One moment I was drowning and the next I could taste Jean-Claude’s lips on mine. He whispered through my mind, “Ma petite.” Down those long miles that separated us, he was there, and he offered me himself, his power to help me stand and remember that I was a vampire, too. The warm scent of wolf and Richard was there over the long miles. I could smell his skin and knew he was tucked in beside a woman’s body. I could feel the curve of her hip under his hand. I smelled vanilla and could feel the cloud of Nathaniel’s hair across my face, and a thousand mornings of waking up beside him. Damian’s green eyes above me as we made love, his hair the color of fresh blood, red hair when it hasn’t seen sunlight for nearly a thousand years. Neither of them was as powerful as Jean-Claude and Richard, but they were mine, and they added to who I was, what I was. Jean-Claude whispered, “We cannot drown if we drink the sea.”
It took me a breathless, terrifying moment to understand, and then I went back to drinking down the vampire in my arms. It didn’t matter that she was putting her energy into his; I would drink it all, and everything she offered. She wanted to put her energy into me, I’d let her.
She poured the deepest darkness into me, down my throat so that I choked on the taste of jasmine and rain, but I swallowed it down. I knew if I didn’t panic, if I just swallowed and breathed in between that shivering pour of energy down my throat, I could do this. She tried to drown me; I tried to drink the blackness between stars. It was like the immovable object and the unstoppable force—she wanted to pour into me, and I let the energy fill me, but I was eating her, and she wanted to eat me.
Distant as a dream I heard gunshots, but I had to trust to someone else for that. My battle was here in the dark, fighting not to drown in the jasmine sea. The world became darkness, and I was standing in an ancient night with the scent of jasmine thick on the air, and a distant smell of rain. “You are mine, necromancer,” she breathed.
I slid to my knees and it was her body, her first body, a dark-skinned woman who held me as we knelt in the sand, on the edge of palm trees and insects I’d never heard outside her memories. “You cannot drink the night, there is too much of it.”
And then there was a hand in the darkness, and Domino was in the vision, pressing himself against the back of my body, not trying to take me away from her, but adding his strength to mine.
She laughed, “White tiger and black is not enough, necromancer.”
And then there was another hand in the night, another figure that wrapped around me and Domino. Ethan, with one arm still broken from the fight, was there in the dream, and that was it, that was the key. He was all the other tiger colors that Domino wasn’t. I had my rainbow of tigers. What I’d never understood was why the Master of Tigers had been her nemesis, but in that moment I understood. It was the gold tigers, and all the colors were the powers of the day and the earth and all that was alive, and she was all that was dead, no matter that she’d begun life as a shapeshifting cave lion; she was cold now, dead for so long that she didn’t really understand what it meant to be alive. Maybe she never had.
I touched the men, and they touched me, warm flesh to warm flesh, and just the feel of their hands on me threw me back to making love to them both. I had images of the sheets wrapped around Ethan, his face looking up at me as he licked; Domino pinning me to the bed, me looking back over my shoulder to see his body bow backward with that one last thrust. She tried to remember sex, and there were memories, but it had been too long and she didn’t truly understand it. She was like a sex symbol who had been told what it is to be sexy and to have sex, but not believing in her own sex appeal, and not really liking sex; it was an empty shell, pretend. There was nothing pretend about me. It wasn’t about being the prettiest, or the best, it was about enjoying it. It was about loving the men who were with you, while they were with you, and valuing every last one of them. It was, in the end, about love. The love of a lover, of friends, and of partners, of people that I never wanted to lose, and wanted to wake up beside every damn day. It was about home. Home wasn’t a place, or a building, or a tropical night full of flowers and rain. Love made home not out of boards and walls and furniture, but of hands to hold, and smiles to share, and the warmth of that body cuddled around you in the dark. I swam in the darkness of the ocean on a raft of hands, and bodies, and giving a damn what happened to them all.
We let her pour her scary, lonely, insane dark into us, and we drank it down with our comforting hands, our bodies that had made us all home, and the craziness of having too many people, too much going on, but what would we give up, who would we give up, and the answer, in the end, was not a single thing. The golden tigers were the power of the sun to bring life to the earth made flesh. They’d been created to chase back the darkness and remind us all that sometimes beauty and life triumph even on the darkest night.
When she realized that she couldn’t win, she tried to pull out of the vampire’s body. She tried to leave him to die alone, but she couldn’t back up, we wouldn’t let her. She wanted to fill us up with her power, and we let her.
