Crimson Death

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Whoever had picked the dress had left my hair loose, curling thick and utterly black around the whiteness of my skin. My eyes were dark. Some trick of the light in the room made them look black, but I had Rodrigo's eyes carved into my brain and I knew my eyes were brown, because his were truly black. A natural blond with black eyes, you didn't see that much.

  "The Welsh come colored like that from time to time," a woman's voice said.

  There was a woman in the mirror now, and it wasn't me. She was taller than me, slender, model thin, but not starved, just built that way. She had long, straight blond hair that fell well past her waist to swirl in the white dress she wore. It was from a much earlier century than mine, loose with long belled sleeves that almost hid her hands. Gold ribbon laced her tight through the bodice so that it showed her small, high breasts to good effect. Her eyes were a clear pale blue, the shade that coloring books tell you is what water looks like, but it almost never does in real life. She was almost everything that I'd ever wanted to be when I was about twelve to sixteen, when I realized I would never be any of it.

  "Wishes," she said.

  "When I was a child, before I knew my own worth, yes," I said.

  She walked closer to her side of the mirror; the room looked identical, as if we were both standing in the same place. She was shining in the sunlight in a way that hair and skin didn't if you were human. She was almost unearthly in her beauty, like a shimmering white goddess.

  "Yes, I was a goddess once."

  "They worshipped you as one," I said.

  "You don't believe I'm a goddess?"

  I started walking toward the mirror as I said, "No."

  "Could anyone but a goddess build a dream for us to speak in?"

  "I've met other people who could create dreams, and they weren't gods."

  The shining light of her flickered for a second like a bad connection on a video, and then it steadied to shine and be lovely again. I stood in front of the mirror now. It was a very old mirror, the glass full of imperfections, dark marks in the glass itself, a bubble here and there.

  "It was a marvel of craftsmanship in its day," she said.

  "I bet it was," I said, and looked at her like a tall, thin, blond reflection in the mirror. I could see that there were flowers and leaves embroidered on the gold ribbon of her dress now. Why had she put me in a dress that was closer to Belle Morte's taste than hers? Or did she want to wear bright colors, but they washed her out?

  "I wear what I wish to wear," she said.

  "Pastels look terrible on me, but I bet they look wonderful on you," I said.

  The image of her flickered again, the shining white light gone for an eyeblink, replaced with darkness, rough stone, like a cave, or a tomb. Then the white figure was back, shining harder, as if trying to make up for that last glimpse. Take no notice of that man behind the curtain.

  I could see that her high cheekbones were paired with a chin that was a little too pointed for my taste, a nose a little sharp; witchy, I'd have said once, but I knew too many witches now and none of them looked like that.

  I got another glimpse of the dark cave, and her face bare of the light for a moment, and anger in those pale blue eyes. Too pale, not as rich a color as she was pretending to have here in her dream . . . our dream.

  "It is not your dream. It is mine!"

  "Have it your way," I said. "Why did you bring me to your dream?"

  "I thought this would be more pleasant."

  "It's not a bad dream, so what do you want in this pleasant dream?"

  "You have something I want," the image in the mirror said.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Power."

  "Yeah, you and everybody else."

  "What?" she asked, as if I'd confused her. If she could read my mind it shouldn't have confused her, which meant she could only read part of my thoughts.

  "I am in your mind," she said.

  "But you still don't understand everything I'm thinking, or everything I'm feeling, do you?"

  "I understand all!" But there was that flicker again, and I saw her standing in the dark place, her thin face closer to mine than it was in the dream.

  "I don't remember the early deities claiming omniscience," I said.

  The flicker again, because I'd confused her again. She came back to the mirror in her white dress with its gold and embroidery, but she wasn't shining anymore. She was lovely, but not otherworldly so. Her eyes were blue, but I knew people with bluer ones.

  "When I am done with you, I will find your blue-eyed lovers and carve their faces down to ruin!"

