Padma looked up at me as if I were floating in the air in front of him. “So, you have found me; I will be out of this city before even the Harlequin can find me.”
“The last time I saw you, you were wearing silk and real jewels. You’re looking a little threadbare.”
I felt movement, a great seething ocean of power behind me like I’d felt outside the warehouse. I didn’t have to see to know it was the small rats again, but I looked all the same. The pale sand was black with fur, more than outside, so many more. Thousands of rats filled one half of the stadium floor. They sat waiting, watching, too quiet, too intent for just rats. The rat with the white spot on its chest and the one white paw stood up on its hind legs and looked at me.
“I survived the loss of my human servant and my tiger when I had to flee Europe. I will survive whatever you do to this one, too.”
“I’m sorry for the loss of Gideon and Thomas.” They’d been his tiger to call and his human servant. His own triumvirate of power. That he’d survived the death of them both would be like Jean-Claude surviving losing me and Richard. It was impressive.
Padma looked surprised. “Thank you, Anita Blake.”
“You’re welcome; they both deserved so much better than you.”
Padma hissed at me, showing fangs, which was rare for the really old vampires. They considered it déclassé to flash fangs like an animal.
“Did you abandon them the way you’re abandoning Hector?”
“He knew the risks.”
“So, you’re going to leave Hector to die, just like you left your son.”
He stood up from the bed, glaring at me, hands in fists at his sides. There was a black wavering in the air around him. “I will wait for you to have a child of your own, Anita, and then I will return and extract my revenge.”
“It was your choice to trade your son’s life for your own, Padma. I’d have been happy to kill you instead.”
“In all the history that Hector remembered, they had never allowed an outsider in the fighting pit on a night when they chose a new king. You were not supposed to be here tonight, Anita.”
“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 air around 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 called mija said.
“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.
It was as if I’d been holding my breath and suddenly, I could let it go. I could relax in a way that you can around your dog, or cat, because they aren’t judging you like people do. The rat settled more heavily against my neck and the side of my jaw. If it was relaxing to touch the wereanimal you could call, touching the animal version of it was even more soothing.
And just like that was all right, it was all right to feel like the darkness was made up of a million rats. It was all right that t
he rats fell through me and were me, and weren’t me, and filled the hotel room and began to swarm over Padma.
“I forbid you to hurt me,” he commanded.
The rats didn’t care what he wanted, and neither did I, because I wanted him dead. I did not want him haunting our steps and I never wanted him near our child. We needed him dead and the rats liked me better because he didn’t like them. He didn’t even like wererats, because they were just animals, after all.
The first one took a bite. “Stop, I command you! You will not hurt me. You cannot hurt me; I am your master.” He sounded so sure of himself, but we could feel his fear, we could smell it on him, feel the trembling of him underneath our feet and against our bellies as we climbed him. Fear meant food.
They started biting him, hundreds of tiny mouths taking a bite, and then they began to feed. And he started to scream. “You cannot do this! I am your master!”
“You are not master here,” Neva, the two other brujas, and I said in unison, “not in our holy of holies. You cannot win here when we have another vampire to call rats for us, another bruja to see the darkness between stars, another wererat to be a conduit for the Goddess. You only seek to steal power, Master of Beasts, but Anita seeks to share it. Someone who shares is always more welcome than someone who takes.” And all the time Neva’s words poured from our mouths the rats fed. If Neva hadn’t held me in her power, our power, their power, the Goddess, or the God, or something, I would have been horrified, shocked, guilt ridden, but he had threatened our child, one we didn’t even have yet. He would have killed us all, enslaved us all, and that we could not allow.
Regular rats shouldn’t have been able to hurt him, it would have been like a lead bullet, but the magic changed the rats into something more like a silver-dipped bullet that could pierce supernatural flesh. The fire died in his eyes while they were still tugging and slicing the flesh from his bones. And then we were back on the sands, and the light died in Hector’s eyes while we were still pulling back from them. He hadn’t survived the death of his master.
I half expected the rats all around us on the sand to fall on Hector’s body like the other rats had on Padma, but the rat on my shoulder made a soft, almost chirp sound in my ear. We aren’t that kind of rat, it seemed to say.
Neva said, “That is not how we dispose of bodies here in the fighting pit.”
I knew because Rafael knew that there was a trap door that opened over the river and there was something not rat, not human, that had been there when the wererats first came to St. Louis. The wererats had built upon the power of this place and what lay beneath. The dead of the fighting pit were sacrifices to what hid in the river here, and in turn it had become part of the magic of the brujas, part of the power of the holy of holies.
I knew that Rafael was healing before I turned and saw him sitting up on the sand. My eyes were back to normal as I crossed the sand toward him. I wanted to run to him, but I still had the rat on my shoulder, and I wasn’t sure how secure he was there. I’d never had a pet rat, and immediately in my head the rat was disgusted with the thought that he was a pet.
“Sorry,” I said, out loud.
Rafael held his hand out to me, and I took it and knelt on the sand, keeping my shoulders straight so I didn’t spill the big rat off. Rafael was smiling at me; his legs were healing all that damage like those fast-forward films of blooming flowers. It was wonderful and a little disturbing.
“You killed another master vampire for us,” he said.
“It was a group effort,” I said.
“A group effort that wouldn’t have worked without you with us,” he said, and raised my hand to his lips to lay a kiss across my fingers.
I wanted to say so much, ask so many things, but I let it all go to trail my fingers down the edge of his face. The rat on my shoulder started to walk down my arm toward him.
“And who is this?” he asked.
“He didn’t like being called a pet, so I’m not sure I get to name him.”
“He says you may choose a human name for him,” Neva said as she walked toward us, “and he will let you know if he likes it.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“I had hoped to take you up on your offer with Pierette tonight, but though I am healing I will not be able to do anyone justice tonight, let alone you and another lovely woman.”
“That’s all right, I think I’m not in the mood after all this.”
“I am sorry that you found our world so harsh.”
I shook my head. “It is what it is, but if Padma hadn’t attacked us here, then we couldn’t have defeated him this easily. He underestimated the power of the rodere.”
“He underestimated more than that, Anita.” Rafael leaned toward me as far as his healing legs would allow, so I moved the rest of the way to him.
“I told you before, I’d come to you.”
“You did, but I know you like your men to meet you partway.”
I smiled and we kissed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Matt Stumpf for helping reawaken the warrior inside me, and to Guro Dan Inosanto for sharing his knowledge and skill with all of us. It is an honor, sir.
A collection of sci-fi and fantasy stories edited by internationally bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton and William McCaskey.
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Rafael Page 23
