"Then answer it," I said.
"All the Harlequin are old vampires. That means they think that human servants are lesser beings, but Damian is a reminder that to you, they are the servants. They don't like that much."
"Okay, I get that, but why do Kaazim and the other shapeshifters have an issue?"
"They all treat any Harlequin human servant as a lesser being, because very few of them were ever good enough to fight at the skill level that the vampires and shapeshifters of the Harlequin did."
"I've noticed that almost none of the Harlequin vamps have human servants."
"Humans are too fragile for our world," Kaazim said.
"The world of the Harlequin, you mean?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Damian is a vampire servant, so the animals to call of the Harlequin have one vampire they can feel superior to," Bobby Lee said.
"That makes sense, I guess."
"Feel superior to me, then," Damian said, "but if you know anything that can explain what is happening to me, please share it."
Kaazim stepped out of the shadows enough so I could see the puzzlement on his face. "Doesn't it bother you that I think of you as less, because Anita has forced you to be her servant?"
"No."
"Because you do not care about my opinion." Kaazim sounded angry now. The first thread of his beast breathed through the room as if someone had opened a hot oven for a second.
"You are Harlequin. That means that you are a better warrior than I will ever be. That alone gives you reason to feel superior to me, but the vampire who made me tortured any pride out of me centuries ago. She made of me an empty vessel to fill as she saw fit. Empty vessels do not have pride, so I have no pride to be injured."
"We know of your creator."
"I always hoped that She-Who-Made-Me would finally do something so awful that the vampire council would send the Harlequin to slay her."
"If we had been sent to kill your master, we would not have left any vampires so old as you alive."
"Either way, I would have been free of her."
"You would have embraced death to be free of your master?"
"Oh, yes."
"Suicide would have freed you, too."
"But it might have denied me entrance to Valhalla. Death at the hands of the Harlequin would have been a glorious death."
"Do you still believe in your Valhalla after all these centuries?" Kaazim asked.
"Yes, I do."
"Most of us lose our faith under the power of the vampires."
"It was one thing she could not take from me."
Kaazim studied him, emotions playing over his dark face like cloud shadows on a windy day, too fast for me to understand, but it was more emotion than I'd ever seen him display. "If she left you your faith, then it was only because she could not understand it enough to tear it away from you."
"Yes, most likely."
"You are lucky that your master did not understand faith."
"I am."
"I was sent to spy on her once, your mistress. She was a terrible thing."
"Did you see me?"
"Yes."
"I did her bidding."
"I saw."
"I will not ask what you saw me do on her orders, because I do not want Anita to know the worst of me."
"You are her servant. She knows all your secrets."
"No, she leaves me space and privacy."
Kaazim looked surprised. "Why would she do that?"
"I don't want Damian to know all my secrets either. I don't want anyone that far inside my head."
"That is very you," Kaazim said.
"Yeah, it is. What do you know about what's happening to Damian?"
"Nothing," he said.
Bobby Lee said, "What do you know about a vampire with symptoms like Damian has?"
Kaazim smiled and nodded respect at the other guard. "Well worded, my friend."
"I've been in your part of the world a lot."
"It has been centuries since we have seen such symptoms."
"Symptoms of what?" I asked.
"Of having angered the Mother of All Darkness."
"I don't understand."
"Did the Mother ever visit your dreams, Anita?" he asked.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"Did you ever wake up in a cold sweat from it?"
I tried to think back to when Marmee Noir was trying to take me over. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure. I wasn't paying attention to how much I was sweating after she'd just been in my dreams."
"I understand," Kaazim said.
"Wait. Are you implying that the Mother of All Darkness is behind Damian's issues?"
"The last time I saw such symptoms, it was her."
I shook my head. "She's dead."
"She's a vampire, Anita. She started out dead."
I shook my head harder. "No, she is dead, completely, utterly, really, truly dead this time."
"How do you kill something that is only spirit, Anita?"
"I know that the Harlequin that witnessed her death were in contact with others. The Harlequin say they were witness to her death."
Kaazim nodded. "Indeed some of us were."
"Then answer your own question," I said.
"You absorbed her through the very skin of your body."
"Yeah, creepy as fuck, but yeah."
"How did it feel to devour the night, Anita? For she was that, the night made alive and real. How could one small human, even a necromancer, consume the night itself?"
"I learned how to take someone's energy from another vampire."
"Yes, Obsidian Butterfly, the Master of Albuquerque, New Mexico."
"If you know all the answers, why are you asking the questions?"
"I know what happened, but that is bare facts, and this was so much more than just facts."
"I don't even know what that means, Kaazim."
"You ate the living darkness, Anita. It has given your own necromancy a power jump of near-legendary proportions. You raised every cemetery and lone body in and around the city of Boulder, Colorado last year, while you chased down the spirit of the Lover of Death, one of the last members of the now-disbanded vampire council who did not bend knee to Jean-Claude's rebellion."
"You say rebellion. I say killing crazy motherfuckers to save the world from their plans to spread vampirism and contagious zombie plague across the planet."
"It would have been an apocalypse for the human race."
