Rafael

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “We can smell your fear, Rosa,” Claudia said, and her voice held derision.

  “No!” she yelled, and she pushed her red energy at me.

  I reached through it like it wasn’t there and felt it shred like mist against the rock of my shields. I had her wrist in my bare hand and my blade pressed against her sternum before she could move. Had I been that fast, or was she just that slow when she did magic, the way I’d had to stand still to redo my shields for Nathaniel and Damian?

  I drew her life out through her skin where it touched mine. Her glow faded first as if it had been erased.

  “No!” she cried out.

  “Tap out,” I said, but even as I gave her an out, I started to get that high from eating her life’s essence.

  Claudia said, “Tell her you give up. Say you give up your right to fight for Rafael’s attentions tonight.”

  Rosa’s skin was starting to cling to the bones of her body; her face looked skeletal, skin starting to dry out as I fed. She collapsed so suddenly to her knees that if I hadn’t moved my knife out of the way in time, she’d have driven it into herself. She didn’t try for her knife; it was too late for that. I kept my grip on her one wrist and held the knife out away from her so she wouldn’t hurt herself on it. “Say you give up, while you can still talk,” I said.

  “Give up, give up, I give . . . up.” She whispered that last as her eyes started to flutter. If she could pass out, she was lucky; I’d never seen anyone who lost consciousness during it, no matter if it was me or Obsidian Butterfly doing it. If I didn’t stop, the woman would be reduced to a dried husk like a desert-dried mummy, but she’d still be able to scream.

  “Anita,” Claudia said, “she tapped out.”

  I realized I hadn’t stopped, and I was still drinking her down skin to skin. I took a deep breath, let it out slow, and I began to reverse the energy. It was a rush to take the energy, but it was also one to give it back. Death and life, the two great energies that make the world go round.

  Rosa’s skin began to smooth out, her body becoming young and beautiful again, but when her nearly black eyes could stare up at me from where she’d collapsed to the steps, the arrogance was gone, replaced by terror. I never liked seeing that I’d done something that made people terrified of me, but in this case maybe that was what it took to stop more people from throwing their lives away trying to attack me tonight? If scaring the hell out of a few people saved their lives, or the lives of others, it was a fair trade.

  “Go back to your seat, Rosa,” I said, and my voice was gentle, as if she were sick and I were trying to send her back to bed to rest.

  “Don’t ever touch me again,” she said in a voice squeezed down by fear.

  I let go of her wrist and moved down a step to stand up. She still had a knife and she was supposed to be trained in its use. Pity and guilt for what I’d just done to her wasn’t worth getting killed for, or even injured. I was so done with the wererats and their constant fighting.

  I felt the witches behind me before I turned and saw them. Neva’s power went before her like a marching band at halftime announcing something scary this way comes.

  Claudia stepped between me and Rosa. “I have this one,” she said, which meant either she was bodyguarding me after all or she didn’t want to deal with the witches; me either, but Claudia had already called dibs.

  Neva had two younger witches with her, both trailing on either side of her on the steps. One had short wavy black hair with pale tan skin, the other had long wavy black hair with deep brown skin; with Neva’s complexion in the middle it was like a color wheel showing possible variations.

  “Necromancers do not give life back,” Neva said.

  “It’s how the spell works,” I said.

  “No, it is not,” she said.

  We looked at each other. It was the younger woman with long hair who broke the silence. “You enjoyed the rush of energy. It fills your aura with power.”

  “Just because it felt good doesn’t mean I liked doing it.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of feeling good?”

  “Not for magic like this,” I said.

  “Why did you use the spell if you hate it so?” the short-haired woman asked.

  “I asked her to,” Claudia said.

  That wasn’t strictly true, but it wasn’t strictly untrue either. The older I get, the more I realize that lies and truths aren’t black and white, but so dependent on how you look at them, or how you hear them.

  “And why did you ask her to use that spell on someone as harmless as Rosa?” Neva said.

  “Because Anita and I are both tired of her having to prove herself every few minutes; she needed something frightening enough to stop the challenges.”

  Neva looked at the wererats around us who had seen what I’d done. “Then you have accomplished your goal, just as the wererats who saw Anita tear Antonio’s arm off will not lightly attack her in the future.”

  It took me a second to realize that she meant Tony. “I’m really tired of having to prove myself tonight.”

  Neva looked at me and I sort of wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “Did Rafael not explain what would happen?”

  “I was told no silver in the warehouse outside the fighting pit.”

  “It is not typical to pull a silver blade outside of a duel,” she said.

  “And he didn’t mention anything about fighting other women to just sit down beside him.”

  “Rafael has never been a good judge of women, not even as a child.”

  I knew that Rafael was over fifty, so how old did that make Neva to have known him as a little boy? I wanted to ask, but vampires consider it rude if you ask them, so I figured all long-lived supernaturals would feel the same.

  “He could simply come to you and escort you safely to your seat,” she said, and she looked past me at Rafael. It was the look your parents give you as a child when you’re out of reach, but they want you to be more polite and better behaved than you are being.

