Page 67 of Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 28)

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 werepeople 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 headsize 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 goneblack 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 likeI’m sorryand 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.

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