"But not the apocalypse."
"You mean the biblical one?" he asked.
"Yeah, as in the apocalypse."
"You say that as if there is only one."
"There is only one."
"You have prevented two on your own. We have prevented more events that would have destroyed the planet, or at least the human population. Some of us lived through the last great extinction and the coming of the great winter."
"You mean the Ice Age, as in the real Ice Age."
He nodded.
I took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and said, "Okay, some of you guys are old as fuck. Make your point."
"My point, Anita, is that apocalypse as in the great devastation or second coming of some religious significance has happened before and will likely happen again."
"I'm not sure we're defining it the same way," I said.
"Perhaps not, but there really does need to be a plural for apocalypse."
"Fine. You've made your point. Now tie all that back to what's happening with Damian."
"You are so impatient for someone who will likely live to see centuries."
"It's not certain that I'm immortal, Kaazim, and besides, I've killed more supposedly immortal beings than anyone else I know, so who will live forever is really up for debate."
"Fair enough," he said, "but you absorbed the Mother of All Darkness without having any idea how to control that much power."
"It's like eating steak; my body uses the energy of the food I eat automatically. I d
on't need to tell it to make bone, or more red blood vessels; it just does it."
"And whoever said that metaphysical food was the same as physical food, Anita?"
I stared at him, trying to reason my way through what he'd said. "I'm not sure I understand."
"He's saying that eating magic isn't the same as eating steak," Damian said.
I looked up at him, squeezing his hand. "Okay, maybe I'm being really slow, but I still don't get it."
"Did you really think you could consume the Mother of All Darkness, the one who created vampirekind, who gave us our civilization, our rules, our laws, and it would have no effect on you?"
"She was trying to do worse than kill me, Kaazim. She was trying to take over my body and use it for her house, car, whatever. She'd even tried to get me pregnant so she could transfer her spirit to my unborn baby, in case she couldn't take me. I had no choice but to kill her the only way I could. You said it: She was just spirit, untouchable, uncontainable, so I destroyed her the only way I could."
"By eating her," he said.
"Yeah, sort of."
"You gained a great deal of power, and Jean-Claude has used it well."
"Yeah, he has."
"But you were the power that consumed her, Anita, not Jean-Claude. You were the one who put your flesh against the body she was using and drank down the darkness between the stars."
I remembered the moment of it and how I'd thought the same thing: a darkness that had existed before the light found it, and would exist after the last star had burned out and the darkness took everything again. But I'd won. I'd defeated her. I'd saved myself and stopped all the evil she had planned for the rest of humanity, the rest of the vampires, and the shapeshifters--she'd been an equal-opportunity villain. She'd planned to take over all of us and make us her slaves, or puppets, or just die at her whim.
Nathaniel hugged me from behind, drawing me in against his body. He'd been tied to me metaphysically when I'd consumed the Mother of All Darkness. Part of what had helped me defeat her was my love and craving for him, and Jean-Claude, and all the men I loved. The Mother of All Darkness hadn't understood love.
"Say what you are thinking, Anita," Kaazim said.
"There was a moment when I thought I couldn't swallow the darkness, because it existed before the light, and would exist after the last star burned out. The darkness is always there. It always wins in the end."
"Yes, Anita, that is the truth."
"But I won."
"Did you?"
I frowned at him. "No more riddles, Kaazim. Just say it, whatever it is."
"The Mother would torment vampires she wanted to bend to her will. She haunted their dreams, and some bled out through their skin as Damian has today."
"Marmee Noir didn't do this, Kaazim, because she's dead."
"She's gone, but you are here."
"Yeah, that's what I said. I won, she lost. I'm alive, she's dead."
He sighed and shook his head. "You talk about her as if she were a body you could stab and watch die, Anita, but she was pure spirit. She housed herself in the bodies of her followers, but she did not have to use a body."
"Yeah, the Lover of Death was able to pull that trick off, too, but he had to keep his original body unharmed, just like the Traveller, one of your other council members."
"The Mother of All Darkness is not a council member, Anita."
"She was their queen, I know."
"No, you don't know. You absorbed her, drank her down, and perhaps she is dead, but her power is not, because you took it into yourself."
"We all know that Anita took the power into herself," Damian said.
"We don't all know any such thing," Bobby Lee said.
We looked at him. "Oh come on, Bobby Lee, don't tell me you didn't know."
"I did, but I don't want you all discussing this out of this room in front of everybody."
"Kaazim already knows."
"Still, one of the debates against Jean-Claude being king is that it was you who killed the big bad, not him."
"Whatever belongs to the servant belongs to the master," Kaazim said.
"Yes, but the vampires that are against Jean-Claude argue that it's the necromancer that's the master, not the vampire."
Kaazim nodded. "They use Damian as proof that Anita makes vampire servants."
"You mean some of the vamps think Jean-Claude is my servant, too?"
"Yes."
"A vampire can only have one servant at a time."
"As a vampire, you can only have one animal to call at a time, but you have nearly a dozen animals to call, so it is not a large stretch of logic to think you could have more than one vampire servant."
