Page 71 of Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 28)

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 physicalillness, 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 whatoscuridadmeans,” I said.

“It meansdarkness,” Claudia said.

“Madre de la Oscuridad, you mean Mother of the Darkness, do you meantheMother 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 heronce 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 MYface 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 and 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 mymoitié 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.”

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