Rafael

by K. Hamilton, Laurell

  “Yes,” she said.

  “The rodere are not broken,” I said, and felt the first tear trail hot and unwelcome down my cheek.

  “No, they are powerful and whole.”

  “Is this what we’re all supposed to feel like?”

  “I do not know about all, but yes, this is what we are meant to be.”

  “Can the leopards be this?”

  “Only if we can find our wizards again.”

  “Wizards?”

  Claudia said, “Without our brujas we would not be rodere.”

  “I’ve never met one of your witches,” I said.

  “Why would you? You’ve never been here before and they are not bodyguards.”

  I felt diminished in the face of the power all around me, or as if I should have power to answer it and I didn’t. The beasts inside me stirred not to rise, but as if they felt my thought. Where is our magic?

  It was the hyena who stared up at me with brown eyes and slit pupils. I looked into her eyes and realized that I’d learned earlier today that the hyenas had never lost their magic either. What the hell had happened to the rest of us?

  15

  I GOT OUT of the SUV with Claudia on one side of me and Pierette on the other. The driver and his wingman weren’t allowed to hang around with us, or more particularly me. They had to drive off and put the SUV out of sight of the main road with the other vehicles. We didn’t want a police officer to do a casual drive-by and wonder about too many cars parked after dark in a warehouse district.

  The three of us stood alone with huge warehouses surrounding us except for the gate just behind us and the fence. I wasn’t going over the razor wire. I looked past the few people still outside the warehouses to the river. St. Louis is too large a city for it to be truly dark, but even without the illumination I would have sensed the river. The Mississippi is just too damn big to be ignored this close to it. The energy and flow of it, the sound of it faint and persistent, and water, you knew a big body of water was close by like a big lake, or even the ocean. The river had that kind of aliveness to it.

  I realized that the rush and beat of the energy was tied to the river somehow. Had the rodere’s witches, their brujas, used the river as part of their circle of protection, or had the river just been here and they’d worked with it, because they had no choice? Some things are just too vast and too powerful to be ignored. I guess it was a chicken/egg question that didn’t matter. The heartbeat of power used the river like blood to keep it pumping. It was like a huge mystical battery.

  “Anita, are you all right?” Claudia asked.

  I nodded. “The magic is . . . loud.”

  Pierette took my hand in hers, though since we were both right-handed, she had to compromise her gun hand, because she knew I wouldn’t compromise mine. Not here and now with strange magic everywhere and the first few people looking our way.

  “It beats through your body like a second heartbeat,” Pierette said.

  “You touching me isn’t making it quieter,” I said.

  “I felt the energy, but now it’s much more,” she said.

  I squeezed her hand and let it go. “If it’s making it worse for you and not helping me, then I’d rather have you with a clearer head.”

  Pierette accepted that without question. We were lovers, but she was my bodyguard first and she never forgot that, which was one reason we could date. There were a handful of people looking at us from the door of the nearest warehouse. I should have been able to sense their energy, tell if they were human or shapeshifter, but I couldn’t. The magic all around me was so overwhelming that I was head-blind to anything smaller.

  Claudia walked confidently past the group by the first warehouse and we did our best to exude the same air of I have places to go and no time to chat, but one of the men called out, “Claudia, whatcha doing bringing a cat into our house?”

  It took me a second to realize he meant Pierette, or maybe he meant me and her; no, that would be plural, cats. Claudia answered him without stopping, “Rafael knows she’s coming.”

  I felt the energy react like water that had been disturbed. I knew that one of them was moving toward us. He was like a bad swimmer floundering and making too many waves or like someone trying to be sneaky in the woods but who crashed through the underbrush like a herd of noisy elephants. I didn’t question it, just moved, and I was there before the man could touch Pierette. She was facing him, too. He hadn’t snuck up on her, but it was like the energy all around us made him move slow, or me fast.

  He thought he was fast, because he was startled when he found us both looking at him and ready. He was about our size, delicate-looking for a man, and he didn’t look as strongly Hispanic as Rafael, more Asian-ish.

  “No fighting in sight of the road, Danny, you know that,” Claudia said, looming over all of us.

  “I didn’t draw a blade,” he said.

  “You draw a blade within sight of the road, and you go into the pit as warmup. Those are the rules,” she said.

  I hadn’t known that rule, but I waited until Danny walked back to join his group of friends before I spoke low to Claudia. “Any other rules that will get us thrown to the wolves, or rats, or whatever?” I asked.

  “The punishments aren’t for first-timers, only for the people that should know better.”

  “Good to know,” I said, as Pierette said, “Reassuring.” We looked at each other and smiled. It was more than a friend smile, but then we were more than friends.

  We were in a dark space between two warehouses now, and I felt the waves of power move smoothly, but it was still a lot of energy getting displaced. Something big was “swimming” toward us.

  I moved up beside Claudia and whispered, “Something powerful ahead.”

  “Neva,” Claudia called out, “we are honored by your presence.”

