her flesh she went like she’d been doused in kerosene. She burned with a blue light. She screamed, and struggled, but he had her pinned to his chest. She couldn’t even beat at the flames with her hands.
The fire bathed Warrick in a nimbus of blue, but he didn’t burn. He stood there yellow and white surrounded in blue fire, and he did look like a saint. Something holy and wonderful and terrible to behold. He stood there shining and Yvette began to blacken and peel in his arms. He smiled at us. “God has not forsaken me. Only my fear kept me in thrall to her all these years.”
Yvette twisted in his arms, tried to get away, but he held her tight. He dropped to his knees, bowing his head while she fought him. She burned, skin peeling back from her bones, and still she screamed. The stench of burning hair and cooking flesh filled the room, but there was almost no smoke, just heat building. Making everyone in the room move back from them. Finally, mercifully, Yvette stopped moving, stopped screaming.
I think Warrick was praying while she shrieked and writhed and burned. The blue flames roared almost to the ceiling, then changed color. They became pure yellow-orange, the color of ordinary flame.
I remembered McKinnon’s story of how the firebug had burned once the fire changed color. “Warrick, Warrick, let her go. You’ll burn with her.”
Warrick’s voice came one last time. “I do not fear God’s embrace. He demands sacrifice, but he is merciful.” He never screamed. The fire began to eat at him, but he never made a sound. In that silence we heard a different voice. A high-pitched screaming, low and wordless, pitiless, hopeless. Yvette was still alive.
Someone finally asked if there was a fire extinguisher. Jason said, “No, there isn’t.” I looked at him across the room, and he met my gaze. We stared at each other and I knew that he knew exactly where the fire extinguisher was. Jean-Claude, whose hand I was still holding, knew where it was. Hell, I knew where it was. None of us went running. We let her burn. We let them both burn. Warrick I would have saved if I could have, but Yvette—Burn, baby, burn.
53
THE COUNCIL WENT home. We had the word of two members that we would not be bothered again. I wasn’t sure I trusted them, but it was the best we were going to get. Richard and I are meeting regularly with Jean-Claude, learning how to control the marks. I still can’t control the munin, but I’m working on it, and Richard is helping me. We’re trying to be less nasty to each other. He’s gone out of state for the rest of the summer to finish work on his master’s degree in preternatural biology. Hard to work on the marks from that big a distance.
He’s approached the local pack there for possible lupa candidates. I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m not even sure it’s Richard that I would miss. It’s the pack, the lukoi. You can always find another boyfriend, but a new family, especially one this strange, that’s a rare gift. All the wereleopards have come on board my bandwagon, even Elizabeth. Surprise, surprise.
The leopards call me their Nimir-Ra, leopard queen. Me and Tarzan, huh?
I gave Fernando and Liv to Sylvie. Other than a few pieces that Sylvie kept for souvenirs, they’re both gone.
Nathaniel wanted to move in with me. I’m paying for his apartment. He seems lost without someone to organize his life. Zane, who recovered from his gunshot wounds, says that Nathaniel needs a master or a mistress, that he’s what the S & M crowd call a pet. The term means someone who is a step below slave, someone who can’t function alone. I’d never heard of such a thing, but it seems to be true, at least for Nathaniel. No, I don’t know what I’
m going to do with him.
Stephen and Vivian are dating. Truthfully, I’d begun to assume Stephen liked guys. Shows how much I know.
Asher stayed in St. Louis. Here, strangely, he’s among friends. He and Jean-Claude reminisce about things I’d only read about in history books or seen in movies. I suggested Asher see a plastic surgeon. He informed me that the burns could not be healed because they were caused by a holy object. I said, what does it hurt to ask? When he got over the shocking idea that modern technology might be able to do something his own wonderful body could not, he asked. The doctors are hopeful.
Jean-Claude and I did christen the bathtub at my new house. Picture white candles glowing everywhere, the light gleaming on his naked chest. The petals of two dozen red roses floating on the surface of the water. That’s what I came home to one morning at about three A.M. We played until dawn, when I tucked him into my bed. I stayed with him until the warmth left his body and my nerve broke.
Richard is right. I can’t give myself completely to Jean-Claude. I can’t let him feed. I can’t truly share a bed. He is, no matter how lovely, the walking dead. I keep shying away from anything that reminds me too strongly of that fact, like blood-drinking and low body temperatures. Jean-Claude certainly has the keys to my libido, but my heart…Can a walking corpse hold the keys to my heart? No. Yes. Maybe. How the hell should I know?
Afterword
This is book seven in the Anita Blake series. As a reader, I find a lot of series begin to lose steam somewhere between book five and book eight. It’s almost as if the writers begin to forget what made the earlier books work, or they are simply bored. As a writer, this is a challenge. How do I keep myself, and you the readers, interested? Here are some of the ways I tried to plan my world so that I, my characters, and hopefully the readers would still be having fun books down the road.
First, I gave myself enough toys to play with: hard-boiled mystery, horror with its monsters, fantasy with its myths, romance with its complications, bare-knuckle politics where assassination is simply good business, and a main character that I still love. I planned a world as broad as our own, so there would be plenty of places to play, and ideas galore. I must have done it right, because as I write this I am enjoying writing the beginning of the sixteenth Anita Blake novel. The fifteenth hit the shelves only this month. I learned new things about my world, my characters, and my mythology in that last book that I had not known, ever. Pretty cool, after fifteen books.