  That scared me and I couldn't hide it with her inside my head, and she understood the fear. She smiled a thin smile. "I wanted to make this pleasant between us, Anita, but if you are determined to be unpleasant, I know how to do that, too."

  Dev lay on the floor beside me. His eyes were gone, just blood and thick bits as he screamed and reached out for me. I grabbed for his hand before I could think, and it felt real enough, but . . . it wasn't. It wasn't and I knew that it wasn't. I'd given her an awful idea to use against me, and she had, but it wasn't real. If she'd wanted to hurt me this wasn't the man to choose. Dev vanished and it was Nicky with both eyes bleeding and gone, but that wasn't right. He only had one eye, and she didn't know that. She wasn't perfect; even this far into my subconscious she couldn't see that clearly.

  "I see more clearly than your man will after I take his last eye."

  I carefully, very carefully didn't think of anyone else, just put a blank wall between me and my thoughts. It was like shielding for metaphysics; just think walls. I put up a wall between us and it appeared in the middle of the room, dividing it in half with the mirror on the other side.

  She screamed then, and the scream shattered the wall, so that I put up my arms to shield my face, and thought it was like the vampire exploding. I wasn't surprised to find a piece of stone embedded in my arm. I'd given her the image. I had to stop that.

  I pictured the wall again, but this time it was smoother, metal, and mine. Her power hit it, but the metal only bent with her efforts; it did not break. Her power beat against my wall, my metaphysical shielding, and she couldn't get through.

  "But you are still trapped in my dream, Anita Blake!"

  Was I? I wasn't sure how to break the dream without dropping the wall, and I wanted the wall to stay. I'd learned to do lucid dreaming where I could change dreams as I had them, or even break free of bad ones, but holding the wall while she battered it and trying to figure out a way to break the dream was a few more balls to juggle than I could keep in the air.

  I started with the dress, and I was suddenly wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, black boots, and my favorite holster with my favorite gun. I felt more me as I looked up at the metal wall dimpling as she beat on it. It bent here and there, but she couldn't break through. I could hold the wall. I could stand in the dream and be okay. Interesting, and I did my best to stop the thought there, no other memories, nothing. I would give nothing to be used against me here. Nothing but the wall, cool metal, smooth without any handholds for her mind.

  She screamed again, the metal of the wall bending as if a giant had hit it, but it held. She couldn't get to me anymore. She couldn't play with me in dreams, and she couldn't make the dream into a nightmare. I could wait her out. She must have realized that, because she decided to let me wake up, or maybe I just woke on my own.

  78

  I WOKE IN the dark place I'd seen in the moments when the dream wavered. It wasn't completely dark, though; there was natural light coming from somewhere in the wall or ceiling. I was in a thin beam of pale sunlight. I was also almost on my knees, but not quite, because chains at my wrists kept me from my knees, or the stone floor. I'd been hanging there for a while, because my shoulders were aching. I got to my feet slowly, carefully, because I knew it would hurt even more as full circulation came back to my shoulders, arms, and hands. I was wearing a red satin nightie that I'd never owned. For a s
econd I wondered if I'd fallen into another dream, but my arms hurt too much for that. I'd tried to be chained up like this for sexy bondage one time back home and found that I could only have my arms up like this for so long before I started to hurt. I'd done one scene where my legs had gone out from under me, and Asher had let me hang like that for a while. I hadn't said my safeword; if I had he'd have unchained me and taken care of whatever hurt, but once he had unchained me my arms had hurt more and for longer than ever before. If I couldn't hold myself upright when I was bound in some way, then I asked for a new position, or just to be held and loved. Unfortunately, there wasn't a safeword in the world that would get me out of this dungeon.

  I stood there and waited for the pain in my shoulders to die down enough for me to feel how many pins and needles were burning through my hands. I flexed them, trying to rush the process, because I'd woken up alone. No one was actually hurting me yet, or even guarding me. Good. First, I needed to be able to feel my hands, because it's hard to fight if you can't. As far as I could see there was no electricity in the room; in fact, there were unlit torches in wall sconces, which meant there were no cameras, no way for them to watch me until they came into the room. Better.

