Rafael

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I felt my eyes fill with my own power and I said, “You can’t roll me with your eyes, whoever you are.”

  I felt Hector move a second before his elbow tried to connect with the side of my head. I moved my head away and my arm up to sweep his elbow away from me and let his own momentum carry him past me. I drove my foot into his leg at the same time. If he’d been human, it would have broken, but he just went to his knees and I was coming in at his back for a throat shot with a blade in each hand as he tumbled out of reach across the floor, coming up on one knee and foot, hands up and ready for me.

  We faced each other, both of us breathing a little hard not from exertion but from the emotion of it. I’d have killed him if he hadn’t moved and he knew it. “Your speed and skill of arms is much improved.”

  “Improved over what? We’ve never met before,” I asked, still in a fighting stance with naked blades in hand.

  He blinked and his eyes were back to the greenish brown of Hector, all the vampire powers locked away. “Over what I was told.” He held his hands out, palms toward me, in the universal gesture of I mean no harm, or at least I’m done for now. “I think maybe it’s too dangerous to play with you, Anita Blake.” He stood slowly, carefully with his hands up so I wouldn’t have any excuse to rush him.

  I came out of the fighting crouch and backed up slowly but kept the knives out. He’d just threatened everyone I loved. If I could kill him here and now without starting a war between the wererats and vampires, I’d so do it.

  “I will go back to watch the lesser fights now, and you can decide if you want to watch me fight Rafael more than you want to be at the side of the men you love most in the world while they fight for their lives.”

  My heart started thudding too fast, adrenaline pumping through me like champagne shaken too hard. I whispered through my head just enough to see if Jean-Claude was listening in, and he was there like a cool line of calm. I didn’t have to get to a phone; he’d warn everyone.

  “Liar,” Claudia said, “everything was true, but not that last. Jean-Claude and the others aren’t fighting for their lives, you’re bluffing on that.”

  “Am I?” Hector said, and again there was that feel of another older, less cocky personality.

  “We can smell the lie,” Lillian said.

  Pierette moved closer to him, hands out to her sides, showing that she didn’t mean any harm, but Hector moved so that he could keep an eye on both of us. He ignored the other wererats more than the two of us; that seemed wrong. They were a fighting culture, everyone was dangerous.

  “It was worth a try,” Hector said, “but now I’ll leave so you can change. I can be a gentleman when I must.” He backed toward the door, hands out, so he gave us no excuse.

  Jean-Claude breathed through my mind, “Thrust power into him, now, before he leaves.”

  “Why?” I whispered.

  “Trust me, ma petite.”

  I did, so I thrust power toward Hector. Jean-Claude hadn’t specified which power, so I went to my default—necromancy. I thrust it into that tall, handsome body, but I wasn’t looking for wererat. There it was like a cool, underground stream hidden away, vampire hiding under all that hot shapeshifter energy, and then I was thrust out so hard I staggered backward into the lockers.

  Hector’s eyes burned with dark brown fire like sunlight through brown glass. “Naughty necromancer, you’ve made Rafael your rat to call, or you couldn’t have pushed past Hector like that, but it won’t matter once Rafael is dead.” He turned and went for the door with a confident swagger, Hector in charge of the body again.

  One of the nurses said, “What was wrong with his eyes?”

  “Vampire, he’s a vampire’s animal to call,” I said.

  “You’ve met the vampire before,” Pierette said.

  “Yeah, I got that feeling, too,” I muttered.

  “No, I mean I know you’ve met him before.”

  I looked at her and her eyes were a dark charcoal gray. Her master Pierrot’s eyes in her face. “I hoped your power would force a mistake, and it did.”

  “What mistake?” I asked, looking into a face that I was beginning to hold dear and seeing someone else looking out of it. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to it.

  “He overreacted to your necromancy and revealed too much of himself.”

  “I didn’t get a sense of who it was holding Hector’s leash,” I said.

  “I smelled something that wasn’t Hector, but I couldn’t tell much else,” Claudia said.

  “Pierette could, couldn’t you, my darling?”

  “Yes, master,” she said, and that they were both still using the same mouth to have the conversation was just weird enough that I almost missed my cue to ask, “What did you smell, Pierette?”

  “It was a who,” Pierrot said, and it was him, because he liked to milk a reveal. Pierette was much more straightforward—it was one reason she was part of our poly group and he wasn’t.

  “Who?”

  “Padma, Master of Beasts.”

  “The vampire council member who almost took us over once before?” Lillian asked.

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Motherfucking son of a bitch,” I said, and I went for the door. I was going to kill Hector and now. The wererats could get mad at me later.

  23

  CLAUDIA CAUGHT ME at the door, putting her hand against it so I couldn’t open it. I knew how much she bench-pressed; if she wanted to hold the door shut, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “You can’t kill him, not before he fights Rafael.”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  “If our laws allowed us to kill him now, like this, I’d help you. I’d love to tear his arrogant ass to pieces, but until he fights for the crown, we cannot touch him.”

  Lillian spoke from behind us. “We are allowed to defend ourselves, but nothing more until he fights our king.”

