Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  The first real steps Anita takes toward this kind of emotional intimacy are with Micah. Micah’s value is often pushed to one side in the books, although he frequently displays his compassion, intelligence, and diplomacy along with sexual prowess. Not only does he strengthen as a character worthy of Anita, he holds his own in Micah, assisting in her work as an animator and making it one of the better books in the series, both plot- and character-wise. Hamilton uses the book to explore the growing intimacy between them—apart from feeding the needs of ardeur—and to highlight the ways Anita is beginning to grow and change as a result.

  The intimacy she allows to develop with Micah extends to others she is tied to as well, particularly Jean-Claude (with whom she had been the most intimate previously), Asher, and Nathaniel. She starts to feel responsible for (and to) those she sleeps with, not just physically, but emotionally, too. At the end of The Harlequin, she pledges to try to learn how to meet Nathaniel’s needs, and in Blood Noir, she shows a level of both acceptance and responsibility of her role in the expanded family group, calling both Jean-Claude and Micah to discuss going home with Jason to support him during his family’s crisis. She backslides again in Skin Trade, sneaking out to join Edward in Las Vegas for a job while Jean-Claude is still (literally) dead to the world and not even calling Micah, but by Skin Trade she’s also reached a feeling of home: “I’d learned that the ardeur could be about friendship and not just romance… . It was about that feeling of belonging, of being home.”

  It’s not only her responsibilities to Micah, Jean-Claude, and Nathanial that Anita begins to own up to. Requiem is kidnapped and tortured by Vittorio in Skin Trade because he is one of hers—even though he wished to break away. Anita saves him, and though that in itself isn’t unusual, it’s not done with the same sense of being putupon she seems to feel in the earlier books. Her lovers are her responsibility, because they can be used against her. That doesn’t stop her from using them, but at least, as the books progress, she doesn’t resent it quite as much when she has to take action to save them.

  Anita also has the power of several different animals within her, each wanting a different mate, each wanting to force her to shape-shift into its form and claim her as its own. She resents these competing forces, and external ones looking to influence the battle, but she also spends many books resenting the weres, who are as helpless about being drawn to her as she is about being drawn to them. By Skin Trade, however, when she finds that Domino (who isn’t any happier about his attraction to her than she is) feels like “home” to her, she doesn’t feel the need to punish him for it, as she would have done had they met earlier in the series. Instead of trying to deny the animals inside her, or cut them out of her life, she’s learning to integrate them and starting to search for ways to use them responsibly.

  Though she still has a way to go, Anita has experienced a level of growth, thanks to the ardeur, that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the series. Anita has watched how Richard’s refusal to accept the dual sides of his nature is destroying him, and it seems that she is learning—from his mistakes as well as her own—to make smarter choices. The question becomes how Anita will resolve this conflict and merge her desires with what she thinks is “right” in future books. Will she come to a more holistic acceptance of herself? Will she stop the acts of self-loathing, like denying herself regular meals and rest, and start enjoying the positive aspects of the life she’s building? She starts appreciating both Micah and Nathaniel’s roles in her life by Danse Macabre. Can she allow herself small moments of contentment, even though her life doesn’t fall into the realm of what is considered “normal” by society’s monogamous standards? Richard can choose to stay stuck; Anita has chosen not to. The door is now open to the possibility that Anita will be able to see past her own selfinflicted martyrdom and come to terms with the fact she is dealing with unique individuals with unique needs. Every action she takes has consequences. The sooner she faces them, the less of a chance there is for the situation to escalate into something none of them can handle. Hamilton’s gift is that she makes us continue to care about Anita on this journey, and her skill in creating Anita’s conflicted inner and outer lives makes us hunger to see the outcome. She’s created a verbal ardeur between the series and the readers.

  Other strong Women

  While the —>ardeur has pushed Anita’s boundaries in many ways, there are other personal challenges that she has yet to face.