  I kept flexing my hands and trying to rotate my shoulders to see if anything was damaged from hanging however long I'd been there. The daylight meant that either it was only a little later the same day, or it was the next day. If the first, then I'd only been out for a couple of hours tops. If the second, then I was lucky I could move my arms, or feel my hands at all. It would also mean that whatever had happened in Dublin that night was over and I'd missed it all. That scared me, tightening my stomach, making me wonder if everyone I cared about was all right. Then I realized I was being stupid. I didn't need a phone to call home.

  I reached out to Nathaniel first and there was nothing, just a blankness, which scared me even more. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, got myself calmer and reached out for Dev . . . and nothing. I tried Jean-Claude, and again, nothing. It wasn't that everyone here in Ireland had died in some horrible vampire debacle; something was preventing me from contacting anyone psychically. I'd had a human witch that was able to do that once, so the fact that the Wicked Bitch of Ireland would have someone powerful enough to do it shouldn't have surprised me.

  There was one opening in the room, a rough doorway that seemed to have stairs beyond it that went up; other than that I didn't see any other doors. Unless there was a door at the top of those stairs to keep me prisoner, they were pretty confident they didn't need a door to hold me. I looked at the manacles on my wrists, because that was what they were; they didn't lock with keys but with a metal piece that slid through a hole. If I could have gotten one hand close enough to the other I could have undone them, but the chains were too widely spaced for that. I looked at the chains themselves. They were big links, like the size of a log chain, so they were big and meant for holding things a lot heavier than me. They weren't fastened to the stone ceiling but went through holes in the ceiling, which meant if someone was at the top of the room above me they'd see the chains move and know I was awake. I'd been so busy looking for modern things, I hadn't thought that old-school would work just fine.

  I listened for movement that might let me know that they were coming to check on all that chain movement like a fish on a bobber, but it was quiet. I realized I could hear the sea. Dublin was a coastal city, so that shouldn't have surprised me, but somehow I thought of the room in the dream and the fact that the windows had looked out over the sea. It was as if the room in the dream were more real to me than Dublin and that one glimpse of the Irish Sea. I had a second to wonder if this was still a part of that dream, and then I smelled the damp and the mustiness of the room. I breathed deeper and could smell the saltier freshness of the sea air. You couldn't smell things when you were dreaming. I hugged that fact to myself, because it helped me not worry about the whole dream-versus-reality thing. I'd treat it as real until I knew I was wrong.

  I heard voices on the stairs. I debated on pretending to still be unconscious, but I'd just gotten the feeling back in all my extremities, and besides, no one coming through the doorway would be human. They'd be able to tell if I was asleep just by my breathing and heart rate. There was really no sense in pretending, so I was standing, waiting, when Hamish came through the doorway, but he wasn't with Rodrigo anymore. The man with him was tall, dark, and not handsome. He wasn't ugly, but he wasn't pretty either. It was like he had several great features, but they didn't all belong on the same face at the same time.

  He was definitely not handsome, but something about the way he carried himself as he entered the room made you want to look at him. There was an energy to him that made Hamish easy to overlook, which would have been a mistake, because the flashiest person in the room isn't always the most dangerous.

  I caught a glimpse of white behind the second man, and it was the Wicked Bitch herself in person at last. She was wearing the same dress she'd worn in the dream, but it wasn't the shining perfection it had been. The dress had dirt on the hem from the rough stone floor, or maybe she'd gone for a stroll outside. She was still beautiful and sort of exotic, for lack of a better word, but it wasn't heavenly light and fireworks in the real world.

  The two men took up posts on either side of her, but a little in front, so they were between her and me. I wasn't sure if they were afraid I'd hurt her, or she'd hurt me, but they were definitely placed so they could keep us apart if need be. Interesting.

  "Anita Blake, we meet at last."

  "I was thinking almost the same thing, though I don't know what name you prefer," I said.