  Rafael got up and started walking down the steps toward us. I could finally see all of him in his fightgear. He looked taller, leaner, and even more fiercely in shape than I knew he was wearing just the black compression shorts. They came down almost to his knees and there were no slits for movement in them like Hector had had, but they were more form-fitting. He looked sexy and fierce and I didn’t care. I wanted to go home to the men waiting for me. I’d killed a man for no good damn reason.

  Claudia moved aside so that Rafael could stand above me and Pierette, who had moved down a step to be between me and the trio of witches, or brujas, or whatever they wanted to call themselves.

  “You killed tonight to defend your life, that is a very good reason,” he said.

  “You read my mind,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You were very subtle about it; I didn’t know you were inside my head.”

  “I do not want to cause you pain as I did earlier with Nathaniel.”

  “Thanks.” I realized he’d probably heard me think I wanted to go home and be with the men I was in love with, because if I was going to kill people, it should be for people that I actually loved. I blinked at him and didn’t try to apologize; it was the truth, and if I couldn’t keep Rafael from “hearing” my thoughts, then truth was all that was left between us tonight.

  “May I take your hand?” he asked, no editorializing about how I didn’t love him. Smart man.

  “Sure, thanks for asking first.”

  “Underneath the shock you are angry with me. I do not want to presume anything with you right now.”

  The anger fountained up and then back down behind the numbness of the shock. “You can feel what I’m feeling and most of what I’m thinking.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t feel anything from you, except caution. I didn’t even thin
k that was an emotion, but for you, it is.”

  He took my hand carefully in his and raised it up so that he could lay a kiss across my knuckles. “I am so sorry that your introduction to our world has been one of pain and death.”

  “Yeah, we will be talking about the whole no they won’t try to kill you tonight thing.”

  “I heard that Tony used a silver blade on you.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll never do it again.” I still wasn’t sure how I felt about what I’d done to the man, so I pushed it down with all the other things I wasn’t sure about. The place wasn’t as full as it had once been, because I’d accepted more of myself, but killing Tony was going to go in the box with the other things that made me feel like a monster.

  Rafael started to hug me but stopped with a look at the knife still naked in my right hand. “I would hold you, comfort you, if you will allow it.”

  “It’s not silver, you’ll live,” I said.

  He gave me a startled look, because even inside my head I had felt nothing when I said it, nothing, just the emptiness where some of my emotions should have been, used to be, but some things are so awful you can’t feel too much about them, not if you want to keep moving forward.

  “I did not set you up, Anita. I swear I thought you would be safer than this here among us.”

  I studied his face, those dark brown eyes, and then I let down my shields, opened a brick for him in the wall so I could know that he meant it. He was telling the truth, but that was only a little better. It meant that he hadn’t understood how afraid his people were of me and the vampires. Kings should know shit like that; Jean-Claude would have known, or would have known to admit he wasn’t sure.

  Rafael studied my face; felt my emotions, or lack of them; heard my thoughts, at least some of them. He was very carefully trying not to think or feel anything much. “What can I do to make this up to you?”

  “Kill Hector, help us kill his master.”

  “And that will make up for the fact that you trust me less now?”

  “It’ll help.” And still I felt nothing. I realized I thought I’d have to kill more people tonight. I no longer trusted Rafael to be a good judge of what would happen, so I was shoving my emotions deep so I wouldn’t feel bad when the violence happened. I even acknowledged in the front of my head that I would not hesitate to use my new supernatural strength again, not if it would save my life, our lives, Rafael’s life, Claudia’s life. If it would keep the rodere free of the Master of Beasts, I would wade through a sea of blood and tear a dozen enemies apart with my bare hands. I would do what it took, whatever it took, to win, because if we lost . . . The Master of Beasts had had a rape fetish, the kind that wasn’t safe, sane, or consensual. I’d forced him to give up his only son to be executed; he would make me and all those I loved pay for that. It was a price I was not willing to pay, so I decided to pay another price, the cost of victory, because no matter how many people I killed, no matter how bloodily and inhumanly I did it, it would still be better than watching Padma torture, rape, and kill everyone I loved.

  Sometimes being the monster scared the shit out of me, and then there were moments like these when I realized I’d rather be the monster a thousand times over than be at the mercy of one.

  25

  NEVA AND HER backup witches surprised all of us by saying they would stay. Rafael hadn’t been able to hide how unusual that was; the surprise and confusion of it ran through his body almost like fear. That was interesting and I filed it away to ask about later when the three witches couldn’t overhear us. They stood behind us bookended by Claudia and Benito on Rafael’s side and Pierette on mine.