  “I knew you would know I was here, Claudia, but how did you know, Anita Blake?” The woman stepped out of the shadows, or maybe the shadows thinned out and let us see her, but either way she was taller than Pierette, but still well under six feet, so I guess average height. Her skin was very brown and showed her age as if she’d spent all her life in too much sunshine and not enough sunscreen. Her hair was still thick and black, unbound around her thin shoulders. She stood very upright, no stoop at all, but her body had begun to wear down anyway. Her bones were strong, but her muscles were thinning down the way that comes only after seventy.

  “I don’t know.” And that was the truth.

  “Why have you brought a leopard among us?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she was addressing me or Claudia.

  “She’s with me,” I said, not really answering her question.

  The woman smiled and it was like the shadows thickened around her, so that her eyes gleamed like black diamonds, but her face was almost obscured as if her eyes glittered bodiless. I called my own power, just a pulse of it, and felt Jean-Claude down that metaphysical cord, helping me. The darkness thinned, so I could see the outline of her face more clearly, but her eyes still glittered with more than just her inner beast.

  Pierette moved a little uneasily and was looking behind us as if there was a threat there, too. I wanted to ask what but kept my attention on the woman. Claudia was just standing beside me, trying for neutral but not quite hiding the tension in her body.

  I felt that sense of something swimming through the power again. It was both as big as the woman and not, or bigger, it was as if whatever it was ebbed and flowed and . . .

  “Neva, they are guests of our king, not intruders,” Claudia said.

  “Blades will not be enough for this, my queen,” Pierette said from behind me.

  “Not enough for what?” I asked. I could feel it, but I didn’t understand what I was sensing.

  “Can’t you smell them?”

  “No.” But the moment she said them, I understood that it was a group of things moving through the magic, so many of them that their shape changed like starlings forming shapes in the
air because there were so many of them, and then I knew even before I heard the first claws clicking against the bricks of the pavement.

  I did that slow horror-movie turn because I was almost sure what was behind us and I didn’t want to be right. Rats, thousands of them.

  16

  I EXPECTED THEM to rush us, but they stopped a few yards away as if they’d come to some invisible barrier I couldn’t see. Some of them stood up on their hind legs and sniffed the air, but most of them waited in silence, barely moving like a frozen dark river of furred bodies. Only the glittering of their eyes as it reflected the dim light here and there proved that they weren’t all asleep like some magic Pied Piper lullaby. They should have been squeaky, or squabbling, or grooming, or something. The unnatural stillness of them was almost more unnerving to me than anything else.

  I had to swallow past my pulse, which was trying to choke me, or maybe that was my heart trying to climb up and out. Pierette asked, “If I draw a blade, what will they do?”

  “Whatever Neva wishes them to do,” Claudia said; her voice was low and careful as if she didn’t want to make any sudden moves or noises. Good to know that I wasn’t the only one who felt like we were on the edge of battle and all we needed was the first person to make a move, any move, and then bad things would happen.

  “Is this some weird initiation that no one told me about?” I asked, trying to make a joke of it, but my voice held the panicked beat of my heart, breathless and thin.

  “No,” Claudia said, as if she thought I’d asked a serious question.

  “Why does our magic know you, Anita Blake?” Neva asked.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked.

  “The truth.”

  “I told you the truth already, so just tell me what you want me to say and I’ll say it.”

  “Are you afraid of our small brethren?” she asked.

  “You can hear how fast my heart is beating, you know I’m afraid.”

  “Look at me, Anita Blake.”

  It was a little too much like a command for my taste, but I’d worry about who was the toughest later, so I looked at her. I trusted that Pierette and Claudia would keep an eye on the furry horde, for what little good it would do us. We needed heavy firepower to have a hope of keeping the rats from engulfing us, things like shotguns and fully automatic machine guns and flamethrowers. Since we didn’t have any of that, I looked at Neva. Honestly, she was a much better view than the waiting rats. Funny how you don’t realize you’re scared of something until it’s staring you in the face. I’d forgotten how much I didn’t like rats.

  Her eyes were like black diamonds except they weren’t just reflecting the dim light like the real rats, her eyes had their own light as if she were a vampire. The only shapeshifters that I’d ever seen with eyes like that had a vampire they called master. Holy shit, did she belong to the same vampire that Hector did? I wasn’t the only “vampire” who had multiple animals to call. If Hector’s master was the same, then we were in serious freaking trouble here.

  “Anita Blake.” She said my name like it tasted bitter.

  “Neva,” I said, for something to say while I screamed down my metaphysical connections, hoping that Jean-Claude was getting all this.

  She turned her head to look at me out of one eye the way a bird will, and I caught a glint of light in her eyes that wasn’t black. I blinked and took a step toward her, then thought to ask, “May I come closer to see your eyes better?”

  “A step, or two, no more; I do not want you tempted to go for a blade. I would hate to explain to our king what happened to his concubine.”

  I didn’t really like being called a concubine, but she had several thousand rats waiting to swarm over us, so until that changed, she could call me any damn thing she wanted. I moved slowly and deliberately the two steps she’d given me; I didn’t want a misunderstanding.

  She stared at me aggressively, both eyes forward, and there it was, starshine in her black eyes. They were the darkness of space with stars scattered and shining in the permanent night between the worlds.

