Very soon after their first date, Anita learns that Richard is a werewolf. She likes him for his humanity, but the fact that he’s a monster freaks her out. Can she help it that, when they go to a restaurant, she wonders if he wants to eat the elderly couple at the next table? That she suspects him of eating Little Red Riding Hood? Sure, she reminds herself that lycanthropy is a disease, like AIDS. She reminds herself that it is not right to be prejudiced.
As she rationalizes, it’s not because he’s a monster that she doesn’t want to have sex with Richard: it’s because she does not engage in pre-marital sex. She was raised Catholic. So when he proposes, she accepts. It made sense, for a moment: she craves normal; she craves life; she even craves sex. Because he craves the same things, Richard represents domestication to Anita, in spite of the fact that he is a werewolf.
But Anita regrets the engagement instantly. At first, she wrestles with whether or not Richard is human. He is the closest she’ll ever get to the two-car garage and the two-point-five kids, but still, she worries about the morality of marrying a monster. Even though he caught lycanthropy through a vaccine and no fault of his own, she blames his beast for her hesitation. If he were human, she thinks, maybe things would be different.
At this point in the series, though, Richard is solid white-picketfence material. So where does Anita’s fear of marriage come from? Why the resistance to domestication? It is, after all, what she thought she wanted.
Perhaps Anita’s extreme reaction to him cooking in her kitchen is a clue. When she comes home to her apartment after a rough night, she’s upset to find music playing: it’s not quiet. He’s left the door unlocked. He’s in her kitchen. In an apron. She runs to her room to make sure there are no signs of an “invasion.” The romantic dinner with candles upsets her so much that he clears the evidence away while she is in the shower. As she frets about the situation, she starts to wonder if her hesitations may be rooted in something other than his being a werewolf:
Did Richard have this domestic vision of a little house, him in the kitchen, me working, and kids? Oh, damn, we were going to have to sit down and have a serious talk. If we did manage to get engaged like normal people, what did that mean? Did Richard want children? I certainly didn’t. Where would we live? My apartment was too small. His house? I wasn’t sure I liked that idea. It was his house. Shouldn’t we have our house? Shit. Kids, me? Pregnant, me? Not in this lifetime. I thought furriness was our biggest problem. Maybe it wasn’t. (The Lunatic Café)
When she’s confronted with the normal life she thought she wanted, Anita instantly realizes that it is not for her. She believes the monsters live in a world too dangerous for normalcy: the work she does would put neighbors and human friends in harm’s way. But her desire to protect humans from monsters is not her reason for giving up on a normal life; it’s her excuse. The moment she realizes what normal would entail, the grass no longer becomes greener on the other side.
Abandoning a normal life, however, means she’s left without a community. She can’t live in the regular world, and up until The Killing Dance, her prejudice against the monsters keeps her from living fully in their world, too: she’ll only kill in their world. As Richard bitterly points out, “You don’t sleep with me, either, because I’m a monster, too. But you can kill us, can’t you, Anita? You just can’t fuck us” (The Killing Dance).
Her relationship with Richard removes any doubt from Anita’s mind that she and domestication don’t mix. Cleaning up after the messes his ideals create forces her to become more of a monster.
In The Killing Dance, Anita must challenge the lupa of Richard’s werewolf pack because he cannot rule them: they don’t believe he will kill. He wants the pack to be run in a more humane fashion, but his hesitation to spill blood causes Anita to become more enmeshed with the monsters than with her own humanity. Although Richard does finally kill Marcus, he does not finish the job and kill Raina and Gabriel. At the end of the book, Anita must complete those two kills or die. Once she kills Raina, she is indisputably the lupa of the Thronnos Rokke Clan. And although she doesn’t yet know it, killing Gabriel also sets her up to be the leader and protector of the wereleopard pack.