  Anita is uneasy with women from the beginning, and it only gets worse as the series progresses. She loses Ronnie, her best friend and staunchest ally, making less and less time for the person who, at the beginning of the series, was central to her life and her sanity. Anita shuts Ronnie out repeatedly, and then is surprised when Ronnie is so angry with her. Not only is she surprised, she finds reasons to justify her shoddy treatment of the woman she claims is her best friend. Anita has no trouble being kind and loving to a vulnerable man, such as Nathaniel, but should a woman, even her supposed best friend, need some understanding, Anita lashes out instead.

  Anita has time for Claudia, her wererat bodyguard, but Claudia is under her in the hierarchy. So is Cherry, the wereleopard nurse, and Dr. Lillian, the wererat doctor. Anita isn’t comfortable around any women who could be considered her equal, and she usually deals with her discomfort by provoking a fight. She hates Thea, the powerful, manipulative mermaid. She’s in immediate conflict with Bibiana, the hugely powerful weretiger queen in Skin Trade. Although she manages to save Bibiana and several others when she defeats Vittorio in order to retrieve Requiem, there’s a strong sense that it was more because Bibiana happened to be there than because Anita feels any responsibility to the weretiger queen.

  Anita has a natural distrust of anyone whose power rivals or surpasses her own—likely in part because that makes them capable of using Anita against her will. And the purveyors of the strongest power in the series are female—especially Belle Morte and Marmee Noir. Whether Anita realizes it or not, it seems that she’s building her own line of energy in preparation to take on one or both of these powerful females. However, she is also forced into alliance with one or the other of them almost as often as she needs to defend herself against them. Did the loss of her own mother at a young age and her contentious relationship with her stepmother make it impossible for Anita to trust any woman again? (Both Belle Morte, as the source of Jean-Claude’s line, and Marmee Noir, the mother of all vampires, are positioned as mothers in the series.) Or will Anita learn to meld her power with that of another female character further down the series in order to benefit both?

  Human Friendships

  Friendship is another area in which Anita does not excel. Jason is Anita’s truest friend, in every sense of the word, and one of the few people who can tell her things she doesn’t want to hear. Jason manages to get through to her when no one else, not even Micah or Jean-Claude, can. By Blood Noir, their relationship has grown to the point where, instead of getting passive aggressive or simply aggressive, as she would have earlier in the series or with one of her other lovers, Anita discusses her anger with Jason at his flirting when she is supposed to be his date with an openness and an honesty she shares with no one else. And they come to a solution that works for both of them, without one or the other feeling shorted. With Jason, Anita achieves a level of honesty and equality on a personal level that she can’t seem to achieve with anyone else. But Jason is two other things: her lover (on occasion) and not human.

  While Anita has grown by leaps and bounds in her ability to maintain emotionally healthy relationships with werecreatures and vampires, the deeper Anita goes in dealing with the monsters, the less room there is for humans in her world. She’ll give the undead second, third, fourth chances—even Gretchen, the vampire who wants her dead because of Gretchen’s unrequited love for Jean-Claude. But Anita won’t give humans who’ve shown her loyalty the same slack. Ronnie isn’t the only friend Anita loses during the course of the books, and her frie
nds are few and far between to begin with. She doesn’t like her coworkers or her manager very much. She loses interest in the young, talented animator she mentors, Larry Kirkland, when he falls for Tammy, a witch who happens to be a cop (another strong woman not to Anita’s taste). After that Larry becomes peripheral in her life.

  The one human with whom her friendship remains strong is Edward, who happens to be a sociopath assassin and not one of her lovers. With Edward, Hamilton has created one of the most complex, intriguing characters in current literature. He threatens Anita more than once; he’d kill her in an instant if it suited him; and part of him wants them to be pitted against each other to prove, once and for all, who is the best killer. Yet when there’s a big problem, each relies on the other as an extension of him- or herself. Edward, who planned to torture the location of the Master of the City out of Anita in Guilty Pleasures, instead helps treat her vampire bites with holy water and joins her invasion of Nikolaos’s lair. When Anita travels to New Mexico to help in Obsidian Butterfly, she is the one he trusts will get his family to safety if he doesn’t survive.

