Page 82 of Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 28)

“Hector couldn’t win without you cheating and saving his ass. Levitating him off the blade was too much; you gave yourself away, and you’d have done that without me here. Even if he killed Rafael, the wererats would have challenged him until someone killed him. He would never have sat the throne or taken the oaths that you need to possess the wererats. This has all been for nothing, Padma. You never could plan long term on your own.”

“You are too young to know that,” he said.

“I share a lot of old memories with people who saw you as the weakling you are.”

“I was weak, that is true, but that was before the Mother came to me and together, we are so much more.” The airaround him wavered like dark mist, and then it was as if the darkness separated from him, looming at his back. I couldn’t decide if it was black flame, or like a dark ghost, but it wasn’t the darkness, it wasn’t even the darkness between stars that filled all our eyes.

“I will be sorry to lose my rat, but there will be other rats to call, other animals to enslave.”

“You’re half-right,” I said. I felt the darkness inside me move, liquid and alive; I had drunk down the night itself, and I had a second of fear that she had been inside me all this time, waiting to join with the lost pieces of herself, but I knew that wasn’t right. I’d met another vampire in Ireland that had a piece of her power, but it hadn’t been like this; they had gained one of her abilities to strengthen their own, but the darkness hadn’t been separate from them.

“The darkness has moved aside for you,” Neva said.

“It doesn’t belong to him,” I said.

“It belongs to itself,” the one Neva calledmijasaid.

“It’s looking for someone to use,” I said.

Neva whispered, “Our power will touch you, do not be afraid.”

I didn’t know what she meant until I felt something much smaller than a human hand touch my hand. It startled me enough that I looked down and lost concentration on Padma. The black rat with its white spots was looking up at me. The other rats had spilled around the island of all of us, but some had climbed the three brujas and the one on my hand. I stared into those black button eyes, and I swear there was too much weight of intelligence and personality for any rat I’d ever seen. I mean they’re smart, but not that kind of smart.

“They will not hurt another rat,” Hector said.

I laughed, and there was that uncertain look that I knew was Padma’s and not the confident swaggering man that Hector was supposed to be. “Do you know anything about real rats?” I asked.

Neva said, “Make him look into your eyes, Anita.”

I did what she asked, staring into the brown of Padma’s eyes set in Hector’s face. “I am the vampire here, Anita, not you.” The eyes started to glow with brown fire like a brown glass with the sun behind it.

“Keep the Goddess in your eyes, Anita, it is not as vampires we need to tame him,” Neva said.

I fought to hold on to the blackness that Obsidian Butterfly had taught me. I leaned over Hector and looked into Padma’s glowing eyes with the darkness between stars in my eyes.

“They showed me their dark eyes and it availed them nothing,” Hector said, but it was Padma’s voice the way Pierrot’s voice could come out of Pierette.

“This is not the same darkness,” Neva said. “There is more than one goddess in the heavens, Master of Beasts.”

“I don’t know what you are babbling about, woman.”

And then I saw the rats in the darkness, so that it wasn’t the darkness between the stars at all, but a blackness made up of rats, as if the universe were connected together with them, or the universe was nothing but rats, black and warm, and the darkness collapsed into an avalanche of rats that fell through Neva’s eyes and into my own and into Padma’s eyes in Hector’s face.

“What are you doing?” Hector asked, and his voice held the first hint of fear.

Neva answered, “She has opened the way for us.”

I felt like I was falling with the rats and the darkness into the brown glow of Padma’s eyes. Hector started to scream, and I wanted to join him. I repeated in my head,I trust Neva, I trust the rodere, I trust their magic, I trust Rafael, I trust Claudia, I trust Benito, and then the rats and I spilled through Hector’s eyes and into Padma’s hotel room, except the rats weren’t metaphors or bits of space darkness—they were real squeaking, scrambling, wriggling rats filling the room.

“You cannot hurt me with rats, it was my first animal to call,” Padma said.

The rats milled around the room and did not touch him, he was right, and then like an echo I felt the black rat with the white chest spot touching my hand, its whiskers tickling along my skin. It reminded me that my body was still kneeling on the sand and on Hector, and it reminded me of one more thing.

“Rats are my animal to call now, too,” I said.

“You are a child playing with toys you do not understand,” Padma sneered.

I felt the rat scramble up my bloody shirt and push its way through the mess of my hair with its drying blood, and the rat didn’t care. It liked being near me, and I realized I liked the weight of it on my shoulder, the way it cuddled against my face. This was the first time I’d ever been able to interact with the real-life version of my animal to call—with all the others it was the wereanimal, but never just the animal part without the human in there somewhere.

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