Rafael

by K. Hamilton, Laurell

  “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 will 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.

  “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 kni
fe 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.”