  Like Anita, Edward has also grown during the course of the series. For one thing, he is now capable of love: He loves his fiancée and his step-children. His respect and friendship for Anita and his understanding of her have grown into a type of love. Anita believes that they’ve reached a point where Edward might not be able to commit the final kill should Anita lose all of herself into monstrous power: “Because I now know that even [Edward] would hesitate. He loved me too much” (Skin Trade).

  Their friendship has actually grown throughout the series. Still, it’s not friendship in the traditional sense; its roots are in their shared working life. Though Edward’s relationship to the supernatural community is different than Anita’s, it shapes his life just as much as Anita’s does hers.

  Anita isn’t always the one who decides to end a friendship. In a shocking character arc, Dolph Storr turns on her for consorting with monsters, showing a rabid prejudice that is astonishing in a man who, book after book, demonstrated so much level-headed cop sense. Anita often wonders why Dolph was placed on the squad, whether it was punishment for something: “Dolph had pissed somebody off, or he wouldn’t have been here. But Dolph, being Dolph, was determined to do the best job he could. He was like a force of nature. He didn’t yell, he was just there, and things got done because of it” (Guilty Pleasures). That makes it all the more disturbing when, in later books, he loses his temper on more than one occasion with Anita: “Dolph trashed the room… . He finally picked one chair up and seemed to take a special grievance against it. He smashed the metal chair into the floor, over and over” (Cerulean Sins). (The explanation that his son is marrying a vampire who wants to turn him isn’t enough to make this transformation believable. There’s got to be more to it. Perhaps somewhere, before Anita met him, he demonstrated prejudice against a particular group, and that’s what landed him on this squad.)

  Dolph starts to lose trust in Anita in the seventh book, Burnt Offerings, because she’s dating Jean-Claude: “I don’t think anything short of giving up Jean-Claude would have satisfied Dolph. I wasn’t sure that was an option anymore for a lot of reasons.” By Narcissus in Chains, Dolph loathes her for the choices she has made in her personal life. “How can you fuck a corpse?” he asks, and later in the same book, when he asks if she’s sleeping with Micah and she admits it, “He stood trembling in front of me, big hands in fists at his side, and for just a second, I thought he might do something, something violent, something we’d both regret… . Whether Dolph cried or not, it was his business, not mine.”

  It seems unfair that while she rescues Nathaniel, whom she’s never even met, from Zane in Burnt Offerings, she won’t make it her business to comfort a human she claims is a friend. Does her growing understanding of the complexities in the preternatural community preclude her ability to maintain human relationships on any level? Why can’t she grow in her human-based relationships as well as her para-human ones? Is Hamilton giving Anita room to grow in her dealing with humans, or taking her down a path that will exclude them as anything but civilians serving as collateral damage in power wars? At this point in the series, it’s not yet clear.

  The Future: Asher as Redemption

  While Anita has grown from the ardeur, and learned much more control over it, neither it nor her other growing powers are done with her yet. And it’s a vampire who holds the most hope that Anita can and will use those powers for something positive and ultimately beautiful, who travels down some of the more complex corridors of the ardeur with her and holds a ray of hope and light in her bleak and ever-darkening world, even though he possesses an element of danger. It’s not Jean-Claude. It’s Asher.

  Half of him is beautiful, half of him is scarred. Jean-Claude still loves him, and although Anita first sees Asher through Jean-Claude’s memories (courtesy of the triumvirate), she soon learns to love Asher for who he is. She doesn’t simply desire him; she loves him: “It was Asher, and I loved him” (Skin Trade).

  He first appears in Burnt Offerings, a tool belonging to the Vampire Council, given the opportunity to exact revenge on Jean-Claude. He’s full of self-loathing, yet Anita can see him for what he was and is: “I looked at him and he was beautiful.” His response to her is, “What I saw in your face, no one else can give me.” Asher steps back, no longer the Council’s weapon. It is the first gift she gives him, and one of the times in the series when she is genuinely selfless.

