Jacob staggered to his feet. His nose had burst like a piece of overripe fruit. Blood poured from his face, over his hands, like crimson water. He yelled at me, voice thick with the blood running down his throat. “You broke my nose!”
I was in a defensive stance, the one I’d learned in kenpo, just in case, but he didn’t try to hit me back. I think he knew that there were too many people close at hand aching for an excuse to hurt him. Jacob was weak, but he was smarter than he looked, and not quite as arrogant.
“I am lupa of the Thronnos Rokke Clan. Maybe just for tonight, but I am lupa here. And he is Ulfric, and you will by God show some respect!”
“You have no right to question the Geri of this clan. I’ve earned my place. You just fucked the Ulfric.”
I laughed, and it startled him, made him unsure. “I know pack law, Jacob. It doesn’t matter how I got the job. All that matters is that I am lupa, and that means that except for the Ulfric, my word is law.”
His eyes looked uncertain, and the first faint trace of fear showed, like a bitter scent on the wind. “You are about to be dethroned as lupa. Your word means nothing here.”
“I am Ulfric here, Jacob, not you, and I say whose word means something and whose does not. Until we have the ceremony breaking her ties with our pack, Anita is still lupa, and I will support what she says.”
“And I,” Sylvie said.
“And I,” Jamil said.
Shang-Da said, “I support my Ulfric in all things.”
“Then let’s have a little irony,” I said. “Since it was Jacob’s idea to put Gregory down in the oubliette, let him take Gregory’s place.”
Jacob started to protest, hands still trying to stop the blood flow from his nose. “You can’t do that.”
“Oh, but she can,” Richard said, and there was a coldness in him that I’d never seen before. He wouldn’t have come up with the idea himself, but he liked it. It let me know just how frustrated he’d been with Jacob.
“Great,” I said. “Shall we all walk like civilized wereanimals to the oubliette and rescue Gregory?”
“I will not go willingly down in that hole,” Jacob said. His voice sounded a little funny, what with all the blood and his nose smashed to hell, but he sounded sure of himself. He shouldn’t have been.
“Your Ulfric and your lupa have both decreed you will go,” Sylvie said. “To refuse the order is to refuse their authority.”
Jamil continued, “To refuse their authority is to be declared outlaw from the clan.”
Jacob glared at me when he said, “I will obey my Ulfric, but I do not acknowledge the Nimir-Ra as my lupa.”
“If I say she is lupa, then to deny that is to question my authority as Ulfric,” Richard said.
Jacob’s eyes flicked to Richard. “We voted her out as our lupa.”
“I’m voting her back in,” Richard said, voice deep and quiet, but loud enough that it carried.
“Take another vote,” Jacob said, still trying to slow the blood from his face. “It will go against her again.”
“No, Jacob, you misunderstand me. I said, I am voting her back in, not you, not anyone else, just me.”
Jacob’s eyes widened. “You’ve preached about democracy in action since I joined this clan. Are you going back on all of it now?”
“Not on all of it, but we don’t vote for Freki, or Geri, or for Hati and Skoll. We don’t vote for Ulfric. Why should we vote for lupa?”
“She’s fucking the Nimir-Raj. For that alone she should be cast out as lupa.”
“That’s my problem, not yours, not the pack’s.”
“You going to fuck her, too? You think the Nimir-Raj will share?”
Richard started to say something, but Micah spoke first, taking a step from the rest, his guards flanking him. “Why don’t you ask the Nimir-Raj?”
Richard looked at me, a question in his eyes. I shrugged.
“Ask him, Jacob,” Richard said. The blood had almost stopped dripping from Richard’s mouth.
“You mind if the Ulfric fucks your Nimir-Ra?” Jacob was still bleeding like a stuck pig. His chest, stomach, even the front of his shorts were soaked with blood.
“I’ve agreed to any arrangement that Anita wishes, as long as she remains my Nimir-Ra and lover.”
