Rafael

by K. Hamilton, Laurell

  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 think 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 bul
ls 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. Literally 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.

  “Hector is not a brujo,” Benito said.

  “The power is not his,” Neva replied.

  “Then where is the power coming from?” Claudia asked.

  Pierette said, “Padma,” at the same time I said, “The Master of Beasts.”

  “The darkness in him is not vampire,” the younger witch with the short hair said.

  “It is unlike any vampire you have ever seen, mija, but it is still one of them,” Neva said.

  “You’ve seen this darkness before,” I said, looking at Neva. She seemed to glow just under her skin as if parts of her nerves ran with golden light. It was faint but seemed to remind me that stars are just distant suns.

  “Yes, she came to us pretending to be Santa Muerte many years ago, but she was not Her, nor was she any goddess she claimed, but she was powerful. We called her Madre de la Oscuridad.”

  “I don’t know what oscuridad means,” I said.

  “It means darkness,” Claudia said.

  “Madre de la Oscuridad, you mean Mother of the Darkness, do you mean the Mother of All Darkness, the first vampire?”

  “So she claimed,” Neva said.

  I almost asked her if she’d been the actual bruja that told Mommie Darkest she wasn’t a saint or a goddess, but it was probably an ancestor, because when vampires decide to play at being gods, they don’t like being told they’re wrong. Best just to go along with the delusion and kill them as quickly as possible. Of course, I’d killed her once already, but like all really good monsters once might not be enough.

  I was suddenly so afraid that my skin ran cold with it, and I could no longer see the black energy around Hector or the glowing power under Neva’s skin. I knew my eyes were back to normal. I’d drunk her power down, and I’d thought, we’d thought, it had killed her, but apparently we’d missed some, and the messy leftovers were inside the Master of Beasts, who had his metaphysical hand up Hector’s ass. Fuck.

  26

  PIERETTE TOUCHED MY face and turned my eyes to hers, they were charcoal gray again, like storm clouds. Pierrot spoke with her lipsticked mouth: “It is not her, Anita; we would know if our evil queen were alive, for we would still be loyal to her.”

  What he said made perfect sense in my head, but the back part of my brain that had gone to some ancestral cave where the darkness was all too real and solid wasn’t convinced by logic. Especially not with Hector’s voice working its magic on me and the audience. Jean-Claude had wanted to feel through me how powerful Hector was, or Padma was, and he was feeling it, but I wasn’t the one being touched by the words directly. When Hector said, “Rafael gives us to the vampires to be raped,” it felt awful in ways that I couldn’t or didn’t want to understand completely. When he said, “He will give us away,” it was like every time you’d ever been left out, abandoned, unwanted.

  “We must distract the Master using Hector,” Pierette/Pierrot said.

  I looked up into his storm-cloud eyes set in her face and missed her brown. “How?” I asked.

  Benito asked, “How do we distract him without attacking him?”

  Pierrot smiled with her lips an
d then slid into my lap, one arm around my neck and the other hanging loose for weapons, though he/she wasn’t obvious about it. It was natural for my arm to slide around her waist and my other hand to cup the side of her thigh to hold her more securely in place as she wiggled in my lap to find just the right spot. It would have been a lot more titillating if I’d been a man, but she still managed to be distracting. Maybe that was the point, because all the touching and adjusting helped calm me down. I could think again, and Hector’s voice wasn’t getting through. Pierette wasn’t even one of my moitié bêtes, so was it just her being a leopard, which was my first animal to call? It always felt good to touch your animal of choice.

  Jean-Claude whispered through my mind, “She is our lover, ma petite; for our bloodline that is power.”

  Pierette glanced at Benito, who was bending over us as Claudia kept an eye on the crowd around us and Rafael tried to refute Hector’s accusations. “Hector’s master has always had an eye for the ladies,” Pierette said.

  I said, “He has a rape fetish.”

  Pierette said, eyes still gray, “No bad thoughts, Anita. We need to tempt him and you frowning will not do that.”

  “He likes unwilling partners,” I said.

  “That is true, but he loves most of all to see a woman happy with someone else, in love with someone else, and then steal her away from them. If he can force her lover to watch the abuse, so much the better.”

  The anger was just there, as if it had been only minutes ago instead of years. I could still see Hannah with her face bloody, her dress torn, and Fernando laughing as she begged Jean-Claude to help her. Willie McCoy, the love of her undead life, standing there in one of his bright suits and ugly ties that he’d loved to wear even when he was still human. Jean-Claude had had to hold him back or he would have tried to save her, and he would have died trying. I’d had a gun and had used it to threaten and buy us time, but in the end we’d gotten lucky because a little inner council squabbling played out in our favor, but Padma had chosen Hannah because she and Willie loved each other so much. It had amused him and his son that Willie and Hannah loved each other so much that hurting her was torturing them both. We’d been able to prevent Padma and his equally awful son, Fernando, from actually raping Hannah, but I hadn’t been able to save Sylvie, the second in line to the werewolves’ throne, or Vivian, one of our wereleopards. I’d rescued them after the damage had been done, and we’d been able to kill the son, who had been the primary rapist in Sylvie’s torture, but even revenge doesn’t undo the damage.