  “I’ve seen eyes like yours before,” I said, keeping my voice low and careful, just in case.

  “You have never been to the heart of our people, so you have never seen eyes like mine.”

  “I think I know why your power and I are getting along so well.”

  “Tell me.”

  “How about if I show you?”

  “Show me what?”

  “I’m going to call a little of the magic in me, so you can feel how similar it is to yours.”

  “We are not necromancers here.”

  “This isn’t necromancy. I just don’t want you to freak out when I open myself to the power, okay?”

  “Show me something worth seeing, Anita Blake.”

  I took that for reassurance that she wouldn’t freak out and I called an ability that hadn’t come through Jean-Claude, or any of the shapeshifters I was tied to, but a self-professed goddess. My skin ran with the energy she had shared with me. The magic around us pulsed and then hesitated like a heart skipping a beat.

  “Your eyes,” Neva said, “this can’t be.”

  The beat of magic around us caught up with that lost beat, and it was as if my body were a gong and it had hit me solidly in the chest. It stole my breath and staggered me backward.

  Claudia caught me or I might have fallen. “Neva, you are not allowed to harm her.”

  “I did nothing,” she said.

  I fought to have enough air to say, “Not her . . . fault.” I looked up at her as I said it and watched her face pale.

  “Neva, what have you done!” She turned back to the other woman, and her anger and fear raised her beast enough that I jerked back from the heat of it.

  Pierette said, “Anita’s eyes are not the witch’s doing.”

  “I can see them for myself. Neva, what did you do?”

  “It is you and our king who should have told me that she carries our magic inside her.” Her anger and fear translated to heat like I’d opened a blast furnace. I stumbled back from them both, and it was Pierette who caught my arm so I didn’t hit a wall.

  “Control your little beasts, witch,” Pierette said.

  I looked and saw that the rats were beginning to creep forward, still unnaturally silent and well behaved. I looked at them with eyes made of black space and starlight, and their energy wasn’t right. They weren’t ordinary animals of any kind. They watched everything with a weight of intelligence and thought that wasn’t very ratlike. Rats are smart, very smart, but they’re animals and no matter how intelligent they can’t look at you with that sense of a personhood in their eyes, their bodies.

  “Wererats don’t come this small,” I whispered.

  Pierette said, “They are just rats that the witch is controlling.”

  “No, they’re not just rats.” I didn’t know what they were, so I had no word to substitute, but I knew what they were not, and that was a normal animal of any kind.

  “What do you see, Anita?” Neva asked; it took me a second to realize she’d used just my first name.

  “I’m not sure, but something’s wrong with them, or right with them, but right or wrong, they’re different.” I glanced back at her and physically she looked the same, though now I could “see” where the tip of the short sword on her back poked out of the line of her shirt. Her thick, unbound hair hid the hilt that came out above the opposite shoulder. How was she carrying it? Just thinking about it gave me the hint of straps under the short-sleeved blouse. I looked at Claudia and I knew where she’d hidden a small blade on her calf, because now I could see the slightest difference from one leg to the other. It had been like this the first time when Obsidian Butterfly had put her power inside me, but never again. I’d gained other powers, but this hypervision for weapons and dangers had never come back. If Neva could see what I saw, then she knew where every weapon was hidden on Pierette and me. Nothing could hide from this.

  Neva an
d Claudia were arguing. Claudia demanding what she’d done to me, and Neva angry that no one warned her I had a piece of their magic inside me already. I glanced back at the rats and realized they were listening. I don’t mean the way a dog does, but the way people do. They were hearing and understanding what the two women were saying back and forth.

  “Obsidian Butterfly,” I said. I had to say it a little louder for them to hear me enough to stop bickering.

  “What did you say?” Claudia asked.

  “Itzpapalotl.” Neva used the original Aztec name.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” I said.

  “What of her?”

  “She’s the master vampire of Albuquerque, New Mexico. When I visited her a few years back, she shared power with me. That’s where the eyes came from for me. Where’d you get yours, Neva?”

  “The gods of the people were not vampires.”

  “I can’t speak to all the Aztec pantheon, but I can tell you that Obsidian Butterfly is a vampire, but if you ever meet her in person, don’t tell her that. She thinks she’s a goddess; no harm letting her keep thinking that and a hell of a lot safer for you.”

  “Why would Itzpapalotl share power with you?” Neva asked.

  “She wanted me to help her get rid of some mutual enemies. Who shared energy with you?” I asked.

  “Our ancestors.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Our magic comes from our ancestors and the gods they walked with,” she said, as if that cleared everything up.

  “Were the gods they walked with Aztec by any chance?” I asked.

  “Some, our people have been touched by the gods of all the lands we have passed through.”

  “And the rats?” I asked.

  Neva looked at me and there was a moment of staring into the starlit darkness of her eyes. The first time I’d looked into eyes like that I’d been rolled so completely that the vampire could have done anything to me, but now I stared into them and did not fall into them, because I had an answering power in my own eyes. I might owe one would-be goddess in New Mexico a thank-you note.