“You’d share her with another man?” Jacob said, voice thick with disbelief.
“With two other men,” Micah said.
That got almost everybody staring at him. I glanced at him, but mostly watched everyone else’s reaction, especially Richard’s. The others looked shocked, Richard looked thoughtful, as if Micah had finally done something he didn’t hate.
“She is the Master of the City’s human servant. Being my Nimir-Ra has not changed that. I’ve felt the mark that binds them together, and it is not something that will break, as, apparently, the mark that binds her to the Ulfric will not break.”
“Nothing binds her to the Ulfric but her stubbornness, and his,” Jacob said.
“You think so?” Micah made it a question.
Jacob looked uncertain. The blood from his nose was finally beginning to slow. “You’ve seen more than I’ve seen, if you think they still have a special bond.”
“More than any of us have seen.” This from Paris, who had pushed her way to the front of the crowd.
“I am Nimir-Raj, of course I see more than you do.” His voice made it so logical, so matter of fact.
“I am Geri, third in line to the throne.”
“Noah is my third in line. I think if you ask him he will say he did not see what I saw either. Third in line to be Nimir-Raj, or Ulfric, is not the same as being the real thing.”
I fought not to give Micah the look of gratitude that I wanted to give him. We were still deep in bluff territory, and not safely out the other side yet.
“You can’t mean to share your lupa with two other men,” Paris said. She’d pushed her way to stand in front of Richard, with her back to me. She was either being insulting, or stupid. Maybe both.
Richard looked down at her, and it wasn’t a friendly look. Somehow I didn’t think Paris ever had a very good shot at being lupa, not with Richard in charge anyway. “What I and my lupa do, or don’t do, is none of your business.”
I saw her back stiffen, as if he’d hit her, and maybe he had hit her pride. She’d really believed she could seduce him into picking her. I could have told her that sex wasn’t the key to Richard’s heart. He liked it well enough, but it wasn’t one of his top priorities, not if it interfered with other things that were. It had been the same mistake that Raina had made with him, or one of the mistakes she’d made with him. Raina had never really understood Richard, either.
“You can’t just arbitrarily decide you don’t need a vote for this,” Jacob said.
“Yes,” Richard said, “I can.”
I stepped up beside Jacob. “That’s what being Ulfric means, Jacob.”
“You’re going back to a dictatorship after all the high-minded talk,” Jacob said.
“For tonight, it’s sufficient that Anita is my lupa, and that’s not going to change. We’ll discuss everything else later.”
“I say we put it to a vote whether the pack wants to go back to being a dictatorship,” Jacob said.
“If you don’t have someone set that nose, it may heal crooked,” I said.
He glared at me. “You stay out of this.”
Richard called up a man with short brown hair and a neat mustache. He shrugged a backpack off his shoulders and began taking out medical supplies. “Fix his nose,” Richard said and then turned to Sylvie. “When he’s bandaged up, pick some people and escort Jacob to the oubliette.”
There were murmurings in the crowd. One clear voice that I hadn’t heard before said, “You can’t do that.”
Richard looked up, searching the crowd, and they fell silent under his gaze. His power rolled out from him like a burning invisible fog, something that clung to your skin and made it hard to breath. They avoid
ed his eyes; some even dropped down into submissive postures, their bodies low to the ground, eyes rolled up, arms and legs held close, making themselves seem small and defenseless, clearly asking not to be hurt.
“I am Ulfric here. If there is any among you that disagree with that, then you are free to challenge the next in line, and the next after that, until you are Freki, then declare yourself Fenrir, and you can challenge me. If you kill me then you can be Ulfric, and you can set any damn policy you want. Until that time, shut the fuck up and follow my orders.”
I don’t think I’d ever heard Richard cuss. The silence was thick enough to cut. It was Jacob who cut it, like I knew he would. He pushed the mustached doctor away impatiently, while the shorter man tried to pack his nose with what looked like gauze. “Anita shows back up, and so does your backbone. Does she kill and torture for you like Raina did for Marcus?”