  "M'Lady will do."

  "You called me by my Christian name and surname. Seems like using a nickname would be too informal after that." I didn't want to call her M'Lady. Maybe just stubbornness on my part, but I didn't want to use the name she forced people to use.

  "You are very calm for someone who awoke in chains," she said, searching my face for some hint of what I was really thinking.

  I tried to shrug but mainly made the chains rattle. "Not being calm won't change anything."

  "Such possession of self is rare."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "I hope you do not mind the change of clothes, but your others had become quite . . . disheveled."

  "I appreciate your thoughtfulness," I said. I'd shared enough of Damian's memories to know that being nice to her was my best chance at not getting hurt. It might also make her more talkative, and I needed more information. Where was I? What day was it?

  She watched me with those pale blue eyes that she'd worked so hard to make bluer in our shared dream. "There is no fear in you now. Perhaps I have been too generous and should have hung you up nude."

  "I said Thank you."

  She frowned.

  "Allow me, mistress," the second man said.

  "Not yet, Keegan." She walked closer until she was only about two feet in front of me. I could have kicked her, but I didn't see what it would gain me. They hadn't hurt me yet; if I hurt them first that would probably change.

  "As my mistress wills," he said, but his face showed a sour disappointment. Whatever he had offered, he enjoyed doing, and I would probably not enjoy it at all.

  "The first time I touched your energy through our shared vampire, you were nearly helpless before my terror. Now you stand before me and there is no fear in you. How can this be?"

  I just looked at her, willing myself to be calm and patient, and wait. I wasn't sure what I was waiting for, but I was hoping I'd know it when it happened.

  "Lay your hands upon her, mistress, and her calm will shatter," Keegan said.

  "I would not recommend that, M'Lady," Hamish said.

  She turned and looked at Hamish. "Why should I not touch her?"

  "You have both drunk deep of the powers of the Queen of All Darkness."

  "What of it?"

  "Her powers will grow with touch as well. I told you what she did t
o Rodrigo."

  I so wanted to ask what I had done to Roddy, but I didn't. They'd assume I knew exactly what I did, and either they wouldn't believe me or they'd know just how new I was to some of my powers.

  "He is weak of will," Keegan said.

  "Rodrigo is petty, cruel, and nearly honorless, but he is not weak," Hamish said.

  "Are you saying I am no stronger than Rodrigo?" she demanded.

  Hamish bowed and said, "I would never say that, M'Lady. We are all your humble servants and pale in comparison to your greatness."

  I half-expected her to call bullshit on the pretty speech, but she didn't. She seemed to take it as her proper due. "Then I will put the fear of me into her."

  "I advise against it," he said.

  "You dare to doubt our Queen," Keegan said.

  "I never doubt the Queen of Nightmares, or we would not have come halfway around the world to serve her."

  "Then watch and learn," Keegan said.

  She reached one pale hand toward me. I waited for her to hesitate at the sunlight, but she didn't. She moved through it as if she'd never seen a vampire go up in flames from it before. She touched my face and it took a lot not to pull away, but I knew that would amuse her and I didn't want to amuse anyone here.

  She caressed my cheek and said, "Such a pretty girl. I normally don't think dark hair and eyes are striking, but you are quite lovely."

  "Thanks, you too--on the lovely part, I mean. You're as pale as I am dark." I remembered through Damian's memories and Asher's story that she was very insecure, insanely insecure. When dealing with a crazy person, it's always safer to go along with the delusion, as far as you can. If she wanted to be the fairest of them all, I would be her biggest cheerleader.

  "We would make a fine pair of opposites for some man's bed, you and I." I didn't like that idea at all; I fought not to show it but apparently failed, because she smiled and said, "That bothers you. I would have thought that sex would not bother you, being of Jean-Claude and Belle Morte's bloodline."

  I tried to think of a polite way to put it, still trying not to trip her crazy. "We just met. I like to get to know someone before I have sex with them. You know, at least a coffee date."