Even after killing Marcus, Richard is still too humane to keep control of his pack. After he is accused of raping one of the women he auditioned for lupa, Anita goes to Myerton, Tennessee, to save him. In the process, she has to kill a large number of the city’s vampires. In Narcissus in Chains, Anita is forced to become the pack’s Bolverk— worker of evil—to do the evil deeds Richard is unable to because of his principles. She executes Jacob, who intended to kill his way to becoming the pack’s leader in order to turn it over to Chimera. Richard is unable to do even those evil deeds that would keep him in power and his pack protected.
The more monstrous Anita becomes in order to make up for Richard’s quest for a humane and human life, the more she is pushed into the monster world. But while killing is a step away from normalcy, it also brings her closer to the monsters that she protects, where she discovers a different kind of love, a different kind of intimacy, and a different kind of home.
Anita’s Keeping a List, Checking It Twice
“You can’t save everyone.” Sylvie said. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
—Burnt Offerings
If there is anything that Anita lives for, it’s protecting innocents from the monsters. Because of her preternatural gifts, because she can save innocents, she feels it is her responsibility to do so.
Anita may have inherited this belief from her creator. In the afterword of The Lunatic Café, Laurell K. Hamilton writes: “If you don’t help protect the innocent, then what good are you? If you don’t protect those weaker than you, what good are you?” Hamilton is not asking rhetorical questions. She later answers her questions, and her judgment is blunt: “No damn good at all.” So Anita keeps a list of those she would kill for, whether to avenge them or keep them safe.
At first, this list mostly consists of humans. Although she kills Nikolaos and many of her supporters to protect Jean-Claude, given the opportunity she would sooner see him dead: she is afraid of the love she might come to feel for him. He is only on her list because if he is the Master of the City rather than Nikolaos, it will save innocents down the line. She also protects Jean-Claude in Circus of the Damned, but again, only because if he is in power rather than Mr. Oliver, the human community will be safer.
In The Killing Dance, things change: the number of monsters on her list rapidly overtakes the number of humans. First comes Willie: he is the first vampire Anita considers a friend, partly because she liked him when he was human, and most importantly, because he is one of the weakest vampires in St. Louis. Anita tends to trust those who need protection more quickly than she does those who don’t.
She also starts saving the monsters for their sake rather than for the sake of humans. Not all monsters are equally monstrous, she discovers. Not only must she protect humans from the monsters, but she needs to protect the monsters from worse monsters. After watching Stephen, the werewolf, get cut up and tortured in order to make a porn film for Raina, Anita realizes humans aren’t the only ones who can be victims. She not only puts Stephen on her list, but cuddles with him through the night when he is still afraid, even though she has never slept next to a man until daybreak. For Anita, protecting people is more important than her emotional hang-ups or fears of intimacy.
Any vulnerability at all inspires Anita’s need to protect. Divided, the lycanthropic community is weak against such monsters as Chimera, who uses each animal’s mistrust of other animals against all of the St. Louis lycanthropes. Anita not only befriends the wererats and protects the werewolves and wereleopards, she also organizes a Lycanthrope Coalition to strengthen the position of all wereanimals. As Jean-Claude points out, “It is getting so that a person cannot insult a monster in St. Louis without answering to you, ma petite” (Blue Moon).
While protecting those on her “list” is what gets her into mo
st of her troubles, it’s also what brings her closer to the monsters. Every monster she trusts has, at some point, benefitted from Anita’s protection. Because it is easier for Anita to trust someone who needs help, protecting someone is often her first step in caring for someone—and sometimes even in loving someone.
Monsters Have Feelings, Too
“So you invited me to come play because I’m now as much of a sociopath as you are.”
“Oh, I’m a much better sociopath,” he said. “I’d never let a vampire sink his fangs into my neck. And I wouldn’t date the terminally furry.”
“Do you date anyone, ever?”
He just smiled that irritating smile that meant he wasn’t going to answer. But he did. “Even Death has needs.”
Edward dating? That was something I had to see.