Richard’s fist struck out in a blur that I couldn’t follow. It was almost magical. One moment Jacob was standing, the next moment he was on the ground with his eyes rolled back inside his head.
Richard turned to the rest of them, the dried blood decorating his nude upper body, his hair turned to spun bronze in the torchlight. His eyes had gone wolf amber, and looked more gold than normal against his darker than usual summer tan. “I thought we were people, not animals. I thought we could change the old ways and make something better. But we all felt it tonight when Anita and her leopards melded. Something safe and good. I’ve tried to be temperate and kind, and look where it’s gotten us. Jacob said Anita is my backbone. No, but she’s doing something right, something that I’ve missed. If you won’t take kindness, then we’ll have to try something else.” He looked at me with those alien eyes, and said, “Let’s go get your leopard. We need to get him out of the oubliette before Jacob comes to.” And he stalked off through the trees and left the rest of us to trail after. There was no question about what to do next. We followed Richard into the trees. We followed the Ulfric, because you’re supposed to follow your king, if he’s worthy of the name. For the first time ever I thought maybe, just maybe, Richard was going to be Ulfric after all.
26
THE OUBLIETTE WAS a rounded metal lid set in the ground. The metal lid sat in the middle of a clearing scattered with tall, thin trees. Honeysuckle bushes ringed the lid on one side; leaves were so thick on the ground that the area looked untouched. I would never have found it if I hadn’t known it was there.
Oubliette is French for a little place of forgetting, but that’s not a direct translation. Oubliette simply means little forgetting, but what it is, is a place where you put people when you don’t plan on ever letting them out. Traditionally it’s a hole where once you push someone in they can’t get out. You don’t feed them, or water them, or talk to them, or anything to them. You just walk away. There’s a Scottish castle where they found an oubliette that had literally been walled up and forgotten, discovered only during modern remodeling. The floor was littered with bones and had an eighteenth-century pocket watch in among the debris. It had an opening where you could see the main dining hall, could have smelled the food, while you starved to death. I remembered wondering if you could hear the person screaming from the dining hall while you ate. Most oubliettes are more isolated, so that once you put him away, you never have to worry about the prisoner again.
Two of the werewolves in nice human form knelt by the metal and began unscrewing two huge bolts in the lid. There was no key. You screwed the lid in place and just walked away. Fuck.
The lid lifted off, and it took both of them to carry it away. Heavy, just in case the drugs didn’t keep the adrenaline from pumping enough and cause the change. Even in animal form you’d still have a hard time getting through the lid.
I walked to the edge of the hole, and the smell drove me back. It smelled like an outhouse. I don’t know why it surprised me. Gregory had been down there for what, three days, four? In the movies they talk about you starving to death, the romantic stuff—if such horror is really romantic—but no one ever talks about your bowels moving, or the fact that when you have to go, you have to go. It’s not romantic, it’s just humiliating.
Jamil brought a rope ladder and attached it with large metal clips to the side of the hole. The ladder fell away into the darkness with a dry, slithery sound. I forced myself to crawl back to the edge of the oubliette. I was prepared now for the smell, and underneath the ripe smell of life in too small a space was a dry smell, a dry, dusty smell. The smell of old bones, old death.
Gregory wasn’t the strongest person I knew, not even one of the top hundred. What had it done to him to lie there in the dark with the stench of old bones, old death, pressed against his body? Had they explained to him how they’d leave him there to die? Had they told him every time they screwed the lid back in place that they weren’t coming back, except to drug him?
The hole was like a perfect blackness, darker than the star-filled night sky, darker than anything I’d seen in a long time. It was wide enough for Richard’s broad shoulders to have scooted down into the dark, but barely. The longer I stared at it, the narrower it seemed to become, as if it were some great black mouth waiting to swallow me down. Have I mentioned that I’m claustrophobic?