I think that this book you hold in your hands, Burnt Offerings, is a good example of another thing that keeps me interested in Anita’s world. I introduce two new characters in this book. (I introduce more than that, but these two will not only stick around, but also will become what I call minor major characters. Or major minor characters, if you prefer.)
By the time most series have gotten to book seven the cast is pretty much set, but bringing in new characters to join the established cast has become a hallmark of my series. In Burnt Offerings, you’ll meet Asher and Nathaniel.
Asher was originally meant to be a villain, but almost from the first moment he stepped on stage he became more than that. He is truly a flawed hero, in that Hamlet, Prince of Denmark way. He was once one of the most beautiful men that Belle Morte had ever collected for her private harem. Then the church got hold of him and tried to burn the devil out of him with holy water, which burns vampiric flesh like acid. Half his body still has that almost heartrending beauty, but the other half has the scars of the burns.
He saw himself as ruined goods. But Jean-Claude loved him, had loved him centuries ago. They had shared the only two women that they ever loved: Belle Morte, the creator of their bloodline, and Julianna, Asher’s human servant.
Julianna was burned alive by the same people who used holy water on Asher. Jean-Claude has never truly forgiven himself for not saving them both. Asher has never forgiven him either. The twenty-plus years that the three of them spent as a ménage à trois, free from Belle Morte, was probably the happiest time of their lives, and definitely of their afterlives.
But from the first moment we saw him, Anita and I thought Asher was beautiful. We were afraid of him at first, because he was a bad guy, but he was always beautiful. Through Jean-Claude’s memories we remembered his body smooth and untouched by the holy water, but Anita fell in love with Asher just the way he is now, scars and all.
Anita and I love Asher, but there is always that suspicion that he actually loves Jean-Claude more than he loves Anita. People keep asking me when Asher will find a girl of his own. I’m no longer certain it’s a girl of his own that he wants. I think there is a certain Master Vampire of St. Louis that Asher would give anything, anything, to truly belong to again.
But I think Jean-Claude needs a third person around, to be with Asher. Belle Morte first, then Julianna, and now Anita. I guess it just depends on where you fall on the Kinsey scale.
In the books that came after Burnt Offerings, Asher would grow and change, and show that he loved Anita, too. And that he still loved Jean-Claude, and had missed him as much as he tried to hate him.
Asher has become not just one of my favorites but a fan favorite, as well. Pretty good for a character introduced seven books in.
Which brings us to Nathaniel, who is also introduced in this book. When you meet him in Burnt Offerings he’s nineteen, and to Anita he is a burden. He is another victim that she has to protect—we actually meet him in the hospital after he has nearly been killed. Since he’s a wereleopard, he’s hard to kill, but a client got out of hand. Client? He’s a high-class “escort” when we meet him, as well as a stripper at Jean-Claude’s club, Guilty Pleasures. And yeah, escort means what you think it means. He went into the hospital because he let a customer tie him up and the customer gutted him. (By the way, I didn’t make that up. Actual crime. Yeah, way creepy. I find that true crime is far more disturbing to me than anything I can make up.) Nathaniel is into bondage and submission, and he is so submissive that he won’t say no, not even to save himself. (That’s actually true of a number of people I interviewed when I was researching the BDSM scene. I found the concept that some people would let you do anything, absolutely anything to them, both horrifying and fascinating. It’s rare, but these people seemed to mean it. Luckily for them their masters, or dominants, kept them safe, even from themselves.)
Nathaniel was never intended to be a major player in the books. His character grew out of the research I’d done, and some corner of my personality I didn’t know was there, I guess. Or maybe Nathaniel just needed to be there for Anita. (If you have not read the series after book ten, Narcissus in Chains, then stop reading this essay, because a big, big, spoiler is coming up.) Have you stopped reading? If you haven’t, here comes the spoiler:
I never intended Nathaniel to be Anita’s boyfriend, of any description, let alone her live-in lover. Surprised the hell out of me. The only relationship that ever surprised me more was Micah, but he’s new in the book he appears in; Nathaniel just sort of crept into our minds and hearts.
He is that person who has had everything go wrong for him, almost. He’s one of those people who should be dead by now in some tragic way, but in the world of fiction I could save him. He is in part based on people I interviewed or knew of in real life, and some of them have vanished. But Nathaniel has not. He has remained in the series, in my world, and he has grown as a character and a person. Anita loves him. He has changed for her, because she demanded it of him. But when you are in love, really in love, you are changed by it. In trying to help Nathaniel change, Anita has changed herself. They have grown together.
I love Asher and Nathaniel, and I never intended either of them to be major players. I certainly never intended them to be Anita’s lovers, let alone for her to love them.
I think that this is what I do differently from most other writers of series: I create characters with each book that are new, fresh, and exciting, and that intrigue me. With each book new people come on stage to fascinat
e me and my characters. I am never afraid to add to my cast.
Now, as a writer that makes my job harder in some ways—it’s quite a job to juggle everyone. But as a reader, it keeps me happy. It keeps me interested. It keeps me guessing. When I finish this essay I will go back to work on the sixteenth book. I am a little more than two hundred pages into it, and already I have learned new things about a character who has been in the series since book four, The Lunatic Café. Which character? Jason, who is introduced in that book and is on stage in every other book from that point on except for book nine, Obsidian Butterfly. See, my characters are like real people to me. If you’re really paying attention to your friends and the people you love, they grow, they change, they shock and surprise you. Your fictional friends should be that real, too. Real enough to make you say, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know that!”
That’s the magic, that my imaginary friends surprise the hell out of me over and over again.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Blue Moon
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1998 by Laurell K. Hamilton
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Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 83