  In Cerulean Sins, Anita offers Asher a place in her bed with Jean-Claude, both to protect him from being taken back to Belle Morte via Musette and because of her growing feelings for him. Asher warns her that if she takes him to her bed and then rejects him, he will leave anyway, as the pain will be too much to bear. She swears she won’t, they all go to bed, and of course, she breaks her promise. She refuses to follow through and take responsibility for the effect her actions have on those around her, the same way she does with Requiem, London, Wicked, and Truth. She refuses to let Asher walk out of her life because she doesn’t want it, and yet she refuses to give him what he needs, even when he’s honest with her from the beginning.

  Belle Morte tries to bind Asher to her again, which nearly kills him, but because Anita breaks another of her own rules and lets Asher feed from her, she and Jean-Claude are able to save him. Later, in Danse Macabre, when they have sex and he feeds off her, he nearly kills her. “He fed on my neck, and as long as he fed, the orgasms continued … It was one of the things that made him so dangerous. While you were in the middle of all that pleasure, you could forget … I lay there like a broken doll.” Despite the danger, Anita is not willing to give Asher up. “I’m not afraid because you almost killed me. I’m afraid because you almost killed me, and I still want to touch you.”

  Feeding the ardeur with Asher gives him back his autonomy. What she refused to give him in Cerulean Sins, she gives him in Danse Macabre:

  “It was not blood that brought my power, Anita. It was you, you wanting me more than anyone else… . I could see into your heart, and I saw only me there.”

  “Yes,” I said, “otherwise I’d have been wicked pissed about the whole almost-killing-me thing.”

  Asher is the one who helps her turn the corner with her ardeur, showing her it can be used with positive results instead of treating it as something to be ignored until it can’t be anymore, then satiating it, then ignoring it again, etc., in a downward spiral. Asher is proof that there’s a choice, that the spiral has potential to move upward.

  Anita questions her choices. She feels that no matter how hard she works, how many bad guys she kills, and what she does for the police and the people she loves, that the bad comes in faster than it can be cleared away.

  And yet, Asher is proof that there’s hope in what she is and what she does. Asher’s presence and character arc indicate the possibility that there’s a reason Anita’s powers continue to grow, and that the end doesn’t have to be destruction.
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  As Jean-Claude points out in Skin Trade: “Everyone believes that Belle Morte’s line is weak because our power is love, but really, ma petite, what is more powerful than love?”

  Devon Ellington publishes under a half a dozen names in both fiction and non-fiction, including the paranormal Jain Lazarus Adventures and (as Cerridwen Iris Shea) the Merry’s Dalliance pirate tales. Her blog on the writing life is Ink in My Coffee: http://devonellington.wordpress.com.

  I know Melissa, Mel, and I know her background in the law. I found her area of expertise applied to my series to be interesting, but not surprising. What the United States of America has done to the legal vampire citizens in my world is one of the worst abuses of personal freedom that I could imagine. You are a legal citizen, you pay taxes, but still don’t have the right to vote. Worse, you can be killed by a court order of execution because you’ve been deemed too dangerous to be held for trial.

  Now, I mention in the early books some incidents that caused this change. There was a master vampire who escaped a maximum security prison by using mind tricks, and he slaughtered a lot of people getting out. He killed more when he got to the outside. i used the headlines of murderers and rapists who are paroled early and then go on to commit more and often worse crimes. What if these people had superhuman strength, mystical powers, and were almost unstoppable? Would we as a society tolerate the slaughter, or would we fight back with the scariest, and best, weapon we have, the law? I took the worstcase scenario view and gave us legal executioners with the full weight of the law and courts behind them.

  Mel points out, rightly, that the judicial branch is almost gutted in this process except that it signs off on warrants of execution. But one thing she fails to add is that Anita and the other executioners don’t just kill vampires. They kill wereanimals, human beings when they’re not furry. It takes more evidence to get a warrant of execution on a wereanimal than a vampire, but in some Western states if you shoot someone dead and later a blood test proves that the human body was a lycanthrope you get off scot-free, because the law assumes that simply by being a wereanimal the person was a real and present threat to your safety, and shooting him or her was a sort of weird self-defense.