  The two of us sat in the carved wooden thrones, though Rafael’s truly looked like a throne with high carved spires on the back of it like something out of a European royal family except the carvings were rats, writhing in masses, crawling over flowers, chewing on human bones. There was even at least one plague doctor carved small, complete with the pointed mask, hat, and robes. The chair was beautiful and macabre. It was a chair for a movie wizard, or an evil king dressed all in black with jewels, not gym clothes. Of course, I didn’t match my chair either. It was much smaller, less impressive, dainty even, but the slender wooden rods were carved entirely of rats, and the headpiece had two carved rats holding a huge round cabochon of bloodred ruby. It was bigger than my thumb and that pigeon bloodred that almost doesn’t exist in modern rubies. It was only when the light hit it that I realized it was a six-pointed star sparkling in the depths of it. I’d seen star sapphires and rubies this big only in museum collections. Even knowing that rubies were a nine on the hardness scale, just down from diamonds, I worried about scratching it. Worrying about damaging the jewel and the carving was so mundane in the scale of things that it broke through the shock and made me more present looking down at the fighting pit. It looked like a small stadium had married a bullfighting ring, with the sand and some of the partial walls around the circle of it, as if sometimes there were things on the sand that people wanted to hide from. I had no idea why you’d needs walls for hiding from bulls in a fighting arena that was supposed to be for humans and wererats. They didn’t shift into anything that big, and they climbed well enough that the small barriers would be useless. I might have asked questions, but movement on the left-hand side of the arena drew my attention.

  I recognized Hector; part of it was he was the only other one in the crowd dressed in fight shorts, but his energy stood out to me now. If he hadn’t come to visit in the locker room, maybe he would have blended into the hum and rush of all the other wererats, but now there was a taste to his power that couldn’t hide from me. Vampire, my magic whispered, there’s a vampire near us. It was the same little voice that had helped me stay alive for all these years while I hunted vampires. I’d have been dead a thousand times over if I hadn’t listened to that warning voice.

  “You seat a vampire’s human servant above all the women in the rodere. How can you humiliate them like this?” It took me a second to realize that Hector was speaking over a microphone.

  Benito handed Rafael one with a snake of cord attached to it. Rafael stood and said, “Anita has earned her way tonight with blood and death. She has honored the power of the rodere that I put inside her.”

  “But the leopard that stands beside Anita did not earn her way, yet she stands above the women of the rodere. You put a cat above your rats, Rafael; what kind of king does that?” Hector said.

  There were mutterings in the crowd that said they agreed with him. The energy changed, as if the air were a little thicker with their outrage.

  “It is rare for other leaders to visit us here, but when it happens, they are allowed one of their people to accompany them so that there are no accidental assassinations that would cause war between us and another animal group.”

  “First you let Anita sit in the queen’s throne for our people, and now you say she is a visiting queen, someone else’s queen. Wererats, tell me whose queen is she? Who does she belong to?”

  Most of the crowd nearest to Hector yelled, “Jean-Claude!” In fact, there were a lot of voices from all over shouting “Jean-Claude,” but there were enough yelling “Micah!” that it rose above the other voices. Someone nearer to us yelled, “Nicky!”

  Hector said, “She is not Nicky’s queen, she is his master, as she and Jean-Claude would be master over all of us!”

  Boos from the crowd, cries of “No, never!” Even I had a second of feeling the pull to be angry. “His voice has power in it,” Pierette said.

  Rafael stood tall and proud, and for the first time I felt the power inherent in him. The energy that came from being connected to every wererat in the country and a few outside of it. It wasn’t just power for Jean-Claude and me to feed on, but magic, the magic of command because most people don’t know how to follow without giving up some of their own personal power, but in this case it was more than that. Lit
erally to be part of the rodere you had to give Rafael the keys to your energy, to yourself. Until that moment I hadn’t really understood how close the connection was to the one that Jean-Claude had with his vampires. I’d never heard of anyone saying that the ties to the leader of a shapeshifter group were a similar dynamic, but power doesn’t lie.

  “I am the only master here,” Rafael said.

  “We feel the vampires drain our lives away when you let her feed on you!”

  When he said drain, I felt weaker; when he said feed, I felt pain like the memory of something trying to take a bite out of me. I started to shield harder, but Jean-Claude whispered through me, “Non, ma petite, we need to know what he is capable of.”

  I let the power flow over me without blocking it out, but it didn’t cling either, but then I knew how to let things go, or to keep them from holding on to me; most people didn’t, as in most of the crowd.

  “I have hidden nothing from you when I am with Anita. I have shared the power we raise with all of you.” But Rafael’s voice was just a voice. It could not carry the crowd the way that Hector’s magic could.

  Neva leaned in between the two thrones and said, “Bring the power to your eyes, Anita, and tell me what you see?”

  It sounded too much like an order, but I wanted all the information I could get tonight, so I did it. There was a black nimbus around Hector, and it wasn’t his aura, because that was squeezed down tight to his body, a dark, red brick color. I’d been told my aura could spike red in places, which most psychics don’t like being around, but the dirty red of Hector’s meant illness. The aura is supposed to be clean and bright whatever color it happens to be, or a mix of colors for that matter; anytime it’s dim or muddy something is wrong. It didn’t feel like physical illness, more like mental or emotional, but whatever it was, it was serious.

  “What is that black shine around his aura?” I asked.

  “Good, you see as we do,” Neva said.

  “Padma never had the power of voice before,” Pierette said.