Richard came to stand beside me, peering down into the hole. He had an unlit flashlight in his hand. Something must have shown on my face, because he said, “Even we need some light to see by.”
I held my hand out for the flashlight.
He shook his head. “I let this happen. I’ll get him out.”
I shook my head. “No. He’s mine.”
He knelt beside me and spoke softly, “I can smell your fear. I know you don’t like close places.”
I stared back into the hole and let myself acknowledge just how afraid I was. So afraid that I could taste something flat and metallic on my tongue. So afraid that my pulse was hammering in my throat, like a trapped thing. My voice came out calm, normal. I was glad. “It doesn’t matter that I’m afraid.” I touched the flashlight, tried to pull it from his hand, but he held on. And, short of playing tug of war—which I would probably lose—I wasn’t getting it away from him.
“Why do you have to be the toughest, the bravest? Why can’t you, just once, let me do something for you? Going down in the hole doesn’t scare me. Let me do this for you. Please.” His voice was still soft, and he was leaning into me enough so that I could smell the drying blood on him, the richness of fresh blood in his mouth, as if some small cut had not healed completely.
I shook my head. “I have to do it, Richard.”
“Why?” and his voice held the first hint of anger, like a slap of warmth.
“Because it scares me, and I have to know if I can.”
“Can what?”
“If I can crawl down into that hole.”
“Why? Why do you need to know that? You’ve proven to me and everyone here that you’re tough. You don’t have anything left to prove to us.”
“To me, Richard, I have something left to prove to me.”
“What difference would it make if you couldn’t climb down in that stinking hole? You’ll never have to do it again, Anita. Just don’t do it.”
I looked at him, at the puzzlement in his face, his eyes, which had bled back to their normal, perfect brown. I’d been trying to explain shit like this to Richard for a few years now. I finally realized that he would never understand and I was tired of trying to explain myself, not just to Richard, to everybody.
“Give me the flashlight, Richard.”
He held on with both hands. “Why do you have to do this? Just tell me that. You’re so scared your mouth is dry. I can taste it on your breath.”
“And I can taste fresh blood on yours, but I have to do it because it scares me.”
He shook his head. “This isn’t courage, Anita, this is stubbornness.”
I shrugged. “Maybe, but I still have to do it.”
He clutched the flashlight tighter. “Why?” And
somehow I thought the question was about more than the oubliette and why I had to climb inside it.
I sighed. “Less and less scares me, Richard. So when I find something that does bother me, I have to test it. I have to see if I can do it.”
“Why?” He studied my face like he’d memorize it.
“Just to see if I can.”
“Why?” and the anger was more than a faint hint now.
I shook my head. “I’m not competing with you, Richard, or anyone else. I don’t give a shit who’s better or faster or braver.”
“Then why do it?”
“The only person I compete against is me, Richard, and I’ll think less of me if I let you, or anyone else, climb down in that hole first. Gregory is my boy, not yours, and I have to rescue him.”
“You’ve already rescued him, Anita. It doesn’t matter who climbs in the damn hole.”
I almost smiled, but not like it was funny. “Give me the flashlight, please, Richard. I can’t explain this to you.”
“Does your Nimir-Raj understand it?” The anger burned along my skin, like a swarm of stings. It damn near hurt.
I frowned at him. “Ask him yourself, now give me the damn flashlight.” If you get angry at me, it never takes me long to respond.
“I want to be your Ulfric, Anita, your guy, whatever the hell that means. Why won’t you let me be . . . ?” He stopped talking, looking away from me.
“The man. Was that what you were going to say?”
He looked back at me and nodded.
“Look, if we keep dating, or whatever the hell we’re going to do, we have to get one thing straight. Your ego is no longer my problem. Don’t be the man for me, Richard, be the person I need. You don’t have to be bigger and braver than I am to be my man. I’ve got male friends that spend most of their time trying to prove they have bigger, brassier balls than I do. I don’t need that from you.”
“What if I need to be braver than you for myself, not for you?”
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 231