  I could see Pierette behind Lillian, still just standing there as if she were listening to things we couldn’t hear, which I guess was Pierrot in her head. “Tell them how dangerous he is, Pierrot, or Pierette, or whichever, tell them.”

  Pierette turned to me and between one blink and the next her eyes went from solid brown to dark gray. Did my eyes ever do the change that smoothly? Did I want to know?

  “He is one of the old council members, but we have no way of knowing if our dead queen made him more powerful with her magic, or if she kept him powerless. If the first, then we will slay him, but if the second, we are all in terrible danger.”

  “He’s the son of a bitch that skinned Rafael alive as torture because he wouldn’t give the rest of you up,” I said. I’d have tugged on the door handle if I’d had a hand free, but I still had a knife in each hand, which raised the question of how I had planned to open the door in the first place. I realized I’d gone for the wrist knives. I sheathed the one in my left hand in the right wrist sheath, which was on top of the wrist; the left sheath carried the knife on the underside of the wrist so I could draw them simultaneously. I’d carried them almost longer than any other weapon I owned. They’d been the first silver I’d bought after bullets. I tried to feel bad about the fact that I’d gone for a killing weapon first thing, but all I could think was if we killed Hector, it might kill Padma and then we’d all be safer.

  “I know who he is and what he did, Anita,” Claudia said. She looked somewhere between sad and in pain, but she still kept her hands on the door so I couldn’t go after him.

  “Then let’s finish this,” I said.

  “If you kill Hector before he fights Rafael, then the rest of the rodere will turn against him. They will not see it as his victory, as some of the vampires see the defeat of the Earthmover and the Mother of All Darkness as your kills and not Jean-Claude’s, but vampire culture is not based on duels, and ours is, Anita. If they lose faith in Rafael, they wi
ll challenge him constantly, they will challenge all of us in his inner circle until we are dead, and then someone else will rule what is left and they will not be friendly to you and Jean-Claude.”

  I was suddenly tired, all the adrenaline of the last few minutes draining into my feet and into the floor. There’s a cost to ramping up for a life-and-death struggle, but if you keep going up without fighting, it can exhaust you almost as much as a real battle.

  “You smell defeated,” Lillian said from behind us.

  “Why can’t any of this be simple?”

  “That is a child’s question, Anita,” Lillian chided.

  My anger roared up from that pit it lived in and filled up all my tired empty cup. I looked at the doc, and knew I looked angrier than she deserved, but anger would keep me going tonight, good behavior wouldn’t.

  “Such rage, luckily I know you now, and I know it is not really aimed at me,” she said.

  The anger started to fade, but the tiredness was there waiting to engulf me. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so I fed my rage on the thought that one way or another Hector would die tonight. If he killed Rafael, then the rest of us would finish it immediately, no games, no rules. I told myself that and made myself believe it, and it kept me going out the door. It was only when we were about to enter the stadium that I realized I was still wearing the bloody clothes. I’d forgotten to change shirts, but I didn’t go back. It was too late for going back. I’d go forward covered in the blood of my enemy; let it be a warning to others, so I didn’t have to kill anyone else by accident tonight. No, if I killed again, I wanted it to be on purpose.

  24

  MY THIGH DIDN’T hurt until I started following Claudia up the stairs toward Rafael. She’d called it a stadium and it was, just smaller than one meant for baseball or football. It wasn’t even that the painkiller was wearing off so much as the stitches let me know they were there both holding the skin together and sort of pulling as I moved up the steps. Stitches on the arms never seemed to bother me as much as stitches on parts of the body that moved me forward.

  There were hundreds of wererats packed into a space that fit inside a large warehouse. I had to shield hard and even then, the air around us vibrated and hummed with their energy. How had I not felt it earlier? It was like the magic outside had dimmed as we stepped into the warehouse; this was contained at the entrances to the stadium. I didn’t know how they’d done it, but I knew really good magic containment when I walked through it.

  A hand reached out from the bleachers and Pierette moved up closer to me, not like a bodyguard block, but like she was just hurrying to keep up with me. The hand fell away, and we kept following Claudia upward while my new stitches pulled. I glanced at the crowd for threats and just because the energy made me want to look. There were people in rat form scattered in among the human audience. I wondered if the energy had overwhelmed them and forced the turn, or if they’d come here and slipped their skins on purpose.

  Pierette and I were small enough that she was able to take my hand on the steps without touching the crowd. She leaned in and whispered against my ear, “Nathaniel says that you are shielding too hard. You’re close to cutting him and Damian off.” Her eyes were back to gray, so a message from Pierrot and my homeboys.

  I let out a long breath and let my shields shift. I was good at shielding; I wasn’t so good at selective shielding. I stumbled on the step and only her hand in mine kept me from falling. I pulled her hand hard enough to stop us where we were, and leaned close to whisper, “I can’t do something this delicate to my shields while I’m moving.”