I wanted to argue with him, but I wasn't sure how. "Jean-Claude is not my servant."
"How can you be certain of that?"
"It's totally not how my power works with Damian, and he is my servant."
"As your connection is different with Nathaniel, your leopard to call, and Jason, your wolf to call, and all your tigers to call."
I opened my mouth, wanted to argue again, but wasn't sure I could work my way to a logical argument. I wrapped Nathaniel's arms tighter around me and squeezed Damian's hand. I knew it wasn't true about Jean-Claude, but I couldn't prove it by talking, only by how it felt, and feelings make piss-poor testimony.
"And what does any of that have to do with what's happening with Damian?" Bobby Lee asked, while I was trying to think my way through the logic maze that Kaazim had put me in.
"Anita absorbed the power of the Mother of Us All, but she is young and inexperienced. It is as if you gave a baby an AR rifle. It is a perfectly safe tool in the right hands, but in the wrong hands, it can do much harm."
"What?" I asked.
"What if you are causing Damian's problem, Anita? The power that is flowing through you, that you don't know how to control. He is your vampire servant and you have avoided him in nearly every way, but a vampire's power is drawn to its servants. You ignore him, but your power doesn't."
"I am not doing this to him."
"This doesn't feel like Anita's power," Damian said.
"Have you not listened to me? It is not Anita's power. It merely resides inside her, but it is not her."
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"Wait," Damian said. "You're saying that the power is the Mother of All Darkness's power."
"Almost," Kaazim said.
"What do you mean, almost?" I asked.
"I'm not saying it's the Mother of All Darkness's power. I'm saying it is the Mother of All Darkness."
"No, she tried to take over my body, but I stopped her."
"Did you, or did you help her do the very thing she wanted to do?"
I shook my head. "She's dead."
"You ate her power, her magic, her spirit, and that was all she was, just spirit. Perhaps it didn't work the way she wanted it to, but she is inside you."
"She is not in control of me, and that's what she wanted."
"True, but if she's in there, Anita, she is trying to figure out how you work, like a new car. Maybe what is happening to Damian is her learning to use the gas pedal, or figuring out how to drift around a turn."
"No," I said, and sounded very sure of it.
"Then if it is not the Mother, it is her power, and by your not forging a tighter bond with Damian, that power is treating him like a runaway vampire."
"Runaway vampire, what the fuck does that mean?"
"When she was more physical and less spirit, sometimes vampires she wanted close to her would run away from her. They would run as far away as they could go. She used to send us to fetch them, but then her power grew. She was able to hunt them in their dreams, to torment them until they did what she wished."
I thought about everything he'd said and finally asked, "What do I do to make him closer to me? I mean, he's right here, holding my hand."
"You are of Jean-Claude's bloodline, or your power is, which means lust is your c
oin to exchange for goods, Anita."
I looked at him.
"Why that look, Anita? You have had sex with Damian before, and he seems handsome enough for a man. Why do you run from him so?"
"I promised Cardinale and Damian that I would honor their monogamy."
"She took her clothes, Anita. I think they're done," Bobby Lee said.
I shook my head. "Cardinale is like the ultimate drama queen, an extreme girl."
"What does that mean?" Damian asked.
"That I wouldn't put it past her to move her stuff out as a sort of test to see how much you love her."
"You mean she wants me to see how much I'll miss her."
"Something like that."
He shook his head. "I spent centuries crawling for She-Who-Made-Me. I won't do it again." He motioned around the room, which looked like it belonged to anyone but him. "I've crawled enough for Cardinale already."
"If the relationship is at an end, then your promise to honor their monogamy is at an end," Kaazim said.
"I've felt how much you love her," I said.
"You're holding my hand. I'll lower my shields. You can feel exactly what I'm feeling."
"If you lower shields now, I'll feel it, too," Nathaniel said.
"I know," Damian said.
"Why do you want me to know how you feel about Cardinale?" I asked.
"Why are you nervous, Anita?" Kaazim asked.
"I'm not sure."
"If you don't want me, that is your right." Damian pulled away from my hand and lost the physical connection to both of us. He was still covered in his own dried blood like an extra from a horror show. I guess all three of us looked like horror show escapees.
"It's not that I don't want you, Damian. You're beautiful."
"Then why do you hesitate?" Kaazim asked.
"This is really none of your business."
"When you asked for my help, you made it my business."
"Well, thank you, and now back off."
"You destroyed our queen, Anita. You ended our way of life and our reason for existence. Now, you are our dark queen, and Jean-Claude is our king. We are your bodyguards. How can your well-being not be our business?"
When he put it that way, it was hard to bitch at him, but I so wanted to. "And how is who I have sex with your business?"
"If you were descended from a bloodline that thrived on violence, I would tell you to hurt him. If a bloodline of terror, I would say make him fear you. If anger, then rage at him. But it is lust that holds your power."
"I can feed on anger," I said.
"Then make him angry, and bind him to you with screams of rage. Perhaps hit him. It will give you more food to siphon out of him."
"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather just have sex," Damian said.
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