—Obsidian Butterfly
Until The Killing Dance, Anita is convinced that monsters have no feelings. She claims they cannot love. The only thing that cures her prejudice? Empathy. Before she can love the monsters, she must feel what they feel.
When Anita becomes part of a triumvirate with a werewolf and a vampire, she is forced to feel all their emotions. This is not a good thing, at first. She puts Richard in as much of a lose-lose situation as he puts her. When he accepts his beast and kills—as Anita begged him to do—it scares Anita away. The worst of it, however, is not that her lover killed. The worst is that, through the triumvirate, Anita also felt the wolves’ desire to feed on flesh. She not only learns that Richard enjoys killing and eating Marcus, she is horrified by the possibility that she, too, would have enjoyed it. She is not ready to accept her own monster, not yet.
The Killing Dance is also a turning point in the way Anita sees Jean-Claude. After a vampire is murdered, Anita is surprised to learn that Jean-Claude is not pleased. She assumed he cared for only the power Robert brought to him, not for Robert himself. He sets her straight: “Then you do not understand me at all, ma petite. He was my companion for over a century. After a century, I would mourn even an enemy’s passing. Robert was not my friend, but he was mine. Mine to punish, mine to reward, mine to protect. I have failed him.” Anita’s false assumptions about him incite an anger so strong in Jean-Claude that it brushes “heat along my skin.”
After Anita witnesses Richard’s wolf-form tearing a bite out of dead Marcus, she runs straight to the Circus of the Damned and into Jean-Claude’s arms. While they have sex, she notices that “emotions flowed over his face.” She is even more surprised to feel and see his uncertainty during their love-making.
The forced empathy of the triumvirate starts chipping away at her belief that monsters can’t love, but there is still one problem: she believes herself to be a monster, too. Although Anita describes herself as “practical” and “ruthless,” she struggles throughout the series with the fear that these are negative qualities and that she is a sociopath. The fact that she can kill so easily and without regret frightens her. She doubts her ability, given her occupation as vampire executioner, to love. Learning that the monsters can love is the first step in winning this battle; learning that she can love is the second. While the monsters can teach her that they can love, only a sociopath can teach her that a killer can love.
Edward, whom she often refers to as “Death,” is Anita’s mentor. She believes him to be the ultimate killer, the ultimate sociopath. Although they are friends, she believes he would kill her in an instant, if needed. They are both executioners, both killers, and Edward taught her almost everything he knows. Anita claims he helped create the woman she is. They are, she believes, two sides of the same coin.
So when she discovers that he has a house and a fiancée, and is helping to look after his fiancée’s two children, Anita is shocked. At first she doesn’t believe he cares for them: she believes he is using them as a cover. It’s not until the end of Obsidian Butterfly that she realizes Edward would sacrifice his life to protect the woman’s son. Protecting is something Anita always understands; when she discovers he can love and protect, it opens her up to the possibility that killing without regret does not preclude the ability to love.
And just in time. In the very next book, Anita meets her soulmate.
A Marriage of Convenience
Micah turned his face, looked into my eyes, and I felt something inside me open; some door that I hadn’t even known existed swung wide. A wind blew through the door, a wind made of darkness and the stillness of the grave. A wind that held an edge of electric warmth like the rub of fur across bare skin. A wind that tasted of both my men. But I was the center, the thing that could hold both of them inside and not break. Life and death, lust and love. “What are you?” Micah asked, his voice a surprised whisper.
—Narcissus in Chains
It is fitting that Anita first meets Micah while in her bed and naked. Her relationship with Micah is instantaneous: Micah’s beast calls to her beast. As Anita says, “We were like fishermen. We had our net, all we needed was for the fish to stop fighting us and lay still” (Narcissus in Chains). The description works, except it’s more like they are the fish who must lay still. Their pairing is instinctive and inevitable, and if they (or really, Anita) will only lay still and accept it, they will snap together like magnets. They are biologically meant for each other: he is leopard king and she is leopard queen. Rafael tells her that her beast has already chosen for her, and Micah explains that they “can’t help it,” which is, perhaps, the only way Micah so quickly gets past Anita’s typical moralizing and reluctance to add another man into her bed.