  Pierette rubbed her cheek against mine like a cat scent-marking, but that was okay, her touching me helped steady me. It felt good to touch the type of animal you could call, and leopard had been my first. It helped me think of Nathaniel, and that helped me think of Damian. I visualized my shields not as metal walls, but as stone, and they were vines that were allowed through the stone to touch me. Nathaniel’s energy breathed through me, and the vines were thorns and roses because he loved pain and pretty things. It made me smile.

  I opened my eyes to find that Claudia had come back down the steps to stand two steps above us. She was watching the crowd on either side of us, which made me look to my side of the aisle; Pierette was already watching her side.

  There was a ratman very close to me. His fur was soft gray and white, not like a spotted animal, but like a man’s hair had gone from dark to gray and now white. His black button eyes were almost as big as my palm. You don’t think about animals having bigger eyes for their head size until you see them in larger-than-normal-life form. It looked almost anime, like he was a special effect. The fur looked softer, maybe it was the color, but I wanted to reach out and pet him to see if it was as soft as it looked.

  I moved back a fraction to touch my hip to Pierette’s, and even that helped shake me out of the urge. I hadn’t been that attracted to wererats the last time I’d seen people in their furry birthday suits, not even Rafael, but then wererat hadn’t been one of my animals to call until he and I made it happen.

  I looked farther into the crowd and found a lot of them watching me. Some were hostile, but most were just too intense. I didn’t remember having this effect on the leopards or wolves the first time I’d seen them in a group after they were my animals, but then maybe it was just volume. The wereleopard pard was tiny compared to this, less than fifty, but the werewolves were around this same size, so why was this different?

  There was movement above us; I turned my hand going to a knife before I had time to stop myself. It was a tall, slender woman with her hair back in a loose braid; one strand was white not like age, but like it had always been there. She stared down at me with large black eyes, not rat eyes, but just brown eyes so dark they looked black until I realized I could see the difference between her pupils and her irises. Her hands were loose and empty at her sides, but the energy coming off her prickled along my skin and threatened to close my throat down. The moment I thought it, I cleared the energy around my throat, and I could swallow again. I pushed her magic, or whatever it was, outside my shields. I didn’t even have to visualize my wall with its thorny rose vine, all I had to do was flex my will, but she was using magic against me; was that allowed in a challenge?

  I asked Claudia, “Is she allowed to use magic against me?”

  “If you want to be queen over all of the rodere, you must face all the powers at our disposal,” the woman answered for Claudia.

  There were two more women on the steps behind her. They had knives naked in their hands just like I did. Nice they weren’t being sneaky about it. Maybe me getting out a knife had made it possible for them to do it? Damn it, I did not know enough rules here.

  “Claudia, tell me the rules here.”

  “They want to sit at Rafael’s side and have a chance to be his queen.”

  “No one told me that I’d have to compete just to sit down tonight.”

  “We didn’t expect them to challenge you since you are not a wererat,” she said.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the woman whose energy was still pushing against my shields.

  “Rosa.”

  “Well, Rosa, you know I’m just here for tonight, so if you and your friends want to fight over Rafael some other time, knock yourselves out, but I’m not a wererat so I can’t be queen here.”

  “If you leave, then we will not hurt you,” she said. She tried to use her height to loom over me, but with Claudia beside me it wasn’t that impressive. Her two friends behind her crowded a little closer on their steps, emboldened by me offering an olive branch instead of a fight, I guess.

  “She used magic first, can I use magic, or a blade, or what? Tell me the rules, Claudia.”

  “Show her your eyes, Anita; let Rosa understand what you could do to her.”

  It took me a blink or two to realize what she meant by eyes,
and then I called up the power that Obsidian Butterfly had shared with me. I knew my eyes had gone black with the glimmer of starlight, because I could see the knife at Rosa’s belt. She might not have drawn it, but she still had a blade. I’d assumed she was armed, but now I knew for certain.

  The other two were better armed, and that was just what I could see under their clothes around Rosa, so at least three blades apiece for them, counting the ones in their hands. I realized that Rosa’s magic had been pushing at me the whole time I was looking for weapons on them. There had been a time when she’d have been a problem for me magically, one I would have solved with weapons, but that was then, and this was very much now.

  I looked up at her, instead of at her center body mass like I would for a physical fight. The moment she saw my eyes she went pale and stumbled back into the women behind her. They saw my eyes then, and the one in the very back held her hands up like I’m sorry and backed away.

  The second woman said something rapid in Spanish. I think it was a spell of protection or a prayer. It wouldn’t save her, because I wasn’t evil. Common sense would save her from me if she just went back to her seat, no deity intervention needed.

  “Go back to your seats,” I said.

  “You cannot be one of our brujas,” Rosa said.

  I looked at her with the eyes that a would-be goddess had given me, and I saw her magic as a faint glow like a flashlight with a fading battery.

  “Don’t try your magic against mine, Rosa, just go back to your seat.”

  “You’re afraid to fight me,” she said, but her voice wasn’t as certain as her words wanted to be.

  “You know that’s not true, Rosa, don’t make me prove that you’re the one who’s afraid.”

  “I am not afraid of you!” Her glow was red now, like fire burning underwater.