Her voice in my head held the first note of panic, as she said, “If you take my power into you, you will be as I am.”
“I’m not like you,” I thought.
“You will be.”
The power felt so good, and yet I knew I was draining the life out of two people, evil vampires, but still people. I prayed, not for help to do it, but that the power wouldn’t corrupt me. That drinking in her darkness wouldn’t make me evil, too.
Using the most evil power I had, I prayed, and I didn’t burst into flames, and no one’s holy object glowed. I ate the darkness that existed before God thought light was a good idea, and he was okay with that; he created the darkness, too. He actually liked both just fine.
41
EDWARD AND THE other marshals had come to the rescue in time to free Ethan to help me and give me Domino at my back. What would have happened if they hadn’t showed up in time? It doesn’t matter, they were there, and it worked. Sometimes that’s all you’ve got; enjoy the win, don’t worry about what-ifs.
The Harlequin had left Olaf and Nicky for dead, but they’d heard Edward and the others coming, so they hadn’t had time to make sure of the deaths. Nicky healed and is back at my side. Olaf healed, too, but he, like Karlton who helped Edward ride to our rescue, didn’t pass his blood test. I wish they had killed him, because come next full moon Olaf is going to be a werelion. He vanished from the hospital. No one seems to know where he is, or what he’s doing. He’s too dangerous to be out there for his first full moon alone. Edward’s looking for him, and so are a lot of people who have ties to certain government agencies. I think we all agree, military, government, marshal, that Olaf was dangerous enough before; he didn’t need to add superhuman speed and strength and a lust for real flesh and blood to his pathology.
Olaf left a note for me again. This one was much shorter than the last one:
“Anita, I will not be your pet cat, so I will stay away from you until I find my way as a lion. I won’t let you do to me what you did to Nick. I still want you, but on my terms.” He didn’t sign it, but then he didn’t need to.
The nurse he flirted with was in surgery when he left, but the doctor with the short brown hair, Dr. Patience, who had liked him and Bernardo so much, she’s gone missing. Edward and I both think that Olaf took her, but we can’t prove it. He still hasn’t done anything illegal in this country. Technically, he’s still a marshal in good standing, and thanks to another marshal who just won a court case worth millions because he caught lycanthropy on the job and was fired because of it, well, Karlton is still a marshal, too. Micah set her up with the local werewolf pack in her home city. He’s also recommended a family counselor who specializes in helping everyone related to the victim make the transition.
Ethan came home with us, one more tiger to add to the rest. I asked my other sweeties about sending Cynric home now that we had another blue tiger, but Jean-Claude doesn’t understand why Cynric
’s age bothers me. He feels we made a commitment to him and to the vampires and white tigers of Vegas. Nathaniel thinks Cynric is tied to me too metaphysically to take the separation well. “He’s in love with you, Anita. Don’t send him away.” Micah shares some of my discomfort with Cynric’s age, but what if Jean-Claude and Nathaniel are right? So, for now, our teenager stays.
The Mother of All Darkness is dead, well and truly dead, and I’d never felt power like the rush of drinking her dry. The Harlequin have all either joined us, or gone back to trying to have lives of their own. We’re safe. Which means that two days a week I get to stay at my house and have windows and air and light, and Micah and Nathaniel come with me, and sometimes Jason comes, and sometimes other tigers, but my vampire lovers can’t risk the sunlight. But five days and nights a week I’m with Jean-Claude. We’re still working out how to live together with everyone. It’s better having a couple of the tigers be female and helping with the men, and some of the newest men being more hetero-flexible, so that I’m not every damn person’s only squeeze. I’ve learned you can fuck this many people, but you can’t take care of this many people’s emotional needs. You can fuck ’em, but you can’t date ’em. Some of the men are happy with being fuck buddies, but most of them want more. People say that women are the romantic sex, but you couldn’t prove it by my life. My boyfriends are all more romantic than I am, and so are my lovers.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels by Laurell K. Hamilton
GUILTY PLEASURES
THE LAUGHING CORPSE
CIRCUS OF THE DAMNED
THE LUNATIC CAFE
BLOODY BONES
THE KILLING DANCE
BURNT OFFERINGS
BLUE MOON
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY
NARCISSUS IN CHAINS
CERULEAN SINS
INCUBUS DREAMS
MICAH
DANSE MACABRE
THE HARLEQUIN
BLOOD NOIR
SKIN TRADE
FLIRT
BULLET
HIT LIST
STRANGE CANDY
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