Micah is different from her other men: Micah is easy. Like most of the men Anita ends up loving, Micah first needs her protection, but that is where the similarities end. Micah admires the traits in her that Richard finds repulsive. He sees Anita’s sociopathic tendencies as “practical,” because they keep her pard safe, Richard’s pack safe, and her friends safe. Where Anita doubts her ruthlessness is a good quality, Micah is so certain it is a positive that he values her for it.
Micah also takes the traditional role of wife in their relationship and home. He keeps the peace. When Anita has trouble growing into her relationship with Nathaniel, it is Micah who forces her to deal with it. He gives her a look that says, “Fix this, or I’ll be mad at you, too” (Incubus Dreams). And she does, because he is also the one who started one of her most treasured rituals: after Micah discovered that Nathaniel had not read Peter Pan, he suggested they all read aloud in bed. If she’s running late after a tough night, he and Nathaniel wait up for her.
Perhaps this is why Micah is the first man in her life whose love she makes a concerted effort not to pick at, “to see if it would unravel.” But Anita Blake does not trust love, so espite her intentions, she does pick at it. She discovers it does not unravel. It is fitting that, by the end of Micah, she uses Micah’s blood as a circle of protection: a symbol, perhaps, of her newfound trust in him.
As perfect a wife Micah is to her, he is not even the most important factor in her domestication. She needs nother wife: someone she doesn’t at first realize she loves, even when everyone else around her does.
Penguins, Spiders, and Leopards, Oh My!
“No, [I’d] kill you to save everybody else you’d destroy.” My voice wasn’t soft anymore.
“Even if it destroys you at the same time?”
“Yes.”
“Even if it drags our tortured Richard down with us?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Even if it cost Damian his life?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Even if Nathaniel died with us?”
I stopped breathing for a second, and time seemed to do one of those stretches where you have all the time in the world, and none of it. My breath came out shaky, and I had to lick my lips, before I said, “Yes, on one condition.”
“And that would be?” he asked.
“That I could guarantee that I wouldn’t survive it either.”
—Incubus Dreams
Nathanie
l is the most important factor in Anita’s domestication. It is surprising that even after she has the conversation above with Jean-Claude, Anita does not realize that she loves Nathaniel. She is willing to survive the death of everyone she loves, except Nathaniel. How could she not realize that she loves him? As she says, “More than almost any other man in my life, he confused me. Nathaniel was so far outside my comfort zone sometimes that I had no clue” (The Harlequin).
It’s not just confusion. From the very beginning, she resists the ways of Nathaniel and the other wereleopards. Their comfortable nudity embarrasses her, and their constant touching feels suffocating rather than comforting. They prefer to sleep in puppy piles, with affectionate touches and intertwined limbs to keep them company through the night. When nervous or worried, touch reassures and centers them.
Not for Anita, not at first.
Growing up Catholic with a “Midwestern, middle-class value system” (Narcissus in Chains) did not give Anita much comfort with intimacy. She is not at ease with the naked body, partly because it tends to inspire the ardeur beyond her control, and partly because of her upbringing. She constantly questions the ethics of her sexual activities. In an interview with Christopher DeRose, Laurell K. Hamilton talked about the creation of the main character for her Merry Gentry series this way: “I wanted someone with an easier attitude about sex. Someone I wouldn’t have to argue with all the time the way I do with Anita.”
And argue Anita does.
Marianne, her mentor, argues with Anita for four pages in Blue Moon before Anita is willing to take the first, simple step toward greater intimacy with her wereleopards—and Marianne asks only that Anita brush Nathaniel’s hair. Even this simple gesture raises in Anita a world of worry about her responsibilities to Nathaniel, his submissive sexuality, and her more dominant nature. She fears the consequences of this affectionate act and what it will mean for their